‘Sorry, son. You’re afflicted.’ I can’t recall exactly what I’d asked my dad, aged 15 and full of anxiety, but I remember his response, looking up from the computer in his study with two-day stubble and the ever-present Gitane burning between his fingers.
My dad was referring to the position of Neptune and the moon at the time I was born. According to the sidereal astrological system, this arrangement of celestial bodies had cast undesirable traits in its subject – me – denoting a hysterical nature.
He said it’d pass in my 30s. Confusing though this was, it was not unusual growing up. An ambient occultism suffused the beats of everyday life: in the living room presided an imposing Enochian altar, a cream-painted box inscribed with a codex for conversing with angels.
Throughout the house, framed paintings of the Hindu goddess Kali devouring the cosmos. On bookshelves, the I Ching, and red-and-gold leather-bound volumes of Aleister Crowley. The tails of our family cats brushed past ornaments of Bastet, the feline deity, and a large white telescope loomed over tabla and Indian oboes called shehnai.
My dad, Michael Vaughan Magee, was best known for his technology journalism. In 1998, he co-founded The Register, one of the earliest online magazines. He loved getting up the nose of mega-corporations, like Intel and AMD, and scooped the traditional press on the semiconductor industry.
Like many journalists, his signature tactic was getting pissed with sources. No matter how lengthy the late-night pub sessions, he remembered the tips. Even as execs got burned, they couldn’t seem to resist his company, true to the double entendre which served as The Register’s motto: ‘Biting the hand that feeds IT’.
He was proudly difficult, leading to business disagreements and the fact that some friends cherished their place within a tiny club: those he’d never fallen out with.
Yet beneath this gruff exterior was a man at odds with the whisky-soaked persona he created, whose true love was not technology or journalism but Tantra, the ancient Indian spiritual system.
