ecosophia | How Not To Do Magic, Revisited

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.

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: the smoking ruins of a republic

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From:

michaelmhughes

Thanks for your detailed criticism, JMG. Allow me to address the points one-by-one.

As for what magic is or isn't, you write:

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.

Your bona fides are indeed impressive. And as I've already stated, I have found your work, and our correspondence and conversations over the years, to be very helpful in my own magical development. And I have always appreciated your perspective, even when I disagree.

Here is where we might differ. You say your magic is based on teachings and systems that have proven themselves over decades or centuries. Well, I would suggest mine is as well. From what I can tell, your magic is rooted in western Hermetic traditions, and in particular the Golden Dawn system and its antecedents (notably Eliphas Levi and the European magical tradition) as well as your tenure in Druidry. I know you are also a fan of Dion Fortune (as am I). I am familiar with those systems, and spent a fair amount of time in practical exploration of Golden Dawn magic. I also find it wanting in a number of respects, and as you are aware, many of its sources were either historically inaccurate (its Egyptology is the most obvious example, along with the ahistorical beliefs about the tarot) or a product of its Victorian ethics/esthetics. It was also almost entirely manufactured by Mathers and crew out of bits and pieces they fished out of the larger pool of esoteric lore, Masonic ritual, and their own poetic flights of fancy. It is also very embedded in Judaeo-Christianity.

Nonetheless, it is a workable system, and I am grateful for your insights as I was navigating its complexities. However, my understanding of magic is based in sources going back to the Greek Magical Papyri, folk magic from a wide variety of cultures (including modern variants like hoodoo and conjure), traditional witchcraft, cunning folk lore, indigenous shamanic systems, and even (yes) some elements of chaos magic. Many beliefs and practices in those traditions contradict the very Victorian, European and Christian-based magic that you favor. And though you seem to suggest I endorse "pop culture" magical concepts, I can assure you that my own practice is very much embedded in historical traditions, not flavor-of-the-month pop occultism, and I'm happy to elaborate on my sources.

And with all due respect, what works for you may not be what works for people in other traditions. There is room for diversity in theory and approach to the very nebulous and hard-to-pin-down practice of this thing we call magic. What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. It is a constantly evolving art, and neither you nor I have the official advanced edition rulebook—because there isn't one!

As for the moral dimensions of malevolent magic, again, I suggest your definition of "malevolent" is culture- and tradition-bound. Other traditions see no problem with binding spells or even hexing/cursing, when deemed appropriate and necessary for protection and defense. Among those of us doing the Trump binding—and they come from many traditions—the spell is seen as defensive and morally unambiguous. I'll get into that in a bit.

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.

Yes, in fact, I have assembled a number of magical workings to support and strengthen American democracy and the Democratic Party. I didn't answer your earlier question because I had a very busy weekend with my family. The many spells in support of the country and its people and institutions are included in my upcoming book from Llewellyn. The Trump binding spell is not rooted in hatred, but in love for the ideals of my country—justice, civility, civil liberties, equality—that I see being trashed by the current president and his cohorts. The spell is defensive, and if you read it, it is designed to prevent Trump and his enablers from doing harm. It does not prevent him or them from doing good. The binding phrasing is direct and explicit.

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.

I disagree. The symbolism and words were carefully chosen. People have quibbled, but that's what people do. I have seen very simplistically worded spells work magnificently, and very eloquent, symbolically specific and targeted spells fail miserably.

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.

Okay, then they are welcome to do so. But are they? People can always try to counter magic, but are their efforts effective? That remains to be seen—I've seen no evidence that Trump is being protected, and, in fact, it seems that he is constantly exposed as inept, bumbling, and (frankly) a narcisstic idiot. If he's being protected pro-Trump magicians, they're doing a pretty awful job!

But to your particulars, the binding does not employ Golden Dawn or Cabalistic magic, so why would I care if they are using the Lightning Flash or the Sephiroth against it? People around the world gather at 11:59pm every waning crescent moon to focus their intention and energy to fuel the binding spell. I have yet to see any evidence that anywhere close to that number of people are focused on countering it, although maybe the deluded "Christians" supporting the most un-Christian president in history may come close in raw numbers. And honestly, so what? I don't fear them, and I don't base my magic on what I believe others may do to counter it. I do what I feel is necessary and important.

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.

Okay, here's where we seriously differ. I don't buy that "rule" and Levi is the be-all and end-all of magical theory. Do you understand how curses work in many traditional indigenous magic systems? The curser makes the target explicitly aware of the curse. THAT IS ITS POWER. It can literally kill someone if they believe they have been cursed. The Trump binding spell was created explicitly as a public exercise. It is important that Trump, and those abetting him, are aware of it. If you believe that mass intention and energy, when focused through ritual, can have a magical effect, and that larger numbers of participants equals more power, then there is no way to do gather a vast number of participants in secret.

It is called a "mass spell" and the purpose is to engage the energy of as many people as possible. Secrecy is a big thing in Western magic, but not in non-western systems. So that's fine if it's an ironclad rule in your tradition—but it isn't in mine. I am not bound by something Levi said in the 19th century, nor are the many practitioners of magic outside of the western European tradition.

And while you may believe magic is morally neutral (at least, that's how it appears to my reading), I disagree there, too. I embrace a more teleological concept of how the universe works. I believe in the oft-repeated maxim that the universe bends in the direction of justice (with lots of fits and stops and backsliding, of course, but generally towards wholeness and growth). Therefore the magicians of the alt-right are at a disadvantage, as they are working counter to more evolutionary social and political currents. You can disagree, but I think my model is as defensible as a morality-neutral universe.

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.

Says you :-) I beg to differ. You keep bringing up the Bonewitz healing spell. So what? He had cancer. Sometimes magic works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes that cancer is too advanced. Maybe his role was complete and he wanted to die. There are so many variables it is absurd to use that as an example of how magic works or doesn't work.

And sure, there have been plenty of other mass spells. I don't think there has ever been one as large as the Trump binding spell, however, or one with as much diversity among its participants. Thousands of people, from Wiccans to traditional witches to assorted pagans and eclectic magicians like me, and even some Christians, take part in the ritual every month, and have been doing so for over a year. The vast majority of them would disagree with you that it isn't working, as you can find out for yourself by simply asking them. They aren't silly, deluded new agers, either—the majority of them have been practicing magic for years. The list of notable pagans, witches, and magicians who have endorsed the spell will be obvious when my book comes out.

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.

It's not handwaving. This is the most corrupt, bungling administration is modern U.S. history, and every day more of his criminal, unethical, and inept behavior is brought to light. The Mueller investigation has resulted in an unprecedented number of indictments and looks to be close to sinking the administration and possibly imperiling Trump's entire family. The GOP is hemorrhaging and Democrats are winning in regions formerly deemed impossible, flipping 30 seats nationwide so far. For every Trump "win" I can point to an equal or larger number of losses. And how do you know he wouldn't have done *more* damage if our spell had not been binding him from doing so? You don't. Magic doesn't have easy scoring systems.

If you think Trump is winning, I'd hate to see what you consider losing :-) Would you care to revisit this thread after the fall primaries?

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.

Uh, no. I'm not dodging any questions. It's not virtue signaling to magically oppose a criminal kakistocracy. And as to your accusation of slacktivism, you clearly do not understand the type of people participating in this spell. I do. I talk to them all the time. They're not just doing the spell and sitting back in their recliners to see how it unfolds. They're passionate, engaged, and actively participating in *all* aspects of political resistance, from marches to letter and email writing, calling their representatives, and voting.

And while you can pontificate about the stupidity, pointlessness, and magical inefficacy of what we are doing, I'd encourage you to talk to the people participating. They're not dolts, they're not magical newbies, and they are deeply engaged in mundane as well as magical forms of activism. They find their participation in the ritual strengthens their commitment to the ideals of justice, liberty, equality, and peace (as specifically explicated in the spell's language). They believe it is working, on many levels.

The western Cabalistic/Golden Dawn approach to magic might be what works for you, but I see it as narrow and a product of its time, mired in historical inaccuracies, and exposing a very Eurocentric perspective. As I left those pastures, I discovered that folk traditions worked much better for me, so the Trump spell is based in very old, very common folk magic traditions. But it is also based in a broader definition of magic—one that includes art and spectacle, poetry and performance. It also incorporates mass intention and focused ritualized energy as a powerful force in its own right, even if was stripped of all magical language and theory.

And what if you just consider it as a prayer? Because you can look at it as precisely that—a prayer in which thousands of people from many countries simultaneously focus their intent on removing a dangerous man from power and protecting the country and its people.

Ultimately, in my view (and it's widely shared among the participants) it's working. Trump *will* be driven from office, and his presidency will be seen as a colossal embarrassment and a sad chapter in this nation's history. Whether we get credit or not doesn't matter to me. Magic resistance is just another tool in our very large toolkit.

Regardless of our disagreements, I am grateful for everything I've learned from you over the years, and to have the opportunity to present my case here. Happy to continue the conversation or answer questions from your forum participants.

Michael

From:

ecosophia

I'll break this out into several comments so that we can discuss each of your points individually.

First, regarding the issue of qualifications, you've done a good job of tracing out a fissure that's very widely found in today's occult scene. On the one hand, there are those of us who have a background in one or more traditional occult schools; on the other, those of you who have embraced the current fashion for eclectic postmodern neo-folk magic. Your arguments against the Golden Dawn et al. can be found repeated very nearly verbatim in forums dedicated to the latter movement, inaccuracies and all -- anyone who thinks that Westcott, Mathers et al. created their magical system from whole cloth simply hasn't done the relevant research -- and of course your choice of source material is also quite standard in your end of things.

When you insist that my take on magical philosophy and ethics is culture- and tradition-bound, of course, you're deploying one of the standard postmodernist debating tactics. The fallacy behind that tactic has been pointed out many times, for your take on these things is just as culture- and tradition-bound as mine -- it's simply bound by the culture of early 21st century cosmopolitan Euro-American liberalism and the tradition of eclectic postmodernism, and those who participate in this culture and tradition too often leap to the profoundly ethnocentric belief that their culture and tradition are somehow universally true. As Wittgenstein pointed out sensibly enough, though, there is no frame of reference that contains all other frames of reference; like the rest of us, you can't step outside your own skin or see through anyone's eyes but your own.

Does that justify your claim that what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa? To some extent -- but that extent can be, and usually is, pushed much further than it will go. The world is not whatever you want it to be; in any frame of reference, drinking a bottle of Drano is likely to be bad for your digestion. We'll talk further down about issues relating to that, as it bears on whether your working is actually working.

From:

michaelmhughes

I didn't say Mathers et al. created their system from whole cloth. I said much of it is based upon the inaccurate scholarship of the Victorian era, and emerges from Judaeo-Christian European tradition. How is that wrong? The tarot, for example, forms the basis of much GD magic, but Mathers and his pals followed Court de Gebelin and Comte de Mellet in believing it emerged from Cabala and the Jewish alphabet. We know that is a myth, but it's still an enormous part of the GD's magical teachings.

If I use magic that emerges from African-American and other folk traditions, and it differs from your preferred European magic, I guess yours is better because of its provenance among Victorian Masonic esotericists? Well, thanks, I'll tell the rest of non-western European practitioners they're wrong, and you're right.

Please let me know where I can find the official magical rulebook(tm) so I can escape my fallacious postmodern trap.

From:

ecosophia

There's a crucial difference between historical scholarship and magical efficacy. To the operative mage, it doesn't matter in the least where the Tarot came from; what matters is that it can be used effectively in certain ways. Richard de Mille has written usefully on the difference between authenticity and validity in his collection The Don Juan Papers; you might want to read that when you have the chance.

I find it fascinating that your immediate response is to accuse me, on no basis, of racist bias. In case you failed to notice, I also use magic that comes from African-American traditions -- cough, cough, traditional Southern rootwork, cough, cough -- and the Hermetic tradition itself is ultimately African in origin, having its roots in ancient Egypt. (Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes is a good source for this -- and it's one of the reasons that Golden Dawn magic is quite popular these days among African-American occultists.)

If you really want to escape your fallacious postmodern trap, all you have to do is recognize that postmodernism is just as culture- and tradition-bound as anything else, and has no privileged position relative to other people's cultures. Of course once you do that, you may find yourself faced with the awkward realization that learning a coherent system of magic -- whether it comes from a European source, an Asian source, an African source, or from somewhere else -- has certain decisive advantages over putting together an eclectic grab-bag of notions torn out of their original cultural context.

From:

michaelmhughes

So, to summarize the assorted comments and reactions, it's a lousy spell, it won't work, the thousands of people who have embraced it are misguided and virtue signaling, Trump is not as bad as he seems, and those opposing him are rabid demagogues and will cause a bloody civil war if we don't just accept him.

Mmmkay :-)

I'm a little shocked at the groupthink here, but birds of a feather, right?

I'm fine with disagreement, and as anyone who has been part of the magical "community" knows, the one thing magicians love more than doing magic is arguing about magic.

Thanks for the opportunity to make my case. As for the predictions of Trump continuing to win (and hey, are we sick of the winning yet?), civil war if he's impeached, and the failure of my spell, I am happy to revisit in the upcoming months to see whether it's me, or y'all, who have to wipe egg from faces.

I do appreciate the mostly civil responses, and I'm sorry if I missed any specific questions or comments. I'm easy to reach, however, so if you want to engage, I'm all ears. When my book comes out in the fall, please feel free savage it in Amazon's reviews (one star without reading it, of course), or steal the copy from your local library and burn it. Just kidding about that last one.

Best wishes to JMG and the participants.

From: (Anonymous)

Michael,

I don't have qualifications to comment on the actual spell but I do notice some of the double standards you are applying in your discussion.

What makes you think that the thousands of people who have embraced your working are not involved into a groupthink, and the people commenting here are?

Cheers,
Ganesh Ubuntu

From: (Anonymous)

As a Trump supporter, I have no problem with people arguing why Trump is a bad president. I welcome it actually. What I don't like is people going out of their way to sabotage him, the hypocrisy surrounding so much of the criticisms of the president, and people destroying our civil society in order to fight evil.

I also don't like people assuming my motives, ethnicity, or anything else based on the fact I don't dislike Trump.

From: (Anonymous)

When you insist that my take on magical philosophy and ethics is culture- and tradition-bound, of course, you're deploying one of the standard postmodernist debating tactics. The fallacy behind that tactic has been pointed out many times, for your take on these things is just as culture- and tradition-bound as mine -- it's simply bound by the culture of early 21st century cosmopolitan Euro-American liberalism and the tradition of eclectic postmodernism, and those who participate in this culture and tradition too often leap to the profoundly ethnocentric belief that their culture and tradition are somehow universally true. As Wittgenstein pointed out sensibly enough, though, there is no frame of reference that contains all other frames of reference; like the rest of us, you can't step outside your own skin or see through anyone's eyes but your own.

Spengler made the same point in The Decline of the West. He noted that each culture has its own worldview and its own set of values that make sense within that worldview, but not necessarily within the worldviews of other cultures. It is for that reason he believed there is no privileged cultural perspective and no set of values that is universally valid.

I find it rather amusing that post-modernism purports to reject all claims to any perspective being privileged over any other, but then turns right around and does just that by claiming universal validity for the values and worldview of early 21st century Euro-American middle class liberalism, something Spengler rejected as a logical absurdity. He specifically rejected the notion of "universal human values" and "universal human rights", arguing that those simply represent the values of Western liberals during a particular historical phase in the evolution of Western civilization.

How Not To Do Magic, Revisited

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