“For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious

The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence wrote a wild text on creativity, the unconscious, and sexuality: Fantasia of the Unconscious. In this class, we’ll explore passages from this intriguing work by Lawrence, as well as his own relationship to psychoanalysis. Lawrence, a Virgo, will take us into Virgo season and the autumn equinox.

On the eve of each season, the poet, novelist, and astrologer Emmalea Russo will present on a particular poet or artist who has dealt with psychoanalysis in their work in interesting and generative ways. There will be time for discussion and free association during class. Our first classes in the series, in March and June 2026, focused on the life and work of the poets H.D. and Cynthia Cruz and their relationships to psychoanalysis.

REGISTER HERE

We will meet online for 2 hours beginning at 10AM NYC (7AM Vancouver/ 3PM London/ 16:00 Stockholm/ 17:00 Beirut/ midnight Sydney) on Sunday, September 6th.

This event will be recorded and made available for all those who register.

All paid subscribers at RU Center for Psychoanalysis are automatically enrolled for this event and the recording will be archived at RU Center for Psychoanalysis Substack.

This series aims to connect poets and psychoanalysis in wild and unexpected ways while catapulting us into the next season. Freud wrote that the poets discovered the unconscious well before he did. So, what can poets teach us about the unconscious, psychoanalysis, and the seasons we move through?

REGISTER HERE

Upcoming events in this series:

September 6th: Fantasia of the Unconscious: D.H. Lawrence and the Autumn Equinox

December 6th: Extreme Activities: Louise Bourgeois and the Winter Solstice

Watch previous events in this series:

June 7th: REPETITION, RETURN, REBIRTH: On the Psychoanalytic Poetry of Cynthia Cruz

March 7th: WE MUST NOT TALK ASTROLOGY! On poet H.D. & her Tribute to Freud

CHECK OUT OUR PATREON

CHECK OUT THE AN ART APART SUBSTACK

My new book is now available on pre-order (release: March 2027): ”Nordic Rune Magic: The Mystical Formulas of Sigurd Agrell’s Uthark”

The runologist whose radical theories reimagined the study of rune magic

• Reveals Agrell’s controversial Uthark theory, a reordering of the Elder Futhark that exposes hidden numerical codes concealed within the runic alphabet

• Examines the syncretic connections between Norse rune magic and Mediterranean mystery religions, including Mithraism, Babylonian numerology, and Greco-Roman cryptographic traditions

• Illuminates Agrell’s analysis of key runic artifacts, including the Lindholm amulet and the Rök Stone, as evidence of a sophisticated living magical system

What if the runes were never simply an alphabet, but a system of encoded cosmic power? This is the central question animating the life and work of Sigurd Agrell, the Swedish philologist and professor at Lund University, whose revolutionary runological theories challenged academic orthodoxy and started a tradition of rune magic that endures to this day.

Carl Abrahamsson traces Agrell’s intellectual journey from his childhood in the forests of Värmland through his rigorous philological training to the publication of his landmark 1927 work, Runornas talmystik och dess antika förebild (The Numeric Mysticism of the Runes and Its Antique Prototype). In this book, Agrell introduced the Uthark theory: the proposal that the traditional Elder Futhark sequence was a deliberate façade concealing a hidden magical ordering. This secret ordering unlocked a coherent system of numerological and cosmological meaning connecting the runes to Mediterranean mystery traditions, particularly the cult of Mithras, Babylonian astronomical knowledge, and Greek and Roman gematria.

Drawing on comparative mythology, philological analysis, and close examination of runic artifacts, Abrahamsson reconstructs Agrell’s sweeping interdisciplinary vision. The author looks at Agrell’s studies of Sámi shamanic drums, Migration-period bracteates, the cryptographic layers of the famous Rök Stone, and also touches upon the intriguing question of the human origins of the god Odin. The result is a compelling argument for understanding the runes as dynamic magical instruments rather than a static alphabet.

Get your own copy here!

Some books are better than others. A subjective statement, for sure, but none the less true. We all have our tomes of destiny on the shelf or in our backpacks. Gifted, found, bought, stolen, or borrowed, these books we return to over and over; timeless and eternal they inform and inspire us with the same vigor and force.

One such volume for me has been A Nietzsche Reader (Penguin 1977). An inexpensive paperback and invaluable travel companion; a fine introduction to the very finest of modern philosophers.

You can usually just pick any page at random, and ”bibliomantically” receive a healthy dose of clarity and wisdom. Divided into sections like ”Philosophy and Philosophers”, ”Morality”, ”Art and Aesthetics”, ”Nihilism” and ”Anti-Nihilism”, ”Will to Power” (and more) this volume was with me all along my years of magical formations. I may be mistaken but I do believe it was given me on my 23rd birthday (1989) by a Norwegian TOPY Eden (Takk, Erick!), and then hit the sweet spot of individuation formation perfectly. And so it goes…

To honor this longevity, I did the bibliomancy thing today, randomly opening and pointing to:

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This week I’m bouncing off the joyful arrival of The Fenris Wolf 13. What began in 1989 as a TOPY infused fanzine project has grown to become a solid piece of identity for me, containing in part all the material itself, and in part a spirit of unfettered freedom. Enjoy the video! Here below are the hard facts and contents of the book:

As of today, the thirteenth issue of The Fenris Wolf is published and available to order. The wait is finally over, and I’m grateful for the patience of Fenris fans and readers alike. I often wonder how it can take so long to assemble these monsters, but that just leads down similar rabbit-holes (or worm-ditto) as ”what’s beyond outer space?” Etc. So better to just repeat: As of today, the thirteenth issue of The Fenris Wolf is published and available to order.

Available as a paperback, hardback, and e-book.

It’s a special issue that bounces off the third ”PSYCHARTCULT” conference (Copenhagen 2022), and anthologizes many of its papers. The overarching theme is ”Film as a visionary medium.” We have also included many great papers and talks from the many psychartcult events we’ve had online together with Morbid Anatomy over the years. Here follows the blurb and a list of the contributors:

Step through the flickering darkness of the cinema and into the realm where celluloid becomes sorcery. This thirteenth issue of the long-running occultural journal The Fenris Wolf gathers essays, personal testimony, fiction, and visual art exploring cinema as humanity’s most potent modern mythology—a medium capable of trance, transformation, and genuine magical operation.

Drawn from a landmark international conference on psychoanalysis, art, and the occult held in Copenhagen in 2022, this substantial anthology treats film not as mere entertainment but as ritual technology. Contributors trace the hidden occult lineage of cinema itself—from ancient light-and-shadow magic and ocular science through the birth of the motion picture camera as an instrument obsessed with recreating human vision and consciousness.

Genre cinema receives rigorous reappraisal throughout: theme-park science fiction and its real-world echoes in immersive “total environments”; folk horror as a vessel for ecological anxiety and buried myth; the Satanic and esoteric undercurrents running through classic horror, cult exploitation films, and arthouse provocation; a controversial epic of Roman decadence read through the lens of Dionysian philosophy; the psychic violence embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s editing techniques; and gothic fantasy as a lifelong artistic language for outsiders and misfits.

Deep biographical excavation forms a major thread, with extensive newly-uncovered archival material documenting Anton LaVey and his surprisingly extensive, often frustrating, sometimes hilarious dealings with Hollywood producers, B-movie directors, and exploitation filmmakers spanning decades—love scenes with a witch’s coven, sequences shot in a Mexican desert town, disputes over ownership and misrepresentation, and the strange Satanic afterlife of forgotten grind-house curiosities.

Additional territory includes the cut-up method as literal magical technique linking underground filmmakers, Beat writers, and sound experimentation; ketamine-assisted psychotherapy explored through the lens of ceremonial magic and inherited demon-lore; precognitive dreaming and its uncanny relationship to cinematic imagery; the liminal symbolism of glass, screens, and thresholds in ritual and viewing experience; feminist reclamation of witchcraft, seduction, and glamour on screen via filmmaker Anna Biller; the historical erasure of Black witches and spiritual practitioners within horror and prestige television; the mythology and dubious real-world reenactments of a fictional telepathic cinema device; possession, hysteria, and trance states connecting Haitian Vodou, Mesmerism, and early psychoanalysis; visionary directors’ unique treatment of gaze, gender, and violence; and a closing meditation on a recently departed David Lynch, master of dream-logic filmmaking.

Illustrated throughout and rich with citation, rare imagery, and firsthand testimony, this volume rewards film historians, practicing occultists, psychoanalytic thinkers, and cinephiles alike. Whether examining pianola technology’s strange kinship with android uprisings, the alchemical properties of the editing cut, or the folkloric roots of Halloween as high holy day, every essay insists that the moving image has always been, and remains, a doorway to something larger than entertainment—a mythic, psychological, and frankly magical force shaping how we dream, fear, and desire.

Authors in this issue of The Fenris Wolf: Anders Lundgren, Kasper Opstrup, Billie Steigerwald, Mara Norman, Charlotte Rodgers, Vanessa Sinclair, Ojoboca, Martin Munthe, Gustaf Broms, Ayesha Adamo, Anna Sebastian, Gast Bouschet, River, Carl Abrahamsson, Blanche Barton, Mitch Horowitz, Chaweon Koo, Brooke Stott, Bri Luna, Gary Lachman, Ana Leorne, Todd McGowan, Peggy Nadramia, Sabina Stent, Matthew Levi Stevens & Locke Fitzroy, Jack Stevenson, Ad Vat, and Mary Wild.

Available as a paperback, hardback, and e-book.

LOVE C (& V)

Online event August 5th: Two Renegade Sexologists: On Psychopathia Sexualis & The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study with Dr Mikita Brottman

This lecture will consider the life and work of two renegade sexologists: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and J. Paul de River. The aristocratic Krafft-Ebing was a German psychiatrist and author of the seminal Psychopathia Sexualis. J. Paul de River was the chief psychiatrist of the Los Angeles Sex Offense Bureau during the 1940s and author of The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study. The work of these two eccentric, obsessive, and sometimes deluded psychiatrists provide compelling time-capsules into the dark underbelly of 19th century Vienna, and the sordid backstreets of mid-century Los Angeles.

TICKETS HERE!

Lectures will be illustrated and enhanced by vivid clinical case studies of what the authors deem “sexual psychopaths.”

We will be meeting online for 90 minutes beginning at 11AM NYC (8AM Vancouver/ 10AM New Orleans/ 4PM London/ 17:00 Stockholm/ 18:00 Beirut) on Wednesday, August 5th.

This event will be recorded and made available for all those who register. Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to expand your knowledge and explore the depths of these psychosexual archives. Register now and join us for an unforgettable experience!

Mikita Brottman is Professor of Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She has a D.Phil from Oxford University in English Language and Literature, and is an NAAP certified psychoanalyst. She performs forensic evaluations for the National Institute for the study, prevention and treatment of sexual trauma. She is also the author of 15 nonfiction books, the latest of which, Guilty Creatures (Simon & Schuster, 2024) was described by the New York Times as "an unputdownable read."

This event is hosted by Rendering Unconscious Center for Psychoanalysis

The joyful instigations stemming from the overheated minds that I wrote about last week stayed with me. On a parallel level, I also wrapped up a four week class about J.G. Ballard for Morbid Anatomy. Ballard was/is another great example of someone who churned his fanciful impressions of the outer and inner spaces via his unconscious interpretations and into fascinating art & literature proper. Focus, form, concentration, content... That’s how you do it; no further explanations needed.

But when it comes to thematically magical quagmires it seems a little bit trickier. Very seldom is a sanely individuated magician appealing to a mass market, or even beyond the closest coterie. You need a bit of madness in there to make it palatable for the addicts of phantasmagoria. Then add an impenetrable system and obsessive structures to administer the “wisdom” and you have a total winner!

But where the artist has art as a therapeutic playground, the magician is traditionally painted into a corner of suffocating symbolisms and perceived (delusions of) grandeur – not forgetting the condescending projections from the outside world. Today, it seems to me that archetypically, the magician is an artist (of sorts) who fell overboard into the great sea and can’t get back on to the boat. (Whether this image holds up tomorrow, we shall see.)

Basically, restraint is pretty good, useful and perhaps even necessary. And to acquire that, you really have to begin at the beginning. Nosce Te Ipsum, and all that jazz.

Read more

I sometimes wonder if the overall occulturation – honorable, I’m sure, in the great scheme of things – isn’t paradoxically part of the still lingering disenchantment of our anthropocene times? Hefty first sentence, I know, but relevant all the same. I suspect the biggest culprit is the mistaking of information for wisdom. Logorrhea certainly clouds the Logos. Perhaps I’m doing the culprit’s bidding myself, in all my projects, books, posts, lectures and various blah-blahs? Most likely.

There is another “I word” that is relevant here, and it’s not Intelligence. I’m thinking of Inspiration. Inspiration has that remarkable power of sweeping us up & away, to not be held down by structures or mental chores but rather just “wow”-ing away and seeing what actually comes out of it.

I can promise you that all serious “occult” seekers and scholars have those instigating, incentivizing moments and sources. A B-movie with some crazy magician that seemed cool? Was your grandmother supposedly a witch? That science-fiction book with strange esoteric elements blew your teenage mind, didn’t it? Et cetera.

These sources must never be forgotten, as they are literally the reasons for whatever achievements or goals later on reached in your pursuit of poobah-status and guru-semblance. Inspiration brought you to where you are now, only partially guided by intelligence and information. Inspiration opens the door to the Miracle suite at the Wonderland Hotel. Why would you want to live anywhere else?

I remember vividly… (part 23)… crunching Crowley’s Confesssions during my year in the Swedish Air Force, realizing eloquent grandiloquence is a highly magical tool, as is an adventurous attitude. I remember Austin Osman Spare and Anton LaVey featured in Swedish men’s magazines – LaVey often pictured together with Jayne Mansfield! I remember getting my hands on Kenneth Grant’s Outside the Circles of Time and “Simon’s’” Necronomicon. Grant boosted my curiosity by being completely far out yet also “stiff upper lip” in his psychedelic synthesis of hocus pocus and science fiction. And, of course, Psychic TV’s “Message from thee Temple” and TOPY’s Thee Grey Book, as they were actually not imaginary fantasy but a real, live-able option in the Interstellar Intersections of Individuation.

Based on these inspiring cornerstones (and then some), my life quaquaversally snowballed. And I knew right away I wanted to create a fun, healthy and inspiring mix of work for others to be equally amazed by. Hence I started The Fenris Wolf in 1989, eclectically hungry and generous in its quasi-curating of morsels of madness and magic alike. I’m happy I did, and I’m still enamored and inspired by the process as such and what it contains. It has also proven to me that magic can actually be a collaborative process without having to lead to madness and jockeying for positions that don’t really exist.

The 13th issue was just published. Let me know whether it informs or inspires you, or both. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to check out the older issues as well. And please don’t ever disenchant the world more than it already has been, by making magic boring and academic-mental.

Vade Ultra Forever!

As of today, the thirteenth issue of The Fenris Wolf is published and available to order. The wait is finally over, and I’m grateful for the patience of Fenris fans and readers alike. I often wonder how it can take so long to assemble these monsters, but that just leads down similar rabbit-holes (or worm-ditto) as ”what’s beyond outer space?” Etc. So better to just repeat: As of today, the thirteenth issue of The Fenris Wolf is published and available to order.

It’s a special issue that bounces off the third ”PSYCHARTCULT” conference (Copenhagen 2022), and anthologizes many of its papers. The overarching theme is ”Film as a visionary medium.” We have also included many great papers and talks from the many psychartcult events we’ve had online together with Morbid Anatomy over the years. Here follows the blurb and a list of the contributors:

Step through the flickering darkness of the cinema and into the realm where celluloid becomes sorcery. This thirteenth issue of the long-running occultural journal The Fenris Wolf gathers essays, personal testimony, fiction, and visual art exploring cinema as humanity’s most potent modern mythology—a medium capable of trance, transformation, and genuine magical operation.

Drawn from a landmark international conference on psychoanalysis, art, and the occult held in Copenhagen in 2022, this substantial anthology treats film not as mere entertainment but as ritual technology. Contributors trace the hidden occult lineage of cinema itself—from ancient light-and-shadow magic and ocular science through the birth of the motion picture camera as an instrument obsessed with recreating human vision and consciousness.

Genre cinema receives rigorous reappraisal throughout: theme-park science fiction and its real-world echoes in immersive “total environments”; folk horror as a vessel for ecological anxiety and buried myth; the Satanic and esoteric undercurrents running through classic horror, cult exploitation films, and arthouse provocation; a controversial epic of Roman decadence read through the lens of Dionysian philosophy; the psychic violence embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s editing techniques; and gothic fantasy as a lifelong artistic language for outsiders and misfits.

Deep biographical excavation forms a major thread, with extensive newly-uncovered archival material documenting Anton LaVey and his surprisingly extensive, often frustrating, sometimes hilarious dealings with Hollywood producers, B-movie directors, and exploitation filmmakers spanning decades—love scenes with a witch’s coven, sequences shot in a Mexican desert town, disputes over ownership and misrepresentation, and the strange Satanic afterlife of forgotten grind-house curiosities.

Additional territory includes the cut-up method as literal magical technique linking underground filmmakers, Beat writers, and sound experimentation; ketamine-assisted psychotherapy explored through the lens of ceremonial magic and inherited demon-lore; precognitive dreaming and its uncanny relationship to cinematic imagery; the liminal symbolism of glass, screens, and thresholds in ritual and viewing experience; feminist reclamation of witchcraft, seduction, and glamour on screen via filmmaker Anna Biller; the historical erasure of Black witches and spiritual practitioners within horror and prestige television; the mythology and dubious real-world reenactments of a fictional telepathic cinema device; possession, hysteria, and trance states connecting Haitian Vodou, Mesmerism, and early psychoanalysis; visionary directors’ unique treatment of gaze, gender, and violence; and a closing meditation on a recently departed David Lynch, master of dream-logic filmmaking.

Illustrated throughout and rich with citation, rare imagery, and firsthand testimony, this volume rewards film historians, practicing occultists, psychoanalytic thinkers, and cinephiles alike. Whether examining pianola technology’s strange kinship with android uprisings, the alchemical properties of the editing cut, or the folkloric roots of Halloween as high holy day, every essay insists that the moving image has always been, and remains, a doorway to something larger than entertainment—a mythic, psychological, and frankly magical force shaping how we dream, fear, and desire.

Authors in this issue of The Fenris Wolf: Anders Lundgren, Kasper Opstrup, Billie Steigerwald, Mara Norman, Charlotte Rodgers, Vanessa Sinclair, Ojoboca, Martin Munthe, Gustaf Broms, Ayesha Adamo, Anna Sebastian, Gast Bouchet, River, Carl Abrahamsson, Blanche Barton, Mitch Horowitz, Chaweon Koo, Bri Luna, Gary Lachman, Ana Leorne, Todd McGowan, Peggy Nadramia, Vanessa Sinclair, Sabina Stent, Matthew Levi Stevens & Locke Fitzroy, Jack Stevenson, Ad Vat, and Mary Wild.

You can order your own copy right HERE. Available as a paperback, hardback, and e-book.

Vade Ultra!

Talismanic objects are important in how we structure and experience our daily lives. Talismans affect us because we have empowered them to. They often carry a spirit or energy that we feel we need; sometimes at regular intervals, and sometimes in the spur of the moment. Talismanic veneration is one of the most common forms of magic in everyone’s life. Many may disagree but that never changes the fact itself.

We all possess and interact with talismans as kids: enchanted objects we find or are given, and that fill life with utter excitement and deep meaning… An old doll, a comic book, a pocket knife, a gadget, gizmo, or garish piece of clothing… When we return to them, they fill us with warm, fuzzy feelings of both safety and adventure.

But the magic doesn’t really go away, ever; everyone still has talismanic objects as adults, but perhaps less consciously so. They might be more commonplace and abstracted; yet they do fill the same function: as doorways of the desired. Examples could be mass-produced religious artifacts that one carries around every day. In need, they can be touched and facilitate a replenishment of the desired.

Read more

In the ripples of the recently published and highly recommended J.G. Ballard biography The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, I have put together an introduction class about this truly amazing and prophetic author. For four consecutive Sundays, beginning July 5th, we will go through his life, literary work, and why it still has relevance today. Sign up for ”The Psychosexual Pathology of Industrial Culture: The World of J.G. Ballard” HERE.

Some writers describe the world. J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) rearranged its furniture in our dreams and then asked why we found the new arrangement so seductive. Across four richly interconnected sessions, this class traces how a boy who grew up watching empire collapse from behind the fence of a wartime internment camp became one of the most unnervingly prescient imaginations of the last century—and why his “Ballardian” vision now feels less like science fiction than like a description of any Tuesday afternoon.

We begin in Shanghai, 1930. Ballard’s childhood in a foreign concession—cocktails and tennis courts coexisting with poverty and distant gunfire—taught him a lesson he would never unlearn: you can watch an entire social order collapse from a balcony. Interned by the Japanese at Lunghua, the young Ballard discovered that catastrophe is not only trauma but a peculiar kind of liberation, a laboratory in which the scenery falls away and you learn what people truly are.

Repatriated to a grey, rationed Britain, he found postwar suburbia almost metaphysically drab—and channelled all of it into science fiction. But not the rockets-and-rayguns kind. Through the magazine New Worlds and its “New Wave,” Ballard famously turned the genre’s gaze from outer space to “inner space”: the psyche under pressure from media, cars, high-rises, and the afterlife of empire. His real alien planet was the human mind.

Here the course slows down to savor Ballard’s great catastrophe novels. In The Drowned World, a flooded London becomes not a disaster to be solved but a mirror reflecting humanity’s pull toward deep time and dissolution. The Drought hardens this into a parched parable of fraying social bonds; The Crystal World freezes it into glittering, beautiful stasis. In each, Ballard refuses the heroic rescue plot. His characters don’t fight the flood—they walk into it. The disturbing question beneath all three: what if the disasters we fear are also the fantasies we secretly rehearse?

Then comes The Atrocity Exhibition, his most radical work—a fragmented anti-novel that reads like a deranged clinical report on media-saturated culture. Assassinations, car crashes, celebrity faces, and weapons tests collide and recombine. Decades before the smartphone, Ballard mapped the psyche trained to greet atrocity with a mixture of arousal and numbness. It now reads, uncomfortably, like a user manual for the scrolling feed.

The course’s middle stretch follows Ballard out of dreamlike landscapes and onto the actual motorways of West London. Crash fuses sex, technology, and death on the Westway, treating the road system as a new unconscious—and unmasking the eroticism already lurking in car culture. High-Rise seals a cross-section of the professional middle class inside a luxury tower and watches, almost gleefully, as petty grievances curdle into tribal warfare. No villain commands the collapse; the residents simply discover they enjoy it.

We trace these obsessions through Concrete Island, and their adoption by the industrial-music underground, where “Ballardian” became shorthand for a whole aesthetic. As Thatcher’s Britain reshaped the country into business parks and shopping malls, Ballard didn’t need to change course. The world simply caught up with him.

The final session opens with Empire of the Sun, his semi-autobiographical war novel—the “Rosetta stone” revealing that every drowned city and fractured tower descends from that boy watching planes above a camp fence. From there we enter his late “corporate dystopias”: the sun-drenched resort of Cocaine Nights, the business park of Super-Cannes, where executives are prescribed nocturnal violence as psychological hygiene, and the mall-fascism of Kingdom Come. In these worlds, power wears no uniform. It operates through gated communities, security protocols, and charismatic insiders—crime repackaged as social glue, transgression in the service of productivity.

The course closes by asking why Ballard still matters. The answer isn’t that he predicted everything. It’s that he taught us a way of seeing: to read tower blocks, motorways, and malls as diagrams of who moves freely and at what psychological cost; to refuse comforting villains and recognize how ordinary desires—for speed, privacy, spectacle—aggregate into inhuman systems; to notice what our own screens are doing to us.

Ballard is offered here not as an oracle but as a companion—and a provocateur who refuses to flatter us. His great impoliteness was to insist that the lure of disaster lives inside ordinary people, that we are not just victims of modern structures but their dreamers and willing engineers.

To finish this course is to step out into a car park or departure lounge and realize, with a slight chill, that you were never quite outside his pages to begin with.

Sign up for the class here.

Some writers describe the world. J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) rearranged its furniture in our dreams and then asked why we found the new arrangement so seductive. Across four richly interconnected sessions, this class traces how a boy who grew up watching empire collapse from behind the fence of a wartime internment camp became one of the most unnervingly prescient imaginations of the last century—and why his “Ballardian” vision now feels less like science fiction than like a description of any Tuesday afternoon.

We begin in Shanghai, 1930. Ballard’s childhood in a foreign concession—cocktails and tennis courts coexisting with poverty and distant gunfire—taught him a lesson he would never unlearn: you can watch an entire social order collapse from a balcony. Interned by the Japanese at Lunghua, the young Ballard discovered that catastrophe is not only trauma but a peculiar kind of liberation, a laboratory in which the scenery falls away and you learn what people truly are.

Repatriated to a grey, rationed Britain, he found postwar suburbia almost metaphysically drab—and channelled all of it into science fiction. But not the rockets-and-rayguns kind. Through the magazine New Worlds and its “New Wave,” Ballard famously turned the genre’s gaze from outer space to “inner space”: the psyche under pressure from media, cars, high-rises, and the afterlife of empire. His real alien planet was the human mind.

Here the course slows down to savor Ballard’s great catastrophe novels. In The Drowned World, a flooded London becomes not a disaster to be solved but a mirror reflecting humanity’s pull toward deep time and dissolution. The Drought hardens this into a parched parable of fraying social bonds; The Crystal World freezes it into glittering, beautiful stasis. In each, Ballard refuses the heroic rescue plot. His characters don’t fight the flood—they walk into it. The disturbing question beneath all three: what if the disasters we fear are also the fantasies we secretly rehearse?

Then comes The Atrocity Exhibition, his most radical work—a fragmented anti-novel that reads like a deranged clinical report on media-saturated culture. Assassinations, car crashes, celebrity faces, and weapons tests collide and recombine. Decades before the smartphone, Ballard mapped the psyche trained to greet atrocity with a mixture of arousal and numbness. It now reads, uncomfortably, like a user manual for the scrolling feed.

The course’s middle stretch follows Ballard out of dreamlike landscapes and onto the actual motorways of West London. Crash fuses sex, technology, and death on the Westway, treating the road system as a new unconscious—and unmasking the eroticism already lurking in car culture. High-Rise seals a cross-section of the professional middle class inside a luxury tower and watches, almost gleefully, as petty grievances curdle into tribal warfare. No villain commands the collapse; the residents simply discover they enjoy it.

We trace these obsessions through Concrete Island, and their adoption by the industrial-music underground, where “Ballardian” became shorthand for a whole aesthetic. As Thatcher’s Britain reshaped the country into business parks and shopping malls, Ballard didn’t need to change course. The world simply caught up with him.

The final session opens with Empire of the Sun, his semi-autobiographical war novel—the “Rosetta stone” revealing that every drowned city and fractured tower descends from that boy watching planes above a camp fence. From there we enter his late “corporate dystopias”: the sun-drenched resort of Cocaine Nights, the business park of Super-Cannes, where executives are prescribed nocturnal violence as psychological hygiene, and the mall-fascism of Kingdom Come. In these worlds, power wears no uniform. It operates through gated communities, security protocols, and charismatic insiders—crime repackaged as social glue, transgression in the service of productivity.

The course closes by asking why Ballard still matters. The answer isn’t that he predicted everything. It’s that he taught us a way of seeing: to read tower blocks, motorways, and malls as diagrams of who moves freely and at what psychological cost; to refuse comforting villains and recognize how ordinary desires—for speed, privacy, spectacle—aggregate into inhuman systems; to notice what our own screens are doing to us.

Ballard is offered here not as an oracle but as a companion—and a provocateur who refuses to flatter us. His great impoliteness was to insist that the lure of disaster lives inside ordinary people, that we are not just victims of modern structures but their dreamers and willing engineers.

To finish this course is to step out into a car park or departure lounge and realize, with a slight chill, that you were never quite outside his pages to begin with.

Sign up for the class here.

Who doesn’t love dogs? Who doesn’t love a good Dog Mystery? DogWorld, the debut novel in the Inspector Hound series by David R. Lee (a.k.a. Chaos Magician and friend Dave Lee), presents a refreshingly imaginative exploration of a world where enhanced dogs, or ”e-dogs”, navigate the complexities of human society while grappling with their own newfound sentience. Set against the backdrop of a quirky café in Bermondsey, the narrative combines elements of mystery, humor, and social commentary, creating a rich tapestry that engages readers from the very first page.

The story opens with Inspector Hound, a former police dog turned private investigator, who is suddenly thrust into a series of tumultuous events following the spread of an enhancement virus among canines. This virus not only grants dogs the ability to understand human language but also complicates their relationships with humans and the broader world. Hound’s journey of self-discovery and investigation is both poignant and humorous, as he recalls his past and attempts to make sense of his new identity.

Lee’s writing is characterized by sharp wit and clever dialogue, infusing the narrative with a playful tone that invites readers to empathize with the canine protagonists. The anthropomorphism of the dogs is skillfully executed; Hound, along with his companions like the feisty Maisie and the ambitious Miss Loveheart, exhibit a range of emotions and perspectives that mirror human experiences. Their interactions are not just entertaining but also reflective of deeper societal issues, such as the nature of loyalty, the quest for identity, and the struggle against oppression.

As the plot unfolds, Hound becomes embroiled in a conspiracy involving the sinister DI Crick, who poses a threat to both him and his friends. The tension escalates as Hound and his canine allies work together to uncover the truth behind Crick’s nefarious plans. This combination of a gripping mystery with hints of political intrigue propels the narrative forward, keeping readers on the edge of their seats.

One of the novel’s standout features is its exploration of the ethical implications of enhancement and the evolving relationship between humans and animals. Lee deftly raises questions about sentience, rights, and the responsibilities that come with power, all while maintaining a light-hearted tone. The enhanced dogs serve as a metaphor for marginalized voices in society, and their struggles resonate with contemporary themes of justice and equality.

Additionally, the setting of DogWorld café serves as a microcosm of community and camaraderie, where the bonds between characters are forged through shared experiences and mutual support. The café becomes a sanctuary for the e-dogs, a place where they can express their identities and rally against the injustices they face. This sense of belonging is beautifully captured through Lee’s vivid descriptions and character interactions.

DogWorld is a brilliantly crafted novel that blends humor, mystery, and social commentary into a compelling narrative. This novel not only promises to captivate dog lovers and mystery enthusiasts alike but also invites all readers to reflect on the deeper meanings behind the lives of those who often go unnoticed. Basically, a must-read for anyone seeking a unique and engaging literary experience!

Check out DogWorld here.

My new class on the origins of the Nordic magical runes, and the theories of Swedish runologist Sigurd Agrell, is finally available here at the FW Substack. Four informative sessions that take us back in time to the Roman Empire and its hotbed of magical systems.

If you are a paid subscriber you can find all four lectures in the TEACHINGS section. Enjoy! Here’s a more thorough description:

Carl Abrahamsson’s lecture series on the origin of the Nordic Magical Runes delves into the work of Swedish runologist Sigurd Agrell and the rich historical, cultural, and magical context surrounding the runes. The lectures are structured around Agrell’s theories, primarily his Uthark theory, which proposes a radical reinterpretation of the Elder Futhark rune sequence, suggesting that the traditional order should begin with the U rune (Ur) rather than F (Fehu). This shift, according to Agrell, reflects a more logical progression of magical meanings and spiritual development.

Abrahamsson begins by sharing his personal connection to Agrell’s work, tracing his own journey through occult literature and Nordic paganism (Asatro). He highlights the significance of Agrell’s contributions, emphasizing how his ideas have been largely overlooked in the English-speaking world, despite their innovative nature and relevance to contemporary magical practices. Agrell’s work offers a unique perspective on the integration of runes into magical systems, suggesting that they originated from a blend of Germanic, Mediterranean, and ancient Near Eastern influences.

The series proceeds to explore Agrell’s background, including his academic training in Slavic languages and his eventual focus on Germanic runology. Abrahamsson points out that Agrell’s approach combined rigorous scholarly analysis with creative speculation, allowing him to draw connections between various cultural traditions. Despite facing skepticism from mainstream academia, Agrell’s theories have sparked renewed interest in esoteric aspects of runology.

Abrahamsson provides an overview of Agrell’s first major work, “Runornas talmystik och dess antika förebild,” where Agrell argues that runic sequences encapsulate a mystical numerical system connected to ancient magical practices of the Greeks and Romans. The lecture highlights how Agrell analyzed inscriptions, revealing their magical properties through numerical values and gematria, a practice where letters are assigned numerical significance, a common practice in ancient magical traditions.

The series then transitions to Agrell’s examination of the Rök Stone, one of the most significant rune stones, which features an intricate inscription intertwining genealogy and mythology. Agrell’s interpretation frames the stone not merely as a memorial but as a complex magical artifact, demonstrating the intertwining of personal loss and communal memory within Norse culture. Agrell’s analysis emphasizes the magical intent behind such inscriptions, suggesting that they serve as gateways to spiritual realms.

Abrahamsson further explores the connections between Sámi shamanism and Nordic magical practices, particularly through Agrell’s final book, “Lapptrummor och runmagi.” He discusses how Sámi drums, used in shamanic rituals, might encode ancient knowledge that overlaps with runic traditions. Agrell posits that there exists a reciprocal relationship between Sámi magic and runology, arguing that both systems reflect a shared understanding of the cosmos and the human experience.

The lectures culminate in a discussion about Odin, the chief deity in Norse mythology, who is intimately linked to the acquisition of runic knowledge through self-sacrifice. Abrahamsson reflects on how Odin embodies the archetype of the seeker of wisdom, representing the complex interplay between humanity and the divine. This relationship underscores the significance of runes as not just writing tools but as magical symbols that connect people to their spiritual heritage.

Throughout the series, Abrahamsson emphasizes that Agrell’s work invites a reevaluation of Nordic mythology, runology, and the cultural exchanges that shaped them. He asserts that the runes and their magical applications remain relevant today, as they speak to universal human experiences and the enduring quest for meaning in a complex world. By bridging the past with contemporary interpretations, Agrell’s theories present a vibrant exploration of how ancient practices continue to resonate in modern spiritual contexts.

If you are a paid subscriber you can find all four lectures in the TEACHINGS section.

Abrahamsson argues that Agrell’s theories, particularly his Uthark concept, have been undervalued in the English-speaking world despite their relevance to both historical study and creative magical practices. Agrell posited that the traditional ordering of the Germanic runic alphabet concealed deeper magical knowledge, suggesting that the U rune (UR rune) holds significance regardless of its position. He viewed magical systems as fluid and subject to transformation, underscoring the influence of Christianity in disrupting the continuity of indigenous practices.

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Agrell’s work stems from a deep investigation into the connections between the graphic similarities of the Elder Futhark and Mediterranean alphabets, including their numerical uses and magical applications. His theories highlight a historical interplay of cultural influences and a shared mystical understanding, suggesting that the runes were embedded with numerical magic akin to that of the Greeks and Romans.

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The Rök Stone is distinguished by its intricate inscription, which has been interpreted through various lenses over the years, initially focusing on genealogical readings. Historically, it was thought to memorialize Varinn’s son, Vämod, but Agrell challenged this perspective by suggesting that the stone’s inscriptions are not only genealogical but also deeply magical. He posits that the runes serve a dual purpose: to honor the deceased and to establish a connection with the divine, particularly Odin, the god of magic.

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Abrahamsson emphasizes the universal human impulse to connect with unseen worlds through myth, ritual, and symbolism. The Nordic pantheon and magical language, he argues, reflect basic human psychological traits and needs. This cultural phenomenon showcases a two-way influence, with the Scandinavian psyche shaping the development of runes and the pantheon while also drawing from external sources.

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There are bands you “discover,” and then there are bands that arrive like contraband: greasy, unmarked, smelling faintly of amplifier smoke, graveyard dirt, and somebody else’s bad decisions. Ball, the Swedish rock band with the name so blunt it almost dares you not to take them seriously, belong absolutely to the second category. They don’t so much make records as they exhume forbidden party music from a crypt where Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Roky Erickson, The Stooges, and some half-remembered biker-gang jukebox all got sealed in together and left to ferment – for decades.

Why are Ball so great? Because they understand something that polite rock music forgot somewhere around the advent of “tasteful production”: rock and roll is supposed to feel a little stupid, a little dangerous, a little holy, and a little like it might stain the carpet. Ball are not here to demonstrate their cleverness. They are here to summon the riff, feed it raw meat, let it run around the room knocking over lamps, and blowing minds while at it.

The first thing to know about Ball is that the name is perfect. Not elegant, not poetic, not search-engine-friendly, not “evocative” in the way publicists use that word when they mean “vaguely marketable.” Just Ball. One syllable. Thud! Bam! Pow! It lands with the dumb cosmic authority of a bass drum in a basement. It could be a joke, or a threat, or a full fledged Satanic philosophy. That’s the point. Ball understand that rock doesn’t always need mythology embroidered on top; sometimes the mythology is already there in the sound of a guitar being overdriven until it stops resembling an instrument and starts resembling weather, mixed with hormonal and metabolically enhanced attitudes.

Their 2017 self-titled debut, Ball, is the sound of a band arriving fully in possession of its bad manners. It’s raw without being amateurish, heavy without being sludge for sludge’s sake, retro without lapsing into wax-museum cosplay. That last part matters. Plenty of bands go rummaging through the late 1960s and early 1970s like they’re shopping for bell-bottoms at a thrift store. Ball don’t sound like they’re “influenced by” that era so much as they sound like they found a tunnel underneath it and crawled out covered from stoned head to broken toe in filthy fuzz.

The debut is full of that hot, blown-out, occult-garage electricity: songs that lurch, stomp, and leer rather than “progress.” The riffs are huge but not polished into arena-rock anonymity. The vocals don’t posture above the music; they seem to rise out of the same smoky pit as the guitars. There’s something refreshingly anti-hygienic about it all. The record doesn’t try to impress you with virtuoso fireworks or conceptual ambition. It simply kicks open the cellar door and says: here is a groove, here is a pulse, here is the primitive neurological fact of rock music before it got re-upholstered and taken to the arena.

What Ball took from early heavy music wasn’t merely volume or distortion, but life. This is where they separate themselves from the countless doom-adjacent bands who think being heavy means moving like furniture. Ball have hips. Ball have sweat. Ball have that old rhythm-and-blues ghost still rattling around inside the amplifier. Even at their murkiest, the songs retain a sense of motion, a lascivious boogie buried under layers of wah-wah fuzz. This is occult rock you can spill beer to, and feel proudly empowered by it at the same time.

Then came Like You Are… I Once Was… Like I Am – You Will Never Be (2020) which, title-wise, sounds like a curse scratched into a church pew by a condemned monk who has just discovered what a wah-wah pedal can make the nuns feel and do. Hail Satan! If the debut announced Ball as disciples of the holy racket, this follow-up widened the ritual circle. The production feels bigger, the songs more self-assured, the whole thing more luridly theatrical. It’s not cleaner exactly — thank Satan — but the shadows are deeper, the colors more saturated (and we all feel with what: a three letter doorway to the vaults of horror and delight).

This is the album where Ball’s sense of drama becomes unmistakable. They are not just a riff band, although the riffs are there and they are filthy and medicinal. They are atmosphere merchants. Their music has rooms in it: red-lit rooms, with fractured mirrors, damp basements, ancient chambers where the wallpaper is peeling and someone in the corner is smiling too weirdly. You don’t simply listen to Ball; you enter a little B-movie cathedral where every candle smells like gasoline and every girl is actually a witch hell-bent (literally) on corrupting you.

And yet — crucially — the band never becomes ponderous. That is the fatal trap of so much occult rock: the idea that because you’re dealing in devils, ceremonies, death, sex, and electric dread, you must therefore become very solemn and very slow and very pleased with your own incense budget. Ball mostly avoid this by remembering that evil, in rock and roll, should be fun. Not safe, not sanitized, not ironic — fun in the ancient carnival sense, where fun means masks and drums and somebody maybe getting chased into the woods (most likely you).

Their later material — including the ferocious albums Midnight Heat (2023) and Satanic Ecstasy (2025) — pushes this logic further. By this point Ball sound less like a band paying homage to primordial heavy rock and more like a band building its own private temple out of the pieces. The garage elements are still there, the proto-metal stomp is still there, the psychedelic smear is still there, but it all feels increasingly internalized. They aren’t waving influence-flags. They’re simply playing Ball. Are you listening closely?

And what is the Ball language? It is fuzz as theology. It is repetition as hypnosis. It is the riff not as ornament but as commandment to worship the dark forces. It is the bass and drums not as accompaniment but as some tremendous beast dragging the song forward by chains. It is vocals treated less like “frontman expression” and more like a transmission from behind a locked door – in an insane asylum. It is Sweden imagining the American and British rock past not as museum history but as a living ooze, something still capable of mutating, infecting, seducing.

Part of Ball’s greatness lies in their refusal to be respectable. Respectability is death to this music. The minute rock starts wanting to be admired by grant committees, lifestyle magazines, or people who describe guitar tones as “awesome,” it begins coughing up dust and eventually slimy blood. Ball sound like they would rather be banned from the civic arts center than applauded politely inside it. Their records carry that whiff of the illicit — not because they are actually shocking in some tabloid sense, but because they restore to rock the feeling that you are hearing something slightly disreputable. (”For the love of Satan, keep fucking!”)

That may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t. In an age when rebellion is often prepackaged as branding, Ball’s commitment to murk, heat, repetition, and sleaze feels almost perversely sincere. They don’t wink at you constantly. They don’t reassure you that they are smarter than the material. They do the harder, rarer thing: they believe in the material. They believe in the riff. They believe in the organ-grinder churn of heavy garage psych. They believe that a song can be three chords and still open a trapdoor in the floor to unimaginable and bloody horrors.

There’s also a Scandinavian weirdness to Ball that matters. Sweden has long had an uncanny relationship with rock revivalism — we seem able to produce bands that don’t merely imitate past forms but lacquer them in cold northern moonlight until they gleam strangely. Ball are part of that tradition, but they are rougher, nastier, less decorative than many of their so-called peers (Ghost would be a prime example). They do not sound like a palatable export. The blonde-haired Kingdom of Ersatz shits out a million sanitized symbols of the supposedly dangerous but dreads these rare moments when the Scandinavian unconscious actually compresses prismatic gemstones into phenomena like Ball. Why? Because Ball speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Satan from the point of view of the teenage Satanist rebel rouser.

The greatness of Ball, finally, is not that they reinvent rock music. They don’t. Reinvention is overrated anyway, especially in a form built on theft, repetition, mutation, and sacred stupidity. Ball’s greatness is that they reanimate rock music. They remind you that the oldest moves can still work if played with enough conviction, filth, and psychic voltage. A fuzz riff, a pounding beat, a voice howling from the smoke — these things are not exhausted. They only seem exhausted when handled by cowards and posers.

Ball are great because they make rock feel physical again. Not theoretical. Not curatorial. Not like a mood board. Physical. Their albums hit the body before the brain has time to issue its little academic permissions. You feel the drums in the ribs, the bass in the floorboards, the guitar in the fillings. The songs don’t ask whether you “get” them. They simply start happening, and then the room changes shape. Beware of the angles!

So praise Ball, then: blunt, heavy, lurid, unclean, and alive. Praise the stupid-perfect name. Praise the riffs that sound dredged from Hell. Praise the sense of ceremony without the suffocating self-importance. Praise the way they make the past feel less like nostalgia than possession. Praise the fact that in a world drowning in tasteful little playlists and bloodless sonic wallpaper, Ball still sound like a band trying to raise something from the dead — and succeeding.

Not every band needs to save rock and roll. Most who try end up embarrassing themselves. Ball do something better. They remind you why it needed saving in the first place.

Check out Ball here!

Abrahamsson references the “Eye of the Storm,” a metaphor for maintaining inner stillness amidst external chaos, as a way to preserve energy and consolidate power. He draws parallels between this concept and teachings from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, highlighting the value of acting without attachment to outcomes while refining one’s inner energy. The essence of this practice is not the eradication of desire but rather the refusal to be enslaved by it.

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In 1989, I met Anton LaVey for the first time. At this time in his life, LaVey was seeing only a select few people. For this film, I’ve met and interviewed some of them, to try and create a composite image of what he was really like, and what he meant to these people. It’s a memory lane trip, filled with personal stories, dark humor, great music and never before seen material with the “Black Pope” himself.

Anton LaVey was many things to many people: musician, magician, writer, wild animal trainer, police photographer, film buff, founder of a magical group, and possibly of a new religion, and yes… He was a Satanist. With his creation of the infamous Church of Satan in 1966, and his bestselling book The Satanic Bible in 1969, Anton LaVey changed the ballgame in many ways. Here was a free-spirited San Francisco based group neither in favor of mind-expanding drugs, nor of peace & love for its own sake. Here was a group that was decidedly, outspokenly anti-Christian. Here was a group that brought dark pro-sexual psychodrama and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche straight into American living rooms and TV couches. Anton LaVey became a celebrity scapegoat who basked in the attention, and made a successful career out of it. But who was Anton LaVey behind the public persona that so easily provoked primitive American Christians and other intolerants? Who was this enigmatic “American Adversary”?

This film contains never before shown interview material with LaVey, private photographs, and rare recordings, plus in-depth interviews with Blanche Barton, Peter Gilmore, Peggy Nadramia, Bob Johnson, Kenneth Anger, Michael Moynihan, Mitch Horowitz, Ruth Waytz, Larry Wessel, Margie Bauer, Jack Stevenson, and Jim Morton.

Here’s the link to join the Zoom meeting/screening and ensuing Q & A session:

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