Excerpt: Resident Aliens (Redux)

The Z(Cluster) was founded in 1995 by marik (Mark [deFrates]'s online name) and his friend FireClown, in a fit of annoyance at the absence of nonhierarchical Chaos Magick associations. It grew alarmingly. The Z(Cluster) is now [c. 2002] a large and disorganized network of Chaos Magicians, Buddhist Sorcerers, Witches, Warlocks, Freestyle Shamans, and other denizens of the occult, dedicated to disseminating the zee meme through cyberspace and beyond. If this sounds like Martian, then it is probably not for you. --http://www.markdefrates.com/pages/zcluster.html

I’m not sure how I came to discover the Zees. Somewhere online I came across an invitation to the e-list from marik, and joined it. Although initially I was abysmally ignorant about Chaos magick, I rapidly became educated enough to form opinions, and after a time of lurking began posting, signing myself “veedub the witch.” Whenever a newbie stuck his (or occasionally her-- it was mostly Boys’ Town) head up, he was usually greeted with the equivalent of an Internet pie in the face in the form of virulent flaming. If the newbie was able to return fire with sufficient wit, he would have passed his initiation test and henceforth be free from flaming except on points of opinion. The heat was always on, and the most eloquent and creative of the enflamed bile-spewing was from the acknowleged leader of the pack, Infekshun (later Infek bin Laden), creator of the over-the-top website Deathandhell (http://www.deathandhell.com/). Infek was one of the greatest polemicists of the late 20th century, and “transgressive” doesn’t begin to describe his writing. He was very nearly matched by several others of the regulars on the Z-list, then on Yahoo!, but Infek was the Alpha Dog.
During the next couple of years, I learned about egregores and sigil magick, A.O. Spare and the use of belief as a tool, and that behind the incessant grandiosity and flaming on the Zee-list lay a lot of love and fellowship which the Chaotes would have been horribly embarrassed to have revealed. It wasn’t until Infek died of cancer in early 2001 that his final manifesto was published at Deathandhell, revealing him as...nice. Truly transgressive. The Zees were the community to which I turned for psychological support when the towers fell in 2001. One Zee wrote at the time:

The terrorists were not madmen. They planned carefully, with intention, and I believe that they knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. They hope to create a world where their god walks openly, and feasts upon a world filled with hatred, and an endless cycle of vengeance and bloodshed. Let us not see their intentions made manifest. Please. The choice, as always, is ours. Wash the ash from your eyes, your ears, your hearts. Sing, dance, laugh, play, and remember. Do what you can to heal the wound, and create a world in which such acts are not fed by our actions and inactions, whether as individuals, or as nations. Live, love, and build again.
I remember now, with eyes washed clean, that ash is an essential part of healthy fertile soil. In this soil, the seeds of a new world may be planted.
Let their sacrifice not be in vain.
In balance, joy and hope,
--Caledhaearn

I had noticed, not that one could help but notice, that there was a great contempt for Wiccans among Zees. The only witches they seemed to have any respect for at all were Feri Witches, who had the reputation of being “more juicy,” whatever that meant. Hm, Feri, that name rang a bell. My old initiates Willow and Leah had been re-initiated into Feri. And Caledhaearn was apparently married to a Feri. I would have to find out more about these people. As it turned out, I discovered that the second initiation I had received from Starhawk a year after my first initiation into Compost was actually a Feri initiation. I knew the mysteries but very little of the lore. So I began researching.