Jonathan Bowden’s Suck, Part 3
Satanism & Modern Cults

You can order Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug here.

3,296 words

Part 3 of 7

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Suck is the second book in volume 2. It was first published as a distinct book under Bowden’s pen name John Michael McCloughlin (London: Avant-Garde, 1994). We will publish it online in 7 installments. The titles are editorial.

Suck covers a wide range of political and cultural topics, interspersed with fictional narratives that may be loosely based on real people and events.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Suck will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson

One similarity which this discussion has not brought out, however, is the degree to which modern cults resemble the Satanic Lodge; more accurately, the neo-Satanic lodge which the young man experienced. This has to do with the control which is exercised over the participants, the degree to which these Cults take people who are broken and divided against themselves. Ultimately they were people who were either congenitally disturbed or who went unloved in childhood. In short, they were people who had a crack running through the middle of their personality, like a mirror which is thrown to the floor suddenly, and the Cult then abused them, paid them back in kind, fleeced them financially, and broke them further psychologically, all the while pretending to do the opposite. Since these cults existed as beacons of light in a darkened world! They existed to provide a total answer for their devotees, to provide a way out of the darkness, to furnish what Adorno called a totalizing experience, a totalization, a utopian optimism—ultimately the truth and the light and the way through the darkness! This was an answer, one inviolate answer, to all those people who read the newspapers and watch the television news and who asked the question: why?—and who wanted an answer. These were people who felt themselves to be crippled and alone. They were struggling and neurotic, and when you listened to them you hear a sort of tremulousness, an inner anxiety, a sort of clutching at the nerve ends of the language which is used to explain how they feel. When this is to discern—or is it to disinterr (?)—their innermost motivations, the sense of tranquility which they have never known, and like a madwoman, such as Judy G—, (someone I once knew), when they turn round suddenly they can see hands stretching through walls which are stained with blood!

The Cults which we have been referring to are household names, such as the Moonies (the Unification Church), the Church of Scientology (originally called the Dianetics Foundation), the Mormons and the Christian Scientists (to a lesser extent). While there are other cults like Exegesis, the School of Economic Science, neo-Crowleyanite sects like the Ordo Templi Orientis, (the OTO), La Vey’s Church of Satan in California, and cultic elements in groups such as Opus Dei in the Catholic Church and the lunatic fringe of Protestant fundamentalism, such as the Plymouth Brethren. While other cults we could mention include Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Madame Blatavsky’s Theosophy (hardly in existence now), a tiny little sect like the Divine Lighters, and elements in the Jehovah’s Witnesses—as well as the dwindling band of Swedenborg’s supporters, who are to be found around his New Christian Church, in Notting Hill Gate in West London. Although there is a line of force which demarcates these cults one from another, and it can be seen in the difference between light and darkness, between the shade and the absence of any shade, the illumination and the nature of that which is illumined (as we might say), and such a division separates the kinder, less offensive (if equally crankish cults) from the more insidious outfits. It is, in short, a dividing line between the Swedenborgians, the followers of Rudolf Steiner (particularly in education), and the harmless zealotry of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—and the Church of Scientology, neo-satanism, much of the Unification Church, Tantric infelicity, and the hippyesque psycopathia of Charles Manson, his family, church, and psychology. Ultimately there is a dividing line between a cult which merely offers a window on the world; an attempt at a complete answer, a monumental act of forgiveness, a form of love and charity which is complete, all-complete, too complete and stifling, even totalitarian—albeit with a smiling, blank and happy face attached—and those Cults which set out to use a sense of love, a beatific vision, to destroy those who become party to their view of the world. There is, in other words, all the difference in the world between trading on charity in a naïve manner, in a manner which reflects that inner naïveté—what we might call the simplicity of the child—and an organization which sets out to throw a phial of vitriol in the face of such childhood innocence. This is a group which seeks to rip off the mask on the teddy bear, the smiling oval face on a yellow background, which stands, on the one hand, for the Acid House Party, and on the other, for Glasgow the city of culture, only to reveal the image of one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes (à la Velasquez) underneath.

All of which was revealed in a party which I attended in Hackney last Saturday evening, the sort of party which is typical of the artistic profession (if not the avant-garde). It was a fancy dress party, a party dedicated to fakirdom, the wealth of the Bourbons, luxurious Nabobs, Persian potentates, and an extremely attractive blonde woman, dressed in the manner of Boadicea, possibly Brünhilde, with a tight-fitting metal bodice, which fitted neatly over the breasts, together with a Viking helmet, a toy sword, and a metal shield, with her hair in gold plaits on either side of her head. In many ways, the party was reminiscent of a scene from Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God, particularly Lord Osmund’s Lenten Party , which is actually set at the Sitwells—where a group of dandies, decadents, and poseurs—all in fancy dress—gather to ape the artistic process, and to talk about the important issues of the day, all of which seem to revolve around the nature of their own personalities. During this party I fell into conversation with a woman who had been educated in a Rudolf Steiner school; one of the dwindling band of such schools which this group had around the country. She referred to the fact that a large number of other Cults, such as Scientology and the Moonies, sent their children to this particular school, even though they did not share the predilections of Anthroposophy. For the first principle of anthroposophy, of the ‘anthropops’ as she described them, was a sort of guiltless splendour, a complete and somewhat neurotic happiness, devoid of any sense of shame, guilt, or anger; in other words, of reality. It was a religious or spiritual type of education which was untrue to life, which was, in short, completely pathetic and liable to be roundly abused by those who came into contact with it. It was as if anthroposophy, a mixture of anthropology (the science of man) with Theosophy (Madame Blatavsky’s ‘Secret Doctrine’), provided its adherents with no mechanism for self-defence at all, with no understanding of reality, no ability to fight back against the misfortunes of existence. In a sense it was one of those radical humanisms, like the Swedenborgian Cult and the theology of Feuerbach, which married a type of secular Christianity—that was nearly all sweetness and light (with no reality whatsoever)—with various types of post-enlightenment belief, at once restrained, civilized, and unutterably sweet. Indeed there was a strange connexion with Marxism here, in that Feuerbach (a committed post-Christian humanist whose views provided George Eliot with her secular catechism) together with the radical theologians Otto and Botho Strauss^[1] were all members of the left Hegelian circle known as the ‘Free Ones’; Die Freien, which met in a beer garden in the centre of Berlin during the 1840s. This was the decade which was to see liberal and nationalist revolution throughout Germany, and this circle was visited on many occasions by Marx and Engels together with Max Stirner, their individualist anarchist, nihilist and anti-Hegelian opponent. Although it has to be pointed out passim. that Stirner used post-Hegelian categories to arrive at non-synthetic or non-syncretic solutions. It was as if he thought in anti-Hegelian categories which were indebted to Hegelianism by virtue of refutation, in that his Zeitgeist (or more accurately) his anti-Zeitgeist involved a recrudescent non-Hegelianism—whereby the ego, the inner resources of the mind, rather than the nature of spirit in history, became the determining factor in human identity, even in its nothingness. However, the point made by the woman at the party was that Anthroposphy did its adherents a disservice. It persuaded them that life was better than it was, that everything was absolutely wonderful, rather like the innocent wonder of the 1960s—something which was best encapsulated by the photograph of a young girl sat cross-legged and naked from the waist down while reading a copy of Carl Sagan’s Love Story,^[2] all of which in no way prepared the children at the school for life. The best example of which can be seen in the fact that one of the masters who was keenest on the ‘all sweetness and light’ line was actually a paedophile, a convicted child molester, who had been abusing the infants in his care for many years. All of which indicates a certain innocence on behalf of these doctrines, a susceptibility to cant and self-delusion, which is typical of belief systems like Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. Unlike libertarian individualism, which always has as its concomitant a certain perversity, these types of religious belief, this moral eschatology, is always amazed by its own failings. It is quite genuinely dumb-struck when the stone is turned over, when their belief-system is turned upside down to reveal the creatures crawling and writhing underneath. In fact, innocence is always a form of guilt which over-estimates itself; it is primarily a form of witness—a truncated idealism—what we may call a desire to have one’s cake and eat it. Whereby a vision of the world and of other human beings which is too unhurried, too complacent, too nice and too over-anxious to be anxious at all, is bound to throw up its opposite. It is based on such a radical form of self-denial, in other words, that selfishness is bound to reassert itself at its expense.

Another example of this tendency for morality to become its opposite is seen in the case of Charles Manson. Indeed one of the leading lights at this particular Steiner school was an ex-aficionado of the Manson Cult; the Family, as it was called, and this individual encapsulates the dangers which are implicit in a position of radical innocence—in a position which is totally untrue to life; its will, strength, nature, and defects—because when you deny the immoral, the delicious and yet barren taste of undivine fruit, you do something to the moral universe. You denature it, you skew it around upon itself. In short, you stop being human—a position which contains the immoral within itself—and you start becoming inhuman, you adopt a position which is not only beyond good and evil but beyond good and bad. All of which is seen to occur with the Manson ‘Family,’ where one individual, namely Manson himself, promised all the others within his circle a form of divine exaltation; a type of limitless parental consent—where Manson promised to love and cherish, to keep in thrall—in an emotional, sexual, and psychological manner—all the other Family members—all of whom became extensions of his own personality, signatories to his undivine will, members of a cast who were searching for a script which he could provide them with. Indeed, it was less of a case of six characters in search of an author (à la Pirandello) than an assortment of characters whose performances were determined by Manson; their director, their Anti-Pope. (As in the Middle Ages when the Holy Roman Emperor designated a rival to the Vatican’s throne.) When Manson was a man who was a mixture of Roman Polanski and Gilles de Rais; a man whose relationship with his ‘children’ resembled Tiberius attempting to evacuate in the mouth of a catamite. Ultimately the ‘Family’ represented the hidden or unconscious element of the nineteen sixties, a decade which had devoted itself to fun and frolics, to hedonism, without any concern for the consequences, and with no perception of any moral come-uppance. Indeed, it resembled a scenario where Mary Kenny, a journalist of Irish extraction, who is now an anti-abortionist, a Roman Catholic, and a non-feminist, who writes for the conservative press, was then—in the 1960s—a woman who wore see-through skirts at parties so that people could see her vagina. Although it would not be accurate to say that the world has seen a complete moral reversal since the 1960s. It would be more accurate to say that the sixties itself was the reversal and contemporary mores, such as they are, is the normalcy. This is a condition where barbarism, a degree of necessary barbarism, is accepted as part-and-parcel of civilised life—without repressing it unduly, and seeing it emerge in a dangerous and uncontrolled way, in a manner which was reminiscent of the bordello and the dog-fight, with the advent of Charles Manson. For in many respects Manson channelled all aggression, the mindless bourgeois hopes and the delusions of that decade—all the counter-cultural sickness, the drop-out psychology and rebellion against Mom and Pop—in the direction of a heedless neo-Romanticism. This is a decadent romanticism (if not anti-romanticism), a form of cultural purge or laxative—a type of aesthetic nihilism—because in a sense Manson was an anti-genius; a conceptualiser of nothingness, a man whose company would enable you to vomit once a day. In a sense, therefore, the Manson Cult represents all of the fucked-out dross of the nineteen-sixties, all of its blindness, stupidity, and lack of talent, all of its scatological emptiness and lavatorial scrapings. If you like, it resembled an exemplum, a negative metaphor for the sheer awfulness of this decade, the capacity it had to bring to the surface the worst, the most treacherous elements, of bourgeois scum. (When the term scum is used correctly, and it refers to a precipitate, a body of matter at once striking and insoluble, which floats to the top of a larger solution that originally contained it, which still contains it, and in relation to which it floats like a thin film on the surface.)

Indeed the alternative religiosity of the 1960s was a mixture of several different things—a commingling of several rival tendencies. As the “peace and love” metaphysic of the hippies was seen to clash with the swirling and negative undercurrents of the Manson Cult, on the one hand—while a sense of experimentation, a sort of do-it-yourself religiosity, led to a commingling of the Occult, paganism, and various types of Eastern religiosity, on the other. As many Christians attempted to point out, such a do-it-yourself approach had its dangers, in that without any reliable structures to appeal to people were liable to go off the rails and make many mistakes. In a sense they were prone to religious forms of libertinage—in the realm of the senses—and they were liable to mix together types of observance which should have remained separate, all in accordance with Crowley’s dictum, “Do what you will shall be the whole of the Law.” Such experimentation inevitably had two sides to it, the one passive, heedless, and only partly demonstrative, the part of the Hippy Cult which looked to the East and waited for transcendence. While the other was deeply attracted towards “shadow cults,” that part of religiosity which is concerned with power, with hierarchy, inequality and will, and which is best represented by various forms of Satanism. This type of spirituality is primarily concerned with the exercision of power, with the control of resources beyond the ken of normal human beings. In short, these types of spirituality offer freedom from death and mastery over life in relation to death, in relation to the prospect of inexistence, a nothingness which is overcome, a type of divine nihilism. All of which sits very well with a Satanic or Luciferian Church; a type of diabolical devotion. Where Lucifer is treated as a metaphor for epicureanism, for a type of “healthy” paganism à la Llewelyn Powys—what we might call a sort of negative humanism or a situation where Lucifer (or one of his attendant demons) is believed to exist, is believed to commune with certain human beings at certain times and in relation to certain ceremonies, as we have already described. Needless to say, such devotees take two views of Lucifer: they either see evil as a positive force; a liberating moment, a thoroughgoing instantiation, or they see evil as good, as justified in and of itself, in relation to a moral order which is inverted, as human beings understand it, which is turned upside down and on its head—so that night is day and black is white and vice versa. This is the type of “morality” which believes that paedophilia is a moral good: since evil is moral and what was presumed to be right conduct is evil. Yet there is another dimension to Satanism, and this believes that Lucifer can be summoned, but that he doesn’t exist. He is not corporeal or otherwise intact; in other words, he exists as a chimera. He subsists as an absence in being, something which the mind conjures up from its innermost depths, and such a creature is a concretization; a divine metaphor. In other words, it believes that his existence is fleeting and subjective, but as advanced physics tells us, the subjective is influenced by the objective, because the experimenter is always part of his experiment. In a sense, therefore, these Luciferians have a view of God; a perception of the deity or anti-deity (if you will), which is reminiscent of the Christian God in the eyes of the Bishop of Durham. Where God is a form of illumination, a type of transcendence, which is revealed through faith, rather than an entity, an observable thing, a miracle—when certain of these devotees are after a miracle. They are primarily concerned with power, with a miraculous transformation of their present circumstances, with a spiritual amelioration for present incapacity. Hence the fact that one of the Satanist groups in Britain is led by a cripple, a woman who suffers from multiple sclerosis. Although it is somewhat surprising that this interest in alternative religions has not extended to indigenous faiths. In other words, that a concern with the ecstatic, the spiritual and the mysterious, has not reverted to various forms of pre-Christian religiosity; such as paganism, heathenism, or Odinism, for example. Instead it has pursued a path from sixties experimentation to the occult, amateur demonisms, and the religions of the East.

Notes

[1] Botho Strauss is a playwright. David Strauss and the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer were left-Hegelians.

[2] Love Story (1970) is by Erich Segal. Carl Sagan was an astronomer and pop-science writer.