Review: Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising. Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, New York, NY: TarcherPerigee 2018, ISBN: 9780143132066, 256 pages

by Frater U∴D∴

So there’s this rock star turned scholar with a predilection for occult topics. Surprising though it may still seem to many, it’s not really news as he’s actually been at it for quite a while now. And here’s the thing: this fellow actually knows how to conduct proper research, academic and otherwise, he is positively committed to doing his homework, and he definitely knows how to write and spin a gripping yarn. None of all that cheap and vapid capitalising on personal celebrity status, invariably zeroing in on low hanging fruit of negligible import, which is all too common in the field of popular entertainment and image marketing. Quite the contrary: picking up just about any book by Gary Lachman, bass guitarist of punk rock/New Wave band Blondie, featured in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since 2006, prolific writer since the 1990s, is guaranteed to deliver an excellent, well-sourced and enlightening read throughout, no matter how complex the subject tackled may be. What’s more, there’s a wide and varied selection to choose from: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, 2001; A Secret History of Consciousness, 2003; The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, 2004; diverse biographies ranging from P.D. Ouspensky and Rudolf Steiner to Emanuel Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky, Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, and Colin Wilson; Politics and the Occult: The Right, the Left, and the Radically Unseen, 2008, and plenty of others.

While Lachman has deep-dived before into little known occultist tenets informing various political movements in history as a contrarian underground ontology of sorts, Dark Star Rising is rather different. It essays to render some rhyme and reason regarding an incumbent president of the United States whose public persona, whose erratic (or, as his less muted detractors will have it, batshit crazy) declarations of intent and pursuant roller coaster policies, and whose eccentric enfant terrible behaviour have bewildered, piqued and more often than not thoroughly frustrated even the most case-hardened political analysts from the outset and indeed keep doing so to this very day of writing: Donald Trump.

To be perfectly clear, Lachman refrains from any outspokenly partisan assaults on the president. Neither does he chime in with the hordes of his caustic critics nor does he favour him with any particular indication of empathy let alone adulation. Instead, he adopts a markedly phenomenological approach, opting for a reserved and sober analysis encompassing both Trump and his vast right-wing supporter base as well as their shared spiritual fundamentals. In addition, there’s the Russian angle as manifested in a strong ideological arch connecting Trump’s political franchise with Vladimir Putin who is depicted as the new tsar, complete with his very own Rasputin figure, neo-fascist ideologue and (now former) advisor Aleksandr Dugin.

For the non-discerning reader, there are probably hardly any more unlikely candidates to investigate in terms of occult ideology than Donald Trump and the American, if not international, Alt-Right. They don’t by any standard come over as particularly spiritual or even remotely interested in the secret lore of occult mysticism, projecting as they do a decidedly materialist, authoritarian and corporatist set of ambitions and ideological creeds of a fascistoid if not downright fascist flavour. Then again, the – admittedly all too often overstated but nonetheless essentially real – occult roots of historical Fascism and National Socialism have been thoroughly studied and established beyond reasonable doubt by a multitude of academic scholars in the recent past. But as they are so fond of saying on Facebook’s relationship tag: it’s complicated. Because, on the other hand, the simplistic conceit, so fondly nurtured by the Left, that occultism must by default be the natural bedfellow of right-wing politics alone, has long been refuted by meticulous scholarly research, not least by the author himself.

Lachman points this out early on by positing:

a view of the occult that automatically links it to the political right wing is inadequate, presenting only half the picture. But this book will be different. Unlike Politics and the Occult it will focus on the link between the occult and far-right politics, not in the past but in the present, that is, today. Why is such a book needed, when I have gone out of my way to argue that occult politics should not be immediately shunted over to the far-right side of the political spectrum? Because in recent times it seems that the occult has entered politics again, and by most accounts it has not been invited in by the left. […] The pages that follow will […] present the evidence for what seems to be a new incursion of far-right occultism into the contemporary political landscape. (p. x)

As a cultural critic, Lachman is generally given to adopt and discuss an overall view of the whole. Yet, the specific “whole” of the subject at hand, rooted as it is in the main in an atomized online, social media driven ecology embedded within the framework of markedly offline politics, necessitates reviewing a plethora of disparate anecdotal indicators: signals lacking immediately discernible connections between one another, be they organisational or of a personal network nature. It is only when viewed in toto that a robust definition of prevalent trends and undercurrents becomes feasible. This is what renders his argument so very plausible and, to a large extent, alarming.

The book takes us on a roller coaster ride across the unsavoury theme park of American, Russian and, to a lesser extent, global right-wing, authoritarian and neo-fascist politics, both the overt and the less obvious interplay between the main protagonists, their shared ideological scaffolding and substructures. While the political Left has historically always been beset by heterodoxies, sectarianism, embittered infighting, schisms and reciprocal excommunications, right-wing ideology is no less heterogeneous, contradictory and multifaceted. It sustains itself by falling back on a multitude of axioms and thought patterns typically derived from various iterations of philosophical and political idealism, some of which are of an unmistakably occult provenience.

We can only cover a few examples here, so let’s start out with New Thought and its connection to #45. First, for some biographical trivia. In the 1950s and onwards, Trump’s parents and their kids regularly attended the reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church on 5th Avenue in New York, where, in later years, Donald and his first wife Ivana took vows. Two of Trump’s sisters were married there as well. Trump is further on record as explicitly claiming to be the “greatest student” of Peale’s.

Norman Vincent Peale, ordained first as a Methodist, then as a minister of the Reformed Church in America, was, among many other things, the doyen of New Thought-spawned Positive Thinking, notably as author of the bestselling The Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living (1952) with more than 5 million copies sold and translated into 15 languages. Extremely well-connected, he was moreover personal friends with Richard Nixon and his family. In addition, he was a 33° Scottish Rite freemason. Later in life, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan for his contributions to theology. Beyond officiating as a man of the cloth, however, Peale was also a rabidly nationalistic svengali of a decidedly anti-Catholic persuasion, as documented by his vigorous activism against Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy in their respective presidential campaigns. But what of New Thought then?

New Thought’s and its various derivatives’ prime credo is “change your thoughts and you can change the world”. The movement started out in the 19th century and goes way back to the American Transcendentalists and their romanticist Neo-Platonic notion of the realm of ideas being primordial and absolutely superior to the phenomenological world of mere matter. It was later tied in with a vast spectrum of other influences as diverse as Mesmerism, auto-hypnosis, Freudian depth-psychology, Theosophy, Eastern mantra techniques, Couéism and social Darwinism, as well as encompassing elements of prosperity Protestantism, Muscular Christianity and even puritan Calvinism. As such, it has projected various forms of expression, many overtly religious of a self-defined Christian persuasion, others of a more agnostic, solely psychological kind. If we take a gander at wildly popular contemporary concepts such as the Law of Attraction, life coaching techniques of affirmation, self-empowerment visualisations, and similar, we are right in the centre of the overall New Thought arena.

While most of its proponents will vigorously contest any connections to magical thinking and the occult, this is by no means reciprocal. On the occultists’ side, New Thought and its various versions are generally acknowledged (and, in the same stride, widely vituperated) as being a kind of lamely diluted “poor man’s magic” for the great unwashed. Yet, their fundamental affinity is beyond dispute: deploying a technology of influencing tangible reality by the use of willpower, tightly focused thinking, imagination, suggestion, affirmations, imagery and symbols – be it in an all-comprehensive combo or selectively. Both operate within the paradigm of “Mind over Matter” regardless whether they may also be co-opting some purported divine, supernatural or spiritual agency in the process or leaving that question all open.

In terms of Donald Trump’s political meanderings, which many of his mundane critics are given to attribute to his personal psychological set up (frequent catchphrases being – whether appropriate or not – narcissism, sadism, sociopathy, attention deficit and/or borderline personality disorder, dementia, semi-literacy etc.), many if not all of these may actually make a lot more logical sense when scrutinised before this backdrop of New Thought and magical, occult approaches to reality. From their vantage point, said reality is viewed – and handled – not as an objective and immovably fixed structure or world matrix governed by the rigid facticity of the established rules of nature but, rather, as an entirely plastic and malleable playing field totally subject to the operator’s will and desires. This perception could actually lend another, unfamiliar dimension to the entire ongoing debate about our new “post-truth era”. Beyond any facile speculation focused on any given predominant individual’s assumed defects of character or mental derangement, it seems considerably more plausible that there’s actually some intrinsically rational if highly unconventional method in this madness. Thus, Trump’s innumerable “lies” and his persistent denial of objective facts could quite conceivably constitute attempts at serial invocation of an alternative reality he insists on manifesting, one entirely subjected to his personal will and his intentions: mind over matter again. Should this actually be the case, it’s up to the reader whether to find this reassuring or possibly even more alarming than the customary mundane take on matters.

There are plenty of other elements to this equation and Mr Lachman covers them in loving detail: the prevalence of meme magic as deployed by legions of internet trolls ranging from hordes of home grown Alt-Right activists to a vast government-affiliated Russian propaganda machine focused on destabilising Western democracies in digital psy-ops waves of unprecedented scale; the projection of a recently resurgent “Sacred Russia” doctrine deeply informing the Kremlin’s and its Western sympathisers’ geopolitics and foreign policy aspirations, notably the “Eurasian snowball” (p. 173); homophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist and white supremacist shills flooding the Internet in recursive avalanches of fake news and precisely user-targeted disinformation; the utilisation of sham religiosity; the no-holds-barred misappropriation of symbols, both occult and other; plus much much more. Beyond the usual suspects like 19th century racial biology and eugenics, fascist, Nazi and proto-fascist thinkers and activists from Evola and Guénon to Carl Schmitt and Heidegger, a lot of this hodgepodge is ideologically interlaced by the author with Chaos Magick’s toolset and its basic “anything goes” attitude.

Lachman also devotes a considerable amount of attention to Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, the impish Russian politician, best-selling writer, political philosopher and idol of the international Alt-Right. His mottled past, starting out as a young punk dissident in Soviet times, encompasses an aborted college education in aeronautical engineering and a series of jobs ranging from street sweeper to KGB informant, publisher and writer. Imbibing the works of revered right-wing authors such as René Guénon, Ernst Jünger and Julius Evola, he was personally mentored by the celebrated poet and fascist mystic Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin. Whilst travelling the West in 1989, he met with French Nouvelle Droite philosopher Alain de Benoist and Belgian ND politician Jean-François Thiriart. After his return to Russia, he co-founded the – now prohibited – National Bolshevik Party of Russia (NBP) and has been involved in multiple organisations of the extreme Right ever since, running his own geopolitical Moscow think tank inclusive, calling for the establishment of a Russian-dominated “Euro-Asian Empire”. He is notably considered to have been one of the driving forces behind the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea. Moreover, Dugin is quite obviously an outspoken proponent of occult doctrines, occasionally acting as a political prophet of sorts himself:

In 2009 Dugin drew a map of a dissected Ukraine, giving the Eastern provinces the name “Novorossiya.” In a YouTube video he gave a detailed account of how the country would disintegrate and predicted that the 2010 elections would be the last Ukraine enjoyed as a unified nation.

[…]

Five years later Dugin predicted that the breakaway “republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk would declare independence weeks before they did. He also predicted that Putin would send in ground troops well before the unmarked Russian special forces turned up. Perhaps most striking was his prediction of the design of the Donetsk Republic flag; it would be red, he said, with a blue St. Andrew’s cross.

He was right about the flag and everything else. We could chalk this up to intuition, a reasonable educated guess – Dugin is, after all, a geopolitical strategist – or simple coincidence. But the fact that Dugin believes that magic is involved in this should give us pause for thought. Like Marx, Dugin is not interested in a philosophy that only interprets the world. He wants to change it. “We do not just study what exists,” he writes. “We follow the process and try to affect it,” a remark that would not be out of place in a book on chaos magick. “Wishful thinking and self-fulfilling prophecy,” he tells us, “is quite legitimate and welcome here,” sentiments that can be found, I think, in more than one text on New Thought. And in a phrase that would not be out of place in one of Evola’s essays for UR, he writes, “We live in the creation of the external world by the internal self. […] Thoughts,” he tells us, “are magic.” This is something on which Swedenborg, Blake, Neville, Norman Vincent Peale, Trump, Austin Osman Spare, and others we have looked at could agree. (p. 174)

In view of the fact that Dugin’s domestic and international influence as a mastermind of the political Right can hardly be overstated, it should be self-evident that these disclosures are of more than passing interest.

Lachman points out, as others have done before, that Trump is conceivably the first “postmodern president” with all the flexible view of conventional notions such as “truth” and “reality” this entails. As pointed out above, it seems that in fact, to Trump, reality is little more than a fundamentally fluid playground which he refuses to take too seriously and where, rather than following a structured regime of solidly verified core facticity, principles and rules of conduct, he will merrily try to swing it, making it up as he goes along, utilising beliefs as mere construction tools, means to an end – a fundamental modus operandi familiar to any seasoned chaos magician as well. Primarily interested in achieving tangible results, both are united in their aim to (re-)create reality itself.

Rather than fuss over wands and bells and incense, and getting the name of that particular demon just right, the chaos magician uses whatever is at hand. For today’s chaos magician, this means the memes that are propagated across the internet.

For chaos magicians and many other contemporary occultists, the internet serves the same purpose that the “astral plane” does for traditional magicians, as a kind of psychic ether that can transmit their willed intentions. Meme magic happens when something created on the internet bleeds into the “real world” and changes it. (p. xiii)

Another critical pillar of Lachman’s analytical edifice is the concept of synarchy which seems to govern, if we adopt his view, even the very fundamentals of the European Union:

There was reason to suspect that the EU itself had its roots in a kind of occult politics, in a strange esoteric sociopolitical movement called synarchy.

Synarchy came to the world’s attention through the obscure writings of a mysterious nineteenth-century occultist named Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. Synarchy means “total government,” as opposed to anarchy, which means “no government.” After a period of popularity in the years leading up to World War I, in the 1930s and ’40s a covert synarchic movement reached well into the centers of French government, at least according to some reports. It may even have been the hidden hand behind a new “psychogeography” of Paris, responsible for the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum and the strange “stargate” at the towering Grande Arche de la Défense. Synarchy’s aim was a kind of United States of Europe, and some of those who had written about it suggested that it was an echo of this idea – and perhaps more than an echo – that lay at the foundations of the European Union.

Synarchy was informed by the same visions of a primordial revelation that was at the root of the Traditionalism that inspired Julius Evola, whose ideas were finding a place for themselves where Evola always wanted them to, in the corridors of power. (p. xix f.)

A form of government encompassing life in its entirety, political, economic, societal and private, commandeered by the enlightened few: no matter how much lipstick right-wing spinmeisters or even some of the historic and contemporary bigshots of esotericism across the board may try to apply to this particular Neo-Platonic pig – this is the formula of totalitarianism pure and unadulterated. And it is certainly something to watch out for if you are given to goosebumps at the prospect of yet another goose-stepping future ahead of us all.

Contrary to what one prominent chaos magician who shall politely be left unnamed here has claimed in a startlingly superficial, self-serving review, Lachman positively does not postulate that it was Chaos Magick which made Trump a POTUS! Neither does he stipulate in any way that Trump is a closet chaos magician in any meaningful sense. (Admittedly, on p. xiv he does state: “what is also strange about this development is that Trump seems to be something of a ‘natural’ chaos magician too” – a rather cavalier appraisal primarily distinguished by its enchanting vagueness: “something of”, indeed.) Regardless its latent ambiguity, influence, let’s not forget, is not at all the same thing as unequivocal identification.

In a wise choice, he never addresses the question of magic’s putative efficacy at all, just as he thankfully doesn’t stoop to peddling any kind of outré conspiracy theories of which there is an overabundance in today’s perpetually excitement-driven, hysterical post-truth political environment anyway. This book is not about what magic can or cannot do, it’s solely about what magicians – or at any rate those who tend to place their bets on some form of magic or another – are actually attempting to do, be it successful or not.

There is a single contention with Mr Lachman’s approach that requires addressing and it is anything but trivial. For one, his depiction of Chaos Magick is sorely reductionist, performative even. Granted that Chaos Magick is positively non-transcendentalist, adhering to the antinomian dictum “nothing is true, everything is permitted”. And yes, it is indeed very much about experimenting with novel ideas and techniques of magic in lieu of subscribing to set traditional rituals and hierarchies let alone rigidly established, normative dogmas. Further, sigilisation is indeed verifiably one of the mainstays of chaos magical practice. None of this is incorrect. Yet this Reader’s Digest version is most certainly not at all where it ends. For instance, Chaos Magick is generally predicated upon a stochastic or probabilistic view of things: it’s all about bending the arm of chance, at  best dealing with the relatively unlikely, as opposed to the totally improbable, not to mention the impossible.¹ There is further a notable subcurrent within Chaos Magick beholden to quantum physics and its concept of non-spatial entanglement, other branches tinkering with information theory, the psychology of brainwashing and mind control, auto-hypnosis, Austin Osman Spare’s Atavistic Resurgence, and so on.

Further, Lachman’s study is given to overestimating both the originality and the uniqueness as well as the overall import of Chaos Magick within the global magical world. For one, like so many other occult arts, it is eminently eclectic in nature. The tributaries to the chaos magical current are numerous and disparate, and that is putting it very mildly. To name but a few, we may reference in no particular order philosophical structuralism, existentialism, 70s UK punk culture, the Discordian movement, deconstructivism, elements of science fiction and fantasy literature, hip psychiatry (e.g. Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man), Tibetan Buddhism, A.O. Spare’s self-contained idiosyncratic system of psychological sorcery, an influx of Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant, Gnosticism, freestyle shamanism, Jungian depth psychology, neo-paganism, postmodern relativism, more recently Lovecraftian cosmology… and the list goes on. Even the very core emblem of Chaos Magick, the eight-pointed Chaossphere itself, was actually pilfered (without credits) from a novel by British sci-fi and fantasy author Michael Moorecock.

What’s more, it’s not as if exploring iconoclastic, novel approaches to magic by way of practical experimentation were the sole prerogative of chaotes: even the most dogmatic and prescriptive traditions of magic have always been given to practical, results-oriented research based on trial and error. This includes decidedly heretic, amoral and individualistic approaches to the dark arts by their more daring and innovative practitioners. From the medieval and Renaissance alchemists and John Dee’s skried Enochian Aethyrs to the adoption of Mesmerism and auto-hypnosis, from Eastern chakra and Kundalini trance work through Rah Omir Quintscher’s Tepaphon and battery magic, Musallam’s Adonism and Wilhelm Reich’s orgone therapy and his late weather experiments – conventional magic offers a rich and well-established treasure trove of ingenious, original laboratory work, disruptive of deeply ingrained dogmatic traditions.

And while it cannot be denied that Chaos Magick became eminently trendy for a couple of decades, triggering plenty of projective crossovers into popular culture ranging from music to fashion and an aesthetics of Chaoism, it does not by any standard dominate let alone represent the international magical scene as a whole, and never did. If we take a closer look at rolled out magical publications for a benchmark, weighting them by trending topics and sales, it has actually experienced a steep decline since the ’90s, retreating once more into a mere niche existence.

Consequently, while it is undoubtedly not Lachman’s intentional remit to toot the horn of any singular magical current, his somewhat myopic overemphasis effectively fails to do proper justice to both Chaos Magick in particular and magic in general. It could, for example, very well be argued that there are other, equally potent occult influences at work here which he fails to determine.

More importantly, perhaps, the political nexus as construed by Lachman seems rather brittle. In terms of factual evidence it hinges in the main on a self-aggrandising comment by National Policy Institute’s Richard Spencer on having willed the dream of Trump’s presidency into manifest reality, plus the few visuals of a popular Russian propagandist of conspiratorial geopolitics featuring a Chaossphere as a background prop in some of his videos. Consider that, to this day, Chaos Magick itself has never embraced, embodied, propagated or projected any particular political ideology or affiliation. In point of fact, the political demographics of its practitioners and proponents ranges from the anarchist far Left across centrist socialists, the politically agnostic and apathetic to vested conservatives and members of the hard core Right – in short, it is very much a mirror image of contemporary Western society as a whole. Political topics and issues, in any case, are never broached within the movement except perhaps occasionally in individual members’ discourse well outside the organisational and systemic confines of Chaos Magick proper.

And yet there’s no way around the fact that our author has a very good point overall, and a pretty convincing if disturbing one, too: the  similarities and the correlative overlap between the various mindsets involved, their deployed techniques of spin and proactive propaganda as well as their eminently contrarian approach to the bourgeois establishment’s reality in general and the body politic (in the case of Trump and the Alt-Right) or occult (as typically wheedled by chaos magicians) in particular are far too striking and well-documented to be frivolously discounted. As befits what is probably the first ever case study of occult-imbued postmodern politics in action, the reader may be pardoned if it leaves him or her with a sense of disconcerted bewilderment and a marked loss of fond conventional certitudes. For many, this exceedingly odd, wild and woolly stuff may be very hard to stomach – but then who could reasonably expect less of anything involving the 45th president of the United States, his motley crew of cronies and his obstreperous antics?

¹ This seems to be uncannily mirrored within a non-occult context in the ongoing discourse on “lone wolf” and “stochastic” terrorism. For a detailed outline of stochastic terrorism and its underlying mechanics, see: https://dailykos.com/stories/2011/1/10/934890/- [last accessed 2020-06-18]