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. In 2012 (ten years ago, LOL) I’d planned to do a major site revamp, 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. If some of my rhetoric here sounds kind of “salty” (as The Kids are saying now) it’s because I’ll be writing about things that I was “salty” about in the past, and it’s had this long to sit unexpressed in my subconscious. Some of this is stuff I’ll probably always be irate about to some extent. I’ve had to learn to be okay with that.
I also acknowledge that a lot of the people who did things that I’m still salty about (like Tracy Twyman, and Nicholas de Vere himself) have crossed the Rainbow Bridge, 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.
This isn’t just 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. We were all still figuring out how (and how not) to interact on what was still a massive uncharted digital space. In many ways, it was a lot like the Wild West. With cat pictures. And animated gifs. 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."
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.
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 and the books Bloodline Of The Holy Grail, Genesis Of The Grail Kings, Realm Of The Ring Lords, etc. Or maybe the book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. If not, buckle up: it's story time!
To this day, I have a hard time describing the Dragon Court to people who don't have an interest in the occult or esoteric subjects. The only reference point most people have for this is Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. Otherwise, it sounds like you're describing a plotline from Game Of Thrones, or Anne Rice's Mayfair Witch novels, honestly. But here goes.
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 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 during the 1960s and 70s, and she still was in many ways despite having returned to Evangelical Christianity after an occult experience which left her badly shaken. She has always been occasionally subject to flashes of precognition or ESP, which she has typically found to be both unwelcome and unsettling. My dad had his own issues, and they 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.
I know there are plenty of good people who are Christians out there who sincerely follow Jesus’s teachings of compassion and mercy, but in my opinion the institution of the Church itself - Catholic or Protestant - is corrupted and toxic. We spent so much time between different churches when I was growing up (“maybe THIS one won’t have toxic people! Maybe it’ll be okay this time!”) Then, my Mom finally decided this was wack, and let us do our 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 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.
The introduction of Nicholas de Vere's essay "From Transylvania to Tunbridge Wells", entitled "A New Age Critique" is a scathing rebuke of Wicca and “New Age” beliefs, from a Traditional Witch's standpoint. With 20 years of hindsight, I have to say that he was correct about a lot of it: moreso regarding his criticism of New Age beliefs and practices than his criticisms of Wicca, though he conflates the two.
But here's the thing: back in the 1990s and were in any way curious about witchcraft or the occult, "New Age" stuff or “fluffy bunny Wicca” as it is commonly called, was often the first and only kind of practice you had access to - particularly when the internet was in its infancy. You had to be careful about asking anyone anything. You had to hope you just happened on the right person or people, or the right book - or maybe find the one occult bookstore in your town, if there was one. And everything I have seen leads me to believe that "fluffy bunnyism" in general developed almost entirely as a reaction to the "Satanic Panic."
It was my first step onto the path. But the first step is not the destination.
Even as Wicca was gaining steam in the 70s, 80s and 90s, a lot of people inside the Craft were coming to the realization that they were not practicing "Witchcraft" like people in ancient times and the Medieval period had done, no matter what Gerald Gardner claimed; and that Wicca is a "re-imagining" of what modern people imagine Witchcraft was like, that takes inspiration from ancient belief systems.
The backlash against the claim or the idea that Wicca was an unbroken tradition going back hundreds of years was mostly already in the progress at the same time Nicholas de Vere was writing his essays lambasting it. But as right-wing reactionary attitudes surged in the 1980s and 90s (particularly in America) it was probably safer to try to divorce the idea of Witchcraft from the Christian/Luciferian paradigm entirely - instead of lean hard into it, like Nicholas de Vere and a lot of "Left Hand Path" people did.
But as people started to take a closer look at the history of the Witchcraft phenomeon, they were discovering that while accounts of Witchcraft as a practice - concocting herbal remedies (up to and including abortificants) finding lost items, cursing and uncursing, dowsing, divination, and "sin eating," were definitely real and accounted for, the idea of Witchcraft as an ancient and organized underground religion (at least as Professor Margaret Murray had imagined it) was starting to look like wish fulfillment to some people, or a product of centuries of lurid Church paranoia and propaganda (such as the Formicarius and the Malleus Maleficarum) to others.
Academics and historians are now wondering if the second type ever really existed, or if the Church basically invented them as an excuse to target other religious groups (Jews and Muslims) and dissident Christians with heretical beliefs (like the Waldensians, Cathars and Bogomils.)
It seems that as the medieval Church's "Witch Finders" started to define what "Witches" did and what they believed and looked like, some people might have actually started conforming to the that image of what a "witch" was supposed to be and believe in, as a way of "sticking it to the man." The late author, occultst and Neo Druid Isaac Bonewits describes how this might have happened in his book A Concise Guide To Witchcraft, in which he refers to the historically-accounted-for type of Witches (e.g. village "wise women," cunning men, herbalists, dowsers, and diviners) as "Classic Witches," and the type of "Satanic" Witches that allegedly emerged later as "Gothic Witches."
I say "allegedly" because folks are now questioning whether those really were "Gothic Witches," or if the "confessions" that were being extracted from them by Witch Finders were just the desperate fabrications of wrongly-accused, brutalized victims who were telling their Church-employed torturers whatever they wanted to hear in order to make it stop.
Nicholas de Vere railed against the idea that "The Devil was invented by the Church" in his essays, and claims that the witches that Isaac Bonewits describes as the "Gothic Type" are the oldschool, original, OG Witches, and that Margaret Murray was 100% right about the idea of an underground, organized "Witch Cult." But he also insists that "Satan" or "Lucifer" is actually the Sumerian god Enki, who he claims has been wrongfully maligned down through the centuries - and who wanted to liberate mankind from the kind of oppressive insanity that Church-sanctioned Christianity eventually became.
The thing is: I do not have a lived experience growing up in any kind of Witchcraft Tradition that would have taught me either way. I grew up in a family that seemed to pass down a weird sort of extrasensory perception to a few members of each generation. For me, this was accompanied by the feeling that something was missing: and that evangelical Church Christianity not only failed to fill that emptiness, it was actively contributing to it. And that whatever I was missing existed somewhere out there: and that Church Christianity was not only trying to distract people from learning about it, it was trying its damndest to stamp it out. And for a while in my youth, I thought this thing was Wicca.
Wicca does project a friendly, sanitized image compared with Traditional Witchcraft - and when you’re a traumatized teen from the Bible Belt, that might be what you want, if you don’t gravitate towards "Gothic Witchcraft," or as I like to call it "Theatrical Gothic Heavy Metal Satanism" instead. Which is what seems to have happened with Nicholas de Vere’s associate Tracy Twyman. According to her associate Sean Alger, who says:
"She was raised as a christian and it was the ‘satanic panic’ of the 80s-90s that fired her up to take the path she did. Because she was what we’d now call “Goth/depressive” she felt personally attacked and misunderstood when the Satanic Panic thing was in full swing."
We were personally attacked and misunderstood though. That was not anyone's imagination. If you were a "goth/depressive" or any other type of outsider, it was kind of a bad time. That's what led so many of us to act out in the kinds of ways that Tracy Twyman appeared to be acting out in. The satanic panic ruined innocent lives. The fact that the it seems to be coming back is really concerning to a lot of us.
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," or giving people a scapegoat to blame when a dysfunctional system isn't working for them (so they don't start to organize against the people at the top who actully are benefitting from that system.)
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. Which is exactly what right wing conspiracy theorists like those in the Qanon movement say about pretty much anyone who disagrees with them politically.
But seriously: the Christian Church (Catholic AND Protestant) is guilty of all of the above. Think about it. The "Satanic Panic" is and always has been a form of projection.
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 knew plenty of people who rebelled against the Satanic Panic by actually becoming Luciferians or Anton LaVey-style Satanists, but that wasn’t my jam. As a kid recovering from religious trauma and the imgagined Hellfire and Brimstone of the Satanic Panic, I wanted to hear that the Goddess loves everyone and doesn’t send anyone to Hell, and that the Devil doesn't exist because he's a boogeyman invented by the Church. Some people need that paradigm. And when the “Fluffy Bunny” reconstructionist Witchcraft/New Age paradigm is all you’ve got, it’s all you’ve got.
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 before that, 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 had started out as spiritual beings incarnated in human bodies, descended from the Nephilim. "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 old Royal Families created and appointed by the "Bornless One" to be the stewards of Earth and mankind. 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 (Elven) woman, and not a metaphor for the Church.
After centuries of persecution by the Church, and most recently the Nazis (who'd misapproproated "Elven" and "Grail" symbolism even as they were killing the descendants of the Elves who were still in Europe in the death camps along with other "social undesirables") 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.)
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 people could still afford things like food and house payments or rent on a regular 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.
The implosion of our group, when it happened, resulted in one of the worst "friend breakups" I ever experienced, and caused a legitimate nervous breakdown that ended up with me being sent to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with Purely Obessional ("Pure O") OCD. Which, to be fair, I do actually have. And by that point, I'd already been struggling with it for years.
To outsiders, the implosion of our group 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 - because like everyone else who gets themselves into the same kind of mess, we naively thought we could handle it.
But due to the fact that the pagan and conspiracy theorist circles kind of overlapped, my sister had already read about and talked about things like MK Ultra and Project Stargate, and The X Files was a hot new show on the TV that we all watched every week. Influenced by these factors, 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.
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.
But way 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. This was the oppressive and often horrific 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 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 Boomer generation to betray everything that they had claimed to believe in, and go right back to being obedient reactionary consumer-serfs? What had caused such an overwhelming backlash of hatred, bigotry, superstition, religious fundamentalism, and right-wing authoritarianism disguised as “American Freedom,” (two words which are diametrically opposed to one another) occurred in response to the relatively small and brief flash of true freedom which had just come before it?
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.