Dr Angela Puca AP: If you’re interested in invented religions you’re really going to enjoy this one.

Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a University Lecturer and a researcher and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick and Magick practising religions and traditions.

Today I have here a special guest. Someone that I’m really excited about and it’s Professor Carole Cusack from the University of Sydney. I really admire her work, she has published extensively in the field of Religious Studies and she also published on Paganism and the field of religions which are invented or made up somehow but then still manifest religious connotations. So please do check out the timestamps so that you can skip to whichever topic you are most interested in. But yeah, I’m really happy to have Carole here with us and so help me in welcoming professor Cusack. Hello Carole, how are you today? Thank you so much for being here on Angela’s Symposium.

Prof Carole Cusack CC: Thank you Angela for inviting me. I greet you from my office in Sydney at which point it is 10 past 11 at night on a very, very hot, hot summer day.

AP: Yeah, thank you so much I understand that it must be also quite challenging to be doing this late at night.

CC: Not a problem. I’m something of a night owl. I’m often up very, very late. It’s fine.

AP: Speaking of night owls, I am wearing the Sisters of Mercy T-shirt in your honour because I know that you are a fan.

CC: Yes, one of the more frivolous things that I did was having to examine a PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh in 2017 and also intending to go to the European Association for the study of Religion Conference in Leuven. I left Edinburgh and flew to Dresden to see the Sisters at the Alte Schlachthof there just for one night and then I flew back into Leuven for the conference. And I have of course seen them in Sydney as well but it did seem appropriate.

AP: That’s really amazing, that’s commitment. But yeah, I’m really, really happy to have you here on the channel because you have done amazing research in a field that I’m really interested in and I’m really sure that even my viewers will be interested in your work as well. So I suggest you look it up and I will leave all the information about Carole’s works and contact details in the infobox.

My first question is about since you have studied a lot of invented religions or made up religions and you have talked quite a bit about the idea of provisional beliefs. I’d like to ask you to expand more on that what are provisional beliefs and what role do they play in these religions or maybe in any religion? If that’s a question that can be answered.

CC: Look, it’s a really interesting question and it’s worth unpacking quite a bit. I mean one of the problems is that people have quite narrow ideas about what certain things mean. So if you say do you believe in X or Y, most people will think that that’s some kind of absolute. That it doesn’t mean like on Tuesday afternoon when you have a headache and you want to go home, do you believe X in which case the answer might be oh not very much, whereas on Saturday morning, when you’re feeling relaxed and happy about the world the answer might be oh yes, obviously. And some listeners might think that’s sort of frivolous but I don’t think it is. I think that human beings are excellent at holding often mutually contradictory beliefs and they don’t struggle from it. It’s not like an existential crisis. The obvious answer, which I really like, the example that I give a lot of my students is, if they think about their self do they think that it’s something kind of stable and essential and real or do they think that they’re basically fluid and changing and likely to be something entirely different next week and the interesting thing is that almost every student and I’m talking about not ordinary undergraduates, they start aged 18 they finish, around about 21, they nearly always say both because they do think they’ve got some kind of core that is them, that makes them not somebody else, that makes them consistently a consciousness. But they also believe in the idea that they’re plastic and malleable and changeable and could be something completely different in five years, if not in five months. And, of course, the truth of the matter is that both things are true.

I am not you and it wouldn’t matter how hard I tried to think about myself and pretend or act or identify as being you, I would not be you. I am me and ‘me’ has some kind of stability but actually, the person I was when I was 20, the person I was when I was 30 are not the person I am now at almost 60. You were very conscious, through time, of how you alter. So it occurred to me a long, long time ago that even though I thought of myself as a principal sort of person and that, in general, I don’t identify with post-modernism and I think of myself as an epistemological realist – which would probably prejudice me. Most people would think towards the stable self-view rather than the plastic developmental self-feel.

I realized that it wasn’t a simple either-or that it is possible to be both kinds of person and I think about provisional beliefs. We talked about this earlier, Angela, about being like playing chess. That you look at a board and you see potential moves that you might make that would influence the game in certain ways but ultimately, the way the game works, you must choose one move. And so the whole of life this is a fairly standard sort of argument amongst philosophers who are interested in linguistic determinism. The whole of life is making choices that mean that you don’t make other choices and you make those choices on the basis of beliefs or ideas or opinions or influences or people that you know at the moment and those things could change and it doesn’t mean because you’ve made choice ‘A’, necessarily, that you will be dictated by choice ‘A’ for the rest of your life.

And it also struck me, when I first started to work in Religious Studies, I noticed that because it was still quite a conservative sort of era, it was the early 1980s, that there were models that were inherited from Christianity and the idea sort of seemed to be that if you had a religious conviction and you stuck to it forever then that meant you were kind of a principled person. And if you moved from one religious tradition to another or did, you know, kind of exploration of various kinds that meant that somehow you were a frivolous gadfly. And of course, probably the 40 years between 1980 and now have told us that that’s not true, that once people are cut loose from ancestral religious traditions and given the opportunity to consider how they’d like to structure their life, actually the model of ‘seekership’ of moving from one set of beliefs to another from thinking about yourself as a certain kind of person and then five or ten years later deciding you’re a different kind of person. It doesn’t strike us as frivolous anymore. It strikes us as natural and evolving. The person who clings to a set of ideas without development, without reflection, without change is the one that we’re more likely to feel negatively about. So I think that it’s quite… I mean I hate using the words ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ because they’re both words that you really shouldn’t ever use, they should be in heavy square coat quotes, you know scare quotes. And it’s like normal of course slips very quickly into normative you know if you say something’s normal then it means everyone’s got to do it. But it now seems to me to be quite normal that people treat phases of their lives as temporary commitments rather than as commitments that are inescapably permanent. It seems to me that our common mode, now, is provisional belief rather than the idea that, well I believe X and I’m going to die in a ditch or on a hilltop for that belief.

AP: Where’s the idea of provisional belief comes from? Is there a particular scholar that kind of theorized it?

CC: I don’t really think so. I mean I’ve got a whole lot of scholars that I’m interested in. I think the people who first worked on ideas about religious shifting and change and also counter-cultural identities. So people like Wade Clark Ruth in America and Colin Campbell in the UK, both of whom were Sociologists. They were looking at people who changed and who made unconventional choices and then maybe revised those choices. There are also people who did, for example, longitudinal religious projects. I mean the most obvious example of those, they’re American academics; Paul Wink W-I-N-K and Michelle Dillon who co-authored a number of books with him. They have a book called “In the Course of a Lifetime” and it’s about a longitudinal questionnaire of people, I think it began in the 20s. And so people were questioned from when they were children through adolescence, adulthood into ageing and finally to very, very great old age and all of the subjects, I believe, of that survey are now dead. But Wink and Dillon wrote a number of books about how people changed as they just lived, you know, even people who didn’t particularly choose to become provisional believers, flexible, open, alternative people, nevertheless, found themselves altering just as they went along the path of life.

AP: Does it connect with the idea of invented religions?

CC: Yes, I think it does because when I started working in this field I was driven really by an aim that has kind of been obscured. I do often mention it when I’m interviewed or asked about it but most people aren’t that interested in it, which is that I was interested in subjects there that were not properly, documented like not in an academic sense. There was no academic literature and most of the sources were websites and hand-produced zines and fringe or underground books from publishers that were generally not considered to be reputable. And so I really started off doing a project trying to turn very flimsy, non-academic materials into something that scholars could do something with. But I realized when I started trying to theorize the movements that I wanted to write a book about, this was in 2009 when I was writing the book, I realized that I had to have some kind of theoretical framework that I could fit them into because there was no way that I thought established academia, at the time, would be very welcoming of this sort of material.

So rather than just saying, well you know I like this stuff and I think it’s interesting I came up with the idea that the sorts of groups that I wanted to talk about were groups where they explicitly announced that they’d made it up, they didn’t try to offer a narrative of legitimation through historical linkages to other religious or esoteric traditions. Rather the founders said, well we did this and we did it because we thought it answered a need in our own lives and in the lives of those people whom we originally recruited from. And so that’s my first principle, is that an invented religion says it’s invented. It’s not an invented religion if people jump around and say no, no that’s not true, we didn’t make it up. That’s something different and of course, maybe I might feel differently about it if I were doing it now. It’s just that in 2009, despite the fact that Ronald Hutton had published “Triumph of the Moon” in 1999 it was still common amongst Wiccans and even looser Pagans, to invoke the argument that they were not an invented tradition that they were an inherited tradition of Witchcraft that had been subjugated by Christians in Europe and had kind of re-emerged in the 19th century largely because of secularization and the kind of weakening of Christian dominance. And I suppose there may still be Pagans who want to cling to that narrative but most of them now are highly reflexive and are willing to kind of go with the argument that a lot of it was largely pieced together by figures like Gerald Gardner and that Wicca itself probably is like the parent invented tradition of a lot of modern religions. But at that time I didn’t have that as my model, it wasn’t really acknowledged. And it’s interesting, David Robertson tried to catch me the first time he interviewed me for the Religious Studies Project and he said he thought that the elephant in the room was Scientology and I said no, no. Because L Ron Hubbard never said he made it up. He linked it to reincarnatory traditions. He crafted an autobiography in which he was initiated into the Blackfoot tribe of Native Americans and he had communicated with Taoist Sages and it was so much not, and I made this up. So that was my baseline and of course, obviously, this works really well with kind of ideas about provisional belief, particularly perhaps with Discordianism, which is the group that comes first chronologically, being founded in 1957. Because Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, who founded Discordianism in a bowling alley with a couple of friends in East Whittier, California in 1957, openly admitted that they originally wanted to craft something that was largely a sort of parody religion. But the interesting thing was that they both came to believe that it was real and it took about 20 years.

I think Margot Adler, when she was interviewing people in 1977, for “Drawing Down the Moon,” her book about Pagans and earth-worshipping groups in America, she interviewed Greg Hill, she didn’t get to speak to Thornley directly but Greg Hill told her that if you took the Goddess of Chaos, Eris which Discordians believe and you rested existentially in her and you took her as seriously as you might take a deity like Yahweh then you would discover that you would be taken, I think what he says, is on the very same trip, i.e. that it would work in the same sort of way. And he then said that Thornley had spoken to him recently and he said to Margot Adler, well what he says is, if I’d known all of this was going to become, you know, just going to come true I would have chosen Venus. He was regretting Eris, the Goddess of Chaos as the tutelary spirit that he’d called in, almost summoned, in a kind of Ceremonial Magick idea of summoning, that he’d summoned into his life and then he realized, well there were a lot of other goddesses and gods out there. Maybe, I could have chosen one that would have been more benevolent. But in that interview with Margot Adler proves that after 20 years of walking the walk and talking the talk and engaging with Eris as the Goddess, the fundamental divine energy at the base of the universe. Both Thornley and Hill had gone from being cheeky post-school-boys, college students who were kind of just messing with the idea of the goddess and religion to people who were profoundly marked by the reality of Eris, I guess, and you can see that with other groups as well.

I mean the Church of All Worlds, the other one that’s kind of interesting from that point of view because it migrated from being more of a fiction-based religion to being a mainstream pagan organization after about five years. But mostly these people put themselves on the line crafted a narrative of theology, whatever you want to call it and they didn’t just ignore it then and just push it out into the world. They lived it and I think that’s the key thing with an invented religion. A lot of people say to me all the time, but these people aren’t serious and I say well, if you’ve walked the walk and took the talk for 20 or 40 or 50 or 60 years, you do mean it and it’s transformative. It will make you someone different.

AP: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean also the fact that these are not just invented religions but religions that are intentionally and openly invented. It’s not something that is pretending to be something else and it makes me wonder what’s the difference between an invented religion and a non-invented religion if any? So what makes a religion legitimate which really doesn’t have to be related to the fact that they are or aren’t invented?

CC: No and that’s where somebody like L Ron Hubbard becomes really interesting. I just said in my last answer to you, I don’t think Scientology is an invented religion, not as I would define them. But nevertheless, he’s a really interesting character to think about because he’s a founder, he’s a charismatic leader. If you talk to Scientologists, who are sincerely and actively involved in church, they’ll tell you about his amazing qualities and his spiritual gifts and the way that he developed this incredibly important path and he’s a kind of messianic figure. He’s not exactly a god, that would be, I think, incorrect but the difference between L Ron Hubbard and somebody like Jesus or Confucius or Muhammad is or Buddha is that L Ron Hubbard was pretty happy to have pretty much everything that he ever said or thought written down. In fact, he once said I believe that the greatest invention in all humankind’s era was magnetic tape. He used to walk around talking into a tape recorder all the time and of course, it means that he’s uncommonly well chronicled and of course, for critics of Scientology this provides weaponry. They want to talk about how he was a hypocrite and interested in making money and B or even C grade science fiction writer and how there were all sorts of abuses and problems and so on and so forth in his movement. Now the truth of the matter is that could have been true of early Christianity or early Islam or early Buddhism or the reforms of whatever literate tradition that Confucius claimed he was reforming. The difference is that there’s hardly any material surviving that we find. It really hard to pin down those leaders, they’re kind of evanescent. I mean early Islam, well the first biography of the prophet Muhammad was written like 200 years after he’s dead and he’s the most recent of the kind of great, well not if it depends how you define the world religions if you want to put Sikhism in there will Guru Nanak is many centuries after Muhammad but these are people who are coming close to our era and there are historians and people working looking for documents. In the world of the invented religions because they all begin in the 50s and the 60s there’s so much more that you can read and there are people who are still alive and you can ask them about stuff and so when you say, what’s the difference between an invented and a non-invented religion?

I suppose in one way I’m sort of saying to you one of the differences is that the non-invented religions are usually those religions that are considered to be traditional, there are a couple of ways of defining that the world religions paradigm is one of them. So Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism with, perhaps, a few others thrown in. They’ve got to be textual, for example, and they’ve got to have purpose-built structures and a dedicated priesthood and so on. So some versions of the world religions paradigm would put Sikhism, for example, Confucianism, Taoism into that bracket. Now that’s one way of defining traditional. Another way of defining traditional is indigenous religions and invented religions are quite different from them too because indigenous religions are mostly orally transmitted and they don’t identify a charismatic leader or founder. They’re more and they’re very kind of connected to kinship and the earth and so on and so forth. But it depends how many kinds of levels of detail you want to go down through because for myself because I’m basically an enlightenment rationalist, I actually believe all religions are invented.

But that’s why my little group are different because they announce that they are. Where all the other ones hang on really firmly to the idea that they don’t announce that they are. They’re either the ancestral practice of time immemorial, which is like the indigenous thing or they’re the charismatic leader-oriented world, religions like Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed or their traditions like Confucianism and Taoism and Hinduism which don’t focus so much on a founder. I know most people think about Confucianism as being founded by Confucius and in fact, they would even say should you use the word Confucianism? And I’m using it as a kind of shorthand but he definitely said he wasn’t starting anything he was just kind of restating a traditional position. So there are all these other religions and groups and they’re not invented because A they say that they’re not and B their origin points are so far in the distance that it’s impossible for us to conduct the kind of forensic investigation that I’m interested in. And I think that’s probably about the best I can do. But on the base, for my own position, as a secularist, I believe that all religions are human cultural products and that means ultimately human beings all invented or crafted or created or whatever word you want to use the religions that we know of.

AP: Yeah, I find it really interesting how you define the category of invented religions as kind of having this element of self-identification with being with their aspect of being invented and the idea that they are recent enough so that we can kind of trace back to where they started and analyse the entire length of their existence. That is quite interesting but that also makes me wonder since, here on the channel and in general I’m, as you can tell particularly interested in Magick. I wonder is there any difference between the practice of Magick that happens within invented religions and the practice of Magick which happens within more established or traditional traditions?

CC: Okay, that’s a really complicated question. When you think about magickal practice you know it’s such a broad term it can encompass things that are as complex as the Ceremonial Magick of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the sorts of spells and potions and talismans that village Wise Men and Women used to provide to their clients. And I’ve thought long and hard about this whole question about Magick in invented religions because in a couple of cases they’re very obviously is but in, I’d say, the majority Magick is more or less absent. So it’s probably better to talk about the easy cases first. So the Church of All Worlds, founded on the 7th of April in 1962 by another two American college students Tim Zell and Lance Christie. It was originally based on Robert A Heinlein’s science fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” which is the story of a man called Valentine Michael Smith who was actually a human baby whose parents die in a probe to Mars and he’s brought up by Martians and then brought back to earth and he preaches a kind of gospel which he claims encompasses Martian values which include complete sexual freedom, non-traditional family structures, the truth of all religious traditions, everything is true. Which is kind of an interesting one philosophically or logically. And initially, Tim Zell and Lance Christie modelled their new religion, which they called the Church of All Worlds after the church that Valentine Michael Smith founds in the novel and they tried to instantiate it in their world based on the same sorts of things. So they did things that people did in the novel like sharing water as a sacrament because Mars is dry and hot and Mike tells all of his followers on earth that the sharing of water is the most precious thing that people can do and you know polyamory and various other sorts of things were part of it.

But in 1967 Tim Zell met Frederick Mclaren Adams who founded Feraferia that year and was one of the leaders, in America, of the Pagan revival and from that point on, from that year on, the Church of All Worlds called itself a Pagan religion. They incorporated the Wiccan wheel of the year as their holy times. Even though they went through a few more changes, I think in 1971 Zell had a vision and they then decided that the Goddess, which they’d already pretty much lined up behind as a kind of basic Wiccan idea, was actually the earth and human beings were like the consciousness of the earth and basically everybody had to, you know, work towards planetary consciousness. But also the worship, the veneration, the cultivation, the care of this precious earth. But their ideas about Magick we came to know, I suppose a lot more about, when Oberon Zell, as he now is, or Oberon Zell-Ravenheart – somehow he changed his name a few times over time, founded a thing called the Grey School of Wizardry.

Now it was encouraged or based on, in a way, JK Rowling’s Hogwarts and he kind of costumes himself in interviews and things now as a kind of Dumbledore, a senior Wizard with a large beard, wearing a cloak and a hat and holding a staff and speaking about wisdom etc. But what he did, which I think was really interesting and it might be something that you could think a little bit more about. You asked about the place of Magick well he says Magick’s not religious and just because somebody’s organized a religion and they might do Magick the two things don’t have to be stuck together. And in fact, he says about the Grey School of Wizardry which we all assume has something to do with Gandalf in Lord of the Rings being called Gandalf the Grey you know there are the wizards with the different colours, Saruman the White, Radagast the Brown. He says that Magick is not religious and it’s not denominational and it’s not kind of restricted and so what he wanted to do was found a magickal school where people, who weren’t Pagans, if they wanted to learn herb-craft or flower-Magick or binding-spells or any particular kind of Magick they wouldn’t have to feel that it was, in some sense, in opposition to or a challenge to their own religious identity.

He actually said the Grey School is a magickal school, it’s not a Pagan school. Of course, the thing is that the people who were on the faculty and who still are on the faculty, though some of the original faculty have since died, are all basically Pagan elders from Druidry and Wicca and Eclectic Paganism and all sorts of different traditions. And so I think, if you were a fundamentalist Christian who wanted to learn a bit of Magick, you might be put off actually doing it through the Grey School because it does look pretty Pagan. But he sees Magick more as a kind of alternative lore, that is L-O-R-E and it’s interesting. I know Oberon moderately well and we’ve talked a lot about whether or not Magick contradicts science and just as he says it’s not necessarily religious. He also says it doesn’t contradict science and it’s very interesting. He and Lance Christie their original degrees when they first met at Westminster College in Missouri they were studying Psychology and he went on to start a PhD in Psychology, though he never finished it, he actually got a doctorate eventually in divinity and Lance Christie got a doctorate in Environmental Sciences so these people are not dumb, by any means and nor are they in any sense hostile to western education, they’re actually quite pro it, really. And he would also argue he does argue that the things that he has done in his life with colleagues and friends and family within Church of All Worlds that might be deemed to be magickal, he would also think of as scientific.

So, for example, there’s an interesting period where he and his second wife Morning Glory, who died in 2014, they bred these unicorn goats, they only had a single horn and I can remember when I was first getting to know him, I wrote and I said but you know they’re unicorn goats and he says who said a unicorn has to be anything other. A unicorn just means one horn. If you get an animal that’s only got one horn and it’s like an exception and normally you would expect it to be two horns. Well, our goats are basically magical but they weren’t because in fact they’re just the result of genetics and it’s scientific and I can tell you how it was done. So I both believe it is Magick because the unicorn, a mysterious beast that no one had seen for centuries, was reborn in modern America because of our breeding program. So it is Magick but it’s just science.

AP: Yeah I was captured by… Yeah, I guess that Magick tends to be quite linked to certain categories but never quite gets embedded in them so to speak. So it is kind of linked or tangent to religion, it is linked or tangent to science, it is linked or tangent to philosophy but then it’s neither of those things. So I’d say that Magick can be seen as a beast of its own but at the same time, it seems to encompass elements of different human endeavours.

CC: Totally but I think, if we think about what’s happened to Magick in the west, at least, in the last 40 to 50, 50 years let’s say. We’ve had a kind of chaos turn that’s shifted away from kind of established ceremonial Magic via Austin Osmond Spare and Kenneth Grant to the Illuminates of Thanoteros, Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin’s group that emerges in the 70s and the books that they kind of put out. Which seem to throw, to use an old-fashioned quotation, the baby out with the bathwater and I think this is very interesting because a lot of people coming through now and thinking about Magick, think about it in terms of the chaos paradigm and they think that it’s possible to do Magick really in a quite simple sort of way whereas I think Oberon Zell would agree with the founders of Chaos Magick that actually he’d been deeply embedded himself in Magickal Studies and had come to be competent across that body of knowledge and practice and deciding, essentially, that you move forward in a new kind of practice that looks eclectic and less traditional and more fluid and less hierarchical. But it nevertheless comes from a position of genuine embeddedness. Whereas, for example, if you were to talk about Magick and Discordianism or Magick and Jedism you’d be about something that was much less anchored in the history of Western Magick and was a lot more about culture jamming and I suppose, a theorizing of something that might look like what Kerry Thornley came to call American Zen, you know the idea that you have moments of enlightenment you have riddles and koans, you practice these kinds of riddles.

If you look at Discordians you know they would say that things like ‘operation mind’ which is you know sort of a subversive worldview but which also manifested in certain kinds of actions which could be called magical actions but they could equally be called art happenings or you know that’s where people would just hand out cards to random strangers and those cards would say, you know ‘there is no enemy anywhere, there is no friend anywhere’ and you know sort of an enigmatic, epigrammatic kind of statements and the idea was well if you could provoke, what my colleague Alex Norman from Western Sydney University many many years ago termed, ‘guerilla enlightenment.’ You know it’s like guerilla war tactics. You want to force enlightenment on people if you can whether they want it or not that’s not the point. But of course, that was very random, very unstructured, very not linked to any kind of historical magical tradition. And so I think when I think about the bulk of invented religions and I think about groups like Iglesia Maradoniana which is a church founded in 1998 by Hernán Amez and a friend whose name I can’t remember right now and worships the recently deceased footballer Diego Maradona. Or Dudeism which was founded by Oliver Benjamin an American journalist who now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand and is based on the “Big Lebowski”, the Cowen Brothers film or Kopimism founded by Isaac Harrison in Sweden or I don’t know, the church, even the Church of the SubGenius founded in 1979 by Ivan Stang, Monte Dhooge and Philo Drummond. In all of those groups, there isn’t really Magick, Magick as your listeners and your own studies would see it. I like to say that there’s definitely magical thinking so that the world doesn’t necessarily look the way that you think it looks and all of these groups want you to see it differently. They want you somehow to be able to look at the world and see it differently and when they say differently they mean in a kind of explosive, well-turned upside down, totally kind of smash it up and start again kind of way. And they all believe in a kind of magical thinking, a kind of enlightenment…

AP: Re-enchantment perhaps.

CC: Definitely though that I think is a bit of a soft term and it’s always a bit difficult to know what to do with it because it can cover everything from someone who sees a film and finds it transformative to I don’t know it’s just the idea that the world isn’t the iron cage of rationality that you know. Max Weber said it was. So yeah re-enchantment and also Christopher Partridge’s term ‘occulture’ which I also think is kind of overly imprecise but in a lot of these areas actually fits pretty nicely. Because the areas themselves are pretty fuzzy around the edges and messy and unstructured and in lots of cases these religions are not perhaps that formalized and even those that are formalized are formalized in a kind of messy chaotic sort of way. And not everybody believes the same things or agrees that you have to do the same things or whatever. And in the more chaotic traditions that manifests with a hyper-individualistic kind of practice.

And that sort of fits nicely the Chaos Magick drift as well, you know, the idea that you don’t have to belong to a fraternity and you don’t have to study for 35 years or however long it is that it takes you to master the entire corpus of magical texts from, I don’t know, Hermes Trismegistus to the present. Who imagines that you can but it’s a little bit like the Discordian idea about guerilla enlightenment as well. You know, if you look at Rinzai and Rinzai Zen Monks in Japan the Koan training is like 30 years. The idea now is that people don’t have time to do that. Heck, in 30 years they might be someone completely different, they might have joined the Catholic Church or I don’t know, become an aardvark. This is the whole thing, you know, it’s like what used to be really prized in religious and spiritual traditions which was long, long immersion and deep, deep commitment to a single goal is now seen as totally impractical.

AP: Sometimes I feel that even categorizations which are not as precise can still be useful because they allow us to move forward our understanding of a specific phenomenon. And there are certain religious phenomena which, as you say, are really unstructured by their nature and so some sometimes even language needs to be unstructured and unprecise so that at least it starts a discussion and enables us to bring to the table all the connotations or lack thereof that this tradition may be having or not having. So I know it’s complicated for scholars and I find myself in this kind of place as well. But yeah, I may change my mind but I usually advocate for using labels, even when they are not particularly precise, just as a methodological tool to analyse what connotations of that word or that category may or may not appear in that specific tradition that I’m trying to analyse.

CC: I agree I think that particularly the Venn diagram idea, you know, where you try to see where different bunches overlap what’s the bit in the middle where they all kind of have a core. Is there a core or are they all kind of branching off? I mean, I think that kind of analysis where you use terms and you try to classify different groups and you try to see if there is something that they have in common or something that they’re kind of aiming towards. I think that can be very useful indeed. But I think it’s worth saying that all of these groups, even the ones that look sort of non-magical like Iglesia Maradoniana. I mean Diego Maradona, is he really magickal? Well he could kick a football pretty well and you know but truly he doesn’t appear to be like… but I mean that would be interesting too because, I think, the two people who founded Alejandro Verón and Hernán Amez they would argue that he was like a miraculous figure and I think this is another thing that’s very interesting. Miracle is a term that turns up more often in conventional kinds of ideas about religion and Magick is kind of pushed off to the side where it doesn’t fit in something like Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism. But there’s a sense in which if you just reduce both of them to adjectival forms so you talk about magical thinking or miraculous thinking. It’s much easier to see how they’re quite similar even if you think you could define Magick the noun and miracle the noun as being quite different when they’re just that kind of adjective form. What they point to is a non-materialist, non-reductive, naturalist view of the world. They point to a view of the world that allows for something that goes beyond the materialist or the naturalist.

AP: Yes, that’s really fascinating. So in we may say that on average, in invented religions, there is more of a magical thinking rather than magical practices even though there are, of course, exceptions to that?

CC: Yes, I think so.

AP: Now I’d like to ask you a few questions from my Patrons because I asked them whether they had questions for you and yeah, they sent me lots of them but I had to select a few because otherwise, this would last for 10 hours but yeah some of these are really interesting.

Andrew asks, has any researcher tried to create a religion for study purposes and if so did they succeed?

CC: That’s important. When researchers are researching, you will know that they are bound by ethics clearances. And one of the problems with this idea of did anybody ever, as part of a project, try to create a religion – to the best of my knowledge the answer is no and it’s largely because the ethical obstacles would be insurmountable. That doesn’t mean that some people haven’t tried deliberately to create religions for reasons other than say founders of the better known invented religions. And it’s true, one of the most interesting things I think is that people tend to forget that the study of invented religions is really a very small subcategory of the study of new religious movements which is actually a big field because there are gazillions of new religious movements all over the place. And one of the fascinating things about new religious movements and two of the really very venerable scholars who’ve studied them for years, Rodney stark and Tim Miller pointed out in an issue of Nova Religio about five years ago, I think might have been closer to ten, I get I lose track of these things, that the fate of almost every new religious movement is to die, almost none of them are successful. I mean the percentage that are successful is tiny. So what causes them to fail? Well, they don’t attract followers so they’re fundamentally unsuccessful, they attract followers but the followers are attracted to the charismatic leader and the charismatic leader ages and dies. There’s no succession planning or even if there is succession planning it doesn’t have the same you know passionate connection as the charismatic leader and so it dies. A lot of them run into financial problems, they have no money, they have difficulties getting registration, renting buildings, getting places to live, even access to things like camp-grounds and stuff like that. So if you look at an invented religion as a subcategory of new religious movements, new religious movement is a broad category where the majority of new religious movements the overwhelming majority of new religious movements fail. Invented religions that we know about usually succeed for a couple of reasons and this might be something that your listener…

AP: My Patron Andrew.

CC: Yes, might be interested in. They usually succeed because the thing that they’re riffing off or that they connect to has a much wider purchase in the community. So something like Jedism could be and I think this would be a mistake, but it could be seen as like an extreme form of Star Wars fandom. Star Wars is a big thing, it’s culturally significant for an enormous number of people who don’t want to become Jedi’s, who haven’t committed to it. And then there’s the kind of middle ground which is intense fandom and then there’s the Jedis. The same thing is true with the religions that were founded using Lord of the Rings as a sacred text. Marcus Davidson at Leyden university works on them. And some of the others that are, perhaps, not based on fictional texts but which have certain kinds of anarchist ideals. So Kopimism, which is about the free sharing of data on the internet which something perhaps we should all be interested in. It’s all, these things are all fitting into a background, a cultural background that everybody understands and knows and so even if you don’t want to join you at least can understand why it’s there or what it means. So I have to say to Andrew, your Patron, no, researchers haven’t tried to do that because really it’s unethical. They have in surveys and things described fake religions, like religions that weren’t real, to survey subjects and ask them to kind of respond about things like their ethics or their popularity or whatever but that’s quite different to trying to set up a religion and recruit people as part of a project which I cannot see as ethically permissible.

AP: Yeah, I agree. He also asks, are there any invented religions that have been created to further a conspiracy theory narrative?

CC: The most conspiratorial, invented religion is the Church of the SubGenius. I think you could argue that it was founded as a sort of anarchist art project in 1979. And the three young men, who founded it, set up an interesting set of parallel narratives and the parallel narratives are one that’s completely realistic, which is the one that says repent, quit your job, slack off and it says, basically, why are you a wage slave to capitalism? You won’t win, you won’t get anything out of it. The people, basically, the one percent don’t care about the 99 percent. The best thing you could do would be to try to cut yourself as free as possible from capitalism and from wage slavery and live a very simple kind of back to nature, low five, low tech lifestyle. Do the things that people love and that will make them happy, make music, make art, hang out, don’t try to be rich have money etc. But what they do, beside that realistic narrative, is they’ve crafted an intense and highly complex conspiracy narrative as well. And the conspiracy narrative involves different groups including the Elder Gods from HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and various other sorts of things and it’s all about how the SubGenii are this tiny group on earth where everybody else is what they call a pink or a normal, which means a person who can’t think for themselves and doesn’t have any kind of control over their lives and the evil Elder Gods oppress and kind of ruin everything and Bob Dobbs, the Messiah of this Church of the SubGenius, is in touch with this race of aliens called the Exists who are going to come and save them and rapture them all away from the earth before it all falls apart. Now the interesting thing about this is that this narrative is quite important and it gives rise to a whole lot of things like the observation of X day, which is the day that the aliens are supposed to come and rescue the SubGenii but which hasn’t happened and which may be infinitely delayed. But if you look at the mythos you’ll see that it kind of really is just a story about how the evil rich capitalist bastards are going to f**k you over. It’s just that it’s dressed up as the Elder gods and the [non-lexical vocables] so you could say that the conspiracy narrative is just like a kind of supernaturalist or at least intergalactic version of the realistic narrative, which is that the rich hate you and wage slavery is horrible and it’s better to be free and has nothing than to be a slave in the capitalist system.

AP: Thank you for answering this question I have another question from Wodenborn and he asks, do invented religions tend to focus more on material benefits like, for example, protection, money and success by magical means or the subjective experience compared to non-invented religions.

CC: Okay, it’s a really interesting question and I can tell you that almost every invented religion is not the least bit interested in anybody becoming rich or powerful mostly they are religions of drop-outs, religions of people who say nature is better than skyscrapers, making art is better than making money, successful, happy relationships with other human beings, friendships, sexual liaisons, group and encounters, and communal bringing up of children is better than the horrible toxic nuclear family that we have. Most of them are really, deeply uninterested in materialism and certainly, that’s true of the older three, the big three; Discordianism, the Church of all Worlds and the Church of the SubGenius, everybody who’s a member of those groups utterly rejects capitalist, materialist views of the world they just hate it and don’t want it. So subjective experience is, in fact, super important in every case because all of the religions basically say search your own heart, seek what you think is going to be truly fulfilling.

It doesn’t matter if it was made up in the beginning, if you do it and you engage with it and you find that it’s real, then it’s real. And those, that are more hopeful because there’s a strongly cynical kind of an even apocalyptic aspect in, especially, the Church of the SubGenius but the hopeful versions like the Church of All Worlds are strongly ecologically oriented. It’s better to plant 10 trees than it is to own a car. Many of the people who belong to the Church of the SubGenius have lived in communes in quite remote parts of, mostly, California often without running water or electricity, just subsistence living, growing everything they eat. So basically no, material profit is not a big part, it’s not even really for a lot of them it’s not even a part at all. Sorry, I just want to say even something like Jediism, one of the things that they’ve done, which is pretty amazing, in America is a lot of prison ministry and you know it’s not like the prisoners are anybody who’ve got anything or have any power. They’re disenfranchised, the people who’ve been left behind.

AP: Yeah and as I was saying, besides you already mentioned that there is more of a magical thinking rather than magical practice, so that also plays, I guess, into answering this question which you said before we have one last… pardon?

CC: People in the Church of All Worlds would be more likely to do a ritual or do something magical to heal the earth than they would to get rich.

AP: Yeah I bet so. They are very rebellious people it seems. We have one last question from Dave and he says that, throughout history, people have attached meats to the unknown using faith as a bridge. But there is a belief that there is something in the unknown to connect to. So in modern religions, this doesn’t always seem to be the case. So he asks, why bother and he says that maybe one reason might be to manipulate people, like in Scientology but why invent a religion without belief that there is something to connect to?

CC: Okay, it’s a good question but I think again it misses some things. He talked about the associating of myth with particular things and I think that’s completely key. When you look at all of the invented religions, story is absolutely, it’s the building block, the bottom line of where the people who founded them started. They either made up a story themselves like the Discordians or the SubG or they found a story like the Jedi and the Church of All Worlds that somehow seemed uniquely meaningful to them. And they thought about how they could employ that story in making sense of the world, in doing things to make a meaningful life. Now when he says using faith as a kind of bridge and what do you do if you don’t believe really? I think that goes back to that whole thing about believing provisionally. One of the reasons we believe provisionally, which of course neither of us talked about when we were talking about that topic, but it lurks in the background all the time, is that we actually now know about a million different traditions and so the idea that you’ve only got your own tradition that your little tribe believes and you’ve never heard of anybody else’s stories. It’s impossible. All of us know so much we may not even think that we do we may not read books about mythology or religion but everybody who watches History Channel documentaries and even fictional films and television programs picks up stuff about Hinduism and Buddhism and Wicca and Ásatrú and Ceremonial Magick and Satanism and all this stuff it’s just everywhere.

So another reason why our beliefs are provisional is because we actually select them out of a massive range of other beliefs that we could that we just that we choose to ignore. This one is meaningful to us, the rest of them we won’t bother about or not right now. And I think that the reason why people don’t feel the need for that kind of really intense belief or faith is that often what they’re looking for is community and common purpose in life. And also for meaning and the idea that what they’re doing is not only agreeable or pleasurable to them but also significant, in some sense. And so when you find yourself in a community, even if you’re only the most provisional of provisional believers, if you stick with the community and you end up liking it and it becomes your way of being and the stories it tells become the way that you tell stories about the world that you live in, it’s the point that I made earlier about the founders. If you walk the walk for long enough it will ultimately change you and in some cases that might mean that you might come to “believe” in inverted commas but of course, it’s been pointed out that even in conventional religions. Now a lot of people don’t believe but they want to belong, they like, I don’t know how many people I know who go to church because the church in question has an amazing choir or a really great reverend or is like a historic and beautiful building in a small country town and to be a member of it and to cherish and care for it is part of like heritage and history. And many people I know who go to church quite regularly do not believe in any real sense.

AP: sounds like a nice thing to end our conversation interview with.

CC: Okay, thank you.

AP: So I’d like to thank again Carole for being here on Angela’s Symposium. It was an honour and a pleasure and I really found this conversation extremely enlightening and I think will be useful for my own research.

So let me know in the comment sections what you think of it and whether you have any questions or doubts or any thoughts really. And if you did like this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new video when I upload it and as always, stay tuned for all the Academic fun.

Bye for now.

Carole Cusack’s Contact Details and Publications:

Email: carole.cusack@sydney.edu.au

Publications: https://sydney.academia.edu/CaroleCusack