This is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

This episode, I speak with musician, occult scholar, and author Phil Lagarde.

I was first introduced to Phil's music through Ben Chasney of

six organs of omittance. So if you remember, Ben was on against everyone with Connor Abed 45,

and Phil worked with Ben on his complex sort of magic adjacent music project, the Hexatic System.

That led me to Phil's blog, which I linked to in the show notes, patreon.com,

forward slash Connor Abe, go there and check them out.

And when I looked into Phil's work and his website, I found this vast body of scholarly research

on magic and landscapes and music.

And it was all so profound and thought-provoking and well-written.

Much of Phil's music, and he has this, again, this massive output of music, which I'll link to as well,

especially under the name of Zenus Emputte is about magically evoking landscapes

through music, specific landscapes that Phil sort of gives to the listener as an inner experience.

I think that that project is really profound, especially right now in this time of confinement,

because it creates a new sense of space within us just through this musical, magical act that Phil creates for us.

Now Phil has this book out on Scarlet Imprint Press. It's called An Excellent Book of the

Art of Magic. This is a grimoirex text of magic from the 16th century, written by imperialist

soldier Humphrey Gilbert and his squire and maybe lover, who knows, John Davis, and it details

their attempts and successes at summoning demons, especially the demon Azazel, for the purpose

of gaining knowledge. This text is back in the world, maybe dangerously so, because Phil was

quite taken with what he found in it and decided to transcribe and introduce

and write quite thoughtfully about this text along with the magic practitioner Alexander Cummins.

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