Long before I cast my first spell or met my first goddess I was just a humble reader into the weird, a Fortean in all but name. Yet despite what that title would suggest my entryway into the world of strange events was not The Book of the Damned. As an undiagnosed dyslexic in my youth such texts were beyond my ability to process, and soon forgotten in favour of television shows such as X-Files or Eerie Indiana. Comics too played their part, especially Ghost Rider and Hellblazer. So while I had many inspirations on my eventual journey into the occult, it was never Charles Fort.

I also owe much to the writings of John Keel, a journalist with a generally easy to follow narrative and willingness to get to the point instead of talking in circles. My own style is an amalgamation of his and that of the early chaos magickians who also sought to strip occultism of the needless rambling and find the treasure among the slurry. His influence, albeit second hand through the many books and articles that he produced, can be seen via the ease in which I explain usually difficult topics for a general audience and sidestep the unnecessary jargon along the way.

Yet while my distaste for Charle’s Fort’s verbosely purple prose is well known at this point, it is in truth but one example of a prevailing trend among pseudo-intellectuals with ideas to grind. A recent diversion into the works of rogue philosopher Nick Land, the main but not sole originator of the concepts of accelerationism and hyperstition around the same time as cybernetic theory became hip in the mid to late Nineties, has left me pondering exactly why some writers choose to hide their theories behind a wall of impregnable literary garbage.

While Land’s cenceptual framework is perhaps a little on the esoteric side even for the most well read of occultists, they do feed back heavily into the idea of chaos magick as a tool for manipulating the wider cultural paradigm. Only by understanding the extreme societal pressures that turn ideas from base coal to shining diamonds can we as spiritual profiteers make good our memetic investment in that process. Or, to use classical terminology, find the path of least resistance for our true will.

As such these supposedly politicized concepts remain important, even if their originator threw his weight behind Neo-Reactionary politics and the Alt Right in the last decade. While some authors such as Christopher S. Hyatt claimed that their writing had a certain rhythm which was deliberately laid down to elicit a given response, others hailing from an academic background like Land instead appear to throw as many obfuscatory and jaundiced references at the page as they can while hoping that at least some choose to stick.

What results is a dense, multi-referenced mess that does a massive disservice to the very arguments that they are attempting to make, as well as limiting the memetic potency of said framework. The easier an idea is to understand, the wider it is likely to spread, after all. I am no simpleton by any means, but the reading and rereading required to get even a tentative grasp of the wider Accelerationist worldview proved to be extremely taxing. Yet we see the same deliberate obfuscation in the wider occult sphere too, albeit for vastly different reasons.

As an example, many people mistakenly give Crowley a free pass by virtue of the time period in which he was writing. Language was certainly more structured around the turn of the Twentieth Century, formal education in grammar and rhetoric deemed as important to the intelligentsia of the day as digital upskilling is to our current youth. However, to deny the fact that the Master Therion liked the sound of his own inner voice a little too much, and revelled in many an overly complex turn of phrase as a result, is highly dishonest.

Pseudo-intellectualism is only part of the story, of course, nor does his monumental ego give the full answer either. No, above all else Crowley knew how to sell his own importance to the subculture he helped create. It can be assumed that the Book of the Law and related writings, making up the wider Thelemic mythos, were deliberately couched in such verbose language to further ensnare those wealthy few whose presence at Aleister’s bedside would fund his experiments at the fringes of occult debauchery.

Becoming the mouthpeace of a new idea will only grant so much power in the material world. Having the sole tongue on the planet that can translate those deliberately confused concepts into a form that is easily packaged for your followers makes you a demigod. Those with higher degrees of initiation to sell will always do better if the founding texts of the order are so heavily confused by a flick of the pen that only people who supposedly hold a greater understanding can educate their supplicant in the true meaning of the words.

That those self same masters stand to profit from the whole process is supposedly here nor there, nor does it matter that this attitude neatly mirrors that which once tied the Christian Bible to Latin by Papal order and made translating that blighted book into a culture’s native tongue a capital offence. Middlemen have existed in every spiritual discipline since hairless apes first stared at the sun and decided that it was looking back down at them. Priests, shaman and cunning folk set about filtering the divine through their own cultural glosses, and were well paid for the privilege.

In the end the world forgot that the idea of a god was more powerful than the memetic manifestation that sat perched gloomily over the Dark Ages, hissing at the population He supposedly created through bared teeth. If those in our modern occult movement wish to avoid the possibility of a similar twilight of reason in the future then it becomes deathly important to stop and think about how to simply and concisely present our ideas. Because we are not supposed to be prophets or demigods at the cost of our fellow magickians, and the inner workings of the esoteric sphere have never been ours to hide.