Toward Ecosophy

Yet again, one of the classic ways to fail at magic is getting the ol' Hogwarts try.

One of my readers -- tip of the hat to Tunesmith -- brought to my attention another attempt by people on the leftward end of the occult scene to use magic to influence US politics. You can read about it here if you like; the short form is that the organizer gave the script for a simple (as in abject beginner-level) spell intended "to bind Donald Trump and all who abet him," and instructed participants to do the spell on every waning crescent moon. 

I discussed the problems with this kind of magic in a post on one of my old blogs, but the point deserves making again -- and this example of the species has an interesting feature some of my readers may want to know about. 

A surprising number of people seem to think that binding spells are exempt from the kind of blowback that tends to happen with curses. Not so; no magic, anywhere, is exempt from blowback. Whenever you do a magical working, the energies of that working are going to affect you as well as the target of the working. That's why spells for healing, blessing, and other good things are a good idea; the person for whom you do them benefits, and so do you. The underlying principle is what I call the Raspberry Jam Law: with magic, as with raspberry jam, you can't spread it on anything else without getting it all over your own hands. 

The blowback from a binding spell is quite simply that you bind yourself when you bind anyone else. (Tip of the archdruidical hat to Dewey, who commented to this effect in the original discussion.) If you keep this in mind and choose your intentions judiciously, you can do it and not have any troubles; for example, quite early in my magical training I did a very effective binding spell on a domestic abuser -- he stopped abusing his victim (and in fact dropped entirely out of her life), and accepting the same binding on myself was as acceptable as it was unnecessary. The intention in this spell wasn't done with any particular care, though, and I doubt the people who are hard at work doing it really want to bind their own tongues and works -- but that's what they've done. 

Still, there's another dimension to this particular epic fail. Er, folks -- 

NOTHING ON THE INTERNET IS PRIVATE. 

If you set up a magical working of this kind on a public blog, and get people to splash eager discussions of it all over other public internet spaces, guess what? People who disagree with your goals will find out about it. There are a lot of people in the alt-Right who are into occultism, and some of them know quite a bit about the subject. By splashing this all over the internet, the organizer of this project guaranteed that on every waning crescent from now until Trump finishes the second term he's probably going to get at this point, alt-Right occultists are going to gather and do their own magic to mess with the proposed spell. Since they already know the dates, the time, the intention, and every detail of the ritual, throwing a metaphysical monkey wrench into the gears is child's play -- especially since they won't be limited to the kind of simple magical working in which everyone can participate. 

All this is uncomfortably reminiscent of another failure along similar lines. Some years ago, when the late Isaac Bonewits was dying of cancer, people in the Neopagan community organized a so-called "Rolling Thunder" ritual to try to keep him alive. It was put together online in the same way as the working we're discussing, and it failed completely -- he died a few months after the working got going. Why? Bonewits was the opposite of an uncontroversial figure in the Neopagan scene; he was in fact very good at making enemies, and since the organizers of the working obligingly made sure that everyone knew exactly what the spell was that they were trying to use, those people who hated Bonewits' guts (and there was no shortage of those) had everything they needed to mess with the spell. I don't know for a fact that that's what happened, but that's my best guess. 

And it's my best guess, in the present case, that blowback from the working we're discussing may be one of the factors behind the really quite impressive failure of the Democratic Party to learn any of the lessons of its 2016 defeat or come up with a meaningful alternative to Trumpismo on the march. I wonder how many would-be anti-Trump activists have systematically placed a binding on their own tongues and works by plunging into this misbegotten project -- with, no doubt, the genial help of alt-Right mages.

What a flustered cluck.