We recently connected with DH Thorne and have shared our conversation below.

DH, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

I remember when I released my first book in June of 2019, I did not expect a great deal of success or sales. I had not yet earned a single penny from my work and normally when someone writes a book and self-publishes it, there is very little reason to expect to turn a profit or make many sales. I remember telling my wife that I would be exuberant if I sold as many as 5 or 10 copies. At 17$ royalty that would be around 85-170$ in royalties). In all honesty, I wasn’t sure what to expect, I would have been happy with anything. At the time it wasn’t about making money. I just wanted to get to say I published a book. Meanwhile, I made sure to build up a little hype with my small community of fans and followers and made a neat announcement video. I had under 1000 youtube followers at that time so I didn’t expect much from that either.

I released the book halfway through the month of June, and in those 2 weeks, I sold over 40 copies, netting over 690$ in royalties! I thought there was some kind of error in the reporting!? The next month was even more and before I knew what was going on I was making between 1500 and 2000 just from book sales every month. It changed everything for me in so many ways. I was finally a success at something that wasn’t working for someone else. It was an incredible moment in my life.

DH, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

When I first began I wasn’t really trying to start a business or anything, it was just meant to be a fun creative outlet for me, and a way to talk about my various spiritual and philosophical views. I created a blog, then a youtube channel then started writing books, and finally, I started offering spiritual services. Those services include everything from one on one spiritual counseling and mentorship, spiritual readings (tarot, etc), and most exciting of all, paid ritual and spell services. My wife and I also run an Etsy store selling handmade occult items, we specialize in black scrying mirrors with a unique triangular shape, but we have other products as well.

Ritual services are where a client approaches me with a concern such as wanting a specific outcome in a situation or wanting a specific ritual performed on their behalf for spiritual reasons. Think of it like baptisms or christenings or funerals and weddings. So I perform the ritual on video, minimally edit it, and send it to the client. And spells are similar, but also simpler (instead of a big ceremonial operation that may take an hour or more, it’s maybe 15 minutes). I also offered teaching and mentoring services in which I would talk with clients, show them certain techniques and ideas, and guide them in their own spiritual practices.

A lot of people are really helped by these kinds of services, either because they manifest an outcome the client wants, or because they help them get in touch with spiritual energies and spiritual guidance they normally do not have access to. And I was very selective in who I would do certain ritual work for. I do not like feeding or enabling people’s superstitious delusions. I will turn down a lot of people because they have unhealthy superstitious expectations. I cannot bring your dead cat back to life, I cannot talk to your dead aunt Sally and find out where the gold is buried, and I cannot guarantee a curse will harm your enemies, What I can do is connect you with spiritual energies and teachings that help manifest miraculous things in your life, providing you have a realistic expectation, these things do provide real help and benefit to people. But I do not like being a gatekeeper or priest if you know what I mean, I am often going to encourage you to do the rituals and spells yourself. I would rather make less money on a conversation where I teach you the ritual or spell than make 3 times as much doing it for you. So if you come to me asking for me to connect you with a spirit that helps bring you more prosperity, I can of course do that for you, but I am just as likely to encourage you to do it for yourself. That is because magick and mysticism are meant to be things you do for yourself. Do not rely on someone else to do it for you!

It is the birthright of every human being to discover their own divinity and how they can integrate that knowledge in a way that makes life the lucid dream it was meant to be. My own life has benefitted enormously from these things, and anyone who truly devotes themselves to them rationally will benefit too.

Everything I do is based on sincere, rational, spiritual, and metaphysical philosophies. I study and incorporate everything from Advaita Vedanta and other Hindu paths, Kaballah, Gnostic Luciferianism, Neoplatonism, Taoism, Zen, Lavayan Satanism, Hermeticism, Chemognostic paths using entheogenic substances, Daemonolotary, paganism and much more. All of it is highly validated by research and based on rational metaphysical sources and philosophers from Adi Shankar to Ploninus and Hermes Trismegistus.

My main interest and reason for my popularity are that I explore and talk about so-called Left-Hand expressions of nondual and mystical spirituality.

Left-hand attainment is a path to spiritual liberation that does not conform to societal standards and taboos. This is often best represented by the Aghori mystics of India. The Aghori are individuals who see the divine in all things and do not shun what society normally treats as taboo. Instead, they embrace taboos as a way to renounce attachment. They cover themselves with the ashes of funeral pyres, eat meat (and have even been known to eat human flesh!), have promiscuous sex, and do a great number of other things normally avoided by society. But they do not do it as a savage with no self-control, they are not doing it to satisfy base cravings or desires. It is more akin to immersion therapy where one becomes less fearful or uncomfortable around such things. Thus they do it in a ritualized, holy, compassionate, and enlightened way, and they are accepted in their society because of this.

In Western culture, this kind of path is often mischaracterized as being “evil.” But then, many Western followers of the left-hand path do not prosecute it with the same degree of reverence, discipline, or enlightenment as the aghori, In many cases, it unfortunately tends to be an excuse for bad behavior. However, the vast majority of left-hand practitioners in the West are good, down-to-earth people with a countercultural aesthetic and nonconformist attitude. It is predominantly characterized by superficially edgy, macabre, satanic, and black metal or goth subcultural themes. But most of all, an interest in forbidden occult secrets. Obviously, this does not mean that you truly embrace evil acts like murder or anything, rather it means you do not shun the dark side of life. Most importantly you seek to expose and integrate your own personal demons and shadows, treating them with compassion and seeking to understand your own dark side. This stands in stark contrast to those who would adhere to a rigid moral code, judge others, judge the self, avoid one’s own darkness, and pretend to be superior to others despite having all the same taboo desires and interests as they do. The end result is a person who is more down-to-earth, compassionate, and more able to refrain from letting their dark side rule them because they give it a safe outlet.

So all of this combined means that while I do a lot of services, the ones I enjoy most are spiritual life counseling and mentoring, The role of the “guru” I suppose you could say, though I dislike being called that, or teacher, or master, or any of those things. I’m D.H. Thorne, just some guy who has an obsession with alternative and occult forms of spirituality and the benefits I have gained from the distillation of those studies are something I delight in sharing with the world.

Since the Pandemic and all the chaos of the last few years, it has become a bit harder to make a living purely off of these things. So I have taken a half-step back to focus on improving my products and services and will be rebranding myself a little bit in the near future as I develop new ideas to share with the world. Money isn’t my primary concern, it’s just a way to pay the bills and have some fun, but the current economic climate means fewer people can justify spending 100-400$ on spiritual services, books, and the like. So I have been dedicating myself to perfecting my art and preparing for that reboot/rebrand in the coming months. But I have no deadline in mind, it will be ready when it is ready, and when it is, I hope it will really help those who need it.

Overall, my mission is to help humanity awaken to the possibilities of mysticism and spirituality. In our modern hypermaterialistic world, humans have lost touch with what matters. Science tells us a lot about the nature of reality, but when it was decoupled from rational metaphysics they lost a major and important component of such study. Materialism is a cancerous nihilistic ideology that reduces humans and the world we live in into mere dust. In that deplorable philosophy, life is an emergent property of dead stuff… While this has never been the rational position of the ancients. It is clear that this entire universe isn’t teaming with life, it is itself alive.

As Carl Sagan once famously said – “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

And that saying is almost the same as “Tat Tvam Asi” that thou art. Meaning you are it (god).

We as a species need to reconnect to this idea. We need to see the divine in all things as our ancestors did, not just in ourselves, but the world. We need to learn to see ourselves as an expression of the universe trying to know itself, to coexist in peace, and respect the planet without necessarily giving up all our rights to devious soulless corporations and corrupt governments around the world who lie about wanting to help us and the planet just to use this to control us and take our freedom. We need to take back our humanity from the matrix and heal our own tormented hearts, and the planet in the process. I do not have the solution to the symptoms, but the problem to me is clear and the solution is too. We need to reconnect spiritually to the divine in all things, both in its light and dark aspects. Only when will we start to emerge from this ongoing dumpster fire we call human civilization.

How did you build your audience on social media?

The best way to build an audience is to focus on what you enjoy and not be ashamed to promote yourself or dress it up a little bit. I see a lot of people out there who make this great big deal out of acting humble and not taking pride in what they do or trying to get others to notice them. This is the number one reason IMHO that many businesses, especially social media-based content creation businesses succeed or fail. You cannot just upload things to youtube for example and hope people find it. You need to establish yourself as part of an online community and start shamelessly sharing your content in that community.

If your content is worthy, it will be appreciated and shared. If your content isn’t you will see it doesn’t get any traction. But so many people don’t even reach that point. They just expect the world to beat a path to their door without ever announcing their door even exists. Then they feel defeated, disappointed, or even worse, annoyed and resentful that nobody is seeing how great their stuff is. And ironically, this is more arrogant than had they just swallowed their false sense of humility and promoted themselves shamelessly in the first place. I have had people make negative comments toward me resenting my small modicum of success, calling me lucky, or privileged somehow. But I worked long hours for that success, and a big part of that is getting noticed.

You have to be better, different, or first. I like to think that in my niche I’m all three for different reasons. I’m the first to do it better and that makes me different :)

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

This is a difficult question because in my opinion art and creativity thrive best under a certain degree of hardship. When people are content and there are no difficulties, people do not fantasize or dream as big as they do when they are under hardship or challenge. So in some ways, in order to make this work better I think more people need to spend time as starving artists rather than as businesspeople. If you are in the industry purely or primarily because you want to make money, I think you are doing it wrong. That is fine if your business is to make some widget that people want or need.

But an artist or creative is unique in that what they create is something more fundamental to the human condition itself. It needs to come from a place of intuitive clarity and sincerity. The more you compromise on that to satisfy a bottom line, the more the art suffers, and so a certain balance needs to exist where there has to be some hindrance to success so that the creative mind works just for the purpose of expression, and this way true creatives will thrive and can become noticed. If everyone who wants to do art and creative things is uplifted as a talented creative genius (the participation trophy mentality), then art suffers for it. While everyone can do art, not everyone is an artist. Not everyone has the gift or vision or training to make a career out of it. And those who do aren’t necessarily blessed, in many ways, it is a curse because you no longer feel incentivized to do it for the love of the art, but the success and recognition. My own success, like most other artists, was because I loved the art, not the money. And if I ever fall off the pedestal of success it will be because I fell in love with the money and sold out.

And this is one reason I never accept offers from publishers, at least not so far. I want to keep my work genuine and pure for as long as I can.

So, if I had to change one thing, it would be to deindustrialize the process, to limit the role corporations play in artistry. I’m not sure how I would do that, as I don’t like the idea of regulation or anything. But I would like to change the culture and mentality.

Take the video game and movie industry for example, once upon a time it was a fertile industry filled with entrepreneurial risk-takers. people willing to put their unorthodox ideas out there and make wonderful art and creations out of it. But these days, the bottom line is all that matters, and this isn’t exclusive to the corporate world, it has bled into the independent sector as well.

There needs to be a more decentralized environment that is based more on the people and what they like. We shouldn’t have giant media conglomerates like Disney gobbling up all the successful IPs and dictating how they are produced. They just about ruined star wars for example by doing this.

This is one reason I appreciate companies that are offering self-publishing services like Amazon and Lulu, and even Steam, and independent online storefronts like you have on Etsy. It facilitates the desire for individuals to be independent, but still earn a living. And this can only be a good thing.

I’m not saying big-budget corporate enterprises shouldn’t exist, but rather, creatives need to realize that the best possible thing for them isn’t to be hired by one of these soulless corporate machines but to be their own boss and make their own way. The starving artist phase really is important, I don’t care what anyone says, without it you never perfect your craft to the same degree. It is that hardship, that thin but persistent barrier to success that makes it worth it in the end. If everyone finished school or whatever and was immediately hired by some industry I think it detracts from the art in a major way.

So maybe more decentralized ways for independent creators to have a platform reasonably free of censorship and corporate oversight. But still viable and integrated in today’s overly centralized social media dominated world. I don’t know exactly what form that takes, but I’ll know it when I see it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dh_thorne/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DHTHORNE/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DHTHORNE
• Other: My books can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/D.H.-Thorne/author/B001KMGFJW?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Also, my linktree has all my links on it: https://linktr.ee/DHTHORNE