Gordon White of Rune Soup has passed away

Sad news from Rune Soup today about Gordon White passing away.

I write to share the heartbreaking news that Gordon has passed away.

Gordon left this world while travelling in Peru - following his life's passion - learning and experiencing traditional magic and shamanic practice so he could continue to teach and help others successfully navigate life.

Rune Soup - and you, the community - were Gordon's proudest achievement. I know many of you will feel his loss greatly. I encourage you to find each other, and your family and friends to help process his loss. I've set up

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

so you may share your thoughts on Gordon if you want.

At this stage, I cannot say what direction Rune Soup will take. Right now, my heart is broken and I am spending time with the rest of Gordon's family to grieve.

I will share more when I can.

James

 

[Thee Nightfool]

Agreed. It was quite a shock.

I've never interacted with Gordon online, which I regret now. We never exchanged even one word. Gordon did not teach me magic. What he taught me was to not be apologetic for the illicit, "impossible" worldview of traditional magic.

I consider myself a simple end-user of magic. Most of my reading of other magicians is trying to make sense of all the experiences using the Grimorium Verum that, for a long time, I had a hard time parsing and integrating before meeting Vodou folks in the 1990s. Vodou folks are healing in ways that Jake Stratton-Kent also found them to be - as people in an unapologetically magical culture.

Gordon helped on the intellectual foundations, doing the work that bridges the amazing, wonderful, terrifying, and totally insane experiences of a grimoire practice, to ground it all again in his love of evidence-based history. Vodou gave me a community to talk with and helped me feel like I was not totally insane. What Gordon did was help me stop making any intellectual apologies. He helped me go on the offensive.

He did make a comment recently I had meant to take him to task for.

There were magicians who had thriving Grimorium Verum practices before his also lovely mentor, Jake Stratton-Kent also burst onto the scene. I had cobbled together mine in the mid-1990s from Idries Shah's The Secret Lore of Magic and bits from Jason Black's magical journal in the wonderful, but also still 1990s Boomer edge-lord, Pacts with the Devil. These are books my intuition says his well-read brain had read, but they seem to have been edited out of his narrations. Too cringey, perhaps, but it distorts the timelines he is fond of. I was there. I also wonder why he never mentioned the Gen-X magicians of the early... let’s be clear here... the Anglo magician's Grimoire Revival. These never died out in Mexico or Haiti. Long story.

That aside, Gordon single-handedly got rid of the cringe. Gordon took all the work that was done by magicians and academics starting in the 1990s and articulated the bigger worldview. He pushed the timeline back to the Paleolithic with Star.Ships - something I decided to steal and use in my own mythic synthesis. He connected the dots between ancient star myths, the migration of myths, stories, and spirits, and the way our ancestors actually interacted with the landscape. Brilliant stuff!

Oh, Peter Grey give us more details .

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

It appears to be, as he put it, Gordon passed away from a broken heart. All Godspeed, to our brother.

Peter's Substack post was really, really damn good. Highly encourage everyone to read it if they haven't already.

 

[ShadowRogue]

Very much agreed! Thank you for saying that, WonderFire

I think he knew he needed to increase his reach. Writing for the dozens of practicing grim trad magicians back then was a terrible business plan. He helped make this weird thing a few of us do much more mainstream. There were simply not that many of us, well into the late 2000's, before the Millennials came along and interest exploded. Kudos to him for furthering that wave along.

We will see what happen now as the mass dream mind of Neptune moves into martial hero-journey of Aries, from dreamy, fluid, magical Pisces. Kudos to Gordon for having Austin Coppick on his show to make this observation.

Yeah, I'm one of those millennials (barely a millennial, was close to being Gen X) who was introduced to Chaos Magic and Animism by authors like Gordon, among many others. While I had already been dabbling and trying to find my way, it was Chaos Magic that was finally my true entry point into the occult. While I was devouring every online resource I could find, and pouring over every word of in chaosmatrix.org, it was blogs and books by people like Gordon that helped me see all the different ways that CM had evolved over the years. So he played a role in my earlier years with it.

Of course, like many others, I did eventually have to pull a "Homer Simpson backing away into the bushes" meme-move when he started falling too deep into the conspiracy rabbit hole. But despite all the controversy, I never stopped admiring him, and I also noticed that he had recently calmed down on that stuff, especially out in public (i.e., outside of his private community). It didn't really bother me as much as others, because "genius" and "crazy" don't always stray too far from one another. The occult community has always been FULL of eccentrics and weirdos, so once people make peace with that fact, they can handle it when someone who they respect falls off the reservation for a while.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:57 PM

In addition to the mention of Peter Gray's tribute, I think combining that with this one here completes the set:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Peter's was more personal, while PseudoAgrippa's write up did a good job at capturing the "contribution" side of Gordon's life. I'm pretty sure that it would make Gordon smile to see something like that spoken about him at a eulogy, because it likely captures what he was hoping to achieve in the end.

 

[MorganBlack]

Nicely said, ShadowRogue!

What I find most disheartening is that I know Gordon was not done yet. His third book of his DOT series was to be on European Cunning Men and Women "folk magic," if I recall.

Knowing a fair amount about those topics, and knowing Gordon's writing, I feel this is a book that really needs to happen to finish upgrading the Anglophone magic world. I now feel like there is a Gordon-shaped hole in the magical commentary-sphere.

Don't get me wrong. I think people like Dr. Al Cummins are doing simply stellar and incredible work as both practitioner and academic. His work is absolutely world-class. But he is already one of us, the Grim Trad Verum guys. Our tradition - which JSK called 'Goetia', (and I call 'filthy, medieval demon magic'), to differentiate it from more 'Solomonic' aristocratic angel magic - is NOT inviting.

We need the Jake Stratton-Kents and Gordons of the world as entry points to invite people into this crazy tradition and practice, but without diluting things overmuch (say, over 80%) into simplified, low-information modern magic methods. I don't want to be that guy. I'm busy. We all have to pick up the slack now, I feel.

Gordon once said he "hated the Grimorium Verum," and called stuff like E.Q. "silly." (I dont use E.Q. myself but many GV guys in the JSK school do. All good!) Hell, nobody is perfect, so I don't hold it against him. The GV is a folk magic practice and not a grimoire per se. I mean, it is a grim, but we have many GVs in different languages from over the centuries, as solid evidence it was a Cunning Folk "folk magic" tradition of diabolist sorcery.

I was hoping Gordon would touch on this, but it is not to be. Let's hope there was an early manuscript that will still be finished and published. Fingers crossed!

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 7:37 PM

Aww! (sniff!) Find the Others, eh?

Miguel Conner and the gnostics at Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, having Christopher Knowles and Greg Carlwood on to reminisce about Gordon.

This is the other community, the paranormal conspiratainment community Gordon also overlapped with. These guys are cool.

You don't have to agree with everything they say. I invariably never agree with anyone about everything they say, but I'm enough of an adult to not hold it against them.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!