I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last several months. Websites are neat. Posted “papers” or essays are nifty. Webzines, for all their “coolness,” still aren’t measuring up to the street zines of the 80s and 90s. Even web-forums are sliding in both membership and relevance. But we live in a time when being connected to each other and to new information is a major, major social construct that has taken on new dimensions since even many of us were teenagers or young adults. Many a burgeoning occultist has never heard of a cassette tape (or, the gods have mercy, an 8-track tape) or that we used to use things called BBSs for early online communication[1]. And life without cell phones? What? Text messaging? Email?

And, I’m sorry, but a Wikipedia entry on the rise and fall of the 8-track just doesn’t cut it.

So the continuing question is how to make content relevant, timely, changing and yet constant. We see this problem with physical organizations too. The O.T.O. is a prime example—as always—of this lack of relevance in a modern world and the inability to provide content that is relevant, timely, changing and yet constant. There was a time when I would issue challenges to make Thelema applicable to the real world. To date, I still haven’t seen anything that takes the bull by the horns and runs with it. The reason? Either the authors are hyperlinked into the core of the O.T.O. code—and therefore practically worthless for anything practical—or they are still foaming at the mouth of their own self-importance[2]. And, of course, there is the rest of Occulture: if we spread enough tea leaves out, we can feed the world. Huh? Get a real job and feed your own kid first before worrying about whether or not the world is going to burn up in 2012.

Back in the old days—I absolutely love starting out sentences like that—in a barely post-We Are The World social void of hedonism and global babysitting, we sat around wondering when we could move Malkuth to Kether and still feel good enough at the end of the day to say we were still dark and spooky. As I get older, I realize that we have run around the mulberry bush too many times trying to figure out our ass from our head and never really grokking the nature of what is missing from our chosen and preferred religious and philosophical weltanschauung. We have raised a little generation of mental midgets who continue to believe—and belief is the key to it all, right?—that we can act any way we choose without consequence all because we can quote a little line from a little book and then call it a day.

But I digress—surprised? I’m not.

The question is about content. Keep in mind that I follow stats religiously and I don’t advertise this site anywhere. My readership is in the 150+ unique visitors per week range on a regular basis with an 85% return rate of a little over 300 regular visitors weekly. And that’s with my shitty personal life flying around here at the moment. Content, and regular content, is king. And, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what it is so long as it captures attention[3].

So how do we—as socially responsible, promulgating, dedicated thelemites—spread a meme that is being destroyed by the lame dilettantism of an occulturally stunted generation? from our own occulturally stunted generation? I mean, seriously: if we wait on the youth of our loins to suddenly pop up and take the world by storm (and keep in mind that so many occultists/pagans/etc went the “I’m not bringing a child into this world because of overpopulation” route), then we are going to be long past even worm-food by the time we reach the bicentennial of this evolutionary shift in global weltanschauung.

The (Nascent) Scarlet Carnival

Blog carnivals apparently are not all the rage yet. I have to be relieved, I think. However, that said, they are popular in certain circles. I’ve been following the Christian Carnival for some time now and highly impressed by the breadth, width, and height to which some of these people have opened up.

But what is a blog carnival? I’m glad you asked.

The short answer is that it is a regularly produced link list that is centrally or diversely hosted on a blog or blogs.

Sounds boring. I know.

But in reality a blog carnival is a prepared set of links to specific blog articles within a particular theme (usually, at least, there is a theme to the particular carnival: random can be okay too sometimes) with or without some minor commentary/props/kudos/etc given to the author and article. It’s like a highway sign or maybe even more like a menu of selections to read.

It’s a great idea!

So here’s where I’m at right now. I want to spend the first couple of months of 2009 laying the foundation for the start of a thelemic blog carnival to run monthly starting with the first of the thelemic new year. Later, if it works out, it can move to biweekly or even weekly if the demand is there. But the first couple of months here I want to work on recruiting for the first two issues and plan out (and then start publicizing) the first six issue topics.

But I also need a partner in crime on this. My goal is to leapfrog this with at least two of us working on it. One will produce Month A while the other is developing Month B and so on. That gives each, basically, two months to gather[4], collate, and publish each issue. And then, after that, it would be a matter of getting various people to host each carnival (which is little more than a post/entry in someone’s blog). Beyond that, it’s all word of mouth.

I just think it would be a cool idea to start. And I’m going to start it. I think the potential topics are damn near unlimited[5].

Thoughts? Ideas? Criticisms? Motivations? I’m up for hearing them all at this point. Sound like a good idea to anyone else?

Anyone game to work with me on this?

innervox

1. And, in fact, I met my mate on just such a thing. [↩]
2. Before anyone points it out, I am guilty of this latter affliction as well. [↩]
3. I do sometimes wonder if I ever proclaimed this whole personal crisis to be merely random chapters of a fiction novel I was writing if anyone would believe me or just feel massively let down. I mean, it’s not. But I’m just saying … it’s about content. [↩]
4. After it gets off the ground, articles would have to be within a certain date range, but that’s all details to work out later. [↩]
5. We could even do a fluffy-bunny humor issue. LOL! [↩]