Note: I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with John Michael Greer recently. For those not yet familiar with the incomparable JMG, he is a leading expert on the Occult, a past Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, a prolific blogger, and the author of far too many fantastic books (both fiction and nonfiction) to list here. His writing has been profoundly helpful in my own spiritual practice, most especially The Druidry Handbook, which I’m very grateful to have read early on in my journey with Druidry.Those who are familiar with his work know that JMG is incredibly generous with his time and his wisdom. Each Monday he hosts a Q&A post on his Dreamwidth journal, Ecosophia, where he takes questions related to the Occult and magical practice. It was there that I first received encouragement–both from him and his readership–to write about the intersection of RPGs and Occultism, Druidry, Jungian psychology, and more, and so I was excited and humbled when he agreed to this interview.
I do hope, gentle readers, that you will enjoy reading JMG’s responses to my questions as much as I did, and that you’ll join me in thanking him!
~Gabriel West
Thanks so much for being willing to do this interview, JMG. I know that there is an RPG that takes place in the universe of your Weird of Hali series of novels. Will you tell us a bit about that, and what the process was like designing it? And beyond the Weird of Hali, what is your personal experience like with RPGs?
I hadn’t originally planned on creating an RPG to accompany my tentacle novels, but one of my readers suggested it, several others chimed in, and the proprietor of Aeon Games—a more than occasional reader of mine—decided to offer me a contract, so I went ahead with it. There’s a scene in the opening section of Marcel Proust’s tremendous novel Remembrance of Things Past where the narrator eats a cookie of a kind he loved when he was a boy, and the taste sends him spinning back in thought to his childhood. That was more or less what writing the Weird of Hali RPG did for me.
I got into RPGs in the mid-1970s, right about the time that D&D stopped being the only game of its kind. My first DM still used the three staplebound pamphlets of original D&D, but the circle of gamers I played with all through my high school years snapped up AD&D as soon as it appeared, and we played other games—Traveler, Tunnels and Trolls, Boot Hill, and Gamma World among them. I got into some of the very early Steve Jackson games when they came out, but my favorite game was first-edition Chivalry & Sorcery, mostly because in those days I was crazy about the Middle Ages.
All this was secondary to my interest in reading and writing fantasy fiction, but it was a lot of fun. I liked to invent annoying items to leave in the dungeons I ran; one that comes to mind was the Incomprehensible Apparatus of Yog, a sphere about eight inches across with a big red button on one side. Everybody assumed it was a grenade. It wasn’t. If a character pushed the button, it ran through a random series of actions—emitting the smell of stale popcorn, glowing bright magenta, sprouting nine thin tentacles that waved around aimlessly for one turn, and so on—according to whatever I rolled with a d100. After 4+d6 turns, the red button would pop up and that would be the end of it. Watching players try to figure it out was always entertaining.
I drifted away from playing RPGs in the mid-1980s, mostly because by then I was hard at work trying to break into a career as a writer, and that was where all my creative energy was going. That made work on the Weird of Hali RPG a trip down memory lane, and also an enormous amount of fun. I’ve rarely enjoyed a writing project more. I had the advantage of working with an existing rule system, the Mythras system (formerly known as RuneQuest 6—long story there) so I didn’t have to wrestle with the mechanics; it was mostly a matter of figuring out how to fit my giddy reworking of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos into the framework of roleplaying. I didn’t put the Incomprehensible Apparatus of Yog into the game, but some of the things in the section on mad scientists must have come out of the same corner of my brain.
The Incomprehensible Apparatus of Yog! I love that. That’s a more-or-less perfect encapsulation of the style of humor that one encounters in much of RPG culture. I haven’t personally played with the Mythras system… Was that chosen deliberately as a good fit for the Weird of Hali?
No, it was more a matter of who approached me and offered a contract; Mythras is Aeon Games’ house rule system. That said, Mythras is well suited to the project; in particular, the focus on character skills rather than character classes works well with the very open-ended kind of adventures that feature in the novels. The characters in my books have to fight, cast or counter spells, flee through wilderness or water or Greenland tundra, figure out the meaning of strange inscriptions, and so on—they don’t have the luxury of fitting into a single character class! I wanted players to have the same kind of experience.
The history of RPGs in this country is inextricably linked with the Satanic Panic of the 1980's and 90's. As a kid growing up in an evangelical household back then, for me it was (in retrospect) a strange time to be alive—every game (especially D&D) and cassette tape was a potential tool of the Devil to ensnare my soul, and my mother and my youth pastor were sure of it. As someone who was studying the Occult during those days, how did you experience that time period? For those who are newer to the Occult or to Druidry, what would you want them to know about the lessons learned during the 80's and 90's?
I watched the Satanic Panic from a distance. I didn’t grow up in a religious family, and when I was still at home my dad and stepmom weren’t worried at all about RPGs; my dad built World War II aircraft model kits, and the best hobby shop in Seattle for those also had a big RPG section, so we’d go up to American Eagles in Ballard on Saturdays and he’d check out the latest model kits while I picked up the latest Tunnels & Trolls and Judges Guild products. By the time the panic got under way in the 1980s, I was married and living in a little apartment in one of Seattle’s hipster neighborhoods, and nobody I knew was into the conservative religious frenzy of the time. It was a frenzy at a distance; it concerned me, because it reminded me of all the other times in the past that occultists have been persecuted by fanatical mobs, but it never touched me directly.
One of the odd things about the Satanic Panic is how little any of it had to do with actual occultism—or for that matter actual Satanism. I know of a couple of times when somebody accused a genuine occultist of Satanic ritual abuse; in each case the occultist responded by getting a lawyer and threatening to sue for slander and defamation of character, and the accuser backed down fast. The victims of the panic, the ones who got accused and in some cases imprisoned, were ordinary people who couldn’t believe that they were being targeted by a witch hunt. I’d encourage today’s occultists, Druids, Heathens, and other practitioners of alternative spirituality to look into what happened, and remember that the same thing can happen again.
Very sound advice! Thank you for that. What connections do you see between the Satanic Panic’s hostile stance towards RPGs and Spengler’s Second Religiousness?
The fundamentalist movement that gave rise to the Satanic Panic is what happens before you get to the Second Religiousness. The movement Spengler was discussing, which occurs late in the history of every civilization, is what happens when that civilization’s version of rationalism finally sinks under the weight of its own failures. (The thing to keep in mind about rationalism is that the world isn’t actually rational; what we call “reason” is simply a set of cognitive habits in our brains, to which the universe need not conform, and so rational models never succeed in explaining the universe very well.) When a civilization’s Age of Reason ends in embarrassment and defeat, as it always does—and as ours is doing now—most people drift back to traditional religious forms as the only bulwark against mental chaos.
That’s the Second Religiousness. What differentiates it from the religious forms that come before it is that it’s tolerant. During an Age of Reason, religion becomes intolerant because it’s always on the defensive, backed into a corner by the assaults of fashionable rationalism. Once reason proves its inadequacy, the assaults end, and intolerance gives way to the sort of genial calm you see in so many old religions. The Satanic Panic was a frantic outburst on the part of religious people desperately trying to defend their faith against rationalism, and doing so more often than not in clumsy and counterproductive ways. Once the Second Religiousness picks up speed, that’s going to be an embarrassment nobody wants to talk about.
I refer back to your Well of Galabes posts often (thank you, by the way, for keeping them archived on Ecosophia!). In one such post, you discuss "the use of the trained imagination as an instrument of perception" as an important tool in the traditional occultist's toolkit. To me, in reading that description, the key word (that many will overlook) is "trained." Do you think that playing RPGs could provide the type of training needed for effective use of the active imagination, or "scrying in the spirit vision," as the Golden Dawn tradition calls it?
The training of the imagination involves several different skills. You can certainly develop some of those through roleplaying games, though there are some that have to be developed in other ways. Certainly, though, every gamer I’ve known had a good strong imagination, and so the other aspects of training—the ability to imagine something clearly with all five imaginary senses, for example, or the ability to clear the mind and let images rise spontaneously from the unconscious—came very easily.
From being a longtime reader of your blogs, I know that you and I share a deep appreciation for Herman Hesse's novel "The Glass Bead Game." In the book, students of the Glass Bead Game are required to compose a "Life" each year, in which they write a fictional autobiography set in a previous period of human history. In writing these "Lives," the main character, Joseph Knecht, comes to a much deeper understanding of himself and the life he is actually living. As an RPG enthusiast, I can't help but relate that to the process of character creation, in which players immerse themselves in an imaginary life and (in my experience at least) often wind up telling everyone at the table a great deal more about themselves than if we'd simply said "so, tell us about yourself!" From your perspective, or perhaps from the Western Occult perspective, what is the value in composing a fictional "Life"/player character? What is it about that process that aids us in heading the admonition to "know thyself?"
Jungian psychologists will tell patients who can’t remember their dreams to make up a dream on the spot. Reliably, the made-up dream has the same kinds of clues about the inner struggles of the mind that an actual dream offers—no surprises there; it comes out of the same mind. When you let your imagination run free, especially when you’re imagining an alter ego, the same thing happens.
Fiction is exactly the same way. Write a story about a character, and if the character isn’t simply a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the Mary Sue variety, it’s going to reflect important elements of yourself. This is especially true if you let the character do what he or she wants to do, instead of treating the character as a puppet you move around as you wish. My fiction always works that way; my characters quickly develop minds of their own and will tell me what they want to do in any given situation. I’ve had characters sit down and explain to me in detail what I’ve misunderstood about them!
If you set out to imagine the thoughts, feelings, choices, fears, and hopes of another person from within, inevitably you’re going to use your own experiences as a basis, and you’re also going to have the chance to explore other ways to think, feel, and so on. A player character is an experiment where you can imagine yourself as a different kind of person, and see how that works for you. You can learn a very great deal about yourself that way!
Is there a comparable benefit to the well-imagined villain? I think here of the oft-misquoted passage from Chesterton, which Neil Gaiman rendered as something along the lines of “The purpose of fairy tales isn’t to teach children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. The purpose of fairy tales is to teach them that dragons can be defeated.” Do the villains we choose to have our protagonists fight–whether in a well-written piece of fiction, or in a D&D campaign–tell us as much about ourselves as the protagonists themselves? What could a Jungian analyst turned DM (or a DM turned Jungian analyst) accomplish by thoughtfully constructing a campaign in order to have a patient fight the right dragon?
Good heavens, yes. Half the reason that so much modern fantasy fiction sucks is that so few writers these days know how to craft a good villain. It’s all Lord Blorg the Bad, Evil Lord of Evilness, who has no reason to be evil but the mere fact that he’s been assigned that role. When Tolkien invented Sauron the Dark Lord for his trilogy, that was a brilliant and unconventional move; he did pretty much everything useful that you can do with that trope, but everyone’s been copying him ever since.
RPGs are way ahead of the game here, and I wish some of the creativity that goes into inventing good villains for RPG campaigns would find its way into fantasy fiction. As for Jungian RPGs, Jung himself offered a great pointer here. He noted that whatever people hate the most is inevitably a projection of their own shadow—that is to say, the aspects of their own personality they can’t stand. Listen to someone ranting about the evil evilness of those evil people doing evil things over there, and what you’re hearing is a detailed description of what the ranter knows to be true about himself or herself, but won’t admit it. Use that to create villains for your campaign and things might get very interesting indeed.
I agree completely with your critique of the “Lord Blorg” villains that are rampant in so much fiction. Interestingly, I’ve also noticed an opposite (and equally unsatisfying) trend in a lot of the children’s books and movies that are popular these days: too often, there’s no such thing as a bad monster, only a misunderstood one. I’ve been working on an essay for this blog on this topic, noting the proliferation of sweet dragons that can be trained, cuddly zombies, vampires that make for the kind of gentlemanly boyfriend you’d be delighted to have your teenage daughter date, etc. It strikes me that the “plushification” of the monster not only gaslights children about the existence of true evil in the world (most all of them know better, in my experience), it also deprives them of the chance to see how evil might be bested.
Would you agree that part of what a conscientious Dungeon Master might do to help his players–especially the younger ones– to develop spiritually and psychologically is to give them truly evil monsters to battle?
Yes, very much so—but also different kinds of evil monsters to battle, and subtle forms of evil as well as obvious ones. It’s not much of a gain if they alternate between cuddly plush monsters and the latest rehash of Lord Blorg the Bad. Most of the evils we encounter in this world don’t wear nametags saying “Hi, I’m Evil!” on their shirts. Characters in roleplaying games should expect to encounter deception, treachery, all-too-plausible lies, and the like. Oh, and throw some things at them that look cuddly and aren’t. One DM I knew used to stock his dungeons with adorable big-eyed kittens. If you picked one of them up, it sank its cyanide-tipped claws into your flesh, then called the rest of the pack out to feed on your corpse. That had a lesson or two to teach!
Recently, I've been running a campaign in Dungeons & Dragons that contains a bit of mock divination (the module is Curse of Strahd, for the gamers in the audience). The DM is supposed to shuffle a deck of mock tarot cards and, in the character of a fortune teller, lay out a spread that reveals the location of important items in the game. This is supposed to be a surprise even to the DM and determines the directions the game takes from there in a randomized fashion. All of that has gotten me thinking about the potential for RPGs as a tool for divination. After all, there is already a randomized element in most games with the roll of the dice... what are your thoughts on that? Could an RPG be designed specifically as a divination tool? Or could an already existing RPG be used as one?
That’s a fascinating idea. Games have been used for divinatory purposes for a very long time; some writers have claimed, in fact, that all games started out as divination. The occultist Nigel Pennick has written a fine book, Secret Games of the Gods, which explores the divinatory and magical meaning of traditional board games; the Golden Dawn tradition of magic also includes the game of Enochian chess, which is designed to be used for divination.
Yes, you could create an RPG for divinatory purposes, but any RPG could be used for divination. Imagine a short campaign where the players either will find a certain treasure, or won’t. The players don’t know this, but the DM has decided that if they find the treasure, that gives a “yes” answer to a question in his mind; if they fail, that’s a “no,” and the details of their success or failure will reveal the details of the way the question will work out. The game is played, the players succeed, but nearly all of them get munched by wandering monsters. The answer to the divination? “Yes, but it will cost much more than you expect.”
The great problem with using RPGs for divination is that most campaigns are too long! Most divinatory questions can be settled very neatly with three to six cards, runes, or what have you. A D&D campaign that takes four to six nights to play by comparison, is like a 200-card reading—every choice the characters make, every randomly generated monster that they encounter, every significant roll of the dice, is the equivalent of a card being laid down in a divinatory reading. That’s the kind of thing you can only use for a very big question—“Who am I?” is one example, and of course that’s what you’re answering in the process of gaining self-knowledge.
I’m reminded that in the 20th century, there was a push in some circles of the Christian theological world to develop a robust theology of play. Some sought to interpret Christian liturgies as a game played with God. What might an Occult theology or philosophy of play look like?
Oh, it would be a philosophy, not a theology—occultists tend to leave theology to mystics, who spend enough time in the company of gods to do it right. From an occult perspective, play is one of the most important ways that human beings make connections between the planes of being. We start on the mental plane, with a glimpse of meaning, purpose, or value, and embody that in imagery and emotion from the astral plane—that’s the plane of concrete consciousness, where the imagination is at home. Then we bring that down through the etheric plane, the plane of life force, to act it out in some form on the material plane.
That’s how play works. That’s also how ritual works. A magical ritual is what the alchemist Michael Maier called a lusus serius, a serious game; it might better be called a game with intention. In ritual, you create forms on the astral plane with your imagination to embody some force or insight from the mental plane, then charge it with the life force and enact it with words and gestures and physical objects on the material plane. Because the world we experience is always partly created by the way we assemble experiences in our minds, that can have a potent effect on the world around us—and of course also on who we are and how we confront the world.
At the risk of conflating correlation with causation, I can’t help but note that the creation of D&D and the rise of RPGs generally occurred at a time when many Western religions were getting rid of rituals like their lives depended on it. The Catholics were taking a post-Vatican II wrecking ball to the Mass, the Protestants were exchanging vestments for blue jeans… Do you think part of what makes RPGs so potent and increasingly popular is the felt lack of a lusus serius? Are we playing D&D in part because the major Western religions have largely gotten out of that playful business of helping us make connections between the planes of being?
Very much so. The mainstream churches got rid of ritual, of symbolism, of all the richness that made their Sunday services something other than a dull lecture and a bunch of people singing off key. Somebody had to pick up what they dropped. Occultism took on some of that job—the occult revival of the 1970s drew an enormous amount of its impetus from the failure of churches and synagogues to provide an alternative to the dreary blandness of everyday life. Imaginative fiction also played a big role in providing what the churches no longer offered. But RPGs also had a very large role in that, and it was particularly potent in that it allowed players to create their own rituals and symbolism and richness of experience. That’s not something the religious mainstream is comfortable with, though alternative religions have been doing it for a very long time.
JMG, I’m incredibly grateful for your time and your insight! Let’s end with an RPG twist to an old fun question: if you had to choose between battling 10 gnome-sized dragons, or 1 dragon-sized gnome, which would you dare to face and why?
Oh, the dragon-sized gnome, no question. In occult tradition, gnomes are the elemental spirits of earth, and so I’d simply trace a banishing pentagram of earth and chant the right words of power, and the gnome—however large—would go back to the elemental realms!