Well, How Did I Get Here?
This is the current landing pad for Jasun Horsley.
Who’s that? I am still trying to figure it out, hence the many books, websites, podcasts and other forms of media I have produced since 1994, when I first joined the worldwide web (Crow Enterprises at Geocities/3255), and 1999, with my first published book (The Blood Poets).
I began podcasting in 2008, as Aeolus Kephas, with Stormy Weather: News from the Front Line in the End Times. This was followed by Warty Theorems, Warts & Storms, Shooting the Ghost, and the limited series Crucial Fictions (all archived here). My most recent sites have been Auticulture.com (where I hosted The Liminalist podcast for 300 episodes), and Landmademan.com. My most recent book is called Big Mother. It is roughly my 12th book (not counting a couple I don’t bother to mention).
Of my books, my favorites are Seen & Not Seen (SANS), Prisoner of Infinity, 16 Maps of Hell, and Big Mother. An easy (short) introduction is Paper Tiger, about my famous (dead) brother, Sebastian Horsley.
Why You Have Never Heard of Me
Despite thirty years of public creative activity, and unlike my dead brother (who only wrote one book), you will not find me on Wikipedia. None of my books have sold more than a few thousand copies, most only a few hundred (if that). None since Matrix Warrior have been reviewed by legacy media (or by more than a couple of alternate online sites).1
I used to have a Wikipedia page, but it was contested and removed while I was working on what became Vice of Kings: How Fabianism, Occultism, & the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse. The reason given was that I was a nobody, though it probably had more to do with members of my aristocratic family (e.g. Baron Haskins, former “rural tsar” to Tony Blair) not liking what I was doing and trying to minimize its impact, without causing “the Streisand Effect.” (My old Wikipedia page, as stored at another site.)
What Makes Me the Black Sheep?
When I was a child, I wasn’t aware that my paternal grandfather, Alec Horsley, Oxford Balliol graduate and founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was also a Fabian (he helped found the Hull branch when he was Sheriff of Hull). I certainly wasn’t aware that he was rubbing elbows with characters like Richard Acland, Bertrand Russell, Paul Robeson, John Boyd Orr, Jacob Bronowski, or the Paedophile Information Exchange. I knew we were mockingly called “champagne socialists,” and that the family business (Northern Foods) was in cahoots with Rowntree Mackintosh (confectionary) and Marks & Spencer (pioneer of packaged meals), and was a major player in world business. I also knew I had no interest in joining the business.
At 18, I inherited a small fortune from my father, Nicholas, the head of NF (later taken over by Haskins). This gave me total fiscal freedom, to come and go as I pleased. I lived in New York and aspired to becoming a filmmaker, before discovering Carlos Castaneda and deciding sorcery was a truer and more adventurous path. (I was unaware of the congruity between the two métiers, as later explored with SANS and 16 Maps of Hell.)
My pursuit of sorcery knowledge led me to Oaxaca, Mexico, and then to New Mexico, where I used my wealth in a misguided attempt to start an intentional community, in preparation for the Apocalypse. Within months, however, at age 24, due to an experience of intense heartbreak, I bailed out. I disinherited my fortune and disappeared to Morocco, with nothing but a poncho, The Portable Crowley and The Book of the Law, a quartz crystal, some Leonard Cohen tapes, and a Walkman.2
The Superculture
Much if not all of my output in the past thirty years looks at the ways in which popular culture, alternate or “counter-” culture, politics, and pseudo-spiritualty are all limbs of a covert, multi-generational, social-engineering octopus that includes occult societies, intelligence agencies, and organized crime networks. While it may span centuries and include many disparate groups, ideologies, organizations, and agendas, such a “superculture” appears to be largely consistent in its aims, principles, and methods.
Whether or not he ever fully achieved a place within the ranks of this spooky superclass, my grandfather was certainly driven to do so. My father largely rejected this aspiration, however, or was rejected by it. Though extremely successful as a businessman, when he tried to follow his personal ambition by starting a leftist tabloid with John Pilger (News on Sunday), it failed catastrophically. Soon after this, he was ousted from the company he had helped to establish, by his brother-in-law, Chris (Baron) Haskins.
Casualties of Class
My brother Sebastian came closer to implementing our Fabian “programming,” by becoming a minor celebrity. It’s significant that his first move in this direction came about via my grandfather’s association with convicted gangster Jimmy Boyle (cohort of the Kray twins). My grandfather used his influence to secure Boyle an early release from prison, endorsing and buying his sculptures. Boyle hooked up with my brother soon after that and they started a drug rehabilitation center in Edinburgh (where I was also living during the same period, at the age of 20), called The Gateway Exchange.
My brother become slightly famous in 2001, when he was publicly crucified in the Philippines, and then a bit more so in 2007, with the release of his memoir, Dandy in the Underworld, for which Stephen Fry bought the film rights. He died in 2010 of a heroin overdose, before any film was made. In SANS, I speculated about the possibility of foul play.
Why I Am Still Alive
Insofar as I was also raised to be a “player” for—and instrument of—the superculture, it seems to me now that—ever since that first cataclysmic gesture of renunciation at 24—I have continued to signal my lack of cooperation, complicity, or compatibility with the designs of the superclass.
Like the song “Once in a Lifetime,” it is as if, at a certain point, I looked around in puzzlement and distaste, and said: “This is not my beautiful house!”
Ever since—to quote another major cultural influence3—I have been seeking to find my true home, and enter it justified.
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A partial exception is this review by Nicolas Hausdorf from the Hong Kong Review of Books. The best thing written about my work is by author John Cussans (Undead Rising), on the least read of my books, Seen & Not Seen: “No One Understands You Like Me.”
It’s no doubt a fitting irony that the only time I have been published by legacy media was with my brief account of disinheriting in the “Experience” section of The Guardian, something anyone can achieve if their story is unusual enough (both my mother and my sister also did it). I was paid £700.
Sam Peckinpah, whose father used to quote the line from the New Testament (Luke 18:14), and who then gave it to the lead in his breakthrough Western, Ride the High Country.
