About - HRMTC: The Hermetic Underground

The Hrmtc Undeground is intended as a social network, with groups, fora and blogs, to compliment the mission of The Hermetic Library, which has been “Archiving, Engaging and Encouraging the living Esoteric Tradition, Hermeticism, Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, and much more” with Open Access Occultism for over 25 years.

While The Hermetic Library itself is an amazing resource for students and researchers, it is primarily a one-way mode of communication; meaning that the visitors to Hermetic.com are able to access and read the materials on the site. However, The Hrmtc Underground is a place where the community can further reciprocally, synergistically engage the materials in The Hermetic Library and, moreover, can engage with each other.

This site is part of the Hermetic.com family, which is the location of The Hermetic Library. Other members of the family include The Hermeneuticon, a wiki for collaborative projects, such as The Metadata Project; which was a separate website, but now included with the library.

This site is maintained by the enigmatic super-villian, known only, to some, as the Librarian. Some others may know the Librarian as John Griogair Bell [also], the curator for the Hermetic Library.

When I first took over The Hermetic Library, I knew that I wanted to try to do more to encourage, to enable interaction with the materials and the site. I had in the back of my mind something very much like what The Hrmtc Underground will hopefully become. But, I experimented with a few methods of adding interaction. First, of course, is that I added contact information to hermetic.com in the footer and on a root contact page. Another thing that I did was to add a feedback tool. At first, I thought about building something myself for that, but decided to try, and ended up subsequently rejecting after using them for a while, a couple of third party services.

Quite a while ago, I settled on using WordPress Multisite and Buddypress, and will continue to explore the ways that this platform can be used to support The Hermetic Library, and anticipate the emergence of new opportunities. But, that didn't quite work out. So, currently, Hrmtc Underground is merely a collection of links to relevant things, not an integrated synthetic whole.

I am certainly inspired by a large number of other great existing online resources, not the least of which are sites like Paul Feazey’s Lashtal, Nico’s Spiral Nature, Tom Coates’ Barbelith and others. I do not intend to replace those, but am first and foremost looking to develop further the natural extensions and support for helping The Hermetic Library. The Hrmtc Underground is a platform for creating additional value and utility for the content on Hermetic.com in ways that a more or less static website alone cannot. Further, I hope these sites develop synergy and become more than they could be alone and that the whole is able to participate in the larger community of related and like-minded sites.

Welcome to the ongoing never-ending beginning of The Hrmtc Underground.