Bird Song & The End of the West

Notes on Bird Song & The End of the West

An invitation

On the 25th July 2022, I received an email:

…

I am getting in touch to invite you for Occulture Conference in Berlin on 7.8.9. October 2022….

We would be honoured to have you as our key note speaker of the conference!

It is going to be our third edition.

In the previous editions we hosted more than 100 international speakers from academic and practitioners backgrounds.

…

I was both flattered and surprised, given my low profile on the occult scene. My natural inclination would be to turn the invitation down, but it was so surprising I wondered if perhaps something else was going on.

Pondering the situation a few days later, I absentmindedly opened a forum post on my phone to see at the top of the page: Go to Berlin.

Fair enough.

A dream

A few weeks later I had a dream.

I was going to give a talk at a conference, feeling the usual expectation of having to deliver to a standard suitable for a serious and important event.

Stepping into the venue I realised I was in a derelict building; and the audience was made up of the homeless and the drug-dependent. The sense of performative expectation collapsed. It wouldn’t matter what I said or did in front of this crowd.

Then it was my time to speak. I hadn’t prepared anything, and so I started to wonder how I could fill the time. I was interrupted by a voice:

Don’t kill the message before it arrives.

The Occulture Conference, 7-9th October, Monopol, Berlin.

Tickets sold for €155. The onsite staff were volunteers, and speakers (as far as I know) were only offered travel and accommodation expenses.

The organisers said all the talks would be professionally recorded.

Closer to the date, it turned out expenses were only going to be €150. It cost me over £1000 to attend. I chose not to claim the expense.

I started to doubt I was a key note speaker.

After the event, I was told my footage was corrupted and unusable.

As you can see from the line up, there were a lot of speakers. Unfortunately, attendees were permitted to enter and exit the talks and workshops as they saw fit.

With a packed, overlapping schedule, audiences suffered severe ‘fear of missing out’: uncommitted, undecided, with heads buried in programs or shuffling in and out mid-presentation. Peak magical tourism with speakers treated like cheap disposable consumer products.

Some speakers were visibly nervous and uncomfortable on stage, perhaps for the first time, but they did it anyway. Instead of being supportive, the audience would often empty mid-way through the presentation. It was an appalling way to treat the people who made the event possible.

Photographs

What follows are a small selection of personal photographs to give a sense of the venue and the environment. The hell aesthetic wasn’t limited to one room; it was unrelenting and inescapable. The tortured, mutilated and distorted human form pressed itself into your consciousness at every opportunity.

The last picture captures the organisers, on the last day, congratulating themselves for running the event. They failed to mention the speakers.

Here are the organisers opening the event on the evening of the 6th October with an ‘evocation of the Nameless God’:

When I arrived on the 7th of October, I went exploring the venue with an acquaintance. Climbing a fire-escape, we entered a large multi-storey open space the organisers called ‘Solis’ (the room pictured in the opening ritual above). A naked woman posed provocatively for a photographer on the raised concrete dais below. Upon entering, she looked up at me. I was struck by a familiar look in her eyes - one I had seen many times in my work with students. A psychologist would say she had PTSD; I knew I was looking at a lost soul.

‘…I had to watch the thing…’

Louis Fleischauer and the Aesthetic Meat Front performed Primordial Kaos Invocation on the 9th October at 9pm, Rubedo Room.

Fleischauer - which apparently means ‘meat beater’, the self-own in the English translation obviously lost on him - was notorious at the event. Amongst other rumours, allegedly he had trouble finding prostitutes to perform his BDSM with, given his propensity to be too violent. He was apparently so well known to the authorities that he had a hard time entering certain countries.

I had the misfortune to be trapped in the room when the ritual performance began. ‘Meat beater’ took up his place on centre stage as a troop of naked women, painted in ash and black markings and attached to each other by long springs terminating in skin hooks through the back, encouraged audience members to beat the springs in time with pseudo-tribal music.

As I watched the women pull at the springs, the occult nerds getting off over the close proximity of naked female bodies, the group convincing itself this was consensual and enjoyable, I suddenly recognised the girl I had seen having her picture taken at the beginning of the conference. She was dancing at the front, the flesh of her back bleeding and taught as she performed for the pleasure of her onlookers, obviously in too much pain but with the exact same lost look in her eyes.

Outside, I came across a woman in tears. She was herself a BDSM performer, and she was heartbroken by what she had seen. ‘Meat beater’ was supposed to protect his troop; instead, he had thrown them to the wolves.

The organisers knew the reputation of the man, and they observed and took part - along with attendees - in the ritual.

It’s trauma for your own good, and its consensual.

‘…flirting with pedophilia, like it’s edgy…’

Carl Abrahamsson gave a talk called Forcing the Hand of Chance - A Look at the DIY Occulture of Thee Temple of Psychick Youth (TOPY) on the 8th October at 4.15-5pm, Rubedo Room.

The talk was accompanied by a large projection of slides.

At 25m53s, Abrahamsson begins, ‘Anything can be art, and on a real grass-roots level, we sent to others (random members of the public) as memes or messages, digital or not, our works of art.’

At this point Abrahamsson shows the audience two collages of pornographic images with children, composed in such a way as to make the children look like they are taking part.

I was sat in the audience. Some people audibly gasped as the images were shown. The momentary look that crossed Abrahamsson’s face betrayed his enjoyment; the audience’s quick stifling of their own shock betrayed their occultural faux-pas.

It’s trauma for your own good, and it’s your fault not his.

The organisers saw no problem with exposing the public to these images at their event, and had no problem with uploading the talk to a wider public online - taking great care to make sure the viewer can see the images more clearly.

(They had a back-to-back showing of Abrahamsson’s documentaries in one room, including one on Kinsey whose sexual experimentation on children is well-known and indefensible.)

It’s worth noting that Abrahamsson’s wife - who also bored the crowd with an excruciatingly self-indulgent monologue about herself - is a noted Psychoanalyst. Someone who cannot claim ignorance of the damage that child sexual abuse causes nor, given its prevalence, the likelihood of victims sitting the audience.

I know of at least one complaint made to YouTube about the content of the video. Apparently the platform doesn’t care to take it down either. Here is the link.

My talk

On the last day, the 9th October, I was scheduled to speak at 2.30pm in the Albedo Room. This overlapped with Stephen Skinner (who I suspect was really a key note speaker) publicly murdering Crowley in the Rubedo Room. I expected a small audience as a result.

Entering the Albedo Room, I was relieved to find myself in an all-white room devoid of the horrors displayed everywhere else, sunlight entering through skylights in the vaulted roof.

A young lady by the name of Sofia asked me if I would take part in a documentary interview immediately afterwards.

The lovely Mariana Pinzon had been the cause of my invite, and she gave me a flattering introduction.

To my surprise, the room was full.

Sadly, the two hour video recording didn’t survive, but the first thirty eight minutes were captured by the sound engineer from the documentary crew. Here it is:

Miraculously, the last three and a half minutes capture what I said during meditation (this is the part included in Bird Song & The End of the West).

The Q&A afterwards was revealing in many ways. A twenty-something woman told me she was always afraid to look into Crowley, given the Holy Guardian Angel sounded dangerously Christian.

The documentary interview

With the conclusion of my talk, Sofia guided me to the location she had chosen for the interview: the Temple of the Nameless God. I descended from the highest and brightest room in the complex to the lowest and darkest.

So far a couple of tarot readers had been interviewed. The idea behind the documentary was to introduce the public to a fringe subculture.

Unfortunately my interview didn’t quite fit this mould, but all three members of the team were sympathetic to my comments.

I believe Sofia is still interested in completing the documentary project, but I have no further details.

Needless to say, without the documentary crew there would be no record of what occurred.

The conclusion

The organisers closed the event by donning white robes and spewing sugary platitudes about love and joy all over the audience. Because of course, this is exactly how what was at work at this event - and more largely in our culture - dresses itself up.

I didn’t stay for the sex party at the artist’s studios.

Going home

Travelling back to England, I found myself consumed with rage. Its source? Principally the older generation throwing the younger generation into the meat grinder.

I swore to spend the rest of my life destroying the guilty parties, even as I understood I was mostly ignorant of why I had gone there and what the effects would be.

Divine wrath does not look like an angry human being.

For comments closer to the time, see WORP FM Episode 4. Trauma for your own good.