Rev Max Interview by Tim Boucher

January 7, 2006 | Share/Save

Rev Max (a pseudonym) is the deranged mind behind Enemies.com, the weird art website which first exposed me to gnostic myths and symbols in the late 1990’s. I didn’t actually get really into gnostic thought until several years later, but I always really loved Max’s out-there artistic vision. So I was very excited when earlier this year, he got in contact with me to tell me how much of a positive influence my website had on him in turn. Funny how things go round and around like that.

We’ve since struck up a close friendship thanks to our shared interest and approach to the world of the bizarre. Since creating Enemies.com, Rev Max has also become deeply involved in an unnamed African Traditional Religion (well, it has a name, but he’s not allowed to tell you what it is). I thought he’d make a great interview subject since he’s had such a wide-ranging personal journey through myth, magic and religion. So without further ado, here is my long-anticipated interview with him. Many thanks to him for this opportunity. Enjoy!

POP OCCULTURE: What’s your religious background - how were you raised?

REV MAX: My introduction to religion came from my Dad, who read me to sleep every night from D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods & Giants. From three onwards I lived on a steady diet of frost giants, trolls and valkyries.

Kids at that age don’t really distinguish between fantasy and reality so it never occurred to me that these were just stories that came out of a particular culture - I simply accepted them as true. So when I was walking to school in the morning snow I would race around telephone poles, thinking if I was fast enough I might be able to catch a glimpse of a troll hiding behind one.

Did you have any formative experiences with religion as a kid which lead you to your later exploits with your website or otherwise?

One of the very earliest memories I have was seeing the Cardiff giant. This was a late 19th century hoax - a farmer wanted to prove that Biblical people were giants, so he secretly hired a sculptor to carve an enormous man out of stone. Then they pitted it with acid so that it would look old, buried it in a field and pretended to discover it a few years later.

Anyway, this statue was a sensation when it was “discovered” - the petrified “giant” was even covering his genitals modestly with his hands, just like in the old medieval woodcuts of Adam and Eve! Eventually some enterprising reporter noticed that the farmer had bought an enormous block of granite several years before that and the hoax was revealed. But for a couple of years there, the “giant” was a popular sideshow attraction.

Long after everyone involved in the original hoax had died, the Cardiff giant was brought to a museum in upstate NY and put on display. My Dad took me to see it, lying there on its back in a bed of straw. I really found whole thing to be quite impressive and eerie. The idea that someone would go through that much trouble to “prove” the Bible really amazed me!

When I was four or so, we moved to Canada, and since my parents wanted me to learn to speak French they sent me to French Catholic school. My earliest memory from those days is from kindergarten: one of the nuns asked me what color the sky was. It was one of those mornings where the entire sky was covered with clouds, with no sun or blue peeking through at all. So the sky had a luminescent glow - the light was diffused pretty evenly through the underbelly of the clouds from horizon to horizon.

Anyway, being a kid, I answered honestly - the sky was white. “Oh no!” the nun exclaimed. “It’s gray!” I remember being very confused, and even held up the thumb and forefinger of each hand to make a visual frame I could look through, the way that photographers sometimes do. I checked again. “No, it’s white” I insisted. So I was sent to sit in the corner.

Looking back I can understand why she thought it was gray - she wasn’t actually seeing the sky but was plugging into the idea of the gray sky as a symbol instead. She was so hypnotized by her own preconceived notions of what a cloudy day is supposed to look like, she couldn’t see it for what it actually was.

That’s the weird thing about Catholic education. They expect you to buy into their reality whether you believe it or not. Even if you don’t, you have to act like you do or face the wrath of the nuns. This was brought home for me in a dramatic way when we learned the story of Job in art class one day.

Now, when I was in 3rd grade, I found out that my Dad had bone cancer - he’d been sick for a couple of years and was slowly dying. So when the nuns made us learn the story of this insane creator god who deliberately tests Job by plaguing him with boils, killing his entire family, etc. it really infuriated me!

God kills Job’s whole family and then rewards him with a new family when Job turns out to be faithful in the end. But I couldn’t help but think that even a replacement family wouldn’t make me happy again if someone had murdered my whole family.

It just didn’t make sense. And to see my friends sit there at their desks and nod like they thought this was all perfectly reasonable behavior on the part of a loving God really confused and upset me.

I was super-curious though, so I kept pestering and quizzing my friends. They took communion and confessed, but I didn’t - maybe they knew something I didn’t too? Maybe they were better people than I was?

“God makes people do everything they do” my friend Richard (a good Catholic kid) informed me one day. “Really? Does he make me say that God is stupid?” I asked. He couldn’t answer me and I realized then that he didn’t know - none of them did.

Since my friends didn’t have the answers, I decided it was my job to give them the other side of the story. So every day during recess and lunch I would entertain the other kids for hours telling them all about the adventures of the Viking gods.

“Thor has a chariot pulled by goats and at night he kills and cooks and eats the goats and buries their bones and the next day they come alive and pull his chariot again!” My friends laughed - “Ha ha, tell us another one!” I felt sorry for them because they didn’t know the big picture, so I responded: “I’m doing you a favor telling you this stuff, some day you’ll realize that and thank me.”

One day as I was talking about the Norse gods at lunch, one of the nuns snuck up behind me and grabbed and dragged me by my hair to the principal’s office where I was smacked across the mouth with a ruler and screamed at. They called my parents and sent me home for the day for “spreading blasphemy.” No kidding - you really could get in serious trouble for telling pagan stories at Catholic school!

Anyway, I went home and told my mom what had happened and she told gave me one of the biggest disappointments of my life - she told me that the Scandinavian gods were just “myths.” God, I was crushed - finding out there was no such thing as Thor was worse than finding out there was no Santa Claus!

A regular activity for our family was going to the library every Saturday to roam the stacks. My parents’ rule was that anything I could read, I could take out - psychology, anthropology, biology, whatever - no section was off limits, even the adult ones.

So the weekend after I got in trouble in school we went to the library and I took out a half-dozen books on various occult and paranormal topics - Voodoo, bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Atlantis, etc. And the very next Monday I marched right back into class and began proselytizing for the occult.

As upset as I was to find out that most people don’t believe in Thor and Odin I was still stubborn enough to think that there still must be “something else” out there. I knew it wasn’t the Biblical god, so what was it? I enthusiastically began trying to covert all of my friends into true believers in ghosts, sea monsters, werewolves, etc.

The nuns caught me and sent me home again. By this point my Dad was really sick and I was upset about that too so in the aftermath of my second punishment I shut up for the rest of the year. And by that I mean that I just crossed my arms and glared at the nuns and refused to speak in class at all - I did that for 3 months - a real prisoner of religious conscience! And then my dad died and we moved to the US and I left Canada forever.

Well, there’s a lot of similar stories I could probably tell you about Boy Scouts, the pledge of allegiance and the like, but suffice it to say that by the time I was eleven I had completely soured on organized religion, patriotism, and all the rest of it - any kind of coerced belief or participation, authority figures, national and religious symbols, hyperemotional vows of allegiance, “salvation,” “sin,” “repentance,” “duty” - to this day I feel an overpowering and visceral repulsion and disgust for all of those things.

Those experiences affected me a lot, actually. I became a permanent outsider.

Like Nietzsche said, “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” The truth of this was revealed to me from a very young age in way that was impossible to deny.

How did you get started with Enemies.com?

I spent 1993 teaching English in Czechoslovakia, and I noticed while I was there that there was no ADVERTISING anywhere - no billboards, no jingles, no nothing. This was only 4 years or so after the Berlin wall came down so the Czechs hadn’t gotten with the program (global capitalism) yet.

Anyway, because there was no advertising I suddenly found that I could remember my dreams for almost the first time in my life. Poems began spontaneously composing themselves in my head, songs, stories - it was great.

I moved back to the US and went to art school for the summer in NYC (SVA). At the time I was reading a lot of antinomian-type authors - Hakim Bey, Peter Carroll, W.S. Burroughs, R. A. Wilson, Georges Bataille, etc.

One of the ideas that really spoke to me was the idea the subconscious has its own sort of primal power that “the Powers that Be” pretend to ignore on one level but actually put quite a bit of effort into controlling and exploiting on another, less obvious one. So I decided to put together a ‘zine and explore these ideas for myself.

The basic concept I had in mind was that this society doesn’t prepare us to be full human beings, it prepares us to be consumers - of goods, services, ideologies, etc. The human brain is occupied territory - we’re so barraged with agenda-driven symbols and slogans and programs that most of us live out our lives in a waking trance, stuffed to the gills with a million and one useless lies that address every phony “need” we have except for one: what does it mean to be truly alive, awake and aware of our desires?

So my idea was to create a parody apocalyptic cult called the “Psychic Enemies Network” and write manifestoes for it. In my imagination the “Psychic Enemies” were these nihilistic pranksters who forced people to wallow in fear and disgust and greed and consumerism until their brains backfired and they finally woke up. Like Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong - product placement in a slave labor camp.

Anyway, I never did publish the magazine (you can find a partial PDF of it on my site) but I did register the domain, and it turned out to be a good choice given what it turned into.

How did you get into gnosticism as your subject matter?

That’s a long story. Back in 1991 I was teaching 7th grade social studies in Texas and I had, really - the shittiest year of my life. My girlfriend dumped me, I got in car crash, I got sued, my Mom almost lost her house - it was really stressful.

Anyway, one day I picked up this music magazine called Option and it had an article about this crazy science fiction author who had had a break with reality and began channeling this alien being called VALIS. He first came into contact with VALIS when it descended upon him as a pink light.

Without even thinking about it, I threw myself on the ground and prayed as hard as I could: “Please pink light, show yourself to me! Enter my mind and help me organize my life and pull my shit together and save me from this meaningless hell!”

Fast forward 4 years to 1995. I had just moved to San Francisco and a bunch of new friends and I rented a van and drove to Mardis Gras in New Orleans. At the time I was reading a lot about Hindu tantra, parallel universes and the Bible. There were a lot of similarities between tantra and the Genesis myth which particularly fascinated me. God created the world in 7 days, the human body has 7 chakras. The snake tempted the woman Eve, the kundalini serpent awakens the inner goddess. The apple opens the eyes of knowledge, the kundalini experience opens the third eye. Etc.

Anyway, I was hanging out in Jackson square just sort of soaking up the fun and thinking about all of this God stuff when - well, it’s difficult to describe, but I had an epiphany that time was not moving.

See, during Mardis Gras, the streets are filled with drunken pagan revelers and also tons of Christians trying to save and covert them. So on the one hand you have these college kids wearing red suits and devil horns handing out “get out of jail free” cards, and then you have church camp kids re-enacting the stations of the cross dragging this life-sized crucifix down Bourbon St. And the drunks are screaming at them, and laughing and throwing garbage, and the weird thing is - that’s exactly what they want! They like being abused, it reinforces their idea that they’re being persecuted, instead of looking at reality, which is that they’re a bunch of sheltered suburbanites mounting an ineffective campaign to spoil the fun of Mardis Gras for everyone else by injecting this weird note of guilt and sin.

Anyway, seeing all this - and also inhaling lots of laughing gas - somehow it just floored me, the whole city became this sort of timeless, mythical amusement park of the soul where eternal forces struggled forever against one another without resolution and none of it actually went anywhere - these were just timeless archetypes playing out their assigned roles. So little has changed over the centuries that we might as well still be in ancient Rome!

A line of police marched down the street in slow motion and it looked like the ground was crumbling beneath their feet; Christian teenagers re-enacted the fall of Lucifer through interpretive dance and then tried to save skeptical audience members.

I came back to San Francisco all fired up and babbling about all of this stuff to a friend of a friend and he said: “Oh! Are you into gnosticism?”

Now, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I bought Jacques La Carriere’s The Gnostics. Lo and behold, the things he described were everything I had always secretly wanted to see.

I had always hated the figure of Yahweh in the Old Testament but it had never occurred to me to tell my own version of his story. Even in a society where a lot of people are supposedly atheists there is still something quite intimidating about Bible and the authority it represents.

But the Gnostics didn’t have that problem because Christian doctrine hadn’t been settled yet - the Bible didn’t even exist until the 4th century! So the Gnostics wrote their own scriptures, retelling Christian stories of sin and salvation from the underdog’s point of view - God is depicted as a bumbling tyrant who wants to keep humanity enslaved while the serpent in the Garden of Eden becomes a Christ-like savior who opens humanity’s eyes.

I was blown away by the subversive humor and blasphemous energy of these texts - I mean, the symbolism, the characters, everything about the Gnostic myths just hit me with the force of a tidal wave - it was like something I had known all of my life but had never been able to articulate.

Despite their archaic, Biblical language the Gnostic myths are also very futuristic - they touch on all sorts of complex and paradoxical ideas that scientists are still debating today, e.g. the existence of other worlds, the nature of perception, the limits of knowledge, etc. So the more I read, the more the whole Gnostic movement really just fascinated and inspired me - discovering it for the first time completely changed my idea of what was possible, what religion was for, what Christianity could become!

I became obsessed with Gnosticism and started - literally - typing 16 hours a day for a month. At the end of the month my wrists were so battered I couldn’t even hold a beer bottle - my fingers couldn’t grip the neck and it fell out of my hands and shattered!

I was initially drawn to your site back in the late 90’s by the crazy artwork. I didn’t know anything about gnosticism, but I was doing a lot of digital art back then on religious themes myself and it really resonated with me. What were your artistic inspirations and aspirations back when you were doing a lot of that stuff? Did the art evolve over time considerably?

Well, the original inspiration for a lot of the art were people like Barbara Kruger, Bruce Naumann, WWII propaganda - grayscale collage and photography that was just sort of an abrasive slap in the face to the viewer. I was also really attracted to the dystopian sci-fi aesthetic of people like JG Ballard and WS Burroughs. RE/Search press influenced me, so did Dadaist collage artists like Max Ernst and John Heartfield.

After a couple of years, the grayscale stuff really kind of depressed me though. It felt too mechanistic and bleak. Also, I had run out of source material for collage - there were too many things I wanted to depict that I couldn’t depict that way. So first I went back and colorized my favorites, then I took a break for a year, then one day in 2001 I decided to pick up a pencil and start drawing.

And that for me was fucking fantastic, liberating, a complete change of pace - colorful, alive, humorous, monstrous, sexyâ€¦my illustrations have a lot of the same themes as the collages I did in the late 90s but are a lot more magical and vibrant somehow. More life-affirming, more vital.

The main reason for that, I think, is that the first 4 years or so I worked on enemies.com I didn’t believe in spirits - I thought all of the Gnostic myths were metaphors for various cognitive, psychological and biological processes. That may be why so many of my collages had a sort of medical flavor to them.

And after I got involved with shamanism and began having experiences with spirits I discovered that spirits are just as real as you or I and so my depictions of the Gnostic myths started to deal with the figures in the myths as actual beings alive in themselves - the vibe became less “Matrix” and more “Loony Tunes” I guess. More playful and optimistic - letting the subjects bumble and cavort and be themselves instead of trying to nail them down and dissect them.

So what were the drawings influenced by? Well, really just all the stuff I absorbed as a kid - underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb and Tomi Unger, bubble gum comics, voodoo flags, Ethiopian magic scrolls, tantric folk art, tattoo flash, stuff like that.

What were your best and worst experiences running that website?

My best experiences were always letters I got from people describing how they’d had some sort of wild out of body journey or mystical vision of timeless unity with all of existence and they were reading something I’d written or illustrated and it triggered a memory of that in them and so they were dropping me a line to let me know they knew exactly what I was talking about. Some college girl from South America wrote and told me my site helped her get through a really stressful, depressed year of her life, that it was a source of hope for her. That was awesome.

The worst experiences came when I started to lose my sense of humor about it and actually argue about Gnosticism with people. Y’know the Gnostic symbol of the ouroboros - the serpent devouring its own tail? That’s what Gnosticism becomes when you try to literalize it or turn it into a dogma. You wind up running around in circles. I got very frustrated and really started to feel a lot of despair when I realized that you can’t show people things they don’t want to see.

I mean to me all of these myths about Adam and Eve outwitting God, and Jesus escaping the cross, and rebellious, anarchic, creative heretics who had orgies and denounced the creator god and wrote their own scriptures are just such a hilarious, liberating, example of the magical power of paradox and humor. But a lot of people are so heavily invested in their identities as atheists or fundamentalist Christians or whatever they can’t allow themselves to laugh or feel wonder or see possibilities or even consider other points of view. It’s all too threatening.

So they come on strong like they know everything and just pour and heap scorn on anyone who colors outside the lines and then you waste hours trying to dialogue with them until you finally realize they hadn’t even read whatever it was they had supposedly objected to in the first place. And then you think “Why am I wasting my time trying to communicate with these cretins? Fuck’em.” It gets old.

What was your life like back then when your site was at it’s peak?

LOL. I was experimenting a lot with uppers at the time so I was in a state of manic exaltation 24 hours a day. At any given time I was reading a dozen different books about quantum physics, brainwashing, genetic engineering, Hinduism, Gnosticism, postmodern literary theory, propaganda, the occult - my apartment was covered with pictures and scribbled on napkins and torn-out notebook pages and collages from ceiling to floor, on every wall in every room. When I saw that movie “A Beautiful Mind” it reminded me a lot of that - the way the guy had his office set up.

Why did you eventually stop working on the site for so long?

The initial iteration of the site was something I put together playfully, almost as a joke. I scanned in all this material about the big bang and parallel universes and dark matter and then cut them up and wove them in with the Gnostic scriptures. I was amazed at how closely all of these ancient Gnostic myths seemed to parallel modern scientific theories - the thought processes behind them seemed to be very similar.

So I used Burrough’s cut-up technique to create a conversation across the centuries - modern physicists and ancient Gnostics having a dialogue about the origins of the universe. The juxtapositions forced the reader to make certain leaps for themselves - like a schizophrenic seeing a pattern.

Eventually I started to take the questions I was exploring a bit too seriously. I stopped leaving my apartment and became more and more obsessive. I started to believe that I was on the verge of solving the mysteries of the universe, and any day now, the aliens would beam me up.

For example, how will the world end? I researched this a lot. Apparently it really depends on whether it is open or closed. If our universe is open it will keep expanding until it winds down from heat death, if its closed the big bang will eventually run in reverse until there is a big crunch and the whole process starts again.

I felt like I had to find out - I could not live without closure on this issue. And I drove myself insane reading every book I could on the topic until I lost track of the fact that even the most brilliant minds in physics can’t answer some questions for sure. I really thought if I could figure out how life started and where the universe came from and how it would end then I could die happy.

At some point though I just kind of crashed. My mom called and told me that my grandfather was dying and I should go home and visit him. I said, no, I needed to figure a chapter I was working on. That night I was lying in bed and one of my neighbors was playing the bagpipes on his roof and I started crying. So I went home.

While I was there I found a copy of Philip K Dick’s diaries, which I had bought years before but never read. I opened it up and was amazed. Basically I had been doing exactly what he had done - winding my brain up into a state of amphetamine-fueled enthusiasm and then working out all this manic energy in an over-ambitious intellectual project, trying to solve the riddles of existence through the comparison of speculative physics with an ancient Christian heresy.

When I read that I remembered praying to the pink light. I guess I got what I wished for. My life was kind of falling apart though. I had gotten too out there, too detached from human life, too cold and intellectual, too obsessiveâ€¦ I had to warm up and get back down to earth. And for years I was ambivalent about the whole thing, I didn’t know what I had done wrong, if it was the speed or the website or my artwork or what but somehow my life had taken wrong turn. So I decided to just drop the site for a while and focus on more mundane things like work and food and my health for a couple of years.

How and when did you get involved in practicing magic?

When I stopped working on enemies.com for a year or so I also stopped doing speed. And I knew that I was really going to miss having the magic and mystery in my life that drug had provided so I wanted to find something else to get involved in - something outside normal reality.

I don’t know why, but I started burning candles a lot. I also started taking baths. These were just instinctive things - I had no idea why I was doing them.

I went to the Mission district one afternoon and bought some incense at this little hole-in-the-wall candle shop called the “Lucky Lady”. I had started reading a little bit about magic and witchcraft and thought I knew what it was. I didn’t understand yet that spirits are real and have their own agendas and personalities but I did know at least that there was something to this “spell” stuff.

The shopkeeper was this old black lady who wouldn’t make eye contact with me and wouldn’t tell me what this incense was for or how to use it. She didn’t even want to sell it to me, really. But I bought it, brought it home and began burning it anyway. No reason - it just seemed like it might be a nice thing to do.

About 2 two weeks later I was at work on my lunch break and some friends and I went to a diner. Next door was another one of those weird ethnic candle shops, so I went inside and the owner came up and started talking to me. And he was asking me what my religion was and I said “well, I’m interested in Christianity and Buddhism” and he laughed and said “our religion is more POWERFUL!” And I just kind of stared. I had no idea what he was talking about. How could a religion be powerful?

Well, one thing lead to another and he wound up doing a consultation for me - I paid him to throw the bones and tell me my destiny. And everything he told me was just so eerily accurate - it was very unsettling. So I asked him what the next step for me was and he told me to come back in a week and do a special ritual to remove all of the negative energy from my aura.

Anyway, at the time, I had been without girlfriend for a couple of years and had a really stressful job, working 11 hour days for crap pay and always just about to be fired. Short version, my life sucked. Within a month of getting this spiritual cleaning I quit my job and started making a lot more money as a freelancer. Then I started dating the woman I eventually married. Wow! All of a sudden life was looking up again.

I went back to the shop and hung around some more. It was weird because I was the only white guy there but everyone was very accepting of me for some reason. From what I hear that’s very unusual. As an outsider it is usually very difficult to get involved in these religions. These are closed communities, private covens - the progression from client to initiate to priest takes years.

Anyway, I went to a couple of masses and drum circles and saw people get possessed. That freaked me out too - it was terrifically frightening and intimidating and disorienting. But somehow I just kept hanging around, and becoming less nervous and less scared, and more and more interested in the whole thing. I wanted to now how this stuff worked.

I found out that I didn’t know anything about witchcraft or tribal religions - absolutely none of the things I had read had prepared me in any way for the real thing. I had to adopt the humble attitude of the beginner who knows nothing and can’t assume anything. It was a steep learning curve and very good for me too.

What kind of magic do you practice? What systems is it similar to?

I can’t tell you much about my particular tradition, but I can tell you a bit about where it came from. During the period when the Americas were being colonized and the slave trade was at its peak, tribes from all over Africa were brought to the New World in chains. They also brought their spirits with them.

Some tribes had “hot” spirits - fierce, rebellious, vindictive, fast. Others had “cool” spirits - gentle, forgiving, playful, slow. This seems to be a recurring pattern across these systems.

Anyway, these transplanted tribal religions were syncretized with Catholicism and the African gods took on new identities as saints. They also absorbed various Native American beliefs as well as European influences like Freemasonry, Spiritualism and goetic sorcery. Eventually they became entirely new religions of their own in places like Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and New Orleans.

All of the ATRs (African Traditional Religions) have very similar beliefs, structures and practices but the names, songs and the symbols are different. One tree with hundreds of branches, each one unique and distinct but with a lot of cross-fertilization. Go back far enough and the differences between them seem to originate with the root tribes themselves.

Do you have any advice for people who might be interested in getting involved with such communities and practices? What problems have you yourself encountered?

Well, my only advice really is to go slow. There is no hurry. Not everyone is meant to practice an ATR - in fact, most people aren’t. You have to be called. The spirits themselves choose who they want to work with. So just be patient, research it, keep an open mind and an attitude of patience and faith. If you are really meant to, you will find a way.

You also need to remember that these are real religions that are hundreds of years old. They aren’t here to please Western consumers and they won’t adapt to them either. They are what they are. These spirits have teeth. They aren’t for playing or dabbling with - it’s a serious commitment.

You’ve mentioned in the past that there are certain things that you’re not allowed to talk about when it comes to the type of magical work you do. Without saying what these things are exactly, can you at least provide us with sort of an overview of what type of things you’re not allowed to talk about, and what purpose might this secrecy serve?

There are a lot of reasons for secrecy. Here’s a few of the most important, off the top of my head:

A lot of times people will be introduced to this sort of magic as a client. They have an intractable health, legal or romantic that is wrecking their life and which they don’t seem to be able to solve by any other means. So they put their faith in a witchdoctor to do a ritual and fix the problem for them.Now, if they immediately rush out and blab about what they have done to friends and family it could create all sorts of problems for them. A lot of times even the people who love them are unconsciously motivated to sabotage them; either they are jealous because they don’t have the courage to do something like that themselves, or they are pious and frightened so they try to convince the client that they are going to burn in hell.Now, none of these things will prevent the spell from working but if the client becomes confused and starts to feel guilty or frightened or silly about it, then this really could sabotage their spiritual growth.
On a related note, there is an energy and intimacy involved in holding a secret. Keeping something secret can give it weight and momentum, even for someone who had been involved in witchcraft for years.Think of a caterpillar in its cocoon. You don’t tear open the cocoon to see what it looks like while its undergoing its metamorphosis - you let it emerge from the chrysalis itself. The change is a mystery, its not meant to be profaned by observing it like a peep show.
There is a lot of prejudice against tribal religions. People are frightened of then - they think they are evil, wrong, etc. The stereotyped stuff you see in Indiana Jones movies is irritating enough to me as it is, so why would I want all of my co-workers to know what I’m into?If they knew about and believed in it then they would either be suspicious and uncomfortable around me or else tire me out with endless requests to help them solve their personal problems. The fact that so few people who know me know what I do means that I can pick and chose who I want to help. It’s nobody’s business but my own.
One final reason I can think of is that I swore an oath to protect the secrets of my lineage, not to let outsiders know certain things. This is both out of respect for my spirits and also for my own protection.The stronger you get with this stuff, the more attention you draw. Not all of this is welcome. The more you become aware of the spirits, the more they become aware of you too - the good ones and the bad ones. And humans as well - other witchdoctors can feel your ripples - they know you’re in the pond with them, even if they might not know exactly who you are, they know you’re there.There are so many more people out there into this stuff than people realize - it’s a very, very competitive subculture. I don’t want other people to know what I do because they might be in the same branch as me, but if they’re not in my particular coven then there’s a good chance they will see me as a competitor and attack me just for fun, just to test their own skills. Maybe someday I will be ready to put myself out there on that level, but right now I’m not.

I’ve seen you make fun of neo-pagans and Wiccans who say that they don’t worship Satan and don’t do black magic, and who claim that witches don’t really do those things. This has always seemed like kind of a watered down, quasi-Christian approach to witchcraft in my uneducated opinion. Does it jive with your experiences of magic in traditional ethnic communities? What’s the difference between pagan/Wiccan magic, and what you do?

The whole distinction between black and white magic to me has always seemed rather pointless. I mean let’s deal with specifics here: are you motivated by anger to get revenge on someone? Then you will probably use ingredients and call on spirits that will puncture that person’s aura and degrade their energy, ruin their luck, etc. Are you motivated by compassion to help someone else recover from a disease? Then you will probably use ingredients and call on spirits that have a different kind of vibration.

But between selfish anger and selfless compassion lie a whole range of motivations, spirits, ingredients and vibrations that can’t really be classified one way or the other. Look at the colors people use for candles: purple for power, green for money, red for passion, etc. Where do you draw the line between love and lust? How about greed and hunger? We’re spirits living in animal bodies - very complicated creatures.

We call things black or white to make ourselves comfortable and give ourselves a way to classify them but I don’t think the spirits really care as long as they get their props. They probably even laugh at us about our insane need to label everything!

I know you have several anecdotes about encountering different types of spirits and non-human entities. Many people fear getting involved with magic and the occult for exactly this reason. Can you share a sampling of your experiences with us? What types of spirits have you worked with? Have you actually seen any face to face? Is working with spirits really dangerous? What are some of the potential positives to such practice?

Hmmm. This part is difficult to explain but I’ll do my best. The general idea with the particular tradition that I’m most heavily involved in is that there is family line of spirits that you have to be introduced to, and make a pact with, in order to be able to work with them. You need to be officially introduced to them and “adopted” into the lineage before you can really come into your own.

The point is that it can be dangerous to deal with these spirits - or really ANY spirits - if you come to them from outside their particular tradition, as an amateur a skeptic or a dabbler. It’s very easy to offend or to confuse disincarnate entities. A lot of them are like people - they prefer certain colors, foods, smells, etc. Some of them are opportunistic - they will latch onto anyone who pays attention to them. Others are proud and reserved and take forever to get in touch with.

They usually appear to me in dreams, in the aftermath of a ritual. I will see people sitting at the foot of my bed talking to me. Or I will go somewhere in my sleep and have long conversations and be shown things.

A lot of them have great senses of humor and are really into puns, jokes, dramatic flourishes, etc. They send you signs and symbols in the “real world” too - animal messengers, coincidences, fleeting snatches of conversation overheard.

Speaking of encountering them “face to face,” one of the biggest blunders I ever made was trying to do a spell using an incantation from a book called “Ancient Christian Magic.” These were unfamiliar spirits - angels - and I certainly had no reason to think they would welcome my requests. This was years before I got involved in a community. I was just sort of experimenting, reaching out blindly to see what would reach back. So I lit a candle and then went to sleep.

That night I sat up in my bed and noticed that the light on the ceiling of my apartment was on, which was odd because it hadn’t worked in years. Then the chair in front of my desk lifted off of the floor and started floating around the room. It really shocked me. I remember thinking to myself “I always wondered if this stuff was real, now I know!”

I looked outside the bedroom window and saw someone clinging to the side of the building, about a meter to my right. It looked like a person wrapped in a shroud from head to toe - but as much as I craned my neck I couldn’t see their eyes. I had a feeling of dread that just about overwhelmed me - my skin was really crawling! The next day I came down with a high fever that lasted for 3 days and was pretty much stuck in bed.

I thought about it later and remembered that angels in the Bible aren’t always nice and friendly. They’re usually figures of awe and terror, bearers of plague and wielders of flaming swords.

Well, the favor I had asked for wasn’t very nice either so I guess I will just consider that a friendly warning - I’m lucky that thing didn’t kill me!

The positives? Well, when you enter a system you like and whose spirits you get along with it can be a tremendous amount of fun to do rituals and get to know them and interact with them as you feel them out. It’s like peeking into a mystery.

And then when the ritual comes to fruition, which can sometimes happen in a very dramatic and humorous way - the feeling is exhilarating. It’s like a wonderful secret - to be able to tap into the power of whatever tradition it is that you are working in and feel the energies of its spirits moving through you - its almost like a drug!

I know I personally have always seen money and spirituality as sort of opposed to one another, so it’s been really helpful for me to hear you talk about how money is so intricately tied into the particular brand of magic that you practice. Can you explain this in a bit more detail? Why is money so important? Do you think there is a lot of scamming and fraud that arises as a result of such heavy importance placed on money in these communities?

Well, the tradition I work in, we charge people to do spells for them. There are a lot of reasons for that.

For one thing, money is a medium of exchange - BTUs condensed into an abstraction that is easily transportable, fluid, a symbol. Almost everything in this world can be converted into money and then back into something else. It’s hard for us to part with it so that’s a sacrifice from the point of view of the client.

And they need to make that sacrifice, to have some skin in the game. Because whatever problem they have has a source - some sort of negative energy they have absorbed. And when they pay the witchdoctor, the energy of the problem is absorbed by the money, and then transferred to the spirits.

So the money act as an energetic buffer between all of the parties involved - the client, the witchdoctor and the spirits. And that is necessary because when you are doing these exhausting rituals late into the night, helping people to solve serious life problems, you absolutely cannot afford to personally shoulder the bad energy of every person who asks you for help. If you did that enough, you would wind up worse off than the people who are coming to you for help!

Because these spirits will take their payment! If you ask them for a favor and then refuse to pay either they will refuse to do the job, or else they might extract their payment in some other way, like draining some of your life-force - money is safer.

There is an incredible potential for scamming, especially when people get scared into thinking that they’ve been cursed or something. I’ll tell you the truth though, most people curse themselves. They accumulate negative energy until reaches critical mass, and then they collapse and can’t figure out how to get out from under it.

To really understand how these things work takes years though. Things that seem arbitrary and absurd have reasons but you can’t understand them until you experience them first hand.

For example, that whole idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed but can only change form. That’s true. If I remove bad luck from someone it has to go somewhere, right? Eggs are good, an egg can absorb a lot. So then what do I do with the egg? It’s like a hand-grenade of bad luck now. I can bring it to a deserted wilderness area and leave it there to be reabsorbed by nature. Or if I am having a conflict with someone then I might do something else with it. It all depends.

How is your magical practice either an extension of or reaction to your earlier work with gnosticism? Are there things in gnosticism which prepared you for what you’re doing now?

Gnosticism started off as a joke for me but eventually became a serious quest for spirituality. I discussed what the appeal was elsewhere so I’ll just say here that Gnosticism helped me realize that religion is something that should serve human needs, and not the other way around.

That’s why there are so many different versions of the Gnostic myth, and why Gnosticism keeps resurging no matter how brutally it is suppressed - the human need to ask questions and tell stories is just too strong. There doesn’t have to be just one storyline, one creation or one salvation - there are dozens if not hundreds and even millions of them. The idea that some authority should claim the right to enforce theological consistency, should punish human imagination and growth, is absurd and insane. When you get right down to it, religions are different because people are different - “One law for the lion and the ox is slavery,” like William Blake said.

Looking back, my obsession with Gnosticism also had some of the qualities of what they call “shamanic sickness” in the literature - I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I had a lot of nightmaresâ€¦ I had a very difficult time dealing with the “normal” world for a couple of years there.

Gnosticism was a radical assault on my assumptions that shook me to the core: Catholicism, political correctness, Oedipal guilt, consumerism - I threw all that crap into this fantastic mythological meat grinder and re-evaluated everything from a foreign frame of reference. And once the infection (if you want to call it that) had run its course I was left some very strange ideas about the way the world worked and a desire to see them put into practice.

I was tired of writing and speculating about and illustrating mythology - I wanted to manipulate the archetypes on a more profound level. So when I found out that there were other religions that that were very hardcore and serious about magic, and that were similar to Gnosticism in so many ways, it was very easy for me to make the leap.

As far as conceptual similarities go, Gnosticism and the ATRs both posit a God who is distant, almost unreachable, but exists inside everyone and everything as an energy at the same time too. Both posit an order of angels ruling over the world as forces of nature - and from the human perspective these can seem good or evil, depending on what they’re doing. Both also emphasize experience instead of faith and reincarnation instead of hell.

But the ATRs aren’t dualistic like extreme forms of Gnosticism can sometimes be. Their spirits aren’t particularly ascetic. If anything they’re radically world-accepting - the gods themselves possess human beings, entering their bodies and acting through them. And I mean this isn’t theory - it’s real. I’ve seen it many times.

These sorts of magico-religious traditions also have a completely different concept of good and evil that the Abrahamic montheisms - they’re not based on scripture or revealed texts, but on the flow of energy, absorbing blessings from the other world, removing negative energy from yourself in this one. In a way that makes them very dynamic and spontaneous - you don’t read about things, you do them. If you want to know what God thinks, ask him! It could be different tomorrow.

Are there aspects of gnosticism which are ill-suited to magical practice?

That’s a great question. The biggest problem with Gnosticism as I see it is that it is too easy to get lost and caught up all of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, and comparing them to the New Testament, and turning it into a giant intellectual puzzle, and parsing everything in Christian terms and Christian lingo, e.g., grace, the flesh, the law, sound doctrine, etc. ad nauseum.

Gnosticism is not about prohibition and mediation at all, it’s about freedom and authenticity but the problem is that the language of Christianity is the distinctive language of prohibition and mediation and that’s very difficult to get around.

That’s probably why my absolute favorite Gnostic texts are the ones that depart the most radically from Christian tradition (or what became Christian tradition) and re-imagine creation and the crucifixion as an organic, spontaneous myth: Hypostasis of the Archons, Second Treatise of the Great Seth, St. Epiphanius’ accounts of the Barbelognostics and Carpocratians, etc. These don’t even try to appeal to orthodox Christians, instead they posit an entirely different universe, wild desire, the absence of authority, fertility, humor and imagination, eroticism, etc.

Valentinus and cats like that who were trying to proof-text and justify everything and reconcile Gnosticism with orthodox Christianity and Platonic thought really bore me. Give me barbarous names and orgies any day! Death to Yaldabaoth!

Your website is single-handedly responsible for inspiring many people to find out more about gnosticism. Now that you have some distance from that, how do you feel about it? Are you still as interested as you were in gnosticism back in the old days? What value do you think gnosticism has for people culturally - what should they get out of it? How far should they take it?

How do I feel about it? That’s hard to say, because in a way I’m still grappling with it - even after all these years, Gnosticism still feels like something slippery that’s alive in my hands, always mutating, something I can’t pin down and dissect.

I’ve read a million and one academic analyses of Gnosticism: it’s parasitic, it’s nihilistic, it’s elitist. It’s all bullshit. The Gnostics weren’t academics, this was an experiential thing for them. You weren’t even considered a true Gnostic in some sects until you had written your own version of the creation myth - people overlook just what a radical position that was, what they were actually doing.

The Gnostic myths aren’t just satirical retellings of Genesis and the New Testament, they’re actually magical spells, portals into a series of parallel universes with completely different origins, rules and destinies than this one. The Gnostics discovered that if they imported Biblical themes and figures into their own myths, they could actually change the past and usurp God - the ultimate cosmic coup-d’etat!

So I’m no longer interested in rehashing tired old debates about whether or not gnosticism is Christian; I only care if it works, if the myths function as tools to unleash magical power and catalyze awakening, rebellion, humor, creativity and freedom.

Build your own universe, fill it with gods that you created, and then draw energy from it. Go back into time, create your own origins, and be reborn! Take it as far as you can!

What’s next for your website and for your creative work? Are you going to keep exploring gnosticism, move more towards the magic stuff, combine the two, or move in some other direction entirely? Have you given any thought to doing graphic work which relates to your new interest? I know you said you were writing some possible magazine articles; care to share anything about those?

From my point of view, art, myth-making, humor and science are all forms of magic which are combined in Gnosticism already - depicting this stuff visually is just another way to point people towards certain possible ways of being and knowing they might not have considered before.

Now that I work with spirits in a more traditional way my priorities have changed a bit, but I won’t know how this has changed my creative work until I relaunch my website and start rebuilding it.

Specifically, I’m getting ready to redo the “Gnostic Friends Network” web site as a CMS [content management system] portal, something I should have done years ago. I’ve also decided to go with a new domain name, secretbible.com, which describes what I want to do with this project a lot better than enemies.com does.

So what is that? I’ve been trying to figure that out over the course of this interview and I basically just want to present Gnosticism as I first experienced it, looking at the world through alien eyes and riding this incredible wave of cognitive dissonance that turned my life upside-down. Basically, I just want to to share what I’ve learned from this project, which is this:

All human knowledge is founded on paradox. You can “prove” anything but proof doesn’t have the power to liberate you - humor and imagination do. Gnosticism isn’t a dualist doctrine it’s a form of monist magic, but you have to exhaust reason before you can tap into that part of it.

It used to drive me insane with frustration, thinking how long it really does take to get an artistic vision out there in the world, but at the same time, one of the main things I’ve learned is that the subconscious operates on its own timetable - you can’t rush it, so in the meantime you might as well enjoy all of the things you learn and people you meet along the way! The process of searching changes you whether or not you reach the goal you had originally set out for - that’s the real secret!

FROM: http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/01/07/rev-max-interview/