This gets my vote for Related Work, although the piece about Octavia Butler may change my mind. And it was a surprise. Not the fact that a Neil Gaiman expose made it onto Related Works, but the fact that this one goes a little deeper, exploring his roots in Scientology, and Scientology’s roots in Thelema via Jack Parsons. And Scientology goes back with Worldcon too, and the Hugos.
I was involved with Thelema, once upon a time, and I was romantically involved with Jim Graeb for a few years, and he was the attorney who incorporated the OTO, as well as a high-ranking member, and he was also a good friend of Helen Parsons Smith, Jack’s widow. So I know a few things that I’m not likely to repeat, about Jack Parsons and that whole scene, and I’ve watched Jack’s rep evolve over the years, to the point where Breaking Bad is throwing in an overblown Parsons reference as dramatic punctuation, and Jack himself is viewed as some kind of playboy sorceror stud in between classified rocket launches.
That was during my paranormal exploration phase, in which I was checking out fringe religions and haunted houses, endeavoring to confirm my belief none of that stuff is real. Which I did (for the most part), but I also met lots of wacky and entertaining people, who were quite real. And I will note that while Jack Parsons was also quite real, he was a saint compared to his acolyte L. Ron, who had access to the same kind of knowledge but used it for accumulating money and power, while Parsons was more of a true believer in the core philosophy about doing what thou wilt, and about transitioning into the age of the individual (happened very recently, according to the astrology).
During that time I was juggling three or more lives. I was working downtown as a legal secretary/slash computer wrangler, and pretending to be a boring nerd, and then at night I was doing my creative thing which involved working on unfinished novels and playing forgettable music, and writing silly features for the alternative press – best-ofs, reviews, and a quirky astrology column. I certainly knew enough about that sort of thing from hanging around with people like Helen Parsons Smith, and Jim, both of whom I have now outlived. That was life number three, hanging around with Jim and his friends, who were an eclectic circle of Northern California occultists, neopagans, philosophers, queers, stoners, artists, writers, and weirdos (some of us were multiple categories) (these days you could probably just say “neurodivergents”).
I remember one time some bright-eyed co-writer at the alternative paper tried to sneak into my business on a weekend when I was headed to spend a weekend taking acid in the woods with some of that crew. Fritz Leiber showed up that time. And I had to exert myself somewhat in making excuses because she was barely out of college and new to San Francisco, and there was no way I was going to turn her loose in that crowd with psychedelics involved. Several years later someone linked me an article she had written – all about the scary individual known as Jack Parsons! I guess eventually she found out, but I’m glad I didn’t have to help.
Neil Gaiman was quite popular in those circles too, especially Good Omens, which was a parody of the Satanic Panic style theology that was popular back then, and my whole reason for wanting to investigate the occultists. Were they really skulking around doing evil shit, and hiding evidence of psionics and UFOs from the government?
Nah, just a bunch of nerds that weren’t completely heterosexual who liked getting high on weed and psychedelics. I didn’t see much actual evil. I saw one pedophile and he got thrown in prison immediately after that fact came to light. The occult people I hung out with were brutal with regard to exiling people such as pedophiles, heroin addicts, large scale dealers, perpetrators of cruelty to animals, and anyone else who might possibly bring the authorities into their sex and drug scene.
There were other crowds where things were different, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s clique in the Oakland Hills, where bad things happened to kids.
Everyone was part of this big sprawling counterculture hippie scene, trying to get rich in this better future everyone was supposedly creating. Looking at the one they wound up building, I’d say they needed a few more project managers. If you were in the Bay Area, and smart, you wound up in this scene at some level, whether as a gamer or a commie or a musician, a pothead, a queer, a person with an extra convoluted brain. Lots of things came out of this scene, like techies, and Deadheads, and lava lamps. All of them certain we’d be building statues of their visionary asses as we enjoyed all-you-can-eat socialist hippie utopia in the age of Aquarius.
But instead, they handed the reins to a bunch of sociopaths like L. Ron Hubbard and Jeffrey Epstein, and here we are, all collectively tossing our retirement savings in the hat so a bunch of ugly old men with too much money can go to parties with lots of cocaine and sex, like we were doing back in the day, except the men were attractive enough so they didn't have to blackmail/coerce people to get laid. And everyone else has to do a GoFundMe to get medical care.
I digress. Cough. We were talking about Neil Gaiman, and this post is specifically about him and his upbringing and belief structure. Which is covered extensively along with his work, and a chronology of his rather disgusting sexual assaults.
I’ve only read two of Gaman’s books, both of them gifts from someone else. First there was Good Omens, which someone gave Jim, and I read it to him on a long car trip, because that was how we used to entertain each other when we weren’t doing cocaine sex magick orgies. We also played a lot of chess, and tinkered with computers. If there was one thing I saw plenty of during my occult escapades it was nerds doing nerd things. We would pass along books, especially if we noticed in jokes, and Good Omens was like that. A rollicking story of kids having a Goonies type adventure (that was Pratchett’s part, according to this piece) and a cynical tale about the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale, which was Gaiman’s contribution, chock full of occultist in jokes.
After I’d been with Jim a few years we parted and headed in separate directions, because I was about to hit thirty and wanted to try for kids, just not with him. The guy I tried with happened to be carrying a copy of Good Omens around at a party and that was the main reason I talked to him. Turned out he hadn’t read it, someone else had just given it to him. We ended up getting married, although the kid thing didn’t work out, which was a good thing because neither did the marriage.
Someone else ended up giving me another Neil Gaiman book though, a paralegal at the law firm where I was working. He was probably trying for the “let me blow your mind with this shocking occulty novel in which pagan gods come to life, nerd woman!” kind of angle without realizing I’d been out of that phase for at least a decade but yeah, I was well aware of different pantheons, like any good gamer nerd with a side helping of goth.
And I did not like the book – American Gods – because it had that same kind of bleak nihilistic coating as the dude in Good Omens, except the decay was more pronounced, and that happens a lot with occultists. Some, like for instance Helen Parsons Smith, manage to hang onto their marbles well into their twilight years, while others turn predatory, like Hubbard, and Gaiman, and seek increasing levels of debauch.
I ended up returning the American Gods book gift with one about human zoos – specifically, a bunch of Native Americans who lived as performers and zoo inhabitants in Paris, doing wild west shows on the weekend and raising their families in enclosures where tourists would pay to gawk. Human zoos really were a thing back in the day, and I remember my mind being absolutely blown by that knowledge. I will see your tale of bleak nihilism, sir, and raise you one existentialist horror.
American neo-religions come out of both man’s endless desire for knowledge and man’s endless craving for wealth, and religion creation is a longstanding industry here, with occasional cults like the Mormons and the 7th Day Adventists hitting the jackpot. Crowley, who was a forward-thinker (that’s what I liked about him among his less admirable qualities), set about analyzing all these religions in an attempt to create his very own (with blackjack and hookers) and his disciples continue in that tradition to this day.
And it does leave a mark on their artistic work that folks accustomed to the jargon will notice (fnord), having a passing familiarity with the same body of work. As Crowley once said, “our method is science, our aim is religion.” His aim with Thelema was to create something a little more user friendly, with less sexism, while retaining all the ceremonies and myths. But rather than following his religion, most of his disciples prefer to try starting their own. With varying levels of success.
Gaiman probably would have had a good shot at being a cult leader, given the body of mythology he was creating. I really appreciated this overview of his work, and since none of the other Related Works are calling to me, it gets my vote. I’ve seen way too much gee-whiz lionization of Old Mercury Fulminate breath over the last couple decades, it’s high time people put down the Great Man pipe and spent some time learning about the ecosystem around him and how it influenced a lot of today’s weirdness.
If you ask me for exciting stories of demons and paranormal manifestations and summonings andspells, I’m going to give you a blank look. Didn’t happen. No time travel. No aliens. No sacrifices aside from a lot of doobies, and one time people killed a chicken, and then cooked it, and ate it. All the other animals were treated like spoiled pets. I saw lots of dudes reading books, and sometimes we threw wild parties where people got high and sometimes fucked each other.
I saw lots of people desperate to learn occult secrets and get admitted to the high ranks of the illumnati so they could go spy on the rich dudes at the Bohemian Grove and learn all the secrets about psionics and space aliens. They tend to get pissy when their fantasies don’t pan out and they learned it was mostly a book group for smart misfits. I’ve met way more felons working in law firms than I ever did hanging around with occultists. I can’t even say that their belief systems are necessarily that bad, since there are plenty of them involved in nicer activities, like helping people use creative visualization and meditation techniques to help with pain control.
You can tell a lot about a culture by what knowledge it considers worth hiding – occultism just means knowledge that is hidden, often because it’s dangerous but sometimes just because it’s foreign or clashes with the dominant religion. The occultism that informed Parsons, Crowley, and Gaiman holds that religion is something created by humans, and you can create one too, because it’s not like lightning’s going to strike you.
Some people use that knowledge in creative ways, like the performance I saw last weekend with Trent Reznor yowling “God is dead and no one cares” at the top of his lungs while putting on a banger of a concert. Sometimes people need a strong shot of anti-religion to help pry their brains loose from captivity.
And some are like Neil, and would rather be one of those bastards making a strong cathartic reaction necessary. What a feeble excuse for a person, and what an illuminating examination of his background.
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