Disinfo.com favorite and frequent podcast guest Duncan Trussell interviewed James Wasserman, the author of In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult, 1966-1989. Wasserman is a longtime member of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientalis and a serious scholar of the magickal arts.
Stream or download the episode here.… Read the rest
Occult memoirs are uncommon, interesting ones even moreso. With In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966 – 1989 (Ibis Press, 2012), author James Wasserman has added to the small canon of the latter.
Wasserman will be known to many of the Disinformed as the gent with enviable facial hair who has written and edited dozens of books (and regularly appears in documentaries) on Freemasonry, the Templars, Aleister Crowley, and other such esoterica. He is also a long-time practicing magician and member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and was a key player in some of the events which have led to the O.T.O.–currently celebrating its one hundredth anniversary–still going strong today.
The years covered in this memoir begin with him as a freewheeling hippie, dabbling with decreasing commitment in political activism, and with increasing zeal in the occult (and, separately, drugs). Against the backdrop of late-sixties and early-seventies New York City, Wasserman chronicles his winding path through the occult with stops including yoga, Voodoo, and other, more obscure practices.… Read the rest
