pretense 'n' pretension, part one

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

There's a scene in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, somewhere in the first couple of volumes, about a cell of anarchist/conspiracist magicians in the '20s. One has chosen to call himself "Tom o' Bedlam," and we see his flashback where his father calls him out on it: as a "magical name," it's a dare launched against the universe. Sure enough, the character ends up one of the most accomplished magicians in the history of the species, but he dies alone and insane in a gutter in London.

I used to read a lot about the occult, but could never muster up the belief to go full-blown Alan Moore "I worship myself as a snake god" with it. The weird thing about a lot of it, however, is that once you know a little, you start seeing it pop up in daily life, like how Robert Anton Wilson saw the number 23 everywhere.

(Or how there's a far-right political party in modern Greece called the Golden Dawn, which sounds so much like a blatant Illuminati power-grab that I'm surprised it didn't get laughed to death on general principle. Apparently the One True Conspiracy That Controls Everything has a camp of young-turk fuck-ups who are tired of being secretive and subtle and think it would do them all some good to hit each other with tire irons for a while.)

So I wonder about how magicians adopt new names, and how the concept of the "magical name" relates to Internet handles, and how your handle reflects you and ultimately begins to shape you. It probably doesn't always work, nor should it; some handles are kid stuff, thoughtless nonsense put in to fill a text field, and rightly so.

(Can you imagine a world where GokuSephirothXXX is somebody's magical name? I'm sure it's happened, and I'm sure it's why the Western occult tradition virtually died in the '70s. It committed retroactive suicide to save us all from the concept of brown-robed magicians lurking in basements with bright yellow saiyan wigs. Ritual magic that involves standing in one place and screaming like you're about to prolapse for three days. A six-foot-long ceremonial "katana.")

If I was writing urban fantasy or New Age shovel-lit, I'd probably go from there into the concept of Internet identity magic: choosing a new name to forge a new identity, and thus a new self. A handle as personal reinvention/transformation, in its way.

This is what I think about whenever I see somebody on YouTube or an MMO or whatever who's chosen to represent himself as something like "Shithead666." As onscreen, so off.