Cultivating Darkness

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Well, thanks very much for joining us, both those who have come out into the bleak cold of Plymouth and those joining us on the live stream. Yeah, I wish all of you could be here sharing the mulled wine with us. My name's Robin and I'm the founder of the publishing house Urbanomic, which was founded in 2007. And…

• 00:07:08

  They're hugely ambitious philosophies. But they're also deeply attached to their place of origin. Whether it's the suburbs of Rome or the desolate, sun-baked countryside of southern Italy, the writings throughout the book vibrate with the immemorial and the modern history of Italy, with both the Mediterranean climate…

• 00:18:20

  For those who are not familiar with these two denominations, right hand path and left hand path are traditional terms in the context of the hermetic Kabbalah, or the hermetic tradition, in Western magic. And although exactly what they signify is often the topic of fierce debate, they're generally understood…

• 00:25:37

  Nothing is reversible. In order to maintain itself in time, a system must constantly consume new energy from outside of itself, which increases the overall amount of entropy in the universe. A process that will continue inexorably until the heat death of the universe. To quote the group Odenon, with each sacrifice…

• 00:33:48

  In the case of the idealized equilibrium of self-deification, the repressed substrate is entropy, dissolution as the primary force of the universe, that must be denied for a system to posit itself as self-sufficient and eternal. Entropy is not the opposite of equilibrium, but its condition of possibility. And…

• 00:42:02

  And kind of... That got fed into certain, like, New Age traditions in, like, California through importations of Thelma, which was his magic, to America. And then you get stuff like chaos magic and these more contemporary sort of postmodern forms of magic. But a lot of them are following at some point, like, the same…

• 00:50:29

  And I'm interested to see whether they're able to restore an equilibrium or whether actually this attempt to restore it will actually create even greater fragmentation. Architecture, in a way, can be seen as a kind of ritual. So there's a piece in Revolutionary Demonology about Rome and the Gra. It's designed…

• 00:59:34

  So I think what we'll do is we'll move on to the films and we'll see if we can talk to them. It's going to seem like this is all fictional, but honestly at the beginning of the day we had at least three people who were going to talk to us and they've kind of disappeared one by one.