Magic, ritual, and witchcraft • December 1, 2025 • Cusack M. Carole
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), founded by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in 1981 after the end of Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions, blended chaos magick, art, and esoteric practices while drawing on imagery of destructive cults. The group ended in 1991, just as the World Wide Web emerged. In the decades since, TOPY and P-Orridge have been rediscovered and venerated by contemporary occultists. This article examines TOPY's magickal frameworks to assess their significance for esotericism, popular culture, and political rebellion, emphasizing artistic and creative methods as sources of spiritual power. Chaos magick and individualism strongly shaped the nature and impact of their activities.
Open Journal of Stigmatized Knowledge & Suppressed Discourses • October 10, 2025 • Dr. Sixbert Sangwa
Twentieth-century occult manuals described repeatable techniques for contacting spirits, which have migrated into wellness culture, social media algorithms, and prophetic movements. A historical-comparative review of esoteric texts paired with content analysis of over 200 contemporary artifacts—websites, livestreams, and social-media campaigns—identified twelve operational pipelines, including ritual invocation, algorithmic entrainment, media hypersigils, remote energy transmissions, and prosperity-prophecy. After May 12, 2025, there was a quantitative spike in vision reports and viral prophecies, alongside a shift in prayer priorities from repentance toward financial breakthrough. The authors argue these findings expose a trans-media apparatus normalizing counterfeit experiences that redirect allegiance from Christ to a syncretic New-Age narrative, matching biblical eschatological warnings.
Svetovi revija za etnologijo antropologijo in folkloristiko • July 29, 2024 • Andrej Kapcár • 1 citation
Magical practices have become more accessible and individualistic in recent decades, with practitioners increasingly incorporating elements from popular culture into their rituals. The immersive visual aspects of popular culture, reaching wide audiences, have influenced new schools like Chaos Magick, which provides a fertile ground for such innovations. This paper examines the mutual interaction between occult knowledge represented visually in popular culture and the actual magical practice of modern mages.
Linguistic Frontiers • January 20, 2024 • Markéta Muczková • 1 citation
Symbols in everyday communication and in magical practice are fundamentally different entities. In ordinary communication, a symbol's function depends on shared awareness of its arbitrary origin. In magical practice, symbols—such as those in sigil magic, Tarot, and amulets—are used to transform reality, yet they ignore this shared awareness as a necessary condition for their functionality. The paper explains the semiotic features of symbols, their role in communication, and how magical symbols operate under a different paradigm, where symbolic language is mandatory but the conventional origin of the symbol is not required for its effectiveness.
Biography • January 1, 2024 • Nicholas K. Mohlmann
Cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes uses subcultural ideological values to either stabilize or destabilize the proper name in biographical writing. Through paranormal concepts, his work enacts a theory of the biographical signature that highlights the uncanny ways biographical texts invest proper names with meaning.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) • July 23, 2023 • Leonardo C. Olyachim
The author introduces an algebraic framework for working with the equations of CMT, presenting an operator that represents magick intent and extending the treatment to cases where multiple such operators act on the same state or event.
Preternature Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural • July 1, 2021 • Daniel Siepmann • 1 citation
Between 1981 and 1991, the band Psychic TV acted as the audio-visual propaganda arm of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), an international occult network designed by Genesis P-Orridge to resemble a militant youth movement. This essay examines how P-Orridge, Psychic TV, and TOPY conducted a deliberate campaign of occult research to test whether chaos magick rituals could generate the widespread belief that P-Orridge and followers pioneered the UK acid house movement. Primary sources, including Psychic TV's compilation albums with pseudonymous artist names, show that acid house's trademark psychedelia became a means of recruiting listeners into these occult experiments.
January 14, 2021 • M. Dines, Matt Grimes
Genesis P-Orridge's Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY) was founded to catalyze individual development for those feeling different and dissatisfied. Psychic TV, formed in 1981 after Throbbing Gristle disbanded, produced a vast mixed media oeuvre over thirty years, collaborating with over thirty musicians, writers, artists, and philosophers. P-Orridge's awareness in occult and pagan ritual was integral to forming Psychic TV and TOPY, which became the magickal and philosophical wing of the band. Using Psychic TV's debut album Force the Hand of Chance (1982) as an investigative framework, this chapter analyzes Psychic TV and TOPY's multi-media texts, performances, rituals, and interviews to unpack the significance of magick, occultism, and ritual in asserting their 'cult'ural and philosophical space between music, performance art, and chaos magick.
Texts and History: Journal of Philological, Historical and Cultural Texts and History Studies • January 1, 2021 • N. E. Mazalova
In Karelia, Russian ritual specialists (sorcerers) are complex figures combining archaic demiurge and trickster traits. Their power comes from secret knowledge, often transmitted through the teacher's saliva and urine. The sorcerer's main function is performing maleficium (porcha), causing harm through a mediator that steals a victim's vital force, leading to weakness and death. Wedding maleficium, persisting through the twentieth century, reinterprets archaic rites of passage: the wedding symbolizes temporary death and rebirth into a new social status. The sorcerer's harmful actions at weddings actually introduce the couple into this state of temporary death. The healer's secret knowledge of incantations (zagovor) aims to restore order from chaos and bodily integrity, often at the cost of the healer's own health through adopting the patient's sickness.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) • January 11, 2019 • Tf Varley, Robin Carhart‐Harris, Leor Roseman et al. • 8 citations
preprint
Psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity, indicating a shift toward a critical state between order and chaos. Using fMRI data, researchers measured the fractal dimension of functional connectivity networks and BOLD time-series. Both drugs significantly increased the fractal dimension of functional connectivity networks; LSD also significantly increased the fractal dimension of BOLD signals, while psilocybin showed a non-significant trend in the same direction. Changes localized to the dorsal-attentional network. These findings support the Entropic Brain Hypothesis, which proposes that psychedelics alter consciousness by moving the brain closer to a critical tipping point.