The (Not-So) Secret History of Saint Patrick's Day

March 17 is the day generally believed to be the death of St. Patrick, the British-born missionary who is credited with converting Ireland to Christianity. And as I wrote in one of my first posts on this blog:

In Egyptian mythology, Osiris was killed on the 17th day of Athyr, the third month of the ancient calendar. (Note that this is October 3rd in our modern calendar)

3/17 is also the date of a Masonically-created holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. The story has it that the holiday was established by high level Freemason, George Washington, allegedly to reward Irish soldiers in the Continental Army. But “St. Paddy’s” has traditionally been a very minor Saint’s day in Ireland. Considering that the day has become America’s defacto Bacchanal (which takes us back to Osiris) it’s worth noting some of the parallels of this day with Solar mythology.

• Osiris was believed to be the source of barley, which was used for brewing beer in Egypt.

• It’s customary to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day and Osiris was known as the “Green Man” 

• The root word of Patrick is pater, the Latin word meaning father. Osiris is the father in the Egyptian Trinity.

Since then, I've been looking into the curious origin of this holiday and have found out some very interesting facts...

• This one's a shocker- St. Patrick's Day was originally celebrated by Protestant Loyalists in the British Army:

Their first meeting and dinner to honor St. Patrick was an expression of their Protestant faith as well as their intention to bond with fellow Irish émigrés. Their 1775 meeting included British soldiers of Irish extraction. All proceeded, or marched, to the King’s Chapel to hear a sermon devoted to the occasion, and then continued on to a dinner in King Street. British soldiers were still the big show of the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City in 1762.


The first celebration in New York City was in 1756, at the Crown and Thistle tavern. Philadelphia held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1771. General George Washington issued a proclamation during the Revolutionary War, declaring March 17, 1780 a holiday for the Continental Army, then stationed in Morristown, New Jersey, in honor of the many soldiers of Irish ancestry and those born in Ireland. It was reported that this was the first holiday granted the troops in two years. Washington’s remark that the proclamation was “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence,” was possibly the origins of St. Patrick’s Day in America as an expression of Irish nationalism as much as Irish heritage or of honoring a Christian saint.

Since many lodges in Revolutionary-era America were chartered under the Grand Lodge of Ireland, I'm willing to bet those Irish soldiers were predominantly Freemasons (remember this is pre-Morgan Affair, when Freemasons were hardcore). To show how much a Masonic enterprise the American Revolution was, here's a list of the Freemasonic Generals in the Continental Army

Photo from Freemasons' Hall, 17 Molesworth Street, Dublin

• Up until very recently, St. Patrick's Day was not a big deal in Ireland itself:

In modern-day Ireland, St. Patrick's Day has traditionally been a religious occasion. In fact, up until the 1970s, Irish laws mandated that pubs be closed on March 17. Beginning in 1995, however, the Irish government began a national campaign to use St. Patrick's Day as an opportunity to drive tourism and showcase Ireland to the rest of the world. Last year, close to one million people took part in Ireland 's St. Patrick's Festival in Dublin, a multi-day celebration featuring parades, concerts, outdoor theater productions, and fireworks shows.

• Modern Saint Patrick's Day shares both a date and a mandate with a far, far older holiday:

St. Patrick's Day is also frequently a time for drinking. It used to be that this tradition was strung out for at least five days, the so-called seachtain na Gaeilage or "Irish week."

That may stem from Roman times, when March 17 started the festival of the Bacchanalia, a celebration to the deity Bacchus, to whom wine was sacred. In olden years long gone by, the Irish drank mead, made from fermented honey. You might do better today with a stout Guinness, preferably dyed green.

• The Bacchanalia are well-documented in the historical record:

The bacchanalia were wild and mystic festivals of the Roman and Greek god Bacchus. Introduced into Rome from lower Italy by way of Etruria (c. 200 BC), the bacchanalia were originally held in secret and only attended by women. The festivals occurred on three days of the year in the grove of Simila near the Aventine Hill, on March 16 and March 17. Later, admission to the rites was extended to men and celebrations took place five times a month. According to Livy, the extension happened in an era when the leader of the Bacchus cult was Paculla Annia - though it is now believed that some men had participated before that.

• Of course, Bacchus/Dionysus is just the Greco-Roman reinterpretation of Osiris. And drinking of beer was sacred to the followers of Osiris, the Green Man:

In Egypt, beer was regarded as food. In fact, the old Egyptian hieroglyph for "meal" was a compound of those for "bread" and "beer". This "bread-beer meal" plus a few onions and some dried fish was the standard diet of the common people along the Nile at the time. Beer came in eight different types in Egypt. Most were made from barley, some from emmer, and many were flavored with ginger or honey. The best beers were brewed to a color as red as human blood. The Egyptians distinguished between the different beers by their alcoholic strength and dominant flavor. None other than the god of the dead, Osiris, was hailed as the guardian of beer, because to him grain - both emmer and barley - were sacred. The Egyptians believed that grain had sprung spontaneously from Osiris' mummy, as a gift to mankind and as a symbol of life after death. This was sufficient justification for the god-like pharaohs to turn brewing into a state monopoly and strictly license brewing rights to entrepreneurs and priests. Many temples eventually opened their own breweries and pubs, all in the service of the gods. The port of Pelusium at the mouth of the Nile became a large brewing center, and trading in beer became big business.

• Beer wasn't simply a beverage in Egypt, it was also a sacrament. This arose from a myth in which the goddess Sekhmet decided to do away with humankind but was mollified with mandrake-infused beer by the supreme god Ra:

Ra now realized that Hathor-Sekhmet would destroy the human race completely. Angry as he was he wished to rule mankind, not see it destroyed. There was only one way to stop Hathor-Sekhmet, he had to trick her. He ordered his attendants to brew seven thousand jars of beer and color it red using mandrakes and the blood of those who had been slain. In the morning Ra had his servants take the beer to the place where Hathor would viciously slaughter the remnant of mankind. Ra's servants poured the beer mixture on the fields. And so, Hathor-Sekhmet came to this place where the beer flooded the fields. Looking down, her gaze was caught by her own reflection, and it pleased her. She drank deeply of the beer, became drunk, fell asleep, and abandoned her blood thirsty quest. 

• This admixture of Egyptian festivities, Irish nationalism and Freemasonry might seem outrageous to some, but in fact it was part and parcel of Celtic culture before the rise of the Roman Church. Namely in the...

... religion of the Druids, as before said, was the same as the religion of the ancient Egyptians. The priests of Egypt were the professors and teachers of science, and were styled priests of Heliopolis, that is, of the City of the Sun. The Druids in Europe, who were the same order of men, have their name from the Teutonic or ancient German language; the German being anciently called Teutones. The word Druid signifies a wise man. In Persia they were called Magi, which signifies the same thing.

St. Patrick himself was believed to have driven the Druids of out of Ireland, but in fact druidry was merely incorporated into Celtic Christianity, which was distinct from other varieties and would remain so until forcibly changed on orders from Rome.

“The Celtic Church in Ireland and in Scotland owed its origin not to Rome, but to Egypt and the East; its customs, traditions, methods, government came from Egypt through Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary, Martin of Tours, Ninian, and through that religious channel, more than a little independent of Rome. The religious ideas of Egypt came to Scotland and Ireland and were absorbed easily into the tribal life of these countries.. There is no doubt that the Celtic Church owed its ritual, its architecture, its worship and its law to Syria, Egypt and Palestine, and that its allegiance to Rome was slight.”

• And it seems that the festival of the death of Osiris shares much in common with another holiday that the Irish brought to America:

This universal illumination of the houses on one night of the year suggests that the festival may have been a commemoration not merely of the dead Osiris but of the dead in general, in other words, that it may have been a night of All Souls. For it is a widespread belief that the souls of the dead revisit their old homes on one night of the year; and on that solemn occasion people prepare for the reception of the ghosts by laying out food for them to eat, and lighting lamps to guide them on their dark road from and to the grave. Herodotus, who briefly describes the festival, omits to mention its date, but we can determine it with some probability from other sources. Thus Plutarch tells us that Osiris was murdered on the seventeenth of the month Athyr, and that the Egyptians accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from the seventeenth of Athyr.

And what of the corned beef and cabbage? In late antiquity the Apis bull was identified with Osiris. The Apis bull would be sacrificed and eaten in ritual feasts. Cabbage is grown in the winter months in Egypt and was used to control intoxication at feasts.


So it's official: all of our modern holidays in America are simply covert repackagings of ancient pagan festivals and the increasingly popular St. Patrick's Day is no different.

The Church took the Bacchanalia away from the Irish and replaced it with a boring religious holiday and the old-school Freemasons used that to bring the Bacchanalia back, which we now understand traces back to Osiris. And Osiris brings us back to the ancient astronauts, which the later adaptations like Bacchus do not.

Welcome to the New Atlantis.

Lovecraft Revisited: Cthulhu, Crowley and Cosmic Fire

Peter Levenda has two new books out. One is a nonfiction work (Sekret Machines: Gods) attached to Tom DeLonge's Sekret Machines project. Gods attempts to put the ancient astronaut corpus of the past 50 years into an entirely new context, one explicitly connected to the mysterious cabal of high-ranking government, intelligence and military figures DeLonge claims to be working with. 

To what end exactly is still a very open question at this point.*  

I haven't finished Gods so I can't comment on it yet but what I've read feels more like The Secret Doctrine or the The Secret Teachings of All Ages than The 12th Planet or Passport to Magonia. 

Which is to say that so far it's more a primer on esoteric history with some UFOlogy sprinkled here and there for seasoning than a UFO book per se. So it would probably make a worthwhile addition to your library as a reference text, if nothing else. I'm not exactly sure how it all plays into the Sekret Machines concept per se but I suppose we'll find out soon enough; there are two more volumes planned in the series. 

Concurrently, Levenda released a fiction work called The Lovecraft Code (a reference to The DaVinci Code, I'm assuming) in which he posits a link between Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and the ritual magic of Aleister Crowley, among others. 

The rough concept here is that there is a real-world connection between the Cthulhu Mythos and The Book of the Law et al, an argument buttressed by synchronistic dates, names, etc, a connection inspired or driven by supernatural forces linking Crowley to Lovecraft.

It's a novel premise for, um, a novel. (I've not read the book so I can't comment on it past what I've heard Levenda discuss on podcasts).

It should be noted, however, that these parallels may not be entirely coincidental. Believe it or not, there's a common denominator between Lovecraft and Crowley and that's the always-looming spectre of British Intelligence.

Crowley is widely believed to have been working for the Crown during World War I at the very least (some claim he was recruited straight out of Cambridge) and for some time thereafter.  How extensive his involvement with spycraft was exactly is a favorite parlor game for occultists. 

Some argue he was a spy along and others say he was typically overstating his involvement to bolster his cyclopean ego. It's a toss-up, the way I see it.

Meanwhile,  back in the States...

Lovecraft was recruited by British Intelligence agent Harry Houdini to cowrite a story for Weird Tales two full years before "The Call of Cthulhu." They later collaborated on other projects as well. From the Wiki:

"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" became a popular story and was received favorably by Houdini. The escape artist was so impressed that, until his death, he continued offering the writer jobs and ghostwriting opportunities. Among them was an article criticizing astrology (for which he was paid $75 – approximately $1048 in present-day terms) and a book entitled The Cancer of Superstition, of which Lovecraft had completed an outline and some introductory pages prior to Houdini's 1926 death. To thank the author for his work, Houdini gave Lovecraft a signed copy of his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits. 

I doubt that this led to Lovecraft himself working as a spy (though there's reason to believe he may have worked as a courier, given his travels) but it's entirely possible that Houdini could have also hooked him up with some occult literature (like Book of the Law) as research for The Cancer of Superstition.

It's also certainly possible that one of the occultists Houdini could have introduced Lovecraft to was the Theosophical fruitcake Alice Bailey, founder of the Lucis Trust and widely seen as the godmother of the modern New Age movement.

A good argument could be made that Bailey was providing weekend seekers with a more acceptable variant on Crowleyism, a Crowley safe for suburban consumption. Both were well-born Britons who were drawn to the excitement of the occult renaissance, both claimed to be co-authors with supernatural beings, both were prolific writers (and publishers) of work many reasonable people find absolutely impenetrable, and both jumbled a whole mess of traditions and teachings from East and West and put their own unique spin on them.

And, of course, both have been fertile targets for conspiracy theorizing, especially in the past 40 years or so.

In one of the most-read posts on this site I proposed that H.P. Lovecraft drew heavily on the works of Theosophist Alice Bailey, particularly her 1922 book Initiation, Human and Solar, for his signature Cthulhu mythos.

I didn't expect this to be overly controversial- Lovecraft actually refers to Theosophy several times in the 'The Call of Cthulhu' and was known to have read Theosophical literature (specifically that of William Scott-Elliot). 

I laid out several points of similarity between Bailey's metaphysical meanderings and Lovecraft's fiction, including the names (Bailey is overly fond of this "One"and that "One" while naming her superbeings) natures and backstories of their respective star gods. They're all over the place if you only take the time to look:

Identical beings, identical names. But what about the exact nature of these beings? First Lovecraft: 

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape - for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that shape was not made of matter.  

Bailey:  (The Ancient of Days) came down to this dense physical planet and has remained with us ever since. Owing to the extreme purity of his nature…he was unable to take a dense physical body such as ours, and has to function in his etheric body. He is the greatest of all the Avatars, or Coming Ones. 

Lovecraft- like many other important artists- was a unapologetic collagist and proudly wore his influences on his sleeves. Most of them, at least.

Claiming Lovecraft was pillaging from Poe or Dunsany isn't remotely controversial but I guess suggesting that the hallowed Cthulhu mythos might have lifted ideas from the febrile hothouses of Theosophy is taking it a step too far. 

Never mind that Theosophy and other esoteric systems were constantly being ransacked by Lovecraft's pulp contemporaries for story ideas at the time.

More than the various parallels is the gestalt- Lovecraft seemed impressed by Bailey's swing- for-the-fences cosmology and may have figured it had potential for strip-mining for the mythos he was slowly fermenting in order to pull all the various horrors he'd been throwing at readers under one big umbrella.

It's hard to read Bailey's swivel-eyed cosmogonies and not see the lines of continuity with Lovecraft (it's hard to read Bailey, period). In spite of their obvious differences, both were creatures of the late Victorian Era, would-be aristocrats straining back towards mythical lost eras. Both were found of stilted, archaic language and both were fond of calling down impossibly ancient and powerful forces in their writing.

Initiation, Human and Solar is one interesting source for Lovecraft's pillaging but there's another Bailey word-salad that was released closer to the writing of The Call of Cthulhu that gives us more grist for the mythos mill.

A Treatise on Cosmic Fire is just as impenetrable and florid as Bailey's other works but it also contains her spin on 'The Book of Dzyan', a Theosophical concoction that posed as a kind of ersatz-Hindu creation myth.

I touched upon Bailey's Dzyan updates in the original Lovecraft post:

STANZA X 

They constructed other forms. They called for cosmic fire. The seven deep pits of hell belched forth the animating shades. The incoming seventh reduced to order all the forms,—the white, the dark, the red, and shaded brown. The period of destruction extended far on either hand. The work was sadly marred. The Chohans of the highest plane gazed in silence on the work. The Asuras and the Chaitans, the Sons of Cosmic Evil, and the Rishis of the darkest constellations, gathered their lesser hosts, the darkest spawn of hell. They darkened all the space.

This all sounds very Lovecraftian, doesn't it? Dark forces from the stars raising up demons who they then are unable to control. Very florid, very purple, very portentous. Compare that last sentence to this, from "Cthulhu": 

Void as they are of lordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer space can yet control them when they must...

Compare "ghouls and night-gaunts" to "animating shades," and "gazing in silence on the work" with "void as they of lordship." Two different ways of telling the same essential story. Amazingly, Bailey outshines even Lovecraft when it comes to the purple.

However there was a mention of Dzyan (most likely the Blavatsky material) in a letter Lovecraft wrote several years after the publication of 'Cthulhu' that seemed to complicate the issue of his sourcing ideas for his mythos from Bailey. 

I initially chalked this up to a writer withholding information to protect a source but there's a much more convincing explanation for the omission: the word "Dzyan" is apparently only mentioned twice in A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. 

And given the fact that Bailey hammers even the most attentive reader over the head with a blizzard of garbled terms and made-up names, Lovecraft can very easily be forgiven for overlooking it. At worst we're looking at a case of cryptomnesia.

Note also these parallels between Dzyan and "Cthulhu":

STANZA II 

"AUM," said the Mighty One, "let the waters too bring forth." The builders of the watery sphere, the denizens of moisture, produced the forms that move within the kingdom of Varuna. 

"AUM," said the Mighty One, and gathered in His Breath. The spark within the peopling third impelled to further growth. The builders of the lowest forms, manipulating densest maya, merged their production with the forms built by the watery ones.

Note Bailey's use of "Mighty One" and "watery ones." Now read Lovecraft telling a similar story of ancient cities below the farthest ocean depths:

 This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. 

And then there is the transformative dreaming associated with these beings. First Bailey:

One group is called the "Lotus Lords of deep unseeing sleep." They dream, and as Their dreams take form, the worlds speed on. The great and cruel maya of the planes of sweet illusion comes into being...

Then Lovecraft:

 Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams

Then there is the impossible antiquity of these beings. Note again Bailey's use of "Timeless Ones."

STANZA V 

The hour of sacrifice, the sacrifice of Flame, arrived, and for aeons hath endured. The timeless Ones entered into time.  

Then Lovecraft, picking up the baton:

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. 

 Then Bailey on the imprisonment in the deepest reaches of the earth:

STANZA VI  

Within the cavern dark the fourfold one groped for expansion and for further light. No light above, and all around the gloom enveloped. Pitchy the darkness that surrounded it.

Then in "Cthulhu": 

The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by.

Again Bailey- note "fourfold one": 

Around the fourfold one lieth the vault of stone; beneath him menaceth the root of blackness, of utter denseness; beside him and above, naught but the same is seen.

Lovecraft- note "Old Ones":

 Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died....

He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy...

Remember that Bailey predates Lovecraft here. And that Treatise on Cosmic Fire would be relatively fresh when Lovecraft was working on "Cthulhu", so the timeline most certainly jibes. I sincerely doubt that Lovecraft would have ever confessed to reading someone as disreputable as Bailey to one of his correspondents but the parallels most certainly speak for themselves. If someone can find a more compelling precedent for the mythos, I'm all ears.

As to Bailey's involvement with the Cryptocracy, well, that's a whole post in and of itself.



* It is worth noting that UFOs, ancient astronauts and all points in between are now classified under the umbrella term "the Phenomenon" in Sekret-speak. I've noticed the term is starting to bleed out in the community at large. Is this seeding the fields for some revelation to come? 

It's All Real. Now What?

There's a famous exchange in the recent Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens in which Han Solo announces to the young rebels Rey and Finn that the Force and the Jedi-- mystical concepts that had come to be seen as superstitious nonsense by most people-- were all real. That the legends about them were "all true." 

Han says "I thought it was all a bunch of mumbo-jumbo," but that, "the crazy thing is that it's true. All of it."

This is a great tagline for a popcorn movie, a rallying cry for all those real-life Jedi out there. But there's a flip side to the equation, maybe one that a lot of people might not factor in to their calculations.

Han's benediction can't help but remind me of a warning passed on by rocket scientist Ed Forman-- close friend and confidant to Jack Parsons-- to his daughter when she cracked open one of the magical texts Forman inherited from Parsons.

“It’s all real, it all works,” Forman said about Magic. “Don’t touch it. You’ll get yourself in real trouble."

Words to live by.

You see, if the Jedi and the Force are real so too are the Sith and the Dark Side. If the Aeons are real so too are the Archons. If angels are real so are demons.  

Consumer economics have conditioned we moderns to believe that we pick and choose among the endlessly-expanding menu of options and discard the bits we find problematic. But if you believe that Magic is a science- or even religion-- then you have to follow its rules.

Magic is like any other system, you can't go and randomly chuck out huge chunks of code and expect it to work properly. Look at how religions tend to collapse once they start trying to discard all the nasty bits of programming- the Devil, sin, punishment and the rest.

PRINCES AND PRINCIPALITIES

Magic, as we've come to understand it today, is based in no small part on Medieval grimoires, a good number of which are essentially handbooks for coaxing the princes, dukes and earls of Hell into doing your bidding. 

This all dates back to Babylon when Pazuzu- yes, that Pazuzu- was regarded by magicians in the Near East as a nasty but useful demon you could enlist in your wars against other demons. 

Babylonians had a lot of problems with demons.

Now I don't know about you but I don't see a "prince of Hell" as a pushover or a soft touch. I'm thinking they drive a hard bargain for their services. Whether you see demons as objectively real or as unconscious projections doesn't really matter once they figure out where your tender points lie.* 

HOT CAN BURN

Magic is "hot," or so they tell me, and the we're seeing the kind of curatorial custodianship applied to it that a generation raised on a libraries of data available with a mouse-click from birth apply to every single cultural epiphenomenon that bubbles to the surface. The scope and breadth of the ability to process and collate data once considered trivial or irrelevant can boggle the mind when viewed from a distance.  But where is it really going?

Interest in magic seems inevitable to a generation raised on Harry Potter and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, which made Magic so palpable and seductive,  but one has to wonder if this is just the latest ephemeral obsession-- like vinyl collecting or organized skepticism-- or something more durable?

The reason I ask is that I'm old enough to have lived through a couple of occult revivals now. I can't question the facility or intellectual firepower of a lot of people who've applied themselves to magic  (certainly not the people who've committed themselves to it), most of them are a lot smarter than me. 

But I do have serious reservations about the power of Magic itself. If you believe that it's real and that it works you have to understand that it's not something you can walk away from once you get tired of it. And Magic is something that's fucked up the lives of some of the best and the brightest the world has ever known. 

The history of Magic is like a Greek tragedy, a parade of incredible minds who paid a heavy price for trying to crash Olympus. John Dee is a good example. Paracelsus is another. More recently, we have Crowley and Parsons. All of these guys were brilliant polymaths and under different circumstances probably would be sitting in the history books next to the Newtons, Galileos and Einsteins. It didn't work out that way.

 A lot of otherwise brilliant magicians seemed to break or ignore a cardinal magical rule somewhere or other and end paying a steep price for it. You could add even John Keel and Robert Anton Wilson to the list if you want to grow the category a bit. 

I'm not trying to discourage interest in or involvement with Magic. I'm not trying to pretend that I could. What I'm saying is that I think it's a lot more powerful- and potentially destructive- than the fluff pieces in the lifestyle sections of mainstream media outlets would lead you to believe. Chalk it up to the power of suggestion if you prefer but the results will probably be the same.

I'm probably preaching to the converted here but it seems to be worth repeating nonetheless. If it's real and it's powerful than it can cut your fingers off, just like any power tool. And given how deep this new generation of curators have gotten with it, the potential for damage only grows.

There could be entirely materialistic explanations for Magic's reality; the power of suggestion again or the subtle and complex machinations of the Unconscious. But that doesn't make the effects any less real or potentially dangerous. 

Which is why I think anyone who takes Magic seriously is better off in the hands of an experienced practitioner, someone who knows where all the bodies are buried and the traps are laid (see note for humble suggestion).

I bring all this up because Magic- however you choose to define it- seems to pop its cheery little head up in times of chaos. And we seem to be tiptoeing on the edge of a volcano of chaos this country hasn't seen in a hundred and fifty years. Not just America but around the world as well. The conditions are rife.

And this chaos is being stoked and manipulated by all kinds of players on all points of all different spectrums; political, cultural, economic, etc. You may have noticed that the spy war I alluded to shortly after the 2016 election has gone mainstream now and we've been bombarded with all kinds of meme magic and agitprop ever since. 

I'm sure it will all end well.

Have you noticed how the one-two punch of Trump's "Obama spying" tweetstorm and Wikileak's Vault 7 CIA surveillance revelations seem to have knocked the extremely well-funded, extremely highly-coordinated and extremely well-aimed "Russia Hacking" media campaign down for the count?

You think that wasn't its own kind of magic spell? Think again.

NOT HOLDING

So Trickster magic is alive and well in Washington, apparently. If you look you'll see a new class of magicians out there, who are using very weird and highly-attuned sigil magic as weapons in this not-so-secret war we're seeing play out in the media.

So now what? Is the Trickster ascendant or is Chrononzon rising too?

Chaos magicians see the Dweller of the Abyss as a liberating force and I'm worried that a lot of others may too, even if they don't necessarily acknowledge Chrononzon by name. The world may look much the same in your daily life for the most part but you can just sense that spinning vortex at your periphery, can't you? 

Yeats prophesied a Center that no longer held and it's become de rigeur among the smart set to "rebel" against that Center. So much so that "rebelling" is now mainstream. But how do you rebel against a Center that no longer objectively exists? Is it a meaningful gesture or just an empty ritual of a fading past, when rebellion had actual consequences? 

Maybe we'll come to learn that a collective Center is as important to the body politic as your "center" is to your physical body. It will be too late by then, of course.

It's at times like these-- when faith is lost in the old certainties, or centers-- that Magic and the paranormal poke their heads up from the sand. When the gods break their contracts it seems there are always ambitious understudies willing to do a little business on the side.

The Greek Magical Papyri date back to a time when the Empire was collapsing and religious conflict was erupting into street battles all over major city centers. Mesopotamia was the venue for a never-ending struggle of nations and subsequently produced some of the most startling Magic history ever recorded (Babylonian religion and Babylonian magic are inseparable). The grimoires arose during the times of the Crusades, against the backdrop of an epic struggle between Christendom and Islam. 

The spiritual supermarket of New York's Burned-Over District can be traced back to the Great Disappointment, when everyone seemed to whip themselves up in anticipation of a Second Coming that never came. Similarly, the occult revival of the 19th Century took place under massive dislocation, human misery and uncertainty, despite a large-scale Christian revival.

With societal and economic pressures building everywhere you look it's inevitable that Magic is going to find a new audience. The question then becomes what is Magic, and are there new forms of it ready to emerge, and can it operate without belief in a supernatural agency. 

Meme Magic is certainly one, Chaos Magic is recent enough to still be considered new and of course there's Synchromysticism, which bridges the two, arguably.

THE PMA

But there's also that distinctly American Hermeticism (as Gordon White calls it) that stuck its neck out during the darkest days of the Depression and that's Positive Thinking.  Mitch Horowitz has written extensively on this, tracing it back to the New Thought movement of the late 19th Century. 

In fact I was reading some Napoleon Hill recently and was thunderstruck by its flat-out, no-apologies magical character. I mean, flat-out wishcraft. Hill was even known to traffic with spirits, that's how magically-oriented he was.  Positive Thinking and its tributaries get a bad rap in the New Age age but I still think there's some suitable power there. 

There's so much negative thinking in the air a little bit of positive might just be a nice corrective. I don't know about you but I sure could use a bit myself, maybe not as a staple but as a side dish. And it might be a damn sight healthier than cutting deals with demons.

NOTE: Gordon "Gandalf" White at Rune Soup is offering online courses at his site and already has a number of modules up for you to study. This isn't all just a long-winded ad for his services, just a humble recommendation of a place to go if you're looking for a serious teacher whom I implicitly trust.

* This is exactly my brief with Satanism. A lot of apologists want to excuse it all as harmless fun, and it probably is for the educated Bohos who toy around with the trappings. But its iconography and messaging have a habit of inspiring others to take all the death-and-sacrifice signaling not so much as a LARP and more as a license to kill.