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Most web wanderers have heard rumors or even legends of 4chan. It’s a notorious site, famous for almost two decades, and with a pervasive cultural influence. People associate 4chan and sites like it with fascism nowadays, violence, and really bad stuff.
Does that make sense, though? Believe it or not, I once ran with a pack of mages on 4chan, “casting spells” in the threads, growling and fireballing at each other, and arguing virulently about who was most powerful. That was never independent from the rest of 4chan’s sketchy, weird culture, but it’s interesting that it happened.
Let’s back up a bit. Do you know how 4chan works? Online, forums were incredibly common in the mid-aughts, of course, but 4chan and other sites like it were unique. Imageboards encourage users to share images, largely anonymously. The site was divided into a wide array of topical boards such as /mu/ for music or /soc/ for general social chatter. 4chan has seventy-five boards currently. I can’t recall how many it had back then.
4chan has always covered many topics, from origami to anime. Unlike most forums of the 2000s, there is no ability to register. That, perhaps, is 4chan’s most charming feature. Post anonymously, damn you! If anyone wants to post with a “username,” the best option is a strange security feature called a tripcode. I’m sorry, very, very sorry, but even after twenty years, I still don’t quite understand how tripcodes work.
Imageboards had, as you might expect, developed in another “region” of the internet. Cool things often do, and that’s why the internet is so diverse and neat. Or was. The long-gone Japanese site, 2channel really perfected imageboards, from what I saw. 4chan was simply a copy. It was the imageboard format’s big introduction to the Anglosphere, and whoa, did it take off.
Many extremely popular meme formats kickstarted on 4chan. These include “that feel when” and all kinds of related ones, as well as unfortunate things like Pepe the Frog. Most people online don’t realize that a lot of the cultural detritus in their feeds ties back to this site and others like it. Caturday was an ancient but prime example, and it hardly ended there.
Meanwhile, like most aspects of new technology, the media fumbled things over the years when trying to document 4chan’s ascension. When it comes to 4chan, the news tends to explore minutia obsessively, dismissing the bigger picture. Even well-researched news coverage of 4chan typically couldn’t capture just how the site worked, let alone the whole culture around it. This is a bit understandable considering how vast, disturbing, and diverse it could be…
This is why many misconceptions exist about the site, and people make weird assumptions. A lot of people barely grasped the imageboard format. People took stories of valiant hacktivism or deep depravity emanating from the site rather literally for years, even the media. 4chan’s weird, but not in those ways, believe me. It turned out to be quite a gross place, but not overtly perilous like that.
In America at my former job, a guy kept asking if I knew about the “deepweb,” for example, and online crimes. This was after he heard me discussing 4chan with another coworker. 4chan was never like that when I visited it, though. Remembering right, 4chan’s janitors or “jannies” as they called them swept up illegal material well, thankfully. While the site was a rather rough place, it wasn’t a criminal den.
What were your preconceptions about this site, anyways? Did you think 4chan was mostly anime pornography and incel chatter? Or did you assume it usually hosted those 1337 hackers? I’m sure that a good percentage of readers who know about 4chan take steps to avoid it and people coming from it. I can kind of understand; we were rather awful, and while I hope I’ve improved, many likely haven’t.
I understand some of the reticence around channers, as you’ll see. In reality, though, it wasn’t the wretched hive people assumed back in the late 2000s. I don’t visit it nowadays, but back then, it was definitely a rough sort of place, but not unwelcoming enough for me to leave.
Why, though? Why the reputation for what’s just an imageboard? Back in the late 2000s, though, what exactly was 4chan, literally and culturally? If you read the news from the time, 4chan could signify benevolent but l33t hacktivists, or even a dangerous online gang.
As usual with the media trying to write about emergent and ascendant technology phenomena, the truth is kind of something else? Let’s move towards those wizards, shall we?? It would be great if I could give a nice overview of the entire imageboard, but I can’t. I can only give my own perspective. Hopefully, it’s more accurate than most media portrayals because I spent so much time on the site itself.
When I was visiting the site, I focused heavily on a board called /x/. Before the letter itself gives you any ideas? It’s X as in X-files, not X_ as in XXX. This 4chan board was devoted to discussion of any and all paranormal phenomena, from angels to zombies. It had everything you’d expect of that online and more: astral projection, empaths, tulpae, even reincarnation lore.
/x/ was, notably, the originator of creepypasta as a format. The concept originally consisted of just short creepy fiction, easily shared on an imageboard. /x/ wasn’t just horror movies and fiction, though. There were believers in the supernatural peppering the board. These included me (at the time, anyways). My occult interests started in high school.
They were peaking in the late 2000s when I discovered /x/, and its regular occult threads. These threads, hosted by serious-sounding tripcodes, focused on magick and how it might best come to life. I soon found a belief system or two, to toy with, adopt, or abandon. My paltry sense of Carroll-loving chaos magic got blown away really quickly, too.
During my time there, 4chan’s /x/ really loved Thelema, Aleister Crowley’s occult fandom. It’s a fad that swept through pretty strongly. Where other sites probably saw influxes of Wicca topics when an occult fad sparked, 4chan jumped to the demure masculine world of ceremonial magic.
Thelema is actually pretty right-wing if you paid attention to it. That’s a hill I’ll die on. As you might have guessed, I’m not fond of Thelema lately. Thelema also had a more pseudo-intellectual (and quieter) reputation than (for example) Wicca or theosophy. Despite that, Thelema’s literature left plenty for channers to argue about in long threads, making it extra-popular on the site.
In particular, there was a ton of arguing about which Ordo Templi Orientis, if any, was legitimate and trustworthy. Ditto for Crowley’s monastic order, the A∴A∴. The OTO in particular was violently fractured on an ideological level. The initiations even differed, and there were good reasons the groups had split. The A∴A∴, being a chain of teachers and students, worked differently, and was designed to split and rejoin periodically.
Other topics popped up, too. You cannot be a serious mage without winning at least a few flame wars about magic, after all. Most of these amounted to arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, though. Others would’ve seemed cult-like without the strange pretentious context. One big controversy? Whether neophytes in the A∴A∴ could have girlfriends, or if that was a “distraction” from the occult path they’d taken!
4channers were quick to form their own online groups, too. This was with or without Thelema, and often not very ceremonial, but complicated nonetheless. Most involved at least some kind of ridiculous group mythology, usually with an “astral plane” focus. After all, if the group isn’t present in person, you have to have that, right?
I joined a Skypish group chat that lasted about five years. It was mostly about Thelemic magic and Crowley and the occult orders and all that. It also had members claiming to visit each other in their dreams. I consider a few of the people I met there to be good friends. Others seem to have evaporated into the ether.
Another few certainly took up the worst mantle possible of 4chan. When Trump moved towards the presidency, the rift was huge, of course, and I cut some people out. What can I say? It wasn’t even simply beliefs. Their (online, even!) behavior left me with no choice but to shut them out.
That group was not alone. There was constant in and out of group drama between 4chan wizards back then. It was made worse by certain 4channers identifying as demigods and angels? One group, known simply as “the Demigods” was particularly notorious, as was a group said to be led by “energy vampires” feeding on members or something.
In the mid-2010s, people from the chan sites experimented with what they came to call “meme magic.” They tried using memes for magic, exactly as you’d expect from the name. This primarily targeted their political enemies, leftists and liberals. Or tried to at least. Posting a picture of a frog over and over rarely does much except take up bandwidth, but anyways…
Remember that, as I said, Thelema (and 4chan) itself tended to be very right-wing if viewed in detail. When the 2016 election came around, the sorcerers (probably not sorceresses) of 4chan expressed their devotion to Trump with attacks on leftist mages and other perceived enemies using these groovy postmodern chaos magic-inspired techniques. Again, they mostly amounted to making a sweet picture in Photoshop and posting it somewhere.
4chan was never a united place. Yes, it leaned right wing, but believe me, we found plenty to argue about. This was particularly true for people like me stuck there without being right wing. When it came to purely occult matters, people argued constantly, publicly and privately, in the most melodramatic fashion possible. My superior can beat up your superior. Fight me. Which OTO is which. Etc. These discussions were (theoretically) relevant because many of us ended up joining various offline occult orders, becoming initiated. Because of 4chan. But anyways.
Around that time, I ended up initiated into two offline Thelemic occult orders too, though. I joined a local lodge of the (“Caliphate”) Order Templi Orientis. It was fresh air compared to watching losers hold those ridiculous, Byzantine online pseudo-RPGs, at least. Supposedly, the organization was plagued with a zillion problems, though, and not to be trusted. This is despite how many barbecues they hold, or how many times the Gnostic Mass ends with cold beer and cheeseburgers. I couldn’t help but enjoy the latter, though. I made friends.
And you know what? That’s probably sensible not to trust, though. I wouldn’t (nowadays) trust anything Thelemic-branded (including the “Caliphate” OTO), but that’s just me. For me at the time, it could have been a worse experience, mostly because I met some wonderful people there. The organization itself could’ve been better, but only by abandoning its foundations. It was always clearly orbiting the dead, imploded star that was Aleister Crowley’s wasted potential, after all. Many members were in denial about him being such a horrible person, too…
Are you curious about the initiations? I don’t have a problem discussing them in brief. They featured the initiator dressed as the figure of Saladin. In the first initiation, I was physically and surprisingly “taken prisoner” by him, and then admitted to the “camp” (basically, the lodge) as a “welcome friend” after taking the oaths. In the second, a beautiful song, and I was sealed into a large vase of water to symbolize the womb and rebirth.
Everyone was friendlier and more forgiving of my awkwardness than I’d expected. I only break (yes, I’ve broken them) my oaths here for two reasons. The first being that I’m now a Christian, and the oaths seem to lack meaning in a certain way. It feels right and good to break them in some small fashion. Secondly, I don’t believe “breaking” them in this way will in any way harm my former OTO friends. My talking about the vase and Saladin’s sword hurts nobody, really. And these rituals are, after all, posted online somewhere anyways, I believe?
I’m now a Christian (that wasn’t a joke last week). I see all of that was a sad distraction for me now. I also cannot bring myself to believe in any of it now. I do see Thelema for what it is: Aleister Crowley’s ego show.
That said, I’m trying to write online pulp fiction (did you know?) and I take inspiration from where I can. My recent project, Serious Wizards Only draws heavily from my experiences on 4chan’s /x/ board, though. The web series, though, doesn’t feature characters inspired by anyone. I’m just imagining what it would be like if people like those in on /x/ actually ended up with magical powers.
I obviously don’t believe in magic (in the usual sense) nowadays, but imagining it in fiction is interesting, isn’t it? Plus, to explore that kind of personality mixture is fascinating. I might someday actually post that story, but for now, it’s just sitting around on my hard drive..
This page was last updated on December 17th, 2025.