A global conspiracy is a toxic oversimplification whose usefulness has been so muddied by psyops and competing interests as to be a complete waste of time.

So it seems to me, in a way, with the concept of the Demiurge.

A cursory inspection could give either notion the appearance of unity but this is just an occasionally convenient mental shortcut.

Far be it for me to use the personal experience of a wizard of limited skill to make broad statements about the Beings playing starring roles in our universe but I have never encountered anything with a resumé to match the job specs.

Archons… sure. Demiurge? Attribution error.

(The best justification I have heard for hard polytheism is the universe certainly behaves like it was designed by committee. A similar principle applies here.)

Let’s quote PJC in PsyberMagick on politics:

Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model, but only if you use it backwards.

The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.

Three things feed conspiracy theories –

Paranoia born of the need for self importance.

The need for enemies: which comes down to more or less the same thing.

The desire for belief even in malignant forms of control rather than in the reality of pure chance chaos and accident.

However, just because an illuminati is accidental doesn’t mean there aren’t groups and forces making a play for your world.

It just means they don’t get along well with each other or, indeed, themselves.

Pete again:

Any conspiracy lacking internal conspiracies will rule its world.

Only through absolute loyalty to each other can the few control the many.

The extreme simplicity of these statements belies both their awesome applicability to conspiracies at all fractal levels and the virtual impossibility of their achievement.

In practice the power of any conspiracy rises and falls in inverse proportion to the power of its internal conspiracies.

Hence saying “the government” or even “the secret government” are oversimplifications that historically have been used to further a corporatist, Dominionist agenda. (Caution: Many, many curse words.)

The centre of gravity in terms of competing agendas has shifted over the last five years toward the entirely rotten global financial industry -possibly because we collectively came down with ‘outrage fatigue’ over criminal occupations and gross war profiteering- but we are still dealing with the geopolitical fallout of the second-most-prominent western agenda:

The above is a rather excellent BBC documentary series from a few years back that traces the rise -in conjunction with radical Islamism- of the neocons from a deranged professor in the late sixties, through Kissinger’s attempts to cockblock their policies with his own global strategies (Kissinger who may have recently said Israel won’t exist in ten years), through Ford, Bush Snr, Bin Laden as a CIA asset in the 1980s, Gulf War I, the Project For A New American Century and right up to the mid noughties. (Extra credit assignment: A full documentary on PNAC. Fair warning: It will only appeal to some of you.)

Obsessing over the minutiae of various false flag events, spook meddling and political corruption is like admiring the knife that stabs you. We’ve been getting stabbed for 60 years. Far better to look the attacker in the eye, especially when it appears to be hundreds of distinct hands wielding a single knife. (A cosmic Orient Express?)

Because the sequence of current events –these falling dominos– have brought us to some very strange and dangerous days. I am writing this from Hamburg and the news flashing up on the screen in the corner is all about the high security -7,000 police officers, snipers on rooftops- accompanying Chancellor Merkel’s visit to Greece.

This is one EU leader visiting another. Let’s be clear. That much security should not be needed!

Selecting a few more stab attempts, randomly drawn and instantly found:

UK Conservatives are testing the waters for drastic changes to abortion law. (Get senior ministers to say it is their “personal opinion” and gauge how the country reacts.)

New drug launches are preceded by covert manipulation of the academic literature:

[C]ompanies will set about paying for and planning, and in some cases ghostwriting, papers saying that the disease their new drug treats is an underdiagnosed problem, it’s much more prevalent than we thought. You might also start to produce lots of literature about how current interventions aren’t very good, downplay your own side effects, promote off-label uses of your drug, and so on. That’s all before you get anywhere stage-managing the literature about the actual benefits of your treatments.

Forget conspiracies. We now live in a world where these things happen in front of our faces. We aren’t even considered worthy enough to be lied to. We are bullshitted at: (Bullshat at?)

[T]he Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt made a crucial distinction between lies and bullshit. To lie is to intentionally deceive, by saying what you know (or believe) isn’t the truth. Romney does this all the time. To bullshit, though, is to talk without regard for the truth, one way or the other. The liar and the truth-teller, writes Frankfurt, “are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game”; the bullshitter, by contrast, refuses to play. “He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.”

That was the bad news

One of the more common charges levelled at what we now call modern Gnosticism (itself an oversimplification) is that it relies on holding a negative view of the physical world… something that is at odds with our majority-Pagan vision of western magic. But it seems to me that this is instead a convenient shortcut, much like the Buddha’s insistence on meditating through visions of the gods and Jesus’s insistence on not being a dick. It’s a cosmology designed to maximise the likelihood that its adherents will actually do the work rather than admire the trappings.

The physical universe is patently not ‘evil’. In an esoteric sense, matter may be a ‘prison’ (labyrinth is a better metaphor) but there is nothing inherent in the quality of the substance itself. My holidays are basically time spent in holy places, spaced out with heavy drinking. One of the most numinous experiences of my life occurred underneath one of the archons’ most significant thrones.

The physical realm isn’t evil. It just may have been hijacked.

The battle for your mind is ongoing. Bob Wilson used to speak of a ‘psychic censor’ that attempts to subvert or block magical experiences. To me this feels like the calcification of your mind that results from allowing a worldview that includes secret free trade agreements and presidential hopefuls who wear magic underpants and ignore 47% of the country they wish to govern.

Given that, certain solutions present themselves:

Keep hold of the weird. For me, the ever-evolving whisky rant is a means to stave off mental calcification. Here’s a great post about just that:

To do that we have to examine the mysteries, the high strangeness, the UFOs, the mystical, the mind expanding, the altered states, and the bizarre. But we have enemies that seek to demolish these things and to “debunk” the ideas in them. Keeping us in a cell of the Black Iron Prison that is called reductionist materialism. They tell us there are no UFOs, no mysteries, no truth to myth, and that anything you experience is simply biochemical reactions in the brain. There is no soul or spirit, no higher state of consciousness, no elevated awareness, no possibility of connection to a source outside ourselves, since they claim it doesn’t exist.

Know that They are afraid of you. Here’s another one:

The elite power-brokers of this planet know on some level that a liberated human consciousness has the power to blast apart all forms of slavery. As professional slave-masters this terrifies them. And so the better angels of our nature are kept in exile, as we are force-fed horror and desecration. But there are Magi among the human race, individuated expressions of the Innermost.

Never stop being outraged. This is shaping up to be an apocalypse of a thousand papercuts. Attacks on the rights of women and workers, the wholesale abandonment of the poor and the unwell, changes to employment rights, the suspension of democratic process, constant monitoring of citizens, attempts to control digital information. It can get tiring keeping it all in your head, I know. But do try. And never stop being outraged and never give in to fear.

Sometimes chaos magic feels like nothing so much as ‘angry gnosticism’. Following a classical experience of gnosis, one is supposed to be -to borrow a phrase- in but not of the world. Fine… but I want our world back.

As King Mob says to the Marquis de Sade: “There is only ever one revolution.”