Occult Rebellion and Creative Practice with Rodney Orpheus and Phil Hine

 T. Thorn Coyle engages with musician Rodney Orpheus and author Phil Hine on occult rebellion and creative fire. The two artists discuss their journeys into music and writing, the impact of the punk ethos on their work, and the significance of their recent book, 'Delinquent Elementals.' The conversation also touches on the historical context of the satanic panic and the importance of authenticity in creative expression. They discuss the importance of curiosity as a driving force in their practices, the role of walking as a meditative and creative exercise, and the definitions of magic and agency. The trio emphasizes the significance of community in the occult, the need for connection while maintaining individuality, and the importance of challenging the status quo.

You can support this podcast at https://www.patreon.com/c/ThornCoyle
Find out more about Rodney Orpheus at http://rodneyorpheus.com
And find Phil Hine at https://enfolding.org

Transcript

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Hello everybody. Here we are at another episode of Magic, Creativity and Life. And I'm T. Thorn Coyle. And what is my news this week? Well, I am still working on my Stars of Power book and the revised 20th anniversary edition of Evolutionary Witchcraft. I also just returned from teaching at the Sacred Space Conference in Baltimore or just outside of Baltimore. It's a terrific conference. And the next one will actually be a joint conference with Between the Worlds. And that is one of my favorite combinations. The teaching is just fantastic. The rituals are really good. Everyone who is there is there to learn and to share, which I appreciate. So you can look that up, Sacred Space Between the Worlds. That will be in February next year. The other thing is I'm getting ready to launch a Kickstarter for my book, The Winding Road, which is contemporary fantasy based loosely on the Thomas the Rhymer ballad. And you can go follow that on Kickstarter right now. I'd really appreciate it if you would. That way you get notified upon launch. So that brings me to today's interview. I'm interviewing two truly amazing people, Rodney Orpheus and Phil Hine. They're both magicians, pagans, creative folks, magic workers who've known each other for decades. And you'll get a sense of that during this very wild and wooly podcast. I had to reign them in a couple of times. It was a lot of fun. They're both characters and very interesting. And I got a lot out of it. And I think you might too. There's a lot in there about magical history. politics and the importance of magic and the creative process. So thanks again for tuning in. Thanks for subscribing to my podcast. And thanks as always to those of you who support this podcast on my Patreon. I appreciate you. Let's dive in. Hello, welcome back to another episode of Magic, Creativity and Life. My name is T. Thorn Coyle and today in the studio I have two guests, Rodney Orpheus and Phil Hine. Rodney Orpheus was born in Ireland and started in the music business in the late 80s as lead singer and songwriter of the Cassandra Complex, who scored multiple number one records in the alternative charts. After moving to Hamburg, Germany, he became a record producer and worked with software company Steinberg on the groundbreaking virtual studio technology system. which has become one of the foundations of modern music technology. He is the author of Abra Hadabra, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Salemic Magic and Grimoire of Aleister Crowley. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California, working as a software designer and music producer and continues to record and tour with the Cassandra Complex. And Phil Hine has been a practicing occultist for over 45 years with a career spanning Wicca, ritual magic, chaos magic, and non-dual tantra. Together with Rodney Orpheus, he co-created and edited the UK's first monthly pagan magazine, Pagan News. His books include Condensed Chaos, The Pseudonomicon, Acts of Magical Resistance, Queering Occultures, and many, many others. In 2019, he founded Twisted Trunk, a small press specializing in publishing translations of rare Tantric texts. forthcoming publications are Yoginis, Sex, Death and Possession in Early Tantra and Yogis, Behaving Badly. Phil and Rodney, thank you so much for joining me today. It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure too. Okay, that's Rodney. I'm the one with a of Yorkshire, Leicestershire accent. and I'm the West Coast US voice. Just so listeners know, I severely condensed all of your amazing accomplishments. And your amazing accomplishments bring me to my first question, What do you consider to be your creative roots? Were you doing music? Were you writing? Were you dancing? Were you doing theater? Were you painting? What were your... creative interests in your younger years. And why don't you start, Phil? Okay, well, Thinking back to my mid-twenties actually, I was studying drama therapy at college. And I came across a book by this guy called Keith Johnston. I don't know if you've come across him Thorn, he's like a, he does improv theater. And I actually did a course with him, but he did this brilliant book called Improv. And Improv was all about, improvisation drama. It was funny, it was challenging and it was deeply autobiographical. And I thought, wow, this is a really good way to write. Because I think, when you start off as a writer, you kind of carry on the habits you've already ingrained. you know, I learned to write essays at school and then at college. And I read a lot of occult books, which quite frankly, during the you know, 70s and early 80s, stodgy. know, the authors write like the bums of stuff full of horse hair. It's all very factual and you get no sense of the person behind the writing. It's all, do this, do that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's no sense of the person coming through. And Keith Johnson's book was the first book that really hit me that you got a sense of him as a developing person who... had his own take on things who was provocative and challenging and very, very funny. And I thought, this is a really good way to write. And it took me a while, but I think that book kind of like pushed me to develop my own writing style. That is really cool. And it also makes me wonder, did that book also help you with your ritual arts? very much so because I as I said I was studying drama therapy and At the time I was in this Wiccan Cover and I was coming back from drama therapy classes going stuff is great We should do some of this and they were all very well. It's not part of our tradition, you know I think they were a bit Scared by it because it wasn't a cult, you know a lot of occultists in that period that I encountered Wouldn't take any notice of something if it wasn't, I don't know, arranged around the tree of life or later on, painted back at a ranger at a chaos theatre. You know, it wasn't a cult, so they didn't take any notice of it. And I got heavily into drama therapy and improv and group dynamics. During the late eighties, I did a lot of ritual mask work, for example, that was very much rooted in Keith Johnson's approach to improv. And then when I started doing magical workshops, again, I drew as much on my experiments in improvisation, theatre and drama as I did on magical stuff. And quite often, I was taking improv exercises and just kind of like dressing them up with a bit of occult glitter, if you like. So yeah, it was a big influence in many ways. That's terrific. I also have a theater background and found, I was like, you know, this is a great use of my skills, right? Because it really helps both in, speaking and presenting and teaching, but also in ritual magic. Yeah, I'm not surprised. And so it's interesting that all of us have a bit of a performance background. Of course, Rodney, you've been performing for decades. So how about your creative roots? Well, I knew I wanted to be a writer from the moment I could read, which was about something like three years old. And that's what I want. As soon as I discovered there was such a thing as books, I wanted to write books. It was that simple. And then in my teenage years, I got really into music and really enjoyed music a lot, never was particularly musical. I came from a very poor rural background, you know, where you didn't get music lessons, that's for sure. You were out working in the fields at 12 years old. But I was really into music. And then one day when I was at school at lunch break, I went to the local news agents and picked up a music magazine. And in that music magazine, they had the cover of a of a punk fanzine, it was like the punk era. And it had three guitar chords on the cover, like E, A, and D. And then it said, now form a band. And I looked at that and I'm like, I can do that. So I bought myself a cheap electric guitar secondhand for 25 bucks, learned those three chords, wrote a song and formed a band. And that was that. That's amazing. That's amazing. And then I thought, I can be a musician. This is great. And then I'm like, well, do I want to be a writer? Do I want to be a musician? I thought, well, you know, I'm like, in my late teens, I like girls. I can either have the choice of staying at home for the rest of my life alone in a darkened room or going on stage and meeting lots of cute girls. And the choice was fairly easy after that. And then you became a writer anyway. yeah. So it was all good. Yeah, yeah, that is cool. Yeah, I also started working around age 13, not in the fields. I was not raised rural, but raised working class poor. but I managed to find a way into the arts anyway, even though my family was like kind of confused by that and are still I think confused by that. Yeah. You've written a book together. Why don't you tell me about what's the title of that book? It's called Delinquent Elementals, which was the title because we couldn't think of a better one. It's from one of the articles in the book. Well, how the book, we haven't really written the book as, well, we did write a lot of the new stuff is new in it, but basically, yeah, the new book, Delinquent Elementals, it's a compilation of the best of all the pagan news articles that we run over many, many, years in the late 80s, early 90s when we worked together. and 1988 to 1992. And then so during COVID or just before COVID, I'd moved to London again and where Phil was living and we got together after many, many, years. And we're like, hey, you know, we did some amazing stuff there that no one's ever heard of. Wouldn't it be great if we could, if other people could see it now? So we started into this thing that became this 656 page magnum opus. which was the best of pagan news. And then COVID hit while we were doing it. So we spent loads of time, really expanding it and writing loads of new footnotes and explanatory articles around it. And so the book is like about two thirds of it's original material and about a third of it I would say is new material that conceptualizes it. the story of Pagan News and how we started here and what it was like to do a zine every three weeks on a budget of basically zero. Right. It was very punk rock. Yeah, exactly. It was exactly that attitude, yes. It was, you know, we had a cheap Atari ST computer that I had for my music and a laser printer that fell off the back of a lorry. Very expensive one that we certainly couldn't afford. It came through three various nefarious means. And we sat in a... We did a ritual and then the next day some guy turned up and said, hey, do want a laser printer? Back in the days when laser printers were really expensive. Right? But you must remember the photocopier that turned up first. right. We've got a photocopier out of nowhere as well. So was all run on a complete shoestring and literally run on a hope and a prayer. Very literally. And then we were sitting in a little tiny attic room in a suburb of Leeds in Yorkshire, knocking this thing out every few weeks. And then every Sunday we would buy all the Sunday papers. And we'd sit around and spread them all across the living room floor of the house that I and my girlfriend were sharing at the time. And we would spend the whole afternoon just going through all the newspapers and magazines and finding interesting stories and going through all the letters we had and the things that the people had sent us. And we would, you know, have we had a big whiteboard of what would be in the latest issue, what was coming in the next issue and everything else. we just. We ran it very professionally, even though it was completely amateurish. did and many years later, I spent 15 years working in a large media company producing magazines and that experience of doing Pagan news was a great help in organization. We actually even won awards for Paganews in the... Yeah. Yeah. actually. Still, that's amazing. you know, it's, I love the punk is, you know, the punk ethos and the DIY quality, but I also love your creative persistence, right? And there's something about that attitude that people who end up having longevity in creative careers, I think need that we're just gonna sit down and do this thing because we want to do it. and we can do it and we're not waiting for someone to tell us we can do it. We're just seizing permission and we're. because other people told us we wouldn't do it, we won't be able to do it, you know. You'll never keep it up, you know. of people say you can't do it like that. And we were like and we very deliberately when we started out from the very beginning, we had we had a little manifesto of what we were going to do or what we weren't going to do. We knew what we didn't want. You know, and we described this in the intro of the book is like, you know, one of the things was It was called pagan news because it had to be, it was news, it was newsy. And that meant we had to do it every month because most pagans magazines were coming out on whenever they felt like it, you know, was every six months or nine months or, you know, whatever. And news is only new news when it's new. So that meant that we had to put it out very regularly, very fast. We wanted a really fast turnaround. Yeah. And it had to be short and punchy. I mean, we didn't want like, you know, 3000 words about the use of the semicolon in the witchcraft laws or something, you know, turgid like that. had to be news. It had to be punchy. had to be funny. It had to, well, we upset a lot of people, let's say, which I'm very proud. And we still are. were everybody. We unashamedly embrace bitchcraft. And, but in a really loving way. That was the thing. We really appreciated the whole community in a very wide way. So we were equal opportunity bitchy about everyone. But we wanted to because we loved it so much and we took great pride in that. And the fact that we had such a very wide coverage of topics. You we would have everything from Wicca to Satanism to the Temple of Psychic Youth to comic books. to UFOs, you name it, we would put it in there. If we thought it was interesting and funny, it was in there. No pagan poetry, was an old thing. Absolutely no. Yeah. That we did end up having Barry Hairbrush. We had a third member called who was a friend of ours. People always thought that Barry Hairbrush was a pseudonym for us because it was the funniest. things in the magazine were these cartoons and stories by Barry Hairbrush. So they thought it was us under a pseudonym to try and obscure the fact we were doing this. But it wasn't. It was actually another person who has up until all the way through for 40 years, he's remained completely anonymous because we swore to him we would never reveal his real name. So he's still just called Barry Hairbrush. But he was like the invisible third member who did a lot of the humor stuff. And he was allowed to do pagan poetry because the poetry was absolutely hilarious. but that was, you know, no pagan poetry, no illustrations of Elven women riding unicorns across a flowing brook or whatever. And, you know, none of that nonsense. No, we didn't want any of that crap. So in revisiting that material, what effect did that have on you? It's got to be wild looking at stuff you wrote and compiled decades and decades ago, and then trying to contextualize it for contemporary times, because the world is quite different now, right? And I love that you wrote some new material. So I'm just wondering about that process. What was the process of of doing this compilation. Something William Burroughs once said to me was that, you know, occasionally you'll look back at stuff you wrote years ago and find it so awful you want to rip it up and throw it into somebody else's bin. Largely, I think most of the stuff we wrote for Pagan News and our contributors wrote is interesting because it's contextualized a very interesting period of British occultism when things were exploding in all directions. Right. It certainly honed my writing abilities because I had to be very concise and you've got 300 words to explain this concept. Don't go over that limit. And I think a lot of occult stuff is actually, well, I hate to say it, but it's kind of timeless. One of the things Barry Harbrish did was his famous occult stereotypes. That was done in the 80s and you can still see those the stereotypes he was taking the piss out of they're still around, you know, like we had about the other day, he said he was reading and saying like what he found so amazing about the book was that it was so timeless and a lot of the stuff we were satirizing is still there and still the same targets and you can still recognize the same people we were satirizing. There's still, we have people like Grivington Gore Crowley-Bore. Crowley-Bores are still around. There's fucking loads of them on Twitter. And the creepy guy who likes initiating young girls with big bosoms into his witchcraft coven where they were skyclad. Those characters are still around. A lot of the people who wrote for Pagan News have gone on to become really famous. or dead, or in fact both. So I think it's nicer for people who are fans of those people now to see some of their early writings, you know, and to look at the news of the stuff that was happening in the 1980s in Britain. kind of lucky and I use that word very advisedly in that when we started, we started literally just as the satanic panic was starting. And and we were actually I got a modem and one of the very first early modems and managed to hook it up to the Internet through also various nefarious means, which was by no means easy back then. And we started browsing, you know, US bulletin boards and stuff like that. And we ended up logging in like Christian Satanic Panic bulletin boards. So we were quite well had advanced knowledge of what was going to happen. Just as it went from the US to the UK and it was very big in the UK at the time. we and everyone ran for cover everyone in the York old scene. And I don't blame them because you know the satanic panic was horrific and evil and scary. Yeah. a lot of people today don't know anything about that period. But we were being young and ballsy and not having families to worry about, decided to grab the bull by the horns and really go for it. So we were the first people that really fought back, like hardcore. So every issue we would feature in-depth articles about what was happening with the satanic panic, what the Christian lunatics were doing and trying to do. We were also the very first people to say, hey, you know the reason they're doing this is because the Christian priests themselves are the ones doing the sexual abuse. And this is a giant cover up. And we got into shit loads of trouble because we hammered it all the way through. Yeah, we totally refuse to buy into that. it's it's not the nice pagans who are doing it. It's the nasty pagans over there. It's it's the OTO or the black witches, you know, who sacrifice chickens, you know. pointing fingers like, hey, we're nice wiccans. It's those evil satanists over there, which we thought was just absolutely well, two things. One, it was morally reprehensible. And two, it was also from a political point of view, completely self-defeating because you were just buying and reinforcing the nonsense they were spreading. So we fought very, very strongly against it and became very well known for it. Yeah, because, mean, every every we would we took great pleasure in every time you would see like a news report of some politician or whatever, we'd see a copy of Pagan News on the desk. You know, we'd see Pagan News we talked about on the radio. So we became like very notorious almost for presenting the other side of the story, which I'm very proud of. and it strikes me as so timely that you're releasing this book now, given our current conditions, know, socially and politically, where everyone's running to throw a lot of other people under the bus right now to try to protect themselves. And it's not working. It's only getting worse for everyone. And of course, you know, I'm talking about the U.S., but it's global, as we know. Yeah, so it's very, very timely. When is the book, when does the book release? Well, the hardbacks available, you can buy it directly from Strange Attractor, the publishers. I think global distribution isn't until later in April. of mid-April. I think you can already pre-order it on Amazon and various other non-corporate conglomerates. Please do. Great, so by the time this podcast airs, people will be able to get it. Great, that's great. think people who've pre-ordered it will be able to get it already, I think. I keep looking at it and going, wow, you know? Yeah, they're really, really, we had some, let's say, design hiccups, because I used to, as I said, because I used to do magazine design, I kind of like stuck my oar in and said, well, why don't you do this and do that? And they... of time, yeah. We went back and forth literally for, must have been at least two years, just on design. Because we wanted to get it absolutely, it was very frustrating because it could have been years ago, but we wanted to get it absolutely right. We wanted to make it perfect. And it really looks fabulous. Yeah, they've got it, because it was a zine, it has to look visually appealing. It's not just a book. we kind of like got them to zine it up. And they got this guy in called Crank Abel and he redid a lot of the crappy Atari clip art we used to use. And in fact, there's one piece of clip art we used to use, which was Mickey Mouse. And we were told you can't use that nowadays because you'll get sued by Disney. ironically Mickey Mouse just went out of copyright a couple of weeks ago, so. Well, there you go. But back in the days when we couldn't use our work apart from the odd bit of clip art, it was okay. Or rather, we didn't give a toss about that. We, somebody tried to, we occasionally we get a threatening letter from somebody's lawyer, but it never. immediately became, we had a letters page at the back of the magazine. And we always had an, we had a section, my favorite section of the magazine was star letter, which we would take the most bitchy, any legal threats or any bitchcraft or anything where people, and always my favorite was when people would start a letter with, know you're not going to print this, but that immediately meant it was going to get printed. Yeah, what was it? This, this fanzine is nothing more than the wild ravings of anarchists and feminists. That's right, that's right. you know. Exactly! Yeah, that's great. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about both creative and spiritual practice and how they come together in your lives. Because clearly they do. You both have long-term creative and magical careers. So Rodney, currently, what do you feel are your core creative and spiritual practices that are helping you these days? Well, I'm still... Excuse me. I'm literally rehearsing for a tour that starts on Saturday. We just... So with the Cassandra Complex, just... We've been on the road for the last year. We've done... I think by the time we finish it, which is in about three weeks' time, it'll be 49 shows in 13 countries this year. Over the last year. So, yeah, that's definitely one of the core... creative practices I'm doing is playing a lot of live concerts, which are also very much part of what I would consider my spirituality playing on stage. mean, I've always approached it from a very magical, shamanic point of view. And anyone who's seen us play live, no, shut up, Phil. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, we always bitch about each other as well. It's like it's been going on, let's say, for 40 years. Anyway, we keep each other very grounded. So yeah, that's very much what I do. I mean, it's a hell of a lot of music. From a more, I mean, my more magical, pardon me, I was in the UO2 for 29 years, I think. So I've been a hardcore element for a long, long time. But I've also been involved with a lot of African diaspora like Voodoo and Santeria are very big interests of mine. I spent a lot of time out in New Orleans with Sally Glassman's Voodoo temple there. That's really where my big interests lie and always have done for a long time. So when you're on stage performing creatively and spiritually, what do you feel? What's the sense? What happens to you? Because sometimes, I mean, when I go to concerts, often there are bands I consider to be like going to temple and there are other bands that are just fun, right? And so for me as a participant, I can tell the difference. And so... As a magical act and as a transformative act, what's that like for you? What do you feel? What do you see? a really good question. That's a great question. I mean, obviously people come to be entertained. People want a good night out. Nobody spends like 20 bucks or whatever to have a bad time. And so there's a responsibility to make sure that when people give you, I live off the money they give me. So I have a responsibility to give them something back. and I'm very aware of that. So it's got to be an entertaining show. But at the same time, to me, that's never been enough. It's never. And it's the same with Pagan, all the way back to Pagan News. It was a very entertaining magazine and it was very funny and very interesting and we wanted to entertain people. But at the same time, that's not enough. There has to be more to that. You've got to educate and inform as well. So we're very political in what we do. And we're always talking about political subjects and we have, know, we have, we're entertaining that we have a huge laser show and videos running and all the rest of it. The videos are often very political, but also often very spiritual because, and that's the third sort of leg of the whole thing in the sense that, I mean, for me, every song is written from an emotional place, from some event, emotional event that was obviously very meaningful enough for me to want to write a song about it. so my ultimate aim then is to evoke that same emotional state in the audience or analogous emotional state so that they can feel what I was feeling. And to me, that's always one of the most amazing moments in a human relationship is when you can look at somebody and you know that they can feel what you feel. It's a very rare thing, but it's really important. It's the essence of the ultimate human connection, if you like. God, I'm getting so pretentious here, but it's true. It's absolutely true. And so... So there's always an attempt to evoke that level of emotional and spiritual depth in the people around me and make that connection with them. You know, when I look into the audience and I see some little girl sitting in the, standing in the front row and there's big tears rolling down her face or whatever. And it's like, yes, she gets this. And I've managed to like make some kind of connection there. and also take that to a place where it can become transcendent, where it stops becoming about pain or whatever, and it becomes about transcending that level of emotion into a shared spiritual state. Does that make any sense? Does that make sense? It does make sense to me and I'm also considering that it has to start within you though, right? The connection, you're the conduit, right? And so if you're not spiritually connected and creatively connected, you're not going to offer that transmission to the audience. It's going to be fake. and a lot of bands, is fake. I mean, there's a lot of acts out there that just are just faking it all the time. And people still like it. And that's fine if that's what they do. But it's not enough for me. It has to have the authenticity about it. Yeah, yeah. And so Phil, with your, is your current primary creative expression still writing? Is that what you consider? It is writing but I also do lectures and a lot of my writing actually starts out as a lecture and what will happen is I'll do loads of research, probably too much, most of it will end up on the cutting room floor, I'll read it to my girlfriend Maria and she'll say that's really terrible, nobody wants to hear about that, just cut it all out, you know. and maybe one or two other people and eventually I'll get something that I'm happy with and I'll go to Treadwell's Bookshop or another venue in London and do a lecture and that's very much performance for me. So writing and performing are really big things for me as well. Now as for my practice, it's very simple. I go for a walk every day. I live in South London. We're very close to a woodland area and a big park. In fact the park is the Horniman Museum that used to be owned by the Horniman family. know, Gregor Mothers, Annie Horniman, Golden Dawn, all that stuff. I either go there every day or I go into our local woods. That's my practice. I might do a walking meditation where I just can like notice everything around me or if I can't be bothered I'll listen to some music. And it's very simple. I often, and I'll use that space to reflect on things that I'm struggling with if I'm writing or so like today I was thinking, what the hell am I going to talk to Thorn and Ruddy about? You know, and I was kind of like, starting to churn ideas over in my head. So I use that couple of hours every day as a kind of free space. And then if I'm doing a lecture, I like to entertain, like Rodney says, I like to connect with people. One of the things I'll always try and do is kind of like fix on somebody in the audience and try and get them to laugh. Because if somebody laughs at what you're saying, that means you made it. That's my kind of like criteria for having made a connection with somebody is getting a chuckle out of them, you know. Either that or shocking them senseless, which I've seen people respond to it. Things I've come out with during a lecture. I was doing a lecture a few years ago on, it was part of a series about the chakras, which is where my book on chakras came from. And I was talking about Jung's approach to chakras and I quoted Jung's something really anti-Semitic. And there people in the audience who'd never heard of that side of Jung before and they were kind of like, told us this woman, her mouth was hanging open, she'd never heard about anything about rung Jung being. anti-semitic or racist. So I was kind of glad to educate her on that point, you know. But mostly, you know, I like to entertain people. It's about making them laugh, getting them interested, maybe exposing them to something they've not come across before. So a lot of my work is very much about taking things that are not in the occult mainstream, they're a bit off to one side, the people or events or... Concepts that have kind of like slipped under the radar That's very much what I want to do. I want to bring the obscure stuff into the light and say hey look this stuff's really interesting You know, just try and out some more about it. And here's what I think, you know Yeah. Have you always been extra curious, Phil? Yeah, I think curiosity is, you know, one of the few things that Pete Carroll has ever said that I actually agree with is that I'm sick of occult ideas that pass from book to book without any intervening thought, you know, that's a really good phrase because, you know, I find as I get older, I'm more and more of a curmudgeon, I question things, know, things that I just accepted as valid when I was getting, when I was on Neophyte if you like, I'd now question and I'd start poking at it, you know. That's what I really like to do. I like to take things that are accepted and you're like, I don't know, that's, you know, poke at it. Curiosity is something that I keep returning to. And whenever I find myself getting stuck, I invoke curiosity again. And it really keeps me going, especially as I age, I think. And I think as people age, sometimes we lose curiosity. And I think it's more important to increase our curiosity about each other, about the world. much agree. I mean you have to keep on asking questions and Keep on you know people often say to me Oh, which of your books do you think is the best one? And I usually say well probably the next one actually, you know I want to be improving all the time and I don't want to be Another thing I get is oh, why didn't you stop writing books about chaos magic? Because I was bored and why do you wanna? and how many books do you need me to write on that topic? already way too many. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's way too many books that just recycle the same old turgy crap, you know. Well, that's just my opinion. Yeah, so I want to get back to walking practice is also important to me spiritually and creatively. I mean, I do other spiritual practices on a daily basis. You know, I do candle lighting, do meditation and breath and energy work. But my daily walk, if I don't get that in, it's hard, it's harder for me to get into the creative flow, right? There's something about the perambulation process. that cycles things through me. And yes, it does expand my thinking. It gives me ideas. It makes me notice the world too. Writers, sometimes we can get too self insular and taking that walk reminds me, no, there's a world out there, right? So it becomes a form of both magic and creativity for me. Well, where's the line between the two? Concepts like I don't really get, when people talk about spirituality, I'm very tempted, well, what do you mean by that? Because it's a kind of word that means very little to me. Spirituality, magic, creativity, they're all kind of like, it's just, yeah, life, getting on with it. Whether you be doing like, I don't know, 16 hour ritual to the gods or bring out a pagan magazine every three weeks. I don't know. So in that case, what is your current working definition of magic? God, I don't think I really have one. I've come down to what's become important for me, and I think Rodney will resonate with this, is that it's whatever engages you emotionally. You know, whether it be listening to music, watching him prance about on stage, watching a really crappy film about a dog that dies at the end and getting all weepy about it, which I often do. Or, you know, going to the top of the hill at night and calling on the great old ones. For it to mean anything, think you have to, it has to give you a sense of emotional engagement with the world, with other people. And it has to give you a sense of purpose and agency. And those are my two strong things, I think, you know. Regardless of whether it actually does have any tangible results, it's the feeling that you have some control of your life. And I think particularly for people who are marginalised because of their class or race or gender identity, that feeling I can have some agency of my circumstances I think is central. Hmm. How about you, Rodney? What's your current working definition? Well, I mean, I don't disagree with anything that Phil said whatsoever. Except that I'm, which makes a nice change. No, except that I disagree with everything he said. No, I'm very practically oriented. I I go back to Crowley's definition of magic is the science and art of causing change in accordance with the will. I don't think it's enough to just to feel you have agency. I want to actually do shit. I want to have the agency. I want to change things. And to me, it needs to be something that is both emotionally transcendent and connecting with the outside of me. It's the opposite of being solipsistic in that it's something that allows me to transcend the parameters of being an individual and become part of the great universe outside, but also having the ability to change that and make shit happen. And that's really important to me in that sense. again, it's pretty wide open definition in that sense. mean, you know, turning on a light switch is causing change in accordance with my will. But, you know, so it's literally magical. I don't know how many people know how a light bulb works. But, but how many witches does it takes to a lightbulb. You We actually had a light bulb joke contest. I don't know if you remember that, Rodney magical light bulb joke contest in Pagan News. It's in the book. But anyways, yeah, but that's my working definition. It needs to give me the ability to change the environment around me and become more connected to it. That to me is magic. It's like saying, I'm a very practical down-to-earth guy. I want shit to happen. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you both talked about connection, right? Connection being a primary component, which I agree. I agree. needs to be, I need to be connecting with something inside me and outside of me, right? And, but I also, you know, my definition of will is intention and action, right? So I also, I want to be consciously engaged. It's not enough to just flip the light switch by rote. Right. right? To me, habitual behavior is not magic unless I am consciously entraining myself towards an end, right? think, but I think training magical behavior to become habitual is a really important thing. I mean, in my first book, I have a chapter called Everyday Magic, which is literally about that very thing where you take them with simple things and you imbue them with a magical meaning to them, and then you learn them inside yourself so that it becomes completely unconscious. And the same way you learn to play a musical instrument, you know, like, Yeah, or you get up on stage and you're just there, you don't have to fret about it or anything, you know. You just go for it. Well, you are now embodying the practice, right? The practice is no longer outside of you. I think it's why these days my magical practice is so much simpler, just like my creative practice is so much simpler, because I've trained and trained for decades, right? Yeah. point out is that in all of what we just talked about, there is no mention of any concept of divinity whatsoever, which I think to some people would find that very peculiar because they would assume that there has to be some kind of devotion to gods or goddesses or whatever. Whereas I mean, Hey, I'm related to deities actually, Rodney. I'm related to goddesses and gods. God is a great, but we don't do it for them. Yeah, I'm an atheist. I'm an absolute, I'm a complete atheist, but I'm prepared to like, but you know, like in the same way when I, you when I see ET phoning home, I know it's a guy in a rubber suit. I know R2D2 is a guy inside a suit, but it doesn't stop me crying when ET phones home, you know? Yeah, it's still ET. The concept of, he's still an extraterrestrial. and a gay and a suit, both simultaneously. Yeah, I mean, I also relate to deity, to gods and goddesses, and I have practices. And I'm not an atheist, but I'm agnostic because I don't know exactly what they are, right? You know, I connect with them. I have results from connecting with them. I have a relationship. And yet I'm not a true believer and I never have been, well, never have been. I was as a child, but I never will be. absolutely. Don't even know that belief is that important, you know It isn't important at all It's what you do that matters And you know throughout the 70s and 80s in particularly in chaos budget conservatives You've got a lot of people banging on about belief. This is based on on totally out-of-date psychology Nowadays, there's a lot of very interesting religious studies coming out, actually belief isn't important at all, it's what people do. You're quite fine, people hold beliefs about something and then you look at how they act and they act completely differently, you know. any Christian for an example. well, it's the same in the political sphere too, right? I'm always saying praxis, what's your praxis, right? Because people can talk theory or what they think all day long, but unless they're applying that, I'm like, what's the use? Which is why in political spheres, I always come back to mutual aid, community care, you know, what are we actually doing to help each other? I'm not that interested in theory unless it is in service of praxis. Yeah, very cool. What is your current creative interest? What are you working on? I'm working on a book called Yagini's Sex, Death and Possession in Italy Tantra, which is not going to be a kind of like here's how to do it book, it is a historical survey looking at a variety of textual sources about Yaginis which are a kind of supernatural semi-divine semi-demonic female spirit in classical tantra that's between about the the sixth of the 13th century. So that's what I'm working on at the moment and I'm going to do a book after that but I think that's enough for now. Cool. How about you, Rodney? What's your why or your current? I know your current creative pursuit is getting through these concerts, right? Yeah, I have barely slept in like two weeks. Just doing preparation for that and jet lagged out of my mind. I'm amazed that I actually managed to stay awake all the way through this. But what's the why at the moment just to get to the end? No, I mean, the why is the same to me and it always has been. You know, some people ask why and some people say why not? No, no, my way has always been like we said earlier, people say, well, you can't do that. And I'm like, well, why not? Let's do it. You know, the reason I mean, the reason I, you know, I didn't tour for a long time because I was, I was ill and I was doing lots of corporate shit and making money and whatever. And then I would go to a concert and I'd see a band up there and go, fuck off. I can do that better. And and then I just that's why I wanted getting saves in the first place because it's like I can do that So I do so that's that's still my why is like if I can do it. I should be doing it and and Go no Phil interrupt me god damn it I don't get many chances to interrupt you, sorry. I was just gonna, to a more magical point, I think that that why is really important. And I think a strength we both had is we both got into magic before the internet. You cause what happens nowadays is somebody will have this wacky idea to do a ritual and they'll go on the internet and they'll get basically told, you can't do that. We both learned magic before the internet, so there was nobody tell us you can't do that. Either just fuck it we're gonna do it sorry sorry or do it you know but we didn't have this whole candlelight online community to to tell us that you can't do that So that actually circles us all the way back to the beginning of this conversation where we talked about not asking for permission to do to make magic, to make creativity, to put creativity out in the world, to live our lives. Right. And especially in these times, I think I think that's important. You know, and so But I'm wondering, for me, there needs to be, I'm not asking permission to do this thing I'm driven to do, but I still need to be aware that there's community out there, right? Because there are some people not asking permission and they're just seizing everyone's shit and breaking things, right? So what's the difference then between I'm not asking permission to... follow this creative impulse I have, but I also still want to maintain awareness of the greater good, of community, that there's other people on the planet, other beings on the planet and in the cosmos, right? So there's no permission, but still connection. Do you have any thoughts on that, either of you? lot of thoughts on that. mean, how we started Pagan News is that Phil was involved with a community called PaganLink originally, which was a way for very disparate Pagan communities to connect. And he literally turned up on my doorstep one day to say, can you help me with this? And that's how we met. That's how we got there. And so... We were doing a mass ritual, what was that? We were doing that thing, heal the earth. Yeah. Yeah. locally and came to me and asked for my assistance. And I'm like, sure, let's do this. And so from the beginning, it was motivated entirely with a sense of a much greater and wider perspective of community and globally. And that was very much what we were about. We weren't doing this to go like, you know, we weren't motivated by Hey, look at me, give me your money, because we didn't. Yeah. But, or it wasn't like, hey, look at us, we're so special and so wise and you should listen to everything we say and do it our way. Yeah, right. But it was very much beyond that. was very much trying to create a community and bring it together. and be part of it as wide and as disparate as possible. And especially back then, that was unheard of because the occult scene back in the 70s and the 80s was extremely, it was tiny compared to what it is now, but it was also extremely disconnected and very gate-kept a lot of the time. And people were like, You know, I still find it weird that people come and say like, well, he's, I'm a Wiccan and he's a ceremonial magician. Like Wiccans don't do ceremonies? What the hell are you talking about? This is the most nonsensical dividing line I've ever heard in my life. It's absurd. Right? But that was very true. you know, only the pack of Crowley's Thoth deck could get you kind of ostracized in some circles, you know. Being queer into the occult was, it was definitely a big no-no. You know, were evil, you were on the left-hand path. When I started to turn up at occult events wearing leather trousers and a feather bow, people would look at me strangely. know, that's Phil Hine, you know. God, he's weird, you know. What we were very much aware of was that all this was changing. A lot of the old shit was being challenged and we were part of that challenging process. So we were supporting other people who were challenging the old guard and also making some waves ourselves. But we were very much tied to... a wider sense of community. And I used to go to all the pagan moots, particularly after we'd, you know, publish somebody's complaining letter, and very often run into the person who, yeah, we published your letter. And I'd get a lot of flack, and I was like, shit, I wish Roddy would do more of this as well, you know, than he could get the flack as well. But, you know, I spent a lot of that time. running around, to conferences, going to outdoor events. I had a great time in many ways. We were very much tied into a community. And I think you're quite right to raise this issue of, yeah, on the one hand, there's going for it and then you have to go for it within the context. Because a lot of time, if you're doing a big project, you need other people on board. You you can't just piss everybody off much as you might like to, but... yeah, yeah, the other, we were very aware of that, especially during the Islamic panic, because we were continually telling people we have to unite because we have this enormous united front who are devoted to bringing us down, to literally imprisoning us and stopping us being us. And so if you don't band together against that, you're screwed. You cannot revolt as an individual against that kind of enormous, patriarchal capitalist machine that's bearing down on you to use you as a scapegoat. I mean, we've got plenty of historical references that shows that's what happens. And that was really important. But I think also that. Sorry, go on. Corollary to that is we had a very, very low tolerance for bullshit. And we tried to attack bullshit as much as we possibly could. Because I think that for us, was another thing that was holding us back, was that so much of the occult world, and it still is right today, is layer upon layer of absolute bullshit. Driven by financial or ego or just pure stupidity and ignorance. And we weren't going to be repeating that. We were not going to be a part of continually, you know, like, like, for the citizens, you know, we just regurgitating the same old crap over and over again without challenging it. And so we took a very scientific attitude and a very punk attitude as well to say, like, you know, we would challenge everything and say, well, OK, prove it. You know. Don't come to us and say, you know, any assertion you make, pack it up. If you can't pack it up, then we don't give a shit. Are we dead? are we we I was in a lot of different occult groups so I can last had my fingers and a lot of pies But you know there were occult groups who wouldn't talk to each other like if you're in the temple of psychic youth a lot of like very straight wiccans were like Oh God the temple of psychic youth. They're all weird. Aren't they? And it's got what I'm not weird. Am I and they're kind of okay We won't quite answer that Phil. You are a bit weird Any occultist calling another occultist weird is a beautiful exercise in irony. Well, so just to bring this together, both of you are talking about not falling into the trap of false separations when what we need to be doing is supporting each other and working together to survive, really, you know? And yeah. So I want to wrap this up. I want to thank both of you for being here, but I also want you to let people know where they can find you. So Rodney, what's a good website for you? I'm the only Rodney Orpheus in the world. So if you just type Rodney Orpheus into Google, you'll get numerous places you can go to to find me. And I'm very active on social media, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, you name it. I'm everywhere. No, that's easy. He is, he's, he's just amazing. He's everyone. My blog is my blog. I've neglected it horribly because I've been doing other things. But it's been up since 2009 and it's where I put all my deranged wibblings about whatever happens to be interesting me at any one moment. You can go on there. I've got a sub-step newsletter which I put out every time I've got something interesting to say, which is not that often. And I'm also active on Blue Sky and Facebook. I can send you that, all that crap later if you want. Okay. And as usual, folks can find me at thorncoyle.com And I thank you all for joining us today. This was a great conversation. Thanks, Rodney and Phil. much. Well, what did you think of that conversation with Phil Hine and Rodney Orpheus? Pretty wild, huh? What amazing history and longevity those two have together. And I appreciate the depth of their friendship and their playfulness with each other and their crankiness with each other. It was not a polished conversation, which I actually really appreciate. They were both pretty raw and just present in the conversation. I hope you learned some things about magical history and they gave you some food for thought about some actions we might be able to take now to boost our creativity and our connection to spirit. So thanks again for joining me and thanks to all of you who listen and who share the podcast and who leave reviews. And thanks again, as always, to my Patreon supporters. You can support me at Patreon. patreon.com backslash thorn coil that's t h o r n c o y l e i'm wishing you a magical creative day