Daily Archives: March 5, 2020

Were sitting drinking in a busy London pub, surrounded by goths and the oh-so-curious. Were not here to chat about The Sisters Of Mercy or Edgar Allan Poe, however. Were here to discuss faith and religion with the Global Order of Satan at one of their public meet-and-greets. Brexit and Trump turned me into a Satanist, Andy Diabolus, the co-chapter head explains. I do think that back in 2015 and 16 I was feeling a bit lost. I didnt know what was going on, so I needed some degree ofagency.

The GoS are self-described as an independent nontheistic rationalist Satanist religious ministry and they fell from heaven in 2016. They were originally the British branch of The Satanic Temple (as seen in the documentary Hail Satan?) but formed a splinter group in 2018. The split came after the GoS ran a campaign where they mailed upside-down crucifixes to Bavarian state buildings, a reaction to a law passed in June 2018 that mandated Christian crosses to be hung in the entrance of every Bavarian state building. The Satanic Temple didnt approve of this not because of its severity or blasphemous nature, but simply because they hadnt given it the greenlight.

The GoS have been building their very own global empire ever since, with chapters in Europe, Australasia and the MiddleEast.

Its a modern way to have a religion without necessarily having all the superstition, Andy tells us, citing the rebellious figure of Satan in John Miltons epic poem Paradise Lost as their main inspiration. What were doing is challenging this absolute authority. One of our major things is to challenge overbearing religions, you know? I dont mind if youre a Christian or Muslim, Im not here to stop that. However, if you go to my kids school and start pushing the bible on them, and start saying, Youve got to believe this, its the one true way, and so on, then you and I are going to have somewords.

Since the 1960s, Satanism in the USA revolved around Anton LaVey, author of The Satanic Bible and founder of the Church Of Satan. This particular belief system, known as LaVeyan Satanism, was a mixture of Ayn Rands Objectivism a philosophy wherein doing things in your own interest is the most important tenet and good old-fashioned Occultism; incorporating sex, ritual and magic. Anton died in 1997 but the Church is still going, charging a devilish $255 to join. Since 2013, however, a group called The Satanic Temple have risen and garnered a lot of media attention with their non-theistic, leftist political message. Their biggest campaign, as covered in the aforementioned Hail Satan? documentary, was to erect a Baphomet statue next to a Ten Commandments statue that was set to be built at the Oklahoma State Capitol. The Baphomet statue was an embodiment of their goals around religious diversity and the separation of church andstate.

READ THIS: The 50 most evil songsever

In the UK, however, without a prominent and TV-ready prophet like Anton LaVey, Satanic sects have generally been more underground. The Order Of Nine Angles, for example, are an extreme, far-right group that have haunted the British fringes since the 60s. Andy refers to them as the Order of No Members due to their indefinite membership numbers and niche, complex worldview. He goes on to say that their ideologies, magick and their advocating murder, or culling, have no place in his group. Many members of the GoS wear masks in photos and have Satanic pseudonyms, for safety reasons rather than religious. That includes everyone includedhere.

The GoS are non-theistic, which means the followers dont actually believe in the Devil (or God) at all. So, why are they not justatheists?

Atheism is very much about what youre not you dont believe in this and that but Satanism is more like, We dont believe in God, but this is what we do believe and this is what we try to follow, Murchadh, a young member, explains as we sit with among other Satanists and drink red wine one evening in a north London flat. He refers to their pillars, which can be found proudly displayed on their website.

Among them are: Act with empathy, compassion, and wisdom towards yourself and others and, All people make mistakes. Allow them to correct those mistakes, as we seek acceptance in others over ourown.

These may seem surprisingly accessible and straight-forward and they are. The followers tell us that a battle for pluralism and religious freedom is at the heart of their movement, rather than any kind of sacrifice or sorcery you might see in late-night Channel 5 horrorfilms.

Political activism and community projects are part of their Satanism, too. Their presence at the anti-Boris march in December 2019 and their Get Home Safely campaign, are parts of their mission to rehabilitate the image of Satanism and attract like-mindedseekers.

As well as the serious stuff we do fun stuff, too, Andy insists, we go on weekends together, go to the pub together. Its not quite tea and biscuits its more cider and black (laughs).

As our conversation continues, things get a little stranger as Andy reveals, somewhat confusingly, that they actually do hold rituals and host what they call unbaptisms from time to time. He says that the ceremonies which borrow imagery and ideas from occult and pagan ceremonies are an important part of theGoS.

You do a ritual every time you cross a road, you look left, right and left again They are little ways of making yourself feel comfortable with the world, or declaring things, making statements, Andy explains. Were not conjuring demons, were not believing that by doing this we are cursing someone or are affecting other people in a certain way, its very personal, its for us. We use the trappings of [occultism]. We can use that power, that symbolistic power, rather than any sort of magical power. Its like your own personal psychodrama. He goes on to compare it to putting on a play and writing your own lines, explaining that self-affirmations are a big part ofit.

READ THIS: 12 of the most uplifting songs aboutSatan

The members we meet range from graphic designers to legal sector workers, spanning across a diverse range of ages. Some are ex-Christians, others lifelong atheists, but their connection seems as real and deep as any friendshipgroup.

Community is the important part. Meeting with people that have the same, if not similar, beliefs to me and then I dont feel alone anymore, Murchadh says, earnestly. He continues, telling us that he grew up as a Catholic and has now been a member of the Global Order for three years, joining when was 18 after losing somebody close tohim.

We cant help but wonder what role music plays in it all. Did everyone begin by listening to Slayer and drawing pentagrams on their schoolwork (like the rest of us) and then kind of, just, got carriedaway?

I started out at boarding school listening to Cradle Of Filth, who I still listen to, says Crawley, one of the members, smirking as she reminisces. I used to play it during my mums prayer meetings when I was about 16, full blast upstairs at home. There would be Gilded C**t just blaring out as the housemistress showed other parents through the house (laughs).

Despite their personal enjoyment of metal and gothic music, like Nightwish and Marilyn Manson, Andy insisted that they dont want to be gatekeepers nor let the GoS become some exclusive goth club. I find myself trying to compile playlists that arent your average thundering black metal, but theres a bit of industrial music, or Satanic doo-wop, or pop music or whatever.

Although theyre not hell-raising devil-worshippers, some of the members we speak with still make sure to separate their personal life from their Satanic social circle. Ive still got Christian friends so Im sensitive towards them, Crawley says. If I want to share something on my own private [Facebook] feed I might hide it from them. Andy echoes this, saying his Christian parents wouldnt be too chuffed if they found out and that he has rehearsed what hed say to them if they ever wereto.

Satanism is going through a renaissance of sorts, and the members we meet at the helm of it seem to be dedicated to cultivating its growth and evolution. Their dedication also stretches to providing a safe, welcoming place for atheists and agnostics that might want to hang out, make friends, have a drink and be part of positive change both personally andsocietally.

READ THIS: 10 of the most believably Satanicbands

As our night came to a close, we ask Crawley what shed say to anyone interested in the group. Send us a message on Twitter or email us, get in touch so we know that youre kosher, then come and meet us. Were not raving, blood-drinking lunatics, were normal, nice people, she smiles, sipping wine, the words Religion Sucks written across her T-shirt.

Despite what you may have seen on TV or in the newspaper, modern Satanism isnt built on a foundation of Lovecraftian rituals, witchcraft or occult practices; the real magic is found in the community that groups like GoS have built, and in their fight for a better, more liberal tomorrow.Hail!

Posted on March 3rd 2020, 11:30am

Excerpt from:

What It Really Means To Be A Satanist - Kerrang!

Witches walk among us seriously. Pittchcraft is a blog written by staff writer Emily Pinigis about her life as a college student and practicing Witch.

In modern times Witchcraft is often portrayed as an evil and mythical practice. As a young Witch, I often find myself hesitating to identify publicly as such due to the inevitable comments that Witches dont exist. In fact, before I started this blog, there was only one person in my life who knew I was a Witch the Witch who introduced me to the practice. It seems that even today, people only think of Witches as the villains in Disney movies. While there are many secrets surrounding the practice, it is far more rooted in established religion than many people think.

A Google search of the term Witchcraft leads to various different definitions. Many of them relate to sorcery or exaggerated supernatural powers, while only a couple actually talk about the Wiccan religion. Even Merriam Webster defines Witchcraft as the use of sorcery or magic or communication with the devil or with a familiar. The definition is not entirely incorrect, though it leaves out all mention of Witchcraft as a real religious practice. The mentions of sorcery and devil worship are rooted in fiction as Satanism is a different religion from Wicca.

As with most religions, its fairly difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the practice and the timeline is further confused in Witchcraft, where the practice may also involve worship of deities of other religions like Christianity or Buddhism. Some definitions of the practice even go so far as to claim that Witchcraft originated with civilization itself. Overall, the religion that is most commonly associated with Witchcraft is Wicca.

Wicca centers on pre-Christian beliefs that Magick exists within the universe and is practiced in such a way that honors nature and the elements. Wicca is also a Neo-Pagan religion, and most of the beliefs of Wicca are the same as Pagan beliefs, except without the same deities as Paganism. There are only two deities within Wicca the God and the Goddess. They are also sometimes referred to as the Horned God and the Moon Goddess.

On a very basic level, these two deities represent the masculine and feminine forces of nature and the universe. The relatively simple nature of the Wiccan deities is what allows for the practice to overlap with deities of other religions. When it comes down to it, Wicca is different from Paganism in that it allows for more religious freedom depending on the preferences of the practitioner. Paganism has strict deities that one must worship to be a Pagan. In Wicca, however, the deities need not be worshipped in such a way they simply exist as the opposing forces of nature. No matter the deities, the practicing Witch must always follow the Wiccan Rede, As it harms none, do as thou wilt.

The very first and perhaps most famous Wiccan was Gerald Gardner, a British occultist born in 1884. In 1934, he joined the New Forest Coven, a group of Witches who practiced their own Magick in a way diverged slightly from Paganism. Gardner went on to work with the teachings of Aleister Crowley another British occultist who dabbled in Witchcraft to found the modern religion Wicca. His practice began to spread from Britain into Australia and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

Gardners development of Wicca began shifting societys perception of Witchcraft into a more positive light. Throughout history before him, Witchcraft was seen as barbarous and often associated with devil-worshipping.

Gardner also began an era in which men could be seen as Witches. Prior to the official creation of Wicca, those being accused of Witchcraft as a blasphemous practice were almost solely women. A woman that stood out for being too promiscuous, intelligent or independent could be accused of being a Witch because she deviated from the expectations for women at the time. Men were rarely accused of being Witches, and, if they were, it was usually only if they were homosexual or flamboyant.

Witchcraft may have existed since the dawn of civilization, but it has grown and changed over the centuries. The creation of Wicca as recently as 1950 makes the entire practice very new and unknown to many people. As the definition of a Witch grows, and the societal views surrounding the practice become more positive, it is important that even those who do not practice Witchcraft understand what it means to be a Witch.

The media plays up the dark and mysterious history of Witchcraft, leaning into the supernatural elements, but it is important to remind society of practicing Witches and the very natural practice of Witchcraft. For many living Witches, it feels like an innate need to speak proudly of who we are and to educate those around us in the hopes that one day, Wicca will be normalized like every other socially accepted religion. That is precisely what I hope to achieve through these writings, if only to a small degree. I hope to normalize the practice of Witchcraft and bring more public awareness to Wicca as a legitimate practicing religion.

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Pittchcraft: The true history of Wicca and Witchcraft - University of Pittsburgh The Pitt News

According to the people who claim to be his messengers on earth, God is pissed about rock music. From the moment that guitars, drums, bass and vocals were joined together, representatives of the major religions have decried the resulting music as blasphemy and have done their best to curb any chance young people have of enjoying it. Whether its burning CDs, rallying to government to shut down concerts, or just posting up outside of an in-store appearance with a homophobic slogan on a sign, those who claim to be Heavens messengers will always find a righteous way to attack an art form that inspires onlyjoy.

But while religion has disliked rocknroll as a whole for ages, certain artists have become the ultimate scapegoats of those doing the Lords work. These musicians have angered church-goers so muchwhether with insensitive quotes, satanic imagery, or the implication that they might occasionally have sexthat their work and/or live shows have been banned (sometimes, theyve even been held at gunpoint). For the sake of celebrating these rabble-rousers, we put together a list of those artists against whom religion has raised its torch and pitchfork thehighest.

Here are 10 artists whose songs, concerts, or very presence were banned by thechurch

Marilyn Manson

For going on three decades, Marilyn Manson has been the ultimate scapegoat for religious groups. The shock rockers career is peppered with incidents of offended Christians trying to shut him down, including having his live show banned in South Carolina in 1997 and being banned from an Australia resort in 1999. Even the Church Of Satan wants to be distanced from him, having clarified his role within the church to a T so as not to have anyone think hes a minister therein. So divisive youre pissing off the sataniststhe shock rockers goldenring.

READ THIS: From spooky kid to hood goth: The changing faces of Marilyn Manson

The Beatles

The ol Bigger than Jesus line caused an odd speed bump in the rampant Beatlemania of the early 60s. In 1966, two broadcasters from Birmingham, Alabama, named Doug Layton and Tommy Charles went on a hardcore Ban The Beatles campaign over Lennons blasphemous quote, causing record stores and radio stations around America to burn their Beatles records and ban the band. The beef was squashed in 2010, when the Vatican officially forgave the Beatles for their hubris. Good looking out fifty years later,Rome.

Slayer

There was something about Slayers brand of hard-hitting, blood-soaked satanic thrash that freaked out religious figures in the 80s like no other music. Slayer fandom soon became the ultimate symbol of an adolescence gone wrong. Pastor Bob Larson led the charge, making a big show of touring with the band and outing them as everyday metalheads. But it wasnt just in Americas sensitive midsection that the band were pariahs; their 2006 album Christ Illusion was recalled by EMI India after Christian groups protested. Its good to know Slayer remain universally feared by sensitive Christians all over theworld.

Behemoth

Of the bands on this list, Behemoth are one of the few who have fired shots back at the church. The Polish death metal bands frontman Nergal was charged with Blasphemy for ripping up a Bible onstage in 2007, for which he even went to trial (the charges were dropped). The band were later included on a list of bands who focus on murder and Satanism, which resulted in Behemoth being banned from Poznari in 2014. Of course, Nergal also trolled Christians and metal fans alike by making up a story about being ejected from the YMCA on tour, so the feud is stillongoing.

Lamb Of God

In the modern day, its important to remember that the church is a broad term, encompassing a wide spectrum of religions that perceive music as the enemy for no good reason. An example of this was Lamb Of Gods being banned from playing a festival in Malaysia after the Office Of Islamic Development of Malaysia became worried about the bands lyrics, specifically those of the Kiladelphia intro which contains lyrics taken directly from the Quran. The show was finally shut down because the bands shows were found to infringe on religious sensitivities, and because the promoter was receiving death threats. So remember, dont be close-mindedall religions have fundamentalists who are enemies of rockmusic!

Black Sabbath

The original heavy metal rabble-rousers, Black Sabbath were hated by religious authorities the minute they exploded onto the scene. The problem, of course, was that Sabbath werent satanists, and so their constant persecution felt especially plastic. There was one incident where we were due to play in a town and we got banned by the church, guitarist Tony Iommi recalled. The show was announced in all the papers for two weeks before we got there. The church managed to ban us. And then the bloody church burned down and we got theblame.

The Everly Brothers

One doesnt usually think of The Everly Brothers as the kind of band who the church would want to crush, but the pop-rock oldsters managed to get banned in Boston for their lovers lane anthem Wake Up Little Susie. The citys Catholics considered the song unseemly due to its sexual themes (even though the whole song is about two teens who didnt have sex). Its just a solid reminder that no matter how sensitive people get about music right now, back in the day you couldnt even talk about the idea of sex without bible-thumpers calling you aheathen.

Cradle Of Filth

Oddly enough, for all their devil-mongering and perversion, it wasnt Cradle Of Filths lyrics or shirts that got them assailed by armed guards and kicked out of the Vatican. The vampire metallers got in trouble in 1998 when they entered St. Peters Square while their keyboard player Lecter was wearing a priests outfit. Strangely enough it wasnt because I was wearing a tacky I love Satan T-shirt that Id just been given, or that our guitarist had a Jesus is a C**t shirt, Dani Filth told Kerrang! in 2019. It was that Lecter was dressed as a priest and apparently thats illegal there. Theyre a law unto themselves and they could have held us for the rest of our lives if theyd wantedto.

Sepultura

Of all the metal bands in the world, Sepultura feel like a weird one to think that God would hate; the band have an open-minded spiritual bent to them that so many other acts dont. But that didnt stop their Lebanon show from being canceled, with authorities accusing the band of insulting Christianity and being devil worshippers. The implied bigger issue, however, appears to have been that some members of the band had posed prominently in their videos around sites in Israel, which is reason to outlaw the band from entering the country (bands with Israeli stamps in their passports cannot enter Lebanon, for the record). The only real victims here were, of course, Sepulturasfans.

Rotting Christ

Greek blackened death metallers Rotting Christ certainly picked a name that sounds solely intended to upset religious figures. And while plenty of loudmouths have protested their shows, the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Esfirmenou really went all-in, getting the bands concert in Patras, Greece, canceled due to their offensive and satanic messages. Taking the accusation one step further, the monastery even implied that Rotting Christs unholy image was part of why Greece was facing a socio-economic crisis. Blaming a metal band for your countrys problems for playing death metalthe ultimate in culturalacrobatics.

READ THIS: The 50 most evil songs ever

Posted on March 1st 2020, 2:30pm

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10 Bands Who Have Been Banned By The Church - Kerrang!

AGNES PELTON was fifty years old when she left New York for the village of Cathedral City, six miles southeast of Palm Springs in the California desert. By 1932, a conspiracy of sun, sand, and settler-colonial ideology had made the state a mecca for visionaries and seekers, attracted by landscapes seemingly unspoiled by human intervention, temporalities seemingly unburdened by the past. In Peltons 1941 painting Future, obscure shadows part to reveal two stone towers. Suggestive of those that marked the towns entrance, they float just above the horizon and flank a distant lavender hill. Overhead, four little portals arranged in a cruciform pattern perforate the bleached sky. Pelton wrote that the work represented a kind of Pilgrims Progress. Through darkness + oppression, across a stony desert and through a symbolic arch is seen a mountain of vision, above which open by degrees, windows of illumination.

The first solo show devoted to Pelton in about a quarter century, Desert Transcendentalist opened last year at the Phoenix Art Museum (where it was organized by chief curator Gilbert Vicario) and on March 13 travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (where it will be overseen by curator Barbara Haskell). Its arrival in Manhattan has been prepared by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums record-busting 201819 retrospective of Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint, to whom Pelton will likely be compared. Both artists put their academic training to work in accomplished yet conventional landscapes, reserving abstraction to convey their vision of a reality beyond the material world. They also drew on overlapping occult sources and shared a decentered view of their authorial agency, seeing themselves as conduits for spiritual forces rather than as autonomous creators. Their contemporary reception has coincided with a surge of institutional interest in underknown women artists and with a broader cultural mainstreaming of astrology, witchcraft, and alternative spirituality (a phenomenon not overlooked at the Guggenheim gift shop, which stocked Ouija boards, tarot cards, and other esoterica during the run of the af Klint show). That said, Peltons organic language of evolutionary processes differs from the diagrammatic tendency of much of af Klints work, and each artist deserves to be considered on her own terms (one shudders at the prospect of cringey epithets like the Coachella Hilma af Klint). The comparison is nonetheless instructive. While af Klint and Pelton were steeped in the heady arcana of their historical moment, their contemporary reception is very much a symptom of our own, speaking to an exhaustion with the art-historical canon and a hunger for meaning outside the domain of empirical data and official institutions.

Born in 1881 to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany, Pelton moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was seven. Timorous, shy, and plagued by neurasthenic episodes and mysterious ailments, she grew up in the long shadow of the nineteenth centurys most notorious sex scandal. In 1872, free-love advocate, spiritualist, and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhullrunning on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Frederick Douglassrevealed that renowned pastor and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher was living in concubinage with Agness grandmother Elizabeth Tilton, who was married to a prominent newspaper editor and abolitionist. The ensuing adultery trial rocked progressive Brooklyn and ruined the Tilton family. Agness mother, Florence, was sent away to Germany, where she married William Pelton, the expatriate failson of a Louisiana plantation owner. He died when Agnes was nine, and Florence gave music lessons and took in boarders to make ends meet. From the time of puberty, Pelton recalled, I was much inclined to melancholy and tears, which was probably aggravated by being the only child in a household of deeply religious and perhaps unnecessarily serious people.

Pelton began her formal study of art in 1895 at the Pratt Institute. Among her instructors was painter and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who espoused the Japanese value of notan (the harmonious contrast of dark and light) and encouraged intuitive expression over mimetic verisimilitude. In the 1910s, his students Georgia OKeeffe and Max Weber would radicalize his ideas in adventurous abstractions, while Peltons output from this timecrepuscular idylls of willowy maidens adrift in grottoes and wooded landscapesclung to the late-Symbolist manner of Louis Michel Eilshemius, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Arthur B. Davies. These Imaginative Paintings, as the artist called them, were congenial to the tentative modernism then emerging in New York. They were exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, among other venues, and attracted patrons including Greenwich Village salon-nire Mabel Dodge Luhan, who would expose Pelton to the desert when she invited her to stay at her estate in Taos, New Mexico, in 1919.

A few months prior to this trip, Pelton wrote in her journal that her Imaginative Paintings were beginning to feel insincere, not real. She wanted her art to reflect perfect consciousness and Divine Reality. As art historian Erika Doss points out in her contribution to the Desert Transcendentalist catalogue, these words were lifted from the writing of spiritual leader Helena Blavatsky. Famed cofounder of the ancestral New Age faith theosophy, Blavatsky held that the worlds many belief systems were based on an atavistic religion organized around a single, metaphysical Absolute. Synthesizing elements of Neoplatonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and other traditions, theosophy aimed to elevate and enlighten humanity by retrieving this forgotten universal knowledge. Like af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and other moderns, Pelton was drawn to the creeds idealist teleology of human perfectibility, finding in it an exotic alternative to scientism, materialism, and mainstream Christianity.

When her mother died in 1921, Pelton, now forty, moved to the abandoned Hayground Windmill near Water Mill, Long Island. There she painted The Ray Serene, 1925, a gestural, Kandinsky-esque churn of psychedelic vapors and whiplash curves, designating it My First Abstraction on the back of the canvas. Two works from the following year cathect on the form of a luminous sphere, enveloped in a tornado of gesture in Being and embubbled by nacreous globules in The Fountains. In the latter work, the multiplying rondures and the yellow solar disk overhead suggest Blavatskys successor Annie Besants description of the cosmos as a mighty solar system, the sun representing the LOGOS and, coming outwards, orb after orb, each orb representing a plane of the universe. Cowritten with self-styled clairvoyant Charles Webster Leadbeater, Besants 1901 treatise Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation provided Pelton with a symbology of colors and shapes believed to possess transhistorical meanings. As scholar Nancy Strow Sheley noted in her dissertation on Pelton, her 1928 painting Ecstasy features the symbol of the curving hook, identified by Besant and Leadbeater with selfishness and greed. The artist explains in an accompanying poem that the cluster of yellow tendrils represents a blooming flower harassed by the ugly hook of darkness, the scythe-like form lurking near the compositions bottom edge.

The same year she painted Ecstasy, Pelton traveled to California for eight months and became immersed in a South Pasadena spiritualist colony called the Glass Hive. She sketched lotuses, symbols of self-renunciation, at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. The flower would eventually mature into the golden inflorescence presiding over Ahmi in Egypt, 1931, a delirious nocturne replete with a white swan, strange conical mountains, and swirling celestial activity.

On her return to New York, Peltons style, which had gurgled with Heraclitean flux and painterly incident, became more serene, hard-edge, and resolved. Symmetry, horizon lines, and landscape elements returned to her compositions, which began to suggest illusionistic depths and expanses. In Star Gazer, 1929, a pale-green chalice shelters a purple ovate form that evokes a schematic standing figure or budding flower. High above in the evening sky, a tiny six-pointed star represents Venus, a planet of antipatriarchal and anticlerical significance in theosophical cosmology. According to Blavatsky, Venus, the sister planet of our Earth, was sacrificed to the ambition of our little globe to show the latter the chosen planet of the Lord. She became the scapegoat, the Azaziel of the starry dome, for the sins of the Earth, or rather for those of a certain class in the human familythe clergywho slandered the bright orb by associating it with satanism.

Pelton labored to reconstruct her interior visions on canvas, realizing numinous tissues and lapidary volumes through successive glazes over months or even years.

The allure of the arcane was central to the af Klint cult that flourished across Instagram feeds last year, but the Swedish artists recourse to extrinsic systems of meaning posed a problem for some critics and historians. Taking af Klint seriously as an artist, in my view, actually requires us to take some critical distance from the mysticism that might have enabled her to make such innovative work, Briony Fer wrote in the Guggenheim catalogue. To focus only on the occult symbolic meanings of her work leads to an interpretive dead end. Like af Klints abstractionswhich Guggenheim visitors could experience on psychic tours where they practice[d] receiving spirit messages through select paintingsPeltons court para-aesthetic modes of reading that might open up meaning for some and close it down for others. In an effort to explore a wide range of possible responses to the artists work, Sheley showed the painting Challenge, 1940, to an expert in occult imagery, who decrypted the picture sign by sign, identifying the star flower as an indication of good character, the milky, pod-like form as a symbol of maternity unrealized, and each inky stipple as a cipher for a decision influenced by men in [Peltons] life. Such literal iconographic correspondences are, of course, anathema to modernism, with its emphases on subjective expression, self-criticism, and hermeneutic indeterminacy. For Pelton, the final significance of her art ultimately lay neither in the sensuous matter of the paintings themselves nor in any hermetic doctrine encapsulated within them, but in telegraphing between the phenomenal world and an empyreal nonsite at the edges of representation and consciousness. I feel somewhat like the keeper of a little lighthouse, Pelton wrote, the beam of which goes farther than I know, and illumines for others more than I can see.

Pelton labored to reconstruct her interior visions on canvas, realizing numinous tissues and lapidary volumes through successive glazes over months or even years. She eschewed improvisation and seriality. With the exception of her last work, Light Center, a luminous egg form veiled in a purple penumbra (painted first in 194748, then again in 196061), she never repeated a composition. She did, however, draw on a consistent body of images that included orbs, urns, mountains, and, perhaps most important, fire.

In 1930, Pelton befriended composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar (n Daniel Chennevire), who became her spiritual guide and sympathetic critic. Steeped in Bergsonian vitalism and Jungian analysis as well as theosophy, Rudhyar was a principal theorist of what he called humanistic astrology, which strove to reconcile star divinations deterministic conception of human agency with depth psychology. It was likely through him that Pelton, who had been fascinated by the eruption of the volcano Klauea when visiting Hawaii in 1924, became a devotee of Agni Yoga, a neo-theosophical discipline devoted to the cosmic, purifying energy of fire. In two works from 1930, she imagines its essence as incandescent heat, manifested as an acanthus of flames in The Voice and as a shaft of Promethean radiance in the formidably minimal White Fire. Fires in Space, 1938, one of her most visceral compositions, scatters twelve conflagrations across a field of unstructured darkness, flickers of illumination in the abyss.

If Peltons fantasias at times seem as much in dialogue with Disney as with Kandinsky, its not disparaging her to say so, any more than its disparaging Kandinsky or af Klint to note their engagements with occultism.

When Peltons landlord sold the Hayground Windmill in 1932, she headed for California. Two years earlier, writes Doss, Time magazine was already reporting a flourishing of cults, of religious novelties, and new fashions in faiths in the state. Initially planning on a brief trip, Pelton stayed for the rest of her life, seeking painterly forms through modes of heightened consciousness like trance, prayer, and meditation. In Messengers, 1932, her first Cathedral City abstraction, a blue moon rises over a desert horizon and progenerates a shimmering urn crowned by stylized palms, evoking the thatched structures of the areas indigenous Cahuilla people. Like the glassy vessel of Star Gazer, this central motif appears to levitate from the bottom of the canvasa transcendent motion Rudhyar described as upward rush or upward aspiration.

Peltons asceticism, spiritual intensity, and isolation from mainstream centers of cultural production might tempt one to romanticize her as a hermit. In fact, she made lasting friendships with her neighbors, hosted studio visits and art exhibitions, and continued to show her work in New York and other US cities. Through Rudhyar, she began a correspondence in 1933 with Raymond Jonson, cofounder of the Transcendental Painting Group, a circle of southwestern artists committed to carry[ing] painting beyond the appearance of the physical world. The same year, she lent fourteen paintings to an exhibition Jonson arranged at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Also included was the work of OKeeffe, to whom Pelton was often and unsurprisingly compared. Pelton, likely aware that their overlapping social networks, shared inspiration in nature, and midlife relocations to the western desert might invite conflation, teased out the differences between them in her journal: [Her] source is not the [same] source as AP [Agnes Pelton] . . . they are not seen primarily inside, in the realm of Ether (as I call it). . . . The joy [of OKeeffes work] is her own subjective reaction, the joy of spreading its rebound over the canvas for her external eye.

Whereas OKeeffes biomorphic forms were overdetermined by the sexualized framing (one that the artist unequivocally rejected) imposed on them by her partner Alfred Stieglitz, Peltons work seems less available to carnal interpretations. She never married; her sexuality remains a matter of speculation, and her squeamishness on the subject reflected the Victorian attitudes with which she was raised. The physicality and violent thrust (per her description) of Seeds of Date, 1935, one in a series of commercial painting she made for a fruit farm in California, caused her some retroactive distress. Pelton resolved to avoid sexual imagery in her abstractions. When a form appears to have a phallic resemblance, she wrote, use the force it represents without the form. (For the most part, her sublimations were successful, with the exception of the conspicuously erectile Ascent [aka Liberation], 1946.)

Even in Cathedral City, one could not live on divine inspiration alone. When the death of an uncle, who for years had helped her out with regular checks, left her in precarious financial straits, Pelton began painting plein air desert scenes for the tourist trade. Letters to her friends speak of chronic illness, money problems, and creative frustrations, particularly the strain of balancing her commercial production with her abstractions. In 1932, she painted two mountain pictures, San Gorgonio in the Spring, a picturesque view of flowering cacti and a distant snowcapped massif, and Mount of Flame, a hieratic peak scaled by little tongues of flame, its summit erupting in a spray of white mist: a symbol of the transformation of heat into Light. To return to such abstractions after her landscapes, she once wrote, was like painting with a moths wing and with music instead of paint.

Was the boundary between picturing the material world and her inner vision as hard as Pelton imagined? Not so in Winter, 1933, a bizarre, almost clumsy sublation of abstraction and figure painting, with its poshlost doves foregrounding an astronomical pink corolla blossoming from the sea. The work epitomizes the alluring wrongness of Peltons paintings, which look like modern art but also like design, advertising, and pop culture. There is something distinctly Moderne in her line, her bulbous yet tensile contours, while her curlicues and fronds and wings are reminiscent of interwar textiles and wallpaper. The glowing ovoid form in Light Center could be a sconce on a bathroom wall; the swan in Ahmi in Egypt could have been cut out of a magazine. Her polychrome hazes suggest neon on a rainy night. To a contemporary eye, works like Idyll, 1952a desert landscape brightly detourned by two translucent parabolic forms that refuse to quite make sense either as objects in pictorial space or as gestural marksmight register as virtuosic exemplars of good bad painting, but the elements of badness dont collapse into kitsch, at least not entirely, nor do they make her pictures any less compelling as explorations of inner worlds and esoteric visions.

If Peltons fantasias at times seem as much in dialogue with Disney as with Kandinsky, its not disparaging her to say so, any more than its disparaging Kandinsky or af Klint to note their engagements with occultism. Theosophy is one of modernisms limit concepts; so is kitsch. (And these two limits might not themselves be cleanly distinct. With its baroque eclecticism and spiritualist trappings, theosophy, one might say, was already kitsch.) Peltons paintings are gorgeously weird explorations of these limitsperhaps none more gorgeous, weird, even destructive than Day, 1935, painted after her exposure to the geometric work of Jonson and the Transcendental Painting Group. A vertical rectangle, scandalously Euclidean and infilled with a cool blue fade, establishes itself on a misty starlit mountain, canceling its illusionism. Although this is the closest she would come to true geometric abstraction, writes the late Michael Zakian, who curated Peltons first retrospective in 1995, the central rectangle is not a pure, autonomous form. A flow of pearly, Peltonian fluid bursts from its side, concluding in plumes of filmy opalescence. The artist called the shape the fountain with the open door. Its negative metaphysics is an invitation inside, to the realm of Ether.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, March 13June 28.

Chloe Wyma is an associate editor atArtforum.

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