The Age of Tantric Patriarchs Crowley, Nietzsche & Gurdjieff (with Layman Pascal)
The Rogue Fathers of Contemporary Mystical Philosophy
Course begins Sunday, Jan 3, 2027
The Tantric Patriarchs series is an invitation into biography as practice. To go beyond merely gaining knowledge about fascinating lives to also assimilate, interrogate & integrate their worldviews. Even to taste the fundamental inner exercises of the men who shaped and disturbed the philosophical soul of the modern era and its still-emerging successors.
Three Biographies. Three Worldviews. Three Masters of the Will.
Nietzsche, Crowley, & Gurdjieff are very different figures. There is a feral philosopher of power, value and nihilism. An arrogant poet and celebrity sex-magician who founded his own religion. A cryptic sage who taught the deep work of soulcrafting. Very different, and yet these difficult men also shared many intriguing characteristics. Anti-philosophers, anti-priests, & anti-educators. Each one was a complex thinker who shaped the spiritual, secular and occult sensibility of our epoch. That is not all. The similarities go much deeper:
All three were brilliant amateur psychologists and prolific experimental authors. They adored their weird Christian dads. They were all Western intellectual shamans who critiqued our entire civilization and proposed their own work as a radical shift in world history. Hyperbolic and confrontational. Masculine caricatures who wove serious ideas together with sly jokes, who played with identities and invented their own autobiographies. These men each believed in embodiment, hierarchy, internationalism, perspectivalism and relativism. They actively opposed normal cultural attitudes and advocated the integration of the full range of human energies -- from the erotic to the transcendent.
These were avid hikers and contemplative mystics who gathered followers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their personal lives were difficult and their relationships were explosive.
Joyful, tragic and manipulative characters. Easy to misunderstand. Arrogant, agitated and agitating. Passionate. Artistic. Self-mocking. They broke rules and invented rules. They hang out with the leading artists, thinkers and writers of their era. Each man held highly ambiguous and provocative ideas about women and Nature. All of them were disturbingly comfortable with extreme ideas and with lives of intense inner contradiction.
Most of all, they all believed deeply in the Will.
These men made it hard for people to meet them in their secret hearts. Nonetheless, we will try. These men charted a course of their own, and our course will explore what happened to them on that journey for good & ill. Join us to delve into their outrageous lives, amazing practices, dangerous tendencies and ongoing influence as their doctrines continue to mystify, illuminate and shape our world.
Strange times call for strange mentors.
WHO THIS COURSE IS FOR:
This is a journey for weird biography enthusiasts, spiritual seekers, and spiritual non-seekers. For philosophy fans, metamodernists, integralites, artists, cosmic ecologists, magicians, mystics, madmen, madwomen, the curious, and all those who want to understand the positive and negative role of radical male minds in the history of contemporary thought & Spirit.
These are the most edgy ancestors of post-postmodern spirituality, personal growth and wisdom tribes. If you like any of those words, this is for you.
No prior knowledge about these figures or their techniques is needed. Just openness to explore weird histories, peculiar contradictions and the feeling of a new aeon. a
Life stories are the original and perennial source of wisdom transmission.
Module Outline
Beginning Jan 3 2027. 6:00pm CET (Paris) · 12:00pm EST (New York) · 09:00am PST (Los Angeles), always 6 pm CET
Three Lives. Six Concepts.
This course begins with special access to articles and videos on The Age of Tantric Patriarchs, the role of biography in Soulmaking, and an exploration of patriarchy & patriarchality through a metashamanic and developmental lens.
Six 90min modules will each feature biographical storytelling, group readings, philosophical analysis, imaginal second-person engagement, inner contemplative exercises, and collective discussion. As well as whatever “weird transmissions” are possible under the circumstances.
Beginning Jan 3 2027. 6:00pm CET (Paris) · 12:00pm EST (New York) · 09:00am PST (Los Angeles)
MODULE 1: PUNK SPIRITUALITY
Jan 3
THE YOUNG ALEISTER CROWLEY learns the art of transgression in the service of overcoming opposites. We meet the arrogant, overly literal, son of a wealthy and weird Quaker proselytiser. His mother calls him the Great Beast. Bullied at school. Father’s death. Poetry. Championship mountain climbing. Discovering his bisexuality. Feuds with WB Yeats and Oscar Wilde. International adventure. Yoga. Joining occult lodges. Imaginal warfare. Improvised sex magick. Squandering a fortune. Learning discipline. And the Egyptian Revelations that would become the religion of Thelema.
MODULE 2: SACRED INDIVIDUALITY
Jan 10
THE OLDER CROWLEY becomes the prophet of The True Will. He converts to his own religion and becomes the world’s leading occult bureaucrat -- specializing in eros, uniqueness and the creative invention of initiatory rites. Despite being branded in the media as “the wickedest man alive,” he still manages to operate as both an elaborate practical joker and a covert double agent during WWII. He literally eats shit at an Abbey he establishes in Italy. Becomes a heroin addict and impoverished novelist. Encounters an alien. Destroys several lives and ends up as an anti-hero to 70s rock stars, an inspiration to counterculture movements, and the most famous occult philosopher in the world. Teacher as Asshole.
MODULE 3: HOW TO BECOME WHO YOU ARE
Jan 17
THE YOUNG FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE learns the art of character as education & philosophy. We meet the son of a peculiar Protestant preacher in Prussia who died when he was just a boy. Difficult relations with his mother and sister. Mystical dreams. In love with Christ and Socrates. Brilliant at school. Becomes a teenage university professor. Renounces his citizenship. Volunteers to fight in the War of French Aggression writing his first works of philosophy. Falls in love with Schopenhauer and the Greek sages as models of personality style. Sets out to remake education, regenerate Western civilization, and rehabilitate the Gods. Then he becomes friends with the biggest pop star in the world: Wagner.
MODULE 4: THERE IS ONLY ONE WILL
Jan 24
THE OLDER NIETZSCHE radically revises the philosophy of value, treating it as the primal appetition of an evolving cosmos. Resigns from the University. Renounces Wagner. Becomes mysteriously ill and nurses himself back to health. Wandering the beaches and Alps, he receives the revelation of Zarathustra, the concept of the Will to Power, the vision of the UltraHuman, the future of music, and the solution to the Meaning Crisis. His increasing sense of joy and transpersonal identity lead to either breakthrough or breakdown. Institutionalized and then co-opted by his proto-fascist sister Elisabeth, he spends the last few years as a semi-vegetative saint visited by the most radical intellectuals and mystics of Europe. A Teacher Distorted.
MODULE 5: INNER FIGHT CLUB
Jan 31
THE YOUNG GEORGES GURDJIEFF takes up intentional living, deliberate contrarianism, and the Way of Self-struggle. We learn his father’s curious beliefs about God and history. Military academy. Priest-training. Medical training. Obsessed by the paranormal. An amateur archaeologist exploring ancient ruins and esoteric monasteries. Visiting saints. Deserts, civil wars and secret agents. Travelling hypnotherapist. Sex-trafficking. The Seekers of Truth society. The question for the archaic proto-tradition behind all wisdom schools. Egypt, China, Tibet, and Persia. Learning to harness inner friction, lean into remorse, and remake spirituality for a plural psyche. Finally destroying all his personal documents and arriving, wealthy, in Russia to propose a new spiritual training system -- just as the Revolution begins. The life of a man in disguise.
MODULE 6: THE ECOLOGY OF ORCHESTRATION
Feb 7
THE OLDER GURDJIEFF teaches a cosmic philosophy about the self-eating, self-composting and mutually transforming universe. How do we take responsibility for cultivating, feeding and educating a suite of different intelligences and modes of embodiment? How do we learn to assimilate our inner efforts in a humane way? And how could the world’s wisdom actually be increased in a radical era? In Europe, Gurdjieff runs a notorious commune. Following his terrible automobile accident he begins the life of an avant-garde author who pens some of history’s most awe-inspiring and difficult spiritual texts. He trains dancers, composes music, and tours America. When his wife and mother die, his last excuse for conventional social behavior vanishes. A Teacher Unleashed.
About your facilitator
Layman Pascal is a teacher, field-holder, philosopher and author at the intersection of metamodern culture, nondual mysticism, integrative developmental theory, metashamanics, and postmetaphysical spirituality. He hosts the Integral Stage, Developmental Hell, and Soulmakers podcasts and is the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Nietzsche All-Too-Nietzsche, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as contributions to numerous journals and anthologies. He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Lab in Vermont twice a year as well as attending and hosting numerous other conferences, gatherings and intersubjective practice spaces.
Layman grew up among the islands and old cedar forests of the Pacific Northwest. Now he lives on the shores of Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada. He takes deep dives into unusual questions at laymanpascal.substack.com and explores the evolution of new attitudes and concepts for occultism at xagick.substack.com. Personal consults, training and updates are available at laymanpascal.com.