Late last summer, Richard Metzger launched a project called Magick Show on Kickstarter. In his own words, Magick Show is intended to be a "serious, in-depth exploration of magick--not pulling rabbits out of a hat, but the kind that can change reality itself."
The project--executive produced by Metzger's longtime friend media theorist Douglas Rushkoff--secured interviews with over 50 modern occultists, experts, authors, artists and witches in Los Angeles, New York and London. But then the company that had funded the shoot went under.
Metzger achieved his Kickstarter goal and Magick Show: A Masterclass in Modern Occultism was thus activated. Those interviewed include the late Kenneth Anger (in his final interview), Grant Morrison, Gary Lachman, Bri Luna the Hoodwitch, Mitch Horowitz, Maja D'Aoust, Luke Haines, Amanda Yates Garcia and Robert Shehu-Ansell. It’s presented like a big conversation, cutting from one speaker to the next over trippy visuals and music sourced from the London-based Library of the Occult record label.
Metzger is best known for Disinformation, his notorious UK TV show on Channel 4, which brought counterculture and high weirdness into British living rooms, and for the NYC-based website and publishing company of the same name. His follow-up project, the outsider arts blog Dangerous Minds (2009-2020) co-created with his wife Tara McGinley was a longtime part of the VICE media group. These days Metzger is returning to his Operation Mindfuck roots. Magick Show's first episode has just been released and he's started giving monthly occult lectures online. Metzger also has a book in the works, which he told me is "the new Cosmic Trigger, but this time the synchronicities have a bigger budget, it’s sexier and there’s artificial intelligence."
You can keep track of Metzger's magical doings at MagickSchool.net (note the Crowleyan "K" in the URL.)I interviewed Metzger about Magick Show, Magick School, the current state of the world and his memoir-in-progress Higher Revolutionary Mutation.
RU Sirius: I first interviewed you for Mondo 2000 back in the mid-late 90s. The “World Wide Web” was still novel and you had just launched the Disinformation website. Now it’s 2025 and you've created Magick Show. How have the changes in technology and culture impacted how you think about or work with magick... or has it?
Richard Metzger: That was late 1996? I had a pretty fully-formed magical worldview by then, one centered around communications technology, marketing, semiotics, and the use of mass media propaganda techniques. Using the most advanced technology in service of your goals. I've always seen magick as my art form, so, no, that hasn't changed much.
I will say that I'm all in on AI. It's the most advanced occult communication device ever created, you just have to know how to approach it. Why it's the 21st century Ouija Board, I tell you! Seriously though, it's interesting because during the first half of 2024 it still seemed like all ChatGPT was good for was like book report kinda stuff. Summarizing something or having it write something for you. Still a toy, basically. And then by mid-summer Google's Gemini AI became so fucking good that it was just utterly jaw-dropping. That particular AI has suggested advanced ideas for technological sorcery that I never, ever could have come up with on my own, and I think that I'm pretty inventive when it comes to that kind of thing. I'd read it back and think 'My god, this is absolutely brilliant.' Beyond clever. On an entirely different level.
Anyone who hasn't updated their concept of how to do magick in the 21st century to include AI needs to do that immediately. Jerking off onto a piece of your homemade art is only going to get you so far, frankly. The magick doesn't happen because of a sigil, the sigil is like the mouse is to a computer. The trick is to use the AI like it's a mouse. That seems so obvious, doesn't it?
RU: The trend is to see tech in dystopian terms with the internet being defined by Cory Doctorow’s notion of “enshitification” and the emerging discourse around technofeudalism. Should we be taking on the tech bro ruling class? Should we steal this singularity? And, if so, what do you have in your bag of magickal tricks to help effect that kind of social change?
RM: I might have to pass on this question because I'll sound too much like a Luigi Mangione stan.
RU: I’ve already broached the Luigi vibe in another interview so maybe you can think about a way to finesse an answer to the question.
RM: That is the answer.
RU: What’s the synergetic impact of bringing a large number of practitioners of magick, witchcraft and so forth into a singular context?
RM: I see magick as a metaphor for creativity and I approach almost everything I do as some kind of spell. Even mundane tasks, if that just means that I might see cooking dinner as a 'working' to make my wife feel more loved, then I'm still scratching two itches with one effort and mentally working on two levels, right? That's just the way my mind has always worked, ever since I was a little kid, I'm always on two parallel tracks inside of my head. With Magick Show I'm casting a spell to educate — and entertain I hope — and also to perhaps seed the beginnings of a magical worldview in someone watching it who is new to the subject matter. Everyone needs to start somewhere and there are so many brilliant minds on display in Magick Show, each of them with their own style of doing things so that a very persuasive argument gets made in favor of magick. Some of what the viewer will hear is going to resonate with them and then maybe they'll go out and buy a book by Mitch Horowitz and try to do something on their own. On one hand it's a pretty wild TV show--and if that is all that someone gets out of it, that's fine by me. But if someone is both entertained and awakened to the idea of magick as a way to improve their lives, then it's working on multiple levels, as I intended. But the strength of the message, of the spell, relies upon for its charge these 50 amazing people seen onscreen. Each of them brings their magick to the overall working and it's a far stronger, more impactful product for it. It's not just one voice, it's a massive magick choir.
RU: A lot of the excitement in recent years has revolved around the notion of Chaos Magick. Does that language still have potency and/or how has this tendency mutated?
RH: That is a really good question. Chaos Magick is great. I have no quarrel with Chaos Magick or Chaos Magick practitioners, but those books came out in the 80s and the magick scene has kind of ossified since then. At least in terms of occult literature, so much of what is published these days is just a rehash of Peter Carroll and Phil Hine's work, or books that offer to explain Crowley to the reader who can't be bothered to read the original texts. When is the last time you read a book about magick where you thought "wow, that's an original contribution," or saw something truly new that you haven't seen before? For me that would be the Peter Carroll and Phil Hine's books in the late 80s. My favorite books on magick are business books, Napoleon Hill, Good to Great, and of course Erik Davis's High Weirdness. I feel like Erik's book has heroically kept the counterculture freak flag flying high, almost single-handedly. It's the one that's turning the young people on to Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. I see that book as an absolute "must-read" classic.
RU: Speaking of business books, you’ve mentioned Think and Grow Rich as one of your big influences… not what you’d usually expect from someone with touchstones like RAW and McKenna. How do those influences fit together? How do you think about money and magick?
RM: Well one way they fit together is through William S. Burroughs who was a big fan of Think and Grow Rich. The notion of the "third mind" which Burroughs and his partner-in-crime Brion Gysin were both interested in comes from Napoleon Hill — the "mastermind concept" he called it--that if you have two people together who are engaged in a certain creative activity, that it's almost like there's a third mind present in the room with them, that 1 + 1 = 3. I think some of the folded-in text used in Nova Express came from Think and Grow Rich, too.
I feel like Mitch Horowitz has really done the general public who are interested in magick a very big favor by giving so much attention to Napoleon Hill's work. Hill’s system works. It gets shit done by incorporating common sense, hard work, concentration, always being friendly, agreeable and respectful to those you deal with and various sorts of psych-yourself-up techniques that people like Tony Robbins will teach you for thousands of dollars in a weekend workshop. This all prefigured Neuro-Linguistic Programming and that sort of motivation magick, but it's kind of the same trip. These, I guess you could call them "success magick" techniques, work. Anyone who does what Hill prescribes will benefit from it, there is no question about it. He even openly discusses sex magick in Think and Grow Rich!
And as to the connection between money and magick, what would the difference be between Rupert Murdoch's magick and someone working for $16 an hour who is doing sigil magick after work? You tell me.
RU: Your old site Disinformation played with conspiracy theory as did so many of us in countercultural media in the 1990s. Conspiracy theory was an obsession of both left and right during the 20th century. Now it’s weaponized by the far right in a way that seems increasingly consequential. Q is, in a way, patient zero for the most toxic brand of conspiracy theory. I now view conspiracy theory as the main conspiracy. That is, conspiracy theory and belief is so prevalent that it saturates the view of political discourse and acts as a camouflage in which actual conspiracies can operate with impunity. How do you view all that now?
RH: Even then I saw a future in which large-scale cyberspace black magick operations — propaganda, in other words, and how the Russians have weaponized social media to make Americans lose their minds— would be practiced by bad actors. Thirty years ago it looked to me like it would ultimately shake out into two sides, the dumb and the smart, between politicians who tell the truth and shameless liars, and that a tug of war over reality would be waged there. I talked about this on CNN back in the late 1990s. I was asked if I thought it was a bad thing that average citizens would have a problem distinguishing fact from fiction and I said, yes, I did think that, but it would ultimately really depend on which side you were on, wouldn't it? What I didn't appreciate then — it took until Sarah Palin arrived on the scene around the same time as YouTube comments to clue me in — was how incredibly fucking stupid around 40% of the American population is. I didn't realize how bad it was until the 2008 election.
Media literacy is a big, big problem and quite honestly I see no way out of it. This is the way it's going to be from here on out, especially when the next QAnon will have AI-generated video "proof" that Hillary Clinton is eating the pituitary glands of babies as a pizza topping. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, "Make it worse!" I'm pretty sure the future's got a whole lot more ‘worse’ in store for us.
RU: What is Magick School?
RM: Douglas, Grant and I were on a Zoom call and Grant said that with all that's going on in the world currently, it might be somewhat incumbent upon us as the old guys--his point being that we were the same age as Leary or Bob Wilson or Paul Laffoley were when we met them--to pass along what we've figured out about this stuff in the way they inspired us. That seemed very attractive to me for a few reasons. First, because Grant's right, with the darkness that's fallen across the globe, maybe it is time to try to raise some trickster energies to monkey with these assholes and see if some X-Men types show up and want to play. Also, I live in a red state and to be perfectly frank, aside from my wife, I've got like one friend here, so by offering these monthly lectures, I will get to have interaction with some intelligent people and socialize in that way. I'm lonely is what I suppose I am saying.
RU: Let’s move on to the autobiographical material you’re working on now, Higher Revolutionary Mutation. What would you tell Mindplex readers about your choice of a title?
RM: The title refers to something someone says in the book about PSI and mutations occurring in human beings. The narrative is concerned with a three-year period in the mid-90s, where a series of extremely improbable synchronicities occurred one right after the other like a freaky short story. Quite spectacular coincidences — that for whatever reason I cannot tell you — I completely forgot about until last summer. Honestly, it was like I had amnesia. And then these long-buried memories resurfaced slowly like champagne bubbles floating up or lights twinkling on over the course of about five or six months and the inescapable implications of what these events strongly suggest have caused a significant shift in the way I see reality. It just took me 30 years until I pieced it all together. But I really didn't even do that, it was more like an intrusive thought that was sort of nagging at me for a few months. Then one day I had the eureka moment: Holy shit, this was ME doing these things and signing them like a painter with increasing levels of impossible-to-miss absurdity. But it's not an autobiography at all. It's an already complicated thread to follow, so I tried to only give enough context for the narrative and for the motivations to make sense. Anything extraneous to the ideas I wanted to get across I left out. Trust me it's convoluted enough as it is without being a memoir.
RU: So you're saying there's lot of emphasis on remarkable “coincidences” in this work-in-progress. What John Lilly called the “Earth Coincidence Control Office” seemed to be working overtime with you. What do you think was happening?
RM: This will sound nutty, but mark my words, I promise you that I will have the last laugh: I think another me from the future — perhaps it's this same me who is typing this sentence or maybe it's even a me from a parallel universe — figured how to use an advanced AI to hack time and send blatantly obvious and humorous messages to myself when I was younger that I was not supposed to miss. Messages that addressed me by my own name and date of birth. Things so outlandishly conspicuous that you would have to be an idiot not to notice them. Like a bird shitting on your head kind of obvious. What I haven't figured out is why I did this. I know that it happened, that much is not in dispute, so I already know the what, I just don't know the how or the why. Oh, and I also had (at least) two co-conspirators. One of them said "Yep, it’s really obvious that we did this together, isn’t it?" and the other one doesn't know yet.
