A pilgrimage of sorts
Oct. 20th, 2026 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophiaWell, I'm back from Los Angeles. It was a very pleasant trip, courtesy of my hosts, South Pasadena Masonic Lodge #290 and the Hermetic Consistory. I did have a little trouble on the homeward journey, which was none of their doing -- delays in transport ended up landing me back in DC at 3:30 this morning, and only the timely presence of a genial Ethiopian taxi driver at that dismal hour spared me a long cold wait at the Metro light rail stop. Still, it all worked out, and I put the time I spent cooling my heels to good use, writing most of a chapter of a future Ariel Moravec story -- the conclusion, in fact, of a story arc that's already been introduced (though very quietly) in the books of that series already in print.
My official reason for being in LA was to speak at the 2026 Sages and Scholars Conference. The theme of the conference was "what it means to be human in the age of AI." My talk was titled "Technology, Myth, and the Religion of Progress" -- the image on the left is me giving that talk -- and regular readers will have guessed already that my approach to that theme was to pour cold water on the overheated fantasies of omniscient computers, and suggest a balanced approach to the new technologies of AI that will make room for its potentials while avoiding some of its likely downsides. Yes, the word "dissensus" got introduced to the audience, and so did the word "retrovation." They seemed to handle those heretical notions surprisingly well; we'll see if I can pull off the standard trick of the fringe intellectual and slip a few useful ideas through the barriers that keep mainstream thinkers safe from anything genuinely interesting or new.
Still, I had other things in mind when I was planning the trip, and my hosts were kind enough to accommodate my vagaries. It so happens that one of the esoteric teachers, and one of the occult orders, that have had a powerful influence on my thinking and practice, respectively were and are headquartered in LA, so I had the chance to make a pilgrimage to two places that are important to me but that I'd never visited before.
The first of those was the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) buildings on Los Feliz Boulevard -- that's the courtyard of the PRS on the right. Those were the longtime stomping grounds of that astonishing force of nature, Manly Palmer Hall, the most influential American occultist of the 20th century, one of the few people I know of who wrote more books than I ever will. Hall had the exceptionally good fortune to attract a couple of elderly widows with oil money early in his career, which enabled him to drop out of the rat race, devote the rest of his life to esoteric philosophy, and build the complex of buildings where he worked, trying to teach occult wisdom to Americans, from the mid-1930s until his death in 1980.
Hall is one of the two esoteric authors who had the most influence on my thinking and my approach to occultism. (The other is Dion Fortune, and I had the chance to make a pilgrimage to her favorite place, Glastonbury, and lay flowers on her grave many years ago.) The image on the left is me standing at the doors of the PRS library, which has 50,000 occult texts, many of them quite rare. The staff was welcoming in the extreme, and gave me a tour of the whole facility.
The PRS is currently raising money to put a new roof on the library, and I promised to mention that here. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, or if your tax situation would be improved by making a charitable donation before the end of the year, they're a qualified 501(c)3 charitable foundation and they'd be delighted to hear from you. (Practitioners of planetary charity will want to know that this would be an excellent choice for a Mercury charity.) They also have an online bookstore carrying many of Hall's books -- there are so many of those that they have to reprint them in rotation. You can find the current stock here.
The second site on my pilgrimage list was the home temple of the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), an esoteric school founded nearly a century ago by Paul Foster Case. Case was a high-ranking member in the American end of the Golden Dawn scene who left the GD when its internal politics got too hairy and founded a school of his own. Like a great many occultists of the era, he ended up in the Los Angeles area, where he established a temple and correspondence school in a quiet set of buildings on Figueroa Avenue -- that's the place on the right.
My late wife and I joined BOTA in 1990; she returned to the lessons in the year before her death, as part of a general review of her studies that I only realized later was preparation for the transition to come, and I followed her lead and returned to the BOTA work after her passing. These days I'm an initiate of the lodge side of their work, too, so a visit to the BOTA temple was high on my priority list.
Once again I had a fine time -- the photo to the left is me in the temple room. My hosts and I took in a Vibratory Attunement, a guided meditation that includes chanting divine names on specific tones, and also had ample time to chat with the local members. I was just a little weirded out by one detail. It so happens that I've heard, and participated in, a lot of recorded guided meditations that were led by Case's successor Ann Davies. They were all recorded in that very room; the acoustics were unmistakable, and so were the tones of the old Hammond electric organ that provided accompaniment and gave us the tones to chant. It really did feel now and then as though Davies or Case himself were about to stroll back into the room.
So my pilgrimage is complete. I expect to be back at some point -- there are already conspiracies under way to bring me back to LA to do my classic two-day geomancy workshop, which is open to complete beginners and teaches them how to do accurate, detailed geomantic readings, and I have a far faint hope that someday I will have an event in the PRS auditorium, sit in the chair where Manly P. Hall gave Sunday talks for more than half a century, and offer some teachings. We'll see.
My official reason for being in LA was to speak at the 2026 Sages and Scholars Conference. The theme of the conference was "what it means to be human in the age of AI." My talk was titled "Technology, Myth, and the Religion of Progress" -- the image on the left is me giving that talk -- and regular readers will have guessed already that my approach to that theme was to pour cold water on the overheated fantasies of omniscient computers, and suggest a balanced approach to the new technologies of AI that will make room for its potentials while avoiding some of its likely downsides. Yes, the word "dissensus" got introduced to the audience, and so did the word "retrovation." They seemed to handle those heretical notions surprisingly well; we'll see if I can pull off the standard trick of the fringe intellectual and slip a few useful ideas through the barriers that keep mainstream thinkers safe from anything genuinely interesting or new. Still, I had other things in mind when I was planning the trip, and my hosts were kind enough to accommodate my vagaries. It so happens that one of the esoteric teachers, and one of the occult orders, that have had a powerful influence on my thinking and practice, respectively were and are headquartered in LA, so I had the chance to make a pilgrimage to two places that are important to me but that I'd never visited before.
The first of those was the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) buildings on Los Feliz Boulevard -- that's the courtyard of the PRS on the right. Those were the longtime stomping grounds of that astonishing force of nature, Manly Palmer Hall, the most influential American occultist of the 20th century, one of the few people I know of who wrote more books than I ever will. Hall had the exceptionally good fortune to attract a couple of elderly widows with oil money early in his career, which enabled him to drop out of the rat race, devote the rest of his life to esoteric philosophy, and build the complex of buildings where he worked, trying to teach occult wisdom to Americans, from the mid-1930s until his death in 1980. Hall is one of the two esoteric authors who had the most influence on my thinking and my approach to occultism. (The other is Dion Fortune, and I had the chance to make a pilgrimage to her favorite place, Glastonbury, and lay flowers on her grave many years ago.) The image on the left is me standing at the doors of the PRS library, which has 50,000 occult texts, many of them quite rare. The staff was welcoming in the extreme, and gave me a tour of the whole facility. The PRS is currently raising money to put a new roof on the library, and I promised to mention that here. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, or if your tax situation would be improved by making a charitable donation before the end of the year, they're a qualified 501(c)3 charitable foundation and they'd be delighted to hear from you. (Practitioners of planetary charity will want to know that this would be an excellent choice for a Mercury charity.) They also have an online bookstore carrying many of Hall's books -- there are so many of those that they have to reprint them in rotation. You can find the current stock here.
The second site on my pilgrimage list was the home temple of the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), an esoteric school founded nearly a century ago by Paul Foster Case. Case was a high-ranking member in the American end of the Golden Dawn scene who left the GD when its internal politics got too hairy and founded a school of his own. Like a great many occultists of the era, he ended up in the Los Angeles area, where he established a temple and correspondence school in a quiet set of buildings on Figueroa Avenue -- that's the place on the right. My late wife and I joined BOTA in 1990; she returned to the lessons in the year before her death, as part of a general review of her studies that I only realized later was preparation for the transition to come, and I followed her lead and returned to the BOTA work after her passing. These days I'm an initiate of the lodge side of their work, too, so a visit to the BOTA temple was high on my priority list. Once again I had a fine time -- the photo to the left is me in the temple room. My hosts and I took in a Vibratory Attunement, a guided meditation that includes chanting divine names on specific tones, and also had ample time to chat with the local members. I was just a little weirded out by one detail. It so happens that I've heard, and participated in, a lot of recorded guided meditations that were led by Case's successor Ann Davies. They were all recorded in that very room; the acoustics were unmistakable, and so were the tones of the old Hammond electric organ that provided accompaniment and gave us the tones to chant. It really did feel now and then as though Davies or Case himself were about to stroll back into the room.
So my pilgrimage is complete. I expect to be back at some point -- there are already conspiracies under way to bring me back to LA to do my classic two-day geomancy workshop, which is open to complete beginners and teaches them how to do accurate, detailed geomantic readings, and I have a far faint hope that someday I will have an event in the PRS auditorium, sit in the chair where Manly P. Hall gave Sunday talks for more than half a century, and offer some teachings. We'll see.
It's nearly midnight and
I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out 
Okay, first up we've got the Dangerous Maybe podcast with hosts Mikey and Nance. Regulars will remember this as the show where I had a memorable and surprisingly congenial conversation with Nick Land, accelerationist mage and current idol of the Silicon Valley technofuturist scene. This one is another meeting of very different minds, and if anything it's a little odder. Chris Cutrone is a Marxist university professor who's spent years now talking about why the Marxist left has failed to deal with the realities of our time; he sometimes calls himself the Last Marxist. As Nance put it, "The last Marxist, an archdruid, and two high school dropouts walk into a bar..." 
Next is the Legalise Freedom podcast with host Greg Moffit. It's been quite a while since I was last on Greg's show but the chemistry was as good as always. Our ostensible topic this time was my anthology of W.B. Yeats's magical writings, but the discussion spun away as usual in all kinds of interesting directions, with politics particularly high up on the list. Greg ended up titling the conversation "What Is Magic? Mass Hypnosis, Mind Power, and the Struggle for your Soul," which pretty much summarizes the theme. You can listen to the first half of it free 
Third is the Pearl Snap Tactical Podcast with host Mark. I doubt anybody will have trouble guessing that Mark is on the opposite end of half a dozen spectrums from Chris Cutrone, who I mentioned above -- though I suspect the two of them could have a lively and pleasant conversation if they gave it a try! Mark and I talked about the rise of populism in today's America, the accelerating decline of the decadent managerial elite, the rise of a new entrepreneurial elite, and the cascading changes in American society, politics, economics, and culture that are unfolding out of the current elite replacement cycle. It's on all the usual podcast venues, but Mark suggests his Substack as a good portal; you'll find it 
I'm delighted to announce that the fifth novel in my Ariel Moravec occult detective series is now available for preorders. 