Tag Archives: occult politics

Occultism and Esoterism

On The Stupidity of TikTok Witches

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I am an ecumenical troll: I will pour salt wherever I can regardless of political, religious, ethnic and gender affiliation, IF what I see is a sheer display of stupidity. This is one of those cases.

As most people will know by now, a certain oddly-colored politician has been reelected into office. Amongst the predictable TikTok meltdowns that were caused by the event, one peculiar trend caught my eye: that of witches sending him curses, either to make him croak or, and I quote, “having him willingly resign from the office so that Harris can take his place.”

Let us pretend for a second that this is how politics works (if it did, most politicians would dread winning an election more than losing it). What never ceases to amaze me is the complete detachment from reality that informs the witchcore scene.

Magic used to be the logical next step on the path to wisdom after mastering the worldly sciences. Now it’s a hobby for people with funny hair who need to unlearn anything resembling critical thinking in order to be able to tell themselves in front of a mirror that they are “witches”.

In large part this is due to the process of specialization and separation of knowledge that occurred after the scientific revolution, which virtually left no space for magic in the curriculum of the wise. This has led to two opposite tendencies developing: the “science confirms our eternal truths” tendency and the irrationalist tendency.

The “science confirms our eternal truths” strategy is typical of many XIX and XX century occultists. It makes no sense. Science is an open and ever-evolving body of theoretical and practical understanding which would survive even if it threw its most well-established theories overboard. If “scientific theory X is actually a reformulation of our eternal occult wisdom”, what does it say about that wisdom when, in 500 years, that theory is disproven and science moves on to the next one?

The scientific path is generally characterized by a flattening of magic onto (pseudo)scientific rationality. The irrationalist path, on the other hand, is characterized by the abandonment of all logic and understanding. It is typical of most milquetoast magical practitioners nowadays. This is the path that leads people to say with a straight face that you can manifest the result of an election and you can substitute sage with a piece of paper with “sage” written on it.1

This kind of irrationalist magic is the variety practiced by the TikTok witches sending curses to Trump. Rest assured that curses do exist. They mostly require some kind of contact with the victim, and even then almost no one can pull them off.

Even from the point of view of sending influences at a distance, Trump is as loved by those who voted for him as he is hated by those who didn’t: from a purely numerical standpoint, these influences cancel each other out, with something left over in his favor.

Finally, whether one likes it or not, the movement he leads has its own well-established etheric egregoric presence, which was created not just internally by those who support him, but also just as much externally by those who loathe him. A simple study of the life of Donald Trump, and even of the last months, shows that it would be very hard–not impossible, but hard–to hurt him, either physically or esoterically. Do you seriously think you lighting a candle and regurgitating formulas from a grimoir you bought on Etsy is going to change the course of humanity?

MQS

  1. Substitutions CAN be operated in magic, but they are an art in an of itself, and require understanding ↩︎
astrology, Occultism and Esoterism

The Esoteric Side of the Loneliness Epidemic

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In scrolling on youtube I must have passed the third or fourth pompous video essay on the loneliness epidemic and the atomization of society. Then I had to laugh as I looked at myself from the outside, lonely in my office, my eyes glued to a stupid screen, which is usually what these videos complain about. I don’t like complaining, but I do like observing.

From an astrological standpoint, loneliness is ruled by Saturn, the greater malefic. Let me stress the word ‘malefic’. Generations of people better than us had no problem calling Saturn and Mars malefic and acknowledging the presence of evil in the world, yet the Becky’s and LaRhonda’s of the world who spend their time deluding themseves manifesting on social media think the concept of evil is beneath them.

It is, by the way, no moralistic notion of evil. Evil is simply that which is contrary to life (life being understood not vitalistically, but as outward expression of the metaphysical process of emanation).

Saturn is evil, greatly so. Even the few gifts it has for us are laced with poison: its deep wisdom, discernment and secret philosophy are often accompanied by illness, depression, poverty, general gloominess of circumstances. Saturn is not the cantankerous but loveable teacher that it is made out to be in pop astrology.

This doesn’t mean that Saturn is an unaccountable Satan like that of the exoteric tradition of many religions: Saturn does actively take part in the process of creation, but it usually does so by fulfilling the destructive and separative part of the equation. For instance, in some old hermetic and astrological texts Saturn is said to rule the first part of the pregnancy. This is the part where the soul becomes bound to the biological process of an individual body.

Through Saturn we become ‘this thing here’, before the other planets add their traits. Because we become ‘this thing here’ we also become subject to death, also ruled by Saturn, who is thus the first Planet we encounter descending and the last one we encounter ascending. Our being one thing, one individual, is the result of Saturn’s work.

As such, our existence as individual, ‘saturnian’ beings is also the basis of our loneliness, which is the presupposition of all we can do and achieve in life, all the social, political, cultural and economic structures we can weave together with other people.

It is not casual that all totalitarian ideologies seek to break down the ties that bind us to other people. All ideologies aim to push a certain image of humanity that corresponds to that ideology’s idea of good, but this image is usually the product of the ideologue’s deep delusion and would never occur by itself. The ideologue’s push becomes therefore a push for the reconstruction of humanity from the ground up.

And what is the ground? Saturn! The isolated individual, the one who has been torn from his or her social, moral, spiritual fabric is an individual who has been reduced to the Saturn phase of his conception, the phase where all we can say about them is that they are one thing, but before the other planets (let alone life experience) have added their specifications. The ideology then seeks to add its own imprint on this amorphous thing.

We do not live in times of totalitarian rule (anyone who argues the contrary has likely never experienced the horrors of totalitarianism). But we do live in times where there are people who profit from our isolation in a similar way.

So what is the conclusion? There is no conclusion. This is just a collection of notes as I observe the world around me. I am not suggesting any conspiracy or any evil master plan. I am merely observing who profits and who doesn’t from the current state of affairs. It is a simple reflection on what it means, from a magical standpoint, to isolate people.

MQS