And now that I’ve been relatively quiet about it for a decade or more, I guess it’s time to finally talk about the Dragon Court again.
A while back, this was the website where I talked about my experiences with various Occult groups and subcultures - until it wasn’t.
I hung onto this domain for a while even though I haven’t really done anything with it for a long time. I’d planned to do a major site revamp in 2012. But other than experimenting with new CSS3 features, and then trying to use it as a blog for a few months in 2018, it stayed static for years. I was that burnt out. I had been burnt out for a long time.
Discovering neocities dot org got me back into website building as a hobby. I’d learned how to make a site that didn’t look like it belonged on Geocities anymore - but frankly, where’s the fun in that? I wasn’t trying to sell anything, be it books, noble titles, or access to articles from a paywalled subscription-only website. I wasn't trying to promote an Online Secret Society. I was just talking about my experiences with the people who were trying to do that, or had tried to do that in the past. If anything, *not* looking like it was trying to be any of those things was one of the (only) things my old website had going for it.
It's not possible for me to be objective about a lot of the things I'm going to be talking about here, because I was too close to the events as they happened. I also acknowledge that a lot of the people who were major players in this conflict are no longer among the living, and as such are not around anymore to offer a rebuttal of their own; and are survived by friends and family who still love and care for them. Please know that despite how it may seem, I am trying to proceed with consideration for them - despite the ill feelings left over from things that admittedly happened 20 years or so ago.
Back in 2012 on an older version of this site, I quoted what felt like a truism at the time: “The Internet Never Forgets.” Except that it does. So much content from that time has been lost. Maybe in some cases that’s a good thing, but there are some things that should be remembered, so that the same mistakes aren’t made in the future.
Despite how it may seem, this isn't intended to be a judgemental hatchet job. A lot of what happened was down to the fact that things were a bit more chaotic on the Old Internet circa the early 2000s. My purpose for posting this here is not to cause more strife, but because none of this should ever be forgotten. But an alternate title for this essay could be: "I read Tracy Twyman's book Clock Shavings after avoiding it since it was released, and I Have Some Thoughts."
If the Internet Gods brought you to this site today, you may or may not be familiar with Nicholas de Vere and his essays (From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells, and The Origin Of The Dragon Lords Of The Rings) or his book The Dragon Legacy. Or you might be familiar with Laurence Gardner (No relation to Gerald Gardner!) and the books Bloodline Of The Holy Grail, Genesis Of The Grail Kings, Realm Of The Ring Lords, etc. Or you may just be wondering what the eff this all is about.
At times I wonder if this whole thing is some is a kind of memetic virus, or tulpa that wants to be believed in. It emerges from the Collective Unconscious, and the form it takes depends on the people that it manifests through. When it manifested through Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner and Tracy Twyman, it took on their worldview and political beliefs. When it manifested through myself and my friends in high school, the form it took was much different: but with a few key similarities in symbolism and mythology that I'll discuss in a bit. This is a theory that sometimes pops into my mind, especially encountering some aspects of it that seem almost viral in nature. At times I wonder if talking about it on a website and telling people about it might be an irresponsible thing to do. Because I've seen people destroy their lives and the lives of others over this thing. And it's not even like anyone involved has recieved fame, fortune or awesome magical powers as a tradeoff.
Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner claimed that the Dragon Court in its original form was established in ancient times, and that it has been re-established in various forms since then. But the Dragon Court as it existed in modern times was a kind of semi-secret society formed in the UK in the 1990s, influenced by certain Occult and Witchcraft concepts, Sumerian mythology, and the ideas discussed in the book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, by authors by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, and headed(?) by Occultist/Trad Witch Nicholas de Vere/Weir. He collaborated with author Laurence Gardner and provided some of the material for Gardner's books, after which Laurence Gardner severed their working relationship and started his own splinter Imperial Dragon Court group, claiming to have discovered that de Vere or Weir was not actually who he claimed to be.
Nicholas de Vere later claimed that that the majority of the material in at least two of Laurence Gardner's books on the subject of the Dragon or Grail bloodlines (The Genesis Of The Grail Kings and Realm Of The Ring Lords) came from information that he supplied to Laurence Gardner in what was supposed to have been a collaborative effort. if this is true, then the same could be alledged about Laurence Gardner's articles in Nexus Magazine, since they were sourced from the same material. By 2001, Nicholas de Vere had completed his own essays on the subject: From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells, and The Origin Of The Dragon Lord Of The Rings, which were posted on the website dragoncourt.org sometime in 2001.
He then inexplicably handed the whole thing (his manuscripts, and the apparent control over the offline Dragon Court itself) over to conspiracy theorist blogger and author Tracy Twyman. The essays were published as a book titled The Dragon Legacy in 2004. She started her own esoteric group, the Ordo Lapsit Exillis (OLE) and attempted a hostile takeover of the dragoncourt.org website and forum, which by then had also parted ways with Nicholas de Vere due to a falling-out between Nicholas de Vere, Tracy Twyman, and the webmaster of that site. More on this in a bit.
Nicholas de Vere claimed that certain people are descended from the "Dragon Bloodlines," who originated with the Anunnaki of Sumerian legend, who he said were the remains of a prehistoric people who migrated from the area around the Black Sea to the Fertile Crescent, during a time corresponding with the start of the Ubaid Period (around 7000-6000 BC.) According to him, this people eventually spread out over Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, and the European continent, and were the real-life basis for the myths about Elves and the Holy Grail. It certainly sounds plausible compared with the theories about extraterrestrials that typically accompanies discourse about the Anunnaki in certain books and places on the internet. But he also claimed that this "Dragon" people was a hybrid species capable of otherworldly, transcendent insight that average Cro-Magnon humanity could never aspire to, because they weren't neurologically wired for it.
(I have my own theories about this that involves speculation about prehistoric entheogen use, which I will get into later in a future essay.)
Anyway, he asserted that these Dragon Bloodlines had modern descendents living in the present day, and that this could be proven through genetic testing. He began to work towards establishing a micronation that these "Dragon" peoples could retreat to. He had actually made some progress at this before his death in 2013.
I'm not trying to "cancel" the man, or upset any of his supporters reading this. But some of the language and concepts in Nicholas de Vere's essays and The Dragon Legacy do unfortunately read as elitist or even eugenicist by today's standards, even if he voiced his personal dislike of racists and Nazis - and this was due mostly to his obsession with royal descent and bloodline purity. I sincerely don't think he was ever intending to promote a fascist or White Supremacist agenda. But even though Tracy Twyman wrote in her Forward at the beginning of The Dragon Legacy that White Supremacists wouldn't be able to "claim the Dragon Heritage," she was apparently okay with slapping actual Fasces symbols onto the OLE logo on the back cover of the book when she had it published. Make of that what you will.
That aspect of it certainly wasn't anything I was on board with. But I'm embarrassed to admit that some of the implications flew right over my head when I was first reading Nicholas de Vere's essays. But there is a tendency towards reactionary romanticism wrapped up in this whole thing that can be seductive if you aren't careful. A belief in an ancient "golden age" in which much of the world was ruled over by magically transcendant god-kings can quickly be twisted to support a sinister agenda, or even just the unconscious biases of certain types of people; especially if the story that is being told insists that those "god-kings" must have been White according to our modern concepts of racial identity.
But during that period from around 1993-1999, I was desperately looking for some sign that the Faeries or Elves of folklore had truly existed in some form, or maybe even still existed; and for confirmation of certain experiences I'd had, and conclusions I'd come to in my metaphysical occult journey. I'd wanted to believe in a past world that had been more magical and wonderous than the one I'd grown up in, and I wanted an explanation for how things had gotten to their current state. And there were plenty of people wiling to provide their own version of that on the early internet. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for young people seeking after this kind of thing now.
In an earlier version of this article from an earlier version of this website, I accused Laurence Gardner hanging out with white supremacists, based on inferences made by Nicholas de Vere and others about the Hungarian Sarkany Rend Dragon Order group that he'd signed on with after parting ways with Nicholas de Vere. I should have known better than to assume that those were the specific Hungarians that Nicholas de Vere was referring to when he stated in his article From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells that a group of radical right-wing Hungarians had tried to lay claim to the prehistoric legacy of the Dragon Bloodlines, including certain neolithic artifacts which had been discovered in Hungary. I also wonder why I was willing to just Nicholas de Vere's word for it without further scrutiny, considering everything else that happened.
One person you definitively can accuse Laurence Gardner of was shilling for is HRH Prince Michael Stewart Of Albany, who claimed to be the legitimate descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and was trying to use this to springboard himself into a political career before he was exposed as a pretender during the 2000s.
I first heard of the Dragon Court by name in the summer of 1999 when I found Laurence Gardner’s Nexus articles online, but I’d been familiar with the concepts it encompassed since my teens. I didn't even encounter the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Published in Europe as "The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail") by by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln until much later, during my 20s. But the concept of the "Grail Bloodlines" was already kind of a meme that was in the process of disseminating itself, and it had already gotten to me in other various forms before I'd heard of "The Dragon Court."
I grew up in Texas during the 1980s and 90s during the Satanic Panic. My mom had been a hippie and New Ager. She has on occasion been subject to flashes of uncanny insight, precognition or ESP, which she has typically found to be unwelcome and unsettling whenever it has occurred. An occult experience which had left her badly shaken had driven her back to Christianity, during the "Jesus Movement" in the 1970s. She and my dad had split by the time I was four.
We had Mike Warnke’s cassette tapes on constant rotation in the family car, because at the time he was kind of the Pope of hippie ex-occultists - even if he was lying through his teeth about the latter. (Yes I've heard The Last Podcast On The Left's podcast about him - and if you haven't, go listen; it's so cathartic.)
We were taught to fear and avoid popular Rock & Roll music, trick or treating on Halloween, fantasy fiction, Dungeons and Dragons, our friends who were LGBTIQ+/ourselves if we were LGBTIQ+, and our friends who smoked brickweed and dropped weak blotter acid behind the bleachers after school. Chick Tracts were foisted upon us after every church service.
We were told to watch out for "stranger danger," i.e. devil worshippers and drug pushers and child molesters, even as we (or people we knew) were being victimized by grownups we knew from church who were trusted family friends. People talked a great deal about God's love for humanity. But the actual message was one of constant terror and abject submission to authority, demanding constant hypervigilance on our part because "Satan" was out to get us - and that God would send us straight to Hell for all eternity if we put a foot out of line.
Scapegoating of social outcasts as a form of authoritarian social control is the goal of the Satanic Panic any time it re-emerges. It creates in-group/out-group dynamics: "be afraid of those strange outsiders who are not like us, and ignore the toxic elements in your own community" as a way of manipulating people into not resisting those toxic elements. It's a tactic of browbeating people into accepting forms of abuse or control by claiming the alternative or the "other side" is "worse."
People in the "out-group" are typically demonized through accusations of 1. blood-drinking or cannibalism, and 2. the sexual predation and the victimization of children. We can see how the current cult of Qanon and MAGA is perfectly following the Satanic Panic script.
But seriously: the Christian Church (Catholic AND Protestant) has had a lot of people who were guilty of both. To the point that the "Satanic Panic" is starting to look like projection.
(Recent testimony of people like Moria Greyland has proven that Wicca isn't blameless in that regard, either: it's kind of starting to look like maybe there were aspects of the Aquarian Free Love movement that turned out to be especially toxic; and that some people in positions of spiritual authority are tempted to abuse that authority. But Anyway.)
The scandal over sexual abuse in the Catholic Church broke out on the heels of the 1980s Satanic Panic, and I don't think that was an accident. It's happening again just as an epidemic of sex pests are being exposed within the rank and file of the Protestant church denominations, and people are falling for the same exact bullshit artistry as before. Authoritarians and reactionaries have been using these types of disinfo tactics for centuries to target "social undesirables" and shield the predators within their own ranks, because people are still falling for them and they still work.
I know there are plenty of good people who are Christians out there who sincerely try to follow Jesus’s teachings of compassion and mercy - or who at the very least just want to practice their faith without trying to control others, and without demanding that all of society be run according to their personal religious beliefs. I've had to come to terms with the fact that my problems aren't with Christianity itself, but with the institutions which claim to represent it. And with the Church's history of colonization, indoctrination, and oppression, along with the current religious nationalism which pervades U.S. American culture in the modern era, and the social indoctrination which has helped to maintain it. But my family didn't have a good experience with Evangelical Church culture while I was growing up. I grew up hearing Evangelicals preach compassion and universal love, but the churches we attended were rife with drama and judgemental infighting. By the time I was a teenager, my Mom finally decided to just let me do my own thing. That was when I met other people trying to recover from religious trauma with varying success. For many people, it’s a lifelong process.
I'd read The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien as a child, and it's possible that my lifelong obsession with Elves began there. My grandparents also had books of Greek and Norse myths, which I grew up reading. During my time in school, also I frequently snuck out of the cafeteria during lunch and back to the library, and my favorite books were the ones about fantasy, history, mythology, and folklore. Around the 8th grade or so, I got to the section about Celtic folklore, myths and legends. This included a lot of Welsh Mythology as well as Irish Mythology, including the earliest tales of King Arthur. And something in those books struck a chord.
The Celtic lore felt seductive and a little edgy in a way that the kind of "Heavy Metal Satanism" that I'd seen my peers experiment with never did. The "Satanists" I knew of back then were just edgelord metalheads who were practicing a form of inverted Christianity. But this stuff that I was reading was from the before-times. These were the Old Gods. These stories had not been in any book I'd read previously from the library, or in any owned by my parents or grandparents. It felt like finding hidden or forbidden lore, even if it was right there in the library. I'd grown up being told I was Irish, and a little digging uncovered my family's actual Scottish, English, Welsh, and Irish roots.
I got into a Teen Witch Otherkin coven in the fall of 1993, but after about nine months the group fell apart; partially due to religious trauma, and partially for other reasons that I'll go into shortly. And in the midst of all this, the Dragon Court as a memetic concept was seeping our consciousness, if indeed it wasn’t there already.
Back during the "Satanic Panic," "New Age" stuff or “fluffy bunny Wicca” as it is commonly called, was often the first and only kind of esoteric or occult practice people had access to - particularly when the internet was in its infancy. And everything I have seen leads me to believe that "fluffy bunnyism" in general developed almost entirely as a reaction to the "Satanic Panic," though it also served as a valuable marketing tactic as well for writers who were cashing in on the new counterculture - and as neoliberal consumer capitalism did what it tends to do best: assimilating countercultures back into itself by marketing the information and symbols and signifiers of that counterculture back to the people trying to participate in it.
But whatever the reason, it turns out a lot of people felt unfulfilled by the paradigm they were brought up in. A lot of people were trying to learn about the belief system that "Church Christianity" had replaced, and if it was possible to go back to that.
Before the Teen Otherkin/Witch coven I was a part of imploded, We had been studying Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick, which is kind of like Golden Dawn-style ritual Magick for Absolute Beginners. And it’s great. I recommend it. (But with 30 years experience and hindsight, I'd recommend that the prospective occultist read Francis King's Techniques Of High Magic as well.) And this was around the time when books by prominant Wiccan authors started to flood the market. For someone just coming out of an entire childhood dominated by the Evangelical Church, it was hard to know what was the real deal, and what was just sanitized, commercialized pop-Witchcraft. But even before all this, I was just...doing things. Things that my intuition told me were correct.
I called it "Chaos Magick." No one told me that this was what I was doing. In 1994 I hadn’t read any of the literature that existed about Chaos Magick yet. I was a fan of Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga, and that’s probably how the phrase kind of just popped into my brain. Later, I of course read Peter J. Carroll, Phil Hine, Stephen Mace, Jaq Hawkins, etc. But before that I was just flying by the seat of my pants, so to speak.
Basically, our Teenage Otherkin Coven had believed that "Elves" of ancient myth and legend were descended from the Nephilim, or Watchers, who were sent to Earth by "The Bornless One" to be the guides and stewards of early Humanity. "Vampires" were really the same species; ones that were maybe not as kindly disposed to regular humans as their "Elven" siblings, sort of like the Seelie/Unseelie dichotomy of Scottish folklore. Their human-hybrid descenants were the Rephaim, and the Priest-Kings and Priestess-Queens of antiquity. They were natural magicians due to their partially-divine origins. The Davidic bloodline, including Jesus, had been among their descendants. Jesus and Lucifer were more like contentious brothers than enemies; in fact, they WERE brothers according to our cosmology. The Bride of Christ was an actual woman (Mary Magdelene, in fact) and not a metaphor for the Church.
After centuries of persecution by the Church, they were hidden and lost and scattered; and in many cases had entirely forgotten or barely remembered who they were. Our group consisted of some of the ones who remembered.
Our goals were to 1. study Magick and energy-working and 2. find others. There was no long-term goal or master plan beyond that; but the implication was that once Elves' descendants remembered their true identities and "woke up," we would be the catalyst for the human race to remember that everyone theoretically had access to magic and ESP, we were all connected, and people would start to reject both modern-day neoliberal consumer capitalism and the type of authoritarian "red communism" which had plagued much of the world until the fall of the USSR, and look for something better. Some kind of "Grail Code," maybe?
We imagined that the phenomenon would eventually hit critical mass and be enough of a disruption of status-quo society that change would be inevitable. (My nerd teenage self imagined something happening a lot like the events of the Shadowrun tabletop roleplaying game: that society would become a high-tech cyperpunk world, but with Magic and Elves. Now it would probably look more like the future San Francisco from Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing.)
Obviously, the roleplaying games by White Wolf (VAMPIRE: The Masquerade, WEREWOLF: The Apocalypse, CHANGELING: The Dreaming, etc.) which were being published around this time were hugely influential (though the first edition of Changeling came out a whole year or so after our group had fallen apart) but we took them as a sign that other people were aware that things Elves, Werewolves and Vampires really existed in a sense, and people "in the know" were trying to "seed" the concept out there among the masses in order to "wake people up."
With the benefit of almost 30 years' hindsight and maturity (I hope) I would instead like to suggest that perhaps all of these concepts were "having a moment of cultural significance" in that current zeitgeist, and we were pulled right along with it.
Yes, this seems obviously dorky and credulous now, ("cringe" as the kids today would say) but we were teenagers, and we were desperate for something like this to actually be true. Because the idea of "growing up" to enter the workforce as complacent serfs - the same workforce that we as kids had watched grind our working-class parents into a fine powder all throughout our childhoods - was abhorrent to us, even back during a time when things like groceries and a house or car payments or rent were more affordable and attainable for folks making a regular working-class paycheck.
At the time, there was no discussion of ever going public about any of this stuff because it was assumed that there were still "government agencies" watching for us who would shut us down just like they'd tried to shut down the countercultural and civil rights movements of the 60s if we attracted attention to ourselves. We had to rebel, but we felt the need to be discrete about it. Our conversations were peppered with "coded language." Outwardly, we looked like a bunch of weird goths and Renaissance Festival enthusiasts, (we probably looked a lot like this group) but we were clandestine about what it was that we were actually doing after school and at slumber parties.
After several months, the group imploded as we started to experience a chain reaction of weird psychological breakdowns, like every disorder or trigger or trauma or hangup we'd ever experienced suddenly went off at once - for all of us, all within the same time period. It was kind of like the film The Craft, but without Hollywood special effects. Just a bunch of teens dealing with the metaphysical/psychological residue of magickal practices that a lifetime of trauma and resulting disorders probably hadn't prepared us for. Spiritual psychosis is real, kids. And that year, it hit us with the force of a ton of bricks.
Back in the day, if you were a Teen Witch, you either knew a Nancy, or you were the Nancy.
The implosion of our group, when it happened, resulted in one of the worst "friend breakups" I ever experienced. To outsiders, the falling-out probably just looked like the usual teen drama - because of course, the relevant bits were all happening in other realities or The Astral Plane. To us, it was Multidimensional Magickal Conflict. To everyone else, it was a group of teen girls screaming at each other in the High School commons area.
But when you are first getting into Magickal practice and you aren't prepared for some of the things that can happen to you spiritually and psychologically, especially when you're "crossing the streams" of reality and imagination in the ways that we were, Spiritual Psychosis is a very possible outcome (if not inevitable.)
There's a phrase which has been employed by Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Alli, taken from Arthurian literature - "The Chapel Perilous." For me, it's the point in the dead center of the intersection between spiritual psychosis and ego expansion. You either navigate your way through it, are helped through it, or you're stuck there for the rest of your life. However long or forshortened that ends up being.
We weren't prepared to deal with some of the psychological and spiritual effects that can occur when you engage in a lot of the things we were engaging with. As a group of kids who were already dealing with various traumas, neurotic issues, and Cluster B personality disorders, we were just not ready for a trip through the Chapel Perilous. The warnings in books like Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick did not prepare us for what happened, or was just not helpful (the Middle Pillar Excercise was the single most helpful thing I did to pull myself out of the mindset caused by spiritual psychosis, and the disclaimer about it in Modern Magick just seems silly and overcautious now.)
Thanks in part to the aforementioned spiritual psychosis, I became convinced that we had been discovered and were being "taken care of" by whatver shadowy government agency had been set up to deal with people like us. By this time in the early 90s the pagan and conspiracy theorist circles kind of overlapped, and my sister had already read about and talked about things like MK Ultra and Project Stargate. Back then, it seemed perfectly plausible.
Now I wonder if we weren't just all succumbing to a kind of "subliminal social programming" for what was "supposed to happen" to kids like us who "played around with magic" if that makes sense. (This seems to be a real phenomenon - occult writer Paul Huson even attempts deprogram readers of it early on in his book Mastering Witchcraft.)
Why is any of this important? Well, beyond all of the "LOL we're so random!!!" teen whimsicality and drama, there was a shared group mythos which would correspond with a lot of the stuff I would read in Laurence Gardner's and Nicholas de Vere's works five years later. It felt like vindication, and proof that we'd been Onto Something, and our teen fantasies hadn't just been fantasies. And if that was true, it might shake up the oppressive paradigm of the world that I had grown up in. A paradigm shift that felt like it was already underway, or was trying to happen again after it had been cut short at the end of the 1960s.
Because, back then in the early 1990s, the aesthetics and the spirit of the 1960s were enjoying a sort of resurgence. it had seemed like my Mother’s generation had been on the verge of a magnificent breakthrough, a renaissance of transcendent thought and art and creativity and personal freedom and expression. But then the 80s happened, Ronald Reagan happened, things got really hairy for a while with the Cold War, and the AIDS epidemic happened. Some things did change for the better, but it was like everything else that was good about that time had just been shoved back into the closet by the time the 1980s rolled around, leading to the dreary reality that I had grown up in.
But I kept hearing stories of the glorious cultural revolution of the 1960s, Height-Ashbury, Woodstock, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, all of it. And my whole life, I was asking “what happened? Why did the cultural revolution fail?” What had caused the Baby Boomer generation to betray everything that they had claimed to believe in, and go right back to being obedient reactionary consumer-serfs? Why did they turn around and participate in the backlash of hatred, bigotry, superstition, religious fundamentalism, and right-wing authoritarianism that had occurred in response to the paradigm shift which they had fought so hard to bring about? Why were we living in the reality where the hateful Backward Backlash had won?
Various people have provided answers that question in one form or another since I first asked it 30 or so years ago. The films of Panos Cosmatos (Beyond The Black Rainbow and Mandy) depict the failure of the "Boomer Cultural Revolution" as an ongoing theme. Reading Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) answered some of those questions for me. Learning about The War On Drugs answered even more. Hippie burnouts described the disillusionment of being come down on hard by The Man for the crimes of free love and smoking dope, then seeing the symbols of their rebellion misappropriated and marketed back to them by consumer capitalism ("I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.")
It had seemed like the thing to do was to try and jumpstart a new cultural revolution to pick up where the other one had left off - but when it came down to it, we were just a handful of psychologically damaged teenage weirdos in Texas in the early 1990s. The eschaton was not going to be so easily immanetized by the likes of us. I entered my twenties with a crushing sense of disillusionment, and a need to prove that what we had experienced was somehow valid, nonetheless.
The period between 1994 and 1999 was one in which I was stuck in a rut of trying to redefine myself and what I believed after the group I had been a part of fell apart. The problem with finding people that you can finally “be yourself” around is that if anything happens to the group dynamic or people have a falling-out, your entire sense of identity and purpose can go with it. And this was the situation I found myself in during that time.
It didn't matter that I had basically just fallen out of what felt like the equivalent Avalon or Rivendell, to land face-first on the concrete. I was just supposed to Get A Job and Become A Productive Member Of Society, and there was no Second Option. Only Dirty Communists dreamed of a life without toil for A Boss, where I’d be able to somehow do my own thing without having to live paycheck to paycheck. That was a privilege reserved only for the Rich.
Nobody in my life could understand that I did not want a “normal” job and a “normal” life. If I hadn’t discovered that I have an aptitude for technology, I’m not sure what I would have done with my professional life. But before that, I bounced around between attempts at college and different jobs that I got mostly just to stave off people’s scorn and judgment at my apparent aimlessness and lack of motivation more than anything else. I learned that if I looked busy, people would (usually) withhold their criticism and leave me in peace.
And to be fair, I was a mess. I did deserve some of the criticism that was being tossed my way by the people I knew. But I was in a hole that I just didn’t know how to find my way out of.
Nobody cared that I had lost my entire sense of identity and purpose at the exact moment when I was supposed to be figuring it out. Nobody gave me The Talk about how this sometimes just happens in life, and a person might find themselves having to reinvent themselves from scratch more than once over the course of their lives. The thing is, I actually did have an idea of what I wanted to do with my life. But everyone rolled their eyes at the prospect of me maybe studying the history of Theatre, or Literature, Mythology, or Esoteric stuff and the Occult for a living, amd writing about it for the edification of other people who wanted to study that kind of stuff. Writing about the history of Theatre as an art form was mainly what I'd imagined myself doing as an adult with a career when I in High School, because that was my particular hyperfocus at the time.
"You can't make a living doing that," people scoffed. "You have to get a real job!"
I didn’t want to be a boss myself, because I didn’t want to be a part of the problem. I wasn’t one of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” I was an Elf somehow born into a human body at the ass-end of the 20th century into the penury of working-class consumer capitalism. And I was far from the only person I knew who felt that way. It was like the Awakening from Shadowrun had happened; but we all just looked like regular humans to everyone else, and were just supposed to conform to what we were being told we were supposed to want. We were luminous, magical beings, but We Lived In A Society. There was an idea that we had been born into this society to change it, but it didn’t want to be changed. It didn’t want us, and it would gladly grind us to death in its gears unless we played along the way we were supposed to with the rest of the general population.
During this time, I wrote multiple screeds about how The Rich basically lived under a form of Socialism, but the rest of us had to endure the worst aspects of Capitalism; but I stayed away from Anarchist, Communist, and Socialist literature for the most part during this time. I knew people whose families had fled authoritarian Communist rule, and their accounts of what had happened were enough for me to at least be suspicious of Marxism, even if a lot of its precepts were similar to mine. The neoliberal capitalist indoctrination of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s had been firmly internalized, even if I was chafing against it. But we'd all watched the Berlin Wall come down in real time, at least on television. The idea of just flitting from one political extreme to the other didn't seem like very much of a solution. The people who took power from the previous bunch often ended up looking a whole hell of a lot like the people they'd just replaced. Wealth redistribution sounded great in theory; but often whenever something like that had been tried, the specters of populism, violence, and brutal authoritariansm showed up to ruin things.
[This image is from The Onion, from all the way back in 2003.]
Politically, I identified as a Left-Libertarian (and I still do, really) though I found myself having to vote for establishment Democrats more often in the name of harm reduction once the year 2000 rolled around.
While I was working through all of this, I read up on Gnosticism and Theosophy, explored Wicca, then returned to Ceremonial Magick, and ended up doing a solitary fusion of the two for a while. I went to college, and started encountering Thelemites for the first time. On two separate occasions, completely out of the blue, I was approached by people claiming to be from the local O.T.O. chapter, claiming that they "thought I looked like someone who might like to join." I didn’t. I’d been burned once already. I liked what I had read of Aleister Crowley’s work despite the controversy surrounding his life, but I wasn’t ready to do it all again. In hindsight, it may have been exactly what I needed - or it might have just ended up as another disaster. Though in hindsight, I probably should have at least given it a try.
It was against the backdrop of all of these developments that I found Laurence Gardner’s Nexus articles online in the summer of 1999. And for one brief, shining moment in time, it felt like I had stumbled upon a Unified Field Theory of pretty much everything that I’d been seeking an answer to up to that point.
