The Stele of Revealing
Paintings
William Blake
The Song of Loss
Vincent Van Gogh
Salvador Dali
Pablo Picasso
Prose
Declaration of Independence
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Poetry
Walt Whitman: Poetic Theory
“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”—Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman, the founder of contemporary American poetry speaks in the period immediately before the Civil War and reveals his power as our national shaman with his potent incantation; Leaves of Grass, by recognizing a vital, symbiotic relationship between himself as poet shaping the emerging zeitgeist or fanfare for the common man that was emerging within the industrial psyche of this transitional creature known as the American citizen. In “Song of Myself,” we even find Hadit singing out in all his glory in less than a quarter century before the prophet of Thelema is born.
Patti Smith: Shamanism
Patti Smith turns all her cultural performances into dramatic ritual and showed us how the shaman plays in post-industrial culture. We no longer have to lament that such potency was abandoned when our collective and individual psyche evolved beyond the aboriginal stage in our development.
Films
The Wormwood Star
By Curtis Harrington
Films by Kenneth Anger
Brush of Baphomet
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
Invocation of my Demon Brother
Death