Artist/scholar/witchdoctor M. Dudeck offers a concise precis of his massive RELIGIONVIR.US project, a queer science fiction religion. In this video montage, Dudeck and his collaborators enact aspects of PSALMS: a 45-minute music-centered performance featuring 13 invented psalms accompanied by a complex digital soundscore and projected video.
The Cultpunk force is strong in this song by the Swedish band Fever Ray.
Author and countercultural religious studies scholar Erik Davis speaks on one of his pet topics, the occult revivals of the 1970s. See Techgnosis.com for much more of his work, including the always interesting, often fascinating Expanding Mind podcast.
A trailer for the 2017 documentary American Jedi, which is available to stream via various platforms. Here’s an in-depth interview with Jedi Knight and Deacon Alex Bird, explaining his devotion to the philosophy/quasi-religion of Jediism: But your myth doesn’t reach back to any time that’s actually real. That’s true. I mean that it has to speak … Read more“American Jedi”
A ’90s-vintage documentary on the Radical Faeries, a queer spiritual counterculture dating back to 1978-9.
WITCH is an all-women Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells, It’s an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression—particularly the oppression of women—down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually … Read moreThe W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto (1968)
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”
A fascinating, comprehensive and beautifully illustrated account of the life and work of John Hargrave, founder of the Kibbo Kift Kindred and later among the chief protagonists of the Social Credit movement in England. Exemplifying the virtues and limitations of the early 20th century “self-taught man”, Hargrave was accomplished in a variety of fields and … Read more“Designing Utopia: John Hargrave and the Kibbo Kift” by Cathy Ross and Oliver Bennett
A video trailer for a sadly unrealized movie adaptation of Starhawk’s 1993 science fiction novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. The religions of ecotopian Califia (as San Francisco and parts of the Pacific Northwest have been renamed in the story) are mostly projections of contemporary Paganism, contrasted with the ultra-fundamentalist version of Christianity enforced by the … Read moreThe Fifth Sacred Thing