These are fools that men adore; both their Gods & their men are fools.
~ ~ Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, Cairo, 1904

You are smart, but sometimes it is foolish to be too smart.
~ ~ George Gurdjieff to Aleister Crowley, Fontainebleu, 1923

For those Disinfonauts who've watched The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Parallax View (1974) just that once too many times, here are some multimedia items to fuel your paranoid ideation.

Eldritch Tomes:

Grant Morrison (story) and Dave McKean (artwork). Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (New York: DC Comics, 1989).

One of the "must-reads" of the Batman: Dark Knight mythos, Arkham Asylum is also a masterful study of postmodern magical symbolism and the varying degrees of psychosis.

The multi-strand narrative begins with the inmates, led by The Joker, taking over the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, holding the staff hostage, and demanding an audience with The Batman. Morrison's backstory also explains - via a "psychotic insight" - why the asylum's founder, Amadeus Arkham, went to great lengths to contain the spectral presences.

McKean's beautiful artwork supports Morrison's dream-labyrinth: as he descends into the Jungian collective unconsciousness, Batman must discard "conventional"-stage logic, becoming more like his foes. Time becomes strange.

The villains (The Joker, Harvey Dent, Clayface, Maxie Zeus, Professor Milo) are complex. Unlike typical comic book stories, the villains have individual fixations and realistic flaws. They are transformed, by the story's close, into mythopoeic figures.

Psychoanalysis has the goal of expanding an individual's range of options ("environmental variables") and healthy responses ("decision variables"), so Arkham's treatment of Harvey Dent ("Two-Face") is provocative. To cure him of his "obsession with duality", the staff shift his moral framework from a coin (two choices) to a die (six choices) to a Tarot deck (seventy-eight), to the I-Ching. "Sometimes we have to pull down in order to rebuild, Batman," psychotherapist Ruth Adams explains. "Psychiatry is like that." Change the structure, don't dwell on the content.

For some readers, Morrison is doing just that: 'playing' with occultural detritus. Arkham alludes to H.P. Lovecraft, and how non-Euclidean geometry and negative architecture can warp the psyche. Amadeus Arkham's initiatory ordeal also delves into Richard Wagner's Parsifal mythos, and he meets Aleister Crowley under ever-so-casual circumstances. You must be mad, or you wouldn't have undertaken this Graal Quest.

What Arkham Asylum captures is how postmodern magical systems are the evolutionary results of human experiences. These experiences can be arduous and dangerous to the unprepared individual. They may be dismissed by conventional society as mysterious or frightening. These qualities are "deep attractors" that compel the attention of weak-minded and emotionally unstable people, as the "mindless occultnik" and "paranoid conspiracy theorist" types indicate.

When this social judgment, which is an important but partial truth, solidifies into a "prescriptive morality", then the self-appointed critics overlook the possibility that paranoia can be transitional: a developmental stage-specific pathology. As the hierophant "burns away" old belief systems, during the individuation process, they may "unmask" subjective truths that are judged by society to be disturbing, and therefore, must be repressed.

If you follow the Path, you will enter Chapel Perilous sooner or later, and confront the unreason that dwells within. Alone. In that moment, the "prescriptive morality" of society will become a barrier that creates fear (remember the fate of Lovecraft's heroes?). The only way out is through: cultivating Aletheia (Objective Conscience), the elusive barometer within a focused, silent mind, towards what Aleister Crowley called Thelema (which establishes the Stewardship of the Higher Self).

I'll let The Joker have the final Keseyesque word: "Enjoy yourself out there. In the asylum."

Don Webb. Endless Honeymoon (New York: St. Martin's/Minotaur, 2001).

There are many would-be heirs to H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Pynchon, but few with credentials like Don Webb, whose Texas mysteries series is both tongue in cheek and deadly serious. The previous two books in the series, Essential Saltes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) and The Double: A Novel (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), mixed surreal events, kinky sex, and discussions about magical philosophies.

When they co-chaired a Death Equinox session several years ago, John Shirley was the awakener of gnosis, whereas Webb put in a positive word for the much-maligned Beelzebub. The founder of Gonzo Science Fiction, Webb was a Contributing Editor to the late FringeWare Review magazine, has authored over 200 short stories, and won numerous awards. His manual Uncle Setnakt's Guide to the Left Hand Path (Runa-Raven Press, 1998) is, in my opinion, a worthy postmodern successor to Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible (New York: Avon Books, 1969) and George Gurdjieff's Meetings With Remarkable Men (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1963).

Webb is the master of what literary critic G.L. Ulmer calls a 'mystory': a palimpsest of personal autobiography, oral history, and conceptual (magical) analysis. "A good mystory should surprise us by its juxtapositions and changes in declatory and stylistic register," Gregory Ulmer claims. [1] This is not surprising, considering that Webb's important essay, Fictive Arcanum, draws upon van Baal and Flowers to propose a communications model of magical semiotics. Webb exalts the postmodern magician: "There is no compromise with those who would limit our imagination, to set back and allow them control of our libraries is a spiritual negligence that will take its toll on our hearts. Read! Write! Preserve!"

Like Grant Morrison and Phil Farber, Webb has mutated occulture history into a self-referential hypertext, which blurs the distinction between reader and author. His stories undergo random permutations: none of the allusions to past magical practices and occulture figures are made by accident.

"The Three Stars", a short story by Webb, is a good example. On the surface, it's a story about Guinevere, the buyer for a small museum, who, through a series of trance experiences, discovers the mystery of the Crown of Three Stars. Look closer, and you will discern that Webb's art lies in concealing the art from profane view. The opening paragraphs that explain how Guinevere's name shaped her life are a mini-lesson in Transactional Analysis. The story rewrites the Arthurian mythos (which is a shell for a memetic engineering project that spanned the Dark Ages, mentions archeological research into Scythian and Sarmatian culture, and obliquely refers to German scholar Oswald Spengler ("a local coffee shop/ bar combo called the Decline of the West"?).

What makes me paranoid about Webb is that I suspect he's up to something, but I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. "The Three Stars" and his Texas mystery series read more like exercises in Milton Erickson's "hypnotic metaphor therapy" than an Agatha Christie novel. Since discovering Don Webb's fiction, I've been having strange dreams, and noticing more 23 synchronicities, too . . .

End Notes: