# Audio/Video: Pop Apocalypse Episode 12: Black Metal and Orthodox Christianity March 04, 2025 In Episode 12, we welcome philosopher, artist, and musician Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. Haela is best known as the songwriter and singer for the black metal band, Liturgy, which has released six full albums and one EP. We discuss Haela’s early relationships to Christianity and metal music, her philosophical training, and her recent conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Along the way, we explore her philosophical system of Transcendental Qabalah and how it informs records such as *H.A.Q.Q., Origin of the Alimonies*, and *93696.* Listen on Spotify: Apple podcasts: Simplecast: Embed ## About Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix is a philosopher, sculptor, and musician. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in philosophy. In 2005, she launched the metal band Liturgy. To date, Liturgy has released one EP and six full-length albums: *Immortal Life* EP, *Renihilation*, *Aesthetica*, *The Ark Work*, *H.A.Q.Q.*, *The Origin of the Alimonies*, and *93696*. Her sculpture has been exhibited in venues including the Gern en Regalia in New York City. She is currently at work on her first monograph, a philosophical elaboration of her system of Transcendental Qabalah, which will be published by Repeater Books. ## Transcript \[MUSIC PLAYING\] MATT DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse. My name is Matt Dillon, and I'm the host and also a research associate here at the Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. The guest today is musician, philosopher, and artist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. Haela is probably best known as the lead singer and songwriter behind the band Liturgy. Liturgy launched in the mid 2000, and to date has put out six full records and one EP. Liturgy's music is really hard to describe in words. But its DNA, as an American Metal band, particularly a Black metal band, is evident, even as they began to evolve and incorporate more electronic, classical, even operatic elements. Like a previous guest on the show, Trey Spruance, Haela's interests in music and religion are deeply esoteric. On the discursive side, she has spent about a decade now articulating her own system, which she calls transcendental Kabbalah. While that system is obviously informed by Jewish, Christian, and thelemic approaches to Kabbalah, the result is wholly unique. It is as dizzying. It is intricate as any other system of Kabbalah. So rather than spend 50 minutes trying to digest it, I am going to direct listeners to the show notes where they can find Haela's blog and video lectures that go into great detail about the system. And of course, we talk about it in the interview. And even more fortunately, she is currently writing transcendental Kabbalah up as a book, which is supposed to be out later this year, which we should all look forward to. With Liturgy, Haela brings these ideas into musical form. The three most recent records all illustrate a pillar of her Kabbalah. So there's H-A-Q-Q, or "Haqq," is the god record, "Origins of the Alimonies," which is a cosmogony record and also sort of an opera, and "93696" is the eschatology record. To be sure, one can enjoy these records without any exposure or understanding of Haela's philosophy. But for those who have learned transcendental Kabbalah or made an effort to do so, you can find a different point of entry into the ideas, one that gives form and substance and feeling to what is otherwise lexical and conceptual. Between her philosophy, music, and sculpture, Haela is leaving behind a body of work that can be enjoyed by fans and also studied as an oeuvre of contemporary esotericism. Finally, I just want to note how refreshing and interesting it is to explore the work of a living esoteric philosopher and artist, who is also a traditional Christian. As we discuss in the interview, he is a lifelong Christian who has most recently, over the last year and a half or so, found themselves in the Greek Orthodox Church. And we discussed why it is that metal musicians in particular seem to be finding themselves into the Greek Orthodox phase. But to pull back, as a scholar of the esoteric and of popular culture, is a really interesting and important to be able to study and look at people like Haela, because the history of Western esotericism, and I'm very much emphasizing Western here, has this close relationship with Christianity, not just in heretical forms, but in traditional forms. And while much of what we call contemporary esotericism has migrated out of those traditional faiths, not all. And so one of the things that makes Haela's oeuvre so enticing and so interesting is that it has all these deep resonances to some of the more notable historical figures who were able to do something really rich and deep and esoteric while maintaining these traditional, religious identities. And with that, let's welcome to the show Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. \[MUSIC PLAYING\] So it is my great honor to welcome to the show Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix from the band Liturgy. Musician, artist, philosopher. So Haela, how are you doing today? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: I'm doing great. Thanks how are you? MATT DILLON: I'm quite well. Quite well. So I start all these shows exactly the same way with same question, because I think it's a good frame, because we are literally in the shadow of Harvard Divinity School. So what was your exposure to religion like growing up? Did you have a sort of traditional or mainline background? Were you raised atheist? Was it somewhere in between? What was that like for you? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. It was a little fragmentary. I would say my main-- I mainly grew up in New York, and didn't go to church much as a kid, except I had some access to Southern evangelical Christianity, because I had family in the South. And so during the Summers, \[INAUDIBLE\] Southern Baptist churches, basically, and a Christian summer camp. But my main environment, I would say, was not really Christian. And then we would sometimes go to multi-denominational liberal Protestant churches. I actually was-- maybe I've said this before, maybe you know this. I was actually baptized by the United Church of Christ in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is the-- they were the-- they were like the chaplain of the Manhattan Project. MATT DILLON: Holy smokes. That is-- HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: They were started by the Manhattan Project, and my family happened to live in New Mexico for just a couple of years. And so I was baptized by the Manhattan Project Church, which is kind of interesting. MATT DILLON: I know. \[LAUGHTER\] So you got the radiation there, like, hand down. That's funny. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. MATT DILLON: Oh, cool. OK. All right. I did not know that. That's fun. And so as you're growing up, did you start playing music really early and were you classically trained growing up or did that come later? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, very early. I was extremely passionate about playing guitar especially from for as long as I can remember. Like, I don't even really have any memories of not being obsessed with a guitar and MTV. And I did take some piano-- there was a classical-- I kind of had to take piano lessons in order to play guitar. But yeah, I really loved rock music and metal from a very early age. I think like Marilyn Manson and Korn and this kind of thing. And that was actually kind of-- that was even before-- I did have a pretty strong experience at this one Christian summer camp that I mentioned in the summer. And I remember there was a moment where-- from a very early age, I've felt myself in a position-- the antagonism between New York secular atheism and Southern religion or something like that. I went to this summer camp and I was a Marilyn Manson fan reading Nietzsche and Marx and stuff like that. But then also, I was already quite passionate about Christianity as well, and would talk about that at school and-- and I always just had a sense that there was this kind of-- I don't know, I guess just a sense of the schism-- the religious schism in the United States or something. Just knowing people on either side of this divide that just both think that one another is completely insane and being caught between those two currents. And that tension has really been with me ever since. MATT DILLON: Very interesting. And so the-- how to phrase this. So when you were a Manson fan, was that mechanical animals or were you an Antichrist Superstar type deep into that record? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah starting with Antichrist Superstar. I mean, actually starting with, yeah, I guess Antichrist Superstar. MATT DILLON: Yeah. Sorry, that-- HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: What had you asked specifically? MATT DILLON: Well, I speak to it because so much of what that record was about-- was against the Southern Baptist evangelical form of Christianity. So it's interesting that would have hit, considering the schism that you were straddling. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Right. And it also-- not just him, but I mean, a lot of metal-- gets into Black metal. It has that kind of gravitas. Even though it's, in a lot of cases, very avowedly anti-Christian, it has this religious pathos that is conveying-- like, it's drinking from the same stream as what religion often drinks from or whatever. And so it's like-- it's kind of its own religion in a way. MATT DILLON: Well put. Yeah. So you started reading sort of Marx and Nietzsche. Was that why when you went to Columbia, you decided to become a philosophy major? Was that, you'd already caught that bug and wanted to explore that, or did you grow into that major over time? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. I mean, technically, I grew into philosophy as the major, though if it wasn't that, it would have been anthropology or something-- already by high school, I was very passionate about philosophy, even Deleuze and Guattari. I already owned Anti-Oedipus before going to college. And I really wanted to study-- I wanted to major in Deleuze and Guattari, and then found out that you can't major in them in an American philosophy department. So I was taking-- I studied Lacan-- my freshman year, I studied Lacan in the comparative literature department. You find the continental philosophers in those other departments. And so I was just like, oh, maybe it'll be anthropology or sociology or comparative literature. But then I ended up taking more history of philosophy classes and getting really interested in Aristotle especially actually. Anyway, I drifted into doing an actual philosophy major and doing a lot more analytic philosophy than I had planned on, because I really enjoyed symbolic logic. And I got into computers as a kid, so I also-- not really as a kid, but in high school. So that could have been-- like I was more encouraged in computer science actually than in any other discipline. My grades and stuff in English and philosophy and that kind of thing were like a little choppier, but coding, I was really good at. I don't know, yeah. But I just didn't-- I don't know, I didn't want to spend my life that way. \[LAUGHS\] MATT DILLON: Fair enough. Yeah. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. MATT DILLON: OK. And what was it that drew you-- because you can sense Deleuze and Guattari over your thought, but what is it that drew you to them as thinkers? Like, what was it that felt so generative and productive? Because that is, for those in the audience who have not read, not easy reads. It's very complex. It's difficult as Lacan is. So what was it that allured you to them? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. I mean, especially back in high school, you look back like, what-- Because clearly, I didn't understand them. \[LAUGHTER\] But it's like they-- I mean, what I like in them is this synthesis of Marx and Freud. There's this strong project of becoming unrepressed but dealing with psychic structures and political structures at the same time. And I don't know, I just felt this really powerful sense of urgency as a teenager that something needed to change. I don't know. And so I was-- I think social norms weren't working very well for me, but I wasn't-- rebelling against them, wasn't working that well for me either. And so there was just this sort of-- I was just very interested in religion and philosophy. And somehow Deleuze and Guattari just seemed to have this edge to them. And there was such a wealth of references in the work that you-- you learn the entire history of philosophy early-- the entire intellectual history of the world if you actually try to start following the references in their work because it's so elusive. But they just seem to have this sense of vision that was like, in the most general sense, just contained a sincere desire for justice, but that one was also very free. And yeah. So I knew I liked that. MATT DILLON: Wonderful, yeah. And you were right. Do you find them-- definitely not in American philosophy departments. But find the weird folk. Go into comparative literature. Go into religious studies. We have a bunch of Deleuze and Guattari people. They're very, very productive for us. So after Columbia, you're in Brooklyn, right? So you're part of this music DIY sort of scene down there. And I came across something you just rerecorded and released last year, "Immortal Life," so that early Liturgy EP. This really struck me because part of what Pop Apocalypse is about is the ways in which the mystical and esoteric go into popular culture. But then there's the other side of that equation, which is how these popular culture products can incite sort of mystical insights or experiences. And came across that you wrote "Immortal Life" after a mystical experience while listening back and forth between "Loveless." And then it was "Strength and Anger," right? Yeah. So could you speak to that? It's a very interesting sort of pair of records. But it's also like, how does it-- what was that experience like? And how did it generate? Or was it an origin point for what Liturgy became? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, yeah. It was a very intense experience for me. I was still in college when I wrote "Immortal Life." So I had discovered screamo in high school. That was the first music scene-- before then, my interest in music was really mediated by the music industry, I guess, things like Aphex Twin. And then I began finding bands that were a little more independent, like Godspeed You! Black Emperor maybe. But then I began to-- I really connected to screamo and math rock and art rock also kind of during high school and then found people that were playing music who were my age. It was a lot of those bands-- like a band like Slint, they like they made their album when they were 15 or something. And it was like, oh, this shows-- I don't know. Screamo shows were just so cathartic for me, I guess. It's very different from going to a concert at an arena. There's a basement. And the show is just really-- it's kind of violent. But it's really emotive. There's a lot of emotional release. So anyway, I was playing. I had a couple of screamo and hardcore bands that I was playing in during college. And I had discovered black metal, which was not really-- there wasn't really wide acceptance of black metal in my social world. It seems to me very far away. Yeah, this moment kind of arriving at the burst beat was-- it was like this sense of rhythm kind of puncturing through the surface of time or something like that. There's My Bloody Valentine tracks that are kind of ambient. But if you turn them up really loud, the rhythm is sort of exiting the tempo meter or whatever. And so I just had this-- I don't know. I'm not quite finding the right words for it right now. MATT DILLON: OK, yeah. No, I mean, mysticism is ineffable. It's literally one of the standard tropes. But no, I hadn't heard the part where the burst beat came from or was related to that particular experience. So that's really interesting because you ended up-- as I recall, you submitted the paper-- what was it? "Transcendental Black Metal" to that black metal symposium in 2009. And just to set the table, this was like a heavy hitter symposium, insofar as black metal can have a heavy hitter sort of conference, with Eugene Thacker and people like that there. And burst speed is very much a part of that. But just for those who are unaware, what was the sort of thesis behind "Transcendental Black Metal," that particular paper? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, I mean, I feel like thesis-- I could say what the thesis is. But in a lot of ways, there was much more of a tone to it than a thesis. The ideas in that text came from a failed thesis on Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power that I had originally planned to write as my thesis for college. And especially, I sort of using Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche. There's just one text that Deleuze devotes to Nietzsche, basically about the play of active force and reactive force and that reactive force is this sort of folding back of desire on itself. And then there's kind of-- active force is rooted in a kind of singularity and a joy and an affirmation. And I wanted to recast black metal in a transcendentalist vein. So part of the effort was to establish an American black metal at the time. I don't really talk about this much anymore because black metal tends to be very regional. There's Polish Black metal and Russian black metal. And it's all very opposed to the universalism, I guess, of rock music in general, if that makes any sense. MATT DILLON: No, it does. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. But there had never been an American black metal at this time. And so sort of reading-- cause I was an Emerson fan as well. So like reading Nietzsche via Emerson, as an American, as someone from the Northeast, it was like, well, maybe like the heritage of the United States with Ornette Coleman and jazz and this kind of thing could be an opportunity to generate a kind of black metal that is really about creative becoming as well as joy and love, basically. And that would also be-- what it says in the text is that would also be the end of the history of metal because it was also a vision of a kind of new synthesis of music, religion, and philosophy together. And that sort of metal had sort of reached its endpoint through the blastbeat, which is the kind of fastest possible ordinary rock drumbeat, and that the burst beat would go through the void of the infinite horizon of acceleration characterized by the blast beat and sort arrive on the other side with a more breathing version of time that's actually closer to the temporality of classical music, so the Sturm and Drang of Wagner or something like that, where rhythm is being experienced as these waves. MATT DILLON: So you talked about-- the burst beat gets brought up in "Transcendental Black Metal," in that paper. But the second technique that you have described as being sort of unique to Liturgy is glitching or general tremolo. I forget if that was brought up in the "Transcendental Black Metal" paper. It's just not on the top of my mind if it was or not. But could you describe that one as well? What is happening with glitching? And particularly, it's not just a sort of compositional fun thing. This has a sort of philosophy behind it. It's intended to do something. So what is it that glitching intends to do? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. So the general tremolo technique is-- yeah, it wasn't discussed in that text. It really didn't come up until after the reception of Liturgy. That original text was before Liturgy kind of began to really have a career. People started responding to Liturgy after that. And then it became a very controversial band, actually. And so general tremolo is generally-- the idea of it is sort of extending a guitar technique of tremolo, which is just picking on your right hand really fast, extending that from, which in it's used, especially in black metal and among types of metal, but I mean, tremolo is also like if you play a violin. It's similar to vibrato basically that where you oscillate the volume. That could be considered as a universal principle that applies not just to one instrument, but can arrange it with cascades of different instruments like glockenspiel. Or other acoustic instruments can carry on the tremolo and then also then extending it to the recording itself and actually editing and glitching it out, but it's basically making contact with a substrate of non-being where the categories that distinguish anything from anything else are suspended during that time. MATT DILLON: Beautifully put. Thank you. Excellent. OK. So you mentioned how the Liturgy starts to take off, for lack of a better term, after-- HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Sorry, I forgot to mention this part. And then also extending that into the praxis of the band itself. So that there's a tremolo in just the feedback of having an idea about genre that then is perhaps perplexing to the identity of a fan. And so yeah, so that it's not-- the general term, it's truly, truly beyond any category, including the distinction between the career of the musician and the music's form and structure. Yeah. MATT DILLON: Oh, no, that's very important adenda. So before I interview anybody, I start talking with my friends who are interested in their particular material. And all the metalheads know Liturgy and have a background with them, but one of the things that surprised a lot of people who don't follow your YouTube is that you are a very deep, outspoken or I don't want to say outspoken, but you're very vocal about your Christianity. So what was it that-- I guess, how to phrase it, what was your faith journey like? So to go from this South Baptist adjacent or straddling that in the atheist world of New York, you go through early Liturgy, how does one become-- how did you become a Christian? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in a way, this is much more what's on my mind currently than the musical techniques and stuff because that stuff is all ideas from over 10 years ago or whatever, and which I still use and care about, but Christianity-- And so I mean, I you might not be aware of this. So I mean, my project right now is a text on transcendental Kabbalah. I'm doing a finally working to synthesize my ideas on this, but during the era that we're talking about when I was developing these other ideas, I was always-- I had a certain passion for Christianity and then also a passion for, as I've already mentioned, the Nietzsche and Marxist axis, which felt at odds with one another. And the first maybe Christian texts that I really read were not theological as much as apologetics texts by Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and people like that. And I remember I've always had the sense. I mean, the band's called Liturgy, so what was happening during these musical performances was-- I've always had a very palpable sense of music as a sacred rite, but Christianity, there's just this love in Christianity that is a little bit different than it's something that you get at a rock concert like a warmth and forgiveness. And so, my journey intellectually, as a Christian I think passed through those apologetics texts. I began attending like an Episcopal Church, but then really upon finding-- once I discovered Bulgakov especially, I began to see that there was a lot of fairly contemporary Christian theology that was responding to a lot of the questions that Marx and Nietzsche were responding to as well and that-- I don't know, that Christianity is a serious philosophical enterprise and not just-- The distinction between faith and reason that people take for granted in modern times is a bit of a social construct, I think. So yeah, I don't know. I didn't really trace the journey there exactly. MATT DILLON: And with Bulgakov, you spoke to that it's high level philosophy and was responding to a lot of the same things that these other thinkers you were interested in did. Did you have-- I see Sophia in sociology popping up in a lot of your writings as well. So what was it about that, that really grabbed you? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Well, yeah. So I guess earlier on-- OK, so earlier on, I was very interested in the-- this was transcendental black metal, these were American black metal tradition. And I was connecting it to really the shakers or whatever. Ecstatic American religion was more what I was interested in at that time, Pentecostalism speaking in tongues. There's that really famous Dan Graham work, Rock My Religion, about connecting DIY punk to the lineage of anti-theological Christian worship that was coming out of these fairly new churches in 19, 20th century or whatever. And most theological Christianity has no femininity in it, really. I mean, obviously the Catholics have Mary, but the divine feminine was something that is seemed to be lacking in Christian theology that I knew, in stemming from Aquinas in this thing. And I mean, the idea of Sophia-- So Sophia, so, I mean, everyone knows what Sophia even is, but so Sophia is-- Bulgakov takes it most directly from Jacob Boehme, or however you pronounce it, who is also a huge influence on Hegel and Schelling and but then he himself really takes it from the Zohar. And what Sophia feels like within Christianity is a reentry of the divine feminine into the Godhead. And with Hegel and Schelling, that function that she plays, it is in there in German idealism and in Nietzsche and Marx without being named as such. And what's so amazing about Bulgakov's project is that it unifies that, the Natura Naturans divine temporality of praxis, basically, of the church outside of the church or the kingdom of heaven on Earth, connecting that in feminine form to actual Christian theology. So it's giving her a place as almost a fourth hypostasis in the Trinity or as the summation of the Trinity or his account of it is pretty Byzantine. Sophia has all these different faces, but yeah. MATT DILLON: I was actually-- not that you needed to have crossed paths with them, but I was surprised just because of the orthodox component of what you do and that you and Trey Spruance had never corresponded. So he's the last person I interviewed or two people ago, and Liturgy came up in that interview. So I was like, this is-- It's a really interesting thing to me because there's more and more of this movement into orthodoxy coming out of metal. And I'm like, what? There is something here. I don't know what it is yet, but I really want to start to unpack it and figure out what's going on because it is. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. MATT DILLON: It is something. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Something I've been thinking about a lot in recent times for sure. MATT DILLON: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember back-- so the original members of Sleep, right? So one of-- I think the first drummer ended up leaving the band to end up going into orthodoxy. And a lot of-- I'm forgetting his name right now, the bassist who ended up doing OHM, that stuff's filled with Orthodox imagery and tonality. There's something going on. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah, I knew-- yeah, yeah, I knew someone in Ohm was orthodox. Yeah, I mean, I encountered orthodoxy relatively recently. I mean, I'm an Orthodox Christian now. I converted. I was a catechumen for a couple of years and I sing in the choir at my church. I take it very seriously. And yeah, I mean, for me, it's partly the theological lineage. It's a whole alternative history to the western history of the church that is so much more rooted in beauty and glory and things like this and doesn't have witch trials in its history. MATT DILLON: That's good. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: And I mean, I think that's a lot like-- I think that there's a lot that was part of Christianity that ended up being stamped out in the west that was then picked up again in Thelema, really and that's connected to metal. And so I think that for me anyway, it was like, wait a second, this was already in Christianity in the eastern version, but yeah. It's also just a grittier aesthetic in a way. MATT DILLON: Yeah. Are you talking with more broadly or more specifically icons, the two dimension that opens you up into the third dimension? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Also the methods of venerating them too. There's so much more touching. In Eastern Orthodox church, you kiss the icons. And I think there's a practice of veneration that is just generally more of an aesthetic and haptic experience, which I get a lot of satisfaction out of. MATT DILLON: That's really well put. There's also the thesis part. That's what I was trying to get to. That was a huge loss in the western church to just put that to the side. And also because again, most of my work ended up being on these gnostic texts. So much of what people were responding to in the Nag Hammadi ended up, through different tributaries, ended up going back in through monasticism and through theosis, this desire to transform, this desire to become like God. And so it doesn't shock me that there's this movement towards, hey, this exists, but we also don't have to reinvent it now. There's this whole tradition here and we can belong to it and go back and read theologians for hundreds of thousands of years or not-- a couple thousand years-- rather than try and restart something. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of-- I also feel like it's an improvement on-- I mean, improvement is a strong word, but there's something healthy in my view or experience and then also still having a dogmatic structure there too. It's not just that it happens to already have been in the church, but it's also because--the thing with the way that Gnosticism or just the general reception of all kinds of hermeticism and Gnosticism and Kabbalah and Western Esotericism is that the thesis turns into a inflation, I guess, or whatever. It's like oh, I am God. And then it becomes maybe destructive or something, or where you lose the thread. And so it's having a kernel of God within you that you can cherish, but still you're still under the veil. Having a relationship to a public liturgy and still there being some a non-individual aspect to it seems like a nice balance to me. MATT DILLON: This feels like not just a good time, but before we proceed, we need to talk about what is Transcendental Kabbalah for you. And of course, this is a huge topic. You have many videos where you discuss different dimensions and aspects of it, and we'll definitely link to those in the show notes. But before we dive in and start to interpret some of the records through it, just what is a encapsulation of what you're after with Transcendental Kabbalah? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in any system of Kabbalah is difficult to summarize for sure, but I mean, I guess for starters, I should just say that I've been developing it more recently, actually. This is my current number one focus is on crystallizing it. And Transcendental Kabbalah, it's a specific system of Kabbalah that is different from but usefully compared to Lurianic Kabbalah or hermetic Kabbalah as practiced by the Golden Dawn or there's different versions of Kabbalah within Thelema. And so it's a system of 32 paths that use the Hebrew letters arranged with Ten Sefirot and has correspondences with astrology and tarot. And so it is a system of Kabbalah. It is, I think, the strongest influence is meditations on the tarot. Are you familiar with this text? MATT DILLON: Yeah. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: So it emphasizes-- I mean, not to get too into it-- it emphasizes water over fire and in a way that is Christian. So it's like in Western esotericism-- so OK, I mean, this is like-- so Christian Kabbalah was born during the Renaissance. You have Pico, Agrippa, Rokhlin. They're incorporating Jewish Kabbalah from the past couple hundred years into Christianity. That happens simultaneous with the rise of Protestantism, pretty much as well as then being-- people often say that the groundwork for the birth of modern science and modern capitalism were the techniques of Kabbalah including just methods of accounting, methods of conducting experiments, methods of looking for electricity, start working really well. And then the idea is that in modern secularism, the religious trappings get cast away, and it just becomes modern society. So Christian Kabbalah is a vanishing mediator of modern secularism. And something I'm really interested in with Transcendental Kabbalah is an attempt to I guess recover Christian Kabbalah. Oh yeah, And then esotericism turns into this countercultural thing in that context. You have modern secularism and then Esotericism becomes countercultural. It becomes associated with first, the romantics, the romantics who were part of the Golden Dawn and then the beats and then rock music. That's what esotericism goes. And according to Catholicism, a lot of that was sinful. And then in modern secularism, it gets taken as either evil in some way or just crazy. It's in the shadows. And so Transcendental Kabbalah is an effort to, I guess restore the connection between Kabbalah and Christianity and then that being an alternative to the mainstream horizon of secularism and to also incorporate post-structuralism and critical theory into it as well. So yeah, I don't know. I'm rambling a little bit, but it's like-- MATT DILLON: No. So this podcast is where we can get as deep in the weeds as you want to. I love the weeds. Give me more weeds. We can just go around in the weeds for a while. No, that's wonderfully put. I'm very excited that you're synthesizing and putting these ideas down in a book because it's nice to go through the Substack in the videos, but it'll be nice to have it in a thing. Can I ask how when you expect that to be out in the world? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, it's supposed to be in-- it's supposed to be at the end of this year. MATT DILLON: OK. Wonderful. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Publishing with Repeater, which is like a critical theory philosophy press. MATT DILLON: Wonderful. So one of the ways to start parsing and getting square off parts of the weeds might be to go with get into the-- actually, let's back up a little bit. So one of the things that I've heard you say before, and I think is really, really interesting, is that Transcendental Kabbalah is, quote, "a speculative tool for attempting to become a allogenic soul over time." So what does that mean? And I know you can talk about the three vibrations of soul. I think that's also super interesting, but the way that idea feeds into your music is so important. So if you could unpack, that would be great. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Sure. Yeah. I mean and-- yeah, and the particular structure of the tree of life of Transcendental Kabbalah is important in this. I mean, just generally speaking, just to make sure I'm saying what's not the weeds, that a system of Esotericism hopefully is used to attain theosis. It's used to grow in maturity and become a self-actualized being capable of generating harmony and flourishing around yourself. And so any religious practice is hopefully doing that. And in our current civilization, we don't really have structures that are useful for that because people don't believe in churches and therapy is SIOP sometimes. And so there's a system of grades with each Sefirot and basically the two main levels are just-- one that has more to do with individuation of becoming capable of having a dynamic relationship to your own unconscious and to be able to create on your own terms in a way that isn't subordinated to anyone else's aims for you. So you attain a freedom on the more secular humanist plane, and that is-- but then there's another type of freedom, which isn't necessarily-- in a way, it's higher, but there are really just two different things. And I find that a lot of times, people have used it too much. Then there's one that is more of a religious awakening where there's an actual experience of God and that you feel connected to the divine and perhaps are able to formulate to exist in a prophetic mode or something like that to be able to formulate a vision for how the world should be or something. And that those are-- and I associate-- I mean, to get to the weeds without explaining it, I associate the first of those not-- so Tiphareth is usually the central-- it's like a central sphere in the tree. It's like everything is about Tiphareth. And I think that there is not just one, that there isn't a central sphere, that the Yesod and Tiphareth-- Yesod is the sun and Tiphareth is mercury, actually. And that there are two different spheres altogether and that the self-actualization that comes with creation is a different thing from the self-actualization that comes from religious practice and that they need to be distinguished and then put in relation with one another and instead of being fused. So that's a thesis of mine. MATT DILLON: Interesting. So we're just hanging out in weeds, but how does this relate to meta perichoresis then for you? Because it's interesting for me to hear this because there's this resonance between your-- I don't want to say your, but the threefold artistic approach or mask of the infinite that comes from philosophy, drama and music and then this has a certain Trinitarian vibe. But so how does that relate to what you just described, which is the, don't confuse or keep separate but then relate the religious impulse or coming to God and then the creative part? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: So OK. So Yeah. I mean, so perichoresis is the life of the Godhead. So that the Trinity is dancing around itself. the person of the Trinity are enjoying one another, and that is what generates the world in a way. And then, but then there's a eternal Trinity, and then there's the economic Trinity in the world where God is progressively being revealed. And this is maybe one of the more singular aspects of my more like a thesis of mine that you wouldn't find anywhere else is that I'm mapping specifically music, drama and philosophy onto the three persons of the economic Trinity. And so you can-- let's say, you attain a self-realization in a music practice that's getting to a certain level, that's going to the Assad level, basically, but that then-- what I'm attempting to do by creating this system is to individually create a body of work in music and in philosophy and in art, that each of them stands on its own terms in the worlds in which they belong. So they're related to their own immanent horizon as canonizable practices on the humanist plane. Sorry, I'm clearing my throat so much. I have a little bit of a cough, but that then there's this higher field where you can think about ways of relating those three to one another to be like a world of its own and turning it into a mini religion. So for example, putting them together. My big project of executing meta perichoresis has, as its core, origin of the alimonies, which is my opera. And so it's like the story of the opera is the aesthetic core of the system of philosophy, which any system of philosophy needs an Aesthetic Like Plato needs Plato's cave. You have to fall into narrative at some point. Philosophy generates techniques, and musical composition. And then there are-- and then the story and the ideas are embedded in a musical work that is then transmitted into the world and gains momentum on its own terms because of the music. So it's not in a silo. It's not in a silo where it's within the logic in any one particular discursive sphere in the world. It's because music is special in this way, because people just get addicted to music. It's like you love music for no reason, not because of an institution. I mean, that's a bit of a generalization, but more so than a lot of the arts and philosophy, I think. And then but then from that becomes a window into people making contact with lineages of philosophy and art that they never would have otherwise, because of the music. So that's one way of structure relating music, drama and philosophy. I have four. There's four different ways of putting them together that-- or four different, I guess, parameters along, which they're connected, that bring the aesthetic beyond the current Like silo of art under the capitalist regime, I guess. MATT DILLON: Got it. Wonderful. OK. And so origin is also the cosmogony record. So I think about these. Hawk is like the God record, origin is the cosmogony record, and 93-- I always do this wrong-- 696 is the eschatology record. So actually this is going to go sideways for a second, but it's such an important sideways point. So the Blake is this figure that seems to be suffusing a lot of what's happening here. And I know he goes back to the apocalyptic humanism. And some of the names are even in your diagrams start to go. So what is Blake for? How has he informed so much of what is coming out of your work now? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely always felt a strong connection to Blake. And I actually first encountered him in college. I took a course on Blake. And I mean, I don't really pay as much attention to Blake now, to be honest, but I think I had never-- until I encountered Blake, I had never encountered an artist who just was a prophet, basically. And in his body of work-- Blake is a very canonized artist. It's like you take a course on Blake and it's like you're mostly analyzing his relationship to romanticism or his use of form and his visual work or whatever. But, I mean, he just saw himself as communing with the divine and using art as an instrument of prophecy. And I remember just realizing how elaborate his mythopoetic system was And just being really captivated by it. And so one of his poems, Milton, is the one from which I derive. Yeah I have a couple of names from Blake that just I have felt needed to be preserved. One of them is O'loghlen, which is his divine feminine. And then the other is his Urizen, which is his I guess his evil Demiurge or whatever, or his God of reason that's supposed to be overcome. Anyway, I get into how exactly I use those figures. I reinterpret them. I mean, for me O'loghlen-- well, I don't know. I mean, I don't get totally into the weeds with that, but yeah. So I mean, I just found I just always really resonated with his way of working. And so I think as I've gotten closer, as I've become more Orthodox in my Christianity, I feel a little bit less connected to Blake in a way maybe because I see him as a heretic in a way, but with a lot of appreciation, nevertheless. MATT DILLON: Interesting. Yeah. So there's a lot of significance to the origin of the alimony. So we can just do a whole thing on that record, but one of the most pronounced is it was the first record that came out after you had basically announced that you were trans. And so the thing that I'm curious to hear you unpack, how did that relate to this evolving system of Transcendental Kabbalah? Were these decision or not decision, but this discovery part of that or was it just a completely separate terrain for you? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah. I've never been sure what the relationship between my gender and the religious art thing is because it's like I know there's a certain divine androgyny or something that tends to go along with people like me or something. MATT DILLON: Yeah. I mean, I saw Adam Kadmon plays this role in some of your thought. I'm like, OK, this is all tracks, but yeah. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it tracks. And I mean, the way that the trans movement conceives of gender is a little different from that and yeah. It's like not much of what I do-- not much of what anyone does is such a conscious choice. MATT DILLON: Yeah. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: But yeah, certainly there was some way in which my gender transition was connected to that moment of creation. And I think that there is something-- yeah, and it has something to do with Adam Kadmon or the hermetic God or something like that, but yeah. MATT DILLON: All right. So this seems like a good time to talk about 93696, the heaven record or eschatology record. First off, just for the vast majority of people who are unfamiliar with the numerology part, where does the title come from? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: I mean, in some ways, I would say I'm not sure, but I mean, what I generally say is that the title 93696, it's the number of the vision of a new eon. I brought Thelema a couple of times, and I'm not a practicer of Thelema but like the current 93 and the 696 current of modern Kabbalah. It's the number of a vision of a kingdom of heaven. And it signifies a kind of Christianized esotericism and a vision of heaven. MATT DILLON: And so as I understand it, and please do feel free to correct me, your eschatology, we might, if we're just going to put a flag on it, would be postmillennial in the sense that there seems to be a very-- there's a human role in this in the bringing forth of heaven or kingdom of heaven and bringing it down to Earth. So this is going to be one of the biggest questions that you'll ever be asked, but what is it that-- how is it that humans are playing an active role in redeeming the Earth to have it become a kingdom of heaven? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. I mean, there's only so much an artist can really do for sure. The idea is that it is a city named Heligan. And the city's name is also SHEIM, the Sovereign Hierarchical Emancipatory Individuation Municipality. That's a acronym. And that it is a world that is governed by four new laws that you could compare it to freedom, liberty, equality. That there's an eon where those are the ideals and in the new eon, its sovereignty, hierarchy, emancipation, individuation. And basically, and most concise way of putting it, is that whatever it is that's happening in our amazingly crazy world right now, that there's space for envisioning creative self-realization and community and that it's really hard to know what's going to happen. I mean, it's almost strange to have-- we live in a really, really crazy time right now, really, really crazy stuff. In three years, we're not going to be in the same world that we're in right now. And so there are a lot of possible outcomes for which my ideas and music aren't very useful like complete civilizational collapse and things like that. It's like a metal album isn't going to help very much, but that if there's a possibility of finding at some level of abstraction what it is that makes us human and ways that we can lean in to these changes to actually build a society that's like truly made of art. Or where it's possible to really, really find true creative fulfillment, as well as religious fulfillment in a way that is close perhaps to the beatific vision or something like that where people really do see God more often. Or that that's a real part of daily life is seeing God or being aware of what the best actions are or something like that. Or the human condition that we're accustomed to is suspended somehow or we evolve in relation to that. Heligan would be something like that and that what an artist can do right now, at the very least is offer some kind of hope or just offer some ideas in that direction because most people are so hopeless. Pretty much everyone I talk to and they have all these different reasons for it too, but everyone is just like, yeah, this is it. MATT DILLON: Yeah. You wake up every day and there's some new crazy thing that you look at. It's like something that was incomprehensible two years ago. And it's just a daily occurrence now. Like, oh yeah, Los Angeles is now on fire. It's terrifying. Terrible things are happening. Yeah, OK. And then just so I'm inside the theology a little bit, is the idea that this is a community level, but then there's also the individual souls. And so part of the process would be the individual souls basically making that ascent from the hyperborean up into the allergenic, that theosis is part of this. The shift within the individual person then helps transform community as well. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. In a way, it's not that different in a lot of ways from Scheler's eschatology. So it's like we could have a world where everybody is a total artist. And just what it is to be a human is to learn as much as you can about the world, learn as much as you can about your own proclivities and abilities, and generate a total work of art comprised of music and philosophy and art. And share it with one another, influence one another through-- have what happens in DIY music scenes or avant garde hotbeds or whatever, just having that be all of life. And so it's like we have a new civilization where there are these universal human beings whose concerns are growth and healing and growing in wisdom and compassion. We're like the religious path is the meaning of life. And at the very least, because people will say, oh, let's say, let's say the best case scenario is that we come out, some of us anyway, in a post-work world. And even, won't life become meaningless? And it's just like, well, at the very least, there actually are really imminent sources of meaning that people need to be led to because not everyone really believes that you can find fulfillment in just deepening your relationships and your relationship to yourself and learning and creating and sharing. It's like in public discourse, people don't often talk about that as a realistic structure for society. MATT DILLON: Yeah. Really well put. So oh gosh, so much. Let's see. So I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this question so that it doesn't come off as tinny. Would you see the goal of the record then as aspirational for people? Is it supposed to open up the space for experiencing what that could be like? And why, I ask this is you've spoken before about the ways in which rock shows can be sacred, and can be initiatory in a way. And I know that that's something that you're very much after with Liturgy shows. There's this sort of religious catharsis that's there. So when you bring something that's this personal and heavy out, is it to basically open those vistas for people? What is the purpose of bringing that out in a way? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, I think opening the vistas. And again, with art and music and even with philosophy too, it's like one wants to be careful to even claim to have an intention. It's like I can't really help but do what I do, and Liturgy has some kind of connection with the Seraphim. It's like a-- and this gets back to orthodoxy as well and the idea of the glory of God actually appearing on Earth. We spoke a little earlier about one nice thing about orthodoxy being the possibility of theosis, which is something that's not very popular in western Christianity, where people have an actual divine kernel that can be cultivated. But another one, and this was part of the reason for the breach between east and west, is the idea that God's energies can actually come down to Earth. And that it's not just God appearing here. It's not mediated. God appears. And I've always been compelled with Liturgy to construct stretches of time that are just as transcendentally gorgeous and moving and scary and triumphant and tender as possible as a way of opening the eternal eye. It's like we have these veils where we're focused on lower level things, fears, self or whatever. And there's a way that music can just explode that briefly. And so yeah, it's like I write the music because I love it so much. It's just an obsession for me, but the effect that I like to hear about it having is getting people to sob at an experience of unio mystica or something. And then that being a healthy thing that then can inspire someone to live in a more loving way and a more courageous way. MATT DILLON: Wonderful. Then I have to ask. Any Liturgy shows, any tour on the horizon for or are you pretty firmly focused on the philosophical treatise right now? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: We're doing some shows this year. I mean, we've been touring a lot in the past. In the past three years, really, we've done more touring than ever because we worked so hard on the last album and really wanted to travel with it as much as possible. But yeah, we're going to do some shows in Europe in May, and then we'll definitely at least do something in New York this summer. But yeah, we're not doing any extensive touring this year because I'm really trying to get this book finished. MATT DILLON: It takes a lot of work to focus on a book. It is no joke. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Especially when it is on esotericism because esotericism, it's so esoteric. It's like I made the mistake of deciding because I had never really read the Zohar, and oh man. MATT DILLON: That is not-- I mean, we talked about Deleuze and Guattari earlier, equally not easy reading. Beautiful. Sublime is one of the greatest things ever written. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: It's like how am I supposed to write-- how can I write a book of Kabbalah if I haven't read the Zohar? And so I mean, there's no-- I mean, so anyway, I'm reading parts of it. I mean, there's five or six passages that are the best known and, but yeah. And I've been studying a lot of medieval angel magic grimoires and stuff like that because I'm very interested in the history of angels and the relationship between this Semitic angel hierarchies with neoplatonist hierarchies within the noose and really constructing a system of Kabbalah really from the most fundamental elements and to have-- I've been studying the history of Kabbalah a lot. And then there are so many-- anyway, yeah, there's so much. And there's so many different systems. People think they know what Kabbalah is, but it's like-- MATT DILLON: Which one? I mean, it's tradition, but it can be regional like black metal. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like which one out of the five. It's like which one out of the 500? MATT DILLON: So we've talked about two persons of the Trinity. We've talked about the music and we've talked about the philosophy and we've really dug in, but there's the third part of the meta perichoresis and that's your sculpture. So how long have you been sculpting? Yeah, what was of path into doing this more visual art? And where does the impulse come for that when you're so already deeply embedded in both philosophy and music? What was it that it's like, I need this third thing also? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. I only had my first sculpture show in 2021, I guess. And I've done three now. I've done one a year for the past couple of years, but it's been a big concern of mine for a long time. I've always been socially in the art world more than anywhere else. And I encountered that in college too, just made friends with a lot of people who were artists and the art scene in the Lower East Side like New York. So I had a practice of making work that looks like work that I've now been making, but yeah, it just didn't really get around to getting a show until the past couple of years. I mean, partly because I feel like back in the day, the visual artists who really lit me up was Joseph Boyce, who was Fluxus artist with strong shamanic and romantic elements. And I mean, honestly, for a long time in the art world, people just were not interested in art that had a religious or spiritual dimension to it. It was just impossible to really get respect or get a show. And that really changed with the Hilma AF Klint show at the Guggenheim where all of a sudden, at least in the world that I was in, it was possible to, I don't know, be an openly Christian artist. And so I mean, honestly, that's basically the reason why I didn't do any sculpture shows until the past couple of years is because I just couldn't really get a show because it's already hard when you're a musician. People will be like oh, OK, you want to do your art thing too, but really, you're a musician, but more recently people have just been a little more sympathetic to my approach in making sculptural work. But, I mean, but part of what I like about it is this is one not really the main thing, but one detail of what I like about making physical art right now is just that it is material. And so I feel like so much of my life is immaterial. It's like you release albums that are just reproduced and they're just digital bits and you perform music and it's a single experience. And creating these talismans that are charged with energy and that there's just one of them and that it was made by hand is very-- I just find it very satisfying. And so I use-- it's 3D printing. I work with the computer a lot. So I'll make models in Blender and 3D print them, laser engrave diagrams and then use a lot of spray paint and distressing techniques like burning and melting wax and things like that. And to create physical vehicles, physical objects that are-- they kind of contain-- they contain like, artifacts of ideas, but just the way the visual art works is just very different from the way concepts work, I guess. And so and so it's having those two modes together is nice for me. MATT DILLON: Yeah. And it brings me back to what we were talking about very early on, this haptic dimension. It's easy to go into this ephemeral space or into this conceptual space, but being able to actually touch, and actually mold and move, it's a powerful thing, especially to talk about our crazy time, we exist in this digital space far too often, although it makes for really nice things like being able to do two hour interviews. And a great distance apart. Well, not too great a distance, but all right. Wonderful, and so just to close, well, what can we expect from you coming in the next several months? Because I know the book should be out by the end of the year, although that's a terrible thing to say to an author because something always pops up. But will there YouTube posts? What's in the chute, as they say? HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah. Yeah, I'm behind on my online life. My intention is to post something new at least every week or couple weeks, but since I've been going so hard with the book, it's a little bit difficult to put time into-- I'm hibernating from online right now in a way, or I was. And so anyway, to answer your question, yeah, hopefully some more Substack posts and YouTube posts, but I'm Kind Of trying to negotiate that right now. But yeah, the main thing is the book. MATT DILLON: Yeah, I mean, and all your fans are going to honor that because writing books is hard and writing about esoterica is hard. And it is a completely different mindset to try and do that as opposed to a Substack post. You have to go into this space where all the pieces of however many hundreds of pages fit together, as opposed to this one post that you can discrete and self-contained. So it's tough, but we're looking forward to it. So Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, thank you so much for coming on Pop Apocalypse. It's been so engaging and interesting to get to know more behind the person behind the work. HAELA RAVENNA HUNT-HENDRIX: Yeah, thanks so much. A lot of fun. See also:- [ Video ](/news-classification/video) - [ Pop Apocalypse Podcast ](/programming-threads/pop-apocalypse-podcast)