Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump

233 Pages·2018·2.6 MB·English

by  Gary Lachman

ALSO BY GARY LACHMAN
Lost Knowledge of the Imagination
Beyond the Robot
The Secret Teachers of the Western World
Revolutionaries of the Soul: Reflections on Magicians,
Philosophers, and Occultists Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock
and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World The Caretakers of
the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality
The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the
Modern World Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and
Ideas
Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life
and Teachings The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead
Letters
Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically
Unseen Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work
The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams
(ed.) A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult
In Search of P. D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of
Gurdjieff A Secret History of Consciousness
Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the
Age of Aquarius Two Essays on Colin Wilson
AS GARY VALENTINE:
New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with
Blondie, Iggy Pop, and Others, 1974–1981

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Copyright © 2018 by Gary Lachman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lachman, Gary, 1955– author.
Title: Dark star rising : magick and power in the age of Trump / by Gary Lachman.
Description: New York : TarcherPerigee, 2018. | “A TarcherPerigee book.” |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048171 (print) | LCCN 2017059541 (ebook) | ISBN
9780525503804 | ISBN 9780143132066
Subjects: LCSH: Occultism—United States—History—21st century. | Magic—United
States—History—21st century. | Political culture—United States. | White nationalism—
United States—History—21st century. | Right-wing extremists—United States—History—
21st century. | United States—Politics and government—2017–| Trump, Donald, 1946–
Classification: LCC BF1434.U6 (ebook) | LCC BF1434.U6 L33 2018 (print) | DDC
130.973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048171
Cover design: Gregg Kulick
Cover image: Pool Pool Getty Images
Version_1
To the Seekers of Truth:
The systematic use of imagination . . . will be requisite in the
future, not only for the increase of knowledge, but also for
saving the appearances from chaos and inanity.
—O B
WEN ARFIELD
Contents
Also by Gary Lachman
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction: New World Disorder
CHAPTER ONE: “I’m a Winner”
CHAPTER TWO: Positive Chaos
CHAPTER THREE: Gurus and Demagogues
CHAPTER FOUR: Alt-Right Now
CHAPTER FIVE: It’s Tradition
CHAPTER SIX: A War of All Against All
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Politics of Chaos
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Introduction
New World Disorder
S
OME YEARS AGO I wrote a book that looked at the influence of certain
“occult” or “esoteric” ideas on politics in the modern world. Occult means
“hidden” and esoteric means “inner,” and in general both refer to aspects of
reality that in some way exceed our standard, rational, scientific way of looking
at things, what we can loosely call the “magical.” While mainstream science
generally wants to debunk such notions, declaring them superstitious and absurd,
they persist, and as I have tried to show in other books, they have formed a kind
of countertradition of “rejected knowledge” that has informed Western culture
and its history practically since they began.1
One aim of my book Politics and the Occult was to show that while the
popular view, promoted by writers like Umberto Eco, is that any kind of “occult
politics” was distinctly on the right side of the political spectrum, this was not
really the case.2 I argued that, on the contrary, there was a “progressive” occult
politics too, whose influence on history could be found if we looked for it. It
could be found, for example, in people and movements like the Rosicrucians of
seventeenth-century Germany and the influence the Theosophists Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky and Annie Besant had on India gaining independence from
the British Raj.
Blavatsky is a good example of the bad reputation the occult has when it
comes to politics. As author of the esoteric classic The Secret Doctrine, an
immense occult history of mankind and the universe, she is often tagged as the
source for the theories that, through their misappropriation by Aryan supremacist
thinkers, fed the odious racial ideas of National Socialism. What is less often
pointed out is that one of the most important influences on Mahatma Gandhi was
his meeting with Blavatsky not long before her death and his introduction to the
Hindu spiritual scripture the Bhagavad Gita by some Theosophist friends. As I
show in my book about Blavatsky, the Gita became the most important book in
Gandhi’s life and until his death he was thankful to Theosophy for his
introduction to it. Even on the very day he was assassinated he wrote
approvingly of Theosophy in his journal Harijan.3 This alone should suggest
that a view of occult politics that places it solely on the right is inaccurate.
I still believe this is the case, and that 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.
Why do I say this? The pages that follow will, with any luck, present the
evidence for what seems to be a new incursion of far-right occultism into the
contemporary political landscape. But perhaps the best way to introduce this
development is by explaining how I first came across it. It came, as most things
do these days, through social media.
• • •
ON FACEBOOK ONE afternoon, I came across something that Harvey Bishop, the
New Thought blogger, had posted. New Thought, as readers may know, is a
generic name for a variety of different beliefs, philosophies, and practices that
have as their central theme the idea that the mind can influence reality directly,
that through mental effort alone we can “make things happen.” Starting in its
present form in the early twentieth century, it has had many revivals and is by
now in some version a mainstay of New Age and spiritual belief. Some readers
may be aware of New Thought through Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a bestselling
book and film of some years back. As Mental Science, Science of Mind, and
other names, New Thought teaches methods of visualization and creative
imagination, through which one can envision a future reality and make it come
true. Imagined with enough will, persistence, and commitment, the envisioned
future will, it affirms, come about.
Bishop and other New Thought practitioners emphasize the positive aspects
of New Thought and its links to spirituality. Indeed, one of its most popular
claims is that through the “power of positive thinking”—the title of an
immensely successful book about New Thought—one can achieve one’s aims,
accomplish one’s goals, and in general secure a good and fulfilled life. But
Bishop’s post was not about this. It concerned something much darker.
One of the most disturbing aftereffects of billionaire Donald Trump’s victory
in the November 2016 United States presidential contest occurred at the annual
meeting of the National Policy Institute, held in the Ronald Reagan Building, not
far from the White House, shortly after the election. “National Policy Institute”
seems an innocuous name for what many believe is a white nationalist
organization.4 Trump’s ascendancy has been seen by the far right—in the United
States and also in Europe—as a sign that liberal dominance was over and that it
was their turn in power. During Trump’s campaign a loosely connected new far-
right movement emerged on the internet, christened by the National Policy
Institute’s leader, Richard Spencer, as the “alternative right,” or “alt-right,” to
differentiate it from its unsophisticated predecessors. Delighted by Trump’s
victory, Spencer greeted the NPI meeting with a chilling cheer, which was
received with an even more ominous response. As Spencer declaimed, “Hail
Trump, hail our people, hail our victory!” the crowd responded with enthusiastic
applause and not a few Hitler salutes—or, as Spencer later explained, Roman
ones.5 What is more disturbing is that Spencer and his followers took credit for
Trump’s victory. He called it “a victory of the will,” and declared, “We willed
Donald Trump into office, we made this dream our reality.”6
As Bishop pointed out, making dreams a reality is a central aim of New
Thought. It takes an ardent wish and, through the power of willed intention,
materializes it. In his post Bishop expressed concern that Spencer and his
followers may have taken a leaf from New Thought’s book and turned the power
of positive thinking to something that Bishop, and many others, did not consider
very positive.
• • •
EXACTLY HOW SPENCER and the alt-right “dreamed” Trump into office—if indeed
they did—will be examined further on. Here I can say that it seems to have
involved what is known as “meme magic.” Meme is a term that comes from the
biologist Richard Dawkins, of “selfish gene” fame, who argued that memes
serve the same function in culture as genes do in organisms. Memes are ideas,
behaviors, styles, images, symbols, slogans, or any other cultural development
that can be transmitted to and imitated by others. Memes are flexible and are
influenced by their transmission, rather like a game of “Chinese whispers” or
“telephone,” in which a message gets distorted as it is whispered from one
person to another, and in the end winds up very different from how it began.
When Dawkins first coined the term back in 1989, the main media for the
dispersal of memes were books, art, music, television, and films—old-school
stuff. Today they spread through the internet, rather like the similarly
biologically rooted idea of “computer viruses.”
The “magic” end of meme magic comes from its link to what is known as
“chaos magick.” What chaos magick is—it adopts the spelling favored by
Aleister Crowley, the most famous magician of the twentieth century—will be
explained further on. For now we can say that rather than stick to the spells,
grimoires, rituals, ceremonies, and symbols of traditional magic, it prefers a “do-
it-yourself” creative approach that favors the magician’s personal initiative and
imagination, his ability, that is, to make it up as he goes along. 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. In effect it is a kind of induced “synchronicity,” the psychologist C.
G. Jung’s term for the phenomenon of “meaningful coincidence,” when what is
happening in our inner world happens in our outer one too, without any apparent
causal relation. If you substitute “internet” for “inner world” you can see the
connection.
When it comes to the alt-right “magicians” who willed and dreamed Trump
into the White House, the meme in question is a frog who goes by the name of
Pepe. This may sound a bit confusing, but then the magick we are considering is
interested in chaos after all.
• • •