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Will magic defeat America’s elites? A former Grand Archdruid on political spells

He'll cast a spell on you. Credit: Finnbarr Webster/Getty


October 30, 2021   8 mins

Suggest that magic plays a massive role in American politics today and most people will look at you as though you just sprouted an extra head. There’s a reason for that reaction, rooted in an impressive ignorance about the nature of magic. A century or so of pop-culture fantasias of the Harry Potter variety, using inaccurate notions of magic as a dumpster for the human needs and longings that our gizmocentric society does a poor job of fulfilling, stands in the way of understanding what it is and how it shapes our political realities.

The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.

Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind.

No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will.

This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.

This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.

Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product.

Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives.

Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed.

But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life.

Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.

Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.

In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply.

Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands.

Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will.

That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here.

So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion.

Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.

American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.

It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street.

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.

That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.


John Michael Greer is the author of over thirty books. He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.


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chris sullivan
chris sullivan
3 years ago

Great article thanks – I will never dismiss magick as simpleminded again – but perhaps it requires a new name so as not to be maligned ??

Jamie C
Jamie C
3 years ago
Reply to  chris sullivan

I use “intention” when speaking with people who’d balk at magic. It neatly packages up “changes in consciousness in accordance with will”.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  chris sullivan

Satanism?

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Hilary LW
Hilary LW
3 years ago
Reply to  chris sullivan

“Sorcery” covers it pretty well I think. It avoids the often whimsical, fairy-tale connotations of “magic” while suggesting a dark and malevolent will to power, or the state of being psychologically manipulated and put under a spell. It’s a fascinating article, by the way.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  Hilary LW

How did you become an owl?

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  chris sullivan

No shortage of witches in these parts of Olde England: ‘A Witches’ Bible’ beckons for a penny in 2nd hand book shops (Janet and Stewart Farrar) amid the wrinkle-leafed Golden Boughs. In old houses long-cast charms are known to mould deep in the wattle walls of some unwitting souls. UK poet Simon Armitage recently incanted a BBC TV slot on the Pendle witch trials’ linkage from the north of England directly to Salem. Now what scries in Foggy Bottom bathed by Great Falls, while over here Samhain seizes the convening COPs – with much butchered biodiversity tossed into simmerimg pots of discord shadowed by the Burnham Wood of restless Scots? Lords of Misrule or carbon-cutting tools? Which spell of quantum-entangled spookery at a distance will this lot concoct? Heaven or earthly hell?

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

Excellent article on an unexpected topic. We live in an age where we’re constantly exhorted to rely on science and experts of all sorts, but we’ve lost confidence in the experts because they’ve obviously been corrupted and the science we’re fed has been edited and distorted by those who would manipulate us.
I suspect many people are now open to what might be called magic, to something other than cold rationality. Let the instinctive part of the brain listen to rituals and study the ancient symbols. I suspect it will guide us in the right direction–even if Steven Pinker suggests otherwise.

Last edited 3 years ago by J Bryant
Hilary Easton
Hilary Easton
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Science knows a lot about this kind of magic. They call it ‘the placebo effect’ and the ‘nocebo effect’.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Germany tried this with Mme Blavatsky and the rest of their cult revivals. It didn’t end well.

Tessa Strickland
Tessa Strickland
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Great article and perceptive comment. We also live in an age where the more fashionable scientists claim supremacy and disdain the origins of their ideas. The mindfulness movement, for example, as promoted by Jonathan Kabat Zim, validates itself on the basis that its effectiveness is scientifically proven, with the implication that this is all very modern and supported by neuroscience, yet the techniques are thousands of years old. As The author wryly observes, this is Buddhism watered down.

jim peden
jim peden
3 years ago

A very readable article filled with interesting and apt insights. So it would seem that behavioural science is indistinguishable from magic. The government’s ‘nudge units’ and SPI-B are living examples. We really have abandoned reason and rationality in favour of appeals to the subconscious and the Enlightenment is over. I wonder who is the Rasputin de nos jours.

Last edited 3 years ago by jim peden
Jamie C
Jamie C
3 years ago
Reply to  jim peden

10 points Jim. Behavioural science is pretty close to magic as defined in this article, only it’s not your consciousness and your will, but your consciousness and someone else’s will. At least an advert is labelled as an advert. Nudges (and all behavioural science aimed at the public for that matter), should be labelled clearly with something like “This message has been designed to influence your choice architecture and may impact your decisions”. Of course, do that and it’s like pulling the curtain back from the Wizard of Oz.

Gordon Black
Gordon Black
3 years ago
Reply to  Jamie C

… and the Wizard of COz.

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
3 years ago
Reply to  Gordon Black

…and all his cozening.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago
Reply to  Jamie C

Perhaps the label should be ‘may contain nuts’

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago

Very absorbing, well-written and intelligent article – and a timely reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

I tried to read it, but just could not struggle along so skimmed about. Druids and their death cult of tormenting victims to a ghastly death as a human sacrifice are not my thing. I knew some Santa Muerte people who once lived down from me, and they very house was creepy to pass – one of them ended up killing the other and so they were gone from the neighborhood, which was very good. I once was brought in to bid a job of fixing a house which had been wrecked by a group of Satanists who lived in it for year – the walls were all covered with satanist murals and signs. I told the owner I was not interested, but that I would have all the plaster take down, rather than just painting over them, so great was the evil emanating from the place – he agreed.

I have been around the world a great deal, and seen a lot of stuff – and when ever occult is being messed with it is always bad news.

Organized religions have a great body of literature, mostly centuries and millennia of philosophic refinement. They have set rules, always a strong moral code which is unambiguous, and you can see the societies they produced, and of the great ones existent, those societies were functional and civilized.

Societies based on ‘Magic’ have Not endured any test of time, they have no long history of philosophical reviewed literature, and no civilizations we can visit to see the results. From history we can see Aztec, Carthage as big occult societies with human sacrifice, and a very great many primitive ones, and in the distant past death cults, the Norse, Celtic Druids, all well consigned to the dustbin of history.

I find any person involved in ‘magic’ creepy indeed, I guess this was some nod to Halloween – There is a great amount of evil in the world, and messing with the supernatural is not wise, or safe.

Leslie, you come from a land where Magic is still about – how have you thought of what goes on there in this way?

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

There is good magic and bad magic. Thankfully there is plenty of good magic about.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

A lot of English ‘druidic’ activity (beyond the believing practioners) seems to be harmless fun and media-obsessed performance art at Glastonbury and Stonehenge (inc hangers-on); a compass bezzle- spinning search for meaning; a yearning for culture, identity and a green religion; and mundane excuses to get naked with humans, drugged or make money (merchandise). Nothing new. But, as you suggest, amongst wider sects lie not only the alt-spiritual but also deeply-troubled people inc those with a bent towards documented extremes of behaviour and politics (or both, as with other religions). It’s probably safe to say druids left violence behind here and are benign; where are the druidic deaths, riots, suicide bombers, brutal wars and the rest? However, I met several traditional chiefs in Africa and heard how terrified by them some folk remain. Witchcraft from around the world is practised here in the UK too: the odd court case paints an ugly, sadistic and sometimes fatal picture – with women and children suffering the most (a global history perhaps).

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt B

‘Magic’ (using the word that is being bandied about), is not found just in the practice of evil or harmless fun. Mostly it is found in positive spiritual practices.

Last edited 3 years ago by Lesley van Reenen
Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

There’s a place in the wide world for magic as a poetic metaphor for positive things, intent and events – together with ‘miracles’. And it’s likely true we know very little of reality. But separating the good from the evil-twin version will always be hard in the public mind, just as Yin and Yang balance in equal measure. The problem comes when there is any hint of people having voodoo stuff ‘done to them’ – that they did not invite, or of which they were unaware. Not unreasonably. Apart from that, nowhere in the article is there anything demonstrating that the brain/mind extends beyond the body, or the inferred idea that magicians may be able to remotely alter another’s behaviour by this medium. A confused bit of writing more suites to a 1920 edition of Marketing Week.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
3 years ago

Across the aeons and incarnations the global hobo’s pursuit of the fair Lesley continues.

How magical, almost Arthurian, as befits an article by Merlin.

Last edited 3 years ago by Martin Bollis
Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

I would love it indeed if he caught up with me.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
3 years ago

🙂 Over to you Sandford.

Last edited 3 years ago by Martin Bollis
Jordan Flower
Jordan Flower
3 years ago

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class:

Add to that list… In the political ruling class’ insatiable desire to grow their tax base and seize societal control, they used progressing waves of feminism to cast a magic spell on women convincing them that their worth is tied to labor, as opposed to the miraculous gift of child birth and ability to nurture.
This has led to drastically declining rates of childbirth, and a dilution of the working class, requiring—as the author stated—a family to have both parents working.
The one or two children that are born get raised in daycare centers, priming them early for parental/familial detachment, so they can be more easily programmed in the public school system.
Single women have been reduced to serfdom, exchanging their window of motherhood for the stale jobs they need to stay current on student loan payments and rent for their 700 square foot urban apartments where they slug cheap wine, order Uber Eats, and binge Netflix series that perpetuate the lie that they’re happy and “crushing it”, because #girlboss or something.
Magical.

Gunner Myrtle
Gunner Myrtle
3 years ago
Reply to  Jordan Flower

#girlboss – very funny. However I don’t really agree. My wife and I are two professionals whose 2 kids were in daycare. We are pretty much exhausted. But being run off your feet is kind of the whole point of being alive. I have cousins who inherited money young and they didn’t live more meaningful lives – the money ruined them. We all like to think that with more time we would write a book, do great things, but most of us wouldn’t. Being forced to get out of bed and go to your job is a good thing – even when you don’t love your job. I think that is one of the things proponents of welfare and basic universal income miss.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  Gunner Myrtle

Your point is absurd – there is a healthy middle way between being a workaholic and being a slob.

Sane people aim at it.

You are using work as a drug to evade reality – that thing that nags at you when are too exhausted to keep running away from it.

We work to live – we don’t live to work.

Gunner Myrtle
Gunner Myrtle
3 years ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

Sorry – I should have been clearer -we aren’t workaholics – I work a 40 hour work week – but when you add in all the running around for kids sports and other family obligations it keeps you very busy.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  Gunner Myrtle

For the sake of the kids. But increasing numbers of people are single or childless.

For various reasons, but partly because the long-hours culture + increasingly difficult commutes make that necessary.

Not to mention the soaring cost of buying, or even renting, a family home.

And these factors are all outcomes of globalised Capitalism.

hugh bennett
hugh bennett
3 years ago
Reply to  Gunner Myrtle

No, no , there is much more to being alive than being run off your feet. And sometimes stay in bed ,look up to the ceiling and think. Go out for a long walk in the rain and figure things out is my strong advice. I am older than you, but I dare not say wiser, but I have a few life wounds that give me a few credentials….
…someone far wiser than me and much better at prose wrote-
“what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare ?
W.H. Davies

hugh bennett
hugh bennett
3 years ago

A Republican and a Democrat in the Arizona desert found a magic lamp.
The genie said “I will grant one wish to each of you”. The Democrat immediately piped up and said, “I wish all Democrats and Progressives had their own green planet, separate from all these fascists.”
The genie nodded and the Democrat vanished. The Republican then asked “So are that crew really all on their own planet?”
“Yes” said the genie. “Are you sure? All of them?” The genie said “Yes” one more time. Then the Republican quietly said, “I guess I’ll just have a glass of water then.”

Last edited 3 years ago by hugh bennett
Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
3 years ago
Reply to  hugh bennett

(Invert as required) 😉

Bo Yee Fung
Bo Yee Fung
3 years ago
Reply to  hugh bennett

Hahaha that’s so enjoyable. Thank you for making me laugh. There was also an immense rush of joy and relief when the genie confirmed that the whole crew of them had all gone to their own planet. Here’s to the glass of water.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago

Quite UnHerd – quite odd, but quite good.
When do we get to the virgin sacrifices in the high temple?

Love the picture btw, very druidical. And the profile picture too, very biblical.

Last edited 3 years ago by Prashant Kotak
Richard Parker
Richard Parker
3 years ago

Thank you, John – that was very thought provoking and inspired me to look again more deeply, too. An interesting and neglected topic (and I say that as a hoary old empiricist)…

Melanie Mabey
Melanie Mabey
3 years ago

How amazing to see my favourite writer here (though I read his other essays & books on peak oil and the collapse of civilisation that is currently underway) I turn to him constantly as a sane voice in a mad world.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Melanie Mabey

I imagine most Unherd commentators would be quite disturbed even looking at his books!

Melanie Mabey
Melanie Mabey
3 years ago

It depends which books they look at, he’s written on such a wide variety of topics, which makes him excellent as a commentator. He joins dots that other people don’t even know exist. I wonder how they found him.

Saul D
Saul D
3 years ago

Lovely reframing of modern angsts and cod-liver cures. We allow emotional fears and needs to dominate over rational and actual needs – creating bogeymen and panics, labeling people as witches and demons to stoke our fears. Instead the emotional space is one we have to learn to manage and resist, to be dissected and diminished, not one to be pandered to with ‘magic’ and illogical incantations.

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
3 years ago

Absolutely fascinating and, dare I say, wise?

It’s absurd that I grew up in a single income household in the 70s, perfectly content, well fed, a bit cold away from the coal fire but very healthy and fulfilled.

I’m very keen on the Hayekian ideas taken up by Thatcher and Reagan but I fear that they may have engendered a materialistic, false society.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago

Yes, because by 1979, solid small businesses like the grocers shop run profitably for years by Mrs Thatcher’s father, had been put out of business by the supermarkets and Big Business generally.

Hence it is Big Business that has benefited from Hayek’s ideas, helped also by Big Business using cheap labour in poor countries.

AC Harper
AC Harper
3 years ago

Um, no. I dissent. Not the political observations for these are gaining visibility after years of elitism. But there is no magic – or at least redefining it as an exercise in conscious change is misleading.

robert stowells
robert stowells
3 years ago

The author has a very superficial view of magic and the examples he gives of magic in America are no more than advertising tricks in business and propaganda in politics which are common knowledge tricks of the trade not magic. Actually the author sounds suspiciously and pretty much transparently like an apologist for that very business, politics and status quo in the US.
We have had at least one recent article and talk by rational psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker observes many of the manifested or observable traits of the rational human mind. I have recently also listened to recordings of Derren Brown’s “Boot Camp for the Brain” in which he makes many of the same observations as Pinker but differs favorably from Pinker on two major aspects. Firstly DB does not seek to present a grand view of the human condition but rather seeks to demystify and unmask charlatans. Secondly DB not only understands psychology and the traits and vulnerabilities but also is a massively skilled practitioner. Clearly following on from these two points it is clear that Derren Brown understands the vulnerability of humanity to advertising tricks in business and propaganda in politics in a way I regard as light years ahead of the author of this article.
Further, on the matter of Harry Potter on which the author dwells. The magic of Harry Potter arises not from the wizardry inside the books but arises from how JK Rowling somehow tapped into a well of inspiration in writing the books themselves. 

Last edited 3 years ago by robert stowells
Olly Rathbone
Olly Rathbone
3 years ago

The author is deeply steeped in traditional occultism but has very much turned down the volume for the purpose of this article. Look up his regular Monday Q&A sessions on his blog for a taster.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago

Advertising, PR and spin don’t use supernatural forces.

Magic does.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
3 years ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

I was thinking that – but then wondered if it’s always true? Sure, some examples of emotional appeal are hyper rational – e.g. micros targeting. But in theory the two could go together. Perhaps not for nothing is PR often called a “dark art”. Some of the Nazis who created their effective propaganda were said to be active in the occult (though I’m not sure how well verified that is).
 
Switching to the light side, even Christians will sometimes pray for aid before making uplifting speeches or pleas for peace. Not magic, but still an attempt to invoke supernatural force. I’ve several times seen random non Christian social media posters who say they attempt to use magic to amplify positive messages – there’s probably thousands who do that. Perhaps even some movie directors, composers , and others who try to uplift humanity at scale.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
3 years ago
Reply to  Adam Bartlett

PS – not trying to say PR foks would always be on the dark side.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  Adam Bartlett

Christian prayer is an invocation of God, whereas magic invokes supernatural forces that are not God and not from God. Therefore are necessarily wrong and destructive, even when used with good intentions.

Satan is the “Father of Lies” and thus the patron saint of PR and advertising. From which it’s not a great step to propaganda.

Ri Bradach
Ri Bradach
3 years ago

Thank you, UnHerd: this is precisely the sort of thought challenging article that I originally subscribed for.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
3 years ago

Excellent scholarly article which is very rare today.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
3 years ago

This really is a novel way of looking at the political situation we are in. Very thought-provoking.

Nicholas Rowe
Nicholas Rowe
3 years ago

Members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people.
Like the Brahmins, they have become a ruling caste. Ugh! The shadow of a ‘gammon’ has fallen over me, I must wash three times before the statue of Saint Mary of Seacole.

Hilary Easton
Hilary Easton
3 years ago

Extraordinary article. Very insightful. I had no idea this is what druids were up to. I look forward to the revolution.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

Good article

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
3 years ago

In the 1920s, the American government thought that, with Prohibition, it could make alcohol disappear: at least the ill-effects and damage caused by it. But in fact alcohol dripped down from almost everywhere, from nearly every nook, crook and cranny, much of it adulterated and therefore dangerous. Locally made, the supply problems never materialised. The newly organised gangsters made the good stuff, the Real McCoy, magically appear, or so it seemed. America went on a wild drinking spree in the Twenties.

Was sensationalism combined with sloganeering a way for corrupt individuals and organisations to lead ordinary Americans up and down the garden path? Virtue-signalling on a grand scale, much of it histrionic, led up to the introduction of Prohibition; and if anything the virtue-signalling intensified throughout the Twenties – almost as a response to the new broadcasting mediums of the radio and cinema that many upstanding citizens had worried much about.
Sensationalism in the media today is overpowering. It’s all nuts anyway. Like, so you’re telling me millions of people around the world are drinking it or doing it, so why do you have to advertise at all, never mind going all out guns blazing over little old me? And who else was discovered to be going all out guns blazing, feverishly pulling levers this way and that, when the curtain was pulled back by Toto in The Wizard Of Oz? Why, it was none other than … the wizard of Oz. For Dorothy, there truly was no place like home.

With the belief in magic and occultism having seemingly dropped off sharply by 1939, that scene from Oz seemed designed to speak to, to reassure the audiences of the day. America was back! It seemed to say: beware of hot air. As who in the business of blowing hot air has designs on reassuring their fellow citizens?

Lloyd Byler
Lloyd Byler
3 years ago

(quote):
The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media.
(end quote)

Yes, yes and yes.

That reminds me of China and the WHO pumping out the ‘subtle’ idea that there is a novel corona virus floating around (and that this is somehow scary, given the fact new variations of [1]corona viruses float around every year as promulgated by nature in an effort to challenge and knock off the weaker and sicker species in order to prevent the sick and weak from being a dominant species);

When, in fact China never tested for a new virus using any known scientific measurements…

…. all China did to ‘verify’ a new virus, is scan the lungs of patients (with breathing problems) using a standard X-ray machine.. which is the same method they utilized the year before, and the year before that…

…and.. given that Wuhan, China is officially the most polluted country in the world, scanning the lungs for pneumonia is kind of important.

.. after calling those pneumonia issues a ‘new corona virus’ China was able to lock people in their homes..
.. which was rather convenient because the ‘slaves’ were protesting too much about pollution!

[1]Corona virus is a scientific definition for any common influenza type dis-ease also known as the common cold, the flu, pneumonia and other bronchial type ailments

Last edited 3 years ago by Lloyd Byler
Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  Lloyd Byler

That’s garbage. Covid19 is much more powerful than flu and much easier to catch than pneumonia.

You have completely misunderstood Darwinism – the weak and sick aren’t a distinct species. It’s only right-wing sh**heads who imagine that they are and try to treat them as such.

mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago

Fascinating correlation and proof if any were needed that the human condition means forever existing in an imperfect and unfinished state. As the surges in magical interest accompany major political system failures they kind of condemn us to repeat the cycle, albeit with overall decreases in lives and property lost when the systems fail. If there were a sudden upsurge in study of evidence based public administration the despots and kabals would have reason to fear. Magic does not frighten them. As an owner of 4 solvent businesses with 70+ years combined trading i accept this status quo: If i didn’t know how to change my customers’ consciousness to my will and keep it there they’d be someone else’s customers.

Last edited 3 years ago by mike otter
mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago

Also one guy on say an order pickers rate ($15-20 hr in Idaho) could easily keep 4 fed and housed and run a cheapie jap car. Sure they’d have do camping for holidays and booze, drugs + gambling would be off limits. Most people in the real toilets of earth countries would kill for that life, hey, wait a minute…? Our income levels have risen by factors of 2-3 since 1960s but our expectations have risen faster. Unless USA really goes south into woke dictator land the profit imperative will move capital into the areas where it can get best returns. Not a fan of Musk but move to Texas looks like smart money to me.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  mike otter

The real incomes of most people in the West have fallen steadily since the 1970’s.

And like many right-wingers, you use Dire Poverty as a weapon to bash the Poor in the West.

There is real Poverty in the West. That there is much worse poverty in the developing world doesn’t alter that.

Also, those brought up in the West have been hopelessly corrupted by Capitalism – which is a corrosive poison destroying everyone it touches. Which is why it’s Bye, Bye USA.

No tycoons or profit calculations can save it – they are the disease, not the cure.

hugh bennett
hugh bennett
3 years ago
Reply to  Tony Buck

Dear Tony, Hungarian joke from the 1950s ( those guys and girls really knew the reality)Definition of socialism: the incessant struggle against conditions that would not exist in any other system.

Julie Kemp
Julie Kemp
3 years ago

Wonderful and excellent article to read this weekend. You write so cleanly and comprehensively with gentle precision and incisiveness. A magical weaver! Magus, magi, magician, master-mistress, music, mathematics, magnificence and melancholy – the latter being a state of consciousness that enables a travelling of the realms ie to ponder and wonder! No ‘clinical depression’ in that! No drugs required, albeit a certain range can be an enabler if used well or wisely.
Invocation has a long long long history – it was known to be creative and purposeful. Ninmah (later named Ninhursag) employed her medical savvy in conjunction at key points with ‘invocations’. Not spells of the light entertainment kind but with the majesty of care and concern for what she and Enki, then Ningishzidda (later aka Thoth, then Hermes, then Mercury) were creating – Us. Such they came to realise themselves was their God-given purpose at creating Human life on Earth.
Our Hybrid origins are closer to being consciously realised more widely. Oh joy and rapture! This is not that which has blackly effected a capture of the
decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.
Thank you Mr. Green Man!
A grateful Australian 72yoa lady/woman/female/person/Human Being/Spirit/Energy/Consciousness/sister and daughter.

David Wildgoose
David Wildgoose
3 years ago

Great article. Imposing your will on someone via mental manipulation is indeed the oldest form of magic.

And yet also one of the most modern.

Remember the ridiculous story about Boris Johnson making model London buses in his spare time? That was to deliberately manipulate the results from search engines when doing an internet search on him. Something that would produce lots of incredulous articles and force down stories on his marital woes with his previous wife and his involvement with a Brexit supporting slogan on the side of a bus.

The “magic” worked. He became leader of the Conservative Party and thence Prime Minister.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago

This is an interesting article and one that coincides with a discussion I had with a colleague at work. He’s deep into conspiracy theories (more studying them than believing them) and he was discussing Free Masonry and its occult links to the highest rungs of power. He says there is evidence of its symbology everywhere in modern society and that we just don’t see it. For instance the American dollar bill has the word MASON in it (the section with the eye and the pyramid), but it’s only apparent if you draw an upside-down pentacle within the circle. In a similar vein, the Google logo (the red M in the envelope) is a representation of the apron worn by masons during their meetings. I was kind of skeptical at first, but the more you read about it, the more you kind of think there might be something to it: JFK assassinated a couple of years after warning the world of secret societies, Dr. Kelly committing suicide after his report on Iraq’s WMDs, Epstein’s suicide in his prison cell while the cameras happened to be off that day etc.
Currently we have public and private institutions producing an ideological firewall around the west, one that inverts good and evil while those who dissent against it are fired. The transgender ideology (rooted in online p0rnography culture) seems to be the wedge issue fomenting this. There is much mention in occult literature of fusing the male and the female in one being, often represented by Baphomet a demonic deity who has the words ‘Dissolve’ and ‘Coagulate’ imprinted on his arms:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33682878 – note the resemblance in the photo to drag-queen reading hour:
https://www.sfweekly.com/culture/bloviating-conspirary-theorist-really-hates-drag-queen-story-hour/
Coincidentally, JK Rowling also has the words ‘Dissolve’ and ‘Coagulate’ tattooed on her arms.
Edit: I forgot to mention that Free Masonry is a religious order. Belief in a Higher Power (the name of which is not specifically mentioned) is a pre-requisite to joining.

Last edited 3 years ago by Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago

This is an interesting article and one that coincides with a discussion I had with a colleague at work. He’s deep into conspiracy theories (more studying them than believing them) and he was discussing Free Masonry and its occult links to the highest rungs of power. He says there is evidence of its symbology everywhere in modern society and that we just don’t see it. For instance the American dollar bill has the word MASON in it (the section with the eye and the pyramid), but it’s only apparent if you draw an upside-down pentacle within the circle. In a similar vein, the Google logo (the red M in the envelope) is a representation of the apron worn by masons during their meetings. I was kind of skeptical at first, but the more you read about it, the more you kind of think there might be something to it: JFK assassinated a couple of years after warning the world of secret societies, Dr. Kelly committing suicide after his report on Iraq’s WMDs, Epstein’s suicide in his prison cell while the cameras happened to be off that day etc.
Currently we have public and private institutions producing an ideological firewall around the west, one that inverts good and evil while those who dissent against it are fired. The transgender ideology (rooted in online p0rnography culture) seems to be the wedge issue fomenting this. There is much mention in occult literature of fusing the male and the female in one being, often represented by Baphomet a demonic deity who has the words ‘Dissolve’ and ‘Coagulate’ imprinted on his arms:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33682878 – note the resemblance in the photo to drag-queen reading hour:
https://www.sfweekly.com/culture/bloviating-conspirary-theorist-really-hates-drag-queen-story-hour/
Coincidentally, JK Rowling also has the words ‘Dissolve’ and ‘Coagulate’ tattooed on her arms.
Edit: I forgot to mention that Free Masonry is a religious order. Belief in a Higher Power (the name of which is not specifically mentioned) is a pre-requisite to joining.

Last edited 3 years ago by Julian Farrows
Michael K
Michael K
2 years ago

Going to necropost. Thanks for this excellent article. Magic and the principles it is based on have actually been examined in depth by various scholars in the relatively recent past. Interestingly, instead of moving from something that is taken as a joke to something that is actually grounded in the human psyche, it was simply forgotten. Unbelievable. I am happy to say that Aleister Crowley, and his extremely clear view of the basic laws of reality have influenced me from very early in my youth. I have never forgotten those teachings, that told me to use my own intellect and will over that of everybody else’s. And I believe that is the most important lesson in life anybody can learn. It really is the utmost basic principle of magic. To quote: every man and every woman is a star. Even quite feminist, way ahead of his time.

LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
3 years ago

What about the blood-stained, guillotined magic that followed 1789? What about the spell of spilt Russian blood, post 1917, that enabled Stalin and his legions to impose their murderous will over millions in the gulags? What about the grandmaster of blood magic whose spellbinding speech and massive death sentences imposed hell on European earth, post 1933?
A far greater power than all of these human-imposed murderous sacrifices is found in the shared cup by which Christ-believers share–and appropriate for themselves, in lieu of their own shortcomings– the spilt sacrifice of a life perfectly lived which was nevertheless nailed to the cross of politics and religion, only to overcome all that arcane power three days later.

Last edited 3 years ago by LCarey Rowland
Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
3 years ago

What have we come to? Imagine randomly picking out from a newspaper library an old copy of an established broadsheet from, say, the 1970s or 80s, and seeing one of the main opinion pieces headlined as given above here:

Will Magic Defeat America’s Elites?

Or, in the same vein,

Will Pop Music Bring Down The Iron Curtain?

Back in the day, no such frivolous baiting of the public got into a serious newspaper’s opinion pages. Pop music may have cast its spell a bit, but why this slip into fantasy here with this article? It’s terrible. Nobody has any reason to embrace magic under any circumstances!
Instead the headline is better served up as a sporting one.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
3 years ago

It is Hallowene to be fair.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

What about “will religion bring down the Iron Curtain”? Perhaps not, alone, but few doubt it played a part through Poland. You don’t have to be religious to see why banning it failed. As for pop, ask Havel.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B