Here’s a link to a recent interview with Curtis Childs for his web series “Swedenborg and Life.” My book on Swedenborg was the occasion, but the topics covered ranged far and wide, from my early days in the Blank Generation to my upcoming work on the occult politics surrounding Precedent Trump. In between we ramble about the western esoteric tradition and its place in modern culture, the unnecessary split between science and mysticism, and resurgence of ‘mind magic’ and ‘mental science’ in recent years, and the ability of the internet to affect ‘real life’…
Tag: Trump
A Dark Star Rises
Amazon has posted a link to my new book, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, which will be published in May 2018. It is a kind of follow up to Politics and the Occult, except that in this case, the occult politics I look at is taking place now, not in the past. The focus is Trump - I could even say he was the inspiration for the book - but my investigation led beyond the White House and to points east, such as the Kremlin. I encountered some odd pairings, such as positive thinking and Traditionalism, and chaos magick and New Thought. And what exactly do Norman Vincent Peale, Austin Osman Spare, and Julius Evola have in common? You’d be surprised.
Dark Star Rising
Yesterday I submitted the manuscript of my new book, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, to Mitch Horowitz, my editor at Tarcher/Perigee. Mitch must like it, at least that’s how I read his tweet about it. It’s a report on the strange “occult politics” that seems to have come out of the shadows with the recent US presidential election, and which I discovered has been at work in Russia for some years prior to this. Researching it I came upon some odd pairings, between “positive thinking” and chaos magick, Traditionalism and a resurgent Russia, and a cartoon frog and postmodernism, to name a few. The book will be out next year. In the meantime you can look forward to The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination which will be available in the fall. In a sense Dark Star Rising begins where Lost Knowledge ends.
Gary Lachman 