Sad to learn of the recent passing of Steve Aydt, a longtime fixture, mover and shaker in the Texan counterculture scene and founder of the Eulessyinian Hot Tub Mystery Religion. I interviewed Steve on that subject in late 2024, and that interview is part of the second volume of the anthology Poetic Faiths: New Religions and Rituals as Works of Living Art, which will be released later this year.
Beginning in the Dallas area in the early 1990s, Steve and his collaborators created parties, installations, zines and multisensory rituals intended to produce what he called a “spontaneously occurring initiatory experience.” What began as an art project gradually became something more genuinely religious; not through doctrines nor demands for belief, but through shared experience, hospitality, imaginative play and the deliberate creation of occasions within which something strange and transformative might happen.
The HTMR combined Dionysian excess, theme-park aesthetics, experimental art, Sufism, Cabala, Moorish Orthodoxy, Discordianism and other esoteric currents. Steve identified Alexander Scriabin’s projected multisensory Mysterium and Coleridge’s “pleasure dome” as important inspirations.
Steve characterized its values as “individual and group gnosis over blind faith, free association over indoctrination and egalitarian discovery over hierarchical intercessory politics.” Hospitality was also central.
His creative activity extended well beyond HTMR. Friends have remembered him as a Moorish Orthodox Church leader, founding Diabolocrat of Disturbathon, Calithumpian bandleader and organizer, artist, publisher of the zine Macumba and host of KNON’s Mansion of Madness.
Steve’s work anticipated much of what we now describe as CultPunk or Poetic Faith: religion and ritual understood as something human beings can knowingly and artfully create together without diminishing its power.
I regret that he did not live to see the publication of the forthcoming second volume of Poetic Faiths. I’m grateful that his remarkable experiment, and some part of the vision behind it, will be preserved there.
Jesse Walker’s 2003 Reason article on the Eulessyinan Hot Tub Mystery Religion can be read here and some of Steve’s reminiscences are available here.