“The magician depends for…success…upon the spectator’s willingness to be deceived.”
— Jean-Eugen Robert-Houdin, preeminent 19th century stage magician
“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”
–Aleister Crowley, from Magick in Theory and Practice, 1930
“I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.”
–Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, 1987
Since Donald Trump first ran for U.S. President in 2016, more than 1,000 books have been written about him, making Trump the most discussed person of the 21st century and one of the most scrutinized public figures of all time. As a result, it’s quite difficult to find new things to say about him given the sheer volume of analysis that has already been done.
Nevertheless, Greymantle believes certain perspectives on Mr. Trump’s personality and character have been much less well-explored than others, and are vital to understanding both the man and the political movement that he has…let’s say ‘conjured’ into existence. Hence our title: ‘Lord of Illusions: Donald Trump as Master Magician’.
Therefore, in this fourth and final post covering the four major-party candidates for President and Vice President in the 2024 U.S. election, we are going to frame Donald Trump’s candidacy in an unusual way: as the performance of a master magician casting his spell on the country. As a magical event.
Magical, in the sense that Donald Trump resembles, more than anything else, an extraordinarily effective stage magician in the mold of Harry Houdini or David Copperfield. Trump also bears striking similarities to the ceremonial magician, poet and occult author, Aleister Crowley – an inspiration for many heavy metal rock musicians and the founder of Thelema, a sinister New Age religious faith – and other figures of the 20th century occult revival such as Idris Shah and Gerald Gardner.
THE MAGICIAN AND THE THREAD OF LIES
The thread connecting Mr. Trump to stage and ceremonial magicians alike is the important role that lies play in their respective art forms. Stage magicians, for their part, are honest about the fact that they employ illusions to deceive their audiences. They are ‘honest liars’ because a stage magician will tell you he is going to lie to you – trick you with illusions – before he actually does. The noted illusionist James Randi once described stage magic as the world’s ‘most honest profession’ for exactly that reason.
Ceremonial and ritual magicians, on the other hand, are more coy about which parts of their rituals are “real” and which are “for show”. If pressed, they will admit that their practices contain a fair amount of nonsense and fraud, but they will also insist that their rituals evoke real supernatural forces.
For the avowed skeptic and the believer alike, the ceremonial magician – the ‘spell caster’ — is an artful liar. To the skeptic, he is a fraud who swindles the unwary out of their hard-earned cash with the promise of achieving some desired end. For the religious and/or occult believer, the ritual magician is someone who exercises actual esoteric power by chanting untruths. Although the words he chants are lies, they are lies with the power to make things happen.
In this respect, the performances of stage and ritual magic are much like the performances conducted by demagogic political leaders. Their pronouncements might be false on their face, or contain vast exaggerations, but are likely to also contain a tiny grain of truth. And they are capable of producing real world effects on their audiences.
For both the stage and the occult magician, then – and also for the political demagogue – lies and illusions are the very essence of their art.
In his willingness to use lies and rumours to acquire power, Donald Trump has proven to be one of the greatest magicians of all time. Greater onstage than Harry Houdini, outstripping Aleister Crowley in the exercise of will, and greater even than Crowley’s follower L. Ron Hubbard in creating a cult of personality, Trump, in effect, occupies a unique place in the history of both politics and magic.
A BRIEF NOTE ON OUR SOURCE TEXTS
Much has been written about Mr. Trump as a demagogic figure, an extremist, a shatterer of social norms, and even as a so-called ‘Confidence Man‘ (the title of a 2022 biography of Trump by New York Times journalist, Maggie Haberman). Much less has been written about Trump from the esoteric angle. The most notable work in this regard is ‘Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump‘ by Gary Lachman, published in 2018. We highly recommend it to readers.
We aim to use Mr. Lachman’s excellent review of the relationship between Trump, the ‘alt-right’ and certain esoteric ideas embraced by Western far right groups as our ‘ur text’. In fact, this post may at times read like a book review of ‘Dark Star Rising‘ as we will quote from it repeatedly and at length.
Along with ‘Dark Star Rising’, we have also drawn upon Lachman’s biography of Aleister Crowley published in 2009 as a major source, along with ‘People of the Lie‘ by M. Scott Peck, M.D. and Haberman’s ‘Confidence Man’ for biographical background information.
A STORY OF MULTIPLE CORRESPONDENCES
Why are we talking about the relationship between Donald Trump and black magic on a current events website noted for making predictions (and highly accurate ones, at that) about election outcomes and economic trends? Can we seriously discuss these two subjects in the same breath?
The answer is ‘yes’, because the ‘Donald Trump and the Occult’ angle is rife with correspondences which, taken together, paint a suggestive picture of the place Trump occupies in Western cultural history, and offers the truest exegesis of his character.
But first, what do we mean by ‘correspondances’?
Simply this: there are overlapping patterns in Trump’s life and the lives of similar demagogues and magicians of the ‘false Messiah’ type identified by author Colin Wilson that reveal the workings of a deeply sinister personality type. This personality type operates in the shadowy esoteric realm, as well as in the highly visible realms of electoral politics, business, and the media.
Whether we are talking about Aleister Crowley or Benito Mussolini, the general patterns that reveal themselves are what interest us, not the specifics associated with a particular individual.
Is Greymantle suggesting the Donald Trump secretly practices black magic in his spare time, chanting spells and sacrificing goats? No – of course not. No more so than did Mussolini or Huey Long.
What we are arguing instead is that trafficking in monstrous falsehoods and conspiracy theories is an occult art all its own, and a powerful one. Lies and conspiracies serve a similar function in the public sphere as the practices of ritual magic do in the private sphere.
This is what we mean when we describe Donald Trump as a master magician.
THE POWER OF FALSEHOODS AND THE PRINCE OF LIES
That fact that a word or a story is a lie does not mean that it lacks power. Quite the contrary, lies can be powerful tools. They are among the mightiest weapons in the arsenals of fraudsters, tricksters and confidence men of every stripe, as well as those of political parties and nuclear-armed states.
In Jewish and Christian theology, Satan is described as “the Prince of Lies”, but is believed to be less powerful than Jehovah, the creator. The theology of these religions (and some others) includes the belief, and ultimate faith, that truth will someday overpower lies, just as Jehovah will ultimately vanquish and destroy his arch-enemy, Satan.
But we’re not there yet. We’re living in the ‘between times’, or the ‘Middle Ages’ as the leaders of the Catholic Church once described the age between the resurrection of Christ and the coming apocalypse (the phrase ‘Middle Ages’ is now used to refer to the feudal period in Western Europe).
For the faithful Catholic, the ‘Middle Ages’ never ended because we still live in a fallen world. In the world as we know it, Satan holds sway as ‘the Lord of This World’. Liars and con men prosper, because a fallen human race has little affinity for truth, and is easily seduced by illusions and false promises.
In his 1983 book, ‘People of the Lie‘, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, in addition to describing the behaviors and mentalities of evil people he encountered in his work as a psychotherapist, made this insightful pronouncement about the nature of Satan, regardless of whether he exists as a kind of cosmic metaphor for evil or as an actual evil spirit: ‘The Devil is a real spirit of unreality‘.
In other words, there is something inherently paradoxical about the nature of evil. Evil is both real and unreal, true and untrue. Noted author J.R.R. Tolkien once came to a similar conclusion, stating that evil is ‘both a presence and an absence’. In Peck’s opinion, lying and dishonesty are integral to any correct understanding of evil.
TRUMP AND CROWLEY: A LIST OF CORRESPONDENCES
To hone in on the similarities between Donald Trump and British arch-occultist, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), who often went by the moniker ‘The Great Beast, 666’, let’s start with a brief list of their corresponding behavior patterns, character traits and habits of living.
- Crowley and Trump were both sons of successful businessmen who took a direct role in their upbringing and impressed on them the need to win at all costs. Their relationships with their fathers were complex, and each have been described by biographers as ‘love/hate’ relationships.
- Each demonstrated signs of extreme egotism at an early age and were frequently in trouble with schoolteachers and other authority figures.
- Each authored numerous books. Crowley wrote his own whereas Trump employed ghostwriters.
- Both were obsessed with garnering attention and publicity. Neither believed in ‘bad publicity’ and both believed it was better to be known for being infamous than not to be known at all.
- Both hired press agents and public relations experts to promote their interests.
- Each centered their self-belief on the professed power of their own will. Crowley sought to harness his will to achieve worldly success by engaging in magical rituals. Trump uses the media, the Internet and publicity to generate interest in his business ventures.
- Both sought out, learned from, and ultimately betrayed powerful and influential older mentors. Crowley’s mentor was A.E. Waite of the occult society The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Trump’s mentor was famed attorney Roy Cohn, a noted New York political fixer who associated with the heads of several mafia families. The correspondence is obvious: secret societies.
- Both were obsessed with sexual conquest and domination. The historical record on Crowley speaks to hundreds of lovers of both sexes. Trump’s tastes are more heterosexual in nature, but his personal history is filled with dozens of discarded lovers.
- Both had/have a preoccupation with authoritarianism and respect hierarchy over equality.
- Crowley was sued for libel and fraud several times in this life, was accused of being a confidence man who took financial advantage of his followers, and entered into bankruptcy proceedings on several occasions, most notably for his failed magazine, Equinox, in 1911. Trump has also been sued many times and has engaged in literally thousands of lawsuits. Several of Trump’s business ventures have entered bankruptcy, most notably the Taj Mahal Casino and Resort in 2009.
Now, let’s take a look at a sampling of quotes from the two men to see how they correspond.
“I am inclined to think that my greatest pleasure is in making a fool of the world and creating scandal by printing rubbish.” — Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 1923
“Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.” — Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, 1987
“Compassion is the vice of kings. Stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong; this is our law and the joy of the world.”
–Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law, Chapt. 2, Verse 31, 1911
“Xi Xinping (the President of Communist China) is a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy. whether you like it or not.”
–Donald Trump on the ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast, October 24, 2024
Clearly, both Crowley and Trump are great believers in using exaggeration and publicity as a means to manipulate the public, both to achieve their desired ends and ‘just for kicks’; meaning, for the sheer pleasure of manipulating the public.
On a second note, it’s clear that Crowley and Trump share another overarching trait: a fascination with authoritarianism. Donald Trump has showered public complements on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even offered posthumous praise for the late dictators of Libya and Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein . Trump has also complimented a number of right-wing militias and the adherents of the online conspiracy theory, ‘QAnon‘.
During the First World War, Crowley left the United Kingdom for New York City to escape harsh wartime food rationing and also, it seems, to avoid several lawsuits brought against him by defrauded investors. During his stint in America, Crowley wrote pro-German propaganda for the monthly German news magazine, The Fatherland, which was bankrolled by the Imperial German government. In doing so, Crowley acted as a traitor to his own home country, England, and demonstrated his infatuation with both an enemy nation and its authoritarian political regime.
In the early 1920s, Crowley purchased a property on the Italian island of Sicily, which he turned into the headquarters of his Satanic Thelema movement – the Abbey of Cefalu. Part of what attracted Crowley to Italy were the authoritarian pretensions of its then-dictator, Benito Mussolini, who had recently come to power through the ‘March on Rome’ in 1922. Crowley praised Mussolini on several occasions, until the Italian dictator tired of Crowley’s many public scandals and evicted Crowley and his followers.
Crowley’s attitudes about the elites and the masses did not change after his rough treatment at the hands of Mussolini. He continued to revere absolute rulers who asserted their will over their followers until their followers gave them total loyalty.
“There is a beast in man that should be exercised, not exorcised.”
–Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 1930
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
–Donald Trump, Campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, 2016
TRUMP AMONG THE DEMAGOGUES
“Demagogue: A leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.”
— The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of the English language, 2003
“Mankind needs a credo. Faith moves mountains because it gives us the illusion that mountains move. This illusion is perhaps the only real thing in life.”
–Benito Mussolini, 1912
“I’m going to build a wall along the U.S-Mexico border to keep out all the illegal immigrants and drugs that are pouring into our country, and Mexico is going to pay for it.”
— Donald Trump, May 25, 2016
If Donald Trump has proved nothing else since entering the political arena in 2015, it is that he can stand with the very greatest of history’s demagogues. A list of such men would include the aforementioned Benito Mussolini, Roman dictators Julius Caesar and Cola di Rienzo, Louisiana governor Huey Long, Alabama governor George Wallace, Russian populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former Argentine first couple Juan and Evita Peron, and last, but perhaps most controversially, German strongman Adolf Hitler.
It’s not a list that most people would be proud to be placed on, and Trump has certainly taken exception to being compared to Hitler and Mussolini. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, Donald Trump has spoken admiringly of various dictatorial figures, citing their supposed ‘strength’ and ‘toughness’ by which most people take him to mean ‘ruthlessness’.
Greymantle is not particularly interested in comparing Trump’s belief system – to the extent he has ever articulated a defined set of beliefs – with those of the eight men and one woman listed above. We are primarily concerned with a similarity in style between Trump and these figures.
THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POPULISM
Huey Long and George Wallace, both governors of U.S. states in the ‘Deep South’, were notable for their use of scapegoating and defiant language to rile up audiences.
Huey Long’s main target was Louisiana’s political elite, made up mostly of wealthy men or men whom they controlled, who Long accused of fleecing taxpayers and providing substandard services in return. In this, Long was not wholly wrong. Nevertheless, Huey Long built a successful populist movement based on an ‘us versus them’ paradigm, an approach very similar to Trump’s.
If Huey Long blamed elites for everything wrong with Louisiana, George Wallace focused his ire and scapegoating on Black Americans primarily, and on ‘liberals’ and the federal government as well. Wallace’s core rhetorical device was to set ‘the government’ against ‘the people’ and to claim that the extension of civil rights to Black Americans would ‘destroy the country’. Wallace was wont to instill fear and resentment in his followers, casting them and himself as victims of malign outside forces.
Even as they built political movements focused on an ‘us versus them’ paradigm, Long and Wallace were did not typically traffic in massive, outright falsehoods. Their views were a reflection of their opinions, but they never claimed that the sinking of the Titanic or the Moon Landing did not happen. They trafficked in populist views — not conspiracy theories. There is an important distinction here.
This was also true of Juan and Evita Peron, and for the most part, Mussolini. Only a small subset of demagogues relies heavily, or even primarily on conspiracies in their quest to acquire power. However, in Greymantle’s view, this type of demagogue is quite possibly the most dangerous because their success hinges on distorting the nature of reality in order to serve their ends.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND THE DISTORTION OF REALITY
In contrast to Juan Peron and Huey Long, Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and German dictator Adolf Hitler all focused heavily on promoting conspiratorial ideas in an attempt – quite successful in the cases of Hitler and Khomeini – to alter the nature of reality, or at least what their followers understood to be reality.
Zhirinovsky variously claimed that meteor showers were U.S. weapons tests, that Russia possessed a weapon that could sink the U.S. beneath the Atlantic, and that Russia could eliminate the Baltic States by installing large fans at the Russian border and blowing radioactive waste into Estonia. This list is merely a tiny sampling of Zhirinovsky’s fantastical statements over the years.
Hitler rose to power by assiduously promoting the ‘Stab in the Back Theory‘ or ‘Dolschstoslegende’ during the 1920s and 30s. This was claim that Germany had been poised to win the First World War in 1918, but was defeated by ‘enemy within’ consisting of Social Democrats and Communists who betrayed German troops at their supposed moment of victory by fomenting a revolution at home.
In point of fact, not a single reputable historian (and very few Germans now) believe this tale, which has been comprehensively debunked and was contrary to the facts on the battlefield in late 1918. In fact, German troops had been defeated in multiple engagements in the summer of 1918 and were slowly retreating across the entire Western front by October 1918.
Nevertheless, many Germans in the 1920s came to believe in this lie because it comforted them. They embraced it because it was easier, emotionally, to believe that the nation had been betrayed by internal enemies than to concede that Germany had been defeated militarily. Suffering the humiliation of defeat after making terrible sacrifices, many Germans wanted to wish their way out of their unhappiness. Hitler sold them a tale which they wanted to hear.
Hitler also blamed Germany’s economic woes and the Great Depression on Jewish financiers and communist agents, and claimed that the Soviet Union was controlled by Jews. He promoted the debunked political tract ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ – a Tsarist era secret police document – as a supposedly reputable book, poisoning the minds of many Germans against their Jewish fellows.
CONSPIRACIES AND THE TIES THAT BIND
Like Hitler and Zhirinovsky, Trump has promoted a variety of conspiracy theories and theorists, ranging from QAnon to those of 9/11 conspiracist Laura Loomer, to far-right media personality Alex Jones as part of his political movement and at his rallies. Trump’s surrogates, including Tucker Carlson, have also promoted the ‘Great Replacement Theory’, the story that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and other fringe conspiratorial ideas on various social media platforms.
Trump’s most-repeated conspiracy theory is that Joe Biden cheated him out of the 2020 election by committing a massive voter fraud. Biden apparently pulled off this logistically complicated, multi-state scheme despite the fact that, in Trump’s description, Biden is a senile old dotard and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, is a mentally challenged dimwit incapable of uttering a coherent sentence.
There is no single conspiracy theory that Trump favors among the rest. Rather, it appears that conspiracy theories are another tool in an arsenal of tall tales used to frighten, outrage, and confuse his supporters.
Perhaps he believes some or all of these conspiracy theories, or perhaps he believes none of them. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that he uses them as psychological tools with which to bind his followers more closely to him. By distorting their view of reality, Trump leads his MAGA faithful ever more deeply into an ‘alternative reality’ the contours and content of which he controls.
‘IF THE MIND CAN IMAGINE IT, THEN THE WILL CAN MAKE IT REAL’
What could inspire a New York City real estate developer to embrace such a strange and magical approach to building a movement to upend the existing U.S. political order?
Some authors, such as Maggie Haberman, have theorized that an unhappy childhood under the boot of a cold-hearted and demanding father figure led Trump to develop an intense need for public approval to counterbalance the constant stream of ‘you’re not good enough’ criticism he got at home.
Other critics have theorized that Trump is secretly an actual fascist or neo-Nazi sympathizer, or even an agent of the Russian government.
Greymantle views the first theory as only a partial, and a highly over-psychologized, explanation, and is doubtful of the second, given the widespread debunking of the 2016 Steele dossier stories, and a relative lack of hard evidence from prior to his first 2016 presidential campaign that Trump had any concrete connections with figures in the American far-right.
Greymantle believes that a more convincing explanation for Trump’s magical approach to politics is provided by Gary Lachman in his impressive 2018 book ‘Dark Star Rising‘ referenced above. In Lachman’s telling – which dovetails nicely with the biographical details in ‘Confidence Man‘ and Trump’s own public statements concerning his youth – it was Donald Trump’s immersion in ‘New Thought’ during his formative years that forged his ‘mind over matter’ mentality.
New Thought is a broad term that refers to a body of thought originating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that instructs its adherents to always ‘put mind over matter’. As such, it is a practical philosophy focused on how individuals can meet their worldly needs and achieve their wants and dreams in this life, not in some hazy afterlife.
New Thought’s central credo is, ‘if the mind can imagine it, then the will can make it real’. In this respect, the core belief of New Thought corresponds closely to various ancient and modern magical practices. Lachman was astute to realize this connection, as have several other authors, including Mitch Horowitz.
IT ALL BEGAN AT MARBLE COLLEGIATE CHURCH
When he was growing up in the 1950s, Donald Trump and his family were members of the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Donald’s father, Fred Trump, Sr., joined the church in the late 1930s during the last days of the Great Depression because he was impressed with Marble Collegiate Church’s pastor, Norman Vincent Peale. Peale coined the phrase, “the power of positive thinking”.
Greymantle will again quote at length from Lachman to give the gist of Peale’s influence on Trump:
‘Trump’s mentor in positive thinking was the man who coined the phrase. In 1952, Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking appeared and became a success, making its author a wealthy man. Peale read earlier New Thought writers and absorbed their fundamental insight, that the mind can influence reality directly or, as its most basic formula has it, “thoughts are causative”.
Peale took this idea, and as the historian of New Thought Mitch Horowitz put it, “reprocessed mind-power teachings through scriptural language and lessons”. According to Peale, one could achieve both material and spiritual success in life – he believed that contrary to much ancient wisdom the two are not mutually exclusive – and thinking positively was the way to do it.
Peale played a large role in Trump’s life. His parents attended Peale’s services on New York’s Fifth Avenue and Trump himself was a familiar face among the parishioners for more than 50 years. Trump later admitted that after hearing one of (Peale’s) sermons he “could have sat there for another hour”.
What did Peale speak of? Mainly about success, in the world of the spirit, yes, but in the material one even more. As Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family, said in a podcast, Trump’s obsession with winning may be rooted in the kind of this-worldly advice he absorbed at Peale’s sermons.’
Lachman is clearly onto something when he identifies the underlying magical structure to Trump’s thoughts and behavior, and the correspondences between the ‘positive thinking’ emblematic of New Thought and the much darker occult currents embraced by the far right.
NEW THOUGHT, CHAOS MAGICK, AND THE ALT-RIGHT
Lachman’s key contribution to the ongoing debate about the connection between Donald Trump and the far right has been to identify the myriad linkages between New Thought, modern occult practices such a Chaos Magic (or Magick), and the practices of select far-right political groups.
The big ball of twine into which these various dispersed threads came together is the Internet, and very specifically the message board known as 4chan.
As Lachman writes:
‘Soon into its existence 4chan became a kind of breeding ground for a form of pop nihilism characteristic of postmodernism, although the ‘teenagers living in their parents’ basements’ – as 4chan users describe themselves – most likely never heard of postmodernism. Millennial ‘whateverism’ slid into a peevish sour irony, a kind of personal ‘plausible deniability’ aimed at at everything at large. It was a kind of cyber Fight Club scenario with a shred ethos “to hate, to deny, to shrug, to laugh at everything as a joke”.’
In this respect, 4chaners were similar to the practitioners of the ‘Chaos Magick’ form of occultism first pioneered in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. In a break with earlier forms of 20th century occultism, the adepts who practiced Chaos Magick indulged in irony, disrespect, and transgression for the sake of transgression in an attempt to ‘break the existing forms of thought” in order to “make coincidences happen and take control of their destinies”.
As Lachman writers further in Dark Star Rising:
‘(The) 4chaners had reach and, estranged from the “real” world or not, they found they could affect it. First they infiltrated other sites and caused havoc, simply because they could. These “raids” soon grew more ambitious. In time, the interphase between the “fake” world and the “real” one, between joke and seriousness, looked wide open.
Meme magic describes what happens when events in cyberspace have an effect on the real world. This is a techno-updated take on the old magical belief that what happens in the imagination can have real consequences. ‘Thoughts are things’. According to meme magicians, internet memes are, too.
4chan users began to notice odd synchronicities between the bits and pieces of pop culture they posted about on the ‘net and events in the real world. They called this “synchromysticism”. The popular meme known as Pepe the Frog got into this act when a 4chaner posted an image of him looking over the U.S.-Mexican border. Trump got the cue and tweeted an image of Pepe as himself. The meme took hold.
Images of Pepe and Trump began to flood the Internet with members of the alt-right and 4chaners spreading the meme. Pepe became the unofficial mascot of the alt-right movement, with Trump the charismatic leader they were all rooting for.
But if all Pepe amounted to was an amphibious postmodern swastika, a “symbol of hate” as (Hilary) Clinton had said, he would be annoying…but what if he was something more? Some 4chaners and alt-rights thought he was – or wanted others to think so.’
THE TROUBLE WITH EGREGORES
Lachman continues in this vein:
‘In esoteric tradition there is something known as an egregore, a Greek term for “watcher”. It is a kind of thought form or imaginal entity created, and fed by, the devotion of a group of followers. The prayers, thoughts, and imagination of the followers create a kind of psychic being…that is kept alive and is helped to grow through their attentions.
The egregor’s power can then be used to advance the aims and purposes of this group.
But as Valentin Tomberg, author of the Meditations on the Tarot remarks, there are no “good” egregores, only “negative” ones. And the egregore’s help comes at a price. As the historian Jocelyn Godwin remarks, the egregors’ creators…soon become obliged meet its unlimited appetite for future devotion. Once brought into existence, an egregore is much harder to put down than it is to raise up.’
The viral nature of the Internet, particularly various social media sites that include Facebook, Threads, X, Telegram and dozens of message boards such as 4chan and Reddit, are conducive to the rapid spread of simple ideas that are attractive to various demographics of people. These can be small, niche demographics, or much larger groups, such as millions-strong members of political parties or organized religions with a global reach.
Given the nature of the Internet and Trump’s active use of social media platforms such as Twitter (now called X) and his own company, Truth Social, once Pepe the Frog and other memes associated with Trump and his movement spread, they quickly took hold in the minds and imaginations of constant Internet users. The iPhone has kept millions (billions!) of people online for many hours each day since it was first rolled out in 2007. This has aided the rise of Trump.
Whether it is the charisma of Trump himself, all by himself, or whether some strange actual egregor has come into existence through the collective imagination of Trump and his millions of followers, it’s clear that Trump has amassed huge popular appeal that has stayed with him even after his first term as U.S. President ended in chaos and violence, and the myth of a stolen election.
Mr. Trump currently stands about a 50-50 chance of winning the November 5, 2024 election, in spite of numerous scandals and outrages, and the fact that an estimated 60% of Americans did not want Trump to run for the office of the presidency again. But here we are. Even Greymantle is stumped!
HOW IT ALL BEGAN, AND HOW IT ENDS
In Greymantle’s view, Donald Trump isn’t some closet crypto-Nazi. He grew up in the Borough of Queens, New York, the part of New York City made famous by the Mets, the mob, and the fictional character of Archie Bunker from the TV sitcom, ‘All in the Family‘. He has all of the attitudes of Archie Bunker – most white residents of Queens in the mid-20th century did.
Nevertheless, Trump did grow up under the tutelage of an authoritarian father who had far-right sympathies. Fred Trump reportedly had admiration for the conspiracist John Birch Society that was popular on the American fringe right in the 1950s and 1960s. The Birchers were conspiratorial and virulently anti-communist, but were not Nazis. Fred Trump reportedly contributed financially to them.
In 1952, a broad group of Republican-affiliated hard-right organizations and personalities, Rev. Peale among them, supported the campaign of General Douglas MacArthur for U.S. President. MacArthur failed to win the nomination at the 1952 Republican Convention, however. That honor fell to his former brother in arms, General Dwight Eisenhower, one of Greymantle’s heroes.
Peale and his associates were much put out by MacArthur’s losing to Eisenhower, and were even more perturbed when Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy won the Democratic nomination for U.S. President in 1960. Peale was one of several of prominent Protestant preachers who claimed publicly that Kennedy would be “an agent of the Pope in the White House”. Later, Peale supported Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful campaign for U.S. President in 1964.
Growing up in this milieu, Donald Trump must have felt continuously disappointed with the direction of the country. For someone for whom winning is everything, backing one loser after another in politics must have felt like a metaphysical injustice as tall as Mount Rushmore. Deeply suppressed disappointment and disbelief can do a number on a person. When that same person becomes otherwise wildly successful, there must be a strong urge to counteract the underlying stress.
In Greymantle’s view, all of Trump’s decisions to play footsie with, and at times embrace, far right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers stem from a need to win at all costs founded on insecurity and an upbringing which stressed that “winning is the only thing” as Vince Lombardi might have said.
Greymantle doesn’t doubt that Trump has a lot of prejudices, but views his quickening descent into dark rhetoric and sinister promises of revenge against his political opponents as evidence of collapsing self-control, rather than a master plan thought out in advance. Nevertheless, Trump’s inner circle and the authors of Project 2025 are planning something big after the inauguration, should Trump win.
Magic is a powerful thing. There are reasons why many cultures have feared to invoke it.
Looking at how America has changed over the last nine years since Donald Trump became involved in politics, I see a country that is losing its grip on reality. Much of that stems from the Internet and the ubiquity of smartphones and the amount of time Americans spend online.
Some of it is doubtless due to the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. But a lot of it is down to Mr. Trump and the conspiracy theories that he has invented, spread or otherwise promoted in order to advance his political and emotional interests.
As the ancients were known to say about egregors and other numinous spirits, ‘Don’t raise up what you can’t put down’.
Until next time, I remain —
Greymantle
