Magic and the Imagination, Part 3: Against the Archons

People like being enchanted.

Rembrandt’s Faustus

In his magisterial De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533), the foundational text of early modern Western magic, Henry Cornelius Agrippa gives a definition of magic that is both concise and lacking in any kind of mystical special effects:

“Natural magic...is that which contemplates the powers of all natural and celestial things, and searching curiously into their sympathy, doth produce occult powers in nature into public view, so coupling inferior things as allurements to the gifts of superior things by their mutual application, that from thence arise wonderful miracles, not so much by art as by nature, to which art becomes an assistant whilst it works these things.”

Note the claim about working with nature, which places natural magic along the lines of medicine or physics; but, as we shall see, magic also touches upon psychology in ways every bit as practical as the applications in medicine and physics. For magic to be effected, however, a trained magician is necessary:

“For magicians, as the most curious searchers of nature, making use of those things which are prepared by nature, by applying active things to passive, produce oftentimes effects before the time ordained by nature, which the vulgar think miracles, which indeed are natural works, the prevention of the time only coming betwixt as if anyone should produce roses in the month of March, and ripe grapes, or sown beans, or make parsley to grow into a perfect plant within few hours, nay, and cause greater things, as clouds, rains, thunders, and animals of divers kinds, and very many transformations of things, many of which sort Roger Bacon boated that he did do by mere natural magic.”

Paracelsus, Agrippa’s exact contemporary, explains the medium by which this natural magic may work on human groups and individuals:

“The intention or imagination kindles the vegetative faculty as the fire kindles wood… Nowhere is it more powerful to fulfill its operations than in its own body where it exists and lives. So, in every body, nothing is more easily kindled than the vegetative soul, because it runs and walks by itself and is disposed for this very purpose… And the more this is impressed on me by my imagination and thought, the more quickly I run. Imagination is the motive-power of my running.” (My emphasis)

What Paracelsus here calls “the vegetative soul,” as we discussed last time in this series, is correlative to the astral and etheric bodies described by Rudolf Steiner and which are moved in subtle ways, for example, in how a teacher influences a student or (without getting too ahead of myself) is one of the mechanisms by which propaganda succeeds.

But the mechanism of the mechanism in this magical operation is love. Now I don’t necessarily mean only eros, as in the power of attraction, but also philia or friendship—and there also can be involved a bit of storge, the kind of love characterized by familial duty. In rhetoric, this happens through what we call pathos, or the emotional appeal; indeed, rhetoric, as the power of persuasion, can be thought of as a branch of magic: for what is persuasion but the subjection of another’s will by means of words and images? In the Fourth Ennead, Plotinus explains how this works:

“Because love is natural to men and the things that cause love have a force of attraction to one each other, there has come into existence the helpful power of a magical art of love, used by those who apply by contact to different people different magical substances designed to draw them together and with a love-force implanted in them; they join one soul to another, as if they were training together plants set at intervals. They use as well figures with power in them, and by putting themselves into the right postures they quietly bring powers upon themselves, since they are within one universe and work upon one universe.” (My emphasis)

When Plotinus refers to figures here, he means images as well as sounds—the tools of the poet, as we saw in part one, applied to magic. Éliphas Lévi puts it this way:

“We operate by our imagination on the imagination of others, by our sidereal body on theirs, by our organs on their organs, in such a way that, by sympathy, whether of inclination or obsession, we reciprocally possess one another, and identify ourselves with those upon whom we wish to act.”

Thus the subtle power of the Facebook “like” or the infamous Twitter/X heart. And at its heels, leashed in like hounds, slogans, gestures, and images crouch for employment: “Safe and Effective,” “Love Is Love,” “Build Back Better,” “The New Normal,” “Getting vaccinated is an act of love,” the rainbow, the mask, and every kind of flag. We are surrounded by magical operations. But since ours is ostensibly a secular and atheistic age, we deny or are oblivious to the sea of magical operations in which we flounder. And our obliviousness makes it all the easier for the magicians working these spells.

Did anyone possibly fall for this?

But why do we go along? Plotinus gives us the answer. “For it is in the irrational soul,” he writes, “not in the power of choice or in reason—which is charmed by music, and this kind of magic causes no surprise: people even like being enchanted.” Let me say that again, people even like being enchanted. Prove me wrong. As Ioan Couliano writes in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (invoking Giordano Bruno), everything and everyone is manipulable. Everyone. He continues:

“We see that the goal of Bruno’s magic is to enable a manipulator to control both individuals and crowds. Its fundamental presupposition is that a big tool for manipulation exists—Eros in the most general sense of the word: that which we love, from physical pleasure to things probably unsuspected, in passing, by wealth, power, etc…. Magic action occurs through indirect contact (virtualem et potentialem), through sounds and images which exert their power over the senses of sight and hearing.”

Couliano, writing in the early 1980s, understands the utility of such magical power as a tool of the nation state and easily imagines a day in which the police State will give way to the “magician State.” Fully recognizing the practical challenges of maintaining a magician State which controls its citizenry through magical manipulation he writes,

“The conclusion is ineluctable: it is that the magician State exhausts its intelligence in creating internal changes, showing itself incapable of working out a long-term magic to neutralize the hypnosis induced by the advancing cohorts of police. Yet the future seems to belong to it anyway, and the provisional victory of the police State would leave no doubt concerning the point: coercion by the law of force will have to yield to the subtle processes of magic, science of the past, of the present and of the future.”

Which describes the conditions under which we in the West have been living for the past few decades, and even more so over the past four years.

Indeed, it is my claim that the Archons running things have deliberately been using the methods described by Couliano and Bruno, by Plotinus and Lévi, in what can only be called the largest scale magical operation in human history. And the lockdowns of 2020-21 were not only ways to destroy small businesses, lives, and careers in the greatest migration of wealth from the bottom to the top of the socio-economic ladder but were tools in the mass hypnosis of millions if not billions of souls. They did this by increasing the levels of distress and anxiety in the souls of so many by a pointed program of slogans and soundbites (call them “spells,” if you will), and by stimulating the imagination through deft employment of eros, philia, and storge in their project of manipulation. That is, they weakened the etheric strength of populations in order to apply their manipulation via the love and hate aroused through a sophisticated campaign of images and slogans, through threats and promises of reward. It is so obvious.

Lévi identifies precisely the method by which this manipulation is effected:

“All enthusiasm propagated in a society by a series of communications and practices in common produces a magnetic current, and continues or increases the current. The action of the current is to carry away and often to exalt beyond measure persons who are impressionable and weak, nervous organisations, temperaments inclined to hysteria or hallucination. Such people become powerful vehicles of magical force and efficiently project the astral light in the direction of the current itself; opposition at such a time to the manifestations of the force is, to some extent, a struggle with fatality.”

The Archons and the individuals through whom and the channels by which they operate are not nice people. They do not love you. They are not trying to help you. They are not benefactors of humanity. Rather, they are, in Lévi’s words, “diseased souls.”

“Diseased souls have an evil breath, and vitiate their moral atmosphere—that is, they combine impure reflections with the astral light which permeates them, and establish unwholesome currents therein. We are often invaded, to our astonishment, in society by evil thoughts which would have seemed impossible, and are not aware that they are due to some morbid proximity. This secret is of high importance, for it leads to the opening of consciences, one of the most incontestable powers of magical art.”

And what they are doing can only be called “black magic.”

“Black magic is really only a graduated combination of sacrileges and murders designed for the permanent perversion of a human will and for the realisation in a living man of the hidden phantom of the demon. It is, therefore, properly speaking, the religion of the devil, the cultus of darkness, hatred of the good carried to the height of paroxysm; it is the incarnation of death and the persistent creation of hell.”

Of course, this magic did not work on everyone—but it worked on enough people to (almost) get the job done.

Plotinus offers the key to resisting the kind of enchantment being enacted by the Archons:

“Contemplation alone remains incapable of enchantment because no one who is self-directed is subject to enchantment: for he is one, and that which he contemplates is himself, and his reason is not deluded, but he makes what he ought and makes his own life and work.”

Paracelsus expands upon this:

“Imagination destroys imagination directed against us. It may happens that I am being killed by the imagination of another. Such an imagination, which should be fulfilled in me, should be diverted elsewhere, lest health and long life be taken from me thereby.”

So, one response is to strengthen the imagination though wholesome or life-giving images and thoughts. We can see how the magic proposed by Novalis and other of the Romantics would be of value here. But the other part of this protection against magic is piety. Again Paracelsus: “for piety is the principal and most consummate means of preservation against bad imagination which can possibly be devised.”

Goodness, then, is the ultimate white magic.

The powers of evil require mass hypnosis in order for their magic to work. And goodness can never be imparted by the State. Carl Jung, writing toward the end of the last grand-scale attempt at magical manipulation in 1945 offers this advice:

“If the whole is to change, the individual must change himself. Goodness is an individual gift and an individual acquisition. In the form of mass suggestion, it is mere intoxication, which has never yet been counted as a virtue. Goodness is acquired only by the individual as his own achievement. No masses can do it for him. But evil needs the masses for its genesis and continued existence.”

So there it is. You want to change the world? Then change yourself, strengthen your capacities of soul and fill it with imaginations of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Practice piety and caritas. This is where theurgy begins, and it’s precisely what the Archons don’t want. And I think we have an obligation to give it to them.

Definitely worth a watch.