We are Cultpunks. We affirm that belief systems, rituals, symbols, pilgrimages, tenets, holy days, shrines, festivals, taboos, mythologies and pantheons can and should be created as works of art. If so, then surely any sufficiently advanced magic is likewise indistinguishable from technology, and religions may usefully be considered as psychological technologies. Just like any other tech, … Read moreRead this first: “A Cultpunk Manifesto”
Nyx Shadowhawk writes on the deeply playful “religion” of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s award-winning children’s novel, The Egypt Game: Part of what’s appealing about The Egypt Game is that its characters have a fantastical secret double life, but the story doesn’t involve any actual magic. The gods don’t start actually talking to them, there’s no Egyptian … Read more“Playful Rites: Revisiting The Egypt Game”
“First three months were great. Waking up in Paradise.”
Trailer for this upcoming documentary on one of the High Priests of psychedelic counterculture. The producers are aiming for a late 2028 release and are crowdfunding to cover their completion costs.
According to The Church of Ambrosia: We are not a church built around a set of rules you must accept or a God you must name. We are a church built around direct experience. The Church of Ambrosia exists for people who believe that the most direct path to spiritual understanding runs through the body, … Read moreThe Church of Ambrosia
Charles Foster writes for Aeon on the subject of edginess: The cosmos is an edgy place. We are on the far edge of a rapidly expanding Universe, hurtling into nothing. Earth is now further away than it was when you began to read this sentence, from the place where, at the time of the Big … Read more“Embrace the edge!”
I first came across this poetic essay by the controversial anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson – more widely known as Hakim Bey, author of the TAZ theory among many other provocative ideas – sometime in the early ’90s. I lost track of it over the years and only recently rediscovered the text, which (faint bell) … Read more“The Runaway Child”
The Cordite Poetry Review offers 13 collage artworks by Australian artist Deborah Kelly, in connection with her queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion known as CREATION: “The religion proceeds from a text I commissioned from artist SJ Norman called the Liturgy of the Saprophyte, and some of these artworks were made as part of calling-into-being … Read more“13 Artworks by Deborah Kelly”
Colin Campbell, the founder of Aretéanism, is interviewed on the whys and wherefores of starting one’s own, nontheistic religion.
A short newsreel capturing extremely rare footage of the Kibbo Kift at work and play. A post-First World War utopian movement, the Kindred broke from the jingoism and militarism of the Scouts and established their own plan for the betterment of individual kinfolk and the future of their society. Among their many innovations were aesthetic … Read moreThe Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (1923)