Encounters with the occult have been kind of numinous phenomenology through my whole existence but rather in homeopathically dilutional intakes. Always already present there, a live-action spectre ready to manifest itself, mostly in the folds of a popculture-erudition, which I fancied above all to enjoy. I became aware of how much our culture was unawarely prone to ghosts and phantoms of a future time which failed to advance. Then, when I wrote my master thesis about the sociology of nostalgia, I understood how much ontologies had transformed themselves in hauntology – quoting a Derrida’s neologism through the crypto punk scholar’s interpretation of him in the CCRU members’ neurotic space of realist reflections – a change old as modernity but materializing itself in its bolder form after the no future of punks mixed up with the phosphoric fluorescence of the ‘80s. Losing the terrain of the future, a retroverted gaze spread out. Fertile soil for the conceptions of Perennialism, which conquered me.
My pivotal confrontation with occult sciences was a very much Italian story under an obscured sun of an early afternoon of a similarly Italian summer in the ‘80s. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum came by mail from a readers’ club and the element of air together with what I wanted so much to see as a facet of secrecy because of the book society, enhanced by the arcane sigils on the book cover’s black background, let me begin despite being a child, with that reading, which at that age I obviously couldn’t grasp, first of all for the fact it commenced with all the oddest lucubrations about a password in front of a file hermetically guarded by a computer, a device which I had barely already seen in reality and that since the moment on I was pretty sure it would serve the purposes of strange inquests which had to be mysterious and sinister on behalf of obscure individuals with an uncommon learnedness in the matters and fields of at the time advancing cybernetics. Thus, quite the opposite of the idea of the Personal Computer we are accustomed to, decisively towards cypherpunk. Perhaps all these secretiveness and mystery were due to my innate cliquey, cabalistic vision of the society, which has in common many tenets of the ones who earlier or later reencounter themselves on the perennial path, yet abhorring conservatism for its disdain towards the vulnerable part of humanity (too simple!) and so much as traditionalism for being prone to compromising and
consequently being abused by the lovers of commonplaces. On the contrary, insisting that a hint of accelerated anarco-progression might be the secret ingredient to achieve alternative to states – not only politically speaking – but also alternative states of conscience, because, if preserving is paramount for getting informed, and to be informed is holy, the act of creation is at least its ontological preceding. The discovery of an underground occult path continued on a fictional way in the same years through the adventures of Dylan Dog, another Italian antihero although he was invented to be a bad (English) boy. To sum up, in the beginning, there were detective stories with encyclopedic imprinting, adventures of the mind, telepathically intraminds but also a hell lot of ghost stories, victorian or homemade. So, I found myself pretty early attracted by the unknown, maybe likewise many children, but I challenged the interest itself by inventing situations where diffusive attractive feelings could materialize and bring the fascination farther to the point that for instance the expedition to an ancient castle, a private mansion in the neo-gothic revival style, quickly developed into a quest for uncover hidden meanings once in some architectures or any artifacts, a passion for pinpointing symbolism in art and detecting hermetic plots or esoteric allegories and metaphors in cultural production, e.g. in movies. Later on came the discovery of cardinal texts and authors of the American counterculture and Psychedelia, such a bright and enlightening vision that inflamed me; i must admit, I have never been a member of something gothic and dark because I found that subculture somehow as lacking taste or after all in a few cases really creative. Then in the ‘90s, verily the grunge years, I was indeed in the grip of the first exclusive postmodern celebration of nostalgia for a style and a decade, the ‘70s. I could discover there in related trivia, memorabilia and fashion some Ariadne’s threads that brought me to a journey for knowing more about some esoteric findings evocatively disseminated also in writers who are not directly associated with something occult like Henry Miller and Don De Lillo, namely with Tropic of Cancer and The Names for not speaking of masters of supernatural and magic realism like Gustav Meyrink or Hermann Hesse. Other stirring points were my interest in understanding some features deep at work at the roots of German culture, which I pointed out for being the matrix of the Western counterculture, back to the age of the Reform and subterranean movements around it like the one of the Rosicrucians but also incentred on figures like Paracelsus and later Samuel Hahnemann as reformers of medicine as well as polymaths like Agrippa von Nettesheim or Athanasius Kircher, yet above all, illustrious or obscure professors in the fields of religions studies and philology at the edge of the 20th century, bookish men all in all, who let a terrific heritage of bits of knowledge on terrains who nobody before has had the insight to plow with such an almost divinely driven and frenzy engagement. Then I moved to austere groupings yet with an artistic attitude like the ones who strived for reforming society and culture via changing lifestyles, the beautiful losers, and daydreamers of the so-called “Lebensreform” movements, Monte Verità and other communes. Meanwhile, on the path of my graduate studies in Sociology, I focused on deviance theories, personal adaptation to anomie, and almost by chance I came across chaos magick theories, socio-cultural experiments as MK Ultra, Echelon and the contracultural response to such projects, as Discordianism. Much inspiration came from some books by a neoteric psychogeographic collective named Luther Blissett – today Wu Ming. In such a manner I felt to be part of an “invisible college”, like in the rosicrucian work Speculum sophicum Rhodo-stauroticum by Theophilus Schweighardt.
So my background up to a very sounded interest in the occult hasn’t been through practices belonging to particular subcultures, like the ones for example linked to black and death metal neither connoted by an active participation in any circles, but a pretty bookish, imaginative, idiosyncratic approach. Another source, just sui generis and unique in its genre was Franco Battiato’s music and the love for prog-rock with the inception of this adoration in the soundtracks of some Dario Argento’s films, as in Profondo rosso with the scores of the band Goblin from Genoa, but also more international bands as Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Album covers gave me often a glimpse in the occult world, yet one off-the-wall, truly mine, whose flashes were colourful psychedelic as already mentioned, a bit like in Rogers Dean’s LP covers. By looking at them I detected much more than something leading to science fiction or fantasy worlds, as the inspirational sources of all this, something archetypal but also learned and handed on by distinctive members of certain traditions of thoughts, perennialist strains. Covers often load with mythology, ancient lures and occult imagery but who wanted to create futuristic music after all. Last but not least, parallel to those cultural or sub-cultural discoveries, there were some strange events in my family on my mother’s side, mostly regarding dream interpretations, spiritualistic beliefs, a sort of paranormal storytelling about what was on in some of the family’s members lives, which had a profound impact on the course of events in my life and above all on how I interpreted the whole. Growing up adopting conduct of life imbued by precepts deriving from naturopathy naturally led me first to adopting a Weltanschaung with a strong tenet in the teachings of homeopathy first and later on, studying alchemy. To the splendor of coming to approach at least speculatively the Great Art contributed my bibliomania: it was because of my passion for rare books and for job experience in an auction house dedicated to such a trade, for which I acted as a contributor. By compiling the catalogue I more and more came in contact with alchemical symbology, but this encounter set in motion the conviction that this imagery deserved to gain new life, but how? By transforming them into moving images or rather, into motion pictures. It was precisely at that time when I decidedly understood my real vocation had to be becoming a filmmaker. I moved from sociology to antique trade to filmmaking and curating filmmakers who seek to instil some spirit in their works. All in all, my existence is marked by later moves for seeking career changes or more existential ones, I am a total lateral entrant and I wish to remain as such because only change persists – in this phrasing all the inconsistency of us human beings that always occurs when confronted by the idea of change!
I neither see myself as a participant in any coterie or as a devotee to any particular tradition with a neon name nor I am a follower of any path but the one emerging from my inner vision where many rivers of conscience steam, hopefully, higher and higher. I scrutinize the wide spectrum of phenomena inherent to the occult with the outlook of a sociologist for some aspects or even more with the gaze of the cultural studies, because I do not only analyze behaviors, values, structures but biographies, cultural artefacts, oeuvres, texts, the arts, I am much more focusing on the content itself and its hermeneutics.
I look at the occultism as a methodology for producing every time a new or semi new magical system based on synergies between spiritual complexes taken out from religious schemes which worked well to free the spirit, something modular where each module is harmoniously co-active for producing effects at the level of the earthly existence and beyond, which in the end is pretty the same thing.
