SICESCA - 10/13/2022

Before we begin, I have a confession to make; I am enthralled by petty youtuber drama. It is indulgent of me, but there is something captivating about the meaninglessness of it all, like a dionysian play writ large upon the blogosphere. I am a temperate person, but sometimes I cannot help but drink deep. So please, dear reader, have no illusions about my excitement going forward. As a fan of boisterous youtuber bullshit, and an occultist, learning that Onision attempted to start a cult back in 2003 and that the scripture was still available in an archived format, was akin to knocking a hole in the wall of my home for renovation, and discovering a wall safe with a perfectly preserved vintage bottle of Caves Jean Bourdy Chateau-Chalon. Trinquons.

You may not know Gregory James Daniel, better known as Onision, but you know the mold he was cast from. You know the archetypical form of Onision. Like a dead and rotting tree, a single prod against the bark of early 2000s quirky internet softboy humor, and your finger sinks into a moldering hollow of alleged predation and abuse. Dear reader I will spare you of the details. The internet is full of Greg-ologists that can recount his history better than I ever could. I am an occultist. My work lies with Sicesca. 

My work is that of reverse-engineering. Occult texts are blueprints. They describe a sort of metaphysical system that serves some purpose or another. It could be a tool for analysis, a vehicle to salvation, a sort of internal regulator for the difficulties of life, whatever the author so desires. Applying a critical lense to occult texts can be tricky, as it can be easy to mistake the blueprint for the machine. My goal for this review is to deconstruct not only Onision’s blueprint, but the machine it represents. 

THE SCRIPTURE

First, let us describe the lay of the land, the shape of the scripture in general. At just shy of 4000 words, the body of Sicescan scripture is one of the shortest sacred texts I’ve read. Our corpus is ninefold, divided into three sections, each with three subsections. I will get this out of the way early: Greg’s command of language is poor, that is to say; typical of any seventeen year old. I will not hold this against him, as I have read worse occult texts. 

SECTION ONE - THE ANSWERS

The Answers is our foundation, our Genesis, Semiotics, and Teleology. The Answers deals with the nature of life, where humans come from, and what the purpose of a human is in the broader cosmology. The Sicescan cosmology is delightfully strange, a chimera of Randian individualism and Gaia cult environmentalism held together by a heaping of secret-history racial theory. 

Sicesca is centered around The Earth, as in the planet earth, which Sicesca conceptualizes as a conscious, defied, high-dimensional will. Gregory’s language here implies that the nature of the earths intelligence is not metaphysical, meaning I suspect he sees the earth as a living, thinking organism in the sense that people are living, thinking organisms. “Earth” seems to mean two things: The physical planet we live on, and the divine mind instantiated in that planet. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to them as “The earth” and the “Earth-Mind” respectively. 

Humanities relationship to the earth is akin to that of antibodies. The earth-mind intentionally and consciously created us to cultivate and protect the earth, while allowing us a measure of free will to “advance ourselves” in some nonspecific way. We are destined to protect the earth. There is also a single reference to the earth as a “major power source” though this reference is vague. 

At about two or three sub-sections in, those familiar with occult history will begin to pick up on Greg’s influences. We must take a moment to talk about Theosophy, and UFO lore. 

Theosophy is a religion established during the late 19th century by notable Russian egg-lover and noblewoman Madame Helena Blavatsky. Its influence on occult history cannot really be overstated. To oversimplify, Theosophy is largely defined by a few concepts: One, the various religions of the world are only pieces of a greater, secret, “true” religion. And Two, at one point in history, humans were perfectly united with their spirit, giving them access to incredible spiritual powers. The goal of theosophy being to reunite the body and spirit, reclaiming said lost ability. 

Theosophy also features a colorful pseudohistory, in which the earth is populated with the ruins of several demi-human “Root Races” whose civilizations rose and fell well before the advent of humanity, and whose genetics and spiritual powers still occasionally exist as echoes in modern humanity. During the early 19th century, this element of theosophy appealed to those with fringe ideas on tricky questions like “why do black people exist?” With answers ranging from the powerfully racist, to the evocative but still racist, to the wacky as hell. 

In the latter half of the 20th century, ideas about the human genome being riven through with demi-human DNA resurfaced in communities focused on UFOs. By the early 2000’s, internet alien forums were swimming in tales about multi-species galactic councils, human-alien breeding programs, and speculation as to what species of alien Jesus might have been. 

While not directly connected with Theosophy, I like to refer to this thread of occult history as “Xenotheosophy” and I think it serves as a fair description of the materials Greg chose when constructing Sicesca. 

When Greg describes the earth-mind creating us, the language is that of experimentation. The earth-mind had to toy with our design, iterate a few times. An interesting aside to this section is the implication that other planets also have/had their own planet-minds, but their designs for life were flawed. Greg describes the other planet's “apparent failure” to foster life. Which, credit where it is due, is an evocative idea. It’s the sort of idea that would fit well into the early-2000s post-new-age xenotheosophical milieu had the cult been more successful. 

The key to the earth’s success: Its creation of both the human body, and the human soul, which Greg directly credits with free will. This is quite interesting. This is more of a Christian conception of the body-soul dichotomy, with the body being the source of base, crass, vulgar desires, and the spirit attempting to guide it towards the pure, the intellectual, the divine. 

Humans are also placed at the top of a hierarchy of being, with humans being the most “advanced,” and other animals like pigs and reptiles being below us. Sicesca proposes a deeply utilitarian worldview. Every creature, every species on earth, was intentionally created by the earth-mind for a specific, almost mechanical purpose. 

Greg credits humanities free will with both its success, and its eventual demise, saying that our free will is the source of disrupting the earth-mind’s natural order via the great sin of eating meat sometimes. Ordinarily, I try to approach texts like this with a degree of separation from the author, at least at first. However, I am keenly aware that Greg is not only not vegetarian, but has repeatedly expressed significant disdain for vegetarians and vegans. I happen to know that he enjoys the occasional ham sandwich. It makes one wonder what the purpose of pigs are in the grand scheme of creation.

So why are we here? Whats the purpose of life? So far there have been vague notions about “advancing” ourselves as both individuals and as a species, but I think the vagueness here may be due to a lack of language skill on Greg’s part. Many lines are downright nonsensical, but we are in occult country now, nonsense is important, nonsense bares discussion. 

Take this line from the third subsection of The Answers: “In the Sicescan way of life, one can easily find that the logistics involve little shades of black and white, but rather a world of color, with many depths, and many realities that you specifically can chose to follow, while in the process being rather accurate as to the genuine truth revolving around our lives.”

There is subtle beauty here, an untrained hand birthing the impressionist painting of an idea. Notably, it does not seem to be connected to the greasy moral/sexual power dyanmics riven through the rest of the scripture. This passage seems to be an attempt at describing Sicesca’s relationship with philosophical truth. You can see Greg reaching for an idea that he does not have the language to describe. The play on “black and white” morality expanded into a “world of color” is the most complex idea he has played with so far, and it creates an interesting contrast with idiosyncratic word choices like “logistics” and “little shades.” I specifically enjoy the image of “genuine truth revolving around our lives.” It paints Sicesca’s occult truths as something present, but eternally distant, like the orbit of the moon. 

But does this mean that Greg actually has his hands on some profound hidden truths about the world? There is no way to know, but probably not. Many ideas are a bit too esoteric for 17 year old youtubers, and Occult Truths at the frontier of human knowledge they are not. However, this passage is an organic example of esoteric language, an attempt to describe an idea beyond ordinary understanding. I would say that I doubt the idea itself is very interesting, but I think that may ring hollow, given that I am currently writing an essay about how interesting I find this sort of idea. So, from an occult perspective, I will give Greg what credit he is due; he tried. Greg actually sat down, and attempted to describe some ephemeral conception of the world, and then posted it publicly. 

The more concrete language Greg uses for the purpose of humanity is stock-standard for the era. There are multiple references to a “next step” in human advancement. This is where we are introduced to Sicesca’s broader cosmology. Here, Greg introduces the “Divant Realm” a plane of reality Greg compares to the “Fourth Dimension” or the “Astral Realm.” For those familiar with the occult, its just the Astral Plane, though Greg does have a mildly unique twist on it. The Divant realm is populated with two types of astral fauna, the good sivonts, and the evil zodins. 

Generally, the astral realm is discussed as a sort of middle step, the place between the realm made of atoms and meat, and the place where god lives. Due to this closer proximity to the divine, it is often conceptualized as a more spiritually “pure” place, but Greg takes an distinctly imperial stance. The Divant realm is a place infested with zodins, inherently negative entities which must be purged. Within Sicesca, the goal of humanity is to reconnect with its proto-human earthly powers as preparation for war. It must regain its spiritual abilities to it may charge headlong into the Divant so it may be purified. 

This positions Gregory as both teacher and general, a warrior monk training initiates for an inevitable, cataclysmic spiritual war. The shades of evangelism are all too clear. 

INEXPLICABLES

This sub-section is the most metaphysical of the trio. It deals with things like alien abductions, auras, and the afterlife. 

Because, you see, the earth is not the only planet with a planet-mind. Greg tells us that there are other planets out in the universe that also have their own intelligences, and their own forged species for protection which Greg calls “Outsiders.” This is Greg’s explanation for both alien abductions and sleep-paralysis, explaining that that both experiences are the result of outsiders traveling to earth to study humans. 

Interestingly, Greg explains that these other planet-minds generally don’t follow the spirit-body dichotomy, and lack a Divant realm to banish their negative energy to. I must say, I enjoy the concept of using the Astral Realm as a sort of metaphysical dumping ground for negativity. I am unsure if it was Greg’s intention, but it reinforces the importance placed on environmentalism, with negative emotions acting as a sort of spiritual pollutant. This concept creates a nice bit of parallelism, casting humanity as both the earth’s physical stewards, and the earth-mind’s spiritual stewards. It also parallels the imperial dynamic between Sicescas physical and spiritual realm. Reading this passage recalled stories of modern imperial nations dumping shiploads of garbage onto the shores of nations in the global south. 

This idea of Divant realm as dumping grounds is added to, saying that the sheer pressure of negative, corrupted energy will occasionally bleed through into humans during their lowest moments. These individuals are referred to as “corrupted” and are described as being both beacons that attract Zodins (presumably some sort of malicious entity), as well as having a sort of contagious effect on the spiritual health of those around them. A corrupted individual will corrupt other individuals, and attract astral predators. 

To fully unravel this thread: People experiencing significant negative emotions (like feeling suicidal) are not only considered “corrupted” but are considered to be contagious in some way. Additionally, the force causing their negative emotions is considered to be something fundamentally, universally evil, and worthy of purging from the order of creation. 

This is, I feel, the opposite of a healthy, compassionate dynamic for a religion. What Greg has essentially created is a theoretical community in which experiencing negative emotions is not a sin per se, but an act of spiritual uncleanliness. Within this religious framework, being depressed is actively dangerous to you, and everyone around you. I hesitate to speculate too much, but I suspect that a community founded on these principles would quickly devolve into rigidly policing their behavior, lest they be accused of spiritual corruption. 

(possibly cut below)

We begin in the first subsection, titled The Meaning of Life. Here, greg draws attention to the overwhelming mystery of the universe, the plethora of unanswered questions that he has the answers to. There is some interesting dualism here. Greg makes it clear that our reality is not the only one. He refers to it as insignificant, but also “remarkable before many other creatures dwelling beyond our eye's reach.”

This defines two new concepts, our distinct organs in the machine: [Multiple Realities], and [Unseen Intelligences]. 

Reading the Sicescan corpus is a balancing act. I find myself struggling to separate the Sicescan ideals from what I suspect are frankly bizarre assumptions that Greg already holds about the world. Let us take these three lines from The Answers - The Meaning of Life at the same time: 

“Stories are made to represent what many of us wish to do but simply believe ourselves to not have the ability, or strength to take part in.”

“Decisions are made by those who seek out a future absent of other humans controlling it” 

“The value of life is decided by the individual ability to change ones surroundings as they see fit.”

Already we construct a deeply [individualistic] worldview. Here, we see personal agency and power directly linked with ones value as a person. Those who control others are of greater value, thus those being controlled are of lesser value. Already we have a system that valorizes the dominant, the controlling, and the dictatorial. Which is deeply humorous considering the very next line in the sub-section: 

“We were all created to nurture our planet and each other, ultimately in mission of optimizing our earth and inhabitants for the best results on course to an extended survival.”

A TIMELINE:

1997 - Greg claims to have followed Sicesca since 1997. In 1997, Greg was 11 years old. 

2003 - Sicesca.com was created. Greg was 17. 

2005 - Greg regularly attempts to promote Sicesca on other websites he created, most notably Ziogi.com, an “Evolutionary Psychology” forum. 

2006 - Greg rennovates the Sicesca website into “Sicesca 2.0” significantly scaling back the scripture, and leaving only simplified definitions, as well as demoting it from a Religion to a Personal Belief system.