Nicholas Laccetti is a face and voice familiar to those who listen to podcasts such as Talk Gnosis, where he acts as a commentator, and has given lectures on figures such as Frater Achad and Josephin Peladan. Also a published author and a great writer on topics like Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Thelema and Liberation Theology, I had the pleasure to ask a few things from Nic.
Hey Nic! How are you on this day in March of 2022?
I’m doing pretty well, working on a book project related to Frater Achad right now, and happy that it might be warmer soon here in New York. As long as there isn’t a nuclear war or something, I’m hoping this year will be the time for me to actually launch a bunch of projects I’ve been planning and prepping for a while now.
What can you tell me of the environments you grew up in, and the influences and events which lead you to be fascinated by religion and esoteric subjects as well as social justice? Did one come before the others, or have they all been a part of your life from quite early on?
I was actually not raised particularly religious or spiritual, and though my family is open to concerns about social justice, we were definitely not activists or very politically engaged. My grandparents on both sides were immigrants to the NYC area — my mom’s side is Chinese and my dad’s side is Italian. I grew up in a mostly culturally Catholic environment and had very Catholic Italian godparents, but wasn’t forced to practice Christianity myself.
My first encounter with spirituality was probably due to the 1990s occult revival in pop culture — I started picking up various books on occultism and witchcraft at a suburban Barnes & Noble when I was around 15. Lucky for me, this was a time period in which you could find editions of Aleister Crowley and other important works in regular physical bookstores. I started reading a mix of serious stuff, like Crowley, and really silly 90s-era witchcraft books and books of spells. I couldn’t really distinguish between it all at the time, but I knew Crowley was something special. My first book by him was 777 — I had barely any idea what it meant, but the table of correspondences in the book fascinated me and led me to want to learn more about the esoteric symbolism behind things.
It wasn’t until I went to college and fell under the influence of some great religious studies professors that I got interested in mainstream religions like Christianity and Buddhism, and became a practicing Christian who was eventually confirmed Roman Catholic. This happened kind of despite my best intentions. I also became a Catholic Christian without actually rejecting occultism — I didn’t exactly reconcile them, but I never really had a conservative phase. At the same time, I started getting involved in radical political work and before last year, had worked for around 8 years in faith-based political organizing.
You have a professional degree from Union Theological Seminary. What can you tell me of your theological academic life (your path to ministry), and considering the state of education in the U.S., would you recommend it for young Americans in general?
After college I thought about going into academia for the study of religion and theology in Late Antiquity, and actually got a Master’s degree first in Medieval Studies with the intention of continuing on to a PhD. I like academic study, and I think I’m good at it, but I quickly realized I would be very unhappy trying to be a dispassionate academic historian. After a couple of years working in nonprofits and doing activism, I missed the theological study I had been doing in school, and tried to find a way to combine it with my activist work. This led me to Union Theological Seminary, as it is basically the home of liberation theology and other forms of socially engaged theology here in the United States.
I never really considered becoming an ordained minister, being a Catholic, even though I have the professional degree for ministry. I did again consider a PhD in theology, but ultimately decided against it. You mentioned the state of education in the U.S. — academia is a pretty terrible career choice at the moment, to be perfectly honest, and you really have to be absolutely sure you are called to be a scholar (and nothing else) and are willing to make all the sacrifices necessary to be successful in that path. Professional ministry in the mainline churches isn’t much better.
For those practical reasons, but also because I’m kind of terrible at limiting my thought to a specialized subject or being willing to forego more experimental takes on religion and spirituality, I didn’t think going full time into ministry or academia would be a very good idea. Instead, I used my Master of Divinity degree for social justice work with church-adjacent organizations and movements that have been aligned with liberation theology. This was until last year, when I decided to leave my full-time job to focus on writing and other creative projects.
You have studied and written about liberation theology, a current which has spread globally, but has also been condemned by many parties as too "Marxist". While Karl Marx himself made famous not-so-positive statements about religion, he also apparently thought of it as a vehicle of positivity in society and human life, if used properly. Regarding Christianity, the actual sayings of Jesus according to the gospels paint a very solidary, almost utilitarian or anarchist picture of the early church, so to speak?
Yeah, I would agree that the early Jesus movement was sort of proto-anarchist in a lot of ways, and was essentially a poor people’s movement rooted in networks of solidarity and mutual aid in the context of the Roman Empire. Liberation theology, influenced by Marxism, emphasizes the fact that the God portrayed in the Bible is not politically neutral, but — in the prophetic books, in the life of Jesus, and in the early church — actually takes the side of oppressed and marginalized people.
As the gospels differ from each other in context and accounts, and the post-crucifixion version of the Jesus-religion can be called Paulian-religion, there is very little info on what the message of the baptizers Yeshua and Yohanan might have been (altho the Mandaeans might give us some clues), but is it safe to say they were dealing in a social uprising of sorts, directed to the poor and containing messianic and eschatological elements?
There are lots of differing interpretations of what the message of Jesus really was, both among scholars and among esotericists, but I think it’s clear that the story of Jesus suggests that God becomes especially present in the world in the life of a poor Jewish person in Roman-occupied Palestine, who is eventually executed by the state as a revolutionary. It’s clear that Jesus was preaching something to a movement primarily of poor and dispossessed people that was considered to be dangerous to the powers and principalities of the time, and he suffered a terrible death for it.
Even in the eschatological or apocalyptic interpretations of Jesus’ gospel, the kingdom of God is placed in opposition to the kingdom of this world, which at the time would mean the Empire. And liberation theology suggests that there is something about this particular person’s life and experiences that should shape how we theologize about God, and how we should act now in the context of social injustice.
Areas that interest you, besides esoteric Christianity, include for example Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Martinism, which all deal with man's reintegration into the absolute, to put it simply. How do you personally view and experience the symbol and role of God compared to the known universe?
My stance on this has shifted over time, to the point where I’m more of a nondualist now than an emanationist — I don’t feel there is really a true separation between the universe and the absolute, in the sense that we need to be reintegrated into something we’ve actually become separated from. I came to this nondualism through various forms of Christian radical theology, Thelema, and Mahayana Buddhism, which are closest to my personal experiences and understanding of God at this point.
I actually still think I’m a Biblical Christian, but I’ve carried the implications of the event of Christ to the radical conclusions that people like Thomas J.J. Altizer and D.G. Leahy have. In the Christian terms of radical theology, God or the absolute became fully incarnate in Christ, and God died on the cross. Rather than, as in some forms of Gnosticism, aiming for separation from this world in order to reintegrate into God, I believe the self-sacrifice of God means that we are now faced with unveiling our total continuity with existence, a transcendence of self we discover in a radical immanence.
This might be experienced as a kind of reintegration into the absolute, but we open the way through enacting the death of God in ourselves and in the world, which means we no longer have a vertical relationship with a God who is higher than the world — we no longer, as Georges Bataille says, “imagine a tide that will permanently elevate [us], never to return, into pure space.”
The new heaven and new earth happen here and now, in this moment.
As the idea of God in Gnosticism and Kabbalah is clearly influenced by Platonic ideas, they do work well together with the Abrahamic symbols and metaphors, and some have even argued that Jesus himself was talking about nonduality. Do you think these biblical and Christian symbols are perhaps the best maps for the western person venturing into spiritual territories, like Jung suggested, since they have molded our cultures for so long, rather than digging for water in for example the Far East, or trying to reimagine pagan European religions?
I do think reclaiming and reinterpreting Biblical and Christian symbols is important, because of the massive influence of these symbols on our culture and historical consciousness. But I’m also suspicious of people who are overly obsessed with the “Western” part of Western esotericism, and unwilling to learn from dialogue or encounters with other belief systems. Being half Chinese might be a part of that. We live in a globalized world, so I don’t think putting too much into a separation of East and West is logical or healthy. Personally, I’ve been engaged in a study and practice of some forms of Mahayana Buddhism recently and they have been very important to deepening my own spiritual work and understanding of the radical potential of Christianity.
That being said, a lot of Western engagement with Eastern religions (as well as with ancient religions), especially in the esoteric world, has been very reductive and misleading. I think people just need to be careful when they are encountering something they don’t really understand, before they start to draw conclusions that might not follow from the sources, but might just be what they were looking to find to begin with. This goes for Christian esotericism, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah, too.
Another system which interests you, and has also grown beyond the visions of the controversial man who developed it, is Thelema. What would you say is the biggest element in Thelema which captivates people, and you personally, besides the person of Crowley himself?
Besides the fact that I really started my own spiritual quest with Thelema and Crowley, so I’ve never been able to easily discard them, I think Thelema is appealing because it holds the possibility of a world in which there is a radical plurality of paths, in which we as individuals are embedded in the continuity of existence in a way that allows us to move through the world with an experience of delight and joy. I think the universe that Thelema — specifically, the Book of the Law — portrays is one in which change and flux are constant, divinity is immanent, but we find pure joy in that constant movement. Thelema also allows for a great synthesis of approaches to spirituality, as Crowley drew from a diversity of sources, Western and Eastern, esoteric and exoteric, in putting his system together. This is the positive potential of Thelema. On the other hand, it can be a toxic community at times and there are clearly people interested in it just because it seems transgressive or anti-Christian. Obviously Crowley is responsible for some of that.
Also, I personally have been engaged in the study of the figure of Frater Achad for a long time, as he is someone who never completely abandoned the Book of the Law or Thelema, but also converted to Roman Catholicism after his break with Crowley. He’s been an interesting model for me to understand my own attraction to both pillars of the temple, so to speak (an image he used himself for his journey between Thelema and Christianity).
As Crowley himself clearly had events in his life which make him not the perfect gentleman to put it mildly, some people have gone as far as to dismiss him from their Thelema all together. How useful do you see separating the man from the religion, such as in cases like Jesus or Buddha as well?
I don’t think you can really separate Thelema from Crowley, both in the sense that the Thelemic holy books were filtered through the man Crowley’s experiences and context, and because Crowley remains the first and one of the most sophisticated commentators on the meaning of those texts. This doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything Crowley said, or treat him as an infallible authority (in fact I think that way leads to disaster), but rather than going beyond Crowley, you have to go through Crowley. I think it’s probably the same for other religions and their founders.
Besides writing about altruism and faith, you also have experience of actual charitable work. How important do you see the role of activism in modern Western society, besides being the classical way to liberation by monks and nuns and other spiritual people throughout the world?
I think it’s important to separate charity from projects of survival or mutual aid — in the former case, marginalized people become the objects of temporary help, and the system remains intact. Unfortunately, this has been the case in a lot of religious forms of charity. In the latter case, we organize politically at the same time as we try to address our needs as a community, with the goal of ultimately overturning the systems that have put us in this position. My organizing work has hopefully been in that latter tradition, though I left my full-time job last year to focus more on creative work.
I still think that it’s only in organizing mass social movements that can we actually change our societies for the better, though I now also believe more strongly in the importance of coming together as individual persons in a voluntary union than in the more collectivist forms of organizing I’ve done in the past. In other words, I’m probably more anarchist now than I was before, when my organizing work was mostly done in a Marxist context. I think that is ultimately also more compatible with my spirituality.
As you are a practicing occultist, how important is daily ritual and ceremony to you? Do you think it is possible to alter one’s perspectives in a radical way through reason alone, or are more dramatic methods such as meditation, psychedelics or psychodrama required?
Daily ritual and ceremony are important to me, even (or especially!) when I fail to do them. So is group liturgy — participating in the Mass has actually been one of the most important ritual practices for me in my life, and I’m spiritually healthier when I regularly attend Mass (I’ve attended Eucharistic Masses of many kinds, including Thelemic, Gnostic, and others, and they’ve all been significant, but I mostly mean the Catholic Mass here, as un-esoteric as that makes me sound). But I don’t think we should discard any potential means to practice our spirituality. Even reason alone can result in a radical change in perspective — though more often than not in the sense of short-circuiting our rational minds to the point of losing ourselves, rather than using reason to come to a full picture of reality (as in the method of Crowley’s Liber OS Abysmi vel Daath).
Ultimately, though, I think becoming overly attached to any method with the goal of achieving enlightenment, rather than engaging in them just for the sake of engaging in existence itself, actually damages our ability to attain spiritually. Like the Book of the Law says, “pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect”; or like Dogen says when talking about meditation, “have no designs on becoming a Buddha.” You engage in practices, and even in study, for the sake of encountering reality itself, not to reach some goal.
Your book The Inner Church is the Hope of the World was published in 2018, and is a must read for all interested in topics discussed in this interview. What can you tell me of your projects after that, besides writing articles in your blog and substack?
As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a book project related to Frater Achad — introducing and annotating some of his unpublished writings — as well as a couple other projects. I want to eventually write a book putting into esoteric practice the radical theology I outlined earlier, and I’m also planning a book (as well as articles and blog posts) about Americana, popular culture, and the occult, which is another interest of mine. I’m not sure which of those will come first!
Thank you very much for this interview, Nic!
Thank you for the opportunity!