Persistent magical assault
This is an excerpt from my work-in-progress murder mystery novel Good People Do Bad Things. In this scene, the narrator Miles is a journalist interviewing Orion, the former front-man of the defunct 1990s industrial rock band Servitor. The conversation has turned to magic and the occult.
--
“Are you familiar with chaos magic?” Orion asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m not sure I buy it all, but I know the basics. But I always wondered why, if all this is so easy, everyone isn’t doing it. I’ve known a bunch of occultists and none of them are rich.”
He stood and cracked his neck before launching into what sounded like a spiel he’d given before. “There’s an awful lot of incredibly powerful magical forces all around us,” he said. “Corporate logos are sigils. Employee manuals are grimoires. Campaign slogans and advertising jingles are mantras. Mascots are servitors, egregores, or tulpas. We are all of us under persistent magical assault.”
“So McDonalds is run by occultists?”
“I used to think that. And that world leaders were either magicians or had magicians on their side. But I’ve met a lot of powerful people now. They’re not secretly reading Aleister Crowley or Austin Osman Spare, though a lot of them have listened Napoleon Hill’s book on tape. The world is powered by magic, but I think advertising firms and propagandists and campaign managers stumbled onto these techniques mostly on their own. They’re perpetuated because they work.”
“OK, I’m with you so far,” I said. “But what’s that got to do with why all the Wiccans and chaos magicians I know aren’t wealthy or powerful?”
“I was just getting to that,” he replied. “It’s cliche at this point to quote that Arthur C. Clarke thing about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. But it seems like few people really think through what it means.
“Literacy is a technology. In a low-literate society, it’s a superpower. You can decipher mysterious glyphs that contain a wealth of knowledge. You can read recipes for herbal concoctions, reports of an army’s movements, astronomical charts, and so forth. But in a high-literacy society, literacy is table-stakes. Illiteracy is a disability, but being literate provides no special advantage. Everyone expects you to be able to read and write at at least a third-grade level.
“Perhaps a better example is in weaponry. A single person with a gun can take on an entire mob of people. An army equipped with guns in a low-gun world is superpowered. Guns are indistinguishable for magic in that society. But in our world, guns are mundane. They’re table stakes for an army. In the US, guns are everywhere, you can’t assume that having one gives you any sort of advantage. So you can think of magic as an arms race in that sense.
“Psychic war is waged all around us, encouraging us to eat junk food, watch television, vote for this or that candidate. With the sort of artillery that governments and corporations wield, it’s little wonder that most people see few results from things like prayers, sigils, or even enlisting the help of minor demons. If you want power in this theater of operations, you need something special.”
“Something like your own rock band that you can turn into an extended magical working,” I suggested.
“Yes, exactly. But even that’s hard. We were up against the record companies, which are able to hijack the magical energy generated by all the musicians on their roster to their own ends. The labels imprint their sigils on every unit sold, siphoning power off people’s art into their own hyperritual.
“Wanking to sigils might’ve worked for Austin Osman Spare in the Elizabethan era, and Burroughs and Gysin might have had some success with the cut-up technique because it was still new and novel and hadn’t been fully exploited by more entrenched interests. But for the most part, individuals or small covens don’t have much chance of making a dent in a reality. It takes a bit more these days.”