Jason Louv is a copywriter and self-proclaimed “magician” who published the influential anthology Generation Hex, a sort of postmodern guide to guide to magic for the MySpace generation. I’ve had it on my amazon wishlist for ages but never actually ordered it; now I’m glad I didn’t.
I say this because of a recent search which brought me to this passage from Louv’s most recent ouevre, his “Ultraculture Journal, Vol I“:
So-called “black magicians” are usually fundamentally stupid, have little insight and operate at such a low level that they are hardly worth noticing, and generally so marginalized that they are invisible to society at large. Black magicians in this sense are usually engaged in making pacts with demonic spirits… animal torture for energy yield or capturing and torturing the spirits of the recently deceased… on top of that they often move in social circles where they become involved in hard drugs and the criminal underworld (drug dealers and the mob are sometimes known to employ such individuals for magically aiding and abetting various operations, as well as occult assassination—the Palo Mayombe community in New York, a major problem for NYPD, is a case in point…
This lead me to a post detailing a 2007 controversy stemming from comments made by Louv and his sidekick “Shivanath” on the “Ultraculture” chatboard – a list for fans of Louv’s writing and apparent source of contributions for his next anthology.
It emerged that the two would-be gurus had (or claim to have had) bad experiences with Voudon, bitterly prejudicing them against African religion in general.
No paraphrase could do justice to their outlandish comments, so I’ll simply quote them instead.
First, Shivanath:
….I’m absolutely free to say Crack is a Bad Drug. Voodoo is a Bad Tradition.
The basic mechanism: displacement of an individual human consciousness from their body and temporary replacement with a parasitic life-force-harvesting energy – this kind of psychic body prostitution in payment for magical favors – is inherently problematic. AAAW! You say, but it was the last resort of the oppressed! Well, so is hiding razor blades up your bum. … It’s time for people to grow out of voodoo and start investing in approaches which are suited to the modern world, rather than dragging these horrible parasite-gods out of the Medieval Colonial Barbarism period into the present.
They should have died with slavery, in short, and to continue to feed them is perpetuating part of the slave system into the present day, under the guise of “liberation.”
Later he continues:
Smart people avoid [voodoo] at all costs, and if these guys show up and attempt to invade a magical or spiritual community (a favorite pass time: invade the temples, steal the accumulated energy, and breed on the women if there’s a chance) they must be met with lethal force. First one or two show up and introduce a few people to the practices, or they’ll take an arts scene or even a band, and just hang out at the edges, or back stage. Then, gradually, the parties start, and get more ritualistic, and there’s a division into the people who can be bent and then taken, used and discarded, broken – and those who won’t play ball and must be made to leave. After that, things go rapidly downhill.
Called on the apparent racism of his collaborator’s comments, Louv demurs:
If there is any confusion here it is between the darker aspects of the Yoruban traditions, such as Voudon and Palo Mayombe, with the whole of West African religion. At the moment I will be very clear. I do not like Voudon and that is an opinion that comes from eight years of research, practical experience practicing it in a solitary fashion as well as directly through Gypsy Lantern and Cult Author, to my great regret.
And elsewhere:
The Yoruban religions are a beautiful and diverse mix, and are as full of as many different types of gods, entities, magical styles and viewpoints as, say, are in Buddhist cosmology, or any other. And every religion has its dark side and its hell realms.
I do not claim to be an expert, but the class of entities generally reffered to as the “Lwa” do not have people’s best interests in mind. I would not call them “demons,” because I think that’s a term that only applies to the Judeo-Christian cultures, which the Yoruban ones are not, despite the outward camoflage. The best lens through which to observe the Lwa, I believe, is the Buddhist. These beings are a type of what are referred to in Sanskrit as Preta, Hungry Ghosts…
These are literally insectile beings that naturally live in this level of reality. They breed out of the husked astral and causal bodies of the dead and move among them just as physical insects do through physical corpses—as above, so below. Voudon practitioners believe that these beings are gods and aspects of fundamental reality. This is not correct. If one sees and lives in this level of reality only they may look like gods, but from the outside it is much easier to see what they “literally” are: breeds of insect-like spirits…
My own comments to follow in a later edit of this post.
LATER THAT EVENING…
O.K. There’s reams and reams of these and similarly silly arguments from Louv and “Shivanath” scattered all over the “Ultraculture” Google group like horrible fundamentalist Christain parodies of an Erik Davis essay and it would be a tedious task to source them all, so I’m just going to make a few observations:
Louv appears to be a marketing hipster who enjoyed a modest degree of notoriety with a rehashed RE/SEARCH-style round-up of the same material typically found in “edgy” Gen-X surveys of Crowley-influenced and “chaos” magick.
Now he has set his sights on bigger game – the whole-cloth creation of an idealistic youth movement based on sorcery. But for some to be in, others have to be out; cue the Hollywood witchdoctor/boogeyman.
Louv and “Shivanath” are ready to take on the “parasitic gods” of Haiti, and let it be known that they aren’t just “dabblers” but SERIOUS FREAKING PSYCHONAUTS with the BATTLE SCARS TO PROVE IT.
Or maybe not. Aside from a few unsubstantiated claims regarding supposed voodoo “rape” rituals (!!!) , Shivanath’s arguments seem to be based almost entirely on multiple references to the Lwa (Voudon deities) in Grant Morrison’s “The Invisibles” - an award-winning graphic novel (or comic book) said to have inspired “The Matrix.”
This may account (in part) for his bizarre statements regarding the supposed favorite past-time of African diasporic priests – glomming onto cool scenes and “breed[ing on] the women.”
Let’s consider the typical palero, a powerful witchdoctor and master of the elemental forces who enjoys deep communion with the spirits of the dead. How does he spend his time?
If he’s anything like most of the paleros I know, he wakes up every day and goes to work at 7:30. Then home at 5 or 6 in the afternoon, a quick bath with some herbs and back to the workshop to do jobs for clients – people who need help getting pregnant, getting their green cards, or getting a cousin out of jail. An hour or two playing the drums, then maybe a beer or two in front of the TV, put the kids to bed and that’s it for the night.
How much time do you think a guy like that spends hanging around hipster art galleries looking for emo kids to “bend”? Unless someone is specifically paying him to bless the gallery so that it will have good business, then probably not much.
Louv, for his part, reveals through repeated references to “insectile” spirits that he has drawn almost all of his ideas about “Voodoo” from Michael Bertiaux’s hilarious “Voudon Gnostic Workbook” - a sprawling, psychedelic work of experimental science fiction which mixes Voudon, H.P. Lovecraft and “Shintotronics” with equal abandon – and has about as much to do with genuine Voudon as the Lucky Charms elf has to do with Irish folklore.
And here’s where Louv’s typical armchair occultist / Western consumerist assumptions trip him up. He seems to genuinely believe that because he spent a couple of years experimenting with “dark chaos magick” that means he has “experienced voudon” – but there is world of difference between masturbating over the hallucinatory were-tarantulas in Bertiaux’s bizarre grimoire and learning the songs, greetings and initiations necessary to participate in an actual African Diasporic religious community!
(Now that I mention it, does anyone in their right mind believe that any of these religions could have survived the Middle Passage if that’s what they were about – “chaos magick,” ”sexual vampirism” and scene-jacking? Like any of those topics would hold the slightest bit of interest for people trying to survive one of the most brutal systems of dehumanized labor production ever invented - give me a break!)
Even on the mundane level, Louv seems to know scarcely more about Voudon than would expected from a 6th grade book report, repeatedly referring to Voudon and Palo as “Yoruban religions.”
In fact, of the major ATRs, only Santeria and Candomble owe their pantheons to Yoruban belief ; Voudon comes from the Fon and Dahomey tribes while Palo Mayombe is Kongo in origin – something any santero, palero or voudonist could have told Louv if he had bothered to ask.
Louv’s case of the vapors gets even harder to swallow when we consider his own tenure as an editor for Feral House – a Portland publisher infamous for promoting all of the most poisonous excreta of underground/Gen-X counter-culture – volumes glorifying serial killers, the Nazi aesthetic, Satanism and child molesters.
Speaking of molesters, what about Shivanath’s claim to “decondition” women “victimized” by voodoo love-spells through his “tantric” training? I can only speculate what this actually entails, of course, but I’m reminded of the charlatan healer in “Road to Wellville” who specialized in administering rejuvenating “womb massages” – nice work if you can get it, but Shivanath had better hope for his own “karma” that none of these women ever realize there was no “voodoo love spell” in the first place!
In the end, it seems to me that Louv and Shivanath’s antics illustrate nothing so much as the dangers and distractions inherent to self-directed instruction in systems which have always been initiatory, communal and secretive. With no teachers to guide them, both sought out (and found) the most ridiculous misinformation possible, succumbing to delusional self-aggrandizement, paranoia and the projection of their own disowned shadows.
The upshot here is that the alleged “dark Yoruban practices” they condemn bear no resemblance to actual Voudon or Palo Mayombe but are instead imaginative phantoms devoid of substance, the symbolic Morlock counterparts to Louv’s “Ultraculture” Eloi.
I could continue with a look at Shivanath’s specious misrepresentation of spirit possession, but its late and I’d rather watch the Colbert Report. Go read about Vodou, voodoo, and western cultural anxieties instead.
These two remind me of the “Witches” so often encountered in Wiccan circles whose rhinestone encrusted grimoires are full of spells they learned from repeated viewings of Charmed.
The Internet and Print on Demand book publishing has created an entire class of know nothing “wizards” who haven’t put in the time and effort to learn their craft. Hipster pretension as occult knowledge. For them to maintain their cache they have to ensure that the inexperienced has no authentic traditions to compare their inanity to. That’ why the Afro-carib traditions are often denigrated by “chaos magicians” and Wiccans., compared to the real thing these people are obvious frauds.
I had the voodoo gnostic workbook as a kid. After one read (something about astral tarantulas) I knew I wasted my money. Funny that people still take that book seriously.
Practicing chaos magickian here (even have an emo haircut, while i still have hair), and I like Feral House and Re/Search too… Even printed a bootleg copy of the the Voudon Gnostic Workbook (“ZOMG teh Werespiders will killz me!”… if you didn’t know some joker claimed it had an “occult copywrite” and people ran with it), which was hilarious and what I’d file under my “Some People Have To Touch The Blowtorch Flame To Learn It’s Dangerous” category so let me get that out of the way as disclosure. But all of this is totally relevant.
I do find it hilarious that you have two “post-modern” occultists criticizing Voudon, etc., for being degenerate. It’s like they didn’t have the 90 minutes to watch that Maya Deren movie (“Ohmigod! Black people! Killing a cow! Then eating it! Werespiders! Aiiiiieeeeee!!!” (Don’t see why a voodoo sacrifice is a problem when Louv himself spent months sacrificing chickens in Nepal).
And maybe… just maybe… Louv didn’t notice that he was an upper-middle-class white kid petitioning spirits to whom he hadn’t been introduced (initiated)? Did he even know who he had on the phone? Come on, that is like 101 level shit… classic consumerism: “I made the offering [paid for it] then they kicked my ass [and I want my money back]!”
This post came to the party/parking lot brawl late, but it’s well-said, to say the least. It’s a shame to watch someone blow up on the internet, but like any train wreck, oddly fascinating. Louv seemed smart enough, though, it’s a shame a con-man vampire like Shivanath/Bastart could latch onto someone with some promise (who initially published Stephen Grasso, a hoodoo (?) practitioner), and, seeing an obvious weakness in his grandiosity, break him.
No Chaos Magick, Werespiders or Haitian Loa necessary. Just a classic example of a sociopath skilled at social games taking advantage of someone.
Anyway, just some words from a dude who was paying attention at the time. Nice website
Nsalamalekum
Hey thanks for your kind comments. And actually I like RE/Search and Feral House too, or did in my early 20s anyway.
And definitely anyone interested in anything even remotely resembling any of this stuff could certainly do worse than to start off reading Peter Carroll!!!!
Honestly what really tripped me out here, was how someone seemingly so intelligent – and who claims “eight years experience with Voudon” – could actually warn against “Dark Yoruban practices” with a straight face.
It’s like someone sent away for one of those “Secrets of the Deadly Ninja” kits that used to be in the back of comic books, and then made it his mission to warn people against “Dark Hindoo practices”!!!!
Too funny…!
Kiambote