The cosmic wandering of Michael Vaughan Magee, as relayed by his son.
‘Sorry, son. You’re afflicted.’ I can’t recall exactly what I’d asked my dad, aged 15 and full of anxiety, but I remember his response, looking up from the computer in his study with two-day stubble and the ever-present Gitane burning between his fingers.
My dad was referring to the position of Neptune and the moon at the time I was born. According to the sidereal astrological system, this arrangement of celestial bodies had cast undesirable traits in its subject – me – denoting a hysterical nature.
He said it’d pass in my 30s. Confusing though this was, it was not unusual growing up. An ambient occultism suffused the beats of everyday life: in the living room presided an imposing Enochian altar, a cream-painted box inscribed with a codex for conversing with angels.
Throughout the house, framed paintings of the Hindu goddess Kali devouring the cosmos. On bookshelves, the I Ching, and red-and-gold leather-bound volumes of Aleister Crowley. The tails of our family cats brushed past ornaments of Bastet, the feline deity, and a large white telescope loomed over tabla and Indian oboes called shehnai.
My dad, Michael Vaughan Magee, was best known for his technology journalism. In 1998, he co-founded The Register, one of the earliest online magazines. He loved getting up the nose of mega-corporations, like Intel and AMD, and scooped the traditional press on the semiconductor industry.
Like many journalists, his signature tactic was getting pissed with sources. No matter how lengthy the late-night pub sessions, he remembered the tips. Even as execs got burned, they couldn’t seem to resist his company, true to the double entendre which served as The Register’s motto: ‘Biting the hand that feeds IT’.
He was proudly difficult, leading to business disagreements and the fact that some friends cherished their place within a tiny club: those he’d never fallen out with.
Yet beneath this gruff exterior was a man at odds with the whisky-soaked persona he created, whose true love was not technology or journalism but Tantra, the ancient Indian spiritual system.
Unlike the bastardised, Sting-style ‘neo-Tantric sacred sex rubbish’, as a friend put it, his work helped kickstart a scholarly interest in the tradition, more about grounding oneself and stepping into your own place in the cosmos. An autodidact, he learned Sanskrit, and translated many primary sources into English for the first time, playing an important role in popularising Tantra across the west, while teaching himself astronomy and astrology along the way.
And in the early hours of Sunday morning on 11 August, 2024 as the stars he once watched faded with daybreak, my dad died.
Everything was as he’d left it at his home when we returned from the hospital. His cigarettes on the counter, his computer open. I found a book by his bed by the Armenian mystic, George Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men.
Of his many ‘aspects’, the one I’d elevated into focus contained his unpredictable, often volatile behaviour. Despite that, I cherished his playfulness, that he seemed to me a font of knowledge, with endless insights about unexpected things. But we had a challenging, push-pull relationship which, like the grips of a warped and broken concertina, produced many unharmonious sounds and connected only rarely.
The dad I was familiar with could be summed up by his self-effacing autonym, ‘Mad Mike Magee’. But through his archives, I’ve learned more of the man who kept diaries on astral projection, befriended occultists and sojourned to Indian cremation grounds in service of his Goddess Kali.
He never expressly hid his arcane interests: the Guardian called him a ‘mystic’, and Intel execs commissioned a caricature of him as a many-armed deity, each hand clutching fags and pints.
Much of this was blurry to me, so I set out to record his occult life, reading scattered notes hidden on obsolete computers, leafing through old books and self-published magazines, and listening to anecdotes from friends. I wanted to realise the full, multifaceted picture, a posthumous act of knowing, where I encountered alter-egos and alien names: Zir Komselha 444 ∴ and Shri Lokanath, avatars that hinted at his life-long metaphysical explorations, an esoteric odyssey from west to east.
*
Michael Vaughan Magee was born in Aberdeen in 1949 to Wendy and Bernard, the middle of three boys. In adolescence, he pulled apart electronics, once blowing up his hand with a home chemistry kit. Wendy was schizophrenic, so Bernard (‘Pop’) raised the brothers largely on his own. Following a move to Leeds, she underwent electroshock therapy and died from leukemia shortly afterwards, which Dad never discussed – though wrote that she inspired in him the ‘conviction that pixies and fairies occupy a parallel world to ours’.
With a promotion for Pop, they moved from Scotland to Leeds. At 19, he met my mum, Jan. They were mods, dancing to Blue Beat records and experimenting with LSD. Sometimes, he asked her to pick up alchemical ingredients from an old apothecary, and told her he’d drawn a magical circle beneath his bedroom carpet.
Through twists and turns he tested various magickal systems – Qabbalah, theosophy, Rosicrucianism – and corresponded with occultists such as Israel Regardie and Kenneth Grant, the successor and one-time secretary to Crowley.
Long before investigative journalism, he created two occult magazines. First, with a battered old Adana duplicator, Azoth. Then, following a 1973 move to London, with my mum and their friend David Hall as co-editors, Sothis, which became influential in the occult underground. (Jimmy Page supposedly still owes £200 for copies sold at his bookshop, The Equinox.)
Regardie warned Dad to study his psychology before dabbling in magick. Instead, he joined Grant’s group, the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). Initiates had to record a nine-month ‘magical diary’ in reverence of a deity. Dad – Zir Komselha 444 to his magickal friends – picked Hathor: ancient Egyptian all-mother and ‘Lady of Stars’. My parents hosted so many occultists they called their home Hotel Thelema. Grant once asked them to dispose of the abundant pornography in his attic; it took five weeks. Through his near-decade in the group, Dad was next in line to lead the OTO.
But then, one night, he woke to a lucid dream involving the goddess Kali, where a monosyllabic bija mantra thrummed in his heart, causing waves of bliss through his body and urging him eastwards, to study Sanskrit and Tantra more seriously.
Perhaps this was all pre-ordained: a story he told was that, while on sentry duty in Delhi during the Second World War, Pop had stopped an Indian holy man from travelling an ancient path. The ascetic responded by cursing him: he would have three sons, he said, and the second would become a sadhu.
So he travelled to India to meet Lawrence Miles, a Cockney socialist who’d fought fascists in Spain with the International Brigades, and supposedly led a mutiny on a Cairo-bound battleship. Miles claimed to be an initiate of the Nath tantric tradition (or sampradaya), and was better known to my family as Shri Mahendranath or just Dadaji.
From his hermit’s shack in Mehmedabad, Gujarat, Dadaji offered to initiate my dad. With this diksha of water trickled onto his head, he imagined the liquid running through his body, and felt a powerful surge of energy. Now, he was Shri Lokanath Maharaj.
Dadaji’s aim was to spread a ‘cosmopolitan’ current of Tantra in the west, resurrecting the essential message of the Natha: to become really ‘awake’, to conquer the conditioning of society and realise oneself. Dadaji thought India was the last pagan stronghold; the west could benefit from its ancient traditions piercing through the Christian moral ramparts.
When Dadaji visited London in 1981, his flowing robes and white beard caught the attention of the tabloids: ‘Guru Pops In For A Cuppa’, wrote the Daily Mail. He instructed Dad to start a group: the Arcane Magical Order of the Knights of Shambhala (AMOOKOS). Despite misgivings, Dad agreed, drafting exercise books blending Tantra with psychotherapeutic techniques and morsels of what he’d learned in the OTO. He initiated newcomers, though he never thought himself a guru.
A near-fatal motorcycle crash disrupted this work in December 1982. One of the many occasions where he cheated the reaper, his life was saved by a stack of books beneath his jacket, including the Shri Yantra tantric diagram. With a metal plate holding his leg together, he recovered against the odds: doctors said he wouldn’t walk again. While recuperating, he deepened his Sanskrit and learned computer code, developing possibly the first sidereal astrology software, Astral Windows.
But apparently Nathas rival Trotskyists in their tendency for schisms. In later life, possibly afflicted with dementia, Dadaji denounced my dad, leading to the dissolution of the group he’d established and causing him immense pain. ‘All beehives eventually break up,’ my dad wrote. ‘That seems to be a law of nature.’
With my mum pregnant, this break from Tantra allowed him to focus his energies on journalism. He started his first gig the day after I was born. Here, a stratification, the seeds of that Mad Mike persona, one who industry types compared to Shane MacGowan for his ludicrously copious drinking.
There are endless anecdotes from these times, my favourite being when he faxed gibberish to his editor after an extended pub session. The baffled editor realised that Dad had mistakenly typed every key one letter to the right. Decoding the copy took all night, but the scoop ran the next morning as planned.
The boozy lunches and late-night disclosures weren’t always conducive to family life, and I became overly sensitive to the sound of the front door slamming.
My mum said something about how Dad changed when his father and Dadaji died in 1989. Here began a period of withdrawal, the door to his study usually locked. He retreated further into the oblivion of alcohol, the side effect being the projection of terror on those of us closest to him. I feel compelled to say that amid these tantrums and outbursts, he never physically harmed us, but scars, pain and bad feelings remained.
Mum and I tried to turn a blind eye. Our interactions with him were pregnant with a menacing undercurrent, and we all absented ourselves from our lives, the three of us like little ghosts, rattling around the house.
My dad left no instructions for his death, so my mum and I quietly winced when the funeral director, auspiciously wearing an Egyptian ankh, listed our options. There were add-ons and special packages, live-streams and Spotify integrations. We’d have to choose the coffin material. Alternatively, there was the cheaper ‘direct’ model, where his body was burned unfussily when a slot in the incinerator became available.
If he’d been in the room, he’d have said to just throw him in a skip, or, more dramatically, strap his corpse to a Zoroastrian funeral tower so the vultures could enjoy him.
My mum and I tried to remain practical in the dissonant space between grief and admin. We didn’t know what we were doing – so we did our best.
The funeral car pulled up at midday in late August, containing the bright-red casket we’d chosen, symbolising the union of masculine and feminine energy. Roadworks caused the car to take a convoluted route. Passersby looked on curiously.
Imprinted on the top of the coffin, by his heart, was the multicoloured Shri Yantra diagram, all concentric circles and geometric shapes, representing the human and the cosmos. At his feet, with its eight lotus petals venerating the elephantine lord of removing obstacles, Gan·eśa, another yantra. At his head, the Kali yantra, an imposing design suggesting time and formlessness, destruction and transformation.
As the shehnai blared their unearthly song, like a hymn between worlds, I walked his coffin into the ceremony and said goodbye.
It’s been a year since then. Along the way, I grappled with strange incidents through which I projected mystical meaning. These, I’ve come to understand through therapy, may not be cosmic rifts, but ‘embodied experiences’, meaningful all the same.
In the taxi from the hospital where Dad passed, the worst song I’d ever heard rattled from the radio: Green Green Grass. Above the derivative algo-funk, George Ezra’s strained croon urged cheerily that I ‘better throw a party on the day I die!’
It repeated in my head for weeks, accompanied by visions of Dad laughing deliriously. In life, he worried no one would attend his funeral. How far from the truth that was. On a rainy night in Soho on the eve of his birthday, we threw him a party at his old haunt, The Clachan, packing the top floor beyond capacity and bridging his journalistic and occult worlds.
When the time came to scatter his ashes by his cotoneaster tree, I plunged my hand into the box of what was once him, and felt every father before me, a shock across deep time ending with me. We listened to Blackbird by The Beatles and cried. In a dream, I stepped through a magic mirror and discovered Dad, young and propped up against a bar, where he was surprised to see me. And I woke with the sense that it had really happened, that the connection was, somehow, real.
Though mercurial and confounding, there was a great deal in him I admired. He wrote poetry and cared for small children and animals. When we buried our family cats, he sent them off with unexplained mantras to other worlds. He was sharp, funny. And I’m grateful for his unbounded curiosity, which I think rubbed off on me. He taught me many things – I suppose I’m one of those nepo babies, although sadly I chose to work as a journalist, rather than establish arcane orders.
In life it is easy to villainise; in death, easy to valorise. So I am learning to acknowledge the truth more fully, not in the aim of resolving conflicts but to accept the interzone that contains my love for him and anger at his missteps and everything in between: all part of the picture. I miss him. And I wish I had the chance to say: I am no longer afflicted – although I’m unsure how much to credit the planets.
