21 Jul Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech
Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech
LECTURE
Atomic Gods: Magick Beyond the Nuclear Horizon
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.
Bio
Peter Grey is a writer, and the co-founder of Scarlet Imprint. He is the author of The Red Goddess (2007), which has inspired the resurgence of interest in Babalon, the goddess of Revelation. His Apocalyptic Witchcraft (2013) has been called the most important modern book on witchcraft, placing it in the mythopoetic context of the sabbat and in a landscape suffering climate and ecological collapse. His Lucifer: Princeps (2015) is a study of the origins of the figure of Lucifer; he is currently writing the second part, Lucifer: Praxis which is due in late 2023. His collected writings, from 2008–2018, are published in The Brazen Vessel (2019) with those of Alkistis Dimech. His most recent work is The Two Antichrists (2021), a return to the Babalon and Antichrist workings of Jack Parsons and his eclipsed sodality The Witchcraft. Peter lives with his lover Alkistis in Cornwall on the edge of the Lizard peninsula, where he surfs in the cold Atlantic, walks the ancient land and pursues his magical practice.
