Techno-Occult Sex Magic in Contemporary Culture
Exploring the "Whore of Babylon" archetype, Only Fans, and the robot-denigration of the feminine
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In “Is Only Fans a Form of Modern Sex Magic?”, esoteric YouTuber Gigi Young explores areas of our hyper-sexualized contemporary pop culture as demonic inversion, a black magic or “techno-occult” global ritual designed to drag a subset of humanity down into a lower, debased condition of being. I found her video fascinating and want to explore it—both where I agree and where there are areas of disagreement. As I mentioned in a recent post, Young is one of the only “occult influencers” I can bear to listen to right now. I find she makes an honest, authentic attempt to integrate insights from her own avowed clairvoyance, ideas from Rudolf Steiner and other occult visionaries, with current developments in culture and society. This kind of effort is, I believe, sorely needed.
I feel a great deal of intuitive connection and resonance with many of Young’s ideas, which mesh with Steiner’s work. I try to be very careful (I am sure I sometimes fail at it) at separating out what I believe to be true from my own direct psychic/paranormal experiences, and where I make suppositions or advance theoretical claims based on those experiences. Sometimes I feel Young expresses too much certainty in her claims, which can lead toward cultic or irrational belief, as well as mainstream dismissal. As I study her work, it helps me make clearer distinctions for myself.
In this video, Young focuses on the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse of St John, the final book of the New Testament, and the “Whore of Babylon” archetype. She finds images of the Whore of Babylon throughout pop music, with women superstars like Lady Gaga, Katie Perry, and Taylor Swift somehow compelled—or perhaps forced via some sort of “soul contract”—to use similar degrading imagery (“becoming cyborg”) over and over again. I’ve explored this previously, looking at the website Vigilant Citizen, which parses pop music videos for occult tropes and use of hyper-sexualized S&M imagery to degrade the collective consciousness, from a Conservative Christian perspective.
A famous passage from Revelation describes the Whore of Babylon, “arrayed in purple and scarlet color and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls,” sitting on the scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, her cup full of “abominations and filthiness of her fornication,” her forehead stamped with “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” Young proposes this archetype is not just the loose or sexually-liberated women. It represents, instead, a spiritual condition of disassociation or dissipation that can apply to both men and women. The Whore is anyone who remains willfully unconscious, transactional, unable to recognize soul and spirit, or transcend their lusts and lower impulses.
Revelation is a bizarre, incongruous text in the New Testament — it is surprising how much power it continues to have over vast swathes of our human community. In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I explored it from a Jungian perspective. Jung’s student Edward Edinger proposed that the Apocalypse is a psychological process, “the coming of the Self into conscious realization,” which requires the paradoxical integration of opposites, elevated beauty and “disgusting filth,” so we integrate the Shadow instead of projecting it.
Young approaches Revelation much as Steiner did: Not just a prophecy of future cataclysm but a symbolic account of how human consciousness splits into divergent streams at the end of this epoch, which may be rapidly approaching. Yesterday, a musician friend wrote to me: “I can’t quite shake the feeling of a sort of end times demonic infiltration of which everything seems to be a symptom.” This feels true to me as well. Degraded contemporary hyper-sexuality is one of the main sites of this “infiltration” or incursion. As I have explored previously, unfortunately, large-scale psychedelic use can also allow infiltration from lower, subconscious influences — a thinning of the veil between the psychic and physical — and may be contributing to the problem.
According to both Young and Steiner, the current “Earth” will eventually split apart, bifurcating into two streams representing two trajectories of consciousness, one evolving toward divinity or grace while the other stagnates or dissipates. One is the higher Earth, the “new Jerusalem” that John saw descending out of heaven. Steiner believed this will become “New Jupiter,” a spiritualized Earth, aligned with the authentic Christ impulse. In Lectures on the Apocalypse of St. John, Steiner speaks about the Christ-being uniting with the Earth: “It is the power of Christ that has descended from the sun and retrieved the useful part of earthly humanity, uniting it with the sun again.”
For Steiner, Revelation is neither a paranoid fantasy nor a literal historical prediction, but a clairvoyant drama revealing the entire arc of Earth evolution, from the distant Atlantean past through today’s crisis of ego, alienation, and technicity toward an approaching bifurcation into hardened and redeemed humanity. He reads Revelation as a call to conscious participation: the symbols of churches, seals, beasts, and the heavenly city describe what will unfold allegorically, with the goal of awakening human beings now. We must work on our egos through love and devotion, so that our inner “book” will contain qualities that can pass over into the New Jerusalem.
In this narrative, the other stream flows toward the lower Earth, composed of the “dross” of this one. What cannot be purified eventually sinks into a subnatural realm, which Young links to the “chaotic abyss” of the Eastern mūla-prakriti (“root substance” or “primordial matter”). Humanity sorts itself along those lines. Steiner proposed an evolutionary current and a devolving current— an elevation and descent, but not in the pop-evangelical sense of a Rapture where the “Saved” disappear into the sky: Humanity sorts itself out, self-selects, based on levels of inner development and soul alignment. I find this intuitively compelling, but of course, there isn’t empirical evidence to support it.
As a narrative or a mythological construct, it offers a mirror reversal of Christian evangelical and Christian Nationalist beliefs that blind faith in Christ’s divinity, combined with prayer and devotion, will lead to the Rapture. According to Steiner and Young, we finally reach the “New Earth” or “New Jerusalem” through a difficult process of inner development and individuation. As a result of successive incarnations, we overcome the power of instinct and learn to master our will, with love and humility. As the “I” becomes stronger, we transform the astral body, creating a new “body” under our conscious control, that Steiner called “the spirit self.” For Jung, this would be the ongoing process of integrating the shadow.
Within that bifurcation, as Young explores in her video, the feminine plays a central role. For Young, the feminine is essential to magical practices because women are the bridge between worlds: the generative power of the womb and sacral chakra produces the “substrate” or ether in which entities can manifest. She argues that “in ceremonial magic, it is the female, it is the woman, who is the bridge to the spiritual world, not the man.” The woman’s body “forms the medium, the bridge to the spirit world,” while the male polarity is the directing phallic force. In her account, a woman’s sex-energy and etheric body can “build the energy up in the room… to such a degree that entities can enter into the space, they can speak, they can appear,” and this is why, in both high and black magic, “the woman is the literal altar.”
She illustrates this with Anton LaVey’s Satanic rituals, where a naked woman lies on the altar; with MI6 occultist Cecil Williamson staging a similar prone female “foundation” for the rite; with Crowley’s “Scarlet Woman;” and with Marina Abramović’s performance where a nude woman lies on a table covered in honey for the guests to consume. All of this, for Young, points back to a single principle: “in order to thin the veil, if you want to communicate with something out there, you have to use women’s generative forces. Women are the vehicle between this world and the next.”
Young emphatically states that “at the end of every epoch, the feminine consciousness splits in two.” One pole is the Whore of Babylon, the fallen feminine who “represents regression into an animal condition,” a soul ruled by “the unrefined impulses of the human being that have not yet been drawn into the heart, have not yet been drawn into the mind.” She calls this condition, kāma-manas: animal desire fused with lower mind, uncontrolled, living out of the lower chakras. It represents the denigration of the feminine polarity into sex slave or mindless concubine.
The other pole, she says, is described in Revelation as the “woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” The woman is in labor, her child threatened by a dragon. For Young the woman clothed with the sun represents the true Sophia, the solar feminine whose “etheric body has completely received [Christ] as her husband,” who has gone through catharsis and purification and now births the “new impulse” of evolution, the New Earth itself.
In previous eras, Young notes, decadence was shown as a regression into animality. The Whore rides the beast, symbolizing her reduction to bestial nature, surrendering to the lower impulses such as greed, lust, and so on. Young believes that, today, this decadent or regressive movement into a subhuman condition is no longer represented as regression into the animal. The decadence is shown as becoming a cyborg or robot-slave. “In our time,” she says, “decadence and regression means turning into a machine through transhumanism.”
She shows how this meshes with a huge amount of pop imagery, from concerts and music videos, which update the Whore-of-Babylon archetype. A central element in this postmodern myth is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, an occult fable, where singers like Lady Gaga, Katie Perry, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift appear as versions of the robot Maria from Metropolis, a sexualized robot. They represent what Young calls the “Ahrimanic doppelgänger,” a malevolent copy of an organic woman.
