Atomic gods: Magick beyond the nuclear horizon

Peter Grey’s lecture on Magick beyond the nuclear horizon, considering Crowley, Parsons, Lovecraft, Grant, Oppenheimer and others, presented at the Occulture Conference in Berlin on 21st October 2023.

If there were gods of the stone, bronze and iron ages, then who are our atomic gods? Who are their adepts, what doctrines do they espouse? Can new gods come into being? Have the old gods died? What rites are we to perform? What does the future require from us?

Kenneth Grant suggested ‘something flew in’ with the Babalon Working in 1947, the year between the nuclear Trinity test at Los Alamos and the incident at Roswell. In this talk I will argue that the door was opened into the atomic age. It is a door that we cannot return through, which opened into an era we have barely understood. Jack Parsons and a cabal of science fiction writers were on the cusp of a revolution in thought, science and sexuality. Their radical and magical vision of the future, distorted by a reductive materialism, haunts us. It is a vital part of the mission of magic to recover and develop these occulted knowledges and transcend the cynicism and despair which plagues us; to reclaim the sacred.

Ours is an age of mutation, transformation and the end of old certainties: new entities emerge, atavisms arise, death cults form and reactionary forces regroup. We have moved from the permissive sixties to the dystopian eighties and into the digital millennium. I will describe how magic has both persisted and fundamentally changed. As the world becomes more unstable, we must inevitably confront the forces of annihilation, and go beyond the limits of the nuclear horizon.