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Title: Moorish Mail-Order Mysticism Author: Hakim Bey Date: 1994 Language: en Topics: mysticism Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/mailord Notes: from The Moorish Science Monitor, Vol VII #2 Autumn 1994
“Mail-order mysticism” may sound like a joke to the serious, orthodox,
traditional, or academic “expert” in religion – & to the professional
gurus whose “Work” consists of personality-monopoly & psychological
authoritarianism – but the Moorish Orthodox Church takes it seriously.
There’s something magical about the mail – voices from the Unseen –
documents as amulets – and something very american, democratic &
self-reliant – mysterious urban folklore – old ad’s for AMORC in
crumbling yellow magazines – HooDoo catalogues, dreambooks – ancient
spirits-of-places intersecting with modern communications networks that
are placeless, spooky, & abstract. And the mail itself now seems antique
– a lost modernity, 19^(th) century, sepia, violet ink – a fitting
medium for the transmission of secrets.
Do-it-yourself Enlightenment? Why not? It may not be the best way or the
only way but it is a way. A genuine vein of initiation runs thought the
“plane” where one finds Dr Bronner’s soap labels, the lost Books of
Moses, the apocryphal grimoires of Marie Laveau, Hollow Earth Theory,
old Theosophical journals in your grandmother’s attic, “What Did These
Great Men Have In Common?”, Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish health-products,
the mail-order courses of Druids and occult Orders, millennarian tracts,
mysterious classified ad’s, Mexican lithography, & c., & c.
It all adds up to a “New World” religion, a translation of
“Wild(er)ness” into the strange lost margins of commodification and
“communication” – both a betrayal & an apotheosis (like all religion) –
a playground for the Trickster – a mundus imaginalis of the postal
system & the printing press & the poetics of Desire.
Literal belief in one or another of these mail-order revelations would
destroy our ability to believe in all of them simultaneously, like a
palimpsest of angelic alphabets, a field of magical “correspondence(s)”,
a conceptual transformation-space of mythic energies and mythopoesis.
The eros of postal mysticism lies in the whole pattern it makes, rather
than in one part or another, one “course” or another. Sometimes those
who sneer the most ironically at this textual spiritism are secretly
drawn by its imaginal sensuality, even while their rational brains
reject it all as high weirdness & superstition. However, one can believe
(or “believe”) both/and, rather than either/or. One drifts in a world of
reveries, and “rejoice, fellow creature! All is ours!” – Or, at least: –
an opening.
Egyptomania – the imaginal “Islam” of old cigarette boxes & masonic
bric-a-brac – the HooDoo figure of the “Old Moor”, author of almanacs,
herb-doctor, Maroon – the northwest African element in american folklore
– plus the Native American component of the great New World HooDoo
synthesis – the Santeria orisha called El Spirito Indio – psychic
tribalism, animism, totemism, and the Nature-religion natural to our
Wilderness-haunted collective (un?)conscious – plus the psychedelic
heritage of the 1950s & 60s, which combined with Moorish Science & the
“Wandering bishops” tradition, to produce the Moorish Orthodox Church: –
Sabbatai Sevi & Jacob Frank the “False Messiahs” – secrets of Canaanite
paganism – Jewish magick & amulets – Protestant chiliasm, the
revolutionary Anabaptists, Ranters, Antinomians – plus, Apostolic
high-liturgical gnostic autocephalous Church ritual – magical Taoism,
“Aimless Wandering”, tatrik intoxicants, initiation through dreams &
contacts with the spirit world – hemp use in ancient China – mail-order
almanacs of chaos cults form the Seven Finger High Glister of the Great
Dismal Swamp – &c., &c.
All this can now be yours, as you “Send Away For A Split Second Of
Eternity” by joining the MOORISH MAIL ORDER MYSTICISM movement.
Certain airwave preachers tell you to “put you hands on the radio!” to
receive a blessing or healing. The modern media are by definition forces
for alienation – and yet – they contain within them hidden & unplanned
magical linkages which are IMmediate – or at least far more direct than
reason would allow. No technology can leach itself clean of the residue
of magic which lies at its source – and communication tech is the most
“spiritual” of them all. The mail is full of gnostic traces – even of
love. Why not initiation?