How Not To Do Magic, Revisited

[ecosophia]

Regular readers of this journal may recall that some weeks ago, as part of a broader project of magical instruction, I critiqued a loudly publicized attempt to attack Donald Trump and his followers with malevolent magic. (You can find my earlier journal entry here, and the original announcement here.)  Michael Hughes, who launched the working in question and continues to champion it, belatedly found out about my critique, and posted a lively (if, to my mind, woefully inadequate) defense of his project in the comments to that entry. The internet being what it is, resuming the conversation in a current journal entry struck us both as a good idea.

Since much of what follows will involve serious disagreements about the nature of magic—and, more importantly, the nature of effective magic—it’s probably worth taking a moment to talk a bit about my qualifications to speak on that subject. I started magical training as a teenager in the mid-1970s, when good practical guides to Golden Dawn magic first became widely available, and have kept at it ever since. Over the years I’ve completed the full courses of magical training and initiation offered by four Hermetic and three Druid orders, as well as receiving extensive training and certification in Renaissance astrological magic and traditional Southern conjure. 

Of my more than fifty published books, just over half are on the subject of magic and occultism, and these include such standard reference works as The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I’ve translated, co-translated, and/or edited such magical classics as the Picatrix, Eliphas Levi’s Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, and Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn. I also served for twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). All this is to say that I’ve studied and practiced a lot of magic, in a lot of different traditions, and know my way around the subject pretty thoroughly. Neither I nor anyone else knows everything there is to know about magic, to be sure, but I do know something of what I’m talking about.

One of the main things I’ve learned from all this is that magic isn’t whatever you want it to be. It’s easy and, these days, popular to slap together various notions extracted from a grab-bag of disparate systems wrenched out of their cultural and philosophical contexts, on the basis of the latest pop-culture fashions, and insist that the result is just as valid and meaningful as anything else. The resulting postmodern pablum is no doubt comforting to those who like to think that the past has nothing to teach them, but the results of such magic are generally far from impressive. Thus I tend to rely on those teachings and systems that have proven themselves over decades or centuries, even—or especially—when they contradict current pop-culture fads.

Two other points are worth making before we proceed.  First, there’s quite a bit to be said about the moral dimension of malevolent magic, but I don’t propose to say it here. It so happens that these days, a great many people like to insist, in effect, that whatever they want is justifiable because they want it, and such issues as the blowback from malevolent magic only apply to those who believe in them. This is a little like insisting that drinking Drano is only bad for your digestion if you think it is, but I don’t propose to pursue that argument here. What I propose to discuss, rather, are the reasons why the working we’re discussing isn’t going to accomplish anything—other, that is, than meeting certain emotional needs on the part of its participants.

The second point I want to make is that the moral character or political significance of Donald Trump and his followers are not the issues here. If your cure is ineffective, it doesn’t matter how bad you think the disease is.  In the same way, insisting that Trump is the evilest evil that ever eviled does not prove that a given working directed against him is going to work. The powers behind magic do not care what you think about Donald Trump, and the sense of cosmic entitlement that leads some people to believe that something has to strike down a politician they hate, just because they hate him, does not make for competent magical theory—or practice.

With that in mind, I’ll proceed to my four criticisms of the working we’re discussing.

First of all, the intention is badly chosen. In crafting a magical working, it’s crucial to have a clear, tautly focused intention; it’s even more important to make sure that the intention will actually bring you what you want.  Thus the first requirement of effective magic is to be very sure about what you want to accomplish, and to choose an intention with this in mind.

There’s an old story along these lines, much told in traditional occult schools, about a guy who wanted to get rich via magic. To do this, he did a working that involved visualized himself handling stacks and stacks of money. He promptly lost his well-paying job, and the only job he could find was in a bank, where he made a low wage counting stacks and stacks of other people’s money. He got what he asked for, in other words, rather than what he actually wanted.

That’s the first level of failure hardwired into this working. It focuses on binding and harming Donald Trump and his followers, rather than revitalizing American democracy, leading the country in some new and better direction, or even helping the Democratic Party pull itself together and win back the voters it lost in 2016. If the working succeeds—it won’t, for reasons I’ll discuss further on, but we’ll let that pass for now—there’s no reason to assume that the results would do anything at all to benefit the people and causes who have been getting hurt since Trump’s inauguration. If Trump falls, after all, the interests and demographics backing him can easily find another figurehead for their cause. What’s more, it’s entirely possible that the next one would be even worse than Trump.

The working does nothing to forestall that, where a working with a positive focus of the kind I just indicated would counter that neatly. That being the case, the fixation on malevolent magic is really rather odd—though it’s a familiar oddity. For decades now, people on the leftward end of the political spectrum, when they think of doing political magic, have tended to default immediately to malevolent workings even in situations when benevolent workings would be far more useful. The return of the repressed clearly has a lot to do with it, and so does the old but by no means outworn occult maxim: “What you hate, you imitate.” 

Michael, in our earlier interchange, I asked you whether you’d considered doing a benevolent working to strengthen American democracy or revitalize the Democratic Party. You didn’t answer. I’m going to ask it again, and I’d like you to answer it. It’s one thing to do a malevolent working when that really is the only option; it’s quite another to do one when there are many other options that will do more good for the causes you claim to support. The fixation on curses and bindings really does make it look as though the point of this working is to feed your hatred and rage toward a politician and a demographic sector you don’t like, rather than doing anything to help a democracy in terminal crisis.

Let’s go on to the next point:  the ritual is incoherent. An effective magical ritual combines carefully chosen symbols to produce an effect exactly in tune with the intention. If you want to do a love spell, you don’t use symbolism that evokes solitude and cold reason; if you want to do a prosperity spell, you don’t use symbols of loss and letting go. More precisely, if you do, you’re not going to get results from your working, because your intention and your symbolism are at odds with each other.

This working is so good an example of what not to do that I’m planning on using it in the future in teaching students about ritual design. The intention of the working is to bind Trump and his followers, but one of the core symbols of the working is the Tarot trump XVI, The Tower. Not only is this not a symbol of binding, it’s exactly the opposite, a symbol of the shattering of bindings. To use it in a binding spell is rather like trying to put out a fire by dumping gasoline on it, or knotting your shoelaces while cutting them with a knife. 

The incoherent nature of the symbolism is bad enough in itself, but it has another, far more serious downside. The working we’re discussing, after all, is not unopposed. There are plenty of people in the US who support the Trump administration, and a significant number of them know at least as much about magic as do the people who hate Trump and all his works. Using an incoherent ritual, one that includes its own antithesis in its symbolism, gives the other side an immense advantage in their countering magic.

One simple way to make the working ineffective would be to gather at the same time the working is being done, and redirect the symbolism of The Tower onto the working itself. That could be done in a simple way—say, by visualizing the lightning bolt striking the tower and bursting the bindings. It could also be done in a much more potent and effective way—say, by tying ten loops of thread onto a card of The Tower, linking them magically to the bindings the working is trying to place, invoking the ten spheres of the Tree of Life in the order of the Lightning Flash, and with each invocation, cutting one of the loops of thread with a consecrated working tool. There are other ways to exploit the incoherence in the ritual, too, and some of them are considerably more potent than the ones I’ve just described.

The powers behind magic, as noted earlier, do not care what anybody thinks about Donald Trump. They won’t make an incoherent ritual work anyway just because somebody happens to want that. Nor, crucially, will they take sides in a magical donnybrook between one set of mages that hates Trump and another set that supports him. That leads us to the next point.

The public nature of the working guarantees that it will fail. This isn’t just a matter of magical philosophy, though of course Eliphas Levi discussed it at some length in his writings. It’s a matter of basic common sense. If you were a member of the French Resistance in the Second World War, let’s say, would you go out of your way to make sure that the Nazis knew your plans? If you’re playing poker, would you show the other players the cards in your hand? Not if you wanted to win, you wouldn’t.

Michael, when I raised this point in my original journal entry, your sole response was to claim that you laugh at the mages of the alt-Right. No doubt you do, but they’re also laughing at you, and with considerably better reason. By publishing the details of your intention, ritual, and timing all over the internet, you’ve guaranteed that all the people who want to mess with your working have everything they need to do so, while you have no knowledge of what they’re doing and so are at a huge disadvantage if you want to counter it. Dismissing that possibility out of hand really makes me wonder how seriously you take this project of yours.

Finally, rituals of this kind consistently don’t work, and this one isn’t working either.  This is hardly the first time a few thousand Neopagans have gotten together online and organized a coordinated mass working, using a specific spell, to try to make something happen. In my original post, I mentioned one of the largest of these, the attempt to cure the late Isaac Bonewits of cancer by performing massed magical workings. It was a total failure. There have been plenty of other examples of the same kind of working, and the vast majority of them have been equally abject flops. Thus experience simply doesn’t support the claim that rituals of this kind are an effective means of causing change through magic.

Michael, you claimed in your earlier comment that the resignations of White House staff, the Mueller investigation, and the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer show that your working really is doing something. To my mind, that’s handwaving, as the gyrations you’ve cited have occupied plenty of space in the media, and distracted many of Trump’s opponents from the hard work of building a political coalition that could defeat him in 2020, without actually doing anything to inconvenience Trump or keep him from pursuing his agenda.

The reality is quite the contrary.  Over the period that you and the other participants have been doing your working, Trump has gutted Obamacare by abolishing the individual mandate, begun deportations of undocumented aliens, breached the global free trade system by imposing massive tariffs on China, repealed thousands of federal regulations, and scored a massive foreign-policy coup by bringing North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un to the negotiating table. What’s more, according to recent news stories, his approval ratings are higher now than Obama’s were at the equivalent point in the latter’s presidency. So what exactly has your binding stopped him from doing?

I take a wry amusement in the fact that people who pursue mass workings of this sort nearly always dodge such questions, and insist that they’re succeeding even when the evidence contradicts that claim. I tend to see that as a tacit admission that what’s going on, down at the root, isn’t about magic—it’s about virtue signaling. While this working won’t do anything to inconvenience Donald Trump or his administration, it’s a great way to proclaim one’s identity as one of the “good people”—and of course it’s also one heck of a lot easier to spend twenty minutes or so once a month pouring out hate at a politician you happen to despise than it is to roll up your sleeves and get to work helping to rebuild the tattered remnants of American democracy from the ground up. 

Comments

question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

Reading over the comments left in the prior dreamwidth entry linked above you said that you are open to an AMA type round of question and answer. For that I applaud your courage. Thank you.

My question is do you believe that rapprochement with Trump and his supporters is possible? Do you believe that rapprochement with the NRA and its supporters is possible? If you don't believe that it is possible what do you think the outcome is most likely to be? Which side do you think is most likely to win in conflict and why?

Of course my thought is that if healing is not possible we are looking at war in which the Trumpistas are much better positioned. You wrote in your response to tunesmith in the linked dreamwidth page "I see Trump and his criminal kakistocracy as an existential threat to many things I care deeply about, from my female, brown, gay, trans, poor, and disabled friends to the biosphere, the rule of law, and civil liberties. So I have zero qualms about working magically to oppose him and everything he represents."

You imply that if Trump were to be removed from power, that would be a boon to your vulnerable friends, the biosphere, the rule of law and civil liberties. Why do you believe this to be true? What evidence is that his replacement wouldn't be worse or that the political climate would become much more volatile?

If I may Michael, I don't see how you can logically think that anything but rapprochement could be of net positive to your values. If there were to be violent open conflict the Trumpistas would win, and civil liberties, the rule of law, the protection of the biosphere and the rights of vulnerable populations would be at much greater risk than they are now. If you can find away to work with the Trumpistas you are better positioned to have your values upheld in the give-and-take of politics.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[smwils1]

"I care deeply about, from my female, brown, gay, trans, poor, and disabled friends"
I am so tired of these politically correct throwaway lines. What, exactly, has the Trump administration done against the gay & trans community? As a gay man who passes for female on the phone, I'd love to know. We have the equivalent to Trump in office as governor here in KY, as well as both chambers of the legislature in GOP hands for the first time since the 1920s, and the Fairness Campaign (LGBT equality) just sent me an email stating that all anti-LGBT bills were either tabled or favorably reworded. What exactly, is the threat?

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[ecosophia]

I admit I've been wondering the same thing since long before the election, but since I don't have any skin in that game, I've generally kept my thoughts to myself.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

The part I find interesting is that for the poor, Trump is a massive improvement. For women, Trump is just less of a hypocrite about it. For the others, I'm not sure Trump is much of a change over the status quo, but if he is, not by much.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[jenniferkobernik]

I also find those lines tiresome. They have become oddly obligatory in some circles. As far as I can tell, they are only there for virtue signaling and/or a sort of protective coloration--"Disagree with me and everyone will see that you are a bigot!" *rattle, hiss, hood flare*

We are meant to be so appalled by the prospect of associating ourselves with the oppression of almost everyone that we don't bother actually thinking about what the person is saying, I suppose. After all, anything is justified if the alternative is some sort of vague but extremely menacing existential threat to nearly everyone you know who is not a born-again good old boy. That and it functions as a sort of shibboleth so that social justice advocates can recognize their own even if they are in the embarrassing circumstance of being rich, straight, white males themselves.

(Speaking as a woman, I wouldn't want to date Donald Trump or be employed as his secretary, but since when is ambient sleaze a deal-breaker in a presidential candidate?)

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[michaelmhughes]

So you're cool with a president who regularly insults women about their looks, has been accused by over a dozen women of sexual assault, has bragged about grabbing them "by the pussy," and believes abortion should be punished by imprisonment.

I am impressed. Seems to me you're doing a lot of "vice signaling."

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[jenniferkobernik]

Well, to say that I am "cool with it" is inaccurate--I think it's tacky and gross; it just doesn't happen to be the deciding factor in my vote for the presidency.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

I remember there were an awful lot of liberals who didn't seem to have any problem with Bill Clinton's equally vile behavior towards vulnerable women. In fact, I remember there were quite a few prominent feminists who came out and defended Clinton on the grounds that his long history of sexually exploitative behavior should be overlooked because he supported all the right causes.

As another example, there were a lot of prominent Hollywood liberals, including Oprah Winfrey, who were equally willing to overlook Harvey Weinstein's predatory sexual behavior for the same reason and only turned on him when the scandal exploded in the press and he became too much of an embarrassment, at which point we got to watch a breathtakingly cynical round of self-exculpatory virtue signalling by Winfrey and a number of other entertainment industry figures. As another prominent African American celebrity pointed out shortly after her speech at the Golden Globes awards denouncing Weinstein and people like him, it was the willingness of people like Winfrey to look the other way for so many years that allowed Weinstein get with sexually abusive behavior towards so many women for so long.

It is precisely because of blatantly hypocritical double standards like the examples I just gave that so many people tune out the liberal left these days.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

I find it rather amusing that when I bring it up with liberals they tend to either question my source or accuse me of racism for even suggesting there's something wrong with Oprah.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

Do you like Bill Clinton? The guy is credibly accused of raping several women, abused power to have an affair, cheated on his wife, and has not treated women well. Unless you want to say that it's only because he's crass/open about it, there's no way to justify not liking Trump, and liking Clinton.

Yet many Anti-Trumpers do just that.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[smwils1]

Yes, people do virtue signal through SJW cant. When I went to the (Lexington) Urban County Council meeting over the Confederate monuments, it was common for all of the wealthy, educated, white speakers to preface, "first let me acknowledge my privilege as a white (etc.) and let me acknowledge those who don't have the privilege and do not have the opportunity to speak." (or some such)

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[michaelmhughes]

Oh, gee, pardon me for not taking your anecdotal report over my "politically correct" facts. Mea culpa!

Just a sampling:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/1/22/16905658/trump-lgbtq-anniversary

And also:

http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/365784-advocacy-group-nearly-a-third-of-trump-judicial-nominees-are-anti

Just a few tidbits from the first article. But oh yes, he's such a friend of gay people (rolls eyes):

He tried to reinstate a ban on trans people joining and openly serving in the military. The Obama administration in 2016 announced plans to reverse the ban in 2017. But Trump, in a series of tweets last July, announced he would bring it back, arguing that trans-related health care is expensive. (Research from the RAND Corporation indicates that it would make up “a 0.04- to 0.13-percent increase in active-component health care expenditures.”) So far, Trump’s ban has been stymied by the courts — and trans people are now allowed to openly enlist and serve.

Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court to replace the consistently anti-LGBTQ Antonin Scalia. Although Gorsuch had a vague record on LGBTQ rights when he was nominated, civil rights advocates argued that, based on some of his past writings on marriage equality and religious issues, he could be a big opponent for LGBTQ equality. In just a few months on the bench, Gorsuch has proven advocates right; for one, he dissented against a Supreme Court ruling that requires states to list same-sex parents on birth certificates.

Nearly one-third of Trump’s judicial nominees have anti-LGBTQ records, according to Lambda Legal. These nominees, if accepted by the Senate, may rule on major LGBTQ issues over the next few years, from anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ workers to trans access to bathrooms.

The Trump administration rescinded a nonbinding Obama-era guidance that told K-12 schools that receive federal funding that trans students are protected under federal civil rights law and, therefore, schools should respect trans students’ rights, including their right to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. The Trump administration took back the guidance altogether, arguing trans students aren’t protected under federal civil rights law.

Trump’s Justice Department also rescinded another Obama-era memo that said trans workers are protected under civil rights law. This has enabled the federal government, including its army of attorneys, to now argue in court that anti-trans discrimination isn’t illegal under federal law. The courts are ultimately independent of the Trump administration, but the federal government can play a big role in legal arguments by throwing its people and resources behind a case.

In a major Supreme Court case, Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Division, the Trump administration argued in court in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop, a bakery that’s claiming First Amendment rights to discriminate against same-sex couples. The case could have potentially enormous repercussions — opening a big loophole in anti-discrimination laws, particularly those that protect LGBTQ people, by letting business owners cite religious or moral justifications to discriminate.

Trump’s Justice Department argued that anti-gay discrimination is legal, filing a friend-of-the-court brief claiming that the federal Civil Rights Act doesn’t protect gay and bisexual workers. The lawsuit in this case was filed by Donald Zarda, a skydiving instructor who says an employer, Altitude Express, fired him due to his sexual orientation. The Justice Department in effect argued that this was legal under federal law.
The Justice Department has similarly taken anti-LGBTQ steps in other cases across the country, including one about North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom law and one about discrimination against trans people in health care. “We’ve gone from a position where LGBT people are protected to one where we’re not,” Esseks of the ACLU said.

The Trump administration sent out a “religious liberty” guidance to federal agencies, essentially asking them to respect “religious-liberty protections” in all of the federal government’s work. It’s unclear what kind of impact the guidance will have, but LGBTQ organizations worry that it will be used to justify discrimination against LGBTQ people within the federal government and its work.

The Department of Health and Human Services enacted a new regulation and created an agency, the Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, that will purportedly work to ensure health care providers’ religious liberties aren’t violated. LGBTQ groups argue this agency will effectively give doctors, nurses, and other medical staff cover to discriminate against LGBTQ people, because providers will now get protection from the federal government if they cite religious or moral objections to refuse service to LGBTQ patients.
Without explanation, Trump fired all the members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. “It’s outstanding,” Isaacs said. “HIV isn’t only in the LGBTQ community, but it largely is.”

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

Almost everything there seems to be either following the law, or arguing for religious tolerance. We can debate the second point, but as a member of a small quirky faith I want to see religious tolerance extended as far as possible.

As for the first one, it should be noted that no law has been passed at a federal level protecting the LGBTQ community. Until such laws are passed, I don't want to see the President do anything: it's dangerous to concentrate too much power in one official.

One of them is making an inference where the data's not there.

I won't argue about lower courts because I don't know enough, and they shouldn't be making major decisions independently of the Supreme Court.

With regards to Gorsuch and birth certificates, that should be a matter for the states to decide, or perhaps, if you really like centralized power, Congress. It is a contentious issue, not clearly addressed by the constitution, and so getting the Supreme Court involved looks like it's perverting your democracy.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

I believe there are some things that he has done that are generally anti-trans. The big thing was his issues with trans folk and the military. This link has a list. It seems to me that some of these are a stretch, political issues dressed up as LGBT issues, but you asked for a list, and this is the first thing that I had found. I think that he doesn't have the best record, but he doesn't have the worst. It's seems that the issues here are either being used to distract, or appease his more conservative base. https://transequality.org/the-discrimination-administration

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[michaelmhughes]

I think rapprochement is certainly possible. I don't write anyone off.

The NRA and its supporters, too. Because many of them do want better common-sense gun safety laws.

I think removing Trump and his kakistocracy would most certainly allow the country to begin to improve and get past this year-long nightmare. Because he is breaking all the rules of civility and turning the presidency in to a joke with his inane tweeting, his lack of intelligence, his hiring of utterly unqualified people for major government positions, his idiotic defense of blatant racists and support of accused pedophiles running for office, his ugly, childish insults unbefitting of the office of the presidency, his misogynistic comments, his likely criminal conduct, including obstruction of justice and possible collusion with a hostile power to subvert the will of the people.... Jesus, I could go on and on and on, but it makes me nauseated.

Nixon was driven from office, and he was a saint compared to the current president. And we survived that crisis. We can most definitely survive this one.

And you think the Trumpers would win in a violent conflict? Excuse me while I roll on the floor laughing :-)

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think they'd win, but I think it would get incredibly ugly for quite a while, and I don't think the country would survive it.

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

How about not hexing us then?

Re: question for Michael M. Hughes

[(Anonymous)]

"Nixon was driven from office, and he was a saint compared to the current president."

Hey, what's a million dead Iraqis and slavery in Libya between friends, right?