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 “salty” 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."
This is also not an attempt to prostelytize or "win converts" to the "Dragon Court" Paradigm, for reasons I will explain at some point within this essay. The short version of this is, "I've figured out what my own version of that looks like for me personally; your own version or interpretation may be different."
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 (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.
Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner claimed that the Dragon Court in its original form was established in Ancient Egypt during the 12th Dynasty, 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, based around Traditional 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/Thomas 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.
Nevertheless, to this day, there is still speculation 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 Nicholas de Vere. if this is true, then the same could be alledged about his articles in Nexus Magazine, since they were sourced from the same material.
Nicholas de Vere later penned 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 over to conspiracy theorist blogger and author Tracy Twyman to publish, as a book titled The Dragon Legacy in 2004. She used it to start 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.
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.
There were a lot of things about Nicholas de Vere's opinions and politics that I personally disagreed with. In his articles, he took what many people have interpreted as a eugenicist stance regarding the intelligence, worthiness, and virtue of the "Dragon Bloodlines" versus people who were not of "The Dragon Bloodlines" that reads as acidly and off-puttingly elitist and misanthropic in a lot of places.
In an earlier version of this article, 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.
Nevertheless, I have had reservations about how the certain writers in the "Grail Bloodlines" genre of written work tend to depict the "Anunnaki Proto-Scythian Ring Lords" as a race of Aryan Supermen; whether that was their actual intent, or the result of unconscious bias.
One thing you definitively can accuse Laurence Gardner of was shilling for 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.
As for Tracy Twyman, she was apparently fascist to the point of slapping actual Fasces symbols onto the back cover of The Dragon Legacy when she had it published.
That aspect of it certainly wasn't anything I was trying to get involved with. But I'm embarrased to admit that those aspects of their Dragon Court Lore flew right over my head in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I discovered it. 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, mystical "golden age" ruled over by a class of people who were superior to everyone else around them (and above all, white) can quickly be twisted to support a sinister agenda, or even just the unconscious biases of certain types of people.
In 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.
This is not meant as a callout of Nicholas de Vere, Laurence Gardner, and Tracy Twyman (though one is forthcoming!) but as an example of how the Dragon Consciousness can take radically different forms or manifest in very different ways, depending on who is channeling it. Tracy Twyman had her Ouija board and Anton LaVay's Satanic Bible, and Death In June. The group I was with had Donald Michael Kraig's book Modern Magick, a VHS copy of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension, some battered Elric novels, and Shriekback.
But: I've also seen this thing destroy people's minds and wreck people's lives. It seems like the threat of spiritual psychosis is always looming. And it's not even like there are any awesome magickal powers as a tradeoff. The only reason I'm still doing this is as a favor to my sixteen year-old self, who saw such potential in this thing before the first iteration of it I was involved with fell apart. And because I believe that it can mean something beyond the backbiting, race psudeoscience, conspiracy theorism, egomania, and jockeying for accolades and titles that I've seen people try and turn it into so far.
For better or worse, I came into this as someone raised with Aquarian ideals. And despite eveything, I still think it's possible for this thing to become something that may benefit humanity in some way. And even though Nicholas de vere spent the greater part of his essays bloviating about the New Age movment - itself a product of the so-called "Aquarian Age" countercultural revolution - his manifestation of the Dragon Court was perhaps more influenced by "The Aquarian Age" than he wanted to admit. And while I do understand the frustration with those elements that his seething hatred of them was born from (becuase there were plenty of things about it that warranted criticism) I think it's mainly responsible for attracting the people he ended up attracting to his camp (like Tracy Twyman and Charles Johnson) who ended up causing more problems than they solved.
And you can argue about the Aquarian Age versus the Age Of Horus all you want, but I think there's a lot more going on with that than people realize. Or that they're two sides of the same coin. Though current events have clearly shown that we're actually living in The Age Of The Leopard.
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 the Church. 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.
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, but my family didn't have a good experience with Christianity while I was growing up. Church communities preached compassion and universal love, but were rife with drama and judgemental backbiting. 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. During that time I frequently snuck out of the school 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.
I compare Wicca and the 20th century Witchcraft revival to the "Druid Revivals" of previous centuries. Particularly Iolo Morganwg's. His brand of Druidry has straight-up been accused of being cultural vandalism by some scholars. But the fact that it exists, and the fact he did it, points to a very real, valid wish that someday, someone might be able just reproduce or re-manifest Druidry or the old pre-Christian religious belief system as it existed before it was obliterated by the colonialism of the Romans, the Church, and the Anglo-Saxons. To just be able to yank it right back out of the Collective Unconscious thousands of years later, fully intact and whole-cloth.
As I write this, there are practicing Druids all over the world who find fulfillment and edification as members of one of the "Druid Revival" movements. It isn't the authentic Druidry of our ancestors, but it's all we've got right now.
Wicca was another attempt to do this - though one that did end up being overly romanticized, commercialized and capitalized, as Nicholas de Vere argued in his essays. It was not a historically accurate reproduction of ancient customs, but a romanticized idea of what those customs might have been like, dreamed up by people in the mid-20th century - maybe with a little help from Aleister Crowley.
["I wrote the rituals in Gerald Gardner's Book Of Shadows. You're welcome."]
But here's the thing: the reason why people have to make do with "Celtic"-inspired "recreations" like Wicca, or modern Druidry, is because their ancestral religion, traditions, and culture were suppressed or stamped out by successive waves of colonization. Not just in antiquity, but into Medieval times and beyond. Any faults in historical accuracy can be attributed to the fact that people in the mid 20th century didn't know what the original practices were; because they had been suppressed and stamped out. And the reason why I'm putting "Celtic" in scare quotes is because "The Celts" themselves were not a monolith, but different tribes sharing similar language and culture. The fact that they are often perceived as a singular unit by modern people is again, down to the fact that they were victims of colonization and suppression.
You can do DNA tests, but DNA isn't culture. It can tell you where you came from, but it can't tell you who you are right now. It might provide clues about how your ancestors lived, but it can't tell you what they believed, or how they felt about the world around them. It doesn't teach you their stories and songs or their folkways. And this is really what I had wanted from the "Dragon Court Paradigm" or the "Dragon Consciousness."
This is what colonization does. It obliterates culture; smashes it into fragments that people are left trying to piece back together hundreds of years down the line. The hitch is: it typically ends up doing this to the colonizers, as well. It demands they compromize their own ancestral culture so they can become a nationalistic monolith capable of obliterating others - in other words, an Empire. This statement is not an "agenda," it is observable fact. White supremacists like to whine that "multi-culturalism is homogenization" (ignoring the blatant contradiction in that statement) even as they attempt to mash themselves into a white nationalist monoculture that erases their actual ancestral identities.
("But you believed you were descended from Elves," you scoff at the screen. Hold on, I'm getting to that.)
And when I was struggling with this as a teen in the 90s, Wicca was right there, with "Here you go! Here's your Lost Ancestral Culture: The Wheel Of The Year! The Goddess and The Horned God, Raising The Cone Of Power, Drawing Down The Moon, etc!" Except that as I read further about ancient peoples and practices, I realized that it really wasn't, not exactly. And that Wicca was itself kind of responsible for trying to mash a bunch of different cultural ideas into a monoculture all its own: which would lead to Consumer Capitalism once again doing what it does best, as Witchcraft as a counterculture was commodified and sold back to people who were legitimately just trying to find their ancestral roots or some kind of spiritual awakening.
But 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" or "Paganism" like people in ancient times and the Medieval period had done, no matter what Gerald Gardner claimed; and that Wicca started out as an early-to-mid 20th century re-creation of what people imagined Witchcraft and Pre-Christian religions were like, that took inspiration from those ancient belief systems. Margot Adler's book Drawing Down The Moon chronicles the development of modern Witchcraft as a religious movement, and as part of the whole "Aquarian" countercultural revolution.
Wicca has also served as a "gateway practice" for a lot of folks who eventually moved on to other paradigms like one of the other forms of Witchcraft or Ceremonial Magick or Thelema as a part of their spiritual or esoteric journey. It's not the original "oldschool Witchcraft." But in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with folks who are seeking a path that encourages greater respect for the land, and a greater respect for others, than Evangelical Churchianity has typically fostered.
The backlash against the claim that Wicca is an unbroken tradition going back hundreds of years was already well underway by the time Nicholas de Vere was writing his essays lambasting Wicca and New-Age spirituality in the 1990s. But as right-wing reactionary attitudes surged in the 1980s and 90s (particularly in America) it was probably safer for practicing Witches to try to divorce the idea of Witchcraft from the Luciferian Gnostic paradigm entirely.
There has been a push to cast doubt on the idea that the "Witch Cult" popularized by Professor Margaret Murray ever existed, or that Satanic Witches as the Medieval Church imagined them even existed, for that matter; and to assert that the Church was just persecuting uppity women, Gnostics, and other marginalized scapegoats and social undesirables. And to be fair, this was probably the case with a lot of the victims of the "Burning Times." The Knights Templar may have been a sect of gay Baphomet worshippers (not that there's anything wrong with that!) Or they might have just had large sums of money and huge tracts of land that King Philip IV of France was willing to frame and murder them for.
One might be tempted to suppose that of course an organized, pan-European "Witch-cult" religion was there; but because of the constant threat of Church persecution, they had to hide, to conduct their activities in secret. Or, the darker possibility that the Church was so adept at persecuting them that nearly any trace of them in the archeological record has been obliterated.
But as one Witch wrote, "Nothing about witchcraft is ever stated definitely. It is always left to inference and your judgement. Consequently nothing written about witchcraft can ever solve it or confirm or deny its existence. As for witches belonging to a premature Spiritualist movement, this is a pleasant daydream. Of course there are psychics in every period of history. Sometimes they became priests of the local religion. At other times they died at the hands of priests of the local religion who did not like having their particular theology confounded by spirits, even if the message came directly from the other world."
Most Wiccans insist that Witches never worshipped "The Devil," as they had been accused of, and that they were instead worshipping the Horned God from before the rise of Christianity. Whom the Church claimed was "Satan" in order to discourage people from worshipping him.
Nicholas de Vere railed against the-oft repeated Wiccan talking point that "The Devil was invented by the Church" in the introduction to From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells. He claimed that Margaret Murray was 100% right about the idea of an underground, organized "Witch Cult," and that they revered "the Devil." But he also insists that this "Devil" is actually the Sumerian god Enki - who he claimed had been wrongfully maligned down through the centuries, and who wanted to liberate mankind from the kind of oppressive force that the Church eventually became.
Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner, Paul Huson, Starhawk and others have theorized that the "Elves" of folklore were perhaps an aboriginal, pre-Celtic or even pre-Indo European people living in Europe, the British Isles and Ireland. Nicholas de Vere talked as if the Elves/Fairies/"Grail Peoples" as if they were a flesh-and-blood people, and not otherworldly beings. But he claimed they were not just a separate race or ethnicity as we tend to think of things in terms of race, but a hybrid species existing alongside mainstream Cro-Magnon humanity. He was attempting to find genetic evidence that would support this. This was one of his major goals from when he started this whole endeavor in the late 1990s, right up to the point of his death in 2013.
However, he also claimed that these "Elves" were the same people as the Anunnaki of Sumerian folklore - and that these were the God-Kings and Goddess-Queens of ancient world, and the foundation of the religious traditions of the civilizations which would come after them. This, he claimed, was the true, Sacral, Gnostic form of Christianity that Constatine's Imperial Roman War Machine and Augustine's Nicene Council had usurped and corrupted - but which Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, had finally exposed in their work The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail. The eternal cycle of the Sacrifical King and the Grail Queen; in this case, Jesus Christ and Mary Magdelene.
When I was first reading Nicholas de Vere's and Laurence Gardner's material, it was like an instant remedy for the religious trauma I had grown up with in a way that Wicca never even managed to be, because it reframed the major players in the Bible as misappropriated figures from Sumerian and Babylonian myths. I liked the idea proposed by Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner that "Satan" as such was not an evil rival of "God" who was "out to get me," but a disinherited Ubaid-era Sumerian prince who had actually lived, and who had been the victim of bad press. I liked their theory that the historical Jesus was Enki's descendant and the heir to his wisdom. So I missed, skipped over, or ignored the things I disagreed with, and incorporated the things that I jived with into the overall framework of my own personal paradigm.
And this continued as the world proceeded into a new millenium of strife and war in the 2000s; courtesy of the right-wing Evangelical-aligned Bush Administration and its countless demented dittohead cheerleaders, who collectively got so high on the ashes of 9/11 that they called for war on two countries that had nothing to do with the attack. In that context, it was easy for me to embrace a lot of the narratives in Nicholas de Vere's essays as a means of coping with the madness. Of course the mainstream Evangelical Pauline or Nicene Christianity was a fabricated farce. A bastardized fairy tale version of otherwise true events, championed by people who didn't, and couldn't, understand real original Christianity or the real, actual Christ; even as they were cheering on atrocities in His name and calling for a new Holy War in the Middle East. It gave me another reason to scorn the Evangelicals, in addition to all of the usual ones.
In his essays Nicholas de Vere accused modern Pagan Witches and Wiccans of misappropriating the "Witch" label, which he claimed only ever belonged to Traditional Witches in the past. But we know that many cultures had Witches, and that they didn't just exist within the specific framework he laid out in his essays.
The writings of Nicholas de Vere and a few other Traditional Witches like Shani Oates and W.E. "Bill" Liddell do seem to suggest a connection between medieval Witches and Gnostics, with the idea that Lucifer was really a benign figure attempting to uplift mankind from the clutches of a perpetually angry, jealous Demiurge. And the fact that the Church employed the same tactics which they had used to persecute Gnostics to target those they accused of Witchcraft is well-documented.
My main problem is that I do not have a lived experience being brought up in any kind of Witchcraft Tradition that would have taught me either way. As a child, I grew up with 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 what occultist Isaac Bonewits called "Gothic Witchcraft," or Satanic 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."
A lot of people like us 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."
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. (Qanon, anyone?)
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 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 with 30 years experience and hindsight, I'd recommend that the prospective occultist read Francis King's Techniques Of High Magic first.) 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 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, 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.
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.)
Regardless, it was this breakdown that drove me to check out Wicca for a time. Like my mother, I'd had a pretty severe occult-related freakout: unlike her, I ran to Wicca instead of back to the Church. But it wasn't long before my path led back to Ceremonial Magick and Chaos Magick.
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. I'm embarrassed to say that a lot of the, shall we say, "problematic elements" went right over my head in 1999. But some of our "Unverified Personal Gnosis" was eerily similar. Enough so that when I found Laurence Garder's Nexus magazine articles in 1999, it felt like I'd found "It," the 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. The history of Theatre as an art form was mainly what I'd imagined myself writing about 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.]
The accusation that the world’s richest families and the Captains Of Industry were Perhaps Not Actually Human was tricking down through the Conspiracy Theory Network of the Early Internet and AM Radio. But as we were also supposed to be Not Actually Human ourselves, the question was how they’d managed to end up with everything, and what we were supposed to do about it from all the way down here. I recalled the personal gnosis of the ringleader of the Otherkin group I’d been a part of a few years before, of a separate species of Elflike stewards, perhaps descended from the Nephilim, who were supposed to rule over and guide humanity. Had they become corrupted, or lost their way somehow? Were we "outcasts" or "by-blows" who could somehow confront them and make things right?
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.
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.