Good & Bad Magic in Politics
John Michael Greer’s The King in Orange

2,210 words

John Michael Greer
The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2021

In his book The King in Orange, John Michael Greer provides a magical perspective on the 2016 and 2020 elections which is highly pertinent with the 2024 election approaching.

It should be noted that contrary to modern misconceptions of magic (and the eldritch cover art), Greer’s definition of magic is very practical. He defines it as the science and art of changing consciousness, whether in one oneself or in others. The political implications should be obvious.

That liberals have placed themselves under a spell is the single biggest takeaway from the book because it explains much of their seemingly erratic behavior, which allows us to better predict their future antics. Greer argues that magic is common in societies where there are stark differences between the privileged and unprivileged. The unprivileged use it either as a coping mechanism or as an act of desperation, because when they have little control over the surrounding physical world, it makes sense to turn to metaphysical solutions. Meanwhile, the overprivileged turn to magic as a method of hiding or justifying their privilege to both the underprivileged and themselves, while hiding, dismissing, denying, or denigrating the plight of the underprivileged.

This isn’t always the case, however. Magic was popular during the Renaissance, but seemingly had little to do with privilege. For example, Heinrich’s Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy had nothing to do with privilege aside from being in Latin and was thus accessible only by the elite, which was normal for the time. And although social inequality in the Renaissance was high, it was not all that different from that of the late medieval or baroque eras. By contrast, the popularity of magic during the interwar period seems to have been primarily the result of the First World War awakening latent occult forces and thrusting European man into a spiritual crisis.

Greer’s definition of magic and his analysis of how magic interacts with privilege perfectly describes the state of rich liberals from the salaried class, however. They are using every trick to justify their unjustifiable privilege while denigrating those of the wage-earning class — many of whom are Trump supporters — who dare to question it. While they are certainly trying to gaslight the underprivileged wage class, their number one target for manipulating consciousness is themselves.

Yes, this self-enchantment is self-destructive, but far less so than confronting reality would be, which would shatter their fragile egos. So-called “white fragility” has nothing on rich liberal fragility. Who needs incense and robes to work magic when the high priests of Curtis Yarvin’s cathedral lead the initiates into frenzied orthodoxy with magic incantations such as “racism = power + privilege,” “lived experience,” and “disparate impact”? Similarly, many of us can’t help but see COVID masks as magico-religious garments.

This explains a lot of seemingly inexplicable liberal behavior. As Greer points out, one of the magical techniques liberals employ is the “rescue game” in which the roles of persecutor, victim, and rescuer never change regardless of the facts. Liberals are perpetual rescuers diving in to save various victim groups from evil white men. It is irrelevant that these victims aren’t really hapless victims, and that it is actually affluent liberals who are oppressing the wage class, which is mostly white and conservative. The narrative cannot change, regardless of facts. This allows liberals to feel smug self-satisfaction rather than guilt as they enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense. It is also why they are so unlikeable and clueless about the fact they are despised, laying the blame on those who despise them.

The salaried liberal class also speaks of values instead of interests in order to obscure — both to themselves and others — their single-minded pursuit of their own interests. Greer observes that this began long before the current year with abolitionism in the 1800s, in which moral outrage was manufactured to justify the War of Secession so that greedy factory owners could exploit “freed” black laborers. Greer predicts and recommends a return to making politics purely about interests, which is what it has been for most of history. This would be a refreshing change, indeed. The more people talk about values and buzzwords such as “justice,” “human rights,” “democracy,” and other saccharine abstractions, the more they really mean power and self-interest. Some healthy cynicism while asking “So what’s in it for you?” would prevent a great deal of evil.

You can buy James J. O’Meara’s Mysticism After Modernism here.

If liberals are incapable of self-reflection due to self-enchantment, it means that they will only double down no matter what. As a result, we can expect more lawfare, political prisoners, censorship, inflation, immigration, and insufferable snobbery. It will be extremely painful for us in the short and medium term, but this same flaw has all but assured their own destruction in the long term.

Greer then contrasts the 2016 election with that of 2020, which can help us predict what will happen in 2024. Turning toward a more popular conception of magic, Greer documents there were several Right-wing occultists working on Trump’s behalf in 2016. They and others who were adjacent to them noticed several “synchronicities,” or apparent coincidences that arise due to the underlying interconnectedness of reality. For example, the anonymous message board 4chan assigns random strings of numbers to posts. A post predicting that Trump would win was assigned a mathematically improbable string of 7s. This was but one of many foretellings of Trump’s victory in 2016.

By 2020, however, the innocence and optimism that had characterized Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign had been replaced by a pervasive sense of dread. There were no favorable omens in that year. In 2024, the 2016 energy has returned, but it is devoid of innocence and optimism. Now it is about revenge. We shall have to see if there are esoteric indicators this time around (perhaps “Ausländer raus!” is our magic incantation), but all the exoteric signs are pointing toward a Trump victory.

This leads into another point: Those who practice magic well, and especially those of us on the Right, understand that there are forces which are bigger than us. Gods, archetypes, spirits, cycles within cycles, Spengler’s world feelings, astrological weather, and so on are all very real, but also difficult to comprehend. If to comprehend a thing is to identify with it, then we cannot even hope to comprehend these things unless we transcend our humanity — which is a difficult and dangerous endeavor, indeed. We can’t control such forces, either, and attempts to do so often lead to disastrous results.

I am willing to acknowledge that there are higher powers than me and that it is better to work with them than against them. I am as comfortable with spiritual hierarchy as with political hierarchy. But whether it is in magic or politics, the Left is vehemently opposed to hierarchy. Wiccan thots pretending to be witches even speak of “using” gods in magic; one would not even speak of “using” a plumber to fix a drain, because it is profoundly disrespectful to talk about anyone that way — let alone the gods.

This sense of entitlement is what drove the Left to break all the standard rules of magic in a fit of Trump Derangement Syndrome after he won. First, magic is supposed to have a single clear intention, but the Left started to include every intersectional and personal gripe in their workings.

Second, the Left’s “magical resistance” failed to follow the rule of secrecy. I can corroborate Greer’s rule which holds that magic works best when kept on a need-to-know basis, like military intelligence. This is because unbelievers can disrupt magical workings through their disbelief, thereby freezing it like one who has looked upon the face of Medusa — because workings that are known are easier to sabotage. The Left was nevertheless very public about their workings, in part because they were the result of emotional outbursts but also because of their desire for performative virtue-signaling.

Third, the Left’s magic was focused on harming Trump rather than helping Hillary. Another of Greer’s rules which I can also confirm is that magic that is intended to hurt tends to be less effective than magic intended to help, bolster, or strengthen. It can even backfire. Most look for a religious or moral explanation for this, but I prefer one which is purely mechanical and is mostly a subset of the first rule. Hurting people is inherently negative. It is to say “no” to someone or something. “No” is inherently ambiguous, because too many other options remain open. This is why in law courts prefer to give negative court orders that instruct people not to do things rather than to do things. Part of this is an aversion to anything suggestive of servitude, but it is also because negative orders grant a lot more freedom since only one option is removed, while all others remain open. For example, a restraining order that requires one to remain at least 100 feet away from another person’s place of residence still allows one to go everywhere else. This is great in law, but terrible in magic. By cursing Trump, the Left was saying “no” to Trump while being ambiguous about who or what they wanted instead. Were they saying “yes” to Hillary, Bernie Sanders, the dozen things on the liberal yard-sign catechism, or anything at all for that matter? In contrast, magic which aims to bolster people and things is inherently focused, because there is a clear idea of what is desired.

An additional reason why the Left’s magic failed to work is because there must typically be either an active identification with or else a “line of sympathy” between the operator and the target. “Love,” for all its sentimental connotations, is the word which comes closest to describing such a line of sympathy. It is naturally easier to establish a line of sympathy with someone you like, are similar to, or want to help rather than someone you despise, want to sabotage, or have difficulty identifying with. According to Julius Evola and the UR Group in Introduction to Magic, this is the true and hidden meaning behind Christ’s instruction in Matthew 5:44 to “love your enemies.” The Left could never identify with nor “love” Trump, however.

Greer makes a good point when he stresses that the chaos magicians of the Alt Right likewise became purely negative after Trump’s victory. They became more focused on trashing the Left than helping or guiding Trump. Greer sees this as contributing heavily to why both sides ultimately lost in 2020. I think this had a lot more to do with the fact that Trump was simply ineffective and that America had already died decades before, during the Civil Rights era, not to mention the fact that the election was stolen — but Greer’s correlation remains, and I suspect it has some merit. I would at least err on the side of caution.

You can buy Julius Evola’s East & West here.

There are a few places where I disagree with Greer, such as his acceptance of the official narrative of the Second World War and his rejection of race realism. But my point of strongest contention is with his analysis of Julius Evola as having been cold, allegedly because he was uncomfortable with his own weakness, which he then projected onto others. Greer’s broader discussion of projection is mostly correct and is spot on regarding the way in which the Left wallows in hate while denying it and projecting it onto the white wage class. We know the latter to be sorely lacking in racial identity, let alone hate.

But it is obvious that Greer is either a libertarian or adjacent to libertarianism, and is thus decidedly uncomfortable with Evola’s ideas. I, too, was once a libertarian and struggled to reconcile my former beliefs with the political implications that naturally flow from Evola’s metaphysics and historical worldview. But Evola’s teachings are real — not just in theory, but in operational practice. Out of all the metaphysics I have studied, Traditionalism and initiation are the most objective, to the point of being scientific. It is action and reaction, not speculation or sentiment. This — aside from a plebian greed for gold — is why it was so easy to disguise the spiritual teachings of alchemy as a natural science. Evola wasn’t cold and aloof because of a personal flaw, but rather because that is the nature of absolute reality. In fact, I doubt Greer has ever seriously read Evola if his reaction is to evaluate Evola and Traditionalism on a psychiatrist’s couch. Facts don’t care about feelings.

Interestingly, Greer predicts that a lot of the outdated liberal ideas cherished by the salaried class are going to be swept away in a return to the natural order, such as via the rise of interest-based politics in contrast to our present disingenuous, values-based politics, as already discussed. But Greer seems oblivious to the fact that some of the ideas that he cherishes, such as racial equality, may likewise be unnatural fads that will be dispassionately swept away by the forces of history. If today’s liberalism is swept away, there is no reason to expect that classical liberalism will somehow be exempt.

Despite some disagreements with Greer, I nevertheless strongly recommend reading The King in Orange, as its flaws do not detract from its magical and political insights.