Christopher McIntosh | Return of the Tetrad: Occult Forces, Magical Objects & The Cosmic Joke
Dr. Christopher McIntosh returns to InnerVerse to discuss the fascinating and fantastic ideas that are allegorized in his novel, Return of the Tetrad. Some things we explore include the inspirations for this tale and how it relates to his own spiritual journey, magic as a way of seeing the world, black magic and dark occult forces, the Mercurial trickster and devil, ritual replacement of a human psyche with another entity, and the cosmic giggle of mystical synchronicity.
In the Plus+ Extension, we talk about roles of the sexes in magical lifestyles, the process of occult initiations and the four elements, the Brotherhood of Light, transcendental awareness, the Rosicrucian great game, magical objects, the Prognometer, fate vs. free will, the European mythos of the hairy wild man, and what magical research was like in the pre-internet era. All that and much more!
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In this episode
Core themes
A Novel Built From a Real Occult Apprenticeship
Chance Garton and Christopher McIntosh open with the origin of Return of the Tetrad, the 2013 novel published by Mandrake of Oxford after decades in a drawer. McIntosh sketches four phases of his own life, from Christian upbringing to rationalist skepticism to astrology, Rosicrucianism and a doctoral thesis on an eighteenth century neo-Rosicrucian order. The mentor figure Gilbert North is loosely based on Gerald Yorke, once Aleister Crowley's chief disciple, who amassed the Crowley archive he later donated to a London library. The narrator, journalist Paul Cairns, is loosely based on McIntosh as a young man.
Four Ways of Operating in the World
The heart of the conversation is Lionel Snell, who writes as Ramsey Dukes, and his first book SSOTBME, which McIntosh says he personally prompted him to write. Snell maps four modalities, science, religion, art and magic, onto Carl Jung's four functions. Science is observation plus reason, religion reason plus intuition, art intuition plus feeling, and magic feeling plus observation. McIntosh argues that much of what we call science or art is really magic that nobody wants to name. He illustrates the as if principle with Snell's maths lesson on the square root of minus one.
Rituals We Perform Without Noticing
McIntosh reframes ordinary cultural life as ritual. Watching Hamlet is a magical act because the audience suspends disbelief and immerses itself as though the play were real. An orchestral concert is another, with the tension of tuning, the silence, the conductor raising a baton that functions as a magic wand. Garton extends this with John Cage's piece 4'33", where the same silent performance feels different each time because of coughs and the psychic energy of the room. Both agree that fiction writing creates egregores, collective thought forms that outlive their authors.
Black Electricity and the Question of Evil
Garton reads the novel's line that black magic is a term used by simpletons, and that talking about black magic is like talking about black electricity. McIntosh calls the saints of evil speech narrative theatrics, but agrees magic is a neutral force that rebounds on anyone who uses it for harm. He describes Eliphas Levi's astral light, borrowed later by the Theosophists, as the field where egregores live, some of them genuinely unpleasant. He points to Stephen Flowers and The Occult Roots of Bolshevism, plus the Ernest Butler and Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki entity transfer story from Herbie Brennan's Whisperers.
Loki, the Cosmic Joke and Staying in the Wow
Asked whether he believes in the devil as an individual, McIntosh says no, then turns to Loki and the line from Goethe's Faust where Mephistopheles calls himself part of the power that wills the bad and causes the good. Loki is the grain of sand that makes the pearl, and the jester whose mockery deflates authority, which is why dictatorships hate humor. McIntosh tells the owl synchronicity story from his living room. The book's real message, delivered by North in a London park, is to look at reality and find the miraculous.
Quotes
“Is magic something that we lose in puberty, only attainable through some Doctor Strange pilgrimage to a far-off Kamar-Taj? Or are there simple ways in which we can reframe our experiences that invoke something a little more synchronistic and sublime in ourselves?”
“And so I create in a way a kind of egregore, an egregore being a thought form, a collective thought form on the invisible plane created by a group of people thinking the same thoughts and focusing on the same symbols and ideas.”
“what you're doing in magic is you are saying to yourself, I'm going to act as if the world that I'm working in were true.”
“the way that it works is because at the deepest level of ourselves we're connected to the whole universe and the universe is everything in the universe is connected by invisible fields and one sort of all-encompassing field this is what the French magician Eliphas Levi called the astral light”
“where Mephistopheles appears and Faust asks him who he is and he says I'm a part of that power which always wills the bad and always does the good or always causes the good and so he's in a way like the grain of sand in the oyster which is an irritant which in the end produces a pearl”
“which means that the real jester is the profound truth teller and who's skilled enough to do it in a way that can bring levity to what is otherwise a painful truth”
“you say you believed yourself to witness miracles in fact what happened was that you looked for the miraculous and found reality now you must look at reality and find the miraculous”
“everyone even the purest scientist working in the utmost isolation has to decide in the depths of his being whether he is going to say yes or no to the universe or else postpone the decision which is another way of saying no at the moment it is the noes who rule the world”
Dr. Christopher McIntosh is a historian of Western esotericism and author of Occult Germany, which examines German mysticism, paganism, Rosicrucianism, and secret societies.
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