Course: Sex, Death & the Occult
TRANSPERSONAL / TRANSRATIONAL / TRANSSEXUAL
becoming more of what you are
by transforming limit-conditions, subconscious intelligence & biopsychological energies
A Six-Week Autumn Magic Course and Collective Ritual
w/ Layman Pascal & Rachel Hayden
What is the occult? And how can a deeper understanding of its theory and practices help us to grow in power and wisdom? Individually we need to become more complex (and simpler), wealthier in every sense, and infused with a greater force of intention in all aspects of our lives. Collectively, we need to enhance the well-being of those we love and also spread new ideas, patterns, and moods into a planetary civilization that is wavering between implosion and transformation. Real growth requires more than just aspiration and meditation. We must contact, unfold and empower hidden parts of ourselves. We need to get better at “magic.”
Layman Pascal and Rachel Hayden are uniquely suited to explore the transrational, transpersonal, & transsexual roots of trans-ontological agency. That means using the edges of our experience, including all the weirdness we feel around sex and death, to catalyze our capacity to receive and transmit influences through the liminal space between realities. This requires an attitude of daring, fluidity, and joy that is often absent from conventional wisdom training.
So join Layman and Rachel as they explore the intersection of historical magic, high strangeness & the integrative future of human thriving. This is not only a course of study, lectures, and occult skill-building. It is all those things but it is also a six-part collective ritual designed to extend the influence of the liminal web & amplify the cultural potency of its participants.
Occultism stirs up many feelings for people. We are using that word deliberately to encourage inner turbulence and allurement. Although the religion-that-is-not-a-religion has been undertaken throughout history by magical, occult, and quasi-hermetic networks, these flavors of existential development are still marginalized within the field of new wisdom studies. This bias must be corrected to facilitate contact with every form of entity, energy and selfhood that we need to live and become more fully. But we must also be safe, intelligent and ethical when we are deepening our understanding of these forces that exist within, around, and between us. This course will get weird. However, Rachel and Layman will create a smart and ethical container of curiosity, benevolent intention, and serious play for these edgy topics, lectures, exercises, and shared ritual enactments.
So if you are starting to feel the small flame of curiosity toward this event -- and if you wish for the people and ideas in these emerging communities to have more sway over the greater world and future -- then seriously consider joining us.
Module Outline
SATURDAYS
OCT 5 - NOV 6
10 am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET
75 min Sessions
Campfire Sessions w/ Q&A on Following Sundays at 6 PM CET
COURSE CONTENT
Each week will be one step in the co-construction of an intersubjective spell & invocation whose “aim” will be collectively determined in the first session. Additionally, each round will include
(a) an educational module on the history of occult, magical, and hermetic approaches to wisdom
(b) a skill-building exercise for one of our occult muscles
(c) an exploration of one of the principles of the new “Xagick” discourse featured in Layman’s substack of the same name
(d) occult homework & suggested reading/viewing.
This course is for people who want an edgy & in-depth exploration of the history and future of esoteric practice that draws upon both the attractive and disturbing forces of psychophysical Nature. And those who are willing to put effort into building their occult tool-kit and collectively inventing the forms of directed invocational work that are possible through new networks and new media technology.
CLASS 1 - Surfacing the Spell
Lecture+Practice: Saturday October 5th
Campfire/Q&A: Sunday October 6th
The Rebirth of Western Esotericism. Male/Female Brains & Liminal Trances. Entering into Transrational Mutuality. The Boundary of Knowledge. The Tarot as the Fool’s Journey. Seeding a Collective Entity. Discovering and Inventing the “Working” of this Course.
CLASS 2 - Opening the Portal
Lecture+Practice: Saturday October 12th
Campfire/Q&A: Sunday October 13th
The History and Role of Elementals. The Principle of Occult Agency. Phallic/Clitoral & Receptive relationships to “Entities.” Building portals and tending openings.
CLASS 3 - Extending the Invocation
Lecture+Practice: Saturday October 19th
Campfire/Q&A: Sunday October 20th
Developing the Will. Solomon’s Goetia. Enochian practices. Utilizing the web of nonlinear connection & resonances. Comparing embodied, visual and verbal sigils.
CLASS 4 - Making the Sacrifice
Lecture+Practice: Saturday October 26th
Campfire/Q&A: Sunday October 27th
The Princple of Shapeshifting & Gender Fluidity in Magickal and Shamanic Practice. Crowley as Queer. What is Occult Feminism? Transgressing ourselves. Revisiting the teratogenic principle. Wyrd & Uncanny.
CLASS 5 - Closing & Banishing
Lecture+Practice: Saturday November 2nd
Campfire/Q&A: Sunday November 3rd
The History of Sex Magick. Death & Surrender. Transgressing the ritual. Surrendering the energy. Oculus Apex and ritual tempo.
CLASS 6 - Receiving the Gift
Lecture+Practice: Saturday November 9th
Campfire/Q&A: Sunday November 10th
The History of Aeonics & Occult Epochs. Entering the post-closed space. Manifesting completion. Ritual review. Style as Manifestation. Hauntology slide-show.
About your facilitators
Layman is an author, public speaker & retreat leader specializing in metamodern spirituality, nondualist theology, integral religion, and metashamanics. He is the host of the popular podcast THE INTEGRAL STAGE (and the more elite SOULMAKERS series).
He helped initiate the Parallax Academy and also works with Endemic, ICON, the Metamodern Spirituality Lab, the Foundation for Integral Religion & Spirituality, Emerge/Perspectiva, RESPOND, Limicon, the Transdisciplinary Leadership Review, Beyond Interfaith, and other leading-edge projects. His book “Gurdjieff for Time Between Worlds” was recently published as the first book from Sky Meadow Press
Rachel has the "transsexual" part of the course down pretty well. She seems to be some sort of accidental witch, some kind of tribopoeitic catalyst, and this (non)power seems related partly to her transformational approach to gender transition. Her main talent in life is hanging out, and her day job is peer support in the community mental health world, practicing being-with-ness and covertly recruiting other weirdos to help open the faerie gates of the world. She's been an intellectual groupie of a number of preeminent Liminal Web chatterboxes, sometimes doing videos with them. Lately she's been working, if you can call it that, on Engenders, a subproject of Adriana Forte Naili's C-Lab, which will extract and enfold the trans experience into conversations around gender. Layman and the Dark Renaissance shock troops finally dragged her first essay out of her - "The State of Queer Liminal " (aka "The Temple of the Starving Moon"), available on Dark Renaissance Radio.