SUBLUNAR SPACE - chaos magic

The Bitter Last Spoonful

2026-05-14T12:00:00+02:00

A complicated but sincere eulogy for chaos magician Gordon White.

Gordon White died yesterday while traveling in Peru. The surprising news hit me a bit more than I'd like to admit.

May the gods have mercy and bless his soul and ease the grief for his family and friends.

I fell out with him five years ago, when conspiracy peddling, doom-mongering, and anti-scientific charlatanry had taken over much of his intellectual output and Rune Soup turned more and more into a sect. Whatever came after reached me only from a distance and through the social media grapevine, as he seemed to have completed his transformation into a full-blown "Alex Jones of occulture", an online army of cultists included.

Much as his early departure from this realm surprised me, on second thought, it didn't really. With his Goldilocks approach to "shamanism" and healing traditions, and skepticism of medicine in general, he was practically courting disaster. Let alone the years he spent bullying entities for which he had neither sufficient understanding nor respect.

Rest in Peace

That said, I genuinely wish him a safe journey into whatever comes next, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as to how much of what he put into the world in the last years came from his own heart, and how much came from forces that had taken hold of him.

I definitely owe Gordon thanks for all the inspiration, brilliant ideas, and sharp hot takes. My ventures into magic and animist ways of seeing the world would probably never have happened if my cynical atheist old self hadn't discovered and become obsessed with his podcast and writings back in the 2010s.

Through Rune Soup and Gordon's idea of "finding the others," I was fortunate to make a number of meaningful connections and dear friendships with likeminded fellow seekers and disillusioned Ex-Soupies, for which I'm deeply grateful.

O Lords, may his troubled soul rest in peace through your mercy. Amen

Machinic Dendrophiles

2025-07-14T14:45:00+02:00

A Critical Reflection on Hyperstitional Occultism in general and the trope of the Tree of Life and the Numogram in specific, resulting from multiple attempts of working with these concepts. I know this article might rub practitioners of Golden Dawn style magick, Thelemites, Chaos Magicians and Neolemurian time sorcerers the wrong way, but it's just like my opinion, man ¹.

v.1.2 - July 18, 2025

I think it's for us to make sense of trees, not to use arborescence as a kind of criterion of philosophical insufficiency. Nick Land²⁶

Cutting Down the Tree

On my research journey exploring different popular Western magical currents I could not help but notice a widespread obsession with the trope of the 'Tree of Life'. It’s almost impossible to avoid. At first, I even assumed there was no way around it, since it’s so prominently featured in nearly all occult literature. While I totally understand the aesthetic lure of a schematic concept of reality, the more I delved into it the less it clicked with me. That also includes its cybergoth sibling, the Numogram.

To recap, the Tree of Life is the central diagram of most prominent of schools of Jewish mysticism, the Lurianic Kabbalah. Likely influenced by earlier mystical frameworks such as The Seven Palaces ² it is composed of ten spheres called Sephirot (סְפִירוֹת). It maps the process by which the infinite divine source, Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף), emanates into creation. Each sephira corresponds to metaphysical principles, ethical qualities, archetypes, and aspects of the soul. The Tree serves as both a cosmological map and a contemplative tool, guiding the mystic in a lifelong process of refinement and return to the divine. It is embedded in Jewish liturgy, halachic life, and inseparable from the communal, theological, and ritual contexts in which it developed. ³ ⁴

It's deeply fascinating but I am neither Jewish, nor do I believe that it can be fully grokked outside of its spiritual tradition.

Although the diagram reached its most recognizable form in 16th-century Lurianic Kabbalah, its basic structure was already established in earlier texts. Christian thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin were among the first to extract and reinterpret this structure outside its Jewish context ⁵. They appropriated the Tree of Life and reframed it through a Neoplatonic-Christian lens, using it to validate Christian theological concepts while severing it from its halachic roots. Fair enough.

My sincere apologies in advance to anyone using Victorian lodge magick in their practice, but in my opinion the really dumbed down misappropriation of the Tree of Life kicked off in the beginning of the 20th century when the magical order of the Golden Dawn placed the Tree of Life at its core, not in connection with any of its original Jewish theological depths but as a kind of aesthetic filing cabinet onto which planets, Tarot cards, Hebrew letters, alchemical symbols, archangels, astrological elements and other endless occult correspondences got mapped ⁶. This reification of structure and symbolic systemization was just the beginning.

Then came Aleister Crowley ("Hold my beer!") and took the Tree of Life further, subordinated it to his own take on pseudo-Kemetic philosophy called Thelema and layered it with Vedic chakras, his own numerological obsessions, erotic metaphysics, and personal empowerment ⁷. The result is even more of a cringeworthy intellectual and spiritual distortion.

From what I gathered, Jewish Kabbalists understood the mystical path as inherently bound to communal responsibility, reverence for the divine, and a centuries-long interpretive tradition. The occult appropriations, by contrast, are individualized, instrumentalized, and divorced from authentic mystical engagement. Where the Jewish kabbalistic Zohar spoke of the soul's yearning for union with the divine through humility and worship, or "Avodah" (עֲבוֹדָה), Crowley speaks of the magician imposing their will on the cosmos.

I find all of this especially problematic in the face of the unprecedented violence and marginalization of Jewish communities during the same period by the same cultures that romanticized their mysticism.

The obsession with the Tree of Life trope didn't die with the early 20th century occult revival. Fast forward to the end of the century where it was regurgitated during the 'Chaos Magic' fad and eventually mutated into something new when the academic artist collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) picked up the trope and cyber-fetishized it.

Enter the Numogram

The CCRU was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction.

The CCRU had a lot of innovative ideas that influenced occult thinking at the time, most notably the concept of Hyperstition ⁸. The neologism that combines the words 'hype' and 'superstition' describes the process by which fictional or speculative ideas can influence reality by circulating through culture and belief. Unlike traditional superstitions, which are typically rooted in inherited myths or fears, hyperstitions are understood as self-fulfilling narratives.

Another key occult innovation from the CCRU was the inception of the Alphanumeric Qabbalah ⁹, a system of English gematria that assigns numerical values to the letters of the Latin alphabet. I make regular use of this system ¹ and plan to explore it in depth in a dedicated article.

The CCRU's most iconic hyperstitional tool is the Numogram ¹⁰, a symbolic diagram built on the base-10 numerical digits and made of ten numerical zones grouped into five pairs, or syzygies, linked by their digits adding up to nine. The difference between the numbers in each pair creates a current, forming the system's primary flows ¹¹.

At a glance the Numogram resembles the Tree of Life in its geometry and like its Jewish predecessor proposes a universal map of forces and movements.

Part of the hyperstitional myth is an explicit critique of the original Tree of Life as a distorted, degenerated form of the Numogram, reduced to a baroque relic unworthy of serious occult inquiry. While both diagrams share structural similarities, such as ten zones, numerological methods, and symbolic mappings, the Tree is portrayed as an incoherent system upheld by tradition rather than principle. Its structure is dismissed as arbitrary, with numerical order and Hebrew letters assigned mystical weight without any internal logic ¹² ¹³.

Where the magical orders of the early 20th century simply appropriated and dumbed-down the Tree of Life to shoehorn endless correspondences into it, the CCRU explicitly rejects its esoteric value and ridicules its Jewish roots in favor of their own techno-occult version of it.

Lemurian Time Sorcery

Based around the Numogram comes a plethora of esoteric lore ranging from Theosophy-esque myths of a forgotten Lemurian magical current that runs in opposition to the western Atlantean tradition, to a matrix of Lemurian correspondences too deep and complex to explore meaningfully within the scope of this article. A great primer on the topic is this article by Mikal Mindzenty.

The gist of the core of the myth is that numeric pairings of the Numogram are haunted by demons representing particular types of temporal forces, as well as Lemurs, described as ancestral or undead time-beings who drift through the channels and gates. These hyperstitional entities turn it from a static diagram into a dynamic network of haunting, often hostile, intelligences.

Obviously borrowing from the structure of magical grimoires the 'gram lore has inspired plenty of chaos magicians to engage with the system in practical ways - from divination using the Numogram to invocations of the demons and communing with Lemurs.

Notable sources of Numogrammatic magic are

Anders J. Aamodt's 'Unleashing the Numogram'
'Time Sorcery' by Vexsys and Neospare
The Lemurian Times community

From a Chaos Magic perspective, this is all very sound, exciting, and innovative. And again: apologies to all neolemurian mages out there having a lot of fun delving into all this. As much as I feel drawn to the cybergothic vibe of the CCRU's ramblings, and prefer a flat circuit of equal numbers over a hierarchical tree of emanations, and love the idea of "time sorcery," I just can't help but cringe at the blatant disregard for magical tradition, dismissed as unnecessary baggage in both Chaos Magic in general and the CCRU's occultism in particular.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to the appropriation of magical traditions. I believe all of magic is, at its core, rooted in syncretism and appropriation. Just look at the Greek Magical Papyri, which blended Kemetic, Hellenic, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Mesopotamian elements. But it did so with humility and awe, placing reverence and worship at the heart of its practice rather than discarding them.

My critique of the Numogram isn't primarily about its rejection or misappropriation of the Tree of Life's origins. More than that, I simply don't find any convincing evidence that the Numogram holds metaphysical or practical value beyond the self-perpetuating fiction of its hyperstitional myth.

Channeling the Nine

The Numogram poses as a metaphysical diagram of time and desire, although its entire structure is arbitrary. It treats the decimal system as if it were cosmic truth.

In that sense it's no more credible than other New Age concepts derived from decimal numerology, such as Vortex Mathematics by Marko Rodin¹⁴, or the 369 Manifestation Method¹⁵ that is based on a posthumous and unsupported attribution to Nikola Tesla:

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe. ²⁷ ²⁸

I would even argue Vortex Mathematics offers a more elegant and coherent system of numeric relations than the Numogram and possibly even more potential for magical application, it just lacks the cybergothic coolness of CCRU inspired techno-occultism.

What all of the mentioned systems have in common are their insistence that the relations between numbers in the common base-10 system reflect some kind of metaphysical gnosis. In any base-n, patterns emerge. The moment you change the number base, the supposed special status of 9 (n-1) becomes completely arbitrary¹⁶ ¹⁷. The truth is that patterns pop up all the time in mathematics, because mathematics is basically just the rigorous study of patterns.

While the authors, commentators, and practitioners all acknowledge the Numogram's arbitrary nature ¹⁸ and even discuss alternative base systems ¹⁹, some still paradoxically insist that this arbitrary decimal structure maps reality itself. The claim that the Numogram "completes itself from the beginning"²⁰ relies not on metaphysical rigor but on the illusion of internal coherence derived from the cherry-picked arithmetic operations used. Like Gnostic sects obsessed with secret numerical codes ²¹, discrete digits are fetishized as keys to transcendence, but any theological or ethical grounding those traditions historically claimed are rejected.

Numogram praticioners claim that the CCRU's magic is valid even if invented, because it "works" and has inspired practice ¹⁸. But this overlooks a deeper problem: when everything becomes potentially true via belief and performance, magic is reduced to a speculative solipsism. The Numogrammatic system of magic is not a revelation, but a simulation of one: occult spectacle, where vibe replaces structure, and memes masquerade as mysteries.

Of course I understand that this spectacle is not accidental - it's the whole point! The Numogram is embedded in the CCRU's larger theory of hyperstition. Rather than seek truth or spiritual transformation, hyperstition revels in simulation that self-replicates.

The fact that both the concept of hyperstition and the creation of the Numogram originate with none other than the supreme edgelord of contemporary philosophy, Nick Land makes me wonder whether the nihilistic void at the heart of the latter isn't, in fact, intended.

Into the Dark Land

Best known for his provocative fusion of continental theory, cybernetics, and occult aesthetics Land's early work combined Deleuzian metaphysics, Gothic horror, and anti-humanist cybernetics to formulate a radical vision centered on fragmentation, machinic desire, and the breakdown of subjectivity.

Over time, Land's thought shifted dramatically toward far-right accelerationism ²², embracing the unraveling forces of capitalism not as something to resist, but as an inhuman engine to be unleashed. He became a key figure in the Dark Enlightenment ²³ movement, promoting neo-reactionary ideas and anti-democratic techno-politics. In his writings on Bitcoin ²⁴, Land treats it as a form of decentralized, algorithmic governance, an emergent intelligence he aligns with capital's escape from human control. His writings reject emancipatory politics in favor of techno-mysticism, elitism, and the aesthetic glorification of entropy ²⁵.

Numbo Jumbo

I totally respect the work and effort being put into Neolemurian Timer Sorcery to make it a valuable system of magic beyond PDF archeology, ironic memes, and schizoposting but for me personally it feels like yet another take on the trope of reifying dendriform graph theory into something metaphysical.

At the end of the day the Numogram is just a diagram of decimal number relations. It is a symbol of hyperstitional belief mechanics rather than an occult map of time. Its "magic" seems to work through sheer belief but without metaphysics. Lemurian Time Sorcery is ritual without responsibility based on myth without meaning. It is aesthetic nihilism wearing occult drag, built to deconstruct, to signal mysticism without ever submitting to it.

If the Jewish Tree of Life once served as a guide toward transformation and communion with something greater, the Victorian orders reduced it to a fetishized aesthetic. Mutated into the Numogram, it now gazes inward into a void of its own making, where meaning is endlessly deferred. The Tree of Life served as a ladder, the Numogram is a closed circuit. It remains a hyperstitional black box, a trap for the imagination, not a tool of liberation.

machinic dendrophiles = AQ 369 = a dubious inheritance = beautiful creatures = completely untrue = drowned continents = entirely by machines = everything counts = fear is the mind killer = intellectual dark web = little lemur people = master manipulator = mirror of existence = neosavage aesthetics = no room for excuses = numerology for life = pandemoniac practices = pathbreaking research = qabbalistic resonance = rituals and doctrine = struggle for power = subordination codes = the demons of unbelief = the ghost continent = the great conspiracy = they all look the same = vortex mathematics = warping into zones ↩↩
Bethsheba Ashe, The Trees of Life, Times of Israel, December 10, 2020 ↩
My Jewish Learning, Isaac Luria and Kabbalah in Safed ↩
Center of Online Judaic Studies, Lurianic Kabbalah and Mysticism ↩
Wikipedia, Christian Kabbalah ↩
Hermetic Library, Samuel Scarborough, The Tree of Life: Filing Cabinet of the Western Mystery Tradition ↩
Thelemapedia, Tree of Life ↩
0rphan drift archive, Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 2010 ↩
Hypestition Blog, Qabbala 101: Part 1, July 14, 2004 ↩
Cybernetic culture research unit, Decimal Numogram ↩
Each zone's digits add up to a gate, which determines a channel, a hidden path connecting different zones. These channels form the Numogram's secondary flows, connecting otherwise separate parts of the diagram. The currents divide the system into three time loops: the Time-Circuit (a central cycle), the Warp (upper loop), and the Plex (lower loop). Gates and channels link these time systems, enabling movement between them and shaping how time is manipulated within the diagram. ↩
Cybernetic culture research unit, absctract culture, digital hyperstition, 6a. The Vault of Murmurs, "1. Numogram and Otz Chaiim" ↩
Hyperstition blog, Qabbala Unshelled, December 28, 2004 ↩
Backup of the Rodinaerodynamics.org website ↩
Ipek Williamson, Tesla’s Code to the Universe: Understanding the 369 Manifestation Method ↩
Thayer Watkins, The Sum of Digits for Multiples of Numbers ↩
The Problem Site, Vortex Based Math - Ask Professor Puzzler ↩
Cluness, Bob. Step into the Pandemonium: On Breathing Life into the CCRU's Invented Magical Traditions. February, 2021. ↩↩
Colectiva Tzitzimiyotl, IMEX Research Reconstruction Program, X profile @Numogrammatix ↩
Vexsys, Time Sorcery, Gate Zero, 2020, p. 15. ↩
Kalvesmaki, Joel. 2013. The Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity. Hellenic Studies Series 59. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. ↩
Nick Land, A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism ↩
Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment ↩
ŠUM | Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory, Šum#10.2 / Nick Land: Crypto-Current, An Introduction to Bitcoin and Philosophy, November 20, 2018 ↩
Verso Books Blog, McKenzie Wark, On Nick Land, June 19, 2017 ↩
The Dangerous Maybe, Nick Land Explains the Numogram, July 1st, 2025 ↩
While he was deeply fascinated by numbers, frequencies, and resonance, there is no documented evidence that Nikola Tesla espoused any specific theory about 3, 6, and 9 having mystical properties. The only attested anecdote is that he was especially obsessed with the number 3. ↩
OCD UK, The History of OCD, Nikola Tesla ↩

Drinking the Kool-Soup

2021-04-20T12:00:00+02:00

This article is a personal critique and call out of the popular chaos magic brand Rune Soup of which I have been a premium member for three years and enthusiastic about for even longer.

v.1.4

I owe a lot of my belated magical coming-of-age to the writings of one man: Gordon White, the charismatic author and chaos magician behind Rune Soup.

From the very beginning of my confused journey into enchantment I had to do a ton of research to make sense of the reality outside of my thus far materialist atheist paradigm. Whatever esoteric topic I was looking into back in the days I dismissed a lot for various reasons but always ended up reading blog posts on Rune Soup. The unapologetic approach to an animist worldview in combination with an undogmatic and open-minded embrace of practical magic really resonated with me. Within a short period of time after having discovered it I listened to the whole archive of podcast episodes, read all of GW's books, and eventually became a Premium Member of the franchise.

The All Red Flags

In the beginning of my membership I really liked the courses, the Q&As, the bonus materials, and the initial lively discussions on the member forum, but I have to admit I was kinda low key annoyed at Gordon's occasional political rants, especially when they seemed like naive interpretations of complex circumstances in European politics (e.g. "Brexit is a Royal op") or his blunt simplifications about the even more difficult situation in the Middle East and his ever growing obsession with US politics. I always brushed it aside as mere ignorance or fad. The political side of Rune Soup was mostly tucked away in Gordon's now defunct geopolitical The All Red Line newsletter and his Archonlogy and Chaeconomica blog series and I was able to separate all that from the magic he was teaching.

Having immersed myself in Helleno-Kemetic magic for a few years now I cringed a bit at GW's PGM course because besides the actually quite well laid out history part the practice lacked quite some rigor for my taste and largely ignored the necessary devotional aspects that is clearly part of this "tradition". After my long and intensive research on the Egyptian Decans I also found the year-long Decan Walk ritual quite off-putting. It seemed like a cherry-picked mishmash of ritual fragments topped with total lack of respect towards the deities involved, but again: I brushed it aside. It's Chaos Magic after all, am I right? Perhaps just a disagreement in style.

As membership numbers rose throughout the years so did the number of discussions on the forum and the questions in the Q&As. I followed the community aspects less and less because of redundant content, some annoying "me, me, me!" tendencies and seemingly rising culty behaviours of some of the members. Again I brushed it aside. Instead I spent more and more time in the Rune Soup communities on Discord which had more valuable discussions and a more healthy overall vibe to them.

I didn't really enjoy most of the content put out in the later courses. They seemed more and more meandering and less and less praxis oriented. I also got more and more annoyed about the lack of citations and attributions. The fact aside that GW always decorates his presentations with stunning digital artworks that he never credits, also much of the content in the courses seemed to be just less coherent regurgitacion of other people's work. (Dr. Skinner's books in Grimoires and PGM, Camelia Elias in the Tarot course).

When the Mansion Game was launched mid 2019 I decided to quit my membership, because the whole thing seemed chaotic and incoherent and nobody seemed to care about obvious flaws like naively mixing tropical and sidereal astrology. No, quite the opposite: criticism was not appreciated and any incoherence was waved off referring to the core principles of Chaos Magic.

It stopped suiting me, so I quit. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with disagree on technicalities. I could have just left it at that, but I still felt like a Soupie. I continued listening to the podcast, read the blog, attended our local meetups, occasionally dropped into the Discord channels.

Then the pandemic hit and everyone seemed to have lost their wits. And it was more and more difficult to ignore...

Literal Rune Soup

I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that GW got depressed from suddenly not being able to travel anymore, something he had obviously enjoyed a lot in the years before, or if it was something else...

Maybe the things that unfolded during the pandemic just made obvious what had been hidden behind a professional marketing facade. In retrospect, many of the tendencies had been there already before. Even GW says so. But that's not all:

I don't know if my memory is skewed but it seemed to me that suddenly the once for years so seemingly optimistic and empowering GW who didn't even fear taking it on with Decans or dragons drifted off into a cynically and smugly presented worldview of what could be summarized as alt-right conspirituality.

He was one of the first in the occult community who bought fully and openly into all of the Covid-19 'Plandemic' conspiracy theories and didn't shy away from sprinkling his thoughts (flipping from "zee koronawirus" being fake, manufactured in a lab, to being an op to implement a global digital currency and restrict personal liberties) throughout his podcast, blog posts, and most detailed in a long and disturbing premium member video presentation called The Vertical Line of which some slides eventually leaked to the public.

And you have to love when someone calls doctors struggling to keep people alive during a pandemic "cowards and sheep." Also, of course Melinda Gates and her globalist pals want to kill black and indigenous people. pic.twitter.com/kqTO4wqmHG
— Michael M. Hughes (@michaelmhughes) January 15, 2021

Despite years of preaching animism and kinship with the more-than-human world, teaching aspiring wizards to become "invincible", and relying on magical skills when mundane solutions fail, GW suddenly spoke about deep state conspiracies and neoliberal technocratic overlords pulling strings to imprison us in a digital control grid with a fake virus "plandemic". And worst of all: apparently there is nothing we can do about it, because "solutionism" is obviously part of the problem. Full-on gnostic despair!

I remember back in the days in his Magical Geography course GW was talking about "staying with the trouble" and the need to do our shadow work with racism, colonization and white supremacy - yet suddenly he repeatedly referred to Black Lives Matter as an op, started using terms like "shitlib" and waved other Trumpist "virtue signals", picked up right-wing accelerationist jargon and embracing questionable figures like Joseph P. Farrell, Alison McDowell, Catherine Austin Fitts, a more and more radicalized Martin Armstrong, and recommending alt-right media sources (Tim Dillon?). Was this the Chaos Magic logic of "belief as a tool" applied to politics? I found all of this development quite disturbing. There was no way to brush anything aside anymore.

There’s really not much regular people can do at this point but arm themselves and try to be economically self sufficient. Every major institution is against you and will let you die.
— Tim Dillon (@TimJDillon) July 14, 2020

I don't remember who said or wrote it. It went along the lines of:

how the Joe Rogan of Occulture suddenly turned into the Alex Jones of Occulture

It's funny but unfortunetely also true...

Anyway, despite the obvious differences in political leaning my post is not (only) about that. It's (mainly) about preaching one thing and then turning around and doing something different while repeating the word "coherence" like a mantra to your disciples. This was not the Rune Soup anymore that I had signed up for years ago.

What Magic is This?

To me personally, despite all the anxieties, the virus pandemic felt somehow deeply spiritual and almost like a global Saturnian purge, with all the horrors and virtues such an idea evokes. Having been a fan of GW's animist "flow model" thinking I was hoping he would address some insightful ideas on viruses as agents, or high level ruminations about this obvious "hyperobject" transversing our reality in 2020, a "virus on a mission", or how we are being reminded by the more-than-human about it's real existence, how we could embrace this time of change to do better magic, for our own healing, the healing of others, about changing the world, about making fucking solarpunk real!

Nothing! Nada! Just antivax rants about Bill Gates and the dangers of 5G! Are you fucking kidding me?

Worst of all, this ongoing right wing conspiracy babble seemed to seep into everything Rune Soup related.....wait...now that I am writing this I have to chuckle. It has become literal Rune Soup: right wing spirituality infested black goo creeping into the brains of some of its Premium Members. Or is it the other way around?

"At this point in the timeline" I cannot but see RSPM as either a gnostic doomsday cult or an alt-right echo chamber, or both.

Yeah there's the nice sounding phrase "Mutual Flourishing" being thrown around lately, but it seems to be either all about becoming gnostic permaculture preppers or using that phrase as marketing for creating a new Leonormand deck, an endeavor he also likes to call a little "sanctuary-making gambit". No marketing is even needed. It's a product already sold. The Premium Members will probably happily pay whatever for it, funding GW's new cult leader lifestyle. How mutual is the flourishing really?

Exiting the Vampire Castle

There is part of me that thinks maybe there is a magical explanation for what's happening with Rune Soup:

Somehow I am not really surprised GW is drifting off. Some of his "tech" has been quite disrespectful towards the spirits he "works" with. He used to jokingly refer to it as "bullying" but that's literally what he has been doing and teaching. It's a typical utilitarian "chaos magic" attitude that might have pissed off quite a few in the more-than-human world.

Also, in Western esoteric systems the spirit world is all about kingship, structures, hierarchies. Maybe when you regularly align yourself with that logic which is unavoidable when following systems of spirit interaction in this tradition, it becomes a habit to "subconsciously" think in those patterns. When you then start to form a hierarchical system in the material world (community, cult), in some sense mirroring the spirit logic, you might get the full attention of certain types of entities and ideas that fuel authoritarian logic even more.

Too far fetched? Too superstitious? Might be an influence, but certainly does not account for the big picture. It feels too systemic and all too human.

"When you squint down at it" RSPM in fact reveals itself as a quite neoliberally operated and marketed conspirituality brand rather than the resilitent animist in-group of operand solarpunk magicians it likes to present itself as... and despite years and years of GW ranting against exactly that: neoliberalism.

In her essay "Comrade" Jodi Dean sharply summarizes the logic of neoliberalism - that uncannily resembles the pattern I experienced around Rune Soup in 2020 and ongoing:

There is individualized self-cultivation, self-management, self-reliance, self-absorption, and—at the same time—impersonal determining processes, circuits, and systems. We have responsible individuals, individuals who are responsibilized, treated as loci of autonomous choices and decisions, and we have individuals encountering situations that are utterly determining and outside their control.

Instead of ethics and economics, neoliberalism’s displacement of politics manifests in the opposition between survivors and systems. The former struggle to persist in conditions of unlivability rather than to seize and transform these conditions. The latter are systems and “hyperobjects” determining us, often aesthetic objects or objects of a future aesthetics, things to view and diagram and predict and perhaps even mourn, but not to affect.

Survivors experience their vulnerability. Some even come to cherish it, to derive their sense of self from being able to survive against all that is stacked against them. [...] For them, the fight to survive is the key feature of an identity imagined as dignified and heroic because it has to produce itself by itself.

If you need more convincing, someone pointed me to this article the other day: Here's what the journalist Matthew Remski wrote in his analysis of the general phenomenon of "conspirituality" on Medium:

As social media becomes dominant, personal branding constellates around the archetype of the singular hero or “thought leader” who changes the world, one post or workshop at a time. But the influencer’s goal is not really social change. It’s “disruption”. Aspirational wellness content that can be spiced up with disruptive “transgression” becomes highly valued in a competitive landscape. This provides the template for the conspiritualist influencer: the solitary hero promising unique and personal salvation for body and spirit in times of crisis.

No, thanks! I am not only done with Rune Soup, I feel like I need a shower to wash it off.

I’m officially parting with RSPM. I’ve been really struggling with the direction of the membership over the past year and took the time to write down the things that didn’t sit well with me. Feel free to read it if you feel called to do so. pic.twitter.com/yUtM5EUfZE
— adam (@madamlehman) January 15, 2021

Fortunately I found out I was not the only one who felt like this. After a public Twitter callout of Gordon's politics by Michael M. Hughes and a less pleasant shitstorm that followed there was a spontaneous initiative started by some disenchanted Soupies to get together to mourn, kvetch, and heal, and to move on and build something new. This initiative has the fitting name The Others. I joined them and I am glad I did. Feels like a new home, warm and welcoming, and full of energy to integrate the present and move into a magical future, to fix Omelas instead of walking away from it.

Postscriptum

I honestly hope this whole mindfuck is just a dark episode of a person having difficulties to cope with the current situation and trying to make sense of the uncertainties. It is very understandable and I empathize. I wish GW the energy and wisdom to get himself back out of this mess, realize and reflect on what he is doing. It is just unfortunate to drag hundreds of paying followers into this. I know it's all voluntary and stuff, yet there's also group dynamics.

If you are a RSPM yourself, and some of the things I wrote resonated with you, feel free to reach out.

If you think I should not have published this but written GW a private email instead: there's nothing to "resolve" here. It's a few years too late for that. Plus, from some friends experiences there doesn't seem to be much acceptance of criticism from his side anyway.

Why publish it in the first place and not just keep it to myself you ask? Because I felt the need to write it down and stand up against it. And not in the shape of a Twitter shitstorm.

If you find my accusations unfair and hyperbolic, my apologies. They come from a hurt place. If you disagree and feel this post is slanderous or just ridiculous, please understand that this is my personal opinion and experience and I tried to express it in the fairest way possible.

If you believe Covid-19 is fake and Bill Gates wants to cull humanity, leave me the fuck alone.