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Thanks for your patience to wait a week longer than usual for this new episode!
This episode is actually a very special one as I have the pleasure to welcome Mogg Morgan as my co-host. Mogg has been the publisher of Mandrake Press for many years and recently we aired an episode of the show where he talked about himself and his work. This time we will be having a wonderful discussion with our guest, author and practitioner Nikki Wyrd on quite a few pretty fascinating topics.
Nikki holds a degree in ecology and has written ‘The Book of Baphomet’ together with Julian Vayne in 2012 which was published with Mandrake Press, she has contributed to many periodicals and collections of poetry and authored theses and academic papers on subjects such as psychedelic culture and magical thinking and philosophy.
In this episode Nikki will let us know how the path was laid out in front of her with her great-grandmother and grandmother reading fortune-teller cards and using a crystal ball. She will tell our audience how she cultivated an interest in mythology and religious and philosophical belief systems as well as in psychedelic mushrooms, Carlos Castaneda’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s work and how she soon found these topics intertwined in a perfect match.
As Nikki was the head of the British Isle section of the IOT for quite some time we will go deep into concepts of Chaos Magick, discuss Crowley’s role within it, share some anecdotes about Simon, the Goth, and touch upon ‘Liber Null & Psychonaut’ by Peter Caroll on the way. Our guest will also elaborate on women in magick in general and within the IOT specifically, shed some light on the grade system within this order and let us know how divination, invocation, evocation, conjuration, illumination are all integral parts of serious studies of the occult.
In the end we will be talking a bit about the future of magick in general and Nikki’s projects in this context, including a book on standard chaos monastic practices to be published within days, teachings online and in person, launching her new website and hopefully much more writing.
Music played in this episode
This week’s music is dedicated to psychedelic rock for a good reason (see the title of the episode). As I am myself not really a specialist of the genre, I though I offer you WIKIPEDIA’S thoughts on it:
Psychedelic rock is a rock music genre that is inspired, influenced, or representative of psychedelic culture, which is centered on perception-altering hallucinogenic drugs. The music incorporated new electronic sound effects and recording effects, extended solos, and improvisation.Many psychedelic groups differ in style, and the label is often applied spuriously.
Originating in the mid-1960s among British and American musicians, the sound of psychedelic rock invokes three core effects of LSD: depersonalization, dechronicization, and dynamization, all of which detach the user from reality. Musically, the effects may be represented via novelty studio tricks, electronic or non-Western instrumentation, disjunctive song structures, and extended instrumental segments. Some of the earlier 1960s psychedelic rock musicians were based in folk, jazz, and the blues, while others showcased an explicit Indian classical influence called “raga rock”. In the 1960s, there existed two main variants of the genre: the more whimsical, surrealist British psychedelia and the harder American West Coast “acid rock”. While “acid rock” is sometimes deployed interchangeably with the term “psychedelic rock”, it also refers more specifically to the heavier, harder, and more extreme ends of the genre.
The peak years of psychedelic rock were between 1967 and 1969, with milestone events including the 1967 Summer of Love and the 1969 Woodstock Rock Festival, becoming an international musical movement associated with a widespread counterculture before beginning a decline as changing attitudes, the loss of some key individuals, and a back-to-basics movement led surviving performers to move into new musical areas. The genre bridged the transition from early blues and folk-based rock to progressive rock and hard rock, and as a result contributed to the development of sub-genres such as heavy metal. Since the late 1970s it has been revived in various forms of neo-psychedelia.
