By now, most people reading this will have heard of the Alt-right. Are they really just racist trolls, or are they the right wing version of Occupy Wall Street: young, technologically savvy, and a bit counterculture? Perhaps they are both or neither depending on who you ask, but the Alt-right is defined less by their beliefs (which are varied) and more by how they spread information.
There is a small, but growing segment of the Alt-right which has begun to take black or chaos magick very seriously. Laugh if you must, but these would be techno-warlocks and witches have collectively devoted perhaps hundreds of thousands of hours in the creation and sharing of magickal* sigils with the intention of altering reality. They call them memes, but the effect, they would argue, is essentially the same.
Through “meme magic” and a liberal interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Alt-right believe they are successfully reshaping reality. First, they got a reality TV show host nominated for President and then finally succeeding in getting him elected, placing him at the head of the world’s largest empire. Motivations for getting Trump elected range from legitimately believing he would make a good president to the more nihilistic “doing it for the lulz.” Again, ideology doesn’t define the Alt-right. It’s their methods which set them apart from the traditional right wing.
In chaos magick, a sigil is a symbol, usually a simple drawing on a piece of paper, which when “charged,” allows the magickian to alter reality in whatever way he or she chooses. A charged sigil can bring personal wealth, improve one’s love life, job prospects, or deliver whatever else one desires. A sigil binds demons or angels into the service of the magickian. When enough people use the same sigil its power is magnified, enabling society wide changes. The most popular sigil in use today is easily Pepe the Frog. If you’re unfamiliar with Pepe’s occult significance, I suggest reading Pepe the Frog Faith website.
The short version is that believers think that Pepe is in fact the avatar of an ancient Egyptian God called Kek, who, empowered by memes created by 4chan, got Donald Trump elected.
This isn’t so radical when you think about it. Really, a sigil is just a visual symbol that communicates an idea like propaganda or a nation’s flag. In an image based society such as ours, most ideas are communicated solely by images, and when enough people share an image, it can make people rich, destroy reputations and even take down governments. Even if there is no supernatural element to them, memes clearly motivated Trump’s base supporters on the internet.
What is Synchronicity?
This theory was first described in the western psychological tradition by Carl Jung. He called these hard to explain coincidences “Synchronicities.” Synchronicity was basically Jung’s attempt to explain supernatural occurrences which defied probability. Jung argued that synchronicity was evidence of a collective unconscious which, whether supernatural or not, runs throughout humanity.
The best example of this phenomenon I can think of comes from a friend of mine. He had been away at college for a while and began to think of his friend Mike. He hadn’t spoken to Mike for almost a year at that point and thought it would be good to give him a call and catch up.
“It was weird,” he told me later. “The phone didn’t even ring, it simply connected us.”
It took them a while to realize what had happened, but it turns out Mike had the same idea and called my friend at the same exact moment. What are the chances two friends would decide to call each other at the exact same time after about a year of having no contact? The rational explanation is that it was just a coincidence, but this is inherently unsatisfying.
Synchronicities may take the form of extra-sensory perception (ESP), seeing a name over and over again, or the appearance of an object when it is most needed. Rational explanations are often available, but sometimes there is just no way to explain how conveniently things work out, as was the case with my friend.
Within occult and chaos magick circles, the presence of synchronicities indicate that the magickian or magickians are being successful in their attempts to change the world. There are a number of synchronicities surrounding Pepe the Frog, Kek, and Donald Trump. These include frog and Pepe references popular music, pairs of repeating numbers on 4chan, and more.
The most memorable synchronicity of all occured when Hillary Clinton openly attacked the Alt-Right calling them an “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women” and later a “basket of deplorables.” During that first speech evoking the Alt-right by name, a protester can be heard yelling “Pepe!” Essentially calling them out by name only empowered them.
About a week later at the 9/11 memorial ceremony, Clinton was caught on amature video being unable to stand . She was dragged into a van by her staff, apparently due to serious health problems that had long been rumored, yet denied by a sympathetic media. Her collapse (on 9/11 of all days) was a sign to these magickians that their chaos god was as alive as ever. Their magickal spells were working. Couple that with the FBI apparently reopening an investigation into her illegal server a week before the election and the rest is history.
If anything, Kek worship and meme creation only increased after Trump’s election. Most recently, the Alt-right has targeted CNN, who is widely (and I would argue correctly) seen as perpetrating “fake news” with Trump being the main target.
The Illustrated Adventures of Baron Trump
Proponents of meme magic argue that synchronicities have increased. They point to the discovery of several books, all more than 100-years-old by author Ingersoll Lockwood. Two of them that appear to describe the President’s son, Barron Trump. Of the five books he published, most notable to Alt-right occultists include:
The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulgar (1890)
Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey (1892)
1900 or The Last President (1896)
Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey is the most interesting book for hunters of synchronicity. The text reads much like the Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. There are clearly hidden meanings and metaphors throughout the text, most of which are still easily comprehensible 121 years later, but the odd synchronicities are what really gets one’s attention, most notably of course, the main character’s name and illustration.
The title character looks a lot like President Trump’s 11-year-old son, Barron Trump (note the extra ‘r’). In the story, a character named Don introduces the concept of a second, inner earth to Baron, where people live and operate a different type of society than those on the surface. The entrance to this parallel Earth is located in Russia, more specifically in the Ural Mountains. They are described as meeting these beings without memory living in the “land of the transparent folk, called also Goggle Land.”
Obviously, Goggle Land is interpreted as the internet, and the transparent folk represent anonymous posters who make up 4chan and other message boards. That the entrance to this parallel world is in Russia is also notable.
This inner Earth is inhabited by peoples known as the “Rattlebrains” or “Happy Forgetters.” According to the text, these people once had little use for names and words, but,
“[O]ne day this happiness came to an end… They were seized with a wild desire to invent names for things; even many names for the same thing, and different ways of doing the same thing. This strange passion grew upon them that they spent their lives making them in every possible way harder to live. They built roads to the same place, they made different clothes for different days, and different dishes for different feast. To each child they gave two, three, and four different names; and different shoes were fashioned for different feet, and one family was no longer satisfied with one drinking-gourd. Did they stop there?”
Posters on the 4chan board said this described the so called social justice warriors or SJWs, but I’d argue this sounds more like our society in general, materialistic and overly concerned efficiency and the power of words. The description of these fictional people continues:
“By the exercise of their strong wills they have been busy for ages striving to unload their brains of, to them, now useless stock of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors and the natural consequence has been that the brains of these curious folk, who call themselves the Happy Forgetters, relieved of all labor and strain of thought, have absolutely shrunken rather than increased in size, so their brains are like the shriveled kernel…” Hence, the name Rattlebrains. “Nor do I need remind thee, O reader, that the chiefest among the Happy Forgetters is the man whose head gives forth the loudest and sharpest click; for he it is who has forgotten most.”
Clearly, the author is making a condemnation of modern society as a whole. Indeed, Baron Trump, who in the story is literally a baron and lives at Castle Trump, might as well be a fantasy figure visiting our world. The criticisms and observations of our society would be similar.
That’s not the most interesting part by far. Lockwood has a fairly accurate picture of the future. There is one point, where the characters seem to predict television and people wasting time on computer screens. He writes:
[T]he sense of sight… it enables you to know things which it is utterly bootless to know, such as what your next door neighbors may be doing… how soon rain will fall, which is a useless piece of knowledge if ye have roofs to cover you, as I suppose ye have.
But the most ridiculous use which ye make of this sense of sight is the manufacture of what ye call pictures, by means of which ye seem to take the greatest pleasure in deceiving this very sense of which ye are so very proud. If I understand correctly these pictures, if felt of, are quite as smooth as that panel there, but so cunningly do ye draw the lines and lay in the colors, whatever they may be, that ye really succeed in deceiving yourselves and stand for hours in front of one of these bits of trickery wlien ye might, if ye chose, feast your eyes, as ye call it, upon the very thing which the trickster has imitated. Now, as life is much shorter in the upper world than in ours, it seems very strange to me that ye should wish to waste it in this foolish manner.
It’s difficult to know if Lockwood is talking about static pictures like in magazines or something more modern like computer monitors. Regardless, for having been written 1892, his insight is still astounding.
The Last President
Lockwood’s final book is the relatively short, 1900 or The Last President and is described as a piece of speculative fiction about the then upcoming presidential election. For most observers, the name in and of itself is sure to get attention, but there’s not much else to it. In it, Lockwood predicts William Jennings Byant will win the Presidency in 1896, leading to riots in the street by overjoyed anarchists and socialists, beginning at Fifth Avenue. Notably, Trump Tower is on Fifth Avenue. The book ends with a terrorist attack on the Capitol Building’s dome during session, thus signaling the end of the Republic.
In reality, William McKinley won the election that year, only to be later assassinated by anarchists after his reelection in 1900. This prompted a significant counter attack by the state, eventually resulting in the creation of the FBI. Anti-anarchist laws were passed and were eventually used to silence critics of World War I.
Posters on 4chan have also noted McKinley’s election took place on November 3, 1896, and the next presidential election takes place on November 3, 2020. Other coincidences may yet be found.
Conclusion
Like all synchronicities, the simple explanation is that readers have confirmation bias. Skeptics will argue this is all coincidence, and that if you look just about anywhere, you’ll find similar occurrences.
Still, even they would admit that the claims of synchronicity are somewhat compelling, though most are somewhat amusing if nothing else.
Often, readers try to tie synchronicities into reality in a fanciful way. One notable theory argues that Baron, Donald Trump and or Vice President Mike Pence are time travelers. Others have compiled a list of evidence arguing such a theory.
The question posted most frequently on the 4chan is, “What does it mean?” If you reject the supernatural implications, as most will, it means nothing, merely that our mammalian brains are very good at picking out specifics from a wide swath of seemingly unconnected data. With it, we create meaning. We are meaning creating machines. It may be the main thing that separates humans from other animals.
But chaos magickians argue these disparate coincidences are connected, and we to them through our will. They would say synchronicities do not tell us what to do, rather they only suggest that there is potential for action.
Regardless, since the election, there hasn’t been much in the way of a unified occult practice, aside from this minor skirmish against CNN, and there probably won’t be another until many more people begin paying attention to the next election cycle.
*The ‘k’ in magick and magickian is meant to differentiate it from stage magic.
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