The Sorcerer State
This is a sequel to my previous post, Saturn and Neptune: The Fight for Our Minds
In this post I want to talk about the mind-control state me we live in; to become aware of it and recognize it; to recognize some of the main techniques, how it snares and controls people.
I also want to talk about the big mistakes it is making, and why it is destined to boomerang and collapse.
And finally, I want to touch on ways to break out of the control. In my experience that can be a long and painful process, so I will be sharing some of what I went through.
So what do I mean by Sorcerer State?
As far as I can tell the term Magician State was coined by Ioan Coulianu in book, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance . Basically he is talking about governments controlling their people, not by force but by media, using words, sounds and emotionally charged images to trigger responses that lead to their being easy to manipulate and order around. This is a kind of media assault – and it is a kind of magical attack – that aims at shutting down all independent and rational thinking and controlling people’s emotions and reactions.
I am using the term Sorcerer state rather than Magician state because I want to emphasize that the way this is being done is low-level, short-sighted and unintelligent, using manipulative kinds of spells that are guaranteed to backfire on them, and collapse in the long run – I will be talking about why that is so in future posts.
Are these Sorcerers knowingly practicing magic spells? Are they consciously invoking demons and making pacts with devils? I don’t know, and frankly I think it doesn’t much matter – the techniques are occult sorcery whether you call them that or not – you might label them persuasion, or marketing techniques, or psychological programming, or rules for radicals – the gist is the same and the trappings don’t matter.
I’m not the first person to notice this, not by a long shot. There are a lot of very good perceptive writers who have written about this. Here is an example from a writer I follow regularly.
This first link is to an essay on the subject.
https://druidstaresback.substack.com/p/magic-and-the-imagination-part-3
If you prefer videos to text – I very rarely take the time to view videos, but some people prefer them – this is a video talk that is on the same topic.
https://druidstaresback.substack.com/p/black-magic-and-propaganda
The two magicians he references are: Eliphas Levi, author of Dogma and Ritual of High Magic and other books on the subject; and Edward Bernays, who is described as the father of modern propaganda and marketing. I think of what Bernays is doing as a debased form of what Levi is talking about. Both are well worth being aware of.
I like to describe it in terms of magic and sorcery since if you know anything about the occult tradition there are laws to magic and sorcery that describe this situation very well – and, it points out the pitfalls and limitations in a way that those who concentrate on persuasion and marketing are usually completely unaware of.
Recognizing the Sorcerer’s Spells
Here I want to sketch out some of the main marks and techniques of the Sorcerer’s spells, so that they can be recognized for what they are. I’m thinking especially about the worst of the early covid years here, but this is not a new phenomenon – it has been part of the world of the everyday news and entertainment media for decades now, but rarely as blatant and heavy-handed as in the early covid years. However, even within my own lifetime I have watched an epidemic of this sort of manipulation blitz happen every time we get ourselves into a new war, or hype up the masses to support a new invasion.
This list is not meant to be all-inclusive.
– Triggering extreme emotional reactions – Fear is a big one, and connected with that is self-righteous rage. When you are blind with fear and anger you are very easy to control.
That is a dead give-away – if you are in conversation with someone, and mention a topic and are suddenly met with a burst of rage and yelling that seems all out of proportion to what you said, you are likely witnessing someone under a spell. I mean that literally.
Fear and rage can be particularly effective when you pair them with inflaming human appetites – like lust, for example, or greed, or desire for fame or power. The critical point is inflaming them, pumping them up out of proportion so that people lose control and are led around by their appetites. Power is addicting, sex is addicting, wealth is addicting, fame is addicting, and if any of those are your weak point you can easily be led around by the nose (or other organ), and manipulated at will.
– Playing to a sense of duty and compassion – Convince people that if you don’t follow orders you lack compassion and are failing in your duty to your family and neighbors. This one is often used for people who go along but still have misgivings – “You understand I don’t do this for myself; this is for (fill in the blank – my family, my children, old people, the vulnerable…).” It’s a kind of a cop-out, a way of saying I’m not responsible for the choice I am making here.
There are a lot of people who can’t be swayed by selfish motives but are suckers for any appeal to the good of others or the common good. These are the sort of people who feel obligated to write a check donating to every appeal for help that comes to them – which is why their mailbox is flooded with those pleas.
– Manipulation by guilt – this ties in to the previous point. The idea is to shame you into compliance.
Combining fear, rage, blame and guilt is a powerful, toxic and effective mix – and add in sexual lust or greed and the combination is well-nigh irresistible – at least for the short term, until it renders you useless or kills you.
– Using emotionally charged visual images, sounds and words – scenes of violence, or explosions, or illness, or people crying – and especially shots of children – very few people can resist responding to a shot of a blood-covered dead young child – it shuts down and overrides all rational response. If you don’t go along this makes you a baby killer or a heartless granny killer or you don’t care about the downtrodden or…
Seen any shots of blood-covered dead babies or wounded crying children in the news these last few years? Ever receive a fundraising letter with pictures of emaciated crying children?
– Use endlessly repeated slogans and sound bytes – The same short phrase being repeated endlessly, day after day, across the full range of media. That internalizes, and whatever you internalize becomes your thoughts – or what you think are your thoughts.
We are on the cusp of accomplishing the will of any man whose words we repeat.
-Eliphas Levi
Think carefully about that. Pay attention to how often the speech of people around you is basically a replayed tape-recording of slogans from media. For a really scary experience, pay attention to how often you catch yourself parroting a media slogan.
Emphasis on obedience and following authority – and the corollary to that, making any sort of thinking for yourself, or doing your own research, or making your own decisions, be strictly forbidden. Trust the experts. Never make (x decision) on your own; always consult your (x official authority). Paint doing your own research as foolhardiness, or dangerous, or idiocy – and worse yet, as dangerous to others – that ties it in with the manipulation by guilt.
The need to silence and suppress all other voices – Much of the force of the spell depends on the collective pressure, so we can’t allow other points of view. Rather than rational debate, dissenting voices will be shouted down, slandered, attacked, ostracized – or sometimes just un-personed, acting like the other voice just doesn’t exist.
There is another important reason why silencing other voices is so important. This sort of low-level manipulative magic is totally dependent on people not being aware they are being manipulated or that there are other points of view.
About nine months ago, the WSJ Editor-in-Chief admitted to Davos elites that legacy media outlets no longer had a monopoly on information and narratives…
“We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well … Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news. And they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying,” WSJ EIC Emma Tucker said.
Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying, “whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control…” [emphasis mine.]
[Quote excerpted from https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hillary-clinton-desperation-warns-well-lose-total-control-if-social-media-stops-censoring.]
As soon as people start to figure out that they are being conned, trust has been broken and the game is over. Spell effectiveness drops to zero at that point, or even backfires and has the opposite effect. That is why it is imperative to discredit or silence people who are aware of this and talk about it.
However, once you have lost control of someone – once they have escaped your persuasion net – you have lost them for good. Getting them back is next to impossible even with threats of violence, or actual violent coercion.
Does any of this sound familiar or ring any bells?…. I sure hope so.
The Magical Chain
This is a very useful concept to understand the reality of mass spellcasting.
Far more of our consciousness is shared than we realize, and there is a very real way in which our emotions and imaginations are part of a larger collective being. We pick up feelings from each other, and we can pick up images and thoughts from those around us or from the media.
When you have media conjuring up strong emotional reactions from people, that is contagious, and it becomes a group phenomenon, a kind of group hysteria that spreads and feeds on itself. At that point the pressure on people is not just from media but from those around you, and especially if it is strongly charged emotionally it is brutally hard to resist.
Once this sort of sorcerer’s wave gets going, a lot of the work gets done by ordinary people caught up in the spell.
This is the mass or collective part of the spell, and it makes standing apart from the mass extremely hard.
The Sorcerer’s Enemies
For this sort of mass spell to work there are certain sorts of human behavior that are strictly forbidden and that need to be shut down as thoroughly as possible.
– Thinking for yourself. Making your own decisions rather than being obedient to authority. As soon as one person is allowed to do that then others can see there is a choice, and having the feeling you have no choice but to obey is part of the spell – obey or else dire consequences will follow.
– Doing your own research. Nuff said.
– Taking responsibility for your own actions rather than blaming others. The thread of blaming is woven all through the mass sorcerer’s spell – if you don’t do x and y dire event happens to anyone else it is all your fault. The sorcerer’s world is high on blame and low on taking responsibility.
This shows why the appeal to duty and the good of others is a kind of misdirection, and it is saying that people are not responsible for their own well being but are at the mercy of other people’s action. It is totally dis-empowering and puts all of your power and worth outside of yourself. (If you know anything about Stoic philosophy, which is very good mental hygiene, this is the inverse.)
And the big one, the key to all the others –
– Taking quiet time. Taking time to think. Slowing down, backing off, disconnecting, allowing the whirling media barrage of sensation and action to calm down for awhile so that you can see and think clearly.
I think there is a reason so many people seem to be frantically busy all of the time with not a moment to breathe – and every spare moment is quickly plugged with some sort of media input, like being glued to your phone while you’re out taking a breather and walking your dog.
(But I have no time to take a breather – there is too much important I need to do or to keep up on…)
If there is a single thing that is needed to break the mass Sorcerer spell, it is this:
The ability to stand alone and draw strength from within.
That is forbidden above all.
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As Ioan Coulianu pointed out a good long time ago, modern industrial societies are “magician states” that use evil magic (in the form of advertising, public relations, and other cheap manipulative sorcery) in place of jackbooted thugs to control the population. Evil magic, especially when it’s applied to crowds, can only work if the targets aren’t capable of independent thought and will — they have to be kept on the lowest common denominator of human functioning, where simple passions are the only relevant drives. So the most important spell being cast by the sorcerers of the mass media and the corporate system is the one that discourages thinking and choosing, and pressures people into responding with grunting, mindless, automatic reactions.
Break that spell and your life becomes much better — but everyone who’s still under the spell will grunt and snarl at you. Do you recall Plato’s metaphor of the cave? He didn’t discuss the political dimensions of it, but the principles are the same.
– John Michael Greer, quoted from his blog forum at https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/296674.html?thread=51099106#cmt51099106
—
I mentioned earlier in this post that the mass Sorcerer state we are currently under is acting in a way that is guaranteed to backfire and to collapse in on itself in the long run – and in fact I think we are seeing major signs of that reaction happening around us right now. I suspect that the timing of this essay you are reading is catching the big start of the wave of reaction, and should ride it.
If you know anything about occult work it is obvious that these coercion techniques are violating some of the most basic rules of ethical, effective and lasting change magic. (And yes, I do think there is such a thing as ethical change magic, and it involves self-improvement and changing yourself rather than coercing others.)
I sum up the rules this way. There is some overlap here, but I separate them out to make some important concepts clear.
– The Law of Equilibrium or Balance
– The Law of Reaction
– The Law of Self-Discipline or Asceticism
– The Law of Truthfulness
– The Law of Trust and Honesty
– The Law of Selflessness
I will be talking about those laws and how they work in future posts.
—
Image of the Witch of Endor from Wikimedia Commons.
(Footnote – when I went online searching for a good image of a sorcerer or wizard, the level of cheese in the pictures I found was so high I needed to take a lactose intolerance pill. That says something about the level of infantile hype around the concept of sorcerer. With that sort of unrealistic, Saturday-morning-cartoon fantasy image of sorcery it is no wonder that the ordinary, run-of-the-mill media spellcasting techniques go unrecognized.)