Mysticism as the Path to Political & Social Change
The Aristocratic Radicalism of Mystics & Occult Thinkers

You can buy James J. O’Meara’s Mysticism After Modernism here.

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James J. O’Meara has a book out, Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, and Other Populist Gurus, published by Manticore Press. The book is about where mysticism intersects with culture and politics, rather than being some purely academic look at mysticism and the occult. It is also about thinkers who used magic to enact real-world change.

Much of the Right is dismissive or derisive of the occult, their criticisms ranging from conspiracy theories about evil Illuminati occultists to dismissing the New Age scene as being solely for Left-wing hippies. Regardless, there is a lot of crossover appeal and syncretic occultism. Even New Thinking Allowed’s Jeffrey Mishlove, who comes out of the hippie culture in Berkeley and is a universalist, has many fans on the New Right. There is a rich tradition of occultism on the Right, as well as overblown allegations that there is an esotericism/occult-to-fascism pipeline which includes Savitri Devi and Julius Evola, not to mention the link between the New Age scene and libertarianism. Mysticism is in fact ideologically neutral and can be tailored to any political ideology or subculture.

The thinkers discussed in O’Meara’s book include William S. Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Colin Wilson, Alan Watts, Neville Goddard, and Julius Evola. It is important to counter the stereotype about all New Age gurus and mystics being hippies, despite the fact that, out of these thinkers, only Evola is thought of as Traditionalist or Right-wing.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book The Eldritch Evola here.

Alan Watts was more a man of the Right than some assume, even if he often came across as a hippie, criticizing tribalism and calling for people to just go with the flow. Watts mocked the dilettantes of the New Age scene and hippie counter-culture, and also spoke out against modern psychiatry. Apart from Eastern spirituality, Watts’ influences ranged from Jung, to Evola and Nietzsche. Watts said that it was the inspiration that he took from Nietzsche’s courage and spirit that kept him from going to a university. Watts called upon people to escape the nonsense of modern society, including bureaucracy, meaningless jobs, conformity, arbitrary social mores, rules, and life scripts that are keeping us enslaved. This went beyond hippie egalitarian individualism, amounting to a call to tap into vitality and embrace non-conformity in a quasi-elitist or Nietzschean sense.

In Alan Watts’ youth he had been a follower of the quasi-fascist Serbian philosopher and mystical guru Dimitrije Mitrinović. Mitrinović was an advocate of guild socialism, social credit, and European unity, though he was anti-Hitler. In Watts’ book Behold the Spirit, which he wrote when he was an Anglican priest, like Oswald Spengler he held that there is a spiritual basis behind the way in which each civilization is formed. As an Anglican priest, Watts said “love your enemy, but love him as your enemy.”

Some excerpts from Watts’ speeches sound more Right-wing. For instance, in his speech “You Are It” he expresses spiritual elitist sentiments, and commented to a young woman that her beauty mattered more than her credentials because beauty comes from biology, which sounds like something that Bronze Age Pervert would say. In another talk, “You Cannot Improve Yourself,” he critiques both the cult of self-improvement and eugenics while also embracing hereditarian thinking. His point was that different genetic traits are suited for different circumstances. He also had seven children, so you could say that he was a traditionalist in his personal life, despite being married multiple times.

While Watts held the hippie Buddhist view that money was just an illusion, he also expressed anti-usury and anti-fiat money views, basically contending that wealth must be something tangible. There is an essay in his book Does It Matter, “Wealth vs. Money,”, where he advocated for something like C. H. Douglas’ social credit, which is superior to Andrew Yang’s universal basic income. In that essay, Watts’ most political piece of writing, he calls for restructuring society to replace work with leisure, but also for a society based upon aesthetics and beauty.

Watts had a strong interest in Buddhism. The Buddhist approach of detachment from all that is material and belief that everything is transient can seem demoralizing and nihilistic. Colin Wilson disliked Buddhism for this reason. However, a change in attitude and consciousness allows for a mindset of freedom and opens up realms of possibility for creativity. Watts was actually not an ascetic, but rather a dandy who embraced the passions of the senses, including the finer things in life.

The Traditionalist Right-wing framework is demoralizing, such as the idea that we must accept cycles of decay. Evola did not simply sit around waiting for the Kali Yuga, however. This relates to QAnon’s quasi-Gnostic, passive mentality of just “trusting the plan,” not to mention the fact that the woke Left is also quasi-Gnostic. Gnosticism does not have to be passive, however, and we must dream big and believe that anything is possible. If you want, call that the gold pill.

Colin Wilson was briefly famous for his book The Outsider, of which celebrities including John Lennon, David Bowie, Gerry Rafferty, and Muammar Gaddafi were fans. Wilson was a prolific author, writing about topics ranging from the occult and crime thrillers to science fiction and horror inspired by H. P. Lovecraft. Wilson is sometimes associated with the Angry Young Men literary subculture, which was basically the British equivalent of the Beats, even though the Angry Young Men were more Leftist and mocked and denigrated British culture. Wilson was actually critical of them.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, spirituality and the cult of Nietzsche fell out of fashion while materialism and rationalism prevailed. So it was during the heyday of the 1960s counter-culture that Wilson tried to get in on the newfound appreciation for Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley, and mysticism. While Wilson was associated with existentialism, he was much more of a Romantic, yearning for the nineteenth-century optimism and heroism that was missing in the modern era. Wilson’s approach to mysticism revolved around the theme of consciousness, searching for the sense of feeling alive and experiencing the full intensity of the senses in the peak experience.

While Colin Wilson was not overtly political, he was smeared as a fascist, due to his relationship with the British fascist politician Oswald Mosley. Wilson was involved with the human potential movement, believing that humans had hidden potential as well as in the Nietzschean ideal that humans can transcend the evolutionary ladder in order to become Übermensch. Wilson once wrote that “[h]uman beings are pretty trivial insects. No wonder so many of them are mediocre.” He also suggested that “cancer kills people because they lack vitality.” Wilson was an elitist because he had contempt for the conformist masses. But he was also a populist, having grown up working-class and never attending college; he scorned credentialism and the elite Oxford/Cambridge set.

Alan Watts was into Oriental spirituality, Neville Goddard was into William Blake and the Bible, Colin Wilson was into Romanticism, and Aleister Crowley was into rediscovering ancient lost magic such as Hermeticism. Most of these thinkers proclaimed themselves to be individualists, yet wanted to be part of something greater which liberal individualism can’t provide. These thinkers were all spiritual elitists, even if they never explicitly said so. That is what sets them apart from the Left, even if some of them may have supported socialism or embraced hedonism. Certainly Burroughs and Crowley — the latter being called “the wickedest man in the world” — were “degenerates” by “trad” standards. Even Wilson’s writings about serial killers and sexual deviants such as the Marquis De Sade talked about them as seekers of a radical expansion of consciousness rather than in moralistic terms.

You can buy Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right here.

Wilson’s The Outsider does not merely talk about non-conformity or rebelling against authority for its own sake. Rather, Wilson viewed the Outsider as an archetype for those who could not connect with society because they were exceptional. But the Outsider is also a spiritual archetype. He is not a cynic but rather an idealist and romantic who envisions how the world should ideally be.

The creative or artistic caste is the natural aristocracy. This view could be described as aristocratic radicalism or aristocratic individualism, or even as a brahmin/priestly or shaman caste. What is standing in its way are mercantile and managerial interests, as well as petite moralism, liberal egalitarianism, and the tyranny and sensibilities of the lowly masses. Viewing artists as a natural elite caste that is being suppressed is a major theme among thinkers and artists such as Wyndham Lewis, Oscar Wilde, H. P. Lovecraft, Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley, and Ezra Pound. Their individualism was often a response to existing hierarchies that were insufficient or arbitrary . Aristocratic radicalism may seem like a cope, but just look at who and what our society rewards and incentivizes. Elitism is needed because, as in the 60s ‘counterculture, egalitarian individualism is easily co-opted by big capital and powerful institutions.

Economic elitism is the adversary of cultural and spiritual elitism, and represents a fundamental flaw in American culture. This was a significant theme in early twentieth-century thought, but it is especially relevant today. There just aren’t enough articulate and prominent voices to make this case. There is a need for leisure and economic patronage, which explains Oscar Wilde’s support for socialism for culturally elitist reasons. William Burroughs and Lovecraft, coming from old money, showed the limits to being self-made men, not to mention the need for patronage.

Creativity is a way of tapping into a spiritual force or metaphysical realm and stealing the fire from the metaphysical gatekeepers. While the imagination is all-powerful, not everyone’s imagination is equal. Mysticism requires training, but also natural-born gifts. I think mastering the occult is extremely difficult, and few people have the talent, with many self-proclaimed mystics and gurus being revealed as charlatans and grifters. There are psychological and spiritual prisons that only certain people can break through.