And here we have the final article in a series of four designed to explore those darker aspects of occulture which feel especially appropriate during the shadowed half of the year. Originally seeing digital print over on ChaosMagick.Com in very early November 2022 the narrative forms a counterpoint to the tone of forthright defiance and solipsism that dominates many of my essays, instead turning such fire inwards. Here we see the occultist as a plague upon the land, and possible architect of everyone else’s demise. Strong stuff, but I am sure that adepts such as us are capable of owning the footprints we leave in the ash.

Memetic Nightmares
The Price we Pay for Freedom of Thought
By Gavin Fox

If it was possible to make the more vocal of conspiracy theorists agree on anything, it would be that the more paranormal aspects of reality are heading towards something of a critical mass. While Charles Fort can be credited with collating the background hum of the weird almost a hundred years ago, it was Art Bell who brought those fears to the masses at the turn of the 21st Century with his wildly popular Coast to Coast AM radio show. The boom in the publication of occult books during that period and rise of ghost hunting shows after also seems to have had a lasting effect on how the masses perceive the usually hidden world.

When we deviate further into the realm of modern folklore the situation gets even more interesting. The Slender Man, shadow people, ZALGO and black eyed children. All of these came from nowhere more mysterious than our very own minds, and their spread has been aided by the one tool that 21st Century man is unable to live without. Because when we add the open dissemination of practical spellcraft around the birth of the internet to the weave of occulture in the years since it becomes a little easier to see exactly why things have gotten so strange. And yes I am indeed arguing that as magickians it might be all our fault.

Think back to the digital dark ages, otherwise known as anything before the early 1990’s. We were still a loosely defined group of local towns, each with a distinct brand of ingrained folklore. Our ideas remained very much products of the area we inhabited, and the nightmares we hoped to avoid were reliant on the horror stories of our forefathers as laid down in dusty old books. The media of this period had a monopoly in shepherding their audience towards the particular brand of social hysteria required for that week, such as with the spurious Satanic panic surrounding McMartin Preschool in the 1980’s. But it is the advent of the World Wide Web and the freedom to self publish which it provides that has truly shifted the whole process into overdrive.

Now when someone claims to have seen goatmen or thunderbirds a hundred thousand interested parties can share in the sighting, adding their own mental energy to that of the original experiencer and literally creating a minotaur out of a mouse. Global folklore is the new truth and, as Alan Moore predicted in his Mindscape interview, our culture is indeed turning to steam. Perhaps an analogy is in order to drive the point home. Imagine the zeitgeist as a still body of water, glassy, reflective and pure. Add to this black sea of infinity the mental energy of a given population and the view changes to that of a rainstorm hitting the once calm surface.

Each of these ripples expands and clashes with those around it before ultimately ceasing to be, fueling the entropy and confusion until discerning one from another becomes impossible. This incoherence is caused in part by differing opinions and personalities, as well as a general lack of focus. Gather together a group of people all thinking about the same thing, however, and their respective ripples intensify in both size and power, brushing aside the static caused by the viewpoints of others and becoming a force all of their own. Of such metaphorical boulders cast into the cultural pool gods are made. And fed too.

This description does not rely on magick or ritual in the classical sense. Far from it. Such narratives also hold sway in a purely agnostic context. The chaote simply seeks to exploit those trends for their own gain through the application and dissemination of ideas toward a given goal. The rise of Fascism in 20th Century Germany, while hailed by some as a mystical act due in part to the particular Pagan flavor which the Nazi Party chose to adopt, was a very down to earth example of this radical hysteria in action and one which birthed monsters far more deadly than those that Art Bell used to discuss.

So taking the above into consideration, magickian or skeptic, it is all too easy to become memetic architects of the very nightmares that we seek to avoid. Be it the Slender Man or jackbooted zealots, we are complicit in their creation and empowerment as with any other idea, feeding them as we turn the possibility of their existence over in our heads. For less physical monsters, it could be said that our modern preoccupation with matters of an occult and paranormal nature has in some way split the Veil, allowing these usually insignificant thought entities to slip through the cracks and become something they were never supposed to be.

Worse, the most radical expression of this idea leads to the unassailable power of the Abrahamic religions, rendering reality down to a numbers game where they out think us many thousands to one. Thus we have an upsurge in ghost sightings during a period when every couple and their dog want to spend their weekends playing at paranormal investigation because some dumb teens pretend to do it on YouTube. Demonic infestation is supposedly on the rise as the public is bombarded with found footage films highlighting the dangers of Ouija and witchcraft at the cinema. Dolls are now objects of insidious evil, while Ed and Lorraine Warren spread Christian misinformation from beyond the grave, rendering all Satanists as social scapegoats yet again.

And without as much as a warning The Slender Man and his fellow denizens of the creepypasta pantheon ooze their merry way directly from the internet into the fears of the post Millennial generation. And sometimes the faintest chance of their unreal existence is all it takes to cause people to wield the knife in their name. Blood is shed to appease these folkloric beasts now as it was with their earlier incarnations, and the only thing stopping the circle of slaughter from extending outwards into the general population is the relatively small number of people who are interested in such obscure fandoms.

Everything is in flux, turning to steam before our very eyes. Recognizing the memetic pressure that we can bring to bear is both empowering and dangerous. It is a nuclear weapon hardwired into the collective unconscious just waiting for us to drop the ball so it can bite society on the ass. Magickians must accept their role in fueling the zeitgeist and approach it with an informed, well balanced eye. Know that the seeds you sow in culture now may have effects far beyond your own lifetime. Thus the efforts of even the most selfish practitioner should be focused on pushing back the shadows rather than lengthening them. Choose wisely when you can as more than your own life may ultimately be at stake.