Bruno and the Occult Attack of Politicians
Since Lord Dampnut’s ascension to the presidency there has been no shortage of witches, sorcerers, and enchanters working to try to bind, curse, or hex him. As a somewhat amusing side effect of this cultural phenomenon we’ve been able to see David Griffin of the Golden Dawn® wax like a tin-foil hat wearing kook decrying this evil and malignant magical warfare against our nation’s Holy King. The purpose of this essay is to lay out why these efforts aren’t really working. I’m putting this out there not to discourage your magical operations, but to make sure they are more effective.
The primary work I’ll be referring to in this discussion is “On Magic” (De Magia) by the great Renaissance thinker and magician, Giordano Bruno. In this work he details the conditions required for establishing the necessary magical bonds whereby a magician would be able to manipulate and control a spirit/spirit-embodied person.
The first two bonds are considered to be comprised of a type of “triple power” which demands the utmost attention before any of the other bonds can be considered. That is, the first two bonds are each composed of three elements a piece which make up their effectiveness as a bond and which must be attended to if any magical operation is to be successful (outside of luck or grace). Here are the first two:
1. The first bond which ties spirits together is general in character and is represented metaphorically by the three-headed Cerberus of Trivia, the doorkeeper of hell. This is the triple power which is needed by one who binds, i.e., by the magician: namely, physics, mathematics and metaphysics. The first is the base; the second is the scale; the third is the summit of the scale. The first explains active and passive principles in general; the second explains times, places and numbers; the third explains universal principles and causes. This is a triple cord which is difficult to break.
2. The second bond is also triple and is needed in the agent, in the action and in the thing on which the agent acts. It consists of faith or credibility, of invocations, of love and of strong emotions in the application of the active to the passive. The role of the soul is to produce changes in the body of the composite, and the role of the body is to change the soul materially. If these bondings do not happen, or especially if they are not present, then no amount of attention or motion or agitation will produce any results. For a magician is most fortunate if many believe in him, and if he commands great persuasion.
So in the first instance, the magician is expected to have an understanding of the nature of the thing being worked upon (physics), an understanding of the symbols being used to create that change (mathematics), and an understanding of the philosophical theories which by necessity must contain the first two (metaphysics), and these three are considered to be the first and most important of magical bonds.
I would venture to say that sorcerers working against the current administration by and large are probably a pretty savvy bunch, or at least sophisticated enough to understand at least one thread of this triple cord (i.e., the “mathematic”). There’s also a good number of magicians out there that have a decent understanding of the metaphysics of their given magical systems as well as the sets of correspondences which they use in any given magical operation. Where many may be lacking is in understanding the subject which they wish to change/affect, and this proves to be the lynchpin to the observable failures of the magical operations up to this point. Because unless all three of these cords are being put into use this most critical and primary of bonds will not take.
The second link in establishing the magical link extends its scope to not just the magician, but the magician, the target, and the operation being performed. Bruno says that the knowledge and understanding which is the core of the first bond is not sufficient in and of itself, but requires a real intense passion in the execution of the operation. In fact it requires a type of furore (a la Ficino) or Platonic mania in the magician to produce the necessary non-ordinary consciousness which will allow the magician to summon forth the necessary force for or against the target. What he doesn’t mention explicitly until later is that the potency of the invocation must be something that would also move the target to feel that they are a passive recipient of the force being invoked. Simply put, it doesn’t matter how passionate your petition is or how adroitly you handle your magical tools – if Lord Dampnut isn’t the type of guy who is impressed by or fears such actions, then your ministrations will not produce a strong magical bond.
Bruno says of this later on in the same work chapter on the bondings of spirits:
“For actions actually to occur in the world, three conditions are required: (1) an active power in the agent; (2) a passive power or disposition in a subject or patient, which is an aptitude in it not to resist or to render the action impossible (which reduces to one phrase, namely, the potency of matter); and (3) an appropriate application, which is subject to the circumstances of time, place and other conditions.”
So not only must you 1) know your magical system really well (#3), be super passionate and precise in your working of that system (#1), but the subject/target of your work must not be resistant to being affected by the system or its operator (#2). Obviously it’s in this last point that the process unravels.
Bruno continues:
“In the absence of these three conditions, all actions are, simply speaking, always blocked. For even if a flute player is perfect, he is blocked by a broken flute, and the application of the former to the latter is useless. Thus, a lack of power in the matter makes an agent impotent and an application unfitting. This is what was meant when we said that an absence of these three conditions, strictly speaking, always blocks an action.
“Closer examination may show that the defect is due to only two, or even only one, of these conditions. But a defect in any one of them should be understood as meaning a defect in all three, as when the flute player and his performance are perfect but the flute is defective, or when the player and the flute are perfect but the performance is interrupted. If the whole meaning of efficient action is taken to consist in the application, then the first condition merges with the third, for the agent is nothing other than the applicator, and to do something is nothing other than to apply something.”
To complicate matters Bruno throws out this interesting tidbit in his list of the types of magical bonds:
“7. The souls of men who are tyrants and rulers, and of those who have acquired some degree of fame and thus have become spirits.”
Now this could refer to the souls of these figures after they’ve died when they move from being a personality to becoming a principle – a kind of euhemerism where the minutia of the person is stripped away and the image becomes the receptacle and embodiment of specific values as in the case of patron saints.
Another, more sophisticated reading of this note may entail that the powerful and famous generate their own spirits of themselves which consist of their public image and the conceptions of themselves created and broadcast by the media. If this latter explanation is valid, then any magical work put against a media figure of some notoriety would affect possibly only the fame-generated spectre of the person and not the actual target. Only through continuous chipping away at the public persona would the source of that spirit begin to be affected.
In the case of the current example - their nature as a thin-skinned slave to their own media representation seemingly should assist media-savvy sorcerers in creating hexes which would damage the spirit proxy. This damage would then impact the host generating the spirit.
So what would a successful magical operation against this monster look like? The key here I think would be a two-fold coordination between those assaulting his public image (i.e., the spirit generated by it) and individuals working on the target directly. Both parties would have to be extremely well-trained, polished operators in order to dismantle such a juggernaut.
The first would tactically release imagery and stories meant to lure in those who have fallen under the spell of his spirit while also dismantling the spirit’s ability to rally those same people to it by showing the spirit and its host as undesirable, insane, impotent, and working against their ability to enjoy themselves. This has become increasingly difficult to do as audiences have become hypersensitive to absolutely anything that has a whiff of being oppositional to their Fearless Leader. When faced with reasonable questions concerning the spirit’s intentions its followers often respond simply by falling into a paroxysm of anger leveling accusations of unpatriotic behavior until the accuser has been shouted down. As a result these victims rally around a continuously fine-tuned stream of media from sources that provide them material which reinforces their position while also coordinating this spirit’s magical force thus amplifying the problem. Frighteningly, one of the only ways to dismantle the power of this spirit’s sway over its servants is to show it as being the thing that they hate and positing an even more insane alternative.
The second group of magicians would have to contend with finding and fixing those weak bonds discussed above. But who would turn a man like that into a passive recipient of the magical influence invoked by the magician? The answer, most likely, would be women. His love life has been very public and it would take no talent at all to figure out what his “type” is. A well-trained sorceress could then make him receptive to her charms (perhaps by feeding him her menstrual blood or powdered hair), receive personal effects from him by which to bind him, and be able to use these in conjunction with a burgeoning relationship with the target. Since the subject’s natal chart is available and well-known this sorceress would be able to calculate the name of his Wicked Spirit, create specialized invocations triggering his already poorly placed malefics, and/or calculate the Lot of Death or Misfortune to divine when certain actions would need to be executed.
( Donhole by Blacky)
The above scenarios are a description of the type of work that would most likely have to be done to magically bring down a man with that kind of power. Anything less would probably fail or only be successful as a stroke of luck or through grace. I still recommend that magicians continue to do the work they’re currently doing though. Not because I feel it will succeed in removing this monster from office, but because it accomplishes a continual regicide within the mind of the operator. There is one throne within the palace of the mind and it should either be filled by you or left conspicuously empty. Sic Semper Tyrannis.
