MAGICKAL WARFARE IN THE 20th & 21st CENTURIESa perspective on current events

In 1904, famous British occultist Aleister Crowley proclaimed the advent of the Aeon of Horus in his received text ‘Liber AL vel Legis’ (aka ‘The Book of the Law’). The 3rd and final chapter, dictated in the narrative voice of the ‘conquering child’ who was to symbolize the new aeon, and full of violent imagery worthy of a self-described “god of War and Vengeance”, includes the declaration that “I am the warrior Lord of the Forties” — a prophecy of the conflict-ridden coming decades that was not a bad call in retrospect, at a time when the planet had still not yet seen a World War.

Robert Anton Wilson (who said many a clever thing and may well have been the most under-appreciated philosopher of the last 100 years) stated that “The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.” This is often reported as “Reality is the line where rival gangs of shamans fought to a standstill.” The longer quote, while slightly wordier, allows for an idea subtly unrecognized by the more popular variant — that the matter of reality’s consistency has not been set in stone, but remains fluid and susceptible to further manipulation.

Human history is full of examples of successful individuals who have utilized magick as part of their arsenal. The common view is that this is because everyone alive prior to the current age was, to one degree or another, in a word, stupid, and was happy to waste time on strategies that did not work. This rather begs the question of how, exactly, these strategies did not work when we only know of these individuals and their interest in the occult arts because they, by definition, have succeeded into posterity.

Despite relatively scholarly works such as Peter Levenda’s “Unholy Alliance” (whose recent reprintings include a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer), the very real way that the occult informed Nazism mostly remains considered by the mainstream as either a quirky side-interest of some of the more high-ranking members of the Party or else dismissed as David Icke-style bullshittery entirely. This opinion ignores many well-documented facts about the history, aims and methods of the Nazis that reflect concern with, and real-world application of, various magickal teachings. Indeed, the popular notion of an Aryan race in conflict with a Semitic one can be traced to the Theosophist mystical writings of Helena Blavatsky in the 1800s.

For whatever reason, regardless of the applicability of Crowley’s Aeonic suppositions, magick has seen a definite increase in availability and use in the West since the penning of the Book of the Law, when compared to the days that the occult arts were solely the work of those few who could afford to spend time and money in research and experiment with libraries of grimoires and alchemical treatises to hand. From the superficial feel-goodness of the 60s New Age of Aquarius to the 90s chaoists consulting their Lovecraftian tarot to today’s woke vision boards. The knowledge that a technique which you are using comes from magickal theory is not even necessary to use it — this is why occultists sometimes refer to magick as a ‘technology’. You do not have to know how your TV works in order to turn it on and watch. Similarly, you do not have to know the roots of the magickal contamination hypothesis if you erect your name in giant golden letters across multiple locations in order to reap the resulting aura of wealth and success, despite any previous record of bankruptcy and failure. The personal computer and the internet itself are the most powerful tools of magick in this age, for those who have eyes to see it.

Now, Peter J Carroll, co-founder of the Illuminates of Thanateros in the 1970s — the group which is more responsible for popularizing the term ‘chaos magick’ and its methods than any other, and thus for much of the increase in magickal interest over the last 30 years — writes blog posts in praise of Farage and Trump. There are Trump supporters who believe that their dissemination of the image of Pepe the frog as a modern representation of Kek, the frog-headed Egyptian god of darkness, helped push the candidacy of Trump over the edge into success via meme-magic (an internet-assisted version of the sigil magick method popularized by the IOT, after the work of Crowley-contemporary magician Austin Osman Spare). Briefly, the theory of meme-magic is that the reproduction of an egregore across the internet so that it occupies the mind of a number of individuals can accrue enough energy as to effect physical reality. In other words, once your parents knew who Pepe the frog was because they saw him on the news, the election was all but over as Trump truly had (an ancient Egyptian) god on his side. And the republican shamans have already begun to fight over the border of the Real, with ‘alternative facts’ released into the air and across the world in an opening salvo, weapons of mass reality disruption.

Meanwhile, there is no organized magickal resistance against the rise of the right to speak of. Wiccans knit paeans to the goddess skyclad while sigilists masturbate over hand-drawn scribblings in their bedrooms, as the forces of repression grow ever stronger. You may not believe in the efficacy of magick, but even a stick brought to a gunfight can be successful if the holder of the gun does not see the stick as a threat, and fails to respond accordingly.