‘The Magical Theory of Politics’ by Egil Asprem
Review: Egil Asprem, “The Magical Theory of Politics. Memes, Magic, and the Enchantment of Social Forces in the American Magic War”, Nova Religio, (2020) 23 (4): pp. 15–42.¹
by Frater U∴D∴
Note: The free download of Egil Asprem’s full paper expires by 31st of July 2020. Until then Nova Religio also offers other scholarly articles for free research access, which we highly recommend exploring. Thanks to Egil Asprem and the Nova Religio team for making their work available for free during this period.
Pursuant to my review of Gary Lachman’s book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, I’d like to point the reader’s attention to a more recent follow-up of sorts, this time hailing from the august halls of academia. It’s actually not a book but a research paper published in Nova Religio. The author, Egil Asprem, is an associate professor at the University of Stockholm, specialising in the history of religions with a focus on Western esotericism, New Religious Movements (NRM), alternative spiritualities, and the cognitive science of religion.
Reviewing Asprem’s paper doubles both as an update on Lachman’s narrative and as an indicator of its general validation from an academic research standpoint. That’s the internet for you: it is a highly current topic, but what would have taken half a century or more in the not too recent past to even earn so much as a remote footnote mention – the sluggish peer-review process and academe’s infamous ivory tower of self-infatuation being what it is – it is now actually being treated to a veritable speed demon mode (yes, pun intended) of publication. And it is to the indisputable credit of global Comparative Religious Studies that such pertinent up-to-date developments are being meticulously investigated in a relatively timely manner, second only in celerity perhaps to far better funded contemporary disciplines like physics, medicine and, arguably, archaeology.
As it says in the abstract:
This article identifies key currents and developments and attempts to make sense of the wider phenomenon of why and how the occult becomes a political resource. The focus is on the alt-right’s emerging online esoteric religion, the increasingly enchanted notion of “meme magic,” and the open confrontation between different magical paradigms that has ensued since Trump’s election in 2016. (p. 15)
He argues that
the “magical theory of politics” undergirding both pro- and anti-Trump belligerents, from 4chan trolls turned chaos magicians to activist witches hexing the president every new moon, can be understood as “enchanted” interpretations of social forces that are typically unleashed during antiestablishment political mobilization in times when political legitimacy is fracturing. (p. 16)
In the paper proper, Asprem goes on to explain:
I will draw on two classical sociological concepts to make my case, namely Émile Durkheim’s idea of collective effervescence and the notion of charisma formulated by Max Weber. In addition, the concept of “affective networking,” inspired in equal measure by affective neuroscience and actor-network theory, highlights the important roles that emotional associations distributed and shared via social media play in whipping up collective effervescence. (p. 15)
That, of course, is quite a mouthful, especially for non-academic readers unfamiliar with the concepts he is conjuring up here. But not to worry, they are actually fairly self-explanatory when viewed within his overall narrative. Asprem distinguishes three camps in the “magic war over the 45th president of the United States” (p. 17): the Cult of Kek, the Magic Resistance, and the Magic Reaction, a taxonomy primarily determining “three phases of the conflict that stand in a chronological and dialectical relationship to one another.” (p. 17)
The Cult of Kek, which has even spawned its own “holy scripture”, namely the One True Bible of Kek by the pseudonymous Saint Obamas Momjeans (2017), a concatenation of earlier pamphlets including Intermediate Meme Magic and Advanced Meme Magic, must technically be considered a subset of the Magic Reaction; however, it’s also a bit of an outlier in that it is anything but apparent whether we are being confronted here with a mere tongue-in-cheek, provocative parody of religion reminiscent of the late 50s Discordian movement (albeit, by contrast, projecting a positively Alt-Right agenda), or with a genuine, serious NRM based on a valid – if very outré – theological concept of the ancient Egyptian god Kek. It may very well be both, an ambiguity further underlined by the fact that it seems to have lost its online mojo as of recently: arguably nothing but another nine-day-wonder to add to the list. Nonetheless it’s still highly pertinent to learn about if only due to its specific tactics of social media focused cultural infiltration (generally referred to as “metapolitics” by the Right) and because it epitomises politicised meme magic, based on innumerable variations of the Alt-Right’s Pepe the Frog image, as an occult activist technique like no other online group these days.
By contrast, the Magic Resistance, though anything but homogenous, is a lot more unequivocal to define in terms of dates, persons involved and verifiable activities. It started out almost seamlessly with Trump’s inauguration, to wit on 16 February 2017, when author, magician and occult lecturer Michael M. Hughes published “A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” online. This text outlined a ritual to be performed “at midnight on every waning crescent moon until he is removed from office”, starting on 24 February 2017 and shared under the hashtags #MagicResistance and #BindTrump. The story was soon picked up by popular magazines such as Elle, Dazed, Vanity Fair, and Vox, thereby gaining considerable traction. (p. 18)
As Hughes himself was to put it in retrospect: “I had not merely written a humorous spell that had gone viral, but had unknowingly assisted in the birth of something far bigger.” (p. 19) Here, too, we find an initially “humorous” occult impetus mutating into a serious, valid form of political activism – a development Asprem tags as “post-ironic”, a term he co-opts from the Cult of Kek’s website. Enlarging on what he had set in motion, Hughes was later to publish his own topical book, Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change (2018).
The Magic Resistance’s political opponent, the pro-Trump Magic Reaction, manifested in February 2017 as an occult countermovement spearheaded by David Griffin and Leslie McQuade of the Nevada-based association Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn®, one of many self-declared successor organisations to the late-nineteenth-century magical order of the same name. Its aim was/is to counteract the Magic Resistance’s and other groups’ binding spells and in the same stride to empower Donald Trump as president. Griffin, whose controversial occult career Asprem discusses at some length, was apparently the first to label the conflict a “magical war”. (p. 20) Not without pursuing a private commercial agenda as a sideline, it seems:
Later in the spring, Griffin and McQuade offered an online “Black Magick Self-Defense” workshop, marketed particularly to regular people who might feel implicated by the Magic Resistance’s targeting of “all those who abet” Trump. In May, Griffin registered the domain magickwars.com, which collected material related to the stand-off […] including conspiracist material from Alex Jones’ Infowars channel. (p. 21f.)
Apart from digging further into the 4chan, 8chan and Reddit roots of the Cult of Kek movement, Asprem also narrates in more detail the hijacking of Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog cartoon character and its ensuing merger with its divine Egyptian Old Kingdom Ogdoad theology forebear Kek (associated with primordial chaos and darkness) by the Alt-Right: an illustrative example of the occult tenets and the propagandistic mechanisms of this particular political culture war. As Lewis Carroll was wont to say: curious and curiouser…
Following up with a rendition focused on the evolution of meme magic, its weaponised social epistemology and exploitation of suggestive language as a tool for Infowar tactics, Asprem goes on to analyse right-wing anti-Semite writer Lawrence Murray’s attempts at propagating his own bizarre mutation of Buddhism in the cause of racist metapolitics:
Thus, nirvana became “Aryan nirvana,” denoting freedom from “Mosaic samsara,” and its objective radically immanentized as the creation, in this world, of a “karmic nation.” The frog-headed meme-god Kek, in an awkward leap, became the bodhisattva of this promised “Aryan nirvana,” and Pepe and Trump his incarnations. (p. 28)
And there’s yet more: a section subtitled “Occulture and the Metapolitics of Egregores” deals with Pepe/Kek being assigned the function of an egregore similar to the GOTOS of the Fraternitas Saturni, it covers chaos magic and its techniques of sigillisation, deals with a wild amalgam of Traditionalism à la Julius Evola, esoteric Hitlerism (Savitri Devi, Miguel Serrano), Thelema and Jungian depth psychology, to culminate in the observation that
a small group of occult-inclined activists are able to reach a disproportionately large audience who, although predominantly unaware of the esoteric frameworks of the culture creators, may discover magical meanings right under the surface of mainstream culture should they stumble upon the right keys. (p. 30)
The final section of Asprem’s research paper is titled “Discussion: The Egregore as Collective Effervescence and Charisma”. Based, as mentioned above, on the sociological concepts of Weber and Durkheim, he undertakes an analysis of the previously outlined form of magical politics. Addressing the nature of magic war, magical attack, magical self-defence, and the perceived (or emic) view of magical efficacy, he also reviews magic’s function of “providing politically frustrated and potentially disenfranchised groups targeted by Trump’s policies with an empowering language of opposition”. (p. 31)
It is of interest to note that while the Magic Resistance originated in the main from bona fide occult, witchcraft and neo-pagan groups who took to their pre-existent magical, enchantment-focused ontology and technology of effecting change in the world, the Magic Reaction movement as a whole embraces – though by no means exclusively – major cohorts of activists who did not originally emanate from an occult environment but only came to the party in the course of their frenzied social media capers.
This is a rather complex field displaying multiple facets, depending on whether the protagonists – and the researchers investigating them – choose to adopt an enchanted or a disenchanted view of magic in particular or the political world at large. Asprem tackles the various issues deriving from this situation, including the pivotal role of “affective networks”, with some bravado and offers an altogether well-reasoned and plausible evaluation which is certain to garner its well-deserved positive echo amongst his specialised academic peers. Even for the more occult minded, emic reader his astute scrutiny serves as an indispensable reminder that occultism never happens in a societal vacuum, an admonition all the more important in times when politics itself is in a dire crisis of legitimacy if not outright disruption.
For all its many merits, it does come as a bit of a surprise that Asprem’s study fails to mention or at least acknowledge Gary Lachman’s 2018 book. Granted that Lachman’s monograph is not a specifically academic publication, its seminal, ground-breaking character cannot reasonably be disputed. Nor can it be argued that Asprem is restricting himself to academic sources alone, quite the contrary. As it stands, the interested reader is well-advised to peruse both texts for a well-rounded overview of the role of magic and occultism in contemporary American politics.
In his appendant video interview with Catherine Wessinger of Nova Religio, Egil Asprem offers some further insights and more detailed information relating to his research work. Here, he also reiterates in no uncertain terms that for all its “post-ironic” stance, its farcical and comic attitudes, the Alt-Right’s determination in pursuing its political targets is anything but humorous.²
¹ The paper is available for free download as a pdf file here:
https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2020.23.4.15
² In his video interview (43’:18”) with Catherine Wessinger, the author summarises and expands on his article and research work, updating some of his findings: