A Total Eclipse of a Total Eclipse

0:47SPEAKER_00:If you're a regular listener of this podcast as a ritual, there's a good chance that at some point you've heard me talk about my favorite definition of the occult, which is that which is hidden or obscure. I love this definition because it goes beyond the normal understanding we have of the word occult. Normally when we hear occult, we think about it as an aesthetic, like spooky, witchy stuff, or as a genre of knowledge, like occult bookstores, or it's just the thing that Christians are afraid of and worried that their teenagers are going to get drawn into through Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music.

1:32SPEAKER_00:Oh no, the occult. But this definition, that which is hidden or obscure, I think touches on what I actually am interested in as a wizard far more profoundly. Because as a wizard and a hypnotherapist, I like the things that are hidden or obscure. And this includes what is hidden or obscure in ourselves, the parts of us that are unconscious, therefore outside of our awareness, or are being repressed or pushed down, that we're trying to deny an emotion or a desire.

2:07SPEAKER_00:And so it's becoming hidden or obscured by the mask that we're trying to wear. And I think this applies even more so in our experiences with other people, where we encounter the presentation of them, but it takes a lot more work to know the deeper truth of any person. When we walk around on the street, we get glimpses of others from the clothing the wear, the way they've styled themselves, how they smile or present. But every human being contains things that we can't see: a family background, challenges they've overcome, passions they've never been able to admit.

2:45SPEAKER_00:Everyone is a portal into these profound depths. And the world around us contains this as well. I love finding little secret spots. I love finding courtyards hidden between buildings where you could walk by the front of the building and you never know that this magical place was there. I'm bringing up this word and this definition today, though, because I think it's the best way to describe and try and summarize and find meaning in the experience that I just went through in Iceland.

3:21SPEAKER_00:So if you're just tuning in for the first time, again, wow, you have picked a heck of a time to join this ritual. Maybe go check out the opening ceremony or the invocation and get a little bit more grounding. But, anyways, this is this portal is a ritual. This is my attempt to explore and understand the artist residency that I just attended in Iceland, which culminated in both a total solar eclipse and a large-scale music festival held on the Snefelsnes Peninsula of Western Iceland, which is a pretty remote part of the world.

4:00SPEAKER_00:There is like a handful of villages out there around this glacial mountain, but most of the villages have a few hundred people in them at most. So it's a pretty remote, strange place to be. And I had the wonderful privilege of living in the Freezer Hostel for three weeks with a bunch of astronauts and scientists and healers and shamans and artists and architects and weirdos and creatives. And I'm still processing it, but it is one of the coolest things that I've ever gotten to do, as well as one that had its own challenges and I think a bit of grief about the things that could have been but weren't.

4:48SPEAKER_00:So today I'm going to try and unpack that in a way that I think will be, you know, fulfilling for me, but I hope will be illuminating and insightful for you in your own journeys. And in order to get to that, we're going to need a magic word. And I couldn't think of any better word than one that is a sibling of our dear old occult, and that is going to be a clude. So on the count of three, say it with me. One, two, three, a clued. A solar eclipse is an occlusion.

5:27SPEAKER_00:It is a moment when the moon steps in front of the sun and blocks it from our view. It's like you went to go see a movie, and then a guy in a really tall hat sat in front of you, and now you can no longer see the screen. Most of the time, when something occludes our view, we don't like it. We want to see the thing itself. We don't want something getting in the way of what we want. So an eclipse is a little bit of a funny phenomenon because it's so rare.

6:00SPEAKER_00:We're pretty much used to the sun being in the sky all the time. So this moment where in the middle of a day, the moon blocks out the sun and it occludes it, and that everything goes dark feels really special, feels really magical, feels really unique and important. Traveling to Iceland to see an eclipse is a very risky endeavor. Not just because Iceland is horrifyingly expensive, or these locations are remote, or you're going to a music festival that you're hoping isn't going to become yet another fire festival, but because Iceland's weather is notoriously unpredictable and often cloudy and windy and rainy.

6:47SPEAKER_00:So if you want to go see an eclipse, going someplace where the chance of it being super cloudy is not really the best bet. I went into this with eyes wide open, knowing that I got the good fortune of seeing an eclipse a couple of years ago from Evansville, Indiana, and we had, I think, like three or four minutes of totality, and it was a clear day, and I got that experience. So I wasn't going to Iceland just to see the eclipse. And I know that the world is chaotic, so I wasn't pinning all my hopes and dreams on weather agreeing with my own personal desires.

7:23SPEAKER_00:I knew there was a good chance that it would be cloudy. And guess what? I was right. We were worried about a week before the eclipse because we had a bunch of windstorms and rain, and it knocked down a ton of the tents that were uh getting ready for the festival to host people, to host musicians. Uh, they had just this field of tents that got damaged. People were living behind the hostel in tents, and those all got taken down, and people had to kind of scramble to get their stuff out of the rain and seek shelter in gymnasiums and various other places.

8:00SPEAKER_00:Uh so going into the week of the festival, my concern was less: am I going to get an optimal eclipse viewing experience? And more, uh, if the weather turns bad, are we prepared to house and feed and take care of 3,000-something people? Um, and I honestly don't know if that's the case. I think if the weather had gone poorly, it could have been fairly bad. But fortunately, the weather was pretty much perfect every single day of the festival, except the day of the eclipse, when it was lightly raining and very cloudy.

8:38SPEAKER_00:And so, yeah, there was no clear view of the eclipse from where we were. But fortunately, uh, I got to go to a nearby waterfall and stand on top of this waterfall and watch the eclipse uh sort of near my friends. I took some space to go be by myself in this moment. And if you've never experienced an eclipse, it is quite cool. Even with clouds in the way, it just starts getting darker and darker and darker. And with the clouds covering us above, the only thing that we could really see was off in the distance where the ocean uh met the clouds, there was a break in the clouds, and there it was like the sun was setting prematurely.

9:21SPEAKER_00:So we saw the sky quickly redden into beautiful pinks and reds and purples and then go completely dark, and then a few minutes later sort of reverse that process and getting lighter and lighter. And then after that, I got to walk down from the waterfall where uh the British trance DJ John Double O. Fleming, who is a favorite of mine, um, he does really long sets that kind of weave and tell stories, and it's just, you know, I think like a DJ's DJ.

9:52SPEAKER_00:He was playing a set that was supposed to be three hours long. I think it ended up being closer to an hour because it was raining on us. But um, there was like 15 of us dancing to him playing massive attack and spongle and, you know, just really reading the crowd in the moment. It wasn't one of those things where someone's awkwardly just playing like house music in an environment that doesn't call for that. He was really reading the environment of this overcast day in front of this waterfall.

10:22SPEAKER_00:And so that was a peak experience. That was amazing. But as a wizard and a trickster and a little bit of a little shit, I thought there was something so funny about all of us gathering to see an occlusion. We gathered to see the sun get blocked out, but we couldn't see the occlusion we wanted to see because it was occluded by the clouds themselves. It was a double occlusion. And the irony of that was just so delicious and so hilarious that I think that was almost as good as if we had gotten to, you know, put on our funny little glasses and watch the moon slowly move across and see, you know, the traditional eclipse.

11:11SPEAKER_00:But the reason that I wanted to focus on it is I think there's something metaphorical about this as well. The portal was an experiment. It was something that the people producing the festival wanted to try out to bring people together with the idea that maybe there could be some cross-pollination, maybe there could be some co-creation, maybe this would give an opportunity for scientists and shamans to make a piece of art together and create something that they wouldn't have if they were just siloed in their ordinary world.

11:51SPEAKER_00:But that is a beautiful idea that's hard to put into practice because to bring people together to create, I think you actually need quite a bit of structure. Uh, before I became a wizard, I worked in corporate tech environments. I was a product manager for a little while. So I've been in a lot of meetings where if it's not structured, people just kind of share their opinion and then suddenly you're out of time and you're like, wait, are we doing which plan?

12:23SPEAKER_00:Whose plan? Do we come to a consensus? What's going on? And so when I got the chance to run meetings, I was kind of ruthless about structure. I would set timers, I would start with warm-up brainstorming things, then we would have discussion, I would organize the discussion so everything's getting written down, and then I would save time at the end to make sure that we summarized what we had decided, we assigned action items to the people who were going to do things, and nobody was leaving without a clear sense of what we'd accomplished.

12:55SPEAKER_00:Because otherwise, you just end up in infinite meetings. And coming out of the portal, I can see quite clearly that when you try to remove the traditional structure, you just end up with the default structure. And I talked about this in a few of the previous episodes. But now that I see it clearly, yeah, if you get people together for big town halls, the people who have the most to complain about or the most interested in hearing the sound of their own voice, uh, I probably fit in the latter category, although sometimes I'm in the former, uh, they take up a lot of the bandwidth in the meeting.

13:32SPEAKER_00:The meeting goes on and on, people get annoyed, nothing's really decided, and you just end up with, I think, what our ancestors develop structure to get away from. You know, we can laugh about a talking stick, but at some point people had to figure out how do we run a meeting where the loudmouths don't just control everything, and you fast forward through that, and eventually you get complicated voting systems and representative democracy and uh kings and so on and so forth.

14:03SPEAKER_00:You get systems where it uh creates structure, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. So I think the main lesson that most of us experienced is that rather than tearing away structure and needing less structure, it's actually we needed more. Having just a couple of point people that are trying to help us with our projects who aren't plugged into the wider structure of the festival means that there's a lot of bottlenecks and you're stuck waiting for somebody to give you permission or information or resources or supplies.

14:38SPEAKER_00:And if that person is also blocked, then a traffic jam ensues where everybody's frustrated, everybody's stuck between somebody honking behind them and somebody stalled out in front of them. And it's actually hard to co-create and do those things. Um, despite that, I think we overcame and persevered and made some pretty cool stuff. Um, there were a couple of uh like foraged material art installationslash chill-out spaces that came together in pretty beautiful ways.

15:08SPEAKER_00:Um there was a group that made a kind of chill-out tent healing space that I never really got a chance to hang out in, but you know, they got it done. It came together. Uh, there was some really cool stuff for the kids' area, including a puppet building workshop that I think was just awesome. And then the group that I was most involved in uh was called the Sensory Chamber. And the original idea was to have a blackout tent so that we could have projectors running and have really cool art pieces across multiple projectors, and this would be a space where you could come and get away from the festival music and experience something uh a little bit deeper and more profound.

15:53SPEAKER_00:And uh there was a lot of cool projects that were being worked on for that. Unfortunately, the things that we were told we were gonna get, the supplies, the blackout tent, all of that, um, didn't didn't happen. We kept not getting the things that we needed, and then we would have to scramble to come up with a new plan. So the people that were really spearheading this had to go through plan after plan after plan because, oh, the things that we said we're gonna get for you were not, and the space that we said you're gonna have were not.

16:26SPEAKER_00:And so even as we made architectural renderings and different designs and continued to problem solve and use our own resources to figure out where to source the things that we needed. By the time we got to the festival grounds and they were busy trying to repair all of the tent damage from the windstorm the week before, uh, we were lucky to even just get a tent set up that was not only not a blackout tent, but was covered in giant uh plastic windows.

16:56SPEAKER_00:So we were scrambling to tape up trash bags over them and then tape space blankets over that and to make something that blocked some of the light, which it sort of did and sort of didn't. And this was just such a struggle. You know, I helped lay the floor in there, I helped tape up these mylar walls of the space blanket material, and every step of the way it was, oh, it'd be so nice if any of the production team could give us a hand or give us the tools we need, and instead we're borrowing what scraps of tape we can to make this happen.

17:33SPEAKER_00:And it took longer than we wanted, and we had to keep iterating, but finally it did come together, and it was like the inside of a balloon. It was all this rippling silver and gold material. There were projectors, we had both a sound system and silent disco headphones, so you could kind of hang out more casually and chat with people, or you could put on the headphones and you could immerse yourself more fully, and it was such an accomplishment, and it was so cool.

18:04SPEAKER_00:The other thing that I think is important about that sort of space is you could roll around on the ground. We laid down and taped all of these foam tiles to make a floor. And as I wandered around a festival, which is not really my native environment, I've sort of missed that festival scene. I've never been to Burning Man or Electric Forest. Um, that's just not my world. But as I wandered around the different spaces, there's a lot of stages where you're staring at a giant screen uh behind a DJ and it's got cool visuals, but you're all sort of dancing facing the same direction, and you're standing on grass, and sometimes it's a little bit cold or windy, and uh, you know, there's only so much free movement you can do in those conditions.

18:51SPEAKER_00:Inside of the sensory chamber, however, you could lay down, you could roll around, you could get on your back, and being able to dance in these dimensions creates so much more space for play. So I would go around and I would see the bigger name DJs and acts and people standing there and watching, and then I would come into sensory chamber and I would see people being fucking silly, rolling on the floor, hopping over each other, playing games, talking in the corner, cuddling, and it was just so cool.

19:23SPEAKER_00:And I think this is one of the big lessons that I'm taking away. If I do more festivals, if I get involved in these builds, is people need a space where they can really roll around on the ground and be silly. We don't always want to stand. A dance for where you have to stand limits your movement and forces you into more traditional patterns of observing and watching rather than the freeform nature of experiencing the other humans in that space. So I think there was so much cool stuff that I want to celebrate, and I'm just incredibly proud of the team that came together to make this happen despite the obstacles.

20:04SPEAKER_00:Um, but the moment that I want to talk about is the way that it all ended. Because we believed, as the residents of this portal, that this was going to be our little clubhouse that we built, and we were going to be able to throw our own parties in it. And the final night, uh, you know, people are talking about different ideas, and there's the idea that, you know, some of us might do a DJ set, or there's going to be a karaoke party, and we're we all really want a portal rap party.

20:38SPEAKER_00:We have lived together for over a month. Now we've been dispersed through the festival and it's been a little chaotic. So a moment to like come together and be silly and sing and celebrate and dance with one another felt really, really important. So as we're getting closer to that final day, uh plans are coming into shape. Uh, there's some different, you know, ideas swirling around, but it seems like we're all in agreement that we're gonna have a very cool portal after party where all of the portal people can come and be together.

21:10SPEAKER_00:And then we wake up on Saturday morning and learn that nope, the uh powers that be have decided they're gonna use that space for a VIP experience uh with a secret password, so it's limited who can get in. And if there's room, portal people can be there as space fillers, but we're certainly not a priority, and it's not our party, and it's something else. And for me personally, as someone with a lot of punk rock DI right background, I thought that was total fucking bullshit.

21:43SPEAKER_00:I thought that it really sucked to have worked so hard to overcome these institutional obstacles, only for the institution itself to cut in line and kind of scoop up the fruits of our labor and turn it into something um elitist and exclusive. Exclusive. And as that night went on, and we were stuck outside of the space we created, and everyone's a little aimless because it's the end of a festival. I think we're all kind of tired of going to the main stage to dance.

22:13SPEAKER_00:I think we really just want to connect with each other, and there's not a clear space to do it. And people are starting to leave and head out early. And I feel like we were really denied a final moment to come together and close out the residency to perform a closing ceremony to complete the ritual. And while it was such a beautiful experience, and there's friendships that I feel profoundly moved by, I think without that closing, it left things a little bit raw and messy and undone.

22:47SPEAKER_00:I mean, you watch a movie, and if you leave two-thirds of the way through, you don't get that sense of closure and completeness. Uh I think that that's a very important ritual that most of these experiences should have. And so while there is, again, so much that I enjoyed and appreciated in this experience, I knew the entire time, once we left, it was going to feel like a dream. Because I think humans underestimate how much our experience and our memory is held collectively.

23:23SPEAKER_00:If you've ever gone on a long solo travel experience, it's amazing. You're meeting people, you're having fun, you're going here, you're going there, you come home, and your friends ask, oh my God, tell me all about your trip. And the moment you start talking, you often will see their eyes glaze over because they don't have a point of reference for this. They don't know what it was like to be in that hostel. You're trying to describe this crazy person from Bosnia that you met, and it's just your words.

23:53SPEAKER_00:They don't have that experience to connect with. And so it's very much like trying to describe your dream to somebody else. Super meaningful and important to you, really hard for somebody else to connect with. I find the same thing with musical experiences. I think you can go to a really mediocre festival and see some name brand acts, and that gives you a way to connect with other people because you can go, yo, I saw Wu-Tang clan, and they go, oh, dude, that's sick.

24:20SPEAKER_00:Even though like the show was kind of bad and it was only the RISA and a bunch of random guys, and you were very far away and the sound was poor. Um, if you went to a DIY show and saw the coolest thing ever, that was so unique and so different, it's going to be hard to explain. Dude, I saw this like oboe noise jam set that just was mind-blowing because the other person doesn't know what that's like. It's harder for them to imagine. So getting ready to leave this experience, I knew we were all basically going over the edge of a waterfall.

24:54SPEAKER_00:And on the other side of all of our trips home or wherever else we were going, we were going to suddenly wake up without the shared experience. You could no longer talk to the person next to you about somebody else in the group, or remember this moment, or that time on the camping trip, or oh, this funny inside joke. That was all going to be dispersed, and you weren't going to have that space to hold that shared experience. So I thought it was really important to have a moment where we got to process our feelings together.

25:28SPEAKER_00:A closing circle where you can say what you're grateful for, highlights, um, challenges that you faced, um, celebrating the connections that you made, not just having one-on-one goodbyes, but really coming together in the little clicks and pods that you'd formed to have that experience together. And so to have that taken away left a bad taste in my mouth. And I found myself meandering through the tail end of this festival, um, tired, exhausted, annoyed, um, aware that I would feel better once I slept and got on to the next thing, but still, you know, thinking my own thoughts about how I think these containers should be held and how denying that opportunity for closure um occludes and blocks out some of the good things.

26:24SPEAKER_00:Again, it's, you know, one of the issues with partying is you can have amazing moments at the beginning of the night, but if at the end of the night the party turns into a shit show, you're gonna remember the shit show portion a lot more than, well, you know, it was really great before the fight broke out. And I feel similar about festivals. I think that there's a very interesting mix in the few that I've attended of high highs and low lows. So I'll have moments where I'm watching some musical act.

26:55SPEAKER_00:Um, in this case, I got to see Reggie Watts and Imogen Heap perform together, and then I got to see them each perform separately, and all of those sets were just incredible. And coming together with my friends and running into the people that I've just gotten to know a few weeks ago, but now we feel so close, those were really special moments of connection and magic and serendipity. And I had so many moments where I just felt overwhelmed by awe of I'm in Iceland and I'm hanging out with these people, and this is happening, and this is so cool.

27:30SPEAKER_00:And then there's other moments where suddenly it's later at night and it's harder to find your friends, and I'm on a dance floor that maybe feels a little bit druggy or kind of whooped out, and I feel a little isolated, and I'm like, what is it that I'm looking for here? You know, do I want to keep partying? Is this, am I chasing something? Like, what is it that I'm after? And I think over the course of the festival, there's a flow between those two points.

28:00SPEAKER_00:There's moments where I'm meeting somebody new, and we're sitting in one of the uh like kind of camping area lounges, a big tented off area, and we're meeting this Icelandic couple and learning new card games from them and hanging out and playing cards, and I'm like, this is so cool. And then moments where we're exploring and uh finding uh just moments of surprise and delight, and I'm like, yes, this is what it's all about. But then the mix sorts of shifts the more tired I get, the more over it I am.

28:35SPEAKER_00:And as it gets towards the end, it's it's a tricky act to you know to navigate the come down without that getting in the way of all that came before and all of the profound moments and wonderful moments. Um, you know, in this episode, I'm trying to find the balance uh between those. So I'll I'll share a couple of highlights just to make sure it's not too negative. But uh I got to do a performance, and when I got asked to do this performance, I knew immediately that this is one of the things that uh is the blessing and the curse of the way I do wizardry because I never know where I'm gonna be performing.

29:16SPEAKER_00:And if it's a quiet space with 10 people, you know, maybe I'd do like a hypnotic guided meditation. Maybe I would do something with a lot more interaction and conversation. If it's 50 people in a field next to a giant bass speaker and people can barely hear me, it's gonna be a struggle to hold that attention. And I'm not gonna do a meditation. I'm gonna have to do something much more attention-grabbing and dynamic and really work to like hold that crowd's attention.

29:43SPEAKER_00:And so when I got asked to do a workshop, I had no idea what the environment was gonna be like. So I really didn't plan anything until I got to the festival grounds. And when I got to the festival grounds, I saw, okay, it's this cool outside space. Um, how it goes is gonna depend on weather and you know who else is playing nearby. And one of the first days, um, they had a whole bunch of scheduling for that space that got just eradicated because a band needed to do a sound check in that space and things just got pushed off the schedule.

30:14SPEAKER_00:So I was like, okay, I understand that I'm lower on the totem pole. Uh, I want to hold this lately. I don't know how much uh space, attention, respect I'm gonna be given. So let me just kind of sit with it and figure out what I want to do. And eventually I realized I don't want to stay in the space they gave me. You know, if you're gonna give me a space, cool, but I'm a fucking wizard. I'm gonna I'm gonna play by my own rules. And I came here to explore games.

30:41SPEAKER_00:And there's the idea of understanding a larger environment as a game and what are the rules, what's the structure, what are we trying to do, what are our goals? But there's another idea of mini-games and how do you subvert a sub a structure by creating your own game within it? And that's precisely what I wanted to do. So I've been doing this event uh over the last year called the Magic Circle, and I describe it as a game with two rules. Inside of the circle, you grant me authority, which is something that people often get a little weird about.

31:13SPEAKER_00:They buck, they go, Oh, well, what are you gonna make me do? And that's why we have a second rule. You can leave the circle whenever you want. This is a game, this is a choice. You are choosing to grant me authority, and if I ask you to do something weird that you didn't want to do, you can go, you can dip. No one's forcing you to be here. And it's hilarious to me because people grant authority all the time without thinking about it. You stop at a traffic light, you open your bag for the security guard, you defer to the loudest person in the room, you grant authority, you do the things that people tell you to do, even if you don't want to, because we're kind of conditioned into these models of authority that are often unconscious and obscured.

31:56SPEAKER_00:We're not always agreeing to give that person authority, even if we do. And the moment that I make it explicit and say this is what we're doing, people get weird and suspicious, like, what's gonna happen? Why are you doing this? Um, there used to be a YouTube series, I think it got pulled down, called Surveillance Cameraman. And this guy was just walking around and just filming. And he would walk into classrooms or behind the counter at a fast food restaurant and just be filming, and you'd watch people freak out a little bit and be like, bro, like what are you doing?

32:28SPEAKER_00:He's like, I'm just filming. And some people would get really agitated and upset, and he'd be like, What do you mean? I'm just filming. Look, there's a camera over there, there's a camera over there, like there's security cameras everywhere. But when they're part of the structure of the world, they don't feel as pronounced. And as soon as they become pronounced, we have a bigger reaction. So, anyways, sometimes the magic circle has this funny effect where even though I'm not doing anything crazy and it's actually quite chill, uh, people get weird uh and worried.

32:59SPEAKER_00:But for this, I knew that very few people had flown to this festival to come see my performance. So I was gonna have to corral a crowd and get them together. And so I decided that I was gonna form the magic circle and I was gonna start crowning people uh with these gnome hats that I brought so people would have roles and we could play this game with active participation and then we could roam around the festival grounds so it wouldn't be the kind of thing where people are wandering in and out of this lecture and only getting bits of it, that if we lost people, fine, but we're gonna be a roving magical gang and we're gonna make some stuff happen.

33:35SPEAKER_00:So the first thing that we did is I said we needed to find the luckiest among us, and we had a rock, paper, scissors tournament, and this little tiny girl ended up winning it. And so I crowned her the luckiest among us, and I said, okay, we need to main coherence in our magic circle. What's a silly walk that we can do? And she immediately demonstrated the silly walk of kind of stomping and waving her arms, and I was like, perfect, great, we've got our walk.

34:00SPEAKER_00:Let's form our circle, let's go. And so, all of us doing the silly walk, me and full wizard regalia, we march across the festival grounds to one of the other tents where a DJ is playing in the middle of the afternoon. So they're playing for like 10, 15 people. And here we come. There's like 30 of us, and we're doing the silly walk, being led by a wizard. We march right to the front of this tent, right in front of the stage, we form a circle, and then we have a dance contest to find the lord of the dance, which there's some little boy that is just going so hard.

34:32SPEAKER_00:So we get another child that is crowned, and then walk on out of there. And then we do a few more funny things, and eventually we end up at uh the space where we started, where I talk about what it means to have a festival and how festivals are a tradition where we reverse the order and structure that is normal. And instead of a king, we have a holy fool that is elected to lead us. Um, and so we blessed the holy fool. We found somebody that uh would fill that role, and then they blessed everybody else, and we had this little nice moment.

35:06SPEAKER_00:And then for those who wanted, we marched our way down to the sea to shout our sorrows into the sea. And a lot of people dropped off at that point, but a good amount still came. I was quite impressed. And then at the end of that, uh, there was a few people just, you know, saying, Thank you for the silliness you brought. That this festival has had big dance acts and a lot of, you know, more indigenous ceremony, which, you know, I don't know how well that was placed there, but that's a different conversation.

35:35SPEAKER_00:Um, but uh that this silliness was something that they were craving and looking forward to, and um, it was quite magical for them. So getting to do things like that is a highlight. It's what I love to do. I love to be able to show people that wizardry is not just the occult that they think of uh serious magic or healing or new age stuff, but that there is a space for play and that there are these hidden parts of ourselves coming back to that definition of the occult, that we are often tamping down.

36:12SPEAKER_00:We're trying not to be silly, we're trying not to make the joke, we're trying to act serious, we're afraid of looking foolish, and creating those containers and spaces where we get to be our wackiest, weirdest, wildest selves is one of the things that I care about most as a wizard. And being in a space where that can ripple and change the environment and come back is the thing that I think I'm most grateful for in this experience. Because later that night, while I was partying, an Icelandic guy came over to chat with me about how cool it was and how much he appreciated, and he loves this silliness.

36:50SPEAKER_00:He tries to bring it into his work, and then he invited me to come down for the sauna ceremonies he was leading uh down by the ocean the next day. And I'd been hearing that there was a mobile sauna, you know, a 20-minute walk away from the festival and these really cool ceremonies, all festival, and I just hadn't had a chance to get down there. So I was like, okay, I'm tired of being at the festival. Let's do that Saturday. That's exactly what I want to go do.

37:15SPEAKER_00:And so uh I made it my business to get down there and he welcomed me, and he was leading this amazing multi-round sauna where we would go in and he's pouring water and oils on the stones and waving the fan around, and then having us sing 90s songs like uh Praise You by Fat Boy Slim, and we're all having this sing along, and then we get out of the sauna and we go run into the water and we come back, and then he's singing Icelandic songs, and there's Icelandic people in there that know these songs because that's a big part of the culture.

37:44SPEAKER_00:And so we're getting deeper with each round, but that silliness was still a part of it, and it was so cool to be able to be someone bringing my magic to the space to see somebody else respond and resonate with it, and then have that returned back in their own way and get to experience something where I don't have to lead, I don't have to coordinate people, I get to just be a part of it. And so I think that is really ultimately what I came to Iceland to experience.

38:18SPEAKER_00:I wanted to not play games by myself, but with other people. I wanted to teach card games and learn card games. I wanted to create a container for silliness and then see what emerged in it. And as I meander my way to my conclusion here, festivals are an interesting phenomenon. I think sometimes in the few that I've experienced, there's too many different things going on. So if you're trying to throw a bunch of all-night dance parties, but you're also trying to have a bunch of science talks, they kind of get in the way of each other.

38:58SPEAKER_00:And I think the partying gets more in the way of the science talks. I think it's very rare that the science talks are gonna block people from partying. But I was, you know, at one of these kind of events and I talked to one of the invited speakers, and he was like, Yeah, you know, I think they kind of got a bunch of nerds here to make the, you know, rich party kids feel smart or important, but you know, a lot of the talks are pretty poorly attended and feel a little bit like an afterthought because most people are here to, you know, eat drugs and dance all night.

39:29SPEAKER_00:And this festival had a lot of different streams going on. There was a lot of stuff about space, there was kind of future technology stuff, there was some weird woo-woo, uh, almost, you know, uh influencer grifter healing culture. There was some more intentional ceremonial spiritual culture, um, there was a lot of music and different acts, and there was a bit of that playfulness, but I think not as much. And seeing the way that it was spread out in all of these different directions, I think it's easy to use buzzwords and to say things, to say that, you know, we're trying to create a radical change and this is what it means.

40:19SPEAKER_00:But where the rubber hits the road is when what actually happens happens. What is the event, what gets prioritized. At the end of the day, are we really trying to hold the space for a sacred fire and people to have a healing experience, or do we want to play loud music that people on drugs can dance to? And I think you can have healing experiences while dancing on drugs, and I think uh there's a lot of blurred boundaries there. But for me personally, I came not for the festival and not even for the eclipse, but the experience of living with other people and trying to collaborate and co-create.

41:04SPEAKER_00:And I think most of that was amazing. Even the challenges are part of it. I didn't expect zero friction. I came for friction, I came for challenge, I came to, you know, have my own emotional outbursts and help others through those. Um but at the end of the day, when having a private party for VIPs to feel important takes precedence over wrapping things up with the people who have been here for a month, who have struggled to make the spaces and experiences and art that elevated this beyond just, you know, a bunch of stages with DJs.

41:43SPEAKER_00:That says something about what the priorities are. And I'm gonna come back to this theme in a future episode. I've mentioned it before, but I'm really, I think, ready to do a deep dive on this. And this is the idea that New Age is the religion of capitalism. That New Age likes to pretend like it's anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist, that it's this radical thing that's not the normative system, and we're doing this thing on the fringe, and it's this, you know, profound radical idea that everything is one and we're healing, and you know, this is not the aggressive dominator culture.

42:24SPEAKER_00:But I think when you get down to it, new age is pay-to-play. There aren't that many free new age churches. Mostly it exists in workshops and paid products and buying Oracle decks and paying for coaching and all of the different things, the retreats that you pay to travel and go do. And there's a lot of colonization in it as both uh the ancient past and you know, history and tradition is mined, as well as indigenous culture is mined, um, because we have a weird relationship to our own modern Western identity.

43:00SPEAKER_00:So we're so desperate to find something that feels quote unquote authentic out there, elsewhere, and then to bring that in for ourselves. But the more we do it, the more that becomes the mainstream thing. And it's everywhere now. I mean, our social media sites are filled up with this content. Most people are talking to each other about astrology or Reiki, and all of these things are no longer on the fringes, even though I think they often like to pretend that they are.

43:34SPEAKER_00:So if we're trying to have festivals in the spirit of the traditional festival where the dominant paradigm is subverted, how do we create structures that actually bring people together in deep connection and plant seeds that can grow to make beautiful art, to share radical ideas, to shake us out of the normal routines and create something? Profound and transcendent and beautiful versus how do we put on a bunch of silly clothes that we bought on Amazon or are cosplaying as different indigenous groups and spiritual traditions and wander around trading tokens with each other, trying to act out the idea of deep connection, listening to talks that cosplay as transcendent, world-changing thought, when ultimately the bedrock foundation is still about getting VIPs into exclusive areas so that we can raise money to throw more festivals where we can kind of rinse, wash, and repeat, and a lot of the radical change becomes set dressing rather than substance.

44:49SPEAKER_00:So I think this is a mix. I don't really want to come down and you know condemn it. And I'm excited to talk to more people that were part of this experience to get other viewpoints. I'm hoping to have the organizer of the festival on here, as well as some of the other amazing people that I met along the way. And so we'll look at this from different angles and you know, continue to kind of see what this was. But I think coming back around what is an eclipse?

45:22SPEAKER_00:What is occlusion? What does it mean for the normal way of things to be to be blocked out for a moment? And the spell I'd like to offer is so simple and is at the basis of everything that I'm talking about as a wizard on this podcast. And I've called these acts of joy and resistance. And I use both of those because I think pure acts of joy can fit into the dominant paradigm and not really change things. And pure acts of resistance can become very dour and very serious, and you can become so focused on tearing something down that you don't realize you're just building the next version of it more or less exactly the same, which is what tends to happen with you know violent revolutions.

46:13SPEAKER_00:There's a period of chaos, and then people go back to uh, you know, wanting a strong man leader and wanting the the order that they they now miss and comes back with uh you know even more problems. So for me, an act of joy and resistance is like a minigame. It's realizing that we don't actually have to tear down all of capitalism to subvert that structure in the moment. And this is an idea that the writer, philosopher, anarchist Hakeem Bey talked about famously as a temporary autonomous zone.

46:47SPEAKER_00:So if you go into the lobby of a bank's ATM thing at night and have a dance party with your friends, you're not using the space the way it's intended. You're doing something different in it. If you go to the mall and play hide and seek with your friends and you don't buy anything, you are subverting the structure that that mall is trying to enforce on you and you are creating your own structure. And when you go to a festival, are you actually subverting the dominant culture, or is this the outlet that is provided for you?

47:26SPEAKER_00:I think the first two matrix films do a great job of this, where in the first matrix film, Neo is presented as the Messiah, he's the prophet, uh prophecy chosen one, he's here to upend this system. But at the end of the second matrix, he meets the architect who says, Buddy, you're a reset button. We know this is unstable. We know that every so often we need to reset it. You're a part of that system, you're not actually the revolutionary you think you are.

47:53SPEAKER_00:And so is going to uh an expensive festival so you can do a bunch of drugs and hear a few talks while you're hung over and walk away thinking, oh wow, I'm really making change. Is that a way to defang you and to sap your revolutionary energy and to give you the illusion of radicality without the substance of it? I don't know. But what I invite you to do is to find the smallest space, the easiest possible way to subvert a structure and experience a moment of act, a moment of joy and resistance, an act of joy and resistance, and to invite at least one other person into it.

48:42SPEAKER_00:So you can be trying to get to dinner on time and you say, Hey, wait, let's go over here and hold hands and watch the sunset as we hum to ourselves. That counts. That's beautiful. Whatever it is, it's about finding a moment, a choice, a way that you can color just a little bit outside the lines. And I invite you to bring joy into it. I invite you to have some level of resistance. Don't just go to the gift shop and buy a t-shirt that says magic on it.

49:10SPEAKER_00:Make your own magic. DIY. And share this with other people. Invite other people into this. One of my mantras that I use to sculpt the experience that I created at this festival is invitation, not obligation. I don't want to force anyone to do anything. I just want to open the door and show you that you can step through. And I do that by reminding you again and again and again that I believe in you.