Words for a Departed Wizard

This is only the second time I have written words for the dead on here. The first was for Eriol, another member of the Rune Soup community, whose death Gordon announced to us at the end of 2019. I didn’t really know what to say then, or how to say it, and I do not know what to say now.

I heard the news just like everybody else on the 13th of May. And I’m not going to lie, it sent me spiralling for weeks. Someone I had known and spoken to almost every single day for a quarter of my life was gone. During that first week, I read the immense outpouring of grief, gratitude and inspiration from people whose lives he had touched, including beautiful tributes from Peter at Scarlet Imprint, JDO and Avalon Cameron.

I cannot give an account of Gordon’s whole life, or even of the person everyone else knew. This is an account of my Gordon White. The catty, cringey wizard who changed the course of my life, and the friend I miss.

My thoughts are especially with James, Gordon’s family, and all those who loved him most closely. I still cannot quite believe he has gone from this realm.

A Recent Dream

A few days before the announcement, I had a dream.

I was in a white box gallery space with a dusty, dirty, polished concrete floor. I was sitting on one of those stackable chairs with a hole in the back, in a circle with my closest friends and co-conspirators. We were at some kind of meeting or event, deep in heated debate. About the world, about culture, and about the future. There were so many great people sitting around the circle, and in the dream I thought it strange that Gordon hadn’t made it.

In the unfolding of the dream, there was a lot of back and forth about politics, the environment, AI, and the nature of intelligence. During the dream, frustrated at what everybody else was saying and the materialist background assumptions in the conversation, I felt the urge to speak up. I told everyone what I thought. Not what I believed, but what I know and intuit to be true about the nature of things and the universe. A revelation amongst close friends, of how much of a crazy weirdo I am. When I woke up, I felt relieved, unburdened, and perhaps even rejuvenated.

A few days later, the announcement arrived that Gordon White had died. I understood the dream and what comes next.

The Cringey Wizard

I first met Gordon in person in my late twenties, although I had been reading Rune Soup since at least the early days of the Whisky Rant. We became mutuals online when he was shitposting about needing magical spells involving beer, and I sent him a Mesopotamian ritual for removing a fallen meteorite from one’s property.

We had been DMing on Twitter for months before we finally met in Soho one afternoon. I had just successfully landed a job after an interview at the startup that would eventually give me a mental breakdown. That first meeting turned into an afternoon of day-drinking in Fitzrovia, moving from pub to pub for lunch. We sat in the sun and talked about magic, meditation, permaculture, and conspiracy theories. We got on like a house on fire. I was deep into The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos at the time, and we were comparing notes. I got the impression that I was the first person he’d met that was doing the whole working.

I was immediately struck by his magnetic personality, his wit, his charm, and above all, his absolutely extraordinary memory. This last quality was both scarily impressive and frequently absolutely infuriating. The confidence that made him such a compelling thinker could harden into a genuinely formidable inability to back down.

The bitch would just never admit that he was wrong.

About.
Anything.
Ever.

You could pull out your phone and prove beyond doubt that he had misremembered some point about Tolkien lore or whatever, and he would just announce that he had been “directionally correct” and move on, and never mention it again. Warhammer lore was the sole exception, on that, he always deferred to me.

From that first meeting, we spoke basically every single day on Google Chat. Him with his bullshit media job, and me with my bullshit startup job. At the same time, he was finishing the two books that would become The Chaos Protocols and Star.Ships, working constantly and burning the candle at both ends. His drive was astonishing, both inspiring and worrying. He seemed constitutionally incapable of doing anything by halves, including work, exhaustion or relaxing.

On Gchat we talked about our practice, what was going on in the Occult world world, and recommended each other what books to read. I don’t think he ever quite got over my total lack of interest in film or television. In those years before Brexit and his Bilbo’s birthday vanishing act, our time consisted of impromptu afternoon beers and after-work trips to the British Museum, the V&A, and the National Portrait Gallery. We would sit in the medieval galleries looking at paintings and reading out a biography from Butler’s Lives of the Saints or Wikipedia, having a good laugh as we pondered the English saints and the altarpieces.

When The Chaos Protocols and Starships came out, I was there, pleased for my friend, that he was happy and in his element, being crowned “the dark prince of modern Chaos magic” and basking in the triumph of having published two books back-to-back.

At one point, we went to an event in North London, a pup meet up of minds of spiritual seekers and conspiracy theorists. This was still back in the “before times,” when such things were still counter-cultural rather than morally objectionable.

The cab ride home was, as he later put it, was unnecessarily confusing. The driver had failed to reset the trip charge in the app. So Gordon woke up the next morning to a £120 bill, essentially having paid for my leg of the journey home as well. In return, he demanded a bottle of fancy rum and would never let me forget it. During the ride, we talked about Rune Soup and his future plans, both for the newsletter that became the All Red Line and what would eventually become RuneSoup.com as we know it today: the magic school.

When we next met up on a random Saturday for another epic, all-day drinking session, the rum debt was paid. I thanked him for mentioning me on his blog writing about the event. He laughed, making a comment about Google juice, and something about hypertext and “Breadcrumbs for the future.” My own goal in life he knew, has never been to be a main character, but to be well-indexed in other people’s stories.

The title of that first post where he mentioned me on his blog was “Always Go Full Wyrdo“.

I knew the sentiment was aimed specifically at me. Advice he would repeat to me for the rest of our friendship. We had a perennial conversation throughout our boozy, in-person relationship about being public about one’s spiritual practice and saying what you believe online. True to form, he was unapologetic. He argued that one should set aside worries of social ostracism; if one is invincible, as he put it in The Chaos Protocols, then none of that matters. I disagreed, and in important ways still do, believing that one’s Great Work is a private matter between oneself and the universe.

It was at that pub garden in the sunshine, that a group of extremely loud and obnoxious Americans once sat at our table. Almost as if to demonstrate the act of being true to oneself, Gordon proceeded to talk loudly and animatedly with them for twenty minutes about how his favourite movie of all time was Flubber. He went on and on in detail about the plot, and how Flubber should make them (the Americans) feel proud and so patriotic to come from a country that could produce such a work of art. He talked about Flubber non-stop until they fucked off to another table.

He turned to me with a smug look of triumph, and I told him it was pure cringe and that I couldn’t believe he just did that. But he was genuinely offended that I’d called him cringey, and maintained from then on that I thought it cringey to be his friend. It became a running joke: my refusal to go full weirdo was bound up with avoiding being cringey. He on the other hand was the king of cringe.

It was in that same pub garden on a frigid winters day that he told me he was leaving. Later he arranged to perform his Brexit vanishing act after his talk at the Occult Conference in 2016, and it was a secret I couldn’t tell anybody for obvious reasons. As the clock ran down, we went for drinks and smoked on pub terraces. We discussed the reception to Star.Ships and speculated over dinner about Guinevere Petzinger’s First Signs. Meanwhile, the Google Chat conversations and Twitter GIF wars continued.

Around the same time, one of those long, boozy conversations became my essay Seeing Through the Debris. Gordon’s ideas and writing run all through it, as they still do. My most recent episode, Monsters in the Mirror for example. The method remained fruitful for the rest of our friendship: throwing models at one another until something gave way and the world looked different.

At the Conference 2016, I met the Scarlets properly for the first time, and outed myself as an Enya fan in their most august company. The day after, I went back to North London for his leaving drinks with close friends and old housemates from his time in London. Throughout our time in London, I had maintained that I wouldn’t get him to sign copies of his books for me because I knew him personally, so why bother? But that morning, I balked. I brought them with me and made him sign them; a snap decision I am now intensely grateful for.

As he signed the books in a quid pro quo exchange, he said: “I’m doing this for you, so you need to do something for me.” From his backbag, he produced a trapezoidal package wrapped in the most exquisite Japanese style, covered in sigils, alongside a wax-sealed envelope with a date, time, and location written on the front. He told me, “I need you to go to this place, at this time, open the envelope, and say the words inside, then throw it all into the Thames.”

Which of course I did.

The Visitor at the Farm

And so, he was gone.

I thought perhaps I would never see him again. Our relationship turned into a digital crossover of a few hours: my early mornings and his late evenings. We discussed his work on the membership and the courses while he was still living near the Hawksmoor and looking for the farm. We exchanged permaculture video links and worked our way thought writers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn, passing ideas back and forth and trying to work out what they meant for magic, ecology and the way a person ought to live. I would wake up in the morning, see his messages from overnight, and respond, and then I would get a reply in the late evening my time if I was still awake.

There are traces of those conversations all through the Rune Soup archive. More than a few episodes begin with Gordon or his guest saying, “I was just talking to Jay” or with Gordon mentioning that I had made the introduction or suggested the topic. I never appeared on the show itself due to cringe, but I was often somewhere just off-mic.

I remember the morning he messaged to say that he had found the farm but had some reservations. I told him that if the place felt right, he and James should pull the trigger. They did.

In 2019, my girlfriend and I organised the first of our grand adventures: Singapore, several weeks in Bali, followed by several more travelling around Australia, including a visit to see Gordon and James on the farm in Tasmania. I still remember being in paradise, staying in a beach hut in Bali’s National Park, when the news of the Tasmanian bushfires arrived in a message from Gordon. As the days passed, the fires spread. We later flew from Bali to Cairns, then Sydney.

While we were in the jungle in northern Australia, the Vāsuki dragon ritual was being devised. I followed the preparations on my phone on patchy WiFi. Several days after the ritual, on the morning we were due to fly to Tasmania, I first received word from Gordon that the decisive rain had arrived after days of lighter showers. Reports on the Australian news followed: an unexpected deluge had dampened the fires in southern Tasmania. We flew out of Sydney even as a member of the cabin crew warned us that they were uncertain whether we would be able to land in Hobart. Smoke from fires elsewhere still raging had reduced visibility.

But we landed, and there he was outside the airport, waiting by his ute in his stupid mirrored sunglasses, shorts, and a slightly dishevelled shirt. He looked blessed and shell-shocked at once. Still coping with the ordeal of the fires, and the intensity of having served as the focal point of a vast ritual. Still trying to comprehend the magical implications of the exact quantity of rain required to break the emergency. And so I became the unnamed old friend who arrives in chapter five of Ani.Mystic. Gordon had left me as a breadcrumb inside his story.

He collected us that Thursday morning, his car still packed with books rescued during the evacuation, and together we drove back into the valley. We arrived at the farm, beat its bounds, and looked over the future permaculture plans. I spoke to the party tree. James cooked on the barbecue. We talked about the wonders of rice cookers. I drank and smoked my way through untold amounts of rum.

We drove through apocalyptic, fire-scarred forest, the smell of ash and smoke heavy in the air. We walked Gordon’s favourite beach and we recorded a joint interview about Solarpunk. If you have ever wondered about Gordon’s view from the old office space it looked like this:

Beneath the stars on our last night, we talked about visions, our mental health, where we stood with our work, and of course the ancestors. Throughout those days, I was acutely aware that I was with him and James in the immediate aftermath of a local apocalypse. One that had been averted by a miracle. It felt like a great privilege even then. It feels even more so now.

After we returned home, and with Gordon’s encouragement, I continued to go all in on making Permanently Moved, a project that was as much a magical working as a piece of creative work. After episodes dropped, messages would arrive: “I know what you think. Why didn’t you go further or say what you really think?”

Small Apocalypses

Later in 2019, Gordon left for his first trip to the Peruvian jungle. On that first dieta, he was with several mutuals of mine, all of whom, helped open the path he would walk for the rest of his life. For the next few years, he churned out an astonishing amount of work: Weekly shows, blogs, card decks, the membership courses, on top of the farm chores, and a social life both on and offline.

I would tease him endlessly about the absolute state of his endless god-awful haircuts in his videos, which I called the “Groomsoup Review”. I also pushed him to see how far he would take the soy-face thumbnails, back when that was still the YouTube meta. This masterpiece of a crop remains my favourite.

The first week he was in danger of missing a Rune Soup upload, he asked me to come on the show as an emergency guest. I refused, still not prepared to go full wyrdo. He made some remark about being my cringey friend. Later, during the pandemic, after his broken heart, he asked me to host the show. I told him the show didn’t matter. He did.

In March 2020, he returned to London for Avenging Angels, and the Food Forest talk at Treadwell’s. We met the moment he arrived, and that night was the last time I got completely fall-down drunk. Somewhere in the course of the proceedings, Dr Jack Hunter dropped out of the event because of COVID, and I agreed to step in.

My head and practice was full of prayer, and we spoke for hours about our the shared Christian inheritance. After an ill-advised round of cocktails, we ended up back at his Airbnb. He gave me a bottle of rum from Melbourne; I gave him a Victorian map of Chiswick, the London neighbourhood where he had lived with James, and the namesake of their farm in Tasmania. Then I staggered home. I spent the rest of the week with severe bruising on my hip and grazes all down my elbows and forearms after falling over on the crossing on my walk back from the station.

On the day of the Treadwell’s event, we sat with the Scarlets in the pub, watching the dystopian, early pre-lockdown verhoeven-esq branding being adopted by the BBC. We talked about the Wuhan labs and joked that, from now on, we should only ever see each other in person on the brink of, or in the aftermath of, small apocalypses.

Although I enjoyed the event, I regretted not going full wyrdo in front of an audience who would understand. Those who were there, or have watched the recording, you can now read my ”100 Notes on Storydwelling” for something a little closer to what I wish I had said. Print zine edition coming soon.

During the pandemic, Gordon went through his cancellation, and he was angry that I did not publicly support him. He was right to be. I told myself that my friendships are private, that public declarations were not how I conducted my relationships, and that I did not want to be pulled into an online conflict. But beneath all of that was a deep fear of the mob. It was an act of cowardice on my part that I deeply regret. His being my cringey, crazy friend had ceased to be a joke between us.

Our daily communication dropped off after that, but the friendship survived. It gathered strength again during his ‘medical event’, and the uncertainty of his recovery.

We mostly talked about our favourite plant-based recipes and our shared love of broccoli. Then he began spending his winters in South America and going on adventures again. I have so many video tours of his Airbnbs, and voice notes of him bitching and moaning at length about chaotic bureaucracy and lost luggage whilst showing me around the places he was staying.

When he was in South America, the time difference allowed for late-night Zoom calls rather than asynchronous chats. Mostly about the terrible state of online media culture, but also progress with ‘the work’. After he moved from blogging to Substack he would tease me about being like the last soldier on the isles of blogging, fighting the last war, posting to an internet that was over long ago. When he finally got on Instagram, going in hard on the WitchTok numskulls, I was all in.

Even during this final catty elder era, while he was remastering all the membership courses, I told him he worked too hard. Earlier this year, however, the tone of his stock replies changed. We all have a limited time on Earth, he said, and we need to do the work we are here to do.

“Do the things that need doing.”

News of the Departure

The news that he had died on one of his adventures was shocking. But never has a man been so prepared for what was to come next.

What made Gordon’s work so powerful was not simply the magic. He treated the occult as a serious way of knowing and acting in the world, inseparable from history, ecology, politics, place, ancestors and the practical business of building a life. He had no patience for a disenchanted universe, or for the idea that spiritual practice should remain safely decorative. Again and again, he insisted that the world was stranger, more alive and more negotiable than modern people had been taught to believe. His work gave people permission to take that possibility seriously.

He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work. Taken together, the courses on RuneSoup.com may constitute one of the most important modern grimoires we have, and I suspect his influence among Western practitioners will be measured in centuries.

A few weeks ago, I was in London for lunch with a friend. We ended our time together with a toast to Gordon’s life. I went to the spot on the bridge where I had made that offering a decade before. I honoured the “old man” and the “flower of cities all” that he loved so much. Then I announced aloud that Gordon White was dead. As I did, the wind whipped up and the clouds rolled in. I spoke to the river and to the city about Gordon. It was their entanglement, and our shared infatuation with both, that had allowed Gordon and me to meet in the first place. Then I spoke about my own relationship with London, what I wanted now, and where I was, and the blessings I was asking for.

As I walked away, thunder rumbled and the rain began. On the train home to South London, the sky was apocalyptic with lightning. I saw hundreds of flashes in the span of minutes outside the carriage window. When I got off the train at my destination, it was over, and the sky was clear and shining once again.

Then, when I stepped through my flat’s door, my partner said, “You have to see this,” and took me to the kitchen window. At almost the exact time I had been on the bridge talking to the city, she had seen the brightest flash and heard the loudest boom of her life. A lightning bolt had destroyed my neighbour’s back wall.

Not exactly a subtle omen.

Gordon believed that words like “rest in power” and “live on in our memories” were curses placed upon the dead: “the blackest of black spells”. I will not ask him to remain here for our sake. He has places to go and things that need doing.

I know that at any time, I could call him up through the mirror, or pull him through the cards, and I believe others out there already have. But were I to do so, it would begin the same way as so many of our conversations did when I needed something from him: “Bitch, I’m busy. What do you want now?”

My friend Gordon was pure hot fire. His influence on the last quarter of my life, was immense and full of meaning. He encouraged me to do more, go deeper, say what I really think, fly my freak flag, and go full wyrdo. That influence has not ended with his departure to the Western Isles. He changed my life, enriched it, and made it so much more than it would otherwise have been. I miss him greatly, and I am deeply grateful.

Even now, weeks on, I occasionally wake wondering whether Gordon has messaged me overnight. The thought passes through me as I pick up my phone, followed by a sudden pang of sadness. For ten years he told me to stop hiding, so this is me, finally, trying to take his advice.

In the words of the greatest cultural mage of our era:

Sail away, Sail away, Sail away.

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