Thinking about Magic

A new occult post looking at the basic inversion behind magic and how it relates to today's world of socio-cultural collapse. 

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Occult posts like this one - posts on the history and meaning of occult images - have their own menu page above. All  posts are in the archive on the right. 
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry.

Julian Bauer, The Sleeping Green - Öinen-Matkaaja (Nightly Traveler)

Been a while since a good old occult post. Lets jump in with a heavyweight topic in the world of the occult - one that opens onto the heart of beast system inversion itself.

What is magic? It's something that runs through a lot of Band posting. Religion, ancient history, the arts, the occult, fantasy - magic is different in each but turns up in all of them.

This is part of a much bigger project that we are just bringing into focus. We can't say much right now, but it has to do with seriously thinking through inversions around words, semiotics, and ontology. We're just getting started. But pieces of it will appear in different parts of the Band - we run different types of posts for different readers, but they are all connected. And magic is a huge part of this

The purpose of this post is to lay out some basic patterns and see why they are so important. "Magic" as a way of thinking runs even deeper than magic as a thing - but the speculative stuff happens elsewhere. Occult posts can get carried away sometimes, but the point of them is to be more direct and practical. Patterns and traps to look out for, concise historical summaries, common images - this applicability to everyday life is probably why the occult posts are our most popular. 

Start with a definition.

Here's Webster's. The second two are more figurative uses and don't really concern us. The first is what we're looking at. And while it is generally correct, it's too vague to do much more than start things off. 

Two things to hold on to - it involves processes or instruments and it exerts "unnatural" powers over natural things.

Look at an older definition - the 1828 online version of Webster's with some Band comments in color.

It's not completely the same but it reinforces the idea of systematic procedures or rules. Unnatural powers are here, as are natural powers unnaturally applied.

This is significant.

It is significant because it indicates something that has come up before in the occult posts - what you believe determines your opinions of the occult [click for a link].

The modern definition emphasizes the importance of supernatural elements - even if only apparent. The 1828 one allows for "natural" magic - the opposite of supernatural - in some cases. This is because people in 1828 believed differently than the consensus among  today's beast system materialists. They are open to the possibility of the Hermetic magus - the master of natural alchemical or astrological forces who applies them unnaturally to everyday reality.  

Illustration from The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, 1825

Definitions give us a place to start, but when the definition can change, look for the underlying patterns.

Expand by looking at different examples of magic in the areas where the Band has encountered them. 

We mentioned fantasy - the Band just finished a series of three posts on Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant so they're fresh. Magic is a centerpiece of the fantasy genre - how does it work here?

We are no more interested in the fantasy fan community than... 

...

...

... really anything. 

The juvenile tone in this piece is weird and off-putting. And the faux humility clashes with the notion that banal personal details are share-worthy. But it is the source of this graph that captures author Brandon Sanderson's classification of "magic systems". The sort of thing that is useful to writers without really getting at what magic is.

The ultimate example would be D&D - a really complicated system with many types of magic quantified down to the most minute level. It has to be to be playable. 

But no real metaphysical level foundation of where it comes from. It's just part of the game.

We'll stick to the Land rather than get lost in the topic of magic in fantasy and look for large patterns.

The word "magic" doesn't really get used in the Chronicles - the word "lore" refers to the ability to manipulate forces. But the end result is the same. Human activity that results in a power over nature not explicable by naturally-occurring means.

Base patterns. Lore covers a lot of effects from many places. But they're the same underneath. When Mhoram turns a wooden staff into a scythe of sunfire and mows down Foul's creatures by the hundreds, whether it's called "Kevin's Lore" or magic is irrelevant. There isn't a hidden blaster in his staff. And the only other people who could make it do the same thing would use the same lore.

Same with all Donaldson's magic - from the raver and his Stone to lighting a room with the high wood.

"Lore" is consistent with ideas of arcane knowledge that is part of the 1828 definition. Donaldson also includes a place where it is taught systematically - magic schooling is self-evidently necessary if it is a systematic knowledge base.

Observations

Lore / magic is the system of imposing will on reality directly. Mediated by the rules and requirements of the magic system. 

First, there are rules. In this case, Mhoram needs an implement, no matter how powerful he is. The "means" in definition 1. When his staff explodes, he is powerless before the raver. When the krill gives him a weapon that can handle his full might, the raver is killed.

Second, the inversion is built right into the foundation. 

Merry-Joseph Blondel, The Sun or the Fall of Icarus, 1819, mural, Musée du Louvre, Paris

The truth is that we are subject to reality. We are born into it, physically bound by it, die and all die in it. Therefore our desires and wills are bound by it as well. 

Not our imaginations - that's why fantasy is always popular. But in the actual world. We exert a degree of control over our circumstances, but there are hard limits. No matter how badly we want to to surpass these limits, we can't.

And if our desires are limited and constrained by the nature of our existence in material reality, magic is the reversal. 

The inversion.

Magical combat is question of whose ability to assert will over reality is stronger. With a rugged enough channel, Mhoram can bend reality harder than the raver and Stone can. When they push against each other, the weaker gives.  In some cases the difference is power is an innate limit rather than test of willpower. It still boils down to who had a greater capacity to impose desire over reality. 

Test this elsewhere. We're also looking at Renaissance paintings right now, and there's a lot of Renaissance in the occult posts. Does Renaissance magic share patterns with the Land's?

Hermes Trismegistos Teaching Ptolemy the World System, ca. 500–600. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,

Magic in the Renaissance is a lot bigger topic than magic in the Land, so look at the branch we spent a lot of time investigating - Hermeticism. It's a set of fake late antique writings credited to an imaginary sage.

This relief carving shows a common tactic in making up fake sages. Including real figures in the fake biography to add "credibility" and jack importance.

 

Renaissance Hermetic magic is still broad. It flows seamlessly into alchemy and speculative Freemasonry and has roots in the same humanism the timelines tell us begins the path to modernism. So we'll use it as a representative.

Hermeticism itself is based on the belief that ancient formulas can allow us to overcome our finite fallen natures and ascend in some way to realms of spirit. There are also more practical cantrips like animating statues - probably connected to statue use in Egyptian, Greek, and other ancient religions. In northern Europe it became the basis of alchemy.

Raphael Custos, Conjunction, 1633, in Steffan Michelspacher's Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia . . . [Cabala, The Mirror of Art and Nature in Alchemy], Augsburg, 1663, plate 3

It's all here - the secret knowledge and power over natural processes leading to cosmic awareness. It's not just that it's false, it's inherently impossible.

Renaissance magic and it's offshoot fit the same pattern. The will of the individual determines or alters the nature of the reality that the individual is objectively a part of. Physically and metaphysically. It just relies more on old books, mumbled incantations, and pointless mixing of liquids in expectation of things that won't happen. This is because it exists in the real world and not in fantasybooks. Any claim to perform feats like those in the Land would have quickly ended in embarrassment. 

A quick word on will. Starting with the Land and magical combat makes us think of will as force of will or will power. Who's will is stronger - Mhoram or the raver? But the verb "will" in 'do what thou wilt' - basic satanic inversion that will determines reality - doesn't have to be an act of intense effort. Think of the will in 'as you will' or a will and testament - it is just a choice, desire, or preference. it is willed.

This caption is blatantly and patently false. As much a lie as claiming to be able to teleport or time travel. The picture is true - in real life a cheap illusion or deception is the closest you'll come to changing your nature.

With magic, the goldfish becomes an actual shark because it wanted to. Magical thinking happens when we think magical process are materially real.

 

This general will over reality or 'do what thou wilt' is really just desire over reality. The insistence that what we want will be indulged regardless of the mounting costs. Personal and societal. In fact, modern society is failing because of the runaway pretense that falsehoods become true if people really, really wish for them.

Obviously, they don't. The only difference is if the consequences are borne right away or can be delayed for a while. Icarus vs. the civilizational abandonment of Logos. Keep in mind - the same boomers who declared 20th-century greed and magical thinking to be True! are still trying to rear-guard their crumbling empire of lies. Pretending you have a logos-built society while actively rejecting logos is brand new in historical terms. 

They're literally failing their preliminary tests tight now.

So Renaissance magic reinforces and elaborates the patterns we found in the Land. At the root is that old familiar pattern of satanic inversion (click for a POST) - of placing will over reality - that defines evil in general. 

Hermeticism is also full of rules. The whole malignant ball is based on mastery of arcane texts - often in obscure languages.  Spells, formulas and rituals must be just right. It's the intricate but useless minutiae that makes this kind of occultism gamma catnip. No one cares about it because it's not real, so anyone who masters any of it can claim secret knowledge of secret powers... So there's that. 

Goofy magic infrastructure as in Harry Potter is an unfortunate consequence of people writing "fantasy" that don't appreciate fantasy. 

Any real magic system would have been fully leveraged since discovery as the - or at least one of the - most important strategic human asset. It would be dominated by the most formidable practitioners and subsequent civilization would have developed around it.

 

Combat doesn't really apply to Renaissance magic since it's fake. A Paracelsian could have a slap fight with a Rosicrucian, but that's pretty much the opposite of magical.

One thing that does come up from our starting definitions is the role of spirits or other supernatural entities. The 1823 definition makes them out to be very important, while the newer one less so. If we look at historical magic, we can see a difference between manipulating impersonal "forces" and invoking creatures. The same holds in fantasy.

This corresponds to what we call the active and passive evils of the fallen world and its beast system.

Mages Guild Conjurer

Passive evil being the tendency towards death and entropy - moral and physical - in everything material.

Active evil being the Prince of this World - Satan or whatever he's called -and his demonic servants.

The counter-bleating argument would be that magic isn't necessarily evil. Which is why we laid out the satanic inversion first.

The Christian perspective is that it is all evil. One may attempt to treat with a demon directly or believe he or she is tapping into "natural" forces, but all are inversions of the order of Creation. There is a difference between magic and miracle - the second is a benevolent supernatural event caused by God. The rest comes from... elsewhere.

And there are no good elsewheres in Christian metaphysics. 

We can see distinction between magic and miracle in the Bible. We can go New or Old Testaments - Peter and Simon Magus make the same point as Moses and Pharaoh's magicians.

Both show the difference between God working though material agents - human ones in these cases. Their magicians opponents can interrupt and change normal processes of reality through their own devices to a point. But when they oppose God's will directly, the difference is clear.

Fall of Simon Magus, 12th century capital from the church of Saint-Lazare, Autun

The story of Simon Magus appears in Acts 8:9–24 with the longer account, including the fall in the apocryphal Acts of Peter [click for link to translation]

Note how the falling magician inverts the position of Peter with his key. And the devil who is the real cause of Simon's power.

Miracle looks like magic because it seems to break what we perceive as the natural order. But all Creation - including what we see as the natural order - is ontologically downstream from the Creator. Should God's hand appear directly to us, it is by definition "natural" You could say supernatural in the literal sense - as in more natural than natural - but that word has been corrupted to mean generic sorcery. 

The point is that the power is coming from Him and not the will or manipulations of the person. It's the same thing for a saintly miracle - a healing, or even a normal person gifted a vision. You can't command or impel it. You are a conduit. And nothing God wills can be contra the nature of reality because the nature of reality as we can apprehend it is merely a temporal extension of His incomprehensible-in-itself Will. 

Gustave Doré, Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh, 1866, engraving for the Bible.

Simon Magus fails the same test as Pharaoh's magicians in Exodus. Their presumably diabolical power can exert desire over the ordinary function of reality to a point. But when they collide with someone miraculously enacting God's will, it is no contest at all.

What general patterns or lessons from biblical magic? The usual - it's probably rule-based, and combat seems related to strength of will or knowledge but it doesn't natter because God blows it out. The big one though is that it is totally inverted in the satanic way of putting will or desire over reality. Either real or fake.

We do have the ability to physically manipulate material forces subject to material laws. And there is the old saying about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. 

Magnetism probably seemed magical when it first appeared. Likewise explosives.

But magnetism required a lodestone and eventually was explicable in a way that is at least repeatable and predictive. And it works for anyone - no lore or secrets required. Likewise explosives. Magical manipulations happen without or in spite of natural processes - from making an improbability a sure thing to changing the nature of reality itself.

So magic is a reality-manipulation that is not explicable technologically - "forces" are either generated within or manipulated directly by the mage by force of will. It's the projection of will - at some point in the process - that distinguishes the magical from the scientifically or mechanically marvelous. Fantasy and sci-fi. 

What reality there is to magical powers is coming from dark supernatural forces. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes-level powers of deduction to notice that morality doesn't correlate to success in the modern globalist system. And it's no secret that Satan is the will over reality archetype. It's all coming from the same place. Those not-good elsewheres...

But this hasn't stopped generations from fantasizing that somehow there is a special non-existent power that is benevolent or neutral they can access for power over reality. If there is one thing we've learned, something doesn't have to be real to be believed. 

Not being sorcerers, we can't say 100%. But we would say that the fantasy/delusion of self-generated mastery of reality - whether as simple as transmuting a mineral or as grand as divine ascent - sounds like the same crap lie about being your own god.

Sophia from Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer (Secret Figures of the Rosicrucians), manuscript, around 1760

Hermetic ascent with Gnostic flavor from a Rosicrucian manuscript. If you think about it, becoming god is the ultimate extremity of will over reality.

Basic inversion also explains the link between sexual perversion and magic. It goes back to the binary nature man as body and soul - fallen material and immortal spirit. That which draws us into the animal material draws away from God. Perverse carnality inverts propriety just as magic inverts metaphysics. They're comparable.

Whether or not the hypersexuality is "dark" or more ambivalent would appear to depend on how the writer or artist feels about the moral utility of hypersexuality. There's a reason why the fantasy community isn't a source of insight.

We'll end by tying back to a post on glamour - fake media illusionism that replaces reality in the minds of the beholders and becomes sort of real when they act it out as if it was. Of course it isn't - which is why the long-term predictions never come true. 

It's the flying car problem. Technological progress is material and constrained by the limits of the material world we inhabit. There's low-hanging fruit, a range of subsequent refinements, then a limit. 

Anything past that - cars running on cosmic rays or neutrinos, for example, or controlled matter-energy conversion - isn't the far end of a development continuum. It's beyond the limits of the potential of the technology that was used to make the projection.

So the West spent much of the 20th century believing in a fake endless Progress! that actually crapped out really quickly. Then the rest of it printing money to extend a simpleminded illusion that it hadn't. The point here is that the unreality didn't stop them from acting as if it was real.  And acting as if it's real doesn't stop the real consequences of it not being.

An underlying problem is prosperity. The 20th century West was so productive, so prosperous, that enormous numbers of individuals who can't sustain themselves flourish on collective largess. We are in a state now where the system no longer has the capacity to sustain the current degree of corruption and bloat.

Micro-homes and bug protein weren't part of the 20th-century Progress! package. Though obvious with a rudimentary understanding of infinite growth and finite spaces.

 

But the herd moronically chose self-fluffing magic over what's real and acted as if the infinite growth were possible. 

The glamour impelled the action, but the illusion was only possible with vast resources to squander.

It's a given that the dreams of Progress! were obviously false from a glance. Anyone studying physics knew that the internal combustion engine had a hard ceiling for starters, even if the infinite water in a finite bucket is a bridge too far for the average mindless consumer. Just compare relative generational living standards - like housing costs. Or entertainment quality. Or education. Public discourse. The arts. It goes on and on. 

The take-home message is that the same system that keeps promising improvements of one kind or another has presided over degeneration and cultural evacuation. So why have generations of people failed to recognize the slow decline and start taking the steps in their own lives to disconnect from the dancing lights and lies?

1. Glamour

The whole beast media globalist consumerism monstrosity is built on and transmits manufactured desire, atomization and cultural degradation. It's like the Matrix, or a huge collective enchantment. A glamour.

and 2. hedonism.

Aleksandr Nikolayev (Usto Mumin), Bacha bazi Dutar Player, 1924, oil on canvas

Despite al the high-minded proclamations, the various manifestations of "do what thou wilt" invariably come down to base appetites. Orifices. Pounding the "reward" button in the Skinner Box until health collapses, but on a civilizational level. 

The hedonism goes hand in hand with the prosperity. It's that cycle of empire that appears to be a consequence of human nature - build up, get fat, greedy and craven, fall into ruin. Because without the prosperity you can't afford the time for hedonism. The problem is that the hedonism makes dopamine triggers ends in themselves. And dopamine triggers alone dull with repetition. Chasing the dragon is a pattern that runs well beyond substance abuse. 

And if there's enough prosperity to go generations without a reset and there's no commitment to Logos as a counterweight,

this...

becomes this...

in the blink of an historical eye.

It's magic.

People fixate on their own weaknesses or vices when diagnosing "the main problem". It isn't drugs, or promiscuity, or porn, or fast fashion, or social media, or the divorce and abortion industries, or conspicuous consumption... It's all of it and more. It's replacing external moral standards and alignment with reality with dopamine. Like the rat at the button.

But the truth is that as all-pervasive as it is, even hedonism is a subset of do what you wilt. And it involves internalizing messages that reality imposes no constraints. That morality is controlling or prudish. And that the more dopamine you can generate, the more food, shelter, and energy are produced... oh wait. 

Reality does impose constraints. Like this amazing graph showing the correlation between the declining intelligence of officers and college enrolment bloat. 

When you change something, it no longer is what it was.

Doing what you want comes at a cost. Human nature is pleasure seeking, but it is also good at productively exploiting its environment. So why lotus eater into cultural suicide?

Because the glowing glass said we should.

Glamour.

Lying signs over reality.

But pretend for a moment that the lies were true. That will and wishes really could change reality. That checking boxes and handing out commendations moves bell curves hones skills. That everyone desires exactly the same outcomes because a dotard said they should. Would this be any different than spraying fire from a staff or turning rods into snakes? Those are instantly verifiable, but otherwise they're the same inverted process of putting representations before the things that they represent. Pretending that the symbols and words that we devise to feebly describe tiny portions of reality somehow make the reality that they feebly represent. That the painting creates the artist or that the train is laying the tracks. 

Let's finish with a definition. 

Magic inverts the priority relationship between 

representations and reality

And this lets us answer that increasingly-panicked civnat cry of what would be needed to "fix the system". It's easy.

Magic.

The Glamour of Fake Reality

For more posts on occult symbolism, click here. For an intro to the Band see the featured post to the right or check out the archive

Other links: The Band on Gab

The last few occult posts have been homing in on the psychedelic occult because it is a tightly-defined specific thing that connects to a lot of occult-friendly patterns in the modern West. We started very broadly and have been moving inwards - the last one was ready to get into some specifics. But something keeps coming up in the background that needs to be addressed. So many occult posts keep circling back to the same underlying issue - the pattern of de-moralization then inversion that replaced American culture with a mass-media phantasm that turned the values that built the society completely upside down. Click for a post on de-moralization.

Winslow Homer, Chestnutting, 1870, wood engraving, Brooklyn Museum

Nabisco Oreos ad, 1952

The more you look at how quickly and completely superficial materialism became the national culture, the harder it is to comprehend.









It is easy to identify. We can observe it historically, and live in its de-moralized aftermath. But there is no easy accounting for why the moral inversion was so quick and complete. The major issues aren't mysterious - unheroic materialist comfort, high-trust values, homogeneous culture, monolithic media, social optimism, etc. But how was it so fast and so all-pervasive? It resembles sorcery.

William Henry Margetson, "She was known to have studied magic while she was being brought up in the nunnery", from The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights, p. 104 by James Knowles, London 1914; Amanda Diaz, Glamour and Magic, photo
According to this definition, glamour derived from the medieval "grammar" which was associated with magic by the general public. In 18th century Scotland, there is 'a form of grammar, altered to glamer or glamour, that meant “a magic spell or enchantment. As glamour passed into more extended English usage, it came to mean “an elusive, mysteriously exciting attractiveness.”'


The modern concept of glamour is connected to the idea of casting an enchantment, or ensorcelling, to use a good Victorian word. Like a lot of occult imagery today it has been stripped of its supernatural dimension and redefined as psychological and/or emotional. But the effect - the fruits - are the same. Glamour makes you perceive the world as different from how it is and act in ways that you wouldn't otherwise. What changes are the reasons.

Edward Burne-Jones: The Beguiling of Merlin, 1874, oil on canvas, Lady Lever Art Gallery

The story of Merlin and Vivian is an archetypal example of magical glamour. She captivates him with her beauty, learns his art, then traps him in an enchanted prison. 

There are two versions of glamour here: the supernatural magic version is the enchantment that Vivian used to imprison Merlin. The story is clear that this is actual sorcery. The modern version is the way she entraps him in the first place. Her appearance and presentation captivate him in a way that makes her irresistible, even when he knows she is an enemy. 

Modern glamour is a captivation that blinds you to truth. Vivian was a beautiful young woman, so in her case it is a combination of physical allure, pleasant manner, and erotic fascination. The key is that your presence or "aura" distorts judgment through beguilement or misdirection - as if it were magic. 










They call it charm for a reason.

French adverstising card produced for Liebig Company's Fleisch-extract, 1867

It is related to illusionism - a big part of the Victorian occult craze. Glamour is a sort of illusion because it clouds your senses and makes you see reality as different from what it is. 






Glamour today is connected to fashion and Hollywood - places built on the idea of beguiling fascination. The Band is referring to the traditional ideas of fashion and entertainment - where the illusion was superficially appealing - and not the open embrace of degeneracy and ugliness that we see today. It's always been degenerate - we're talking about glamour, or surface appeal. What Tolkien called "fair-seeming".


Amanda Diaz is skilled fashion photographer who walks a line between glamour as style and its magical roots. The Band knows nothing about her beyond the obvious talent in her work and is not interested in looking deeper into this sort of wizardry. But this photo is a great illustration of the connection.

Amanda Diaz, Ashley, 2017, photo

It's all based on the play between attracting and withholding, revealing and concealing. A connection that demands more. 

The model looks pretty, but is so made up that her actual beauty is unknowable. Heavy coloring around the eyes and mouth draw attention to the most communicative, suggestive, and potentially erotic parts of the face like a highlighter, but the thickness of the make-up makes it impossible to read her expression. Is she guarded, angry, interested? Her neckline plunges but her pose is modest. Color contrast makes her appear to come forward towards you, but the pastel dress prevents the contrast from being too aggressive. Her face is dead center, and accentuated by the hair, which shimmers like glitter. The light washes the hair out in the middle so it doesn't overpower the face and adds a mystical dimension to an otherwise very sharp shot.  



Mass entertainment cloaked itself in glamour - it still does to an extent, but the culture is so degraded now that the illusion is unsustainable. The "glamour of Hollywood" made that cesspool seem appealing and enticed people to let it into their minds and homes. It is powerful because it is working on different levels at once. This lets you see through one while still remaining trapped in larger illusion.

There is the glamour presented in the movies themselves. This is what most people think of when they think of Hollywood illusion - fake scenes that look real, but because they're fiction they can carry whatever message you want. This is the principle way that entertainment media programs the masses. 

But this is surface level wizardry and easy to see through. The real glamour was deeper. 


















The real illusion is that media is reality. 

Big entertainment extended the glamour of the silver screen (!?) to real life with an illusion of spectacle. Sharp contrasts, selective lighting, big blurry crowds - something's happening! This matters! It's real.

The real spell was to extend the glamour to "the entertainment industry" itself. Not just to the spectacle but to the idea of mass media, to the point where each home had "reality" brokered by a small glowing screen.










Like hearing your whole life how the Kennedy-Nixon debate "changed" politics by grasping the rhetorical potential of television as if this was just a neutral, rational fact that no one sees a problem with. Like calculating the amount of carpet for a room. Now actually consider the claim on its own with objective eyes. Either:

A. The nation is so enchanted - the alternative is moronic - that they actually think it makes sense to choose the leader of the nation the height of the Cold War because he looked awkward under studio lights.

B. The story is nonsense and other factors were in play. 






The actual answer is that it doesn't matter. What matters is that everyone accepts the lie that whatever explanation the glowing screen offers up is reality, no matter how preposterous. The story is absurd, but storyteller after storyteller with offer reassurance and encouragement to ignore what you can see to be true or false and accept the narrative. Two layers of glamour - what it tells you and what it pretends to be.

One you can see - the rhetoric of t.v. determines elections. But you can only see it because of the other - the lie that what the glowing screen says is Truth. This internet slide is typical for presenting ensorcellment in a fake cathode illusion.

Make-up before the debate. 

Stage it differently and Nixon wins. But either way, whoever crafts the prettier picture rules your life. The glamour is that the t.v. can tell you that a man sweating on t.v. is a natural way to choose a president, and everyone just nods along. When you accept the deeper glamour, you make it effectively real by your own actions. 





It looks utterly retarded - the voluntary surrender to pure illusion in charting the course of the nation. But it helps explain how "everything" could change overnight.

And no one seemed to care. No one even seemed to notice. They were too busy chasing the fake success or cowering from the fake perils that the fake reality served up. Literally submitting, lollipop in hand, to the glamour.

Wheaties outdoor living sweepstakes, 1953

So what happens when everyone is in the Truman Show? For one thing, you can never really seek the truth because there in no path to consider any options outside of that the ones the media gives you. When you are entranced by shadows you don't look at the projector. If the media world is accepted as reality, it is your baseline for all further reflection. All your scenarios start with the options they give you - "none of the above" is never even entertained.

When you are trapped in an illusory game, you think the preset roles are the only options for you. Your opinions, reactions, and preconceptions are preset. 

It looks a bit like this:














If you accept media as reality, it can't be discredited, no matter how dishonest or depraved the message. Those are just "bad actors" - deviants acting out within the natural order of things and not signs that the dishonesty and depravity are inherent consequences of basing your society with a manipulative, globalist illusion that hates your culture and people.

The unholy trinity of mediation, demoralization, and inversion is much too pervasive to cover in a couple of blog posts - the Band is still unsure how a fake mediated illusion could replace reality so quickly and thoroughly. They had deep roots to be sure:

De-moralization goes back to the deist "Creator" in the Constitution and the "Enlightenment values" that American civic nationalism is built on.

Thomas Nast, Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner, Harper's Weekly, 20 November 1869

Inversion goes back to the beginning too. The fake civic nationalism of t.v. world inverts the Christian morality and empirical ingenuity - the real national culture - that built the prosperity that made mass media possible. 

But it's free!

New York Times, 11 November 1918

Centralized media as well. 

We the People had been conditioned to accept increasingly centralized and rhetorically-potent forms of media influence - newspapers, movies, radio - like this long-running globalist shill. But nothing with the ability to pipe a constant audio-visual fake reality in the home. Entertainment news, and interests, all reflecting the same de-moralized and inverted materialist values and carried by the most aggressive mass-marketing the public had ever been subjected to. 












The history can't explain the almost-universal acceptance of a fake, inverted, media-created materialist value system almost overnight. Not in the way that you can look at the background and see how immersion in a transparently unreal bubble of illusion to the point of social and moral self-immolation is the obvious next step. It really does look like like magic.

Mutual Life Insurance Ad, 1945; Oldsmobile Ad, 1953; Rich Plan Ad, Mercury Ad, 1957; America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies Ad, 1957; Profit makers on Parade, Coal Industry Ad, 1948

Ad Council Ad actively creating an association between the illusion of endless materialistic Progress! as the defining characteristic of the American nation.

The Advertising Council Inc. was formed by the major players in the advertising industry after World War Two to "maintain or advance a philanthropic image for both advertising and business. Its goal was to address ‘societal problems through influencing and informing public opinion’." By 1949, it was coordinating the national structure of advertising agencies and had dropped "over 500 advertisements in national magazines, newspaper supplements and business publications, 8,000 newspaper advertisements, 6,000 outdoor posters and messages carried by almost all the network radio programs resulting in more than 2 billion ‘listener impressions’."

The notion that anyone could conceive of this as either organic or reality is why it seems like a glamour. But it is free.







The Band is not arguing for a supernatural explanation. What we are looking for is a way to conceptualize a level of illusion and inversion that seems logically inexplicable at this point. Conceiving post-war culture as an enchantment better captures the power and speed of what happened than trying to explain it away with psychology.

Besides, priests in lab coats have told us magic isn't real, so there's nothing to fear. Glamour can be no more than a metaphor. And after all, dark sorcery of that magnitude would be incredibly costly. You'd need a blood sacrifice that's so big it isn't realistic to contemplate.

Jes Wihelm Schlaikjer,  See Here's Your Infantry, 1943 

Something to consider.


The best way to deal with deception on this scale is to look at specific instances then tie them back to the larger pattern. This way, the full scope of the glamour will come into view over time, and maybe even make more sense logically. The psychedelic occult is a specific instance. Psychedelia was a subset of a media-world illusion category called "social revolution that changed everything" or "the counterculture" from its creation myth as a youth-led rebellion against "mainstream" or "establishment" culture". The quotations are because these are nonsensical terms that only have meaning within the distorted fake world of media.

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967
Time Magazine, Sep. 22, 1967
George and Patty Harrison visit Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco Monday 7 August 1967 

The official narrative is that the 60s happened when enlightened Boomlings realized that their parents' culture was repressive, unfair, and stiflingly conformist -  as obsolete as slavery in an era of Progress!. Of course, the histories were written by the same deceivers that brought us the creation myth in the first place. 

The reality is that the rebellion was tolerated and even encouraged by institutions, marketed over the airwaves, and publicized through big entertainment.








There is often a kernel of truth in inversion. Postwar culture was soulless - the carcass of historic American culture re-imagined as self-obsessed materialism. But this wasn't really the trap.  The actual spell was to make people believe that their values and identity was what the media told them they were. To make them dependent on mass culture to set their moral compasses and lifestyle options. The specific options that you are given are irrelevant - the "current style" is illusory smoke that can change with the wind.

Think how quickly the world projected by mass culture flipped from the 50s to the 70s. This is only puzzling when you accept that they are determining your values. 

When everyone buys in though, they really do gain that power. It's like magic. 

























The real changes arose from the consequences of economics and centralized social policy - creeping socialism and cultural decay.  Realities that the glamours misdirect from. Those are things that have identifiable causes and clear solutions, were they presented openly and honestly. Better to have an enchanted population remembering t.v. shows and blathering on about 'how we were' or 'how everything changed' as if these were naturally occurring processes like self-absorbed hedonism leading to socio-cultural decay.

The way to make proceed into a fog of illusion is to move out from basic truths about what we can know and how we can know it. Moral reasoning - to consider empirical facts through moral principles. This keeps us aware of the different levels that knowledge operates on and keeps us from following tendrils of mist. 







The glamour - the general acceptance that a government-compliant and corporate-run media determines reality - intersects with a pattern that came up in the last occult post. What the Band as referred to as guilt vs. shame-based systems of values. We used these terms because they are relatively common, but they are terrible labels for moral perspectives. Guilt and shame create the impression that value systems are built around negatives, but these are really the consequences of immorality. The emotional penalty that you pay for wrongdoing. Breaking the rules makes you feel guilty in a guilt-based system and ashamed in a shame-based one. Neither should be the positive defining state because they assume failure. Actually follow the moral code and you feel neither.

Let's be positive and refer to them by where the incentive not to transgress comes from.

Paolo Veronese, Allegory of Virtue and Vice, around 1565, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection, New York

Internal or internally-motivated systems have guilt as the penalty. Christian moral codes - like American national values - are internally driven because they are built on an individual's personal choice to live according to logos. Only you know what you believe in your heart and whether you are telling the truth. 

This painting was a popular pre-modern theme and represented life as a personal choice between virtue and vice. Vice offers the lush life on the left, but Virtue is open, modest, and honest. Virtue and Vice are personifications here - they aren't meant to be read as real figures. The man is making his choice privately - the opinions of others is irrelevant. 

Andrey Mironov, The Conscience, 2015, oil on canvas

Under these conditions, immorality makes you feel guilt because you aren't living up to what you know to be right. You're failing a private covenant in a private relationship, and guilty feelings are supposed to motivate you to do better. But no one else can see this directly, and the presence of spectators is irrelevant. Only you know if you really are doing better, and whether the guilt is gone. 

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, oil on canvas, Tate Britain

Ideally, internal morality is consistent even though temptations change. Personal motivation means that your personal desire - how you want to live - is a constant standard no matter where you are. In reality power corrupts because human nature is highly corruptible, but the very possibility of corruption implies that there is a standard in the first place. Something even the corrupted can come back to...

America was a high-trust society because its traditional public morality was internally-directed Christianity. That is, the baseline world view and value set that the majority of Americans took for granted. Obviously national IQ was part of it, but other high-IQ cultures that are historically low-trust and show intelligence alone isn't sufficient. 

William Sidney Mount, Bargaining for a Horse, 1835, oil on canvas, New York Historical Society

You need internal morality for the pressure to be personally virtuous in dealing, adjudicating, teaching, governing, etc. There are always cheaters, but the normative assumption is that people are inclined to do right. 

Consistency.

Elizabeth Hunter, In Disgrace, 

External or externally-motivated moralities have shame as the penalty. What you feel is disgrace or humiliation in the eyes of others, rather than any personal guilt over what you have done. The incentive is to not get caught, not to avoid wrongdoing, because you only feel badly when someone sees you. 

Obviously these feelings aren't mutually exclusive - we can feel guilt and shame at the same time. The point is where the main internal driver of the moral system comes from. Inside or out? 

Scene in a New England town A.D. 1700, from The New Eclectic History of the United States by Mary Elsie Thalheimer, Cincinnati and New York, 1890


External systems base morality on conforming to external opinion, regardless of whether those beliefs were believed. Humiliation as a punishment relies on exposure, with shame compensating for the lack of internal guilt. 

You should be ashamed is something someone else tells you to feel. Obviously the relationship is different with children because they have to be taught values. The Band is referring to adult behavior - whether there is a developed internal moral direction or if the baseline assumption is transgress until you get caught. 

Mouthing the words, so to speak, or not inhaling. These people corrode a high-trust system by being untrustworthy - immoral for their own advantage - whenever possible.

Your personal desires can line up with external values, but they don't have to. There is no causal connection. When the rules don't match, the pressure is to ignore them. And when enough people do, morality becomes a hollow, hypocritical shell.






When the difference between internal and external morality meets the invasion of the home by the t.v., another big pattern comes up - the distinction between public and private life. Private life is one of the great benefits of advanced civilization. The freedom to be alone with your thoughts is  beneficial intellectually, creatively, and psychologically. It's a break from the formalities and pressures of society - an opportunity to put your feet up, to be unserious, or for quiet reflection. But an internally-directed person remains morally consistent.

Rudyard Kipling's study in the 17th century Bateman House in Sussex

If you are internally driven, a less self-conscious environment doesn't mean the basic values you desire to live by change.

The inexplicably creepy pool in the Vanderbilt's Biltmore Mansion and a Djurdjevic in the Podesta collection from an earlier post.

Private life for the externally-directed tends towards a second morality - what you have to do for appearances, and what you do when no one is watching. Guilt is you letting you down - there is nowhere to hide. Shame is letting others down - don't get caught and you're whistling a jig. 









Mass media society brought a fake, extenally-derived value system into the private space of the home. Turn the glowing screen on and there is no place for personal reflection outside the media delusion bubble.  Suddenly, all values are external and that external morality is set by media shills. At this level, it doesn't matter what particular fake value set is being pushed, but the mass conformist obedience that makes fake value sets possible at all.

And what are the value sets? We've spent a lot of time on materialism and secularism, but there is another strange value that has largely been forgotten in the 21st century, maybe because it was focused on the children. Or maybe because it seems so bizarre in hindsight, although this is all bizarre in hindsight.

Be Popular Don't Gossip - Good Manners school poster, 1959

Betty Cornell, Betty Cornell's Glamour Guide for Teens, Pocket Books, 1958

We're referring to popularity as a measure of personal worth. This is the extreme in external morality - your worth reduced to how liked you are. The problem is that popularity has no moral direction.






Popularity was a perfect fit for mass media culture, since this is a one-way form of communication. It can't do anything for or with you, and everyone gets the same program. The only way to measure success is to tot up sales or box office, or viewers, or whatever. Now consider how often the most popular is forgettable. Doesn't matter - in media bubble world, popularity is the value in itself - quality is irrelevant.

Mass media culture + popularity as a value = the outline of the counterculture.

Just a spontaneous, grass-roots youth movement...

How did "things" change so quickly? They weren't real, and the advantage of not being real is that you can appear however you want whenever you want. Even as opposites at the same time.








This is where we have to look at how the content of the glamour evolves. Once you've established the deception that media is reality, you can lead people with the illusion of choice between fake options. Up to now, the Band has been treating media-created mass monoculture and t.v. as more or less the same. This is because the impact of t.v. on society was critical for setting up an externally-driven public morality around materialism and popularity. But, counterculture values were introduced through another arm of the mass "entertainment" industry - music.

Theo van Doesburg, Composition VII (The Three Graces), oil on canvas, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis

The model is the historical avant-garde - the "radical" early 20th-century modernists who were set up as the edgy alternative to a stale fake "mainstream" art culture. There are long regular Band posts on the avant-garde if anyone is interested (click, click) - for this one all we need to see is the basic pattern. The official story is that they were freedom-fighters throwing off a repressive establishment that was out of touch with modern times. But they offered nothing in its place. 





The establishment was fake, but it was built on a de-moralized version of European traditions. The illusion seemed to have some connection to the people. All the avant-garde did was deliberately tear down the rules and standards of establishment art and society - society says art should be realistic, so we're ugly! Society needs social norms, so we're degenerate! Society is Christian, so we hate God!

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Aurora, 1881, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museum of Art; Jean Metzinger, 1906, La Dance (Bacchante), oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, Netherlands; Pablo Picasso, 1909-10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude), oil on canvas, Tate Modern, London
It was purely negative. Even the individual artists just did whatever they wanted - the only real connection between them was opposition to the mainstream. 


Sounds familiar.

The main difference between the avant-garde and the counterculture was the level it played out on. The avant-garde was a "high" culture assault that took place in the world of galleries, collectors, and critics. It had a huge impact on the 20th-century by destroying centuries-old traditions of Western culture, but the vast majority of people weren't really aware of it as it was happening.

Michael Crawford, "It's meaningless, lady, believe me-I painted it.", New Yorker cartoon, December 3, 2007

Other than the occasional cartoon poking fun at that wacky abstract art. These really only reinforce the idea that loving nonsense is how you show that you belong to the cultural elite. 

Woodstock movie poster, around 1970

The counterculture applied the same pattern to the vastly larger fake "pop" culture mainstream of postwar America. Instead of rippling out of the galleries of Europe, it was in the eyes and ears of everyone. 









To make a counterculture, you need a source of non-mainstream heroes to offer up as alternatives. The avant-garde had a network of galleries, critics and limitless globalist funding to create "movements" like Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. The 60s had the exploding music and fashion industries as incubators for an endless string of celebrities and scenes. The difference is that it is all playing out in a mass media constructed society that was unimaginable to the early 20th century modernist. The pattern looks like this:

Start with the glamour - mass-culture replaces reality with whatever illusion it claims is popular. It begins as a monoculture with no path to coherent morality, real history, or heroic achievement beyond popularity.

The monoculture splits

The glamour gives the illusion of rebellion - Prepackaged and identifiable with military precision by costume, music, and other markers. 

T.v continues to play the role of "mainstream" or "establishment" reality, while other centralized media - fashion, theater, fine arts, and especially music - invert, attack, and ridicule the fake establishment.

The relationship is symbiotic: the mainstream gives the counterculture a perpetual target that makes it seem edgy and exciting. The counterculture lets the mainstream milk "conservative" outrage by clucking about the immorality while making it edgy and exciting. Meanwhile establishment media normalizes counterculture values as a rear guard by working them into the fake reality in a "family-friendly" way. 

This really is an avant-garde/mainstream relationship - where the leading edge breaks "new ground" and pulls the establishment along with it. This lets the avant-garde pretend to be fighting for "freedom" and "progress" while engaging in cultural destruction. T.v and counterculture do the same thing, only in the glamour of mass monoculture. 






Put it together and it looks like this:

The Partridge Family is a really good illustration of this process. The show is about a single mother with a crappy haircut and a musical family that travels around in a bus with an unattached manager on whimsical adventures. Life appears wholesome - the implicit morality is high-trust, orderly mid-century American values, only without any of the substance that held them together. The message is that broken families and alternative lifestyles have no bearing on social norms, and that show business is a fun, friendly place where young people get the same valuable life lessons that families provide.

The colorful bus was based on Further - the psychedelic bus that Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters drove around the US spreading their gospel of music, drugs and hedonism. 

The Partridge Family just makes it fun and safe for kids to play along with.

See how it works? The counterculture gains rebellious credibility with dyscivic behavior that inverts the traditional and fake establishment American values. This makes it "cool".

The idea of rebellious cool becomes free-spiritedness to be marketed to the de-moralized masses. The inversion is normalized - the counterculture becomes something for kids to admire, and the establishment gets the fantasy that you can invert all your values and keep your high-performance society. 

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921, oil on canvas, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

The truth is usually in plain sight - the decoration is based on the art of Piet Mondrien, one of the avant-garde artists that had inverted and destroyed fine art. 



The whole fantasy was bullshit - cover for an industry built on perversion and exploitation and reassuring pre-programming for generation divorce.

'How can you criticize single moms? Didn't you watch The Partridge Family?!?

The pathology is boiling beneath the surface.

The Dead in 1969.

The reality of a counterculture touring roadshow was a lot different.











None of this was organic. The counterculture attacks traditional society as "outsiders", then the mainstream repackages the attack as the new normal. Rock and roll was a vehicle for moral inversion, but there is a limit to how influential it can become, since its appeal is based on its outsider status. The mainstream creates a "safe" version that looks "normal" but has switched in new values. The show ran for five years, and within a year of its first season was the center of a massive marketing and merchandising blitz by the standards of the time.

Susan Dey's Secrets on Boys, Beauty, & Popularity, Scholastic Books, 1972

David Cassidy was the designated "teen heartthrob" but Susan Dey had drew her share of attention. Here's some fine moral guidance for young boomers, direct from the cathode ray. 











Nothing about this is spontaneous. Media can't always predict what will be successful, but they have an idea, and they controlled all the options. In a glamour where everyone has to watch and there are only three channels, something will be the popular one. And if you doubt that, consider how quickly the whole phenomenon vanished. One of the main myths of the glamour is that popularity is driven by public opinion. In a top-down, centralized monoculture, the opposite is true.

The Byrds, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Simon and Garfunkel, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead

The counterculture had countless faces because it was fake - entertainment companies could sign, produce, and promote whatever they thought would catch some interest. Remember, it is a negative concept - the only common element is that they all reject the fake culture of their audience's parents. And the glamour was so powerful that many of that generation still are. 











One reason Boomers seem so detached from reality that they never grew up - they are still fighting a decades-old chimera that never even existed in the first place.

But at least the neighbors aren't talking...

This post was necessary to get to the point where the psychedelic occult can make sense to talk about. Over time, the media culture glamour grew deeper and more complicated - first setting up a fake mainstream, then spinning out any number of fake countercultures to lure the impressionable away from reality and drag society deeper into luciferian self-interest and materialism. The psychadelic movement is one of these fake countercultures. The next post will get into the acid tests and the Band's Grateful namesake.

Trips Festival Poster with Allen Ginsberg, The Merry Pranksters, Big Brother & The Holding Co., and The Grateful Dead, Longshoremen's Hall at Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, January 22, 1966.




They've got it coming.