Culture

Unto Arcadia: A Living Future

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In 2023 I encountered the Hexorian movement.  If you’re not familiar with it (and you may not be) it’s from the freeform “Chaos” magic school, focusing on the idea of a god of cities, Hexorius.  A diety of the undercurrents and foundations, Hexorius had a powerful effect on those involved in the movement – suggesting not something created but something deeper and primal.

I took to these ideas because it’s apparent that cities are living things, and because of my own interest in genius loci.  However, the Hexorians also followed other dieties, other faces of Hexorius or a Power behind all of them.  One was Valdas, the god that took on those who explored the city, but most fascinating to me was Arcadia.

Arcadia was a deity or ideal of a City To Be.  A sorcerous solarpunk future, where man, magic, and nature were in balance, a place for everyone.  She was a roadmap, a goal – and a goddess at the same time.  A living future.

Though Hexorian magic and practices appealed to me based on previous experience, this issue resonated hard with me, and I wanted to explore what it says here.

Utopian dreams are nothing new to humanity – nor is their failure.  Someone is always trying to build a utopia, and someone always has a plan, hoping to build a bright future on failed ones.  In some cases, utopia seems to involve getting rid of a lot of people who don’t fit the blueprint.  Other ideas of utopia live only as abstract plans, turning into something else when released into reality.

The idea of Arcadia a future regarded as alive, an idea I approve of as noted in my other writings.  Arcadia isn’t a blueprint or an outline, but a goal of a future that was organic, balanced, a living thing, a god.  It’s something you form a relationship with, not follow a checklist.

Be our practices mystical or not, the idea that the future is alive is critical to our own survival.  We’re not going to hammer the future we want into place – the world and all in it are alive and complex, and nothing we do will change that.*  We have to form a relationship with the future in order to have the one we want – or have one at all.


The future has to be treated as a living thing just to acknowledge the sheer size of it all and how connected it is to everything.  To think of it in mechanical ways is to miss this.

It’s not much of a leap to regard the future as a god.  Perhaps, from a mystical point of view, a very rational approach.  As I note – again and a gain – I find the idea of a god to be useful if nothing else.  The universe is big and compex.

(Of course, in this interlinked world, it’s not that hard to imagine a future as literally alive, manifesting through us.)

Thus in my daily observations, I sometimes close by saying “Unto Arcadia.”  A way to acknowledge the living future we can aim for.  Because our future, no matter how you think of it, will be like a living thing.

In fact, if we don’t recognize an organic future, we might not have one.  Arcadia may be our only choice.

Unto Arcadia.

– Xenofact

* Well, if humanity wipes itself and all life on Earth out we might change it.  But that’s not a future of survival for us.

For some Hexorian resources please refer to:

  • https://dkmu.org/ – The web page of the originators of Hexorian work, the DKMU.
  • #OpGrimoire – A grimoire of Hexorian work, containing some of the resources on the DKMU website.

The Sage Trap

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Ever see someone who wrote a great book of wisdom and gave a few good speeches change into something not them?  Maybe they become some ranting crank, maybe they’re churning out shit, but they’re not the person you thought they were.  I mean sure maybe they were always an asshole, but not every wise person you admire can be a horrible twit.

What the hell happens to these truly people that make their fifth book so full of bullshit, egotism, crank rants, or all three?  Let me propose that in too many cases the issue is they keep going.

Some people have one to a few good books in them and that’s fine.  I mean no one is angry that Lao-Tzu wrote one (OK, maybe two) books.   I’ve seen many authors who do one or two books of advice and happily go back to whatever they do or write something different.

But we all know many an writer that keeps going. It seems that timeless wisdom becomes less wise and more time consuming as more and more books come out.

In our world, being a truly wise person, being a person of insight, means you will get exploited and be encouraged to exploit yourself.  It can be overwhelming enough that an asshole will go for it, and a truly insightful person may not be insightful enough to fall into the trap.

Our capitalist economy is based on finding what makes money and squeezing the hell out of it.  You’ll get book deals and opportunities, speaking engagements and convention schedules.  Why it might even let you quit that job and be a wise person full time – and then you’re trapped as all you can do is keep doing more stuff even if there’s nothing more to say.

You might even say I’m not doing it for the money.  But you may well bloody be doing it for the praise, the adoration, and the confirmation.  You have confirmation people want you, which can boost your ego or worse make you think you can keep helping people by doing the same thing.  Meanwhile the publishers and marketers will be fine to add to their bank accounts thanks to you.

People don’t want you to go anyway!  You wrote one good book that changed their lives, so keep changing it!  Our culture doesn’t emphasize reading and rereading classics, it pushes the new, the latest, the better-than-last.

What our society does not do is say “you left us some truly great wisdom with this book or two, thank you” and move on – and lets the writer move on.  We damn well know one person can change the world with a book or two, but our culture and economy doesn’t let that happen.

Being someone with real wisdom to share can be a trap.

Again I’m not decrying writing a lot of stuff.  I myself write here and under other names on many subjects because its my hobby – though I did have to learn when to stop.  Other people have a lot to say about subjects – something I also do (and also had to learn when to stop).  Yet others savor the challenge of covering a new topic each book, as a friend of mine does.   What I am saying is it’s best to be aware that our culture and economy will wring every dollar out of you, lock you into doing the same thing, and you may well fall for it.

You can be good enough that you eventually end up not good at all.

I start appreciating many a mystic, monk, and weirdo who wrote a book or two, blew people’s minds, then headed into the mountains or started a band or retired to smoke weed.  Sometimes the greatest gift is to shut up and do something else and let people appreciate your brilliance.

– Xenofact

Mystic’s Game

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For this post, I am using the term mysticism to refer to the overlapping worlds of magick, spirituality, and religion.  It’s hard to divide the three up, so I chose to lump them together, and we can fight over that sometimes.

“Gamification” is a term I’ve seen in increasing use over the years – the idea of applying game elements (scores, achievements, measures) to various “non-game” elements of life.  When you place systems, rewards, and social recognition around something, people gravitate towards it.  We like systems; humans seek and make order.

Despite the term becoming prominent in the 2000s, humans have been doing this for our whole existence.  We have ranks in the military, systems of promotion at work, and ways of organizing territories, etc.  The title of Sergeant, the need to pass a certification test, and the idea of states or provinces are all gamification, at least in the broader sense.  As you noticed, I prefer the broader sense.

The world and people are complex, and we humans are good at making or finding rules and boiling them down to something we can work with.  If something needs complexity or simplicity, we’re damned good at finding either.

I’d argue that Gamification is critical in mystical practices.

When you dive into mysticism, you’re facing The Big Everything.  Call it the Good, Kia, Tao as I prefer, the Universe is simply so big it’s hard to deal with – and we’re part of it!  Even trying to understand and deal with our own minds is a challenge since you’re using your thinking to think about thinking.  No wonder we need to think of the great Powers as like us, understand stages of meditation, or develop cosmologies of Spheres and Paths.

Mysticism needs gamification because otherwise we have no place to start.  Even blowing your mind with ritual practices and substances is gamified because it’s safer – it’s easier to see the guardrails when there’s a plan.

I find seeing mysticism as a form of gamification to be liberating.  It provides appreciation of the systems people have built before me – and are building now.  It provides awareness that some of this is made up, but it’s made up for a good reason – it’s a tool to deal with the Big Everything.  It provides the power to make your own systems and ways of thinking when needed.  Finally, it provides humility to realize that what you think or believe is a construct as you need it that way.

And, of course, admitting mysticism contains gamification lets you apply knowledge from games, gamified activities, and gamification theory.

By the way, if you look at your esoteric practices and see the gamification within, turn that view on your entire life.  I think a lot of us know instinctively we’re gamifying our mystical practices since they’re big colorful, and wild.  We might miss how gamified our mundane life is.

Or maybe we ask if there’s any boundary between the mystical and the mundane.  Maybe that division is just a rule we came up with . . .

– Xenofact