Angel Tech and Sacred Rites
Please join me this Sunday for a live interview with author/consciousness explorer Antero Alli
This Sunday, at 1 pm EST (10 am PST), I will hold a live discussion with author/filmmaker/consciousness explorer Antero Alli on Zoom. Free for everyone.
Please register for it here.
Alli has just released two books, Last Words and Sacred Rites. Arielle Friedman and Reivin Alexandria interviewed him recently for our magazine, Liminal.ghost.io. Listen to it here. He is one of the few, exemplary contemporary artists to meld hermetic, occult, and shamanic techniques with avant-garde art practices.
Antero Alli’s biography: “In 1977, Antero was deeply impacted by the Paratheatre of Jerzy Grotowski inspiring him to develop his own ritual technology of Paratheatre as documented in three books, “Towards an Archeology of the Soul” (2003), ”State of Emergence: Experiments in Group Ritual Dynamics” (2020) and “Sacred Rites: Journal Entires of a Gnostic Heretic” (2023). His paratheatrical work is documented in academia by Nicoletta Isar, Professor at the Institute of Art History, Copenhagen University. Between 1977 and 2018, Antero wrote, directed, and performed in numerous experimental theatre productions. As a prolific underground filmmaker he has, since 1993, created fifteen critically acclaimed feature art films [watch them here]. Alli has sustained an astrological practice since 1985 when he also began writing a series of esoteric books, now published as Angel Tech, The Eight-Circuit Brain,The Akashic Record Player, Experiential Astrology, and others.”
A week before my seventieth birthday, I was diagnosed with aggressive Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Without six months or more of high-dose chemo-infusions to treat this disease, I was told I may have months, not years, before my inevitable decline and demise. I declined the chemo. Quality of life has always meant far more to me than quantity of years lived. I remain in symptom management until further notice.
From that day onward, my life passed before me like an epic fiction movie, a series of flickering moments against a starless black sky, illuminating a series of scenarios leading up to who I have become. Who was I? Who am I? In life, as in cinema, there are only moments. Also, as in cinema, I have come to see and know my life as fiction. True fiction is not make-believe, but naked truths wrapped inside stories…
Amor fati—that notion of whatever happens, it’s all good, or at least, necessary. I remember during my cynical twenties I often accentuated the negative in most situations with my smug, buzz-killing, pessimistic bias. In my thirties I was converted by the spiritual bypass of new-agey positivity while naively denying my own shadow. Both negative and positive biases resulted in boring, two-dimensional lives. Whether I was self-negating or self-boosting, I was still stuck on myself.
One day, I simply got sick of myself and sought escape into novelty. I started making new experiences more important than who or what I thought I was. Turns out, I didn’t really need a fucking self-image. I just needed to be nobody but myself wherever I went and with whomever I was with. Since people will always create images and ideas of who they think you are, I decided that what other people thought of me was probably none of my business; not my monkeys.
I knew that if I wanted to expand the playing fields of my life, my work, love, and art, I had to embrace myself, warts and all, and turn to face the many contraries within myself, others, and the world—the beautiful and the ugly, stupidity and intelligence, the weak and the strong. This decision initiated an ongoing path of radical self-acceptance, not just intellectually, but somatically through the Body with hundreds of others who trained and worked with me in Paratheatre, a transformative, ritual theatre medium that I started developing in 1977 (paratheatrical.com).
Many years of doing these transformative rituals turned me into something of a gnostic mystic in love with direct, firsthand life experience over any preconceptions and assumptions about them.”
— Antero Alli, Last Words (excerpt)
😢 Love Antero Alli! 🙏🏽 He’s the coolest. We read Angel Tech when it first came out (1987). We were conducting Magic Squares experiments, into musical notation; divine looping harmonies with synthesizers to invoke angels. It worked! His films and live theater 🎭 are Fun! - potent rituals that shake the cobwebs out!