Political Cursing
I have been getting a lot of questions about political magic, specifically about the use of curses and bindings against politicians. Mat Auryn asked 28 different practitioners, including me, about it and posted the results to his blog. Read our answers here: http://matauryn.com/hex-appeal/
Over the weekend several Strategerati wanted to share and discuss this proposed “Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him: February 24th Mass Ritual” on the group. I don’t allow political discussions in my course groups, but I did chime in with why I thought this spell was exactly the sort of toothless waste of energy that I spoke about in the Mat Auryn piece above.
As Spells go this one is SUPER LAME.
From the Sorcery perspective it suffers from all the classic failings.
- Weak personal link to target, something that is EXTRA important when effecting a famous person. If we view magic as an influence we weight it against other influences. The normal person has a certain amount of attention from the world, famous people have exponentially more, making the need for a solid and direct link to the target vital to the success of the operation. A picture will not due. There are plenty of people that have personal links to Donald Trump. I live in NJ have know 11 people that have done business with him personally in construction, 10 of which have been screwed by him over BTW….
- The intent is both vague and impossible to achieve. There is not a single person on earth who does “no harm To any human soul Nor any tree Animal Rock Stream or Sea.”
- The author claims that “The spell in this document was carefully crafted, in structure and language, to avoid psychic blowback and unintended consequences”. Really? How? It doesn’t seem to aknowlege that the target or targets, since this is apparently also aimed at the nearly 1/2 of the voters that cast their votes for him, have any guardians at all. The one thing that this spell might do is ping a response from the prayers of protection and retaliation that are said for him every day. A student of mine pointed out that when it comes to the Battle of Britain “people actually died doing that work, or suffered chronic health problems thereafter. Fortune and Crowley died within two years after the war ended. They were also trained practitioners doing coordinated work. The mention of defixionis as an example of this work is also out of place: Defixionis are kept Secret and Buried-You don’t announce that you’re doing them.“
If you are going to do this kind of work, get a good solid link. If you can’t get a link to him, then bring the spell or the casters somewhere that he will be. If you can’t do that effect the people around him with links you can get. Set something specific as your goal, something in small that you can hit and which would have a big impact. Protect yourself and be aware that there are protections in place to retaliate.
As a piece of activism it is equally lame, and should not be compared to the levitation of the pentagon: something people actually showed up live for, put their freedom on the line for, and has gone down as one of the great activist publicity stunts of all time. If you got groups of hundreds of people to do this together or place their orange candle stubs at trump tower on the same day then it MIGHT make the news. Though I can be harsh on activists at times in terms of policy or lack thereof, I have enormous respect for the ability to organize and have impact. This is not that.
As it is, this all the power to change policy or effect the president as a circle to “heal the earth” does to reverse climate change.
