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Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism

Greer, J.C.

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Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies

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Greer, J. C. (2013). Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism. Anarchist Developments in
Cultural Studies, 2013(2), 166-187.

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Download date: 15 mar 2019

Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies
ISSN: 1923-5615
2013.2: Ontological Anarché: Beyond Materialism and Idealism

Occult Origins
Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism

Joseph Christian Greer

ABSTRACT
Convention concerning the beginning of Post-anarchist discourse locates
its origin in Hakim Bey’s work in the 1980s; however, no commentator
has sufficiently analyzed the thoroughly spiritualized anarchism upon
which it is based, termed “Ontological Anarchism,” nor the group that
promoted it, the Association of Ontological Anarchism. This article
draws attention to the ways in which the interface between a starkly
postmodern form of esotericism called Chaos Magick and the anarchist
tradition produced Ontological Anarchism, and, further, to the implica-
tions of this hybridity on the historiography of Post-anarchism.

KEYWORDS
post-anarchism, chaos magick, Hakim Bey, zines, discordianism

INTRODUCTION

Peter Lamborn Wilson once lightheartedly lamented, “Hakim Bey

is more popular than I am” (Knight, 2012: 74). What makes this
comment humorous is that Hakim Bey is a nom de plume for Wil-
son. What makes this comment noteworthy is that Wilson used
this nom de plume to initiate one of the most innovative develop-
ments in the history of twentieth century anarchism. This devel-
opment, which he termed Post-Anarchism Anarchy (now called
Post-anarchism), arose from the confluence of esotericism and
1
anarchism in the 1980s zine network. Thus, in order to under-
1
The category of esotericism should be understood not as a cluster of
historically linked occult or hermetic phenomena but rather as an instru-
ment for historians to better understand marginalized spiritual currents
OCCULT ORIGINS | 167

stand the origins of Post-anarchism we must locate it in the con-

text of Bey’s work and the specific audience for which he was
writing.
While convention concerning the origin of Post-anarchism
states that it began in Bey’s work in the 1980s (Call, 2010: 10;
Newman 2010: 51, 71n.8), no commentator has sufficiently ana-
lyzed the thoroughly spiritualized anarchism upon which it is
based, termed Ontological Anarchism, nor the group that pro-
moted it, the Association of Ontological Anarchism (AOA hence-
2
forth). The aim of this article is to draw attention to the ways in
which the interface between a starkly postmodern form of esoter-
icism called Chaos Magick and the anarchist tradition produced
Ontological Anarchism, and, further, the implications of this hy-
3
bridity on the historiography of Post-anarchism. To this end,
three related undercurrents run through this article. The first
concerns the identification of primary sources with regards to
Wilson/Bey and Ontological Anarchism. The second links these
esoteric sources to a gap in scholarship on the prominence of
esotericism within early Post-anarchist discourse, i.e., Bey’s On-
tological Anarchism. The third concerns Lewis Call’s convincing
argument concerning the role of “the Nietzsche effect” in laying
the foundation for Post-anarchism (as mention is made through-
out the article of Nietzsche’s strong influence on the esoteric dis-
courses that predate as well as prefigure Bey’s Post-anarchist
4
Ontological Anarchism). The conclusions drawn are likewise

which may or may not be related to occultism or hermeticism. See

Hanegraaff, 2012 and fn.5.
2
The title of Leonard Williams’s article “Hakim Bey and Ontological
Anarchism” suggests that it would have provided some insight into this
topic; however, in failing to grasp the spiritual context of Bey’s use of
Chaos as ontology, the article ends up mistaking Ontological Anarchism
for an “artistic practice” and in so doing fails to elucidate Bey’s
innovative refashioning of anarchism. See Williams, 2010.
3
The term magick was coined by British occultist Aleister Crowley to
separate his spiritual system and writings from the so-called
superstitious magic of the occultists whom he considered his
competitors. The fact that his term has persisted to this day, as evidenced
by the Chaos Magick discourse, testifies to the continued relevance of his
approach to spiritual and religious texts and practices. See Crowley,
1992. For an account of Crowley’s lasting influence see Bogdan & Starr
(eds.), 2012.
4
Quoting Keith Ansell-Pearson, Call describes “the Nietzsche effect” as
the consensus opinion amongst scholars that the most fertile aspect of
Nietzsche’s work is not so much its content but how its performative
168 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

threefold: first, that the history of Post-anarchism cannot be writ-

ten without considering the contribution of occultism; second,
that Bey’s work itself will remain misunderstood if the esoteric
themes that it addressed, and physical mediums through which it
first appeared, remain unexamined; third, through acknowledging
the esoteric foundation of Bey’s Ontological Anarchism, an even
earlier form of Nietzsche-inspired, anarcho-occultism called Dis-
cordianism can be read into the multiplicity of discourses that
5
compose the pre-history of Post-anarchism.
At the heart of this article is the correction of an inaccuracy,
namely, that Bey’s 1991 text, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous
Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (hereafter TAZ) pub-
lished by Autonomedia constitutes the origin of Post-anarchist
discourse. This is not to deny the centrality of the texts that com-
pose the book TAZ, but rather to draw attention to the fact that
TAZ is an anthology of previously published works. Mistakenly
identifying the origins of Ontological Anarchism in TAZ effec-
tively neglects the original primary sources which first intro-
duced Bey’s idea of Ontological Anarchism, as well as the milieu
in which it was initially, developed, critiqued, and revised. The
glossy publication produced by Autonomedia in 1991 entitled
TAZ does not represent the origin of Ontological Anarchism; ra-
ther, it is a redacted volume assembled to popularize Bey’s work.
In order to illustrate the implications of the failure to recognize
TAZ’s provenance, this article focuses on the Chaos Magick mi-
lieu in which Bey first developed Ontological Anarchism.
The TAZ text itself is broken into three sections which corre-
spond to three distinct works composed by Bey at various times.
The first section of the book is the verbatim reproduction of a
prose-poetry zine entitled Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological
Anarchy, first published in 1985. The most rigorous development
of Ontological Anarchism followed after the publication of Chaos
in a number of zines, but most regularly as a series of letters and
essays in a Chaos Magick zine from the years 1986–1988. These
letters and essays would come to be collected as the second and
largest section of TAZ and were titled Communiqués of the Associ-
ation for Ontological Anarchy. The essential aspect of this devel-

quality deconstructs the logocentric bias of Western thought and reason.

See Call, 2001: 51–52.
5
Debate continues to rage over how to define “occultism” with Marco
Pasi’s historiographic definition standing out as the most workable. See
Pasi, 2012; Hanegraaff, Brach, Faivre, & van den Broek, 2005: 884–889;
Hanegraaff: 2012.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 169

opment, as will be shown, concerns the way in which the com-

muniqués were written largely in response to issues prominent in
the anarcho-queer-magickal milieu, which heralded Bey’s Chaos
as essential reading for the nascent Chaos Magick movement. The
last section of TAZ is a collection of writings which focus on the
formation of moments where Ontological Anarchism has flourish,
termed Temporary Autonomous Zones, and from whence the title
of the book is derived. As will be made clear in what follows, TAZ
was not the primary source from which Post-anarchism originat-
ed, and thus, much stands to be gained by both subverting this
monolithic origin point and reasserting the radical hybridity of its
origins for historians of Post-anarchism and esotericism alike.
As Bey’s writings on Ontological Anarchism first appeared in
his zine Chaos, and developed into “communiqués” published in a
number of influential zines, the first section focuses on setting
Ontological Anarchism within what Bob Black termed the “mar-
ginal milieu” and, in particular, clarifying its relationship to Joel
Biroco’s influential Chaos Magick zine Kaos (Black, 1994). The
second section offers an in-depth description of Bey’s explicitly
Nietzschean reading of Chaos and how this functioned as the
basis of Ontological Anarchism. The conclusion takes up the sig-
nificance of citing Ontological Anarchism as the origin of Post-
anarchism. Essentially, it will be argued that Bey’s role in the
formation of Post-anarchism obliges scholars to recognize why
he, and others, perceived natural affinities between anarchism
and esotericism. Finally, brief mention is made of a slightly earlier
syncretism of Chaos ontology, Nietzschean philosophy, esoteri-
cism, and anarchism termed Discordianism, which heavily influ-
6
enced Bey’s formulation of Ontological Anarchism. It will be
argued that the inclusion of Discordianism in the early historiog-
raphy of Post-anarchism will lead scholars to recognize how the
origins of Post-anarchism in an occult milieu is not simply an
oddity or an aberration, but representative of a grossly underap-
preciated historical alliance between anarchism and esotericism
beginning from the late 1950s onward.

6
Just as scholars of Post-anarchism have neglected to explore the
sources anthologized within TAZ, so too have scholars of Discordianism
failed to examine its origins in the zine scene. Carole Cusack’s work on
Discordianism exemplifies this unfortunate trend. See Cusack, 2010 and
ibid, 2011.
170 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

DISCURSIVE TRANSFERS “BENEATH THE U NDERGROUND”

In olden days I was a Prophet, today I am a rabble-rouser.

Joel Biroco, “Renegade”

Today, it is no secret that Wilson and Bey are the same individu-
al. However, when Bey’s Chaos and the AOA communiqués were
printed in the mid-1980s zine network, this secret was closely
7
guarded. Similarly, while the AOA’s greatest asset was the force-
ful eloquence of the provocations issued by its only public repre-
sentative, Bey, the mystery concerning its size and militancy lent
it an undeniable mystique. In hindsight, Bey seems to have been
its only official member; yet, as mentioned he too was a mystery
at that time. The most plausible explanation as to why Wilson
adopted his pseudonym after his return from Iran following the
1979 revolution, was so that he could safeguard the respectability
of his academic work which he continued to be publish under the
name Wilson. As Bey, Wilson’s writings were unapologetically
radical in both style and content. Understanding the difference
between the once-separate identities of Wilson and Bey is the key
to understanding how Ontological Anarchism was formed. While
Wilson was an independent, Traditionalist scholar of Islam and
Persian poetry, Bey, the prolific anarcho-mystic and man-boy-
love propagandist, was a prime mover in a vibrant, “sub-
underground” known as the “zine scene” that flourished in North
8
America and the UK from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. This
milieu can most accurately be described as a network of political,
sexual, and spiritual non-conformists, all of whom communicated
through small-circulation hand-made magazines called fanzines,
abbreviated to zines, as well as taped letters, self-recorded music,
mail-art, and “comix” sent through the mail. Named after the
company that allowed for the cheap production of these publica-
tions, xerography established itself as the central pivot of this
outsider milieu. Aside from a general, but by no means totalizing
acceptance of anti-authoritarianism and the rejection of censor-
7
This is exemplified in the video recording of Joseph Matheny’s “T.A.Z.”
event that featured Robert Anton Wilson and Hakim Bey as speakers.
Whereas Robert Anton Wilson’s part was filmed with only minimal
distortion effects, Wilson, performing as Bey, is blurred out almost
entirely with the use of psychedelic colors and patterns in the video
(Matheny, 1993).
8
For a detailed overview of the Traditionalist context where Wilson
began his academic writing career see Sedgwick, 2004: 147–160, and
Versluis, 2010.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 171

ship, those who participated in this network were anything but

homogeneous in taste, opinion, and areas of interest (Black, 1994:
4). As an embedded authority, Bob Black described the milieu
stating: “abhorrent topics, from space colonization to Holocaust
Revisionism, are taken in stride” and it was not uncommon to
have ads for Situationist or queer zines in magick publications
and vice versa (Black, 1994: 6).
Both thematically and aesthetically, labels like punk, queer,
anarchist, and magick do more to misrepresent the material with-
in the zines than categorize them, as each of these elements were
routinely reconfigured in any number of ways throughout the
network. This is clearly true for Chaos Magick publications like
Salvation Army and Kaos, both of which were embraced by both
anarcho-queer individuals disenfranchised with what they saw as
the commodification and banalization of homosexuality as a fixed
identity, and anarchists whose esoteric worldviews ran afoul of
9
their atheist materialist comrades. Certainly, the zine scene was
an exceptionally fecund network in regards to the cross-
pollination of radical politics, illegal sexualities, and esotericism,
and as such stands as “an undiscovered continent” of primary
source materials for scholars of contemporary anarchism, cultural
studies, and esotericism (Wobensmith, 2012).
The Acknowledgments page of TAZ indicates the extent to
which vastly different discourses overlapped in the rhizomatic
zine network, which inspired and disseminated the writings that
would be collected as Communiqués of Ontological Anarchism.
The list of publications on the Acknowledgments page reads as a
who’s who of the most influential zines in the network. Of par-
ticular note is Joel Biroco’s Kaos, Mike Gunderloy’s Factsheet Five,
R.U. Sirius’ Mondo 2000, and Popular Reality. These titles bare
mention because aspects of each (magick, cyberpunk, alternative
sexuality, etc.) are essential components in Bey’s Ontological An-
archism and characterize the major themes within the zine net-
10
work more generally.
9
As leading lights in Chaos Magick, the alternative sexualities of Aleister
Crowley and William S. Burroughs are cited by numerous Chaos
magicians as evidence that sexual nonconformity is magical by nature:
See Hine, 2003. The Church of the Subgenius and Discordinaism are two
religious groups whose reworking of anarchism through religious
language, humor, and esoteric symbolism effectively excludes them from
consideration as part of contemporary anarchism.
10
Scholars looking to reconstruct the most notable individuals and pub-
lications within the zine network could scarcely find a better resource
172 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

As space constraints prohibit a broader analysis of Ontologi-

cal Anarchism’s development across a number of zines, focus
shall here be on one zine, Joel Biroco’s Kaos, as it not only served
as the most influential platform for non-sectarian discussions on
Chaos Magick, but also because it printed much of what later
11
became the Communiqués of Ontological Anarchism. Before link-
ing the contents of Kaos to the development of Ontological Anar-
chism, though, a few descriptive issues regarding Kaos and Chaos
Magick merit addressing. As to the latter, providing a brief out-
line of an entire magical discourse is difficult enough, and this
especially so for one oriented in the postmodern project of desta-
bilizing essentialist positions so as to align the magician with the
Chaos thought to undergird reality. Suffice it to say that Chaos
Magick is a largely existentialist worldview initiated in the late
1970s by two British magicians, Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin,
that is based largely on Nietzsche’s “theory of magical science”
concerning the will to power, Crowley’s religious teachings, and
the English mage A.O. Spare’s sigilization technique (Rocket,
12
1988: 18). Essential to Chaos Magick is the meta-belief that be-
lief and identity are tools, indeed “magickal force[s]”, that can be
used to manipulate reality according to one’s will (Caroll, 1987:
39–41). As for the zine, issues of Kaos open with incendiary edito-
rial introductions by Biroco, which are followed in no particular
order by letters-to-the-editor, longer essays, pirated and original
art, book reviews, and a mail-order listing of other zines. Based
on both the belief that letters-to-the-editor retained a vitality lost
in other modes of writing and Biroco’s policy of printing every-
thing, Kaos had an exceptionally long and patently polemic let-
ters-to-the-editor section. The result was that passionate discus-

than TAZ’s acknowledgment page and back-cover. These pages link the
most influential agents in the zine sub-underground to the aging cultural
icons who paved the way for them, including Burroughs, Leary, and
Ginsberg, all of whom have blurbs on the back cover.
11
Kaos changed it name from Chaos in issue 7 to distinguish itself from
another Chaos Magick zine, Chaos International.
12
Two articles in Kaos 11 illustrate the way in which Crowley’s
influence in Chaos Magick is denigrated to the point of being lamentable,
whereas Nietzsche’s is elevated to the highest possible rank. Ramsey
Duke’s claim that, “Nietzsche [XXX] was my prophet: I preach the
Superman, and the Death of God” encapsulates the latter, while Yael
Ruth Dragwyla’s statement “Crowley was . . . a young and soul-crippled
child” articulates the former. Nearly every account of Chaos Magick cites
A.O. Spare its first and the most significant theorist. Duke, 1988: 26;
Dragwyla, 1988: 20.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 173

sions and vitriolic diatribes alike often extend over a number of

issues, and as a primary contributor, Bey’s work was both con-
stantly referenced, celebrated, and disparaged.
As Kaos operated under a print-everything standard, its inter-
national audience encompassed a wide-spectrum of the “lunatic
fringe” and topics were often revisited from a number of perspec-
tives. Kaos 6 illustrates this point well, as it features an anarchist
analysis of language by post-left anarchism luminary Bob Black
that responded to an earlier piece by the zine’s editor, Biroco,
about the language of magick, which was then referenced later in
issue 6 by Stephen Sennitt, the creator of the influential zine
NOX, in an article about the interface between esotericism and
linguistic psychology and physics. However, for all of the variety
within each issue, opinions concerning the nature of Chaos and
in particular the means by which it was to be used magically
were central in every issue. While it would be impossible to prove
Bey’s formulation of Chaos was the most influential of those pre-
sented therein, it can be said that Ontological Anarchism was
amongst the most discussed approaches in the zine; accordingly,
the origins of the formal Post-anarchist discourse cannot be un-
derstood outside of the competition between leading schools
within the Chaos Magick discourse, and thus informed by Onto-
logical Anarchism’s competitors, namely, Thelema, and Genesis
13
P. Orridge’s Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.
If we are to read Ontological Anarchism against competing
influences within the Chaos Magick discourse, it is necessary to
first characterize their common assumptions. Basically, they all
shared the belief that the experience of “gnosis” through magical
techniques, rituals, and psychedelics, revealed the anarchic, yet
malleable, interplay of the forces that structure reality. Addition-
ally, it was believed that the structure of reality was actively ob-
scured by the “barrage of psychic propaganda” frequently identi-
fied in Situationist language as the “Spectacle” (Alistair, 1986;
Jackson, 1986). The difference between the competing interpreta-
tions of Chaos Magick was in the course of action suggested by
14
the gnostic experiences of Chaos. Far from undisputed, Bey’s
13
Arguments over these approaches to Chaos Magick are commonplace
in Kaos; see Paul B., 1986: 15; Rocket, 1988: 18; Biroco, 1986: 35 and 1988:
35.
14
While it has been suggested that the term Gnosticism be abandoned
altogether, debate over the correct ways in which the term gnostic can be
used remains heated. The best introduction to the dispute is Williams,
1999. It is set with scare-marks to indicate its emic use in Kaos.
174 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

conclusions concerning these experiences—which appeared many

times within a number of issues—were attacked for being every-
thing from the ramblings of a post-psychedelic airhead to the
fearful poses of an intellectual dilettante (Bey, 1988: 9). The ma-
jority of critiques directed towards Bey stemmed from his insist-
ence on reading Chaos as a primarily generative force wherein
“the Way & the Great Work”, or the path of the Chaos magician,
was to manifest his imagination in such a way that encompassed
the desire of others and in so doing transcend the forces of “than-
atos” which in his estimation belong exclusively to the Spectacle
(Bey, 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1978c; 1988).
As mentioned, Ontological Anarchism was a heated topic
within the pages of Kaos. Bey’s strident optimism was in the mi-
nority amongst contributors who reveled in pessimistic nihilism,
and specifically the exaltation of murder, torture, and the end of
the world (Bey, 2003; Biroco, 1988). As evidenced in a text that
later became communiqué #4 in TAZ (but was entitled “The End
of the World” in Kaos 6), as well as the text that would become
communiqué #5, “Intellectual S / M Is the Fascism of the Eight-
ies—The Avant-Garde Eats Shit and Likes It”, it was pure revul-
sion that spurred Bey, and by extension the AOA, to the position
summarized in the line: “Ours is no art of mutilation but of ex-
cess, superabundance, amazement” (Bey, 2003: 37). In defining
himself against those who were “queer for death” insofar as they
celebrated not conviviality but “thanatosis” and Schadenfreude,
Bey increasingly altered his theorizing in the mirror of the other
authors published in Kaos (Bey, 2003: 38). The tension between
these two camps—with Bey’s “self-realization, beauty, and adven-
ture” approach to Chaos set against the “gnostic fascism” of Rabbi
Rabinowitz and Stephen Sennitt (to name only two representa-
tives)—came to a head across four issues on the topic of using the
image of the murderer, and specifically Marquis de Sade, in black
magick practice and Chaos Magick in general. The numerous
responses from Bey contained in each issue reflected the devel-
opment of Ontological Anarchism over and against those enticed
by the power of the darker aspects of Chaos Magick. Considering
that Bey’s responses, many of which underwent no editing from
the original form they possessed in Kaos, were collected years
later as the Communiqués of Ontological Anarchism and inserted
as the middle section of TAZ, it is not an overstatement to claim
that in neglecting their original context, historians cannot under-
stand what Ontological Anarchism is or to what it was respond-
ing.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 175

The dispute over de Sade was by no means an isolated inci-

dent. As Ontological Anarchism, like Bey’s concept of Chaos, was
routinely foregrounded in the pages of Kaos, so too were the cri-
tiques of it. To clarify what Chaos actually meant to Bey, and in
turn shed light on Post-anarchism’s origin, the next section shall
outline how Bey defined this concept and the implications he saw
therein for realizing autonomy through esoteric spirituality.

ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM

This is not just a matter of spiritual dandyism, but also of existen-

tial commitment to an underlying spontaneity, to a philosophical
“tao.” For all its waste of energy, in its very formlessness, anarchism
alone of all the ISMs approaches that one type of form which alone
can interest us today, that strange attractor, the shape of chaos—
which (one last quote [from Nietzsche]) one must have within one-
self, if one is to give birth to a dancing star.
Hakim Bey, “Post-Anarchism Anarchy”

Ontological Anarchism is Bey’s formulation of a more authenti-

cally anarchist anarchism, one which reflects the ontological state
of being, which he identifies as the boundless vitality of Chaos.
Harking back to A.O. Spare, whom Sherwin and Carroll recog-
nized as the father of the Chaos Magick discourse, Hakim Bey
describes Chaos as synonymous with the Dao of the Daodejing
15
and Zhuangzi. Further, utilizing the palimpsestic approach that
characterizes much of his work, Bey additionally references the
Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, fractals, and Hesiod’s Theogony as
illustrating variant aspects of Chaos, which, he argues, exceeds
the capacity of any rendering or conceptualization. In essence,
Chaos, the primordial and infinite, “inert & spontaneous,” and
“original undifferentiated oneness-of-being” is the indestructible,
unmitigated potentiality that simultaneously vivifies and is all
that exists: in his words, “chaos is life” (Bey, 2001: 1; 2003: 3).
15
The decontextualization and appropriation of the Dao in the Chaos
Magick discourse follows a trend that runs through much of 20th and
19th century esotericism. Nearly a century before figures like Biroco,
Bey, and Sherwin adopted the Dao as a synonym for their conception of
Chaos, Crowley incorporated an idiosyncratic interpretation of Daoism
into his religious system known as Thelema. Space constraints limit any
discussion of the notable influence of Crowley’s idiosyncratic conception
of Daoism in the Chaos Magick milieu, however, it nonetheless remains a
topic ripe for research. For an extended discussion of Crowley’s
engagement with Daoism see Nillson, 2013: 118–124.
176 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

Characteristic of the Chaos Magick milieu, Nietzsche’s philoso-

phy also plays a major role in Bey’s work and his conceptualiza-
tion of Ontological Anarchism is no exception. Reminiscent of the
opening passage of the Daodejing, Bey makes clear that Chaos
cannot be defined; however, it can be described, and he does so in
explicitly Nietzschean terms as being “based on nothing” and as a
consequence, inherently “for Life” (Bey, 2001: 1). Described as
explicitly against what Bey saw as the fashionable nihilism and
pessimism of the time, he argued that Chaos’ basis in nothingness
and expression as sheer potentiality meant that nothing, be it
natural law or god, obstructed the expression of will; in fact, the
chaotic nothingness afforded the will absolute power to create.
Chaos is, for him, a limitless existential affirmation of all creation
and possibilities, an overtly generative and gratuitously generous
force that allows humanity to create the values that best serve the
fulfillment of its desires. Articulating what Lewis Call would later
term Nietzsche’s “affirmative anarchism of becoming” (Lewis,
2001: 50), Bey describes Chaos by stating:

If I wanted to be fancy I could call this nothing the Abyss .

. . or even god, if only to confuse the issue. My pet term is
“ontological anarchy”—meaning that being itself is in a
state of chaos, & that life is free to generate its own spon-
taneous orders. . . . the generosity of being IS becoming.
(Bey, [undated]: 8)

At the heart of Ontological Anarchism is the knowledge that

Chaos, conceived of not as a single entity, but as the undeter-
mined, creative potential that underwrites being, defines reality,
and this potential allows humanity, to paraphrase Nietzsche, to
give birth to a dancing star.
As eminent Sinologists A.C. Graham and Arthur Waley noted
of the Dao, ontological Chaos effectively undermines the legiti-
macy of all hegemons and abrogates all laws—be they laws of
nature, church, or the state (Graham, 1989: 299-305; Waley, 1939:
70–75) More than simply nullifying them, recognizing Chaos as
the ontological state of existence renders law an impossibility
16
according to Bey. Condensed into the slogan “Chaos never
16
The claim that the ontological state of reality invalidates even the
possibility of law or governmemnt is commonly attributed to Zhuangzi
in Discordian and to a lesser extent Chaos Magick texts; however, no
such matter of fact claim is made is present in the text attributed to him.
See Wilson, 1998: 304; Shea, 1975: 1.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 177

died”, Bey argues that every form of law is a perverse impossibil-

ity because the cosmos is an ever-changing flux of potentiality,
which makes the imposition of order a spurious illusion only
made true by coercion. In Bey’s words: “Ontological Anarchy
however replies that no ‘state’ can ‘exist,’ in chaos, that all onto-
logical claims are spurious except the claim of chaos . . . and
therefore that governance of any sort is impossible” (Bey, 2001: 2).
That is, the propagation of law, as well as its apparent existence,
is illusory in the sense that it is the product of someone’s imagi-
nation which has gained general acceptance over and against
every other possible alternative. Bey is careful to point out that
ontological Chaos means everything is equally real, even illu-
sions, and what is more, they can serve deadly ends (Bey, 2001: 2).
From this conclusion, Bey asserts that insurrectionary action
against the forces that impinge on one’s autonomy is less im-
portant than overcoming the insidious self-alienation that occurs
when one internalizes the illusions of “Babylon or the Spectacle,
Capital or Empire, [or the] Society of Simulation” (Bey, 2003: 84).
In this vein, it is important to note Bey’s recurrent advocacy of
violence against ideas in the form of “poetic terrorism” and “art
sabotage,” which supersede the futility of battling the police and
potentially martyring oneself for some abstract cause. While one
cannot hope to defeat the police state, according to Bey, one can
overcome the idea of police and achieve an even more meaningful
form of liberation since physically battling the police serves to
dignify the illusions they represent and perpetuate—like law, or-
der, state control—which may in turn lead to them being internal-
ized. Adopting the illusions of the state, or any hegemon, de-
stroys the possibility of any substantive attempt at autonomy, for
it is only from the unmitigated freedom of Chaos that true auton-
omy, that is, self-ownership free from what Nietzsche termed
resentment, can arise (Bey, 2003: 64–71; 2001:1).
Bey believes that Chaos, which is to say existence itself, is de-
fined by its propensity for creativity and abundance, and by vir-
tue of being inextricably embedded in it, humans too are funda-
mentally endowed with the ability to be ever more imaginative in
regards to affirming the chaotic nature of reality. However, the
normative status and acceptance of abstractions like work, histo-
ry, and even the revolution occlude humanity’s naturally cosmic
magnanimity. Bey argues that through the faculty of the imagina-
tion and use of the will, as well as magical techniques and the
administration of sacraments (“The AOA sacraments are hemp,
wine, coffee, tea, meat & brandy . . . & of course psychedelics”
178 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

(Bey, 1987c: 20)), reality can be directly experienced for what it is,
Chaos, and in so doing one learns to fashion it according to one’s
desires as opposed to those of the Spectacle. While we will return
to Bey’s description of this fashioning as sorcery, it is important
to note that he likens breaching the false simulacra of life perpet-
uated by advertisers and the entertainment industry with a gnos-
tic experience of the marvelous, and that the manner in which
Bey describes the act of breaching the images of life so as to ac-
cess it in its actuality represents an innovative synthesis of the
occult philosophy of William S. Burroughs and Raoul Vaneigem’s
concept of the revolution of everyday life.
Lest autonomy or the Dao become mere images of themselves,
Bey insists that they be understood as “identical” insofar as they
only exist in the unmediated enjoyment of the tangible benefits of
such things as “[f]ood, money, sex, sleep, sun, sand, & sinsemilla”
(Bey, 2003: 10, 79–83). Following groups like Ranters, Diggers,
17
and Hassan-i Sabbah’s mythical Assassin, whom he claims as
spiritual anarchist forbearers, Bey’s assertion concerning humani-
ty’s innate potential and rejection of mediation lead him to pro-
claim: “[t]here is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no
path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin—your invio-
late freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other
monarchs” (Bey, 2003: 4). These conclusions concerning the anar-
chist revolution should be read in the antinomian tradition, that
is, with the understanding that humanity already possesses what-
ever benefit would be conferred upon them by some holy event,
be it the Second Coming or The Revolution. In addition to affirm-
ing the universal presence of Chaos, the previous quote also illu-
minates another integral tenet of Ontological Anarchism: the
elusive dream of the anarchist utopia is now possible in the form
of an intersubjective union with other ontological anarchists, a
state which reflects the natural, non-dual order of the cosmos.
17
Through his personal relationship to Brion Gysin and William
Burroughs, both of which made the legend of Hassan-i Sabbah a central
feature in their fictional works, Wilson would come to adopt the figure
as his own. When writing as Bey, the mythic qualities Hassan-i Sabbah
and his Assassins would be referenced to demonstrate the “still un-
imagined liberties” to be gained through Ontological Anarchism, yet,
when writing as Wilson, the historical aspects of the legend would be
brought to the fore. Much remains to be written about the cultural
reception of Sabbah both in and outside of the interface between
esotericism and anarchism. See Burroughs, 1994; Murphy, 1997; Bey,
2003: 13–14; Wilson, 1999.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 179

Described in terms of the Surrealist concept of Amour Fou,

Bey identifies love as the key factor in the synthesis of Individual-
ist Anarchism, esotericism, and Daoist non-dualism which pro-
duced Ontological Anarchism. This love is neither romantic nor
fraternal, but akin to an exalted state of transcendental, interper-
sonal union; indeed, it is the incarnation of Eros that holds within
it supreme enlightenment. Paraphrasing Hesiod’s Theogony, he
writes: “After Chaos comes Eros—the principle of order implicit
in the nothingness of the unqualified One” (Bey, 2003: 21). As a
non-ordinary state of consciousness, the experience of erotic un-
ion is, like other gnostic experiences, equated with directly know-
ing Chaos itself: through Eros the “Other completes the Self—the
Other gives us the key to the perception of oneness-of-being”
(Bey 2003: 69). Thus, by breaching the abstractions and images of
civilization, one comes closer to the source of being, Chaos; and
its primary means of expression, Eros, functions as the precondi-
tion and substance of autonomy, the natural state of cosmos and
humanity. As part of an inspired response to the de Sade debate
in Kaos, Bey defined this mystical form of intersubjective auton-
omy as vital to Ontological Anarchism:

Ontological Anarchy defines itself according to the monist

principle that the self involves the Other, is identifiable
with the Other; that the self’s freedom depends on the
Other’s freedom in some degree . . . a politique of eros not
thanatos. (Bey, 1987c: 20)

Breaching the world of mediation, whether through Eros, magic,

or psychedelics, stands as the goal of Ontological Anarchism. As
such, Bey devoted a large part of his career to this end by re-
searching the history of and theory behind what he termed Tem-
porary Autonomous Zones, or T.A.Z.—areas of geography where
18
the imagination was as liberated as the soil. It bears repeating
here that his most celebrated piece, the long essay entitled TAZ,
was developed from ideas already present in his zine Chaos and
the communiqués, and that the book in which the essay appears
is a collection of these three works, despite being referred to in
the singular as TAZ. Most of the research on Bey and Wilson (of
18
Though Wilson would, in a lecture in 1999, claim: “the book is old
enough to read itself and it really should as there is a lot of outdated
nonsense in that book,” it remains an important aspect of his corpus and a
necessary link to his current work on the intersection between Luddism,
radical environmentalism, and hermeticism. See Wilson, 1999; 2007.
180 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

which there is little to begin with) revolves around the “tempo-

rary autonomous zone” and thus I will only state that he ex-
plained it as the matrix for the emergence of a Sorelian myth of
“Uprising” and a “pre-echo of the Insurrection . . . a necessary
step towards the Revolution that will realize utopia” (See Grin-
don, 2004; Moore, 2004; Matheny, 1993).
Ontological Anarchism is based on the claim that Chaos de-
fines reality, and whether through Eros or psychedelics, a direct
experience of it constitutes an altered state of consciousness that
holds vast power. One outlet for this power is sorcery; as Bey
claims, “the goals of ontological anarchism appear in its flower-
ing” (Bey, 2003: 23). In other words, the widening of perception
necessary for harmonizing with Chaos will inherently lead the
individual to understand the ways in which consciousness and
the will represent real forces and how the products of the imagi-
nation can be made tangible when one understand how they
function. Bey illustrates this point in Kaos 8 when, mediating be-
tween two opposing magicians, he recommends “[saving] our bile
for the shits who really deserve it, the really successful evil magi-
cians, the bankers, advertisers, weapons-salesmen, educators &
self-appointed rulers” (Bey, 1987a: 12). The reality of banks, ads,
guns, and law-men exemplifies the way in which these “evil ma-
gicians” have manifested the contents of their imaginations to the
point where they are taken as really existing. Against these evil
magicians, Bey advocates breaking the “Spook world’s” monopoly
of control with a counter-magic, sorcery in fact, which in the
process of materializing the individual’s true desires banishes the
illusions of the social order (Matheny, 1993). He explains:
“[s]orcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural
Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao” (Bey 2003:
23). Thus, insofar as the impossibility of law derives from the
world being inherently chaotic, it would not be incorrect to claim
that Bey’s investment in this counter-magick is more fundamen-
tal than his opposition to the law as such.
With titles like “Black Magic as Revolutionary Action”, the
communiqués published in the Chaos Magick milieu testify to the
complimentary nature of anarchism and esotericism as Bey con-
19
strued them. Further, as the communiqués represent the longest
19
As mentioned, the communiqués were published in a number of zines
and Bey estimates the number being possibly in the hundreds; however,
if one can gauge appreciation in terms of both influence and polemics,
then it seems reasonable to suggest that the Chaos Magick milieu
remained among the most committed audience for Bey’s work as he
OCCULT ORIGINS | 181

section in TAZ, one cannot but read the book’s popularity as a

sign of the underground appeal of anti-authoritarian texts en-
gaged with esotericism. Insofar as Ontological Anarchism cannot
be divorced from the magical milieu in which it matured, one
must ask how developments from it, like Post-anarchism, rest on
thoroughly esoteric conceptions of consciousness, the will, and
Chaos, perhaps unknowingly. For historians of Post-anarchism,
Bey’s Chaos zine and the communiqués of the AOA represent
founding documents, and the job of reconciling their esoteric
worldview to Post-anarchism remains unfinished.

CONCLUSION

In the AOA, Ontological Anarchism possessed a body, both in the

sense of an institutional framework (however imaginary) and one
20
composed of flesh and bones, namely, Wilson’s. Always written
in the third person, the communiqués of the AOA presented
themselves as representing the post-Situationist avant-garde of
the anarchist movement, which, it is important to note, used as its
primary channel the most popular underground magickal move-
ment of the 1980s, i.e., Chaos Magick. Ontological Anarchism
distinguished itself as the premiere form of both occultism and
anarchism through its denunciations of Leftist anarchism, New
Age religion, and rival “Death freak” occultism. Its stirring provo-

developed Ontological Anarchism. Also, it bears noting that Bey’s work,

numbering well over a hundred texts of various lengths, would be nearly
impossible to catalogue, as a result of (with a few significant exceptions)
the tragic lack of interest in organizing zines and underground
publications. This is to say nothing of accounting for the disorganized
collections of low quality and in some cases clandestinely recorded
lectures, Naropa classes, and Moorish Orthodox Crusade radio dispersed
across the web.
20
While Bey admits to initiating a number of hoaxes, it would be
incorrect to categorize the AOA as such on account of its single person
membership. For all intents and purposes, the AOA represented a serious
contribution to the Chaos Magick and anarchist discourse and thus does
not deserve to be disregarded as a hoax. This is not to say that hoaxes
cannot make serious contributions to any given discourse; they can and
do, as may be the case with the text attributed to Zhuangzi and is
certainly the case with Discordianism. See Ziporyn, 2009: xv.n.8. It
remains to be said that Bey’s most notable hoax remains his participation
in Ong’s Hat (see Kinsella, 2011). In terms of related hoaxes, see also the
forged Italian language Hakim Bey book A Ruota Libera, and what looks
like a second forgery, Il Giardino dei Cannibali, although I have yet to
confirm this personally (Anonymous, 1996; 2011).
182 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

cations for radical action through black magick, ubiquitous pane-

gyrics for queer spirituality, and ludic revolt are noteworthy in
themselves; furthermore, its inflammatory position papers, the
most relevant of which is “Post-anarchism Anarchy” is where the
formal Post-anarchism discourse is said to have originated. It is
interesting to wonder if Bey’s Ontological Anarchism would have
been credited as founding Post-anarchism if he had not written
this piece and in the process coined the term “Post-Anarchism”.
Surely, Ontological Anarchism would be just as noteworthy an
innovation regarding the anarchist tradition without the text. Yet,
would his thorough investment in esotericism, or any of his other
unpopular preoccupations, have kept him from being cited as the
21
originator of the Post-anarchism discourse? If any serious ar-
guments can be raised that insist on excluding him on the basis of
their spiritual or sexual inclinations, one must question a great
deal more than the insistence on the negation of identity that is
so often promoted as integral to defining Post-anarchism.
In lieu of pursuing the above question any further (and a de-
finitive answer is, in any case, impossible) attention should be
focused on Bey’s “Post-Anarchism Anarchy” text, as it is singled
out as particularly significant in the history of Post-anarchism.
Without detracting from the originality of Bey’s work, what
emerges after close analysis of this text is that much of the AOA’s
9-point program for a Post-Anarchism is derived from a pre-
existing anarcho-esoteric group, the Discordian Society, which
Bey mentions in his communiqués (Bey, 2003: 60). Indubitably,
convenience is a major factor in the convention to cite the “Post-
Anarchism Anarchy” communiqué as the birth of formal Post-
anarchism discourse for the very good reason that Bey coined the
21
This article opened by citing an anecdote from Knight’s biography of
Wilson. It bears mentioning that Knight’s text is far from authoritative or
even fully reliable. Half way through the text Knight claims to have
become suddenly aware that Wilson promoted and espoused man-boy-
love as a viable sexuality and immediately lost interest in recording his
subject’s life. Knight then proceeded to finish the text with
autobiographical writings intermingled with fictitious episodes of an
Islamic superhero. His description of realizing Wilson’s sexuality,
though, rings particularly bogus on account of the fact that Wilson is
quite open about his sexuality, even to the point of devoting numerous
texts to intergenerational relationships. It seems certain that Knight
would have been well aware of Wilson’s sexuality long before starting to
write his biography, and simply used it as an excuse to present his own
work as superseding that of his former guru. See Knight, 2012. For a
sample of Wilson’s writings on man-boy love see Bey, 1980; Bey, 1993.
OCCULT ORIGINS | 183

term; however, historically, Discordianism provides an even bet-

ter site for the birth of the cluster of discourses that compose con-
temporary Post-anarchism. It not only predates Ontological An-
archism (it was formed in 1958), but presaged Ontological Anar-
chism in a number of important ways: it heralded Nietzsche as
the necessary component in the synthesis of Daoism and anar-
chism, it promoted the worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of
Chaos, and it operated through the mail-order home-made publi-
cation network that would eventually develop into the zine net-
work which popularized Ontological Anarchy (and of which Bey
calls for the further development in point 4 of his Post-anarchy
22
Anarchism “program” (Bey, 2003: 62)). As a religious formula-
tion of anarchism based upon a Nietzschean reading of Daoism
and occultism, Discordianism laid the groundwork for Chaos
Magick, and Ontological Anarchism in particular. It did this by
shifting the ontological foundations of anarchism to an esoteric
reading of Chaos, whereupon liberation could no longer be con-
ceived of in terms of material gains won from the oppressor class,
but in the freedom to (re)create reality. Before Bey called for a
revitalized anarchism based upon mystical experience, figures
like Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson (both of whom
were close friends of Bey) had already published their most popu-
lar Discordian works, based on a revitalized spiritual anarchism
informed by esoteric systems including the Kabbalah and the
work of Aleister Crowley. Thornley’s Zenarchy and Wilson’s Il-
luminatus! trilogy (co-authored with anarchist zinester Robert
Shea) stand out as particularly influential texts which combine
anarchism with spiritual principles along the lines Bey suggests
in “Post-Anarchism Anarchy.” The indistinguishability between
Discordianism and Bey’s Ontological Anarchism has led many
within the Chaos Magic milieu to anachronistically label Discor-
dianism a form of Ontological Anarchism and by extension Chaos
Magick; this may not be too far off the mark, as the original Dis-
22
A notable parallel between Discordianism and Ontological Anarchism
concerns the misreading of their primary sources by various scholars.
Like Chaos, the primary text of Discordinanism, The Principia Discordia,
originated as a copylefted zine, which circulated for years within the zine
network before eventually being published as a book. In the years it
circulated, it was altered significantly as a result of the sub-culture that
embraced it. Scholars who read the Principia and TAZ as monolithic texts
fail to understand both how the texts came about and the issues that
inspired them. See Cusack, 2010: 8–52; Urban, 2006: 233–239. No
assessment of Discordianism has been written that takes zines into
consideration.
184 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER

cordians themselves embraced Bey’s work as a form of Discordi-

an scripture (Thornely, 2009: 18).
While designating Bey’s Ontological Anarchism as the birth
of a formal Post-anarchism discourse has been helpful as a histor-
ical sign-post for scholars looking to date Post-anarchism, schol-
ars must recognize that this designation is somewhat arbitrarily
applied to Bey’s work as he was the first to use the term. In truth,
Ontological Anarchism was largely a generalization of the con-
spiratorial anarcho-occultism first theorized in Discordianism
and, as such, it would be much more accurate to state that formal
Post-anarchism discourse began with Discordianism. However,
the question remains: how do scholars benefit from shifting the
origin of Post-anarchism to Discordianism? The answer concerns
both historical accuracy and the advantages of adopting an anti-
essentialist understanding of identity and origin. Whereas schol-
ars once recognized Ontological Anarchism as the progenitor of
Post-anarchism, now that Bey’s work has been set within its oc-
cultist context, they are obliged to take into consideration Chaos
Magick, Discordianism, and a host of alternative magickal sys-
tems that continue to shape Post-anarchism discourse. Far from
being dead weight, the esoteric discourses integral to Ontological
Anarchism offer scholars of Post-anarchism entirely new regions
of theoretical terrain as well as a range of unexpected alliances
that have gone without notice for decades. The integration of
these overlooked esoteric antecedents into Post-anarchism will
create a fuller historical picture, and in so doing will reveal it to
be a rich hybrid of a number of diverse discourses.
Indeed, Post-anarchism did not begin with any single author
or group; its origins are hybrid and stem from a multiplicity of
discourses: post-structural criticism, the fiction of William Bur-
roughs, Chaos Magick, Discordianism, Nietzsche, Stirner, etc.; the
list could go on indefinitely. However, historical texts can act as a
prism through which topics like post-anarchism can be under-
stood more clearly. In this vein, the loose anarcho-queer-magickal
zine network beginning with the Discordian Society stands as a
prime example of the sociality that post-anarchism would claim
to herald decades later. The mailing of home-made zines, mail-
art, and xerography exemplified the mutual connectedness of
polycentric, volunteer association networks composed of self-
organizing systems that many postanarchists hold as the struc-
ture of postanarchist politics. In this sense, Joel Biroco, speaking
for the anarcho-queer-magickal milieu, may have been right
when he wrote: ‘I am the early representative of a future crowd’
OCCULT ORIGINS | 185

(Biroco 1988: 5). As the cross-pollination of magick, anarchism,

and queer sexualities within the zine network, and then in the
pages of TAZ, helped create the next generation of cultural radi-
cals, scholars must be prepared to adjust their scholarly instru-
ments to meet new sources and new conceptions of anarchism as
well as its history.

Christian Greer is currently writing his PhD at the University

of Amsterdam. His academic interests include the interface be-
tween anti-authoritarianism and esotericism, the “Beat genera-
tion,” Type-3 & Post-Anarchism, and underground publishing.
His non-academic life is devoted to the free skool movement
(particularly Corvid College), nature (natura naturans), zine mak-
ing, and “the ludic.”

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