Disintegrator 26. The Great Outdoors (w/ Gordon White)
Feb 19, 2025
01:01:09
Gordon White is a chaos magician, shamanic practitioner, and permaculture designer based in Tasmania. He podcasts and teaches through the vehicle of Rune Soup, the world's largest magic academy, and he writes prolifically -- not only on the Rune Soup blog but in several incredible books. Gordon's breadth and depth of knowledge is unbelievably humbling, and it was an honor to spend an hour or so with him.
We came to Gordon for perspective, to some bring context and breadth and dimension to our relatively narrow world. Disintegrator sits in a kind of para-academic space, where we tend to limit the things we allow ourselves to write and think in terms of what's acceptable in mainstream academia. And there are so many people in this space, squashed between the outer walls of the academy and a totally vast, teeming ocean of different ways of thinking and being.
((An academic might chastize us for using 'outside' as a kind of euphemism for an alien or an other, but we'd push back -- it is the inside that we're all kind of bunched up against, like feudal serfs huddling for protection and warmth. As we look outside, we've started to speculate about what might be out there, inventing our own 'pseudosacreds' that preoccupy our minds without forcing us to change anything about ourselves.))
Gordon brings sledgehammers from magical practices and shamanic tradtions around the world, alongside a potent alternative canon of Western, and, well, pummels our walls a bit.
Tons of references packed in here, but a good place to start would be his books Chaos Protocols and Ani.Mystic (in order). Marek fell in love with Gordon's world through these three podcast episodes (one, two, three) and this lecture at the Guggenheim (with visual media from friend of the pod Refik Anadol).
Further references:
We came to Gordon for perspective, to some bring context and breadth and dimension to our relatively narrow world. Disintegrator sits in a kind of para-academic space, where we tend to limit the things we allow ourselves to write and think in terms of what's acceptable in mainstream academia. And there are so many people in this space, squashed between the outer walls of the academy and a totally vast, teeming ocean of different ways of thinking and being.
((An academic might chastize us for using 'outside' as a kind of euphemism for an alien or an other, but we'd push back -- it is the inside that we're all kind of bunched up against, like feudal serfs huddling for protection and warmth. As we look outside, we've started to speculate about what might be out there, inventing our own 'pseudosacreds' that preoccupy our minds without forcing us to change anything about ourselves.))
Gordon brings sledgehammers from magical practices and shamanic tradtions around the world, alongside a potent alternative canon of Western, and, well, pummels our walls a bit.
Tons of references packed in here, but a good place to start would be his books Chaos Protocols and Ani.Mystic (in order). Marek fell in love with Gordon's world through these three podcast episodes (one, two, three) and this lecture at the Guggenheim (with visual media from friend of the pod Refik Anadol).
Further references:
- A big and loving shoutout to Jay Springett, who just absolutely rules in every possible way, you gotta be a JayMo fan fr.
- Gordon references Dr. Jeff Kripal on the subject of the 'imaginal' -- which becomes a helpful concept later in the episode as we talk through technology. The imaginal is an ontological layer or that is not necessarily physical but still real.
- The most significant reference here is of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazillian anthropologist discussed in the context of pespectivism and what a truly decolonized anthropology (and philosophy) might look like.
- Gordon references Ephesisans 6:12 ("powers and principalities") in the context of a Christian ontology that affords an idea the status of a being.
- Dr. Jack Hunter's concept of "ontological flooding" -- an "opening of the floodgates" of what is discussible in ontological terms. Here's a discussion on the subject from 2021.
- Marek references a recent trend in philosophy ("object oriented ontology") that grapples with the autonomy of the non-human world. This episode is cheekily named after Quentin Meillassoux's concept of the "great outdoors" -- a plane of reality that exceeds human experience or human conception.
- Gordon references Paracelsus, Edgar Cayce, Rudolf Steiner, and Allan Kardec in the context of a Western spiritualist canon.
- Gordon discusses Matías De Stefano specifically in the context of mineral intelligence. Here's an absolutely wild talk on the subject.
- For those unfamiliar, the "Dieta" that Gordon refers to is a period of isolation, strict diet, and deep work with plant medicines like ayahuasca.