I’m not sure I’ve ever actually put into words my thoughts about why I create all the propaganda posters on the site. But, it’s not all, or entirely, just about having some fun. Funsies is a big part of it, to be honest; of course. I have always had to be really careful not to burn out doing all this work on Hermetic Library since I’ve taken over. Doing fun stuff like the propaganda posters and anthologies and so on are definitely part of that, because whilst they have a lot of reasons they should be done, it is important that they be a bit fun too.
So, aside from fun, what are these? Perhaps before that I want to mention what these are. There currently three types of content that I group under Ministry of Information. 1) Unicursal, 2) Village, and 3) one-offs. The first is where I started. The second was an addition later. And the third are various things that are mostly unique or don’t end up being a real category in and of themselves.
Unicursal
I was inspired by the old WWII era propaganda posters from the UK. The first, and most well-known, is
Keep Calm and Carry On, but there are actually others, and that’s what I based the first three on. Keep Calm has a nice quick double beat. Freedom Is In Peril has a longer double beat. And the underlined terms in Will Bring Us Victory offered a neat option for highlighting terms of interest.
I’m not now entirely sure what initially got me thinking about how I should start to make a Thelemic / Crowley versions, but some time
wayback at least as far as 2013, I added the section for Ministry of Information, clearly inspired by amusement about risibly officious bureaucratic office names and similar buffoonery, to Hermetic Library with the first four posters. By April 2013, I had a few others and had added some as merch on my old, now defunct Cafepress shop, including t-shirts, mugs, posters, and more. If you look at the old archived page, you’ll notice that I also hadn’t started using actual quotes yet, and instead was using a silly redacted lorem ipsum to kind of play with the top secret / propaganda theme. Also at that time I was linking to the old Google Site Search for the terms (this was before the move to a wiki engine that has built-in search). Wow, it’s wild to look back and see how things have changed!
Village
At some point, I noticed there were some quotes that didn’t quite fit the three structures offered by the Unicursal posters. There were a couple of quotes in source material on the site that was a little stranger, perhaps, a little more surreal. And I remembered the little proto-motivational posters, with something in that particular font on a thematic colour surrounded by a white border, that appear in some episodes of
The Prisoner. Welp, that was a pretty cool inspiration. Around that time I think I was also listening to
Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling too. But, anyhow, I created the first couple of those.
Originally I mainly thought of the Village design as an option for quotes that seemed “surreal” for some value of that. Lately I’ve been thinking of the Village design as what I use for quotes that aren’t Thelemic / Crowley based, from other sections of the library, and that’s what I’ve been doing with that.
One-offs
The other category of stuff at the MOI are more or less one-offs. This is basically all the other stuff, like the
Hermetic Library images with which people can show their support, as well as things like Magick Union 666
Sabo Cat, and
so on.
Less one-offy, there was a period of time that I was create propaganda under the umbrella of MOI for each Thelemic year, an example of this is
Anno V0, with events on the liturgical calendar, but I’ve since moved all of that into Hermeneuticon, and am instead focused on perennial images for calendar events that don’t have to be re-created each year over again.
What’s it going to be then then, eh?
Okay, so I’m sure I could keep waxing nostalgic about all this, but my point was to highlight how that started, what it was I started, and now I get back to the why of it.
MOI was a fun way to create landing pages with topical quotes by creating images in the style of the old propaganda posters. Part of the point was to have fun, but another important point for me was to create a new kind of index, a cross-index of landing pages, at the site that highlighted quotes and important terms which might lead people to check out the source works and other pages at the library.
By April 2013, I’d also come around to the idea of making merch too, obviously, though that’s also gone through a number of changes and hiatuses over the years, now primarily as a perk to reward and thank supporters who pledge on
Patreon.
Way back in the day, before things like Wikipedia, there was a kind of website that was a web of pages all linked together in various ways (not links of links, per se, as that was a different kind of site) that offered an endless rabbit hole to follow threads. There was a kind of example of this at
Aphorisms on the now depreciated pages for former Fellow Colin Campbell. But perhaps a better example that’s current is
TVTropes. There’s others current and historic, of course, but a survey of those isn’t the point. The thing I’m trying to show is that there is a kind of cross reference that I was trying to create with these MOI pages where each had a major theme, based on the poster, and then quotes from around the library that reflected on that theme, not even necessarily that agreed with or supported the main quote, which would allow for a new and different way into the content on the site.
In a way, this is kind of like the purpose of the overall
Hermeneuticon Project which used to be a separate site, now folded in to the main library at
Concordance,
Hermeneuticon, and
Metadata (and used to include an alpha of
The Aleister Crowley Reference Desk which didn’t survive the transition). I’ve long wanted to develop more fully those, and do add things when I can, but even still these are some other kinds of monster from each other.
My biggest hope, among various and sundry others, is that MOI offers another meaningfully different entry point, a way for me to continually create new thematic landing pages, that help people discover all the extensive old and growing content of Hermetic Library.