Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism

Convention concerning the beginning of Post-anarchist discourse locates its origin in Hakim Bey’s work in the 1980s; however, no commentator has sufficiently analyzed the thoroughly spiritualized anarchism upon which it is based, termed "Ontological Anarchism," nor the group that promoted it, the Association of Ontological Anarchism. This article draws attention to the ways in which the interface between a starkly postmodern form of esotericism called Chaos Magick and the anarchist
tradition produced Ontological Anarchism, and, further, to the implications of this hybridity on the historiography of Post-anarchism.