#gnostics

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Gnostica, Volume 5, Number 10, No. 46, Llewellyn, June 1978

[girl-debord]

River's 13 Punk & Metal Albums of 2025

13. Pyrex - Body (Total Punk Records)

This was a tremendous year for NYC's Pyrex--this LP hit in March & grabbed my attention so I wouldn't miss a follow-up EP in June or a phenomenal live tape in July. Their sound isn't exactly what I usually spring for, with garage-punk vocals & an approach that centers melody, but no matter what else came after this record this year, I just couldn't leave it off my list--if for no other reason than that these are the songs I've found myself humming while I do the dishes. There's this post-punk-y quality to the production, and every song is so different & so damn catchy. Pyrex is a good omen for New York's scene and the vitality of hardcore punk in general.

favorite track: Face Off

12. Nisemono - Nisemono (Toxic State Records)

More from NYC! This is about as short as I go for this list at 13 minutes & change, but absolutely zero time is wasted. This is true Japanese-American hardcore punk, mixing all the right stuff from both scenes. It's so fucking tight instrumentally--especially that drumming, holy shit--and the vocals are frantic in a way that feels barely-contained. I saw this band play with LiFE & this album was the full setlist--just as punchy and twice as powerful.

favorite track: Nikushimi

11. Habak - Mil orquídeas en medio del desierto (Alerta Antifascista/The Plague of Man/Ojala Me Muera)

Ten years after their debut, Tijuana's neocrust forerunners are still going strong. Since Lagrimas caught my ear a couple years ago, I've been trying to keep tabs on this strain of Spanish-language post-rock-inflected grind/crust, and I think I can safely say this is some of the best material to come out of it. Habak is as emo as they come, but they bring such an unmatched severity to the faster crust sections that even the purist in me is hooked. This LP is particularly well-paced, keeping the energy up even through slower sections & spacing out its hardest punches juuuust right to make them as crushing as possible. It's another triumph.

favorite track: MIl orquideas del desierto

10. Pisssniffers - Pisssniffers (Chaos & Anticonformity Records)

This was such a good year for raw noize d-beat, but a lot of it will be relegated to my "twelve-minutes-and-under" list, true to form for the genre. I'm ecstatic that this one weighs in at a whopping 17 minutes because it's one of the best I've heard since Physique's "Again." The production is pretty no-frills, but it really nails the whole Kawakami sound, especially the way those treble-y drums clip the noise into tight, rhythmic blasts.

favorite track: Horror

9. Gnostics - Revelation (Roachleg Records)

I might have actually been the first person to listen to this album--the band told me I was the first to buy the tape, and I listened to it just before it went up on bandcamp. As is often the case with debut albums, the production & recording aren't the tightest ever, but this is just such an unusual sound these days--old-school slow crust that strays into atmospheric sludge territory in a couple tracks. It wanders from Amebix to Gallhammer to Battle of Mice, but has a strong aesthetic keeping it cohesive. I adore the muddy guitar tones & the two vocalists call to mind a bunch of my crust faves. This band was such an unexpected and welcome discovery.

favorite track: Is Love Lost?

8. Sickness of Greed - All That's Before Us (Sore Mind/ Filth Holocaust Records)

Sore Mind is one of the best tape distros to ever do it, and releases like this are exactly why. As you might expect from a band named for a LiFE track, Sickness of Greed crashes like the crustiest, but they've got some Northern Europe in them too, particularly the vocals. This LP is 11 quick punchesthat are measurably heavier than your average hardcore record. My top "play-it-loud-as-fuck-while-driving" record this year.

favorite track: No Sanctuary

7. INDUSTRY - INDUSTRY (La Vida Es un Mus Discos)

Wow. This really draws from the sounds of every punk band with a chorus pedal I've ever loved--The Mob, Zygote, and of course Killing Joke--but if I had to pick just one point of comparison it's Exit-Stance. I truly think no one's done dark anarcho punk quite like them for 40 years--until INDUSTRY. Everything about this LP is bleak, but never dull, and it isn't an imitation either--just an extension of this lost art into the extremely apropos setting of the 21st century. The bass tone in particular really captures that primordial proto-industrial/post-punk sound, and they're paired with some of the best all-around guitar effects & production of the year.

favorite track: Minimize Interhuman Violence

6. Death Gasp - Death Gasp (Final Return Records)

I suspect stenchcore may be having a little renaissance in the 2020s, and Death Gasp is doing it exactly the way I like. It's got thrashy licks with none of thrash's corniness, gnarly death-metal guitar tones, and breakneck crustcore sections. Best of all, it's got SO much reverb. I love how unapologetically sour it all is--the rough vocals, the morbid cover art, all the octatonics. This is, to me, the very best kind of meeting of punk & metal that distills both into their purest, nastiest forms.

favorite track: Halls of the Dead

5. Contrast Attitude - Discharge Your Noise (WHY Records)

Contrast Attitude is one of the craziest sets I've ever seen live, and I could not have been more pumped for this album than I was after seeing them play in June. What struck me at that show--and strikes me every time I listen to this album--is just how much they're willing to push the crasher crust/d-beat formula in new directions. They undoubtedly channel the power of Discharge & their friends & former bandmates in Disclose, but there's no cloning going on here. The first track gets a little motörpunk with its heavy-metal sounding riff, and throughout the album we get little tastes of a retro love for burning spirits & old-school Japanese hardcore, but the whole thing comes across as anything but a rehash. It's thoughtfully executed and tight, tight, tight.

favorite track: Discharge Your Noise/The Last Moment

4. Möney - Hegemony (Chicken Attack/Icepicks at Dawn)

Egg punks Möney take a turn for the darker with this little post-punk album that totally blew me away from the first listen. It's short & sweet, but contains at least one contender for a "song of the year" for me. Something about the anarcho-punk-y covals on the title track combines into something so fresh with the crazy noise effects on the guitars. It still has a little of that warm, sweet tone that marks it as downstream from egg punk, but both lyrically & instrumentally, this feels like a brush with the reality of living in an immensely violent international system that's as alien as it is ubiquitous. I adore the noise track for its Foucauldian title as well as the crazy technical feat it represents to do something like this with pedals. All in all, this is the most danceable something can be while still feeling like a work from Tiqqun.

favorite track: Hegemony

3. MEM//BRANE - MEM//BRANE (District Six)

It felt amost anticlimactic when this dropped on January 1st because I knew then that it was going to be pretty high on this list. Even with all the good stenchcore this year, nothing quite scratched the same itch. The guitars are thoroughly death-y, but something about the vocals & the way the songs are structured puts it almost into blackened crust territory for me. The riffs all feel inspired by the old greats, but they're original and really, really memorable. We've also got a strong contender for "song of the year" here, and the subject matter of a lot of this album really strikes a chord with me, somber though it may be.

favorite track: In Lieu of Flowers

2. PSYCH-WAR - PSYCHOTIC WARMONGER (Sore Mind/Archaic Records)

Another Sore Mind release! This album is incredible because I enjoy it more every time I listen to it--and I've listened to it a lot. The sound is pretty directly inspired by "Scandinavian Jawbreaker"-era Anti Cimex, but witrh a solid scoop of motörpunk madness thrown in for good measure. Every song is more or less about the end of the world, and the whole thing feels like a high-speed rampage thru the wasteland as the bombs are falling. The guitars & drums are so locked in I feel like I'll die if I don't immediately start moving when this comes on. The production is remarkably crisp for a d-beat record, and without loising any of the sound's magnitude.

favorite track: Screams at the Sky

1. Subversive Rite - Apocalypse Zone (Acute Noise Manufacture)

For whatever reason, I didn't really get this one the first time I heard it. I guess listening to it as a new release didn't have me primed for what I was going to hear. But my second listen was eye-opening--the clean-ish vocals are such a breakthrough of old-school goodness. Of course it reminds me a little of Détente & a long list of other "crossover" greats, but this album really feels tapped in to that age of punk & extreme metal largely unhindered by subgenre labels. It all feels song-first, like it pulls from inspirations & invents as the song demands, not in order to imitate or show off. There's a amount of reverb & delay, something which seems to elude bands like this. Most importantly, these are just phenomenal songs, and they all pull together thematically along the lines of urgent resistance. EVEN THE HANDS OF STEEL MUST CRACK!

favorite track: Hands of Steel

[0tricksterlove0]

The Bridal Chamber

The bridal chamber in mysticism is about union with "God", this transcends worldly things, as those who are mystics, know that ALL worldly things are limited and cannot satiate you, only "God" can. Only that of the soul, can satiate you. It was NEVER actually about "uniting masculine and feminine principles inside yourself" as these are "things of the world", and even, it is not about 2 people coming together in a union, as that is of the world too. I say "God" in quotes as any word for.. well.. "God", will just limit the limitless. The bridal chamber is not about 2 people coming together in the physical, or about "masculine" and "feminine" coming together, the mystic spiritual teachings of a bridal chamber, are about you and "God", there is no need for another partner to get you to Divinity, that is a misrepresentation and a misunderstanding of the bridal chamber in mysticism, imo.

Also, the bridal chamber is a relationship with "God", to the most deepest, intimate depths, something that nothing outside of you, another human, can ever give you. Any of the forms of the world, are limited, the love we say is love, is not actually divine love, it is transactional, a lot of the times. Unconditional love, is seeing someone's pure essence, without any judgements or biases, but also, divine love, is divine eros and agape love, and it is of "God". No one can love you like "God" does, as divine love is not of this world, it is not limited. It is divine in nature, and a gift from "God". This divine love, is actually a form of ecstasy for the person who feels it from and to "God", as it transcends worldly love, when you are in the bridal chamber of "God", you feel this ecstatic divine eros and agape love. A lot of people hold conditions onto love, and do not have the same type of love Jesus has, and not just divine love for fellow humans, but divine love for "God", too.

Mysticism is always about union with "God". It is an intimate divine love union, which is why it is called "the bridal chamber". Just look up the mystic's writings. St. Teresa of Avila is a good start, she talks about the bridal chamber in her work "The Interior Castle" as being a union with "God". Not with anyone or anything outside of yourself, but it is an internal process of union with "God". People often get this type of divine love union wrong, all the time. Just look at the amount of twin flames around, using Rumi's or Hafiz's poetry, thinking they were talking of a human beloved, instead of what these mystics were talking of, which was, THE Beloved, "God".

Just my thoughts... people always misunderstand the actual meanings of mysticism and of the mystic's writings, usually it is people who have no understanding of mysticism and the mystics as a whole, who get it wrong... it is NOT about romantic, courtly, human love, it is about a divine love union with "God". Mystics are always about transcending the worldly things, so of course, it is not about a physical partner. The bridal chamber, is about you having a divine union, mystical marriage, unio mystica, with "God".... seeing the bridal chamber as a union with a physical partner, is not understanding the mystic's understanding and writings of said bridal chamber. Gnosticism also has this bridal chamber, and it is the same thing here too. It is a union with The Divine. I am not any type of Gnostic, I do have Gnosis, but I am not a Gnostic, but I do understand, the Gnostic's own understanding of Divinity, is what they had a union with, they use the term "bridal chamber" for this union, too.

[arcane-offerings]

Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal. IAO: Ophite Iconography. Montreal: Anathema Publishing, 2024. Paperback. 224 pages. 

www.arcaneofferings.com

Shop link in bio

[santmat]

A Stream of Light Moving Through Ages

A Stream of Light Moving Through Ages

There are moments in human history when certain souls appear not as isolated figures, but as expressions of a single continuous Power — a river of awakening flowing through time. Saints have long said: the path of realization is not created anew with each Teacher, but is carried by the Masters, generation after generation, like a flame passed from lamp to lamp so it never goes out.

This is the Great Tradition.

It has no beginning and no ending. It rises wherever the human heart cries out for truth.

It steps into the world whenever the world has forgotten the inner path.

It lives through many bodies, many names, many voices.

It is one Power, one Light, one Sound — expressed through countless Masters across the ages.

The Masters do not come to found religions. They come to awaken souls.

But human beings, longing for certainty, often turn mystic schools into religions — fossilized echoes of once-living truth. The Masters do not condemn this; they simply continue their work through new forms, new bodies, new eras, so that the living connection to the inner Power does not fade from the earth.

There were nights in Hathras when the hut seemed no larger than a lantern, but the light within it reached far beyond its walls. On such nights, when the air was still and the small clay lamp flickered against the mud plaster, Tulsi Sahib would speak not in prose, but in song — a stream of inner seeing shaped into verse.

-- from the very latest Sant Mat publication, Tulsi Sahib: The Hidden Flame of Hathras, December 4th, 2025: https://archive.org/details/tulsi-sahib-the-hidden-flame-of-hathras/mode/2up

[samhainsam6]

Archons and the Garden of Eden

14 minutes Hello, fren 🤠! How has life been treating you lately? I hope you’re finding small joys and a bit of peace (in my book, at least), learning to enjoy your own company makes everything else more manageable. 🍁 As autumn settles in, the temperature has dropped and spooky season is rolling in. There’s something special about festive blankets, hot tea, and Halloween drawings on the window…

Archons and the Garden of Eden

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Daniel Pinchbeck

As a different way of responding to the onslaught of current events, I am putting together an anthology of original texts from the Western Hermetic tradition, which I intend to publish in the next few months. I believe the Western Hermetic tradition, understood properly, offers a “line of flight” or path of escape from the current frenzies of technocratic nihilism as well as regressive Christian traditionalism. The Hermetic, alchemical, and Gnostic tradition also help us place the phenomenological rupture of the psychedelic experience within a coherent ontological and philosophical paradigm. I also think there is a political dimension to this exploration, as one element of the tradition is the recognition that every human being possesses, inherently, a spark of the divine, and deserves dignified, decent treatment on that basis alone.

Below is a draft of the introduction I am working on for the book. I would love to your hear thoughts or ideas in the comments.

Introduction: The Morphic Field of the Western Esoteric Tradition

The Western Hermetic tradition is often seen as a dusty cabinet of curiosities—a collection of fake grimoires, ornate symbols, and pointless Crowley-ite rituals that seem more like historical artifacts or old movie kitsch than an evolutionary path. For centuries, modern rationalists have viewed alchemy, magic, and occult philosophy with deep suspicion, while the modern scientific mind dismissed them as primitive superstitions. As Dutch scholar Wouter Hanegraaff argues in Esotericism and the Academy, this entire corpus of thought could be seen as the “rejected knowledge” of Western culture:

The category that we now refer to as 'Western esotericism' … stands for the sum total of 'rejected knowledge' against which both mainstream Christian culture and modern or secular society have established their own identity. Even today, it remains their principal 'Other', whether or not we are consciously aware of it.

In fact, the 2,000-plus Hermetic tradition offers an organic, participatory and metaphysically sophisticated worldview that was systematically suppressed within Western culture. First, this tradition was attacked and marginalized by Christianity. This culminated in the Inquisition, where all magical operations and initiatory paths were outlawed and suppressed, seen to be demonic. In the Renaissance, the Church refused to allow Pico della Mirandola to present his synthesis of NeoPlatonism, Kabbalah, and Christianity. The brilliant minds behind the Rosicrucian Enlightenment had to go into hiding when Pope and Kings turned against them. Later, the Hermetic corpus and practices were ignored and ridiculed by the secular Enlightenment. Scientists dismissed interest in any kind of psychic or sacred dimension as strictly irrational and regressive.

What I believe we urgently need, now, is a “return of the repressed”: A sophisticated reappraisal and a critical analysis of the West’s tradition of metaphysical thought and occult practice—after all, this is the approach that is “indigenous” to those of us with an Anglo-European heritage. Current developments in physics and philosophy point beyond the reductive materialist paradigm which has dominated for centuries. Our cutting-edge paradigms (panpsychism, dual-aspect monism, analytic idealism) understand consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality—perhaps even the constitutive element. This is exactly what our own “secret tradition” has been trying to tell us for over twenty centuries!

One problem is that many traditions from the Western occult have very specific, highly complex taxonomies— like the Rosicrucians, the Kabbalists, the Golden Dawn, or the Theosophists. By stepping back, we can view the landscape as a whole. When we do so, a striking and consistent metaphysical structure starts to reveal itself. This book is an attempt to clarify that underlying structure. It moves beyond the mere collection of historical texts toward the articulation of a shared coherence—a distinct “morphic field” in which the tradition operates.

Reading and reflecting on this anthology, it becomes clear that, for those of us rooted in the Western paradigm, we possess a native path to realization that does not require the adoption of foreign cultural idioms, whether Eastern or indigenous, or even “New Age.” This path does not require abandoning intellectual rigor or logic. The Hermetic tradition is not a relic: We have access to a profound, technically precise “science of the soul” that supports modern evolution. Western occultism offers us a path: A way to approach the immense complexities of our current technological age without getting subsumed by the Machine. It is inherently hopeful, contradicting both the nihilism of technological rationalism and the primitive constructs of evangelical Christianity. It meshes perfectly with the modern psychedelic renaissance, and suggests a destiny for this movement that goes beyond healing trauma or self-optimization, toward building a deeper resonance with the cosmos, and finding our own indigenous way to “redemption,” self-realization, and collective healing.

The Microcosmic-Macrocosmic Mirror and the Emanated Universe

At the very heart of this tradition lies the principle of the microcosmic-macrocosmic mirror, the conviction that the human being is not an accidental biological phenomenon localized on a speck of dust in a vast, empty void. Rather, the human is a scaled-down, fractal model of the universe itself, containing the totality of universal principles and divine latencies. In this view, the central axiom of the Hermeticists—”As above, so below”—is more than a poetic sentiment; it is a structural reality. Each person is intrinsically valuable, possessing a spark of the infinite source and representing an aspect of Nous, the divine intellect.

We live within a hierarchy of being where reality is not created ex nihilo (out of nothing) by a distant, separate craftsman, but emanates directly from a single, inexhaustible source. This divine source cascades downward and outward through various planes of existence. As it descends, it slows its vibration, condensing from pure, active, luminous spirit into the dense, passive matter we inhabit and manipulate. As Isaac Newton’s translation of the Emerald Tablet famously articulates this singular unity:

"That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing."

The Entanglement of the Soul and the Mechanism of Gnosis

However, the tragedy of the human condition is characterized by a profound state of amnesia. We have “fallen” into, or become hopelessly entangled by, the lower material world. As P.D. Ouspensky wrote on the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, this descent results in a state of literal “sleep”—a mechanical, conditioned trance wherein “people live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know that they are asleep.” We forget our divine origin and our latent capacity, identifying entirely with the physical shell and its immediate survival instincts.

Because the wound is one of ignorance and amnesia, the cure in the esoteric tradition differs radically from orthodox Western religions. Salvation is not found through passive faith, institutional dogmas, or moral compliance in the traditional religious sense; it is achieved through gnosis—a direct, fiercely experiential knowledge of the divine and the hidden laws of nature.

This is a proactive mandate. It requires an inner technology, a rigorous science of consciousness that mirrors the precise outer sciences of mechanics or chemistry. The esoteric practitioner does not wait for unearned grace from above; instead, they work systematically to awaken latent faculties and achieve a technical mastery over the inner workings of their own mind. As Aleister Crowley famously defined it in Magick in Theory and Practice: “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” True freedom requires the disciplined application of that Will.

The Nature of the Divine and the “Friction” of Evil

This highly active, participatory framework brings us to a radical departure from the common Western conception of “God” and the Devil. In the esoteric tradition, the Divine is rarely an anthropomorphic patriarch passing judgment from afar. Instead, it is portrayed as an infinite, boundless potentiality—the Pleroma of the Gnostics or the Aïn-Soph of the Kabbalists. It is a pure, objectless Mind characterized by an internal necessity for self-reflection. The Divine desires to know Itself, and to achieve this self-cognition, it generates the mirror of the cosmos and the human soul.

Because the ultimate ground holds all forces in equilibrium, what we encounter as “evil” is not an absolute, autonomous principle of darkness or a rival deity. Rather, evil is a structural byproduct of the creative process... (read the rest on Substack)