Hi there – Carolyn Elliott, editor and founder of WITCH here.
I generally don’t go in for internet conspiracy theories – stuff along the lines of “this mass shooting was a false flag!” or “Beyonce is controlled by the Illuminati!”
… for the simple reason that most conspiracy theories reveal themselves to be wildly immature by imagining that evil resides only in a nefarious handful of puppet-masters pulling strings in a hidden high tower somewhere.
As if we’d all be living in a glorious utopia were it not for a coterie of a few hundred reptilian overlords.
I think these conspiracy theories fail as plausible constructs of reality because they avoid the stark fact that evil and ignorance of all flavors are very widespread human attributes, and that we are all, everyone last one of us, implicated in and responsible for the world’s ills.
We are all reptilians, so to speak. None of us over the age of 18 are innocent victims in the sweep of history.
But there is one central “conspiracy” that I believe it is very, very, very worth discussing.
And that is: the Conspiracy Against Magic.
Now, admittedly, calling it a Conspiracy may be unfair – since I still don’t believe there’s a handful of Illuminati reptilian Zion government agents plotting to suppress magic.
However, I do believe that there is a rather simple thing called greed that rules the hearts of many ordinary people all over the world, and that this greed has sparked an effort to suppress Magic in order to keep a large majority of people disempowered.
Also, there’s an amazing benefit to understanding the Conspiracy Against Magic:
Once you understand it, you can never be hoodwinked by it again.
Once you can’t be hoodwinked by the Conspiracy Against Magic, you can’t be shamed out of owning your own power by the forces of dogmatic scientific materialism.
Once you can’t be shamed out of owning your own power by the forces of dogmatic scientific materialism, you’re a force of nature capable of causing major impact on the world around you.
So let’s get down to brass tacks. Here are 5 Keys to Understanding the Conspiracy Against Magic.
1. Governments and corporations relentlessly use the tools of Magic (symbols, mantras, ritual) to control people’s actions.
The Nike swoosh. The Apple apple. The perky Google “G.”These logos are what magicians call sigils. They are symbols of power, charged again and again with attention and energy via advertising.
Also: The Pledge of Allegiance. The Star-Spangled banner. These are mantras, spells, also symbols and invocations of power, charged with emotional ooomph at every ball game, fireworks display, and start of the school day. The point of these symbols?
To get us to invest our money and our time and our emotional energy in the Organization – the corporation, the government. To motivate us to hand over our cash, our privacy, our military sympathy.
To be honest, there’s not much that distinguishes governments and corporations these days.
And what do you call sigils and spells used to control the actions of others without regard to those persons’ well-being?
You call that black magic.
Black magic is alive and well, it doesn’t need Game of Thrones or Harry Potter-style villains in capes to perpetrate it. Black magic doesn’t need babies sacrificed on upside-down pentacles.
Black magic doesn’t need any “occult” trappings at all to work perfectly. It just needs symbol, emotion, attention used without regard to the well-being of the people that these symbols affect.
In order for the existing governments and corporations to remain in power, it’s important that they have an exclusive understanding of how symbols and art (think of the emotional music and imagery used in U.S. Army commercials shown on the big screen before Hollywood movies in America) function to guide people’s actions and decisions.
Hence, it’s important that governments and corporations go to long lengths to affirm that magic does not exist, it’s a childish, primitive, stupid fantasy.
If governments and corporations can get you to believe that magic is fake and non-existent, then they can render you an easy mark for their own magic – a mark incapable of defending herself, ripe for the picking.
And this, my friends, is how we arrived at a point in history where a vast wealth disparity exists (bigger than the wealth disparity between the Egyptian pharaohs and their slaves), where basic health care is a luxury, where young people are squeezed into immense debt just to get an education, where alienation so deep it sparks mass shootings prevails.
2. Currency is a spell
All currency – from the American dollar to the gold standard to cryptocurrency like Bitcoin – is only worth anything because a substantial amount of people believe it is worth something.
Anything that depends on a density of shared belief for its effectiveness is a spell, an enchantment. Think of it this way: An acorn does not depend on our shared belief in order to grow.
A mutual fund, however, certainly does.
Dollar bills and piles of gold and strings of code don’t have inherent value. They don’t provide nutrients, like food. They don’t heal, like medicine. They don’t do anything but symbolize value.
And currency can only symbolize value when a significant group of people mutually agrees to believe that value is symbolized and exchangeable via that currency.
In other words, if tomorrow we all stopped believing that dollars and gold coins and Bitcoin represented value, those currencies would lose their value.
The shared game would end. Maybe a new shared game would start based on bartering cabbages. Who knows. The point is, currency is only as real as our belief in it.
Currency as we know it is the most amazing practical spell ever cast in the world. The Sumerian magicians who initiated it knew exactly what they were doing.
Again, in order for the efficacy of the spell that is modern currency to stay strong, it’s important that the vast majority of people be magically defenseless and clueless.
The best way to keep people magically defenseless and clueless is to assure them that science (the great religion of our age) has proven that magic is bullshit.
3. Scientific materialism is a fundamentalist religion
What happens when you venture outside the orthodox tenets of a fundamentalist religion?
You are ostracized, attacked, ridiculed as sinful or insane.
This is exactly what happens to scholars and scientists who venture outside the orthodox tenets of scientific materialism.
Take a look at what’s happened to Rupert Sheldrake, the well-honored Oxford-educated biologist who dared to propose a non-materialist stance on plant evolution — he’s had multiple assassination attempts and not long ago his TED-X talk was taken down because it strayed too far from the orthodox tenets of materialism.
“Scientific materialism” isn’t identical with science. Actual science has an open, exploratory, experimental view point.
“Scientific materialism” however, is not so open. It’s the dogmatic belief that only what can be measured and quantified exists, and anything else is eye-roll worthy sheer nonsense.
You know, nonsense like the human soul, or the existence of divinity.
4. The Conspiracy Against Magic is Identical with the Conspiracy Against the Feminine
Feminine wisdom just knows the answers. When you’re operating from feminine wisdom you can’t “show your work” like your algebra teacher always demanded that you do.
Why? Well, it’s hard to say exactly, but there’s an operation of intuition, of truths bubbling up from invisible depths, dew drops caught in glistening webs of wild connections.
The kind of wisdom that comes from an image in a dream, or the shape of some tea leaves, or the quirk of a tarot spread.
The kind of wisdom that just knows how to form a whole human baby from some blood and water and scraps of DNA and protein.
If one wants to keep the feminine locked down and under control, it’s important to insult and mock and cast doubt and aspersions on feminine ways of spontaneously knowing.
It’s important to make people believe that the feminine strengths in themselves can’t be trusted and aren’t worth much.
The more you can do this, the more you can succeed in alienating people of all genders from their souls and their own ability to create their fate.
And the more you can alienate people from their souls, the easier it is to get them to buy junk and obediently pay taxes and participate in the regular media-driven political circus.
Also, let’s not forget that thousands of people (mostly women) were killed in the European witch hunts during the burning times.
It’s also possible that these witch hunts were not entirely motivated by religion – that perhaps there was also a strong desire in place to take strong women out of places of economic and social power – by burning them at the stake.
So, something to think about: if the largest killing of women in history surrounded the European witch hunts (i.e., a gendercide targeted at magical women), is feminism really separable from magic?
5. The Conspiracy Against Magic is Connected to the Conspiracy Against Black and Brown People
It’s true that magic exists in all races and all cultures, but think about some of the primary racist stereotypes used to put down black and brown people:
They’re too wild, too irrational, too musical, too loud, too energetic, too sexual, too in-the-moment, too in their bodies, too angry, too disregarding of rational polite quietness.
In other words: they are too much in touch with their magic, their eros, their spark of life.
There’s a lot of things that can be said about the historical and cultural roots of racist atrocities, but it sure seems to me that the racism of white people against – well, everyone else – has a ton to do with white people resenting being alienated from their own magic and projecting that resentment onto everyone who’s still somewhat in touch with theirs.
So the next time you hear someone deriding some form of magic (astrology, alchemy, spirit invocation) as pathetic superstition…
… take a moment and think about how the denigration of magic goes hand-in-hand with the denigration of black and brown people, and all of black and brown peoples’ vast contribution to magical knowledge.
In Conclusion
The hard, practical world (of corporations and governments and cash) runs entirely on magic.
The fact that modern schools teach that “magic isn’t real” is just a conspiracy to keep the majority of people in the dark and unable to use the resources of magic for their own benefit.
featured image: collage by Hugo Barros
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