Curse Your Boss, Hex the State,

Curse Your Boss, Hex the State, Take Back the World     dr. bones
Take Back the World
dr. bones
“Do you want to be exploited forever, to die a beautiful
soul trapped in a body-turned-machine, or will you rise in
armed joy?” Curse Your Boss,
 In Curse Your Boss, Hex The State, Take Back The World,
Conjurer and anarcho-communist swamp-dweller Dr. Bones unravels
the Spectral Cage in which we—–even magic-workers—–find ourselves
Hex the State,
trapped. The State, Capitalism, Society, and Media all enmesh not just
our actions but our very perception both of this world and the Other,
Take Back
and Dr. Bones shows you how to forge the keys to freedom.
  But unlike the pulp pablum pushed out by mass-market magic pub- the World
lishers, this book won’t tell you how to get that car you saw in the com-
mercial, or how to get a raise or find inner peace. Instead, Dr. Bones
offers you rituals and theory to change the entire world, to free not just
yourself but others, and issues a revolutionary call to take up magical
arms against Capital and the State.

“This book will get you in trouble, and make you want to
cause more trouble, and find others who want to cause trou-
ble too, until next thing you know you’ve seized the means
of production or successfully turned a riot into a revolt.”

—Rhyd Wildermuth, from the foreword.

dr. bones
 Curse
Your
Boss
Hex The
State
Take Back
The World
1
 This work by Dr. Bones is licensed under Creative Commons (Attri-
bution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International).

This work may be remixed with attribution for non-commercial

purposes, provided it is licensed under the same Creative Commons
license.

First Printing: 1 July, 2017

Gods&Radicals (godsandradicals.org)

ISBN: 978-0-9969877-5-2

Solidarity copies of this work are available for low-income, activist,

striking, and other people unable to afford to purchase a copy.
Bulk copies are also available.
For more information, visit:
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In the name of all the Holy One may this Sword be effectual to do
my services, and may the Lord of it approach to serve me and may all
these powers be delivered over to me so that I might use them
138-028-951-023-952-283-285-761-601-352
Abiririan, Abrium, Abrian, Abirmum, Unse Kadmaiah
I.m.I.K.I.B.I.P.a.x.v.Ss vas
I.P.O. unay Lit. Dom. mper vobism
Beneath thy guardianship, I am safe against all tempests and all
enemies as is the owner of this book.

2
This Book Is Trouble 9
Anarchism
For Occultniks 13

Part One:
A Prison of Ghosts
The Spectral Cage 21
The State 27
Capitalism 33
Society 45
MEDIA 53
The Return of the
Iconoclast 59
What Lies Beyond 69

3
 Part Two:
Sorcerers Against
The State
A Conjurer’s
Communism 85
Starting Your Own
War to Get Free 107
Lock, Stock, and Two
Burning Candles 117
Fighting for Ourselves 129

About 144

4
5
6
For :

F
beat-up liver.
or Brother Bat, The Crossroads Man, and my

For Rhyd who gave me a chance and believed in a Flor-

ida boy’s rage.
For the Hex Doctor in Pennsylvania who drinks and
slings spells as hard as I do.
For all those whose spirits burn like molotovs and
whose graves shall number among the criminals.
But most of all for my wife, who had the time, the pa-
tience, and the unending fountain of love to go on walks
and talk to some dirty kid picking scrap metal out of a
pickup truck. Your soul is a torch through even the darkest
of prisons.

Solidarity with all imprisoned comrades! Victory to

the CCF! Victory to the FAI/IRF! In the crapshoot we call
life may He Betwixt load the dice ever in your favor.

Igne Natura Renovatur Integra

7
This Book Is Trouble

O n a muggy autumn evening in Central Flori-

da I stood in front of the door of my sister’s home, watching
an over-sized, gas-guzzling farm truck attempt to navigate
the narrow passage from street to driveway.
I was certain the driver would hit a mailbox, or per-
haps one of the expensive cars parked nearby. I was hoping,
of course, the mailbox would be spared.
Probably five full minutes passed as I laughed and
helped to guide the truck in, crushing recently-fallen
acorns from the wax-leafed Southern Live Oak under my
feet. The driver didn’t laugh, perhaps too intent on not hit-
ting anything to find the whole matter amusing. His pas-
senger, however, seemed to relish the whole drama, de-
lighting in the awkward absurdity of his arrival and all the
trouble he’d caused.
It was pretty amusing, really. An anarchist conjurer
transported to the temporary suburban home of an anar-
chist druid by means of a truck which itself looked to be
held together only by magic and will: Dr. Bones couldn’t
have orchestrated it better if he’d tried.
As his driver ran inside to piss, we hugged, I poured
him a beer, and demanded he take off that silly bandanna.
The rest of the night we sat across from each other around
a fire, arguing and laughing and plotting and, most of all,
reveling in all the trouble we knew we’d one day cause.

Dr. Bones really is like a Florida swamp incarnate. At

9
home in the thick humidity of land the capitalists relent-
lessly try to drain and pave over, the man seems to delight
in the very things the ‘civilized’ world hates about such
places. He likes alligators, gets along with mosquitoes, and
breathes in the fecundity of swamp-rot like it’s incense.
He’s also a troublemaker in the classic sense: the affable
sort your boss or concerned friend warns you about to no
avail because he’s just that damn charming. It’s not hard to
imagine him in other lives as one of those communist agi-
tators the KKK warned newly-freed slaves against speak-
ing to, one of those attractive-daguerreotyped Wobblies or
Molly Maguires that factory bosses hired Pinkerton to get
rid of, or a muck-raking Southern reporter who refused to
let politeness and death-threats stop them from reporting
on lynchings.
He even dresses the part in thrift-store suspenders and
button-downs and fancy hats and that really silly bandan-
na. He looks like trouble.

I guess I should probably warn you. He wrote this book,

and he’s trouble, and so is this book. It’s exactly the sort
of thing polite magical society will warn you away from.
You probably won’t be buying this in a witchy-poo store any
time soon, nor will it be on any top-ten lists of “must-buy-
for-your-coven-mates-this-Yule,” unless you have a coven
that actually does shit.
Trouble is what Dr. Bones is all about, which is also
what I’m about, and also probably what you’re about if
you’ve gotten this far. Because he knows, and I know, and
you probably know, that magic ain’t worth the trouble un-
less it’s actually able to make trouble. Trouble for your boss-
es, for your landlords, for the bigot in your neighborhood
or the homophobe waiting for you in the alley. Trouble for
the politician who voted against a minimum-wage increase
or for more war, trouble for the developer who polluted
the stream where you first met a water spirit. Trouble for
the cop who strangled a Black kid and blamed his death
on drugs. Trouble for the shop-owner who raised prices
on food and batteries during a hurricane. Trouble for the
property-owner who raised your rent.

10
 This book is that sort of trouble, but it’s especially trou-
ble for all the authors writing books promising that magic
can help you ‘get ahead’ but never once telling you how to
keep immigrants from getting deported, oil companies
from destroying the planet, or anything else that actually
matters.
Most of all, this book is trouble for you. Maybe you
shouldn’t read it. It won’t make you rich, won’t win you a
beautiful lover who will do whatever you demand of them,
won’t tell you pretty lies about how to ascend into other di-
mensions to get in touch with your inner child or previous
incarnations. It won’t bring you peace, and it won’t make
you happy either.
It will get you in trouble and make you want to cause
more trouble, and find others who want to cause trouble
too, until next thing you know you’ve seized the means of
production or successfully turned a riot into a revolt.

Still reading, huh?

Awesome.

The night I met Dr. Bones, he asked me to show him my

favorite crossroads. I knew just the place, a spot intersected
by roads, electric lines, and flight paths. We walked there
and then he performed a ritual to introduce me to the Man
of the Crossroads.
I tend to be pretty dubious, but I humored him as he
stuck a fork in the dirt with a playing-card wedged within
its prongs. He then shouted, tossed a full whiskey bottle
against the pavement with all his force, and then stared,
shocked.
The bottle hadn’t broken, and I started laughing.
“I—I don’t know what happened,” he said, disturbed,
embarrassed.
I kept laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he looked really upset, quite disap-
pointed with himself. Certainly he thought I’d consider
him just another charlatan, full of self-importance and
empty of magic.
I really tried to stop laughing. Honestly. I couldn’t help

11
it, the whole thing was so hilarious. It was only when I saw
the shame spread across his face that I stopped long enough
to tell him why I was laughing: there was a giant—dark, wet,
made of shadow and swamp rot—standing behind him.
“Wait—you see him? That’s… that’s even more than I
was expecting.”
I shrugged and laughed some more. The best magic
works in ways bigger than you expected, and I think this
book’s gonna cause more trouble than he expected, too.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rennes, France
17 May 2017

12
Anarchism
For Occultniks

E mpty air and silent streets, a stillness only

broken by the occasional late night driver: I press onward,
my legs and ankles beginning to ache. There’s no need to go
fast as long as I get there by midnight, and yet… I’m forced
forward. Compelled. Three and a half miles of walking,
some of it through foot paths on manufactured lawns, all
to reach my goal. Every year it’s the same thing, every year
it’s the same journey, the same plan, the same mission, the
same anxiety.
By State law what I’m going to do is illegal: criminal
trespassing. Depending on the mood of whichever “keep-
er of the peace” grabbed me, I could also be charged with
criminal mischief, prowling, illegal loitering, littering, and
desecration of a grave. I could also be forever barred from
returning to the spot of my capture.
Good thing I care little for the law.
Where was the law when my sacred trees were ripped
from the earth to put in a restaurant? Where was the officer
to arrest the drivers of bulldozers as they disemboweled
the Land Spirits I had known for years? Where was the care
of the State for the web of life that had existed unbroken for
decades: plants, animals, and spirits breathing as one en-
tity on an unused and unmanned acre of woods? There was
no law, no law in the sense of anything measuring justice.
There was only the law of property and of profit.
13
 I’m within eye-shot now, that tenebrous mass of dark-
ness close to the hospital coming into view. I laugh as I
think of all the patients peering out their windows, clutch-
ing crosses while staring at what could indeed be their final
resting place. Here are row upon row of polished stone and
wilting flowers, old enough to house a veteran from Ted-
dy’s playtime in Cuba and new enough to bury the victims
of Middle East adventurism--an unbroken chain of lives
given to the service of an idea, years spent obeying com-
mands for only faintly alluded-to goals.
There is no gate, no door, so I can’t be charged with
breaking and entering. There is simply an opening, wide
enough to drive a car through. Only a fool, however, would
think about simply walking in. There is a price to pay, signs
of respect to be made.
I walk out of the shadows of the trees, crossing the
street in a bold sign of intention. Here is the danger, here
is where flashing lights could ruin everything, and as such
my pulse quickens; I am in-between shadows, forced into
the light of street lamps. The words “Melbourne Cemetery”
hang in front of me like finish-line tape. I pull a dime from
my pocket as I mutter calls for protection and entrance,
making clear my intentions to the ones who are watching.
Payment made, I take a step in but stop. Slowly, I turn
around as a cop car pulls down the road.
I’m exposed, not far enough away to be wreathed in
darkness; I am a silhouette drenched in light. He slows
down to get a better look, confirming my fears that I have
indeed been noticed. For a moment we stare at one anoth-
er, my refusal to run confirming I am no mere midnight
prowler.
The Cemetery closes at dusk, and yet here I am, in clear
violation of the law. Whose law? Your law or mine? I turn
from him and walk inwards, a challenge: do you dare to
follow? To leave the confines of your climate-controlled car
and enter a world where a badge and a gun will do noth-
ing to protect you? To play with things that obey no human
hierarchy, ghostly fingers quite capable of crossing the
boundary of class and race, ruler and servant? To leave the
illusions that things just are because they must be?

14
 He drives on, pretending not to have seen me. I chuckle,
and six feet to the side of me something else does too.

This book is not intended for everyone, though every-

one will have something to gain from it. This book is in-
tended for the sorcerous, the magical, those who regularly
cross boundaries and hedges though have yet to do the
same in the mundane world, the world of power and poli-
tics.
This wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, when the
physical and the spiritual natures of the world weren’t cleft
in two, the wise and the cunning were just as much a part
of of the discussion of how things should be run and how
human lives are to be lived as whatever institutions which
were set in place to do the same. Merlin guided the deci-
sions of King Arthur and Saint Colomba assisted many a
peace between the Picts; the struggles of the Native Ameri-
cans against their colonial oppressors was drenched in
spirituality; the Haitian Revolution was literally brokered
between the Loa and their people by a houngan.
In all these instances, the magical used whatever pow-
ers at their disposal to summon aid in times of great crises,
often identifying with the prevailing politics of the time.
The libertine Crowley, for instance, used whatever magical
force he could muster to defend Britain from the Nazis, but
never thought to free the colonies from the yoke of Britain’s
Empire; the CIA under the auspices of MKOFTEN experi-
mented with occult techniques and discarnate intelligenc-
es to ensure tranquility from its housebroken population.
Magical force is just that: a force—one that can be
wielded for any manner of philosophical goal. While some
spirits by nature may not stomach or stand for certain ide-
ologies, plenty are either completely indifferent or so far
beyond human sensibilities that questions like “democra-
cy” or “voting” are as alien to them as they are to us.
Our biases are just that: our own.
What has yet to arise is an ideology—or a discussion
of ideology—within the magical community on its terms,
for the Witch and Wizard to get together and start talk-
ing amongst themselves about just how this whole world

15
seems to run, or even how it should run.
That is changing. Gone forever are the days where such
things had to be hidden in metaphor and allegory. We no
longer need to adopt the prevailing religion of the time as
a cover for our real beliefs. Traditions now have an unpar-
alleled ability to talk to one another. Where once a singu-
lar magical current might be the only one for hundreds of
miles, now our cities and towns are host to hundreds such
currents.
This is a magical renaissance. This is our time.
And yet we have been loathe to act outside ourselves, to
truly break the false division of the spiritual and the mun-
dane. We’ve failed to extend our thoughts onto the wider
social sphere. We honor the Earth as sacred, yet haven’t
stopped the people (with very real names and addresses)
who are killing it. We burn candle after candle on money
jars as global finance eviscerates the middle class (though
you’ll never hear talk about the poor). We hold hands and
Ohm at “gatherings” and “festivals” as bombs drop onto
children reducing them to a fine red mist. This is hubris at
its finest level.
This is changing.
Books like Peter Grey’s Apocalyptic Witchcraft and
websites like Gods&Radicals are beginning to question the
larger artifice around us. Sorcerers are once again becom-
ing Philosophers, Dreamers, and Revolutionaries. The tide
is turning. We are getting angrier. We are starting to give
a damn. The question becomes what exactly we plan to do
about all this.
I’ll never forget an interview during the height of the
Occupy protests: A bright and idealistic youth was ques-
tioned by a female reporter for one of the large news com-
panies. The reporter asked the youth why he was there. He
listed a host of reasons: wealth inequality, lack of afford-
able education, lack of healthcare, a hurried and fevered
critique of global capitalism. The reporter, after nodding
silently, then asked the youth what exactly the protesters
actually wanted to do about it. The youth was stunned and
struggled for a moment, as if he hadn’t actually thought
about anything beyond how bad everything was, about

16
 what exactly he planned to do besides protest.
That is where we are now.

This book is many things: a lock pick to undo the shack-

les around your head, a flag to help find the others, and a
loaded pistol with which you might steal back everything
that’s been taken from you. It is not a call for activism, for
new parties and glib slogans. It is not here to help you get
elected or run a better protest down at city hall.
This book is for wizards and witches intent on getting
free through a series of mighty, reckless, shameless crimes,
the unfolding of which might grant us a freedom so radical
our minds can only fathom its faintest possibilities. Prop-
erty will be stolen, cages burned to the ground, and many a
powerful god cast bleeding beneath our own daggers.

On Anarchism
Anarchism is the abolition of unjust hierarchies and
the creation of self-governed, voluntary unions. Anarchism
is the radical idea that you do not belong to anyone else
and are actually quite capable of making your own deci-
sions. It is the shocking claim that the division of society
into castes of race, sex, gender, or class is oppressive, and
as such must be done away with. It is the almost unheard
of idea that maybe you’re just fine the way you are and don’t
need a church, commune, State, or boss to tell you how to
act.
It is also something many Witches and Wizards have
already been doing for quite some time.
Let us start with what we already know, or perhaps,
what we don’t fully realize: that the world of global capital-
ism is not merely an economic order, a system, but a mas-
sive spectral cage inimical to the flowering of our souls and
potentialities. Only when we realize the nature of this pris-
on, the bars and locks that bind us, can we begin to plot our
escape. And the first bar you must break is in your mind.

17
Part One:
A Prison
of Ghosts
The Spectral Cage
“...for their luxury is bitter and their beauty is
depraved. And their luxury is deception and their
trees are godlessness and their fruit is deadly poison
and their promise is death. And the tree of their life
they had placed in the midst of paradise.
“And I shall teach you what is the mystery of
their life, which is the plan which they made together,
which is the likeness of their spirit. The root of this
(tree) is bitter and its branches are death, its shadow
is hate and deception is in its leaves, and its blossom
is the ointment of evil…”
—The Apocryphon of John

T he modern world seems baffling: thousands

of years of evolution, of striving towards some unknown
goal seems to have brought us… nowhere. What have we
gained, what have we won through all this “progress?”
The planet is being torn to shreds, we are rapidly de-
pleting every resource we can get our hands upon, the spec-
ter of war stalks every continent, and all we do is gaze at
this massive edifice in bewilderment. If there is one thing
that seems to be universal, practically instinctual, it is the
inability for the human mind to correlate its contents. I
take a step further: it cannot correlate the world outside of
it, either.
No one is happy, no one can say with an honest tone
that they are enjoying the global conditions we’ve wrought
as a species. And it shows. Everywhere there is a sickness,

21
 a neurosis, a deep and unsteady feeling about everything
around us. Depending on your ideological lens, the cause,
the root as it were, is either within us or outside of us. To
the conservative, things were fine and now they’re not; to
the radical, things have never been fine and now they’re
even worse.
Both are true in a sense that they are human symp-
toms of an even greater problem. What is this world we’ve
created for ourselves? A cage, one both etheric and physi-
cal, that we gleefully lock ourselves in everyday.

“The Way It Is”

Let’s not joke around: this place is terrible.
As the driving force for our entire way of life, we’ve cho-
sen a system; we have nurtured it, protected it, symbolized
it. We’ve taken an abstract thought and wedded ourselves
to it completely. Everything we do, from the highest ideal
to the most basic life function, is interpreted and given
nafta-20-years-mexico-regret.
ian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/04/
January 2016, http://www.theguard-
of Regret for Mexico,” accessed 15
1. The Guardian, “NAFTA: 20 Years

meaning through this single, solitary, monolithic ideology.

We, in our eternal hubris, have labeled our stage of
existence as “the end of history,” as living in a “post-ideo-
logical world.” Such terms, foolish as they are, are loaded
with meaning: there is a (manufactured) consensus that
the world as it exists today is pretty much what we want,
minus some rough spots that we’ll strive to fix.
Is it really?
I could ask any of the children in Nigeria watching the
Shell corporation decimate the local environment while
making a hefty profit; I could ask the Mexican immigrant
forced to work for slave wages in the United States because
NAFTA made imported rice cheaper than what could be
grown in his native land.1 I could ask the twenty-three-
year-old working two jobs, literally wasting the best years
of her life, making money for somebody else just to survive.
I could ask the middle manager, forced to coerce and domi-
nate those underneath him in service to those above, pow-
erless to enact any real change, made a lonely lightning
rod for employee hate; I could ask the salesman at the car

22
 lot, forced to wear his fake grin, selling not just products
but himself to strangers for hours at a time, the majority of
his life a sorry stage play in the name of profit. I could ask
all these people, people whose entire lives are dictated by
an outside economic force, whether this is really what they
want. If they had the power to build a world, would this be
the way they would do it?
They’d all probably say no, but they’d also say, “that’s
just the way it is.”
It’s much like an abusive relationship: one partner gets
terrified and beaten on a regular basis but just can’t seem
to bring themselves to leave, after all he/she “really loves
them” underneath it all. The problems, the terrible nature
of the relationship, are not viewed as something intrinsic
but as aberrant. The problem isn’t “the thing itself,” it’s the
endless rationalizations we end up making to excuse its be-
havior. “Well, I didn’t do the dishes that night.” “Well, I did
kinda yell at him.” “Well she just gets these moods some-
times.” On and on and on.
It’s normal human behavior: we can’t see the forest for
the trees.
We are chained by our minds, forced to use unwieldy
and limited equipment to analyze and understand the
world around us. What we perceive to be “normal” or “good”
is based on mental processes; we have forgotten that all our
mental processes are conscious and unconscious in nature.
We think we choose things when in reality we are just as
often being led by subconscious or unconscious motives.
Is this world, this way of life really of our choosing?
Did we resolve to make it this way, sit down and plan it
out, or has it just kind of happened? What we term to be
“natural” is no more natural than the abusive relationship
described above: just because something is doesn’t mean it
has to be that way.
We used to dream differently.
Remember when you were a child and you’d imagine
different heroic roles for yourself, different exciting and
noble careers to engage in? Or perhaps you imagined be-
coming some wise-woman or seer, a life full of esoteric
adventure and knowledge? And yet here you are, working

23
 a dead-end job at a no-name place making fuck-all money.
Where’s the disconnect? What happened?
rethinking-our-minimum-wage/.
billmoyers.com/2013/02/22/
accessed 17 January 2016, http://
thinking Our Minimum Wage,”
2. Moyers & Company, “Re-
“Well,” you mutter after a ten-hour shift, “this is the real
world. Not everything is roses and gumdrops.” And you’re
right, it’s not. The “real world” involves sacrifice and hard-
ship, things that in the long run end up making a better
individual. Only your “real world” is not the “real world” for
everybody. Your suffering and hardship doesn’t so much
help you as enrich somebody else.
Again, it’s the limitations of the human mind at work:
what we see and understand as our experience, we assume
to be a collective experience. That’s not always the case.
While wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s
profits are at an all time high.2 Somebody is raking in the
cash based on your sweat equity and it ain’t you. Every dol-
lar you make is the minutest fraction of the value you’ve
created. You’re being stolen from, robbed, except the State
calls it “legal.”
And this is “just the way it is.” Why?

Enforcing the Rules of the Prison

The occult, unconscious, hidden processes of the world
are only very rarely brought to light; they depend on that:
conscious reflection divests them of the psychical and spir-
itual “energy” they use to function. The minute you start
questioning things, critiquing them, concretely analyzing
them, you realize what was once a mighty dragon is no
more than a paper tiger.
It’s you that gives it power, it’s you that makes it some-
thing other than itself.
Don’t think so? You think the decisions of upper man-
agement make massive profits possible? The combined bril-
liance of CEO’s across the country makes the economy run?
Unless you’re one of the lucky few that get paid to practice
magic full-time and don’t have to work for somebody else,
it was you who made all that money, you who sold all those
products, you who worked all those hours… for them.
The worst part is that the entire time, you lied to your-

24
self: you told yourself that your servitude was the “real
world,” that you were part of a team that was “all in it togeth-
er,” that somehow all this struggle had some greater mean-
ing. Maybe you went even deeper off the edge, thought that
this system that enchained you served a greater function,
that your work built a great national family, that it was
good and helped create something you could be proud of.
Maybe every Labor Day you sat down with a factory-born
meat tube packed with cancer and even patted yourself on
the back.
It’s Stockholm Syndrome: the victim begins to identify
with and love her captor.
And so you listen to the edicts from the class of people
that literally live off of your work and pain. They tell you
that you need to “tighten your belt,” that you must under-
stand how “times are hard” and that you won’t be getting
a raise this year because the company needs to “stay com-
petitive.” You then nod your head when the man on the TV
exclaims you should be “thankful” that you have a job, that
you’re somehow “lucky” to be born in the “greatest coun-
try in the world,” that you can enjoy the privilege of ten to
twelve hours of mind-numbing, soulless, repetitive tasks in
the service of someone else.
And worse: when someone dares to criticize what is
going on, how quickly some of us rush to defend the “way
things are,” put them down, tell them that if they don’t like
it they can just leave the country regardless of the fact that
passports cost money, money most people don’t actually
have, and that there is nowhere to run because the same
thing is to be found everywhere.
We unconsciously live for and serve an ideal image;
our physical output of value and mental justifications are
dictated by Those That Rule. Only we don’t see them, we
see the invisible god-image of The System, this mysterious
intangible thing that makes all other things run.
This thing, this mental construct we call Capitalism is
truly the god of this world. It exists far beyond economic
capacity: We blindly follow it, fawn over it, dream about it,
sacrifice our individual will and existence to supplement
its own. We identify with its mythology and symbols, it in-

25
 fects and colors our speech: “I don’t buy that.” “What are
you trying to sell me?” All of this we do unthinkingly, un-
3. The Talmud
consciously, in service to this ideal image, this immaterial
thing. It exists in us and in the world around us: when we
picture it in our head we conceive of it just like a Judaic god
might exist in its creation: “As the soul permeates the whole
body… sees but is not seen… sustains the whole body… is
pure… abides in the innermost precincts… is unique in the
body… does not eat and drink… no man knows where its
place is… so the Holy One, Blessed is He.”3
The World is not the World, not as it truly exists. The
World is much more than landmass and sea, forest and
shaded glen. Wrapped around the world are convenient fic-
tions, mental shorthands for powers we’ve forgotten exist
simply because we allow them to.
Let us peel back the veil and judge this world human-
ity has fashioned; let us free ourselves from illusion and
truly gain some gnosis. Let us see the forces silently pull-
ing the strings and the cage they keep us in.

26
The State
“The Law basically comprises a list of things
which the upper classes do not want the lower classes
to do, because they (the upper classes) would find it
irritating, unpleasant, or inconvenient. These things
are set out on paper so that the lower classes can
readily find out what they are not supposed to be
doing, and thereby avoid doing it.”
—GURPS: Goblins

W hat is the State? Depending on who you

ask, it is the regional government, the protector of the
people, or even worse, a tool the oppressed might utilize to
free themselves. The State might be better understood as a
large and calcified cartel that owns the industry of power,
a monopoly on getting things done controlled by the few
through the vehicles of education, privilege, taxation, and
force, all to achieve a unified and unbending will towards
its desired objectives.
The amount of control the State commands over our
lives is titanic: the State determines what products you can
own, how you can produce them, how you can use them,
what food you can eat, how you can grow it, how you are
raised, what you are taught is true, how you are socialized,
what behaviors are drilled into you, what you do and don’t
see in the media, how it’s explained to you, what resources
you have access to, how much you make, how high unem-
ployment is, who we send our kids off to kill, and much
more. To revolt against any of this is to face physical vio-
27
 lence, imprisonment, shunning, and even death.
Any of that make you feel free?

What Good Is A State, Anyway?

The idea that the State is a benevolent benefactor is a
joke. We’ve been told it’s some kind of necessary protector,
something to ensure everybody’s safety, but one need only
look at the “law” to see how dark the humor is of such liars.
A celebrity can be found with a veritable stockpile of drugs
and pay a fine, while someone of color will get years for car-
rying the tiniest trace amount.
The Ruling Class, the wealthy and powerful, under-
stand that it is the laws, police, and violence of the State
that keep the peasantry away from them and keep their
property safe. They can be assured folks like you and me
won’t show up uninvited to gala dinners, won’t put up a
fuss when they buy up our homes, won’t get in the way
when they want to do something fun. If we do? We’ll be
made to understand.
As for their livestock? Well, just look at history. When
unfair wages are being paid, or worse stolen, do the cops
come in and smash up the store? When workers strike, is it
the employer that gets roughed up? No. It’s you. The minute
you break out of your sanctioned zone of behavior the cops
(that is to say, the State-sanctioned force of violence) come
in and put an end to it. Be in the wrong area at the wrong
time and you’ll get the hint real quick. Make a ruckus and
you’ll be quickly dispersed. Be poor or homeless or not ac-
tively feeding the State (producing wealth) well enough,
and you’ll be made a criminal.
Now the real violence begins. Because you don’t have
money you cannot perform the functions of the Citizenry
(buying things, ingesting media, performing labor for the
Ruling Class). If you cannot perform the functions, you are
not serving the State. If you are not serving the State you
are in rebellion and as such need to be put down.
Through all this the State has convinced you that this
unequal domestication is good, that to serve it is “for the

28
benefit of all.” We are trained from a very young age to cel-
ebrate our particular expression of calcified power as if it
were an entity itself, one deserving of joyous and wild wor-
ship.
How wonderful that you are willing to leave your fam-
ily to go off and kill people you’ve never met, only to return
home a broken and brain-dead mass! How joyous that you
will lie, cheat, and steal from your fellow human beings in
the service to your Lord! How glorious it is to push aside ev-
ery single notion of right and wrong and test new biological
weapons on unsuspecting people!
Everywhere you look you’ll find disgusting reminders
of this slithering spook: jammed into magazines, stain-
ing video games, splashed across computer and television
screens alike. Fighter jets soar over a football game and the
crowd goes wild, yet if it were an artillery shell full of mus-
tard gas we’d call it poor taste.
But what exactly are we cheering for? What exactly
are we fighting and dying for? What power do you claim
to share with those who wave the same flag? That power
doesn’t belong to you: your government’s foreign policy
never has your well-being in mind. It belongs to the “col-
lective,” which is to say those that rule the herd. Try to call
the cops on the police and see how far your power extends!
The slaves among you will preach about how such au-
thoritarian force is a “necessary evil” for the safety it pro-
vides. What safety is that? Safety for the poor who get their
marijuana-medical-advances/.
www.cnn.com/2015/04/15/health/
pact,” accessed 20 March 2017, http://
Medical Marijuana Could Have Im-
4. CNN.com, “10 Diseases Where

hours cut for talking back to a boss? Safety to be kept away

from plants that have been shown to cure cancer?4 How
many of us live in the “safety” of knowing that if we get
sick and miss too many days of work we will be left to die
in the streets?
This safety—a safety more easily provided by neigh-
bors you can trust, or by preventing dangers like factory
farms from ever coming into existence—is the “bad cop” to
the adage that without the laws and judges the freedoms
we enjoy simply wouldn’t exist.
The freedoms the State claims to have given us were
always ours to begin with.

29
 If they nevertheless give you freedom, they are
simply knaves who give more than they have. For
then they give you nothing of their own, but stolen
wares: they give you your own freedom, the freedom
er-the-ego-and-his-own.
tlibrary.org/library/max-stirn-
ary 2016. https://theanarchis-
His Own, accessed 16 Janu-
5. Max Stirner, The Ego and
that you must take for yourselves; and they give it
to you only that you may not take it and call the
thieves and cheats to an account to boot. In their sly-
ness they know well that given (chartered) freedom
is no freedom, since only the freedom one takes for
himself, therefore the egoist’s freedom, rides with full
sails.5

Freedom, liberty, these things can only be exercised,

not given, so the State merely regulates what you can and
can’t do; the only difference between States is how violent-
ly they’ll disagree with what you do. Am I to be thankful,
worshipful even, that my spouse doesn’t hit me as often as
some others do? Of course not! We reject that violence al-
together. Yet why is it we are impelled to feel grateful that
our own country is not as swift to put the boot to our neck?
Why should I be thankful I have more leeway until it comes
to violence, rather than being free from the threat of vio-
lence altogether?

Violence For Hire

The primary reason for the existence of the State is
neither for peace nor for freedom, but to exert the Law for
the purpose of control. And whose control? Control for the
highest bidder.
Kevin Carson, in his brilliant essay, “The Iron Fist Be-
hind the Invisible Hand,” makes the case that it is the State
itself that Capitalism depends upon to enforce its monopo-
lies. Market relationships, far from being “free,” are regu-
larly maintained by threats of physical violence. Consider
the State’s role in protecting intellectual property rights:

Chakravarthi Raghavan pointed out that re-

search scientists who actually do the work of invent-
ing are required to sign over patent rights as a con-
dition of employment, while patents and industrial

30
 security programs prevent sharing of information,
and suppress competition in further improvement of
patented inventions… The Government Patent Pol-
icy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amendments,
allowed private industry to keep patents on prod-
ucts developed with government R & D money—and
then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of
production. For example, AZT was developed with
government money and in the public domain since
1964. The patent was given away to Burroughs
Wellcome Corp [Chris Lewis, “Public Assets, Pri-
vate Profits”].
As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked al-
ready, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 actu-
ally lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by
two years by a special act of private law [Benjamin
Grove, “Gibbons backs drug-monopoly bill”].
Patents have been used throughout the twenti-
eth century “to circumvent antitrust laws,” accord-
ing to David Noble. They were “bought up in large
numbers to suppress competition,” which also result-
ed in “the suppression of invention itself.” [America
by Design, pp. 84–109]. Edwin Prindle, a corporate

carson-the-iron-fist-behind-the-invisible-hand.
2017, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-
anteed System of Privilege, accessed 20 March
Hand: Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guar-
6. Kevin Carson, The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible
patent lawyer, wrote in 1906:
‘Patents are the best and most effective means of
controlling competition. They occasionally give ab-
solute command of the market, enabling their owner
to name the price without regard to the cost of pro-
duction… Patents are the only legal form of absolute
monopoly’ [America by Design p. 90].6

And for this monstrosity we are to give reverence?

Whatever you might protest, be it against Capitalism
(which would reduce you to mere laborer) or Society (which
would deny you your Uniqueness), it is always the fist of
the State that will crush you. The State is a war god crying
out in the wastes, four heads for each direction vomiting
laws and ordinances. By the gift of a uniform, a symbol of
its favor, it turns assault and murder into “justified” homi-
cides, rape into “collateral damage,” and charity into “crimi-
nal mischief.” It is the State that demands blood, demands
sacrifice, demands scores of real beings with hearts and
heads subsume themselves to its twisted and maniacal de-
sires.

31
 And it is Capitalism which will sell you back the pieces
at a profit.

32
Capitalism
“Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The
politicians are put there to give you the idea that
you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no
choice! You have owners! They own you. They own
everything. They own all the important land. They
own and control the corporations. They’ve long since
bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the
state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in
their back pockets and they own all the big media
companies, so they control just about all of the news
and information you get to hear. They got you by
the balls.”
—George Carlin “Life is Worth Losing”

W hat are the values of our society? Above

all other things, the God of Profit reins supreme. Profit is
the idea that I should sell something for more than it is
ment for the bourgeoisie, as in Bernie Madoff.
Weil, or when done to the point of embarrass-
ence over the courts, as in Joseph "Yellow Kid"
undertaken by citizens with less power and influ-
7. Note this is commonly called a “scam” when

worth, because I need to make money in order to live.7 This

is not “working to live.”
Humanity has always needed to expend its energy
to survive. What makes the profit system different is that
rather than working for oneself (I am growing food to feed
myself) or working for a collective (I am growing food so
that we can eat), profit ensures we do tasks in exchange
for money. The work we do is not our own, the products or
goods we create are not our own: nothing is our own ex-
cept the worthless currency printed out of thin air by some
bank, and that stuff is only symbolic, not real.

33
Choked By An Invisible Hand
This is the defining religious belief of our time, the an-
thropomorphic “invisible hand” of the Free Market some-
how guiding all societal functions and desires to the most
efficient and benevolent outcome.
Anyone who doubts that this is anything other than a
religious belief need only look to the impossibility of such
a Free Market: Commercial shipping cannot exist without
heavy subsidies from the government, so the American
people in effect pay for these companies to employ slave
labor across the sea. Banks and high-end investors are free
to gamble on our homes and tilt the table in their favor with
the full knowledge that the government will bail them out
if things get too hot. Global capital is free to stalk the Earth
regardless of borders while workers (people) must be moni-
tored and acquire visas to tread across invisible lines that
capitalists can ignore.
So much for free!
“But look at the freedom Capitalism has provided for
us,” the mold-encrusted hordes often dribble, snot run-
ning down their noses. “Aren’t we free to have all these nice
things?”
Yes, the beloved freedom rings again! What is this
“freedom,” peddled out in front of us in between internet
videos and torn across television screens?
I will tell you what it is, but let us not forget from
whence we came:

The working class lifestyle under the factory

system, with its new forms of social control, was a
radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss
of control over their own work. The seventeenth cen-
tury work calendar was still heavily influenced by
medieval custom. Although there were long days in
spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent
periods of light work and the proliferation of saints
days combined to reduce average work-time well be-
low our own. And the pace of work was generally de-
termined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the

34
 laborer, who got up after a decent night’s sleep, and
sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who
had access to common land, even when he wanted
extra income from wage labor, could take work on a
casual basis and then return to working for himself.
This was an unacceptable degree of independence
from a capitalist standpoint…”8

Don’t let anybody ever tell you this all just arose or-
ganically. Capitalism, the enslavement of one group of

behind-the-invisible-hand.
kevin-carson-the-iron-fist-
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/
cessed 20 March 2017. https://
8. Carson, The Iron Fist. ac-
people by another for a profit, only came about through
force; while we may no longer work in factories, the same
discipline is still rigidly required today.
From the moment you clock in at your job you are no
longer a person. You are a tool, a device, and often a cheap
one at that. You will do what you are told, exactly as you are
told, even if you know a better way. You will lie, you will
fake a smile, and you are expected to work as hard as you
can, regardless of the tempo of business.
The entire system is deadening, anathema to actual
Individuals. Instead of pursuing your own passions, your
own desires, you are forced to supplant your own Will for
the will of another.
Yes, you make some money, though it’s still but a frac-
tion of the wealth you produce for someone else. But does
that pittance really make it okay? As I wrote in “Capitalism
is a Death Cult and Science is a Whore,”

Human beings need value; we will look for and

place meaning in something, anything. Forced into
a world with the (false) understanding that nothing
had any intrinsic meaning, that there was no order
or reason to the universe, we needed to come up with
our own; when coming up with our own we needed
to measure how worthwhile it is because we now
existed in a universe with no absolute moral order.
Money became the perfect vessel. Money is an easy
exchange and measure of value, a universal one.
Anything and everything can be measured by it. As
if by magic we can equate the value of 100 potatoes
and use this symbol of its value to purchase and ac-
quire things of similar value; we can tell how good
something is because “good” things are more expen-

35
 sive. As such that currency value becomes a stand in
for actual value itself. The problem is it becomes the
only measure of value. As Marx said “If money is
science-is-a-whore/.
capitalism-is-a-death-cult-and-
godsandradicals.org/2015/10/28/
Cult and Science is a Whore, https://
9. Dr. Bones, Capitalism is a Death
the bond binding me to human life, binding society
to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not
money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and
bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal
agent of separation?9

The solution to enslavement offered by Capitalism?

Start a business! Take out a big loan, work insane hours and
put everything else in my life aside just to make enough
money to retire well. And what of the people you employ?
Well, to ensure your freedom it will be necessary to restrict
theirs. You’ll need them to do menial tasks to ensure a
steady stream of profit for yourself while paying them “fair”
wages determined by how low people are willing to go to
get enough to feed their children.
What kind of madness is this, that buying and selling
has become the central pursuit of our entire species? That
we will shred the days of our youth between two or three
jobs in the hopes that when we are old and most likely bat-
tling cancer we will be able to finally live the lives we al-
ways wanted to… for what? Fifteen years?

Full Landfills, Empty Souls

Our spirits should vomit at the very idea of such a pa-
thetic existence.
Free Market means the market is free, humanity and
everything else now sacrificed to this hellish spook. Com-
munities have been turned into uneasy camps of mercenar-
ies, everyone sharpening their knives and hoping to find
an unexploited weak spot in the jugular of the marketplace
and each other. People gleefully turn on one another, dis-
emboweling entire livelihoods if they so much as get a
whiff of the possibility that they could perform the same
function cheaper. Hopes of religious salvation have been
replaced with the dreams of getting rich quick, regardless
of who or what might suffer in the process. Moneytheism,

36
the One True Religion, reigns supreme.
All bonds that once united things have been severed by
the bandit Capitalism. Marx, more than a hundred years
ago, could already see this:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper

hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyl-
lic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley
feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superi-
ors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between
man and man than naked self-interest, callous “cash
payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecsta-
sies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotis-
tical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless in-
defeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single,
unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word,
for exploitation, veiled by religious and political il-
lusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct,
brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every

Moscow, 1969), 98–137.

One, (Progress Publishers:
Engels Selected Works, vol.
munist Manifesto, Marx/
10. Karl Marx, The Com-
occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with
reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the law-
yer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its
paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away
from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced
the family relation to a mere money relation.10

Science, philosophy, religion, art, everything has been

thrown upon the altar. Philosophy, once held as the great-
est of intellectual pursuits, has been tossed into the trash
heap; students who would dare study such a thing are ad-
monished that they’ll never make any money that way. And
they listen! How many Plato’s are stuck in accounting, how
many Dante’s are cashiering, how many Marie Laveau’s are
rotting away at a desk?
The whole of our species is being held hostage for mere
nickels and dimes.
Capitalism also robs us of our individuality. Where
once there were people now lie only market objects. I am
not me, not Unique, instead I exist only as a “laborer,”
“worker,” “employee.” Those above me, too, are only a “boss,”

37
 “manager,” or “shift lead.” In desperation, we willingly de-
stroy or limit part of ourselves to play this ludicrous game.
You are not an artist, a painter, an amateur psychologist
and civil war buff, you are merely “Shelly, the waitress.”
This is the ideal? This is what we’ve striven for after
millions of years of evolution?
Everyone knows Capitalism is terrible, everybody ac-
knowledges slaving away at somebody’s store just to pay
your bills is not the reason we exist, yet we all continue to
do so without asking for a better world. We say one thing
and do another. The truly frightening thing is how long
this has been going on. Even Oscar Wilde noted:

There are a great many people who, having no

private property of their own, and being always on
the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the
work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite
uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by
the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny
of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there
is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civili-
sation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy
of life. From their collective force Humanity gains
oscar/soul-man/.
reference/archive/wilde-
https://www.marxists.org/
of Man Under Socialism.
11. Oscar Wilde, The Soul

much in material prosperity. But it is only the mate-

rial result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in
himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the
infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regard-
ing him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as
in that case he is far more obedient.11

You are not your own when you are in the service of
another, propelled to serve them out of fear of starvation
or homelessness. You are not the wonderful, grand, beauti-
ful, breathtaking whirlwind of star stuff and Spirit that you
know yourself to be. You are not the seeker of esoteric se-
crets or the psychonaut that in your heart you truly ache to
be. You are neither Witch or Wizard. You are a mere worker,
a number, and are expected to act and live as such.
Born an Individual imbued with such raw potential,
yet only existing to be shackled into the slavery of a mere
market-relation, a mere commodity! Where is the bard that
could sing such a funeral dirge? So lost are we in our own

38
 pit of money-seeking that we can’t even birth the poets to
tell the forlorn misery of our species.
But it doesn’t end at our species!
Under Capitalism everything is commodified, every-
thing becomes a product. What was once a simple patch
of woods cannot continue to exist unless it serves a func-
tion. Of course, the only function deemed worthwhile or of
value is if that patch of woods is making money. To stay a
patch of woods it must become a park, which means it must
be bought and held by a board of executors or government
agency who worry that too many raccoons might cause
problems so they’ll have to call an exterminator. To simply
be requires that this patch of woods transform itself into
someone’s property, or that it be managed and governed,
and that’s if we still want it to be a patch of woods! Unfortu-
nately very few people have the time for such an endeavor
(time is money after all) and would rather bulldoze and rip
up the woods to make something profitable. All the lives
and spirits contained within literally amount to nothing
in the face of “the market” because the wild world exists
outside the realms of profit.
Because it cannot grovel before capitalism, it must be
destroyed.
Think about that, how far removed we are from our
Ancestors! Where once a holy tree or lake could be found,
a small shrine set up and the sacredness of the place ac-
knowledged by the community, we instead must buy up
the property surrounding the holy object ($), file with the
State to have it acknowledge our ownership of the property
($), pay taxes to ensure we can keep the property ($), and
then the object must perform some function that we can
get a return on our investment ($) lest we continually bleed
ourselves dry in preserving the place.

Life Reduced to Money

Vile, empty, disgusting money has ensnared every-
thing, and everything must play by its rules. If the stock
market goes down in New York, I am to worry about my

39
swamp in Florida, to fret over my “property value.” What
absurdity it is that people live in homes and raise families
therein, constantly watching the resale value of the house,
only decorating or upgrading it in the pursuit of increasing
their investment?
Money rules our lives instead of us ruling over it. Hu-
manity has become a mere function of the economy in-
stead of the economy serving human interests. We are the
withered and diseased appendages to the brands we live to
buy, termite-stricken trees groaning in the wind, nothing
more than housing for our profit-obsessed hosts. We live
these rotten lives of subservience to the Almighty Dollar
to ensure “a better world,” and what a world it has created!
Consider education: it isn’t about knowledge anymore,
it’s about getting a degree that will allow you to make mon-
ey. We go to college or university not to enrich our lives or
broaden our perspectives, but to increase our earning po-
tential. We stay away from the Humanities because “there’s
no money in it.”
How right we are!

Universities have become, in a word, high-

priced, high-powered vocational schools where every
discipline must prove its value on the open market
or risk massive cuts, and where students are treated,
and often demand to be treated, like consumers. Ex-
pensive private entities like for-profit colleges and
corporate educational companies thrive in this en-
vironment, often promising much but offering little,
and in this environment, philosophy and the liberal
arts bear a crushing burden to demonstrate their rel-
evance and profitability.
Howard writes about this situation in the
context of her review of Friedrich Nietzsche‘s little-
known, 1872 series of lectures, On the Future of
Our Educational Institutions, published in a new
translation by Damion Searls with the pithy title
Anti-Education… In a Paris Review essay, his trans-
lator Searls quotes the surly philosopher on what
“the state and the masses were apparently clamoring
for: “as much knowledge and education as possi-
ble—leading to the greatest possible production and
demand—leading to the greatest happiness: that’s

40
 still-timely-critique-of-the-modern-university-1872.html.
com/2016/01/nietzsches-philosophy-of-education-and-a-
(1873),” accessed 26 January 2016, http://www.openculture.
ucation and a Still-Timely Critique of the Modern University
12. Open Culture, “Neitzsche Lays Out His Philosophy of Ed-
the formula. Here we have Utility as the goal and
purpose of education, or more precisely Gain: the
highest possible income… Culture is tolerated only
insofar as it serves the cause of earning money.12

Everywhere you look you will find this corruption. It

seeps through every aspect of our lives, stains everything
we touch, breathe, and even eat. We all know that a home-
cooked meal with real ingredients is infinitely better than
a mass-produced microwaved TV dinner, yet Capitalism
destroys any acknowledgment of the importance of such a
difference. Both fill us up and meet our demand for suste-
nance, so the only thing that matters is how much it costs to
make. Thus the TV dinner is “economically efficient.”
The health problems caused by this insanity are mind-
boggling: cancer, heart disease, liver disease, obesity, glan-
dular problems, diabetes, kidney disease, the list goes on

Books, 2009).
(New York Review
Straw Revolution,
Fukuoka, The One
13. Masanobu
and on. But of course good wholesome food is “a luxury,”
and the sad thing is for many on the lower part of the to-
tem pole, it is. They don’t make enough to afford organic or
quality food, and instead must subsist on the food filled
with pesticides and artificial dog-shit they can afford, later
paying the cost in poor health.
ingpower.org/.
http://www.grow-
13 January 2016,
Power, accessed
14. Growing
The crazy thing? Organic food doesn’t need to be ex-
pensive. Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer organic farmer,
grew crops with almost no effort in Japan, yet when he
brought them to market for sale nobody touched them.
When he asked why, he was told that his price was too low,
that people expected to pay more for organic produce. So
walipini-underground-greenhouse/.
cessed 13 January 2016, http://waldenlabs.com/
Year Round; An Extraordinary Walipini,” ac-
“$300 Underground Greenhouse Grows Food
15. Walden Labs Solutions for Self-Reliance,

he had to raise the price to make a living.13

Do not mistake the restriction and glaring errors of the
marketplace as all that is possible, nor decree that Capital-
ism proves our world is unsustainable. It’s quite possible to
grow and raise one million pounds of organic food, both
plant and protein, in the space it takes to build a Walmart.14
It’s being done right now without the use of fossil fuels. You
could put that in every town. You could even add under-
ground greenhouses, currently being used in Austria to
grow bananas in the Alps, to keep things growing year
round for a mere three hundred dollars.15
But we don’t because there’s too much money in keep-
41
 ing those things from happening.
So instead we get polluted streams, toxic air, and an
island of plastic the size of Texas floating around in the
ocean. Capitalism’s endless call for infinite growth cannot
abide on a very finite planet, but we forget that the growth
called for is only in what already exists. What’s worse is
that technologies and research that might alleviate the situ-
on this. Highly recommended.
is a fantastic and well-sourced book
Finance, Conflict, Physics and Space”
The Nazis' Postwar Plan to Control
16. Dr. Farrell’s “Nazi International:

ation are actively blocked for fear that those in power will
lose money.
Remember Tesla? One of the greatest minds of the 20th
century? He had all the funding he could ask for until he
started talking about free energy, then they pulled the plug.
Remember William Reich? The guy who discovered orgone
energy and was able to manipulate clouds and bring rain
to the desert? They threw him in jail, banned his research,
and actually burned his books. How about Ronald Richter,
the little ex-Nazi who claimed to have developed cold fu-
sion?16 Even though all his theories on energy have been
proven and the United States Air Force had a security
detail monitor his every move (strange attention for “just
torn-physicists-discovery-hints.html.
http://phys.org/news/2012-02-plasmas-
Origin of Phenomina Like Solar Flares,”
Physicists Make Discovery that Hints at
17. Phys.org, “Plasma Torn Apart:

some quack”), he was laughed out of the lab and dropped

into obscurity.17
There are stacks of research that have not been brought
out for the general public because it is not profitable to do
so, the entire species left bound, gagged, and robbed. Our
species, our planet is being held at ransom for the continu-
ation of quarterly returns, free and clean energy deemed
impossible because it will hurt some people’s investments.
If you buck against the system they will either buy you out
or kill you. They will brook no other option.
Worker efficiency and production has doubled yet wag-
es haven’t, and we’re working more hours instead of less.18
We’ve produced enough goods to fill the world a million
tion/charting-wage-stagnation/.
2016, http://www.epi.org/publica-
Charts,” accessed 16 January
“Wage Stagnation in Nine
18. Economic Policy Institute,

times over, every need and desire met, yet still we slave
away. We could feed the whole world tomorrow yet still we
have poverty.
Why?
This world of imbalance exists by design. Capitalism
depends upon a heavy stream of slaves constantly work-
ing and enough people constantly starving to keep those

42
 slaves fearful. It demands obedience because to have even
a marginal bit of freedom puts the whole system in danger.
“The laborers have the most enormous power in their hands,
and, if they once became thoroughly conscious of it and
used it, nothing would withstand them; they would only
have to stop labor, regard the product of labor as theirs, and
enjoy it. This is the sense of the labor disturbances which
show themselves here and there. The State rests on the slav-
ery of labor. If labor becomes free, the State is lost.”19

19. Stirner, The Ego.

That power continues to exist, but look at the poor souls
in whom it lies dormant! What has become of our species?

After a century and a half of patriotic indoctri-

nation by the statist education system, Americans
have thoroughly internalized the ‘little red school-
house’ version of American history. This authoritar-
ian piety is so diametrically opposed to the beliefs
of those who took up arms in the Revolution that
the citizenry has largely forgotten what it means
to be American… Two hundred years ago, stand-
ing armies were feared as a threat to liberty and a
breeding ground for authoritarian personalities;
conscription was associated with the tyranny of
Cromwell; wage labor was thought to be inconsis-
tent with the independent spirit of a free citizen. To-
day, two hundred years later, Americans have been
so Prussianized by sixty years of a garrison state
and “wars” against one internal enemy or another,
that they are conditioned to genuflect at the sight
20. Carson, The Iron Fist.

of a uniform. Draft dodgers are equivalent to child

molesters. Most people work for some centralized
corporate or state bureaucracy, where as a matter of
course they are expected to obey orders from superi-
ors, work under constant surveillance, and even piss
in a cup on command. 20

Any Witch, Wizard, or Sorcerer that would willfully

succumb to such a debasement is not worthy of any such ti-
tle. Better they sink back into the sleeping, exploited mass
of humanity than affront the spirits with their wretched-
ness.
I speak of course of that vile falsehood they call “Soci-
ety.”

43
Society
“The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformi-
ty; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.
The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has in-
creased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere
present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas.
Its most concentrated dullness is ‘public opinion.’
Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who
refuses to submit is at once labeled ‘queer,’ ‘different,’
and decried as a disturbing element in the comfort-
able stagnancy of modern life.”
—Emma Goldman

J ust what is “society?”

Society is a construct, an enclosure of peoples. What
makes something a society is only its boundaries. We can
speak of American Society or German society, but what are
they, really? Nothing more than patterns of behavior by in-
dividuals we’ve circled with invisible borders. What does
New Orleans have in common with New Brunswick? What
kinship does Arizona have with Alaska other than the most
superficial ties forced upon it by another body (The State)?
The word Society can lasso any group of individuals to-
gether: an Anime-lover’s society, BDSM-enthusiast society,
30-year-old-and-unmarried society. While all these group-
ings may have value they are all still mental constructs.
The only real connection these individuals have is that of
intercourse.
Max Stirner again: “If one hall encloses many persons,

45
 then the hall causes these persons to be in society. They
are in society, and at most constitute a parlor-society by
talking in the traditional forms of parlor speech. When it
21. Stirner, The Ego.

comes to real intercourse, this is to be regarded as indepen-

dent of society: it may occur or be lacking, without altering
the nature of what is named society.”21
Intercourse is inter-relationship, something that can-
not be faked; like a street where all the neighbors know one
another and regularly get together, it has a totally different
feel than a stuffed cul-de-sac full of strangers. This is real
human connection and it need not be limited by geograph-
ic condition: plenty of people have true intercourse and in-
terrelationship through online forums, groups, and guilds.
Are these connections not altogether more real than the
false “societies” handed to me by the State or my employer?

Imagined Communities
The State and Media tell me I’m part of American soci-
ety. What business do I have with other Americans? What
intercourse? Am I to be thrown together with the most
backward Mississippi racist wrapped in a Confederate flag?
With the moneyed New York City CEO that never tips his
bartender? I owe these people nothing, they are no kin of
mine and mutually we are devoid of any intercourse, yet I
am to feel and act as if I’m more connected with them than
an Anarchist in Greece or Rojava? Why am I expected to
act in concert to achieve any goal with Protestant Evangeli-
cals when I’d rather be in the company of Necromancers?
Oh, they don’t want you to think about that! In fact,
you must believe in Society, the invisible lasso, because
the State and the rich require us to feel for those we might
never care about. If Russia carpet-bombed a KKK national
convention, the Powers That Be and the spooks they sum-
mon would have me pick up arms to defend my “country-
men” instead of joyously cheering their demise.
Society only exists as a construct, one that’s been con-
jured for a very specific goal. “Prison no longer means a
space only, but a space with express reference to its in-

46
habitants: for it is a prison only through being destined
for prisoners, without whom it would be a mere building.
What gives a common stamp to those who are gathered in

22. Ibid.
it? Evidently the prison, since it is only by means of the
prison that they are prisoners. What, then, determines the
manner of life of the prison society? The prison!”22
The confines of Society can be thought of as the fencing
in any given human form, but they also dictate the behav-
ior of its captives.
Let’s unpack, for instance, the spook of “The American
Dream.”
Right after WWII, America’s leaders found themselves
in a bit of a pickle: through amazing productivity and sweat
equity they had within their hands an industrial power-
house capable of meeting nearly every consumer need for
the next five years in the space of one. Clothes, shoes, farm
equipment, all that would be needed or desired for half a
decade, produced at the current work rate in just one year.
Now, to many this was a thing of beauty—after all, people
could all work for just one year and do whatever the hell
they wanted for the next four.
But the rich cannot make money that way.
So they cooked up this plan to do something about it,
and pilfered here-and-there from the best hanger-ons of
the former Nazi propaganda machine until they got ahold
of the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a man by the name of
Edward Bernays. Mr. Bernays was a kindred spirit to those
in power: echoing the political implications of certain jack-
booted politicians, he saw the bulk of humanity as irratio-
nal and dangerous, a herd in need of a shepherd. He wor-
ried that the American people “could very easily vote for
the wrong man or want the wrong thing” like more democ-
racy or greater control over their lives—hell maybe even
mixing races—“so that they had to be guided from above.”
Whether his puerile and fascist thoughts about humanity
were the wrong thing never seemed to dawn on him.
Bernays came up with this idea that a certain utopia
could be created by channeling the instinctual human en-
ergies of this herd into business and commerce. By playing
on and then fulfilling the constant yet simple human crav-

47
 ings for new and shiny things, this massive force of produc-
tion they’d created could be kept going at war-time rates; it
would keep the people busy, the “right people” could lead
2004).
York: IG PUBLISHING,
Propaganda, (New
23. Edward Bernays,
the show, and those “right people” would be made wealthy
by keeping this “benevolent despotism,” as he called it, go-
ing.23
To quote the man at length:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of

the organized habits and opinions of the masses is
an important element in democratic society. Those
who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true
ruling power of our country.
… We are governed, our minds are molded, our
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men
we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the
way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in
this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly
functioning society.
24. Ibid.

… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether

in the sphere of politics or business, in our social con-
duct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by
the relatively small number of persons… who under-
stand the mental processes and social patterns of the
masses. It is they who pull the wires which control
the public mind. 24

So out went the call, and the people were fed this
massive diet of cravings: you need that new car, you need
that new house, you need this new aftershave--all to keep
them placated and mindless while other people got rich. It
worked so well we started calling our ability to buy things
“freedom.”
So they took a few of these products, packaged them
together and started labeling it “The American Dream.”
And the car, the house, these things were in it. Everybody
needed them, and as everybody needed them whole towns
and existences were created to ensure you not only en-
joyed your freedom, you actively needed it to exist. Towns
sprawled outwards, unattached to any social centers as row
upon row of that exact house you saw in that commercial
48
 popped up. Roads followed, winding and weaving endless-
ly past places to buy things and places to keep things.
The attainment of this product package that depend-
ed on certain social and material conditions became the
symbol, the totem, for an entire society.
Remember that this is not some vague collection of
hopes; people kill themselves if they don’t attain this prod-
uct package, they tear themselves apart, drink and beat
their spouses, abuse their children, all because they haven’t
appeased the commercial in their head. This is magic par
excellence, a thought-form embedded within the target
that will cause it to self-destruct unless the objectives are
met. Society is not some organic thing: it is designed, man-
ufactured, studied by think tanks, and tweaked if it isn’t
performing well.
Your life has been designed. Your personality has been
designed. Your family’s spending habits on Christmas and
the table layout at Thanksgiving have all been designed,
studied, and implemented to attain certain goals.
This is magic: the enchantment of an entire captive
population, all to further an objective.

Summoning the Specter of Society

Ever notice the spook of Society is always conjured
up when the rich need something? We’re made to feel like
we’re all in this together—not when it comes to peace, but
when it comes to war. We’re reminded that we must help
our neighbor through charity, and thus subsidize his suf-
fering when the State or Capitalism refuses to aid him. We
are reminded that we’re all part of a “team,” that we share
a “mission statement” and “values”; we are goaded to ingest
the “culture” of whatever corporate entity we slave under to
continue to produce value that they might devour.
Society itself is a figment of our imagination, a con-
structed lie like Santa Claus or the myth that good guys
always win. It is an immaterial program downloaded
throughout your childhood so you become a good little
soldier for wherever and whomever you were born to serve.

49
 There is no Society, there is only the illusion that we
belong together, that we are really friends instead of often
bitter enemies. You have nothing in common with the peo-
ple that profit off of and rule over you, and yet they depend
upon you thinking of them as a close cousin.
Take for instance my own state, Florida: What exactly
do the educated, semi-liberal folks on the Space Coast have
in common with the cross-burning, crypto-fascists in the
Panhandle? Geographic conditions? Ecologically the two
regions are quite distinct. Culture? Both areas have abso-
lutely zero in common save for the English language. Reli-
dren, and enslaved the survivors. For more information read Adam Wasserman's A People’s History of Florida.
masters and thrive. The American government, under Andrew Jackson, destroyed the fort, killed the woman and chil-
seen as a threat to the entire Southern Slave system because it showed the enslaved they could very well live without
colonial fort given to them by the British Empire. They formed their own society, one so free and prosperous it was
25. The Black Fort was an incredible community of runaway slaves and Black Seminoles living in and around a British

gion? The Panhandle is rife with hell-fire Baptists while the

coast couldn’t care less.
What exactly is binding these people together?
Take it a step further: what loyalty does Florida owe
to the United States? To the English language? Florida will
have existed longer under the Spanish crown than Uncle
Sam until the year 2050. Why should it ingest any “Ameri-
can culture?” What makes it “American,” exactly? Why
don’t we have siestas at noon or drink wine throughout the
day as our forbears did? Why is George Washington a more
treasured Ancestor than every heroic life lost at the Black
Fort?25
“Society,” that falsehood, is nothing more than a pimp
intent on making you a prostitute. It peddles its wares in
front of you when you are nothing more than a child, prom-
ising a ready-made identity for you to treasure and enjoy.
Yet it demands you sell yourself in return, it beats you end-
lessly with this identity. Society is what makes a woman
feel bad if she doesn’t like rough sex because it’s popular;
it’s what applauds the gay man one moment then reminds
him he needs to “grow up” and get married the next; it’s
that nagging feeling in your gut as you try to forget the
dead faces of Iraqi children while you are forced to give a
discount to someone that murdered people for college mon-
ey; it’s that binding force that causes you to view someone
in a McDonald’s uniform as garbage, scream in their face
over coffee, and refuse to see them as a human being.
The moment I am described, a piece of me is lost; the
moment I am lassoed by a society of any kind, I am impris-

50
oned. Communist, Floridian, Human, all these words sum-
mon spooks in your mind and limit your reception of me.
We kill little pieces of each other everyday, and for what?
To make is easier to understand, to write one another off?
Human-being shorthand?
What we should seek are associations that we ourselves
create, real ones not simply put upon us by an outside force.
I seek real connection, real relationships, in short: actual
intercourse.
What we mistake for society is intercourse, is inter-
relationship and reciprocity, that warm fuzzy feeling when
two individuals act and aid one another.

What determines their intercourse? The prison

too, perhaps? Certainly they can enter upon in-
tercourse only as prisoners, i.e. only so far as the
prison laws allow it; but that they themselves hold
intercourse, I with you, this the prison cannot bring
to pass; on the contrary, it must have an eye to
guarding against such egoistic, purely personal in-
tercourse (and only as such is it really intercourse
between me and you). That we jointly execute a job,
run a machine, effectuate anything in general—for
this a prison will indeed provide; but that I forget
that I am a prisoner, and engage in intercourse with

26. Stirner, The Ego.

you who likewise disregard it, brings danger to the
prison, and not only cannot be caused by it, but
must not even be permitted.
Like the hall, the prison does form a society, a
companionship, a communion (e.g. communion of
labor), but no intercourse, no reciprocity, no union. 26

Harmonious intercourse is not a byproduct of Society,

but is something that happens underneath it, in spite of it,
just like you can make best friends at an absolutely shitty
job. It’s not the job that made you allies. We can be thrown
into any room, building, or grouping, but that does not
mean we are part of it; we seem to have forgotten that these
things came from us, not we from it.
These things grow organically and cannot be packaged
neatly, just like real life. Which is the real “society”: a group
of people getting to know each other at a party or three
hundred million people across 1,538 miles connected only
51
by a flag?
Society demands we act certain ways, think certain
ways, for the benefit of that society, not for you.
What unknown ledges of greatness might humanity
leap off and learn to fly if we remove this possessing spook
from our minds, if we no longer self-encoded the edicts of
focus groups and advertising agencies, if we realize the
only thing real about our “societies” was the interrelation-
ships we ourselves create and maintain? Should we not rid
ourselves altogether of this dreadful idea we call society in
favor of the endless emergence of interlocking, everflow-
ing, inter-connections between individuals? Is this not the
model the Spirit World seems to follow?
Each of the powers that run the Spectral Cage are weak
when naked in their wretchedness. When the roses we’ve
been promised end up smelling like rotting entrails we are
quick to throw them away. To keep us from seeing the truth,
the Spectral Cage needs a professional, dedicated force of
paid liars to make it look good. And it has one.

52
MEDIA
“Media is an assemblage of tools with which to
expand an audience’s conception of what ‘the world’
is to such an extent that their own lives and capabili-
ties seem utterly insignificant; a means of psycho-
logical warfare by which people are overloaded with
information and desensitized to their own and oth-
ers’ suffering; the sum of all means by which human
beings reduce the infinite complexity of reality to a
dead-end maze of abstractions.”
—CrimethInc, Contradictionary

W hat can be said about the Media, the final

disease-carrying member of this most loathsome of pris-
ons, the wet and sopping glue that binds all the Spectral
Cage together? Your average human being will perhaps
never fully understand how deep they are in misinfor-
mation, how surrounded they are by toxic and noxious
thought-forms that have been carefully selected to ensure
a steady stream of profits. While society may have been the
ideal vehicle to enforce desired cultural norms in the past,
it is not quite up to the task today.
Society may be considered the weakest bar in the Spec-
tral Cage. No one honestly cares about one another any-
more; patriotism is long since dead, its stinking corpse only
still cared for by those who’ve fallen into the Kool-Aid and
not merely sipped it. Today the spook of Society kills the
individual above all else.

53
 “You’re Not Worth It”
The media as we know it exists to trick the mind. Me-
dia is an ongoing conversation between you and Those
Who Rule. Each and every magazine cover, every TV
show—even the most miniscule vapid reality show—has
been endlessly focus-grouped to ensure the desired narra-
tive gets across. You are manipulated, you are played with,
your very heart, ego, and self-worth nothing but an instru-
ment for them to string along.
While the State and Capitalism will gleefully exploit
you in the name of Society, they must somehow convince
you that you actually enjoy it.
Is this not violence? If I were to lie to you, talk down to
POV_EmotionInAdvertising.pdf.
ments/points-of-view/MillwardBrown_
com/docs/default-source/insight-docu-
vertising,” http://www.millwardbrown.
27. Millward Brown, “Emotion in Ad-

you, say things that manipulated your entire fibre of self

worth you would regard me as the most terrible of persons.
And yet with the Media it’s not just legal, it’s business. “The
subject of emotion in advertising tends to bring certain
types of commercials to mind: those featuring touching or
heart-rending vignettes, cooing babies, or romping puppies.
Too often an emotional response to advertising is thought
to be one that elicits tears or smiles. But in fact, every ad
generates an emotional response, because everything we
encounter in life generates an instinctive emotional re-
sponse. Everything. And so in this way, emotion is more
important than most advertisers realize.”27
No matter how hard you struggle, you will never be
kids-violence-media/.
com/2013/02/21/living/parenting-
January 2017, http://www.cnn.
Damaging to Kids?” accessed 12
28. CNN.com, “Is Media Violence

free from the onslaught of images, because even if you ig-

nore them your subconscious is still watching. 90 percent
of movies, 68 percent of video games, and 60 percent of
TV shows have depictions of incredible violence within
them, yet we worry when the news is too “scary” for our
children.28
The worst to suffer are woman, an entire gender split
open and feasted upon by the vultures of Media. Magazine
cover after magazine cover tells them they aren’t having
enough sex, they aren’t pretty enough, that they aren’t skin-
ny enough, and if they just buy these products they might
actually be regarded as a regular human being. Your aver-
age teen girl gets one hundred and eighty minutes of this

54
onslaught a day compared to a mere ten minutes of paren-
tal interaction.29 In movies and television, women are told

body-image#1.
features/helping-girls-with-
www.webmd.com/beauty/
with Body Image,” http://
29. WebMD, “Helping Girls
time and time again that they just need to find the right
guy to be happy, that Prince Charming will come in a fix
everything.
Is this not violence? If you had a neighbor that screamed
at your young daughter that she was fat every time she
went outside, how would you handle it? And yet we view
subjection to this kind of torture as “natural,” as “okay.”
It’s just business.
It’s become a cultural trope that people of color are “the
bad guys” or usually “die first.” What effect does this have
on a young mind nearly every movie containing a virtual
lynching? What effect does it have to be aware that this is
not your society, this is not your culture, that at best you
are an unwanted addition and at worst an intruder?

If you are a white girl, a black girl or a black

boy, exposure to today’s electronic media in the long
run tends to make you feel worse about yourself…
Nicole Martins, an assistant professor of tele-
communications in the IU College of Arts and Sci-
ences, and Kristen Harrison, professor of commu-
nication studies at the University of Michigan, also
found that black children in their study spent, on av-
erage, an extra 10 hours a week watching television…
Their paper has been published in Communi-
cation Research. Martins and Harrison surveyed a
group of about 400 black and white pre-adolescent
students in communities in the Midwest over a year
long period. Rather than look at the impact of partic-
ular shows or genres, they focused on the correlation
between the time in front of the TV and the impact
on their self-esteem…
“If you are a girl or a woman, what you see is
that women on television are not given a variety of
roles,” she added. “The roles that they see are pretty
simplistic; they’re almost always one-dimensional
and focused on the success they have because of how
they look, not what they do or what they think or
how they got there.
“This sexualization of women presumably leads
to this negative impact on girls.”
With regard to black boys, they are often crimi-

55
 nalized in many programs, shown as hoodlums and
buffoons, and without much variety in the kinds of
roles they occupy.
“Young black boys are getting the opposite mes-
sft052412.ph.
pub_releases/2012-05/iu-
www.eurekalert.org/
15 January 2016, http://
30. EurekAlert!, accessed
sage: that there is not lots of good things that you
can aspire to,” Martins said. “If we think about those
kinds of messages, that’s what’s responsible for the
impact.
“If we think just about the sheer amount of
time they’re spending, and not the messages, these
kids are spending so much time with the media that
they’re not given a chance to explore other things
they’re good at, that could boost their self-esteem.”30

Ad after ad telling you you’re not good enough, that

you’re garbage and that you need to buy, buy, buy to
amount to anything in this world. When are we going to
start counting suicides as casualties in the War on the Hu-
man Spirit? How many more slit wrists must we stitch up?
How many more blue-faced cadavers must we cut down
from closets?
Who would allow such madness? Who would stand by
and let this happen? Who is responsible for this monstros-
ity we unleashed upon an entire planet?
That’s not the question, Comrade. The question is, who
stands to gain?

Researchers who study TV’s effect on kids say

this black-and-white view offered by the TV world
31. CNN.com, “Media Violence.”

can cripple kids living in a gray real world. “If a

child sees himself as the ‘good guy,’ then anyone who
disagrees with him must be a ‘bad guy’—and this
black-and-white thinking doesn’t leave much room
for trying to see it from the other side, or working
out a win-win compromise,” says Michelle Garrison,
investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute
Center for Child Health, Behavior, and Development.
“On the other hand, if a child starts seeing himself as
a ‘bad guy,’ then it may no longer feel like it’s about
choices and actions that can change.”31

How perfect. You’ll either raise up a generation that

is unable to think critically and consider opposing view-
points, or one that is silently resigned to its predetermined
56
 fate. How convenient. Why, it’s almost like somebody want-
ed it that way. But such things surely are beyond those
noble souls that rule us?

Stories That Kill

We are left then with the knowledge that what we are
fed as “reality” is anything but.
It would be enough to simply be lied to, but what we
breathe everyday is nothing short of the largest system of
coercion and manipulation ever dreamt up by humanity.
From the moment we are born till our last gasping breath
we are assailed by images and messages that have been
cooked up by others, noxious fabricated identities and
roles we half-humanly ape. What “people” are really run-
ning around nowadays, when everything from their per-
sonality to their deep seated fears has been given to them?
How many great thinkers, artists, and sorcerers have we
lost in either a haze of mediocrity or have killed themselves
because they “couldn’t fit in?” The rape never stops, never
sleeps. Endlessly false news stories get you to hate the free-
dom fighter and love the oppressor. Celebrity gossip keeps
your mind occupied. Reality television teaches you to favor
competition and ruthlessness over co-operation.
They decry any vision of a new world as “against hu-
man nature.” Human nature has long been buried under
mountains of garbage, replaced with puppets dancing to
corporate songs sung by government maestros. Are we
even aware of how much we’ve changed, how much we’ve
been molded? How fundamentally alien are our minds,
minds birthed and fed on a never-ending stream of vio-
lence and advertizing, compared to a person born one hun-
dred years ago?
What’s the difference between an artist given positive
encouragement and one who wakes up everyday to the
television telling him he’ll never be more than a criminal?
What’s the relation to magical skill in a girl born knowing
spirits exist and taught as such, versus one who is fed life-
denying materialism and a religion of consumerism?

57
 How many people have we lost?
How has the species fallen, what have we done to our-
selves, what great heights could we have reached if we were
not so horribly afflicted with chains?
The dogs of the Media are guilty of nothing less than
mental genocide: the elimination of free spirits, of individ-
uality, is their daily task. How limited we are, how broken,
how misshapen. You can break with the church, you can
reject the State, you can even despise Capitalism and never
touch currency, but from the Media you will never be free.
And it is precisely this damaging mind control that ham-
pers the most essential aspect of yourself: your spirit.
The limited mind is not one conducive to magic, and
actively works against it. How many spells have failed not
because the caster lacked the Will, but because they didn’t
think they were good enough, that they didn’t deserve the
results? How many prayers have been ossified by Madison
Avenue cultural constructs? Who are you really working
for with your prosperity candle when you call out to the
Spirits to get you that car you saw in the commercial?
We stand in a wasteland of amusement englossed with
sigils to put us to sleep. The sheer fact of this limitation,
of this damage, of this servility should awaken the hungry
fires of vengeance within you. That is the call of your Spirit
to be free.

58
 ing any tin-pot dictator into a hero provided he’s killed enough American troops, a slave to mental constructs and engineered absolutes
allows us to gaze out rather than fully drink in. A Communist only sees the world through his own Ideological Telescope, thus transform-
in the world only through that lens. In essence we do not “see” the world but stare out at it through a telescope, a manufactured tool that
over time. If we have been conditioned to understand a certain color or certain symbol as “dangerous” or “criminal” we see it’s existence
32. We ingest reality subjectively, not only through our own limited senses but translated through the mental coordinates we’ve built up
The Return of the
Iconoclast
“It is idiotic that those who have figured things
out are forced to wait for the mass of cretins who are
blocking the way to evolve… Put your old refrains
aside. We have had enough of always sacrificing
ourselves for something. The Fatherland, Society
and Morality have fallen (…) That’s fine, but don’t
contribute to reviving new entities for us: the Idea,
the Revolution, Propaganda, Solidarity; we don’t
give a damn. What we want is to live, to have the
comforts and well-being we have a right to. What we
want to accomplish is the development of our indi-
viduality in the full sense of the word, in its entirety.
The individual has a right to all possible well-being,
and must try to attain it all the time, by any means.”
—An Illegalist named Hégot, 1903

N ow the bars of the Spectral Cage are neatly

laid out, the wire mesh that has surrounded your life all
the more apparent, all the more real. The true horror only
begins when we see that we ourselves are as guilty as those
that rule us, the way your mind works literally hacked by
the memes of State and Capital to create a conducive Ideo-
logical Telescope.32 Aspects of yourself you never questioned,
even took perhaps as part of your own personality, are in
fact nothing more than mental viruses breeding within
you like bottle flies in a corpse. Things you never thought
about, or worse perhaps even enjoyed, reveal themselves as
spectral jailers laughing at your fate. You who deem your-
59
 self a powerful magician, a spirit-imbued witch, are forever
only pretending because you are already limited.
Like a finely-tuned machine, you move according to
programming. You have been taught to regard some uni-
forms—be they suits or military fatigues—as so sacred you
will treat them as any other god or goddess you revere.
How many times have we seen a police officer violently
beat someone while crowds of people find themselves hor-
rified yet unable to act? It’s not simply a fear of the same
happening to them, but the mesmerizing aspect of author-
ity. Just as a Christian cannot spit on a Bible, neither can
you violate the taboo of breaking the enchantment of au-
thority held by the badge.
This religious thinking is even prevalent among the
“leftists” in the protest crowd who challenge these enchant-
ments without bothering to act in a sufficient way to disen-
chant them: they march down an empty street and scream
at Federal buildings, staying of course on the street and
making sure to leave at the appointed time. They beg to be
heard, cry to sway hearts who have no business in running
the affairs of others, and kneel before their political mas-
ters. Millions can be killed, tortured and starved but the
“liberal” maintains his peaceful, non-threatening buffoon-
ery through it all. Human life is “sacred” to them, even the
wretched ones who wantonly kill and harm as they please.
These things are merely thoughts, right? Hardwired,
sure, maybe even insurmountable, but they’re just air, just
propaganda. It’s all in my head. Right?

Not Just Spooks, But Specters

The one failure of Max Stirner’s theories and of his con-
temporaries was that they believed thoughts had no power
of their own. This is where the Sorcerer stands in a unique
position. We, perhaps even we alone, know just how much
power thoughts can have. The right thought, with enough
force provided by the Sorcerer and her allies, can change
the very fabric of space and time.
If thoughts have power and force, doesn’t that mean

60
that the spooks of Nation, Society, and Capitalism have a
force and power all their own? If each action reverberates
through the Spirit World, are not the trips and triggers of
the State and Capital just as alive there too? By implanting
these ideas within you, Those That Rule effectively funnel
your psi/energy/chi towards these thoughtforms. You lend
your power and force to fuel these vampiric spooks, in ef-
fect becoming nothing more than a living battery.
All the commercials, all the movies, all the pleas about
society, all that damned ritualistic behavior at sporting
events suddenly begins to make sense: they provide you
with a focus for your thoughts, sigils aimed at your compli-
ance. More so, these new gods become the living spiders
weaving webs in your head, controlling your actions and
behavior, chaining up your spiritual being. Who needs
jack-booted thugs when the great majority of the time the
people willingly kneel, willingly sacrifice themselves for
the greater good? Why conscript people when, raised on
the fiction of national identity and the spook that they owe
their lives to it, they will willingly line up to have their legs
blown off for the honor of serving the bloodthirsty savior
they call “Nation”?
With clear vision now, we can see the true Lovecraftian
nature of this plane of existence: a brutal material jungle
where the great mass of people are fodder or batteries for
the projects of more powerful beings, living food and sim-
ple toys for errant spirits they refuse to believe in. We might
think of humanity then as Homo somnia, “the Dreaming
Person,” a creature constantly plugged into a world of dis-
charging symbols and images shaping its behavior and
thoughts in a world swarming with spiritual forces.
And what a world! Swirling clouds of eregores moving
through and around the human species, individuals like
walking beehives funneled with spooks and symbols. If
our prayers and rituals empower the gods, or at least em-
power their actions on the spiritual realm, what does the
collective worship of a flag or a dollar by three hundred
million people do?
Have these spooks become gods in their own right?
Just as my seething rage could shatter a glass in some-

61
 one else’s hand and with enough magical force I can tip the
scales of fortune in my favor, don’t the Gods of Nation, So-
ciety, and Capitalism have a power and force all their own?

Smashing the New Idols

Are you free from this power, dear Sorcerer?
You who claim to traffic in ancient gods and wispy spir-
its on moonlit nights, who bend the very universe to your
will through ritual and unseen allies, are you truly under
your own power? How much of you really is you and not a
byproduct of them? How much of your own spiritual power
do you give away on a daily basis to the modern gods of
Capital, State, and Society while swallowing all the lies of
the Media?
Everywhere you turn, you are not only chained in
by the Spectral Cage but strapped into it, drained of all
your vital forces. Everyday you allow this to happen, but
if a card-reader or medium were to tell you that a host of
negative entities were draining the same vital forces, your
very spiritual power and expression of self, how quickly
would the cleansings engage? How earnestly would sage
be smudged and protective circles cast to keep away such
foul creatures?
The words of Lovecraft ring just as true for these new
gods that ensnare humanity as any creature that descend
upon us from Between The Spaces:

One might easily imagine an alien nucleus

of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept
alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions
from the life-force or bodily tissues and fluids of
other and more palpably living things into which
it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes
texts/fiction/sh.aspx.
hplovecraft.com/writings/
20 April 2016, http://www.
Shunned House,” accessed
33. H.P. Lovecraft, “The

completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile,

or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of
self-preservation. In any case such a monster must
of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly
and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary
duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life,
health, and sanity.33

62
 Until we rid ourselves of the spooks and fully exor-
cise the ghosts of these ideas within us, we will forever be
chained into the Spectral Cage. No matter how free you
might believe yourself, no matter how developed in your
chosen art, you will in the end remain nothing but a pup-
pet genuflecting before ideological parasites you mistak-
enly take for yourself.
Wilhelm Reich echoed the same in Listen, Little Man!
when he said:

I want you to stop being subhuman and be-

come “yourself.” “Yourself,” I say. Not the newspaper
you read, not your vicious neighbor’s opinion, but
“yourself.” I know, and you don’t, what you really are
deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your
God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think
you’re a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or
the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you be-
have as you do.
… You listen to commercials on the radio, ad-
vertisements for laxatives, toothpaste, shoe polish,
deodorants, and so on. But you are unaware of the
abysmal stupidity, the abominable bad taste of the
siren’s tones calculated to catch your ear. Have you
ever listened closely to a nightclub entertainer’s
jokes about you? About you, about himself, and
your whole wretched world. Listen to your adver-
tisements for better bowel movements and learn who
and what you are.34
man.com.
http://www.listenlittle-
accessed 6 May 2016,
“Listen Little Man!”
34. Wilhem Reich,

How is that so many on this planet of ours are capable

of shaking the foundations of all creation, yet they waste
their lives at office desks or cheering for scraps of cloth
blowing in the wind? This world is one of forces and pow-
ers, and the gods of the Spectral Cage have convinced you
to relinquish your power so they can freely use theirs upon
you. We worship “freedom of the press” yet understand
when the State steps in and tells you some things are off the
table. We cry to be given health care by the great national
father instead of demanding to be healthy. We’ve become
so thoroughly indoctrinated to believe we have the right to
overtime pay, yet shrug our shoulders when corporations
63
 simply decide to hire twice the amount of people at half the
cost to make sure we don’t get that pay.
Enzo Martucci proclaimed: “The freedom of an indi-
vidual ends where his power ends.” Your power scarcely
moves beyond the confines of your own skull, and even
then just barely. We need not economic arguments nor
plays to pity to seek the destruction of the system. The de-
sire to awaken oneself and to become fully developed and
free should suffice. The desire, the hunger, the will to mani-
fest still beats strong in our hearts even as the gargoyles of
Capitalism seek to tear it out of our chests. As long as your
material conditions hamper your existence you will never
climb to the heights of Occult and Spiritual ability you so
longingly crave. As long as you’re trapped within the Spec-
tral Cage of any ideology, you will be stuck drawing sigils
in puddles of piss.
Why are we not demanding an end to all this, if noth-
ing else, for the sake of ourselves?
Being merely human is something to be overcome, but
they will not grant you even that. In a world of gods, ghosts,
and goetic demons, we are to be condemned to be mere
workers, mere citizens; we are to select from a multiple
choice line of personalities excluding the only choice that
matters: our own.
Forget the working class and its messianic dream that
the most beaten down members of the exploited will rise
up and liberate the world. Time and time again the crowds
of humanity have sampled the taste of Revolution not to de-
stroy masters altogether, but only to choose new ones. In a
matter of fifty years there may not even be a working class,
automation and 3D printing eliminating the vast majority
of busy-work we’ve been calling jobs.
Generis Sermon.”
#2: The Fire is Here, “The Sui
sermon in A Beautiful Resistance
zenship and workerism see my
35.For more on the idiocy of citi-

This working class is merely another entity, a mental

construct, a spook, one that waits hellishly for the chance
to feed on human blood. Overwhelmingly the enslaved
class is interested in merely eking out a better existence for
themselves at their jobs. I don’t intend to live or die for my
job anymore then I plan on doing the same for the Coun-
try.35 The revolutions have ended up being nothing more
than a changing of the guard, and none of them have had

64
 our interests in mind. I’m not fighting to create some new
society, another concept larger than myself, a new master
ready to rule as soon as I throw out the old.
Ideology of any kind is a cruel inversion of value: the
new gods (State, Race, Revolution, Class, Humanity) be-
comes the only “real” thing, while the individuals inside it
are reduced to mere objects; real people become things to
be used as tools in service to this greater being, whatever
it might dress itself up as. History up until now has been
nothing more than a glut of madness that occurs when
people become insects.
To what do we aspire? A powerful nation, good laws, a
safe job with some benefits? No! We aspire to knowledge,
to growth, to fully feel our Will to Power and manifest the
greatness that lies within us. Everybody knows that this
mockery we call modern living is not the point of living at
all, yet we all just keep doing it. When do we say enough
is enough? When does humanity as a whole stir from its
slumber and fully develop? Does it even have the legs to
stand on anymore?
Am I to continue to exist under the weight of these
chains until the species comes around? Am I to silently
pray that some outside force, some Christ-like ideology will
win over the masses and point towards the science of lib-
eration? There is no saving the species any longer, there is
no teleological principle, no salvation waiting at the end of
the tunnel besides the one we ourselves create.
The sheer fact that Free Spirits still exist in this world
under the heavy weight of GMO’s, cancerous products, ad-
vertizing, and State-sanctioned violence is nothing short of
a miracle; that humanity’s beaten corpse is still shallowly
breathing should be the subject of the most heroic poems
and songs.
Who exists to write them?

Remembering Who We Are

This is not a rescue. This is a recovery mission.
The Witch and Wizard have fought alongside many a

65
 struggle, but in the end they were often used as tools to
further the egoism of whatever Great Cause or Nation they
were spooked with. Crowley was nothing more than a pup-
pet for British interests, just as each one of his comrades in
Germany and the U.S.S.R. were.
You Occultists, you Witches, you Wizards and Conjur-
ers! Do you not desire to be free? To cast off the chains of
limitation and break out from this most wretched of pris-
ons? Do you desire to no longer be tools but something
greater? How can you exist, how can you stand to know that
what makes you marvel and wonder is only half-formed
within you? You have done well in a one-legged race: now
is the time to put on both shoes.
Max Stirner said, “Whoever will be free must make
himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap.”
Do you want your magical nature, perhaps a part of
you that you hold so dear, to be sublimated into the mold
of Good Citizen or Good Worker? Do want to sacrifice your
necessity-demanding-everything.
library/right-be-greedy-theses-practical-
manding Everything,” https://libcom.org/
Theses on the Practical Necessity of De-
36. Libcom.org, “The Right to be Greedy:

life, your dreams, and your passions any longer to the idea
of the people and new gods above you? How much longer
will you submit to their power?
As the visionary group For Ourselves36 wrote in “The
Right to be Greedy”: “We are on the verge of liberation only
when it can be said of each of us that he/she has become so
rebellious, so irrepressible, and so unruly that she/he can-
not be mastered by anything less than his/her self.”
To be free we must take a hammer to the icons of the
false gods, we must destroy Capitalism, State, and Society,
along with all the focus-grouped illusions and morality
given to us by the Media. We must divest them of all power,
all sacredness, until they mean nothing to us. We must not
only burn down each cobweb left by them in our minds,
but cleanse ourselves from whatever negativity these
plague-ridden spirits have brought into our lives. We must
offer nothing but derisive laughter to the pimps and priests
of this pantheon that enslaves us.
Nothing should remain unwounded from our own
sharp scalpel of criticism, every “ought,” “should,” “must,”
“need to,” and “duty” must be ruthlessly analyzed. If we find
it implanted within us, rather than arising from our own

66
will, we must cast it out like the infection it is.
Only by divesting these gods and spooks of all psychi-
cal power, all worship, can we begin to see them for what
they truly are. With the Web of Ideology in flames and the
Ideological Telescope smashed to pieces, we release that
power, that energy back into ourselves to be used freely as
we see fit. Abandon this Spectral Cage to the petty pimps,
the power hungry and the puerile peons that build it brick
by brick in service to ever rotating masters. Our future lies
elsewhere.
The time has come to free ourselves from the chains of
subservience, from unchosen duty, from undesired sacri-
fice to psychic creatures that only seek to devour us like the
gaping maw of Tiamat. Down with all parties, all nations,
all peoples! It is time to fight for ourselves, our Unique, in
short, our egoism.
Let us truly begin to make ourselves!

67
What Lies Beyond
“When one has let go of that great hidden agen-
da that drives humanity and its varied histories,
then one can begin to encounter the immensity of
one’s own soul. If we are courageous enough to say,
‘Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give
me what I want; only I can,’ then we are free to cel-
ebrate a relationship for what it can give.”
—James Hollis, Eden Project: In Search of the
Magical Other

M idday. A Florida sun beats down on my

shoulders, the temperature reaching mid-‘90s. I walk past
the all-you-can-eat buffet trying to not make myself too
obvious, moving resolutely towards the tree line. A dish-
washer peeks out the back door, his face curled with a quiz-
zical look.
I pretend not to notice.
Just past a few oaks and palms swarmed in Spanish
moss lies the foundation of a long-since fallen home. No
walls, no windows linger to bear testament to the family
that once lived here or its history, only a barren floor that
living souls once crossed countless times everyday. I stand
on the peeling linoleum trying to imagine what life was
like here. Am I in the kitchen? Was this the bathroom?
I continue on.
Trash everywhere, signs of a former campsite. Cheap
beer cans that once dulled the pain of existence lie scat-
tered about like so many dreams.
There is a well here, covered. My wizard-sense tingles.
69
Wells are portals to the underworld. I continue onward and
push past a few more trees until I enter The Meadow.
Wildflowers roam freely in the wide and open space,
big Florida sky racing everywhere above me. The trees rise
tall enough to block out all the buildings and thick enough
to shield all the noise from the street. It feels as if I’ve
stepped into a tiny pocket of reality, a place removed from
the regular world.
The field hasn’t been touched, hasn’t been developed. It
may have been used for grazing in the ‘70s, but past that it
has existed like this since before the first Spanish foot ever
fell on land.
My mind instantly runs to possibilities: outdoor ritu-
als, lunar rites, voodoo dolls twisted over hidden flames.
This place is a goldmine for magical use. But I have other
reasons for being here.
When my comrades and I first came upon The Mead-
ow, we planned on using it to guerrilla garden our own
crops. As we planted pumpkins, one spot struck out to me
as strange: a natural circle made by trees for no particu-
lar reason, nothing but grass growing in the center. I had
made a mental note at our first survey to journey back here
in spirit form to sniff the place out, something in the back
of my mind telling me this wasn’t just some regular patch
of Florida woods.
How right I was.
In trance I came across creatures I had never seen
before, with strange ape-like faces that made me gasp in
shock. They made it clear that if the site was to be dis-
turbed I would need to provide them with a Spirit House,
something they could reside in.
I make my way across the meadow to the circle, a
strange buzzing in the air. As I walk to where I believe
these spirits reside, I see a gopher tortoise feeding. This is a
second sign. Gopher tortoises live in dens underneath the
earth, a reference to the Underworld. Tortoises are wise
and old and contain a “world within them” into which they
can retreat. With symbolism dripping everywhere, I can
tell the air is thick with spirits.
I burn incense and go into trance. Suddenly I perceive

70
 a large swarm of insects beginning to dance within the
circle. Strange things these spirits, faces unlike those I’m
familiar with. They tell me this place is “a halfway point,
a nexus.” They say I can hang mojos and prayers up in the
trees here to reach them. Suddenly they rush me, my body
feels as if a wave of hornets had grazed my skin. I break
my focus.
They say they signaled me because “they knew what
I was.” They have no name and have lived here as long as
they can remember. They live and breathe through the
land. When I ask what they do they simply reply that they
“lived,” that we humans don’t know how to live, that that
was our problem.
I am reminded of something a Swamp Spirit had said
to me earlier that day, something profound enough for me
to write down:

“There is a light within a man of light, and it

lights up the whole world. If he does not shine there
is darkness.”

This place has power, very real and very present, tin-
gling on every follicle across my body. I do what any re-
sponsible person would do.
I turn up its volume.
I walk around the circle clockwise, rattle in hand, call-
ing out to The Things That Dwell Here to open the gate, to
open the portal between worlds. I chant and sing and rattle,
each word tearing a hole in the fabric of what’s real. I make
my way around the circle. When I get to where I started, I
stand confused. What now? Am I waiting for something?
What happens now? I say my thanks and leave the circle,
saying no words to close whatever I had opened.
What followed can only be described as the closest
thing to a mushroom trip I’ve ever had sober. My vision
seemed to split, my body felt high, and I began to explore
a world previously unknown to me. To an outsider I would
have looked crazy, a strange fellow in shades and suspend-
ers muttering to empty space in a woodlot.
But I saw things as real as you and I, and while my
body may have been in this world, I was not. I had taken
71
my journal with me and began to hastily describe what I
was seeing, thinking, and feeling:

“Intent! Intent is the Key! Just as intent can take

your consciousness to any time or place so too does
it program and pool the world around you. This is
the key to magic! My words author and write the
world around me!”

I was led to a village peopled by things not quite

earthbound. They referred to me as “the human wizard.” I
healed a cow there. We talked religion. My journal, with
increasingly leaning handwriting, recounts, “Our god and
our religion are as puzzling to them here as theirs might
be to us. No violence either. Nothing seems to be created
or destroyed.”
Time flowed differently wherever this village was,
something I was keenly aware of. Days passed in minutes,
non-important events rolled by as if in a movie. At times I
would switch between third and first person views of my-
self: “At night my two companions and I would speak of
great and esoteric secrets. One evening I attended a gather-
ing of wizards at a crossroads. We met to discuss the state
of the multiverse, but there was nothing to discuss for it
had always been this way.”
Further into the experience I met a traveler, vaguely
elf-like on the road outside of town. Our conversation was
strange. The encounter was preserved in hastily drawn
script on my pages:

I met a traveler along the road:

“What do you do?” I asked.
“Live, grow food, and die.” He seemed confused
by the question. ‘Do people live in your world?” he
asked.
“Yes, but they do other things as well. They seem
more interested in the stuff in-between living and
dying”
“Like what?”
“Well we… we create things”
“You mean change things around?”

72
 His consciousness and thinking were like meeting
someone from another planet. When he left I watched the
grass in our world actually move.
I came out of that experience feeling as if I had lived
a life in the space of a few hours. I dreadfully missed my
mysterious companions and remembered fondly the peo-
ple of the village I had aided. I longed for the full moons
that glimmered with black flames every night knowing full
well I might never see them again.
My wife noted that when I came home I looked as if
I’d seen a ghost. I told her I’d seen an entire world of them.
Vodka eased my nerves as I slowly tried to integrate what
I had experienced, what I had known. For two days after I
existed in a strange confused state, my concepts of time
and reality being forever and immeasurably altered. I be-
gan to worry I had strayed too far, come too close to the
very edge of sanity. I didn’t know how but I was sure that I
could have very well disappeared into that world, never to
return. My wife began feeling a presence watching her at
night, which only terrified me more because I wasn’t sure I
could control or banish these beings.
Of course, I had to go back.
By lunar light, and with incense and a special ceremo-
ny I had been taught by the spirits of the circle, I reached
out to the companions I had traveled with for so many
nights under their own strange moon. Amid my wailing
and gnashing of teeth they came, as did the weird road we
had walked across. What followed was a two hour conver-
sation between me and my fellow wizards involving many
topics, most of which would give Lovecraft a run for his
money. What is of relevance here is what they said in re-
gards to how they lived:

“We live because we know our authentic self, we

know why we exist. To do anything but this would
ultimately damage us.”
“If you could see your authentic self, why you
exist and your greater nature, why would you do
anything else?”

I didn’t have an answer.

73
Seeing Our Selves
Why did we live lives outside our nature? Why is it that
humanity seems to be the only species so intent on deny-
ing itself, on hating itself, on whipping itself with scourges
to become pure? These creatures lived lives that seemed to
center on the true inner purpose contained within them, a
resonance and peace with what they were. Doubt seems to
be a strictly human condition, especially in regards to the
Self. Athena, Legba, Hotei: these beings never apologize for
who or what they are but instead operate according to their
own desires. Our world is fundamentally different, a place
of tempests and dynamos, but our spirits, the ones inside
us, are essentially the same.
Sorcerers often forget they have quite a bit in common
with that ghost trapped in a jar on the shelf. Our own souls
are made up of the same infinity as theirs, and if certain
esoteric teachings are to be believed, perhaps ours are just
as old. We forget we ourselves are holy, just as sacred as the
beings that seem to drift in and out of what we mistakenly
call “reality.”
We have seen and touched the Great Beyond. And yet
outside of our rituals, temples, and altars we settle for me-
diocrity of the worst kind. One thing that has never left
my mind about that strange journey to some far off place
was the feeling I got traveling about to village after village,
camping out under stars and spending my time elucidat-
ing esoteric greatness. I felt like this was what life was sup-
posed to be.
But my actual life didn’t add up.
I know I’m not alone: Countless witches whisper to
spirits on the weekend yet sit in a cubicle Monday through
Friday. Necromancers summon the spirits of the Dead in
their living room yet remain powerless against their boss’s
tardy slips. Never before have there been as many magic us-
ers on the face of the Earth, yet never before have they not
had the time to fully pursue their studies. And it’s not just
them: writers, poets, and sculptors live existences halfway,

74
two days of the week devoted to their true calling while the
rest is spent “just trying to make a living.”
Is it a living? Is it a living to be up at 5 a.m. to make
money for somebody else? Is it a living to subdue yourself,
your style, your tongue, to meet requirements you had no
say in? Is it a living to perform tasks that could easily be
done by a machine just to keep you busy? Because that’s
what most of the world is now, just busy work. Something
to keep you pre-occupied, something to keep you stupid.
Something, anything, to keep you from thinking about
yourself.
No philosopher could have ever imagined the scream-
ing, yelping, flashing cage we’ve built, a fake world with
ready-made selves so we’ll never have to plumb the depths
of our own soul. Cults abound in the world now, worship-
ing gods never before seen: The Cult of Crossfit, The Cult
of Veganism, The Cult of Nintendo, The Cult of Apple. Ev-
erywhere we look spooks descend on us from on high with
contracts to buy our souls in exchange for mass-produced
masks called “identity” wrapped in a fetid bow called “a
sense of belonging.” Have you ever stopped yourself from
thinking, saying, or doing something because it didn’t “fit”
with what you were? Have you ever had to stop the free-
flowing fount of creativity within your heart to make sure
you towed a line?
You’ve been bought and paid for, Comrade. These ideas
own you, they control you, they make you act in a predeter-
mined way undecided by you. As real as any whip tearing
across your back, you will feel mental anguish and subcon-
scious pain for disobeying their rules. The others around
you are just as trapped and will shun you, the real you,
until you return to the comfortable image/symbol they’ve
made you in their minds.
Political and religious cults of all kinds specialize in
this, demanding that you remain “ideologically consistent,”
or in other words chain yourself to their own musty ideals.
Spontaneity, creativity, adaptation, and syncretization, all
the hallmarks of living things belonging to the realm of
vitality and the actual beings that exist there are frowned
upon. That is because these things are dead, inanimate,

75
 airy phantoms that depend on human beings for their
propagation.
This is the poison of ideology, in whatever godly form
it may attempt to appear.
Look at us! How crazy must we appear? An entire spe-
cies running around trying to appease invisible concepts
of their own creation, egregores that have slipped the chain
and begun issuing orders themselves. Like some mytholog-
ical wizard, the creatures we’ve summoned have devoured
us, individuals reduced to material servants to accomplish
tasks or psychic rag dolls to be chewed upon at leisure.
Why aren’t we living and doing things for ourselves?
Why aren’t we seeking to become who we are? Why do we
kneel before these mental beings, these Archons? If the
State, Capital, and Society operate out of their own inter-
est, why can’t I? Why should my life belong to anyone else
other than myself?
Ever since we were children we have been told to think
of anything else but our own dreams, our own wants, our
own drives and desires. Our walks on Earth have been one
massive guilt trip after another, the sparkling waters of our
own inner springs stopped up if the taste doesn’t suit the
outside world. Why should I limit my being, my infinite
self, to the momentary rules of a finite experience? What
claim could any state, any economic system, any morality
have upon us, we momentary visitors crossing the bridge of
earthbound existence? What a cruel joke: the same people
who’ve glimpsed the infinite and the creatures that live
there steadfastly keeping the customs of the polluted pool
in which they were spawned.

Becoming Our Selves

for philosophy of the time.
third person, as is common
37. Stirner writes in the

What is it to be Unique? Consider Stirner’s definition:

Stirner names the unique and says at the same

time that “Names don’t name it.”37 He utters a name
when he names the unique, and adds that the unique
is only a name. So he thinks something other than
what he says, just as, for example, when someone

76
 calls you Ludwig, he isn’t thinking of a generic Lud-
wig, but of you, for whom he has no word.
What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a con-
cept; what he means is neither a word, nor a thought,
nor a concept. What he says is not the meaning, and
what he means cannot be said…
“What you are cannot be said through the word
unique, just as by christening you with the name
Ludwig, one doesn’t intend to say what you are…
“With the unique, the rule of absolute thought, of
thought with a conceptual content of its own, comes
to an end, just as the concept and the conceptual
world fades away when one uses the empty name:
the name is the empty name to which only the view
can give content…

stirner-s-critics.
org/library/max-stirner-
theanarchistlibrary.
Stirner’s Critics, https://
38. Max Stirner,
“Only when nothing is said about you and you
are merely named, are you recognized as you. As
soon as something is said about you, you are only
recognized as that thing (human, spirit, christian,
etc.). But the unique doesn’t say anything because it
is merely a name: it says only that you are you and
nothing but you, that you are a unique you, or rather
your self. Therefore, you have no attribute, but with
this you are at the same time without determination,
vocation, laws, etc.…
“You, inconceivable and inexpressible, are the
phrase content, the phrase owner, the phrase embod-
ied; you are the who, the one of the phrase. In the
unique, science can dissolve into life, in which your
this becomes who and this who no longer seeks itself
in the word, in the Logos, in the attribute.”38

None of us are merely the sum of our parts, or even

our experiences. Those things belong to us. I am not merely
a Floridian, merely a Communist, not even merely a Con-
ous, natural, and without struggle.
life. It also implies action that is spontane-
effortlessly in alignment with the flow of
mental state in which our actions are quite
39. Wu Wei is the Taoist cultivation of a

jurer. We contain multitudes, no two of us are ever truly the

same. Each person’s Unique is that timeless aspect of their
soul, that breathtaking and ever dawning sun that surpris-
es even them. It is the expressionless you, the unknowable
you, the gnosis of you, the Wu Wei of your own being.39
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are Uniques; but
that does not mean all of us are Unique Ones. How many
of these limitless microcosms we call people have bound
and chained themselves to ideas and concepts often built

77
 far away from their own minds? The greedy Capitalist who
hoards money he’ll never spend believes he’s acting of his
own accord, when in reality all other aspects of his Unique
are sublimated to his desire for cash. The woman who re-
fuses to care about others, denying herself the joy and plea-
sure of friends and lovers because she’s “tough,” is just as
spooked as the monk who refuses to have a family because
he wants to remain “pure.”
Just because we believe something to be in our self-in-
terest doesn’t make it so. There are Conscious Egoists and
Unconscious Egoists, those who seek a full and flowering
life of self-enjoyment and mastery among those who be-
lieve they’re doing the same but in fact are serving powers
quite other than themselves. Through morals, laws, dog-
mas, and social custom the ultimate Unique One within us
becomes limited, damaged. We become more of the world
than ourselves, we force and push one another into boxes
nobody wants to be in.
Consider Heidegger’s Dasein: the being within you
that stands back from its existence and acknowledges ex-
istence. The authentic Dasein is aware of her existence as
being her own, not the property of others. “Human beings
are characterized by Uniqueness, one from the other, and
this Uniqueness gives rise to a set of possibilities for each
individual. All human beings are continually oriented to
their own potential, among which are the possibilities of
pages/dasein.html.
http://royby.com/philosophy/
World,” accessed 6 May 2016,
degger means by Being-In-The-
40. Roy Hornsby, “What Hei-

authentic and inauthentic existence. If, whilst moving for-

ward, the standards and beliefs and prejudices of society
are embraced, individuals may fail to differentiate them-
selves from the masses. This Heidegger explains is an inau-
thentic existence.”40
An existence organized around our utility to others,
rather than our own self-development, leaves us spiritu-
ally crippled, forced to expend our energies not on becom-
ing ourselves but instead either submitting to pre-defined
roles thrust upon us or swatting them away.
As long as the goal remains outside us, as long as we
as individuals only have a part to play instead of being our
own show, we reduce ourselves to the barest of existences:
living servants to gods both blind and dumb (and the few

78
who’ve managed to stand close enough to be confused with

(and don’t care about the ugliness).

God and Justice bless our works
State, the “hero” cop the proof that
cess, the president a pope for the
41. The billionaire an avatar of suc-
them).41 Worse, some can only conceive of themselves as
regards the distance between them and the particular god
they worship.
Consider the words of Renzo Novatore in “The King-
dom of the Spooks”:

All around me makes me want to vomit.

On one side the scientist whom I must believe
in order not to be ignorant. From the other the mor-
alist and the philosopher from whom I must accept
the commandments in order to not be a brute. Then
comes the Genius whom I must glorify and after the
hero to whom I must bow affectedly.
Then the companion comes and the friend, the
idealist and the materialist, the atheist and the be-
liever and all other infinity of monkeys definite and

Kingdom of the Spooks.”

Individualist Thought, “The
Anthology of Egoist and
Enemies of Society: An
42. Renzo Novatare,
indefinite that want to give their good councils to
me and to place me, finally, on the one good path.
Because naturally that the path which I was on is a
mistaken path, as mistaken as my ideas, my thought,
my everything. I am a mistaken man.42

Everywhere we turn we are told we are wrong, that

we must act the “right” way, that our own dreams and
desires are either selfish or unattainable while the hopes
and nightmares of the Spectral Cage must exist, even at
the cost of our very lives. The tyrannical gods that would
rob us of this freedom to freely give our care, love, and
even fervor are the grand enemy of Egoism, wherever they
might be found. They pervert the true feelings within us
and make them empty rituals: instead of caring for those
around me, I throw money at a church which quickly loses
it, I stay home and meme for disaster relief instead of actu-
ally doing anything, I “adopt” a baby tiger or African child
to “feed” instead of tearing down the very structures that
cause them pain in the first place. We symbolically attack
other symbols, our feelings perverted and funneled into
empty vessels. The same rage that can rob a bank or burn
down a building dissipates in a sea of mental masturbation
and contests to determine who is the most “woke.”

79
The Resonance of Self And Other
In your home you probably maintain a series of altars,
perhaps one ancestral and one for whatever spirits you
happen to work with. These spirits, more likely than not,
are beings you yourself have sought out. For whatever rea-
son, probably even unknown to you, the current or “feel-
ing” of a certain pantheon just jived with you, just clicked.
Amongst this pantheon you came into contact with beings
you regarded as friends and teachers. Over time, new de-
tails reveal a wealth of information, even in the smallest
spirits, so much so that sometimes we’re amazed. We know,
deep in our gut, that we cannot simply pull out of thin air
the fascinating quirks and idiosyncrasies we see and hear.
The personalities become clear, we taste the full essence,
the true Unique of that goddess.
Our “spiritual courts” begin to resemble not so much
a temple with strict delineations of a spirit for each and ev-
ery action but good friends we’ve grown to know and re-
spect over time.
This is resonance, the harmony of intelligences giving
and taking on an equal footing with no illusions. The in-
volved parties are not oath bound or forced to do anything,
things are simply asked. It’s the same activity that goes on
when children play a game or a group of friends go out to a
bar for a drink. No one is sacrificing themselves, all are en-
joying it. We engage in these group activities because they
bring us joy, we do it for our egoism.
Relationships without resonance are a clear and stark
reminder of why we despise them. The game where one
child is picked on or the dinner party with a couple we
loath lack the magic, the palpable “click” of real intercourse.
The beginner’s altar is much the same.
You’ll see a god or goddess for everything, picked not
so much on need or relationship but preconceived ideas
about what they’ll be doing. They gather six or seven death
gods because they’re scary and they want to be feared, or
thirteen different manly gods because they are wrapped
up in their gender. These altars always look discordant,
cobbled together, like a child without imagination trying

80
to build something out of Legos without any directions.
They are imitating on a spiritual plane the same spooks
that bind them here. The difference is that resonance, that
intercourse.
It goes to follow that a lack of resonance can only be
as harmful and misguided for our personal relationships
as it is our spiritual practices, and make no mistake: every-
thing is a personal relationship. You either have one with
an actual intelligence, or with the concept, the image, the
spook of one.
Why can’t we have the lives we dream of? Why can’t
we pursue our passions, wonderful and beautiful in their
multiplicity? Why must we settle? Why is it that the very
people who should have the clearest idea of the small and
trivial nature of what we deem human existence are just
as subdued by it as anybody else? Where are the witches
demanding sabbats be paid holidays, or better yet, why are
they still beholden to a master, begging for sustenance?
As I’ve explained earlier, all the technology is there:
free energy, abundant organic produce for all. Even the
aspects of our life we deem dirty, disgusting, troublesome,
or tiresome can be fundamentally changed. We can rear-
range the world to suit our tastes, desires, and dreams. We
can selfishly demand everything. We can live for ourselves
and destroy all that would limit our Unique, and we can do
it all together.

81
Part Two:
Sorcerers
Against The
State
A Conjurer’s
Communism
“Individuality can only flourish where equality
of access to the conditions of existence is the social
reality. This equality of access is communism; what
individuals do with that access is up to them and
those around them.”
—Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism

T here is always anxiety around pulling off a

group event. Something so simple as getting together for
a card game may not bother the stomach much, but this
particular Saturday’s events had me worried: a meeting be-
tween my own Anarchist comrades and those from across
town in the neighborhood right across the street. Nervously
I tapped the crock pot holding my wife’s homemade baked
beans, making polite conversation with a comrade’s room-
mate while in my head my mind was whirring with ques-
tions: Did we have enough plates? Would everyone like the
beans? Would we have enough to drink?
It wasn’t the cost of these items that mattered, though
we all had very little money. It was the honest desire and
hope that those friends who I liked would enjoy themselves.
My desire, my greed, was for their satisfaction.
As we assembled and drank the first beers of what
would become many, the anxiety slowly released, drifting
chords of barbecue wafting from the warm crock pot like
the salty smell of a newly broken wave on a long-overdue
85
beach trip. Conversation began to unwind, unknown peo-
ple became persons with names, feelings, and histories.
Our traveling comrades arrived soon after, laughing and
carefree, arms carrying offerings of beer and a stereo. More
who we’d never met before tucked inside behind them.
For a moment the uncertainty of new arrivals hung
high in the air. Again, it wasn’t a thirst for individual glut-
tony, but a sincere desire emanating from the heart of all
assembled that everyone would have a good time. Each
hoped that each would enjoy themselves and in resonance
found union.
Flash forward an hour, past the breaking out of hard
liquor. I stand on the porch, chewing a toothpick, my eyes
taking in the scene.
Comrade Squancho is grilling burgers and my wife is
chatting up my brother’s girlfriend in an honest attempt
to get to know her. Punk music fills the air as laughter and
joy rise to meet the virile rays of the Florida sun, its orange
gaze kissing our skin with warmth while more desolate
landscapes up north freeze. From down the road our new
friends, in a spontaneous division of labor and resources,
return with cheese for the burgers and more booze for all.
Gary cannot rise to greet them, laying on the apartment
floor in a makeshift cot and covered in vomit, the entire
bottle of Captain Morgan he’d made disappear on display
again for all.
“I’m kinda glad it was him,” one reveler chuckles.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Well at every good party there always has to be that
one person that drinks too much. After he goes down ev-
erybody else, well, they seem to be immune to it. I’m just
glad it wasn’t me this time.”
“Yes,” I ponder aloud, “a human sacrifice. He has been
delivered to the gods of inebriation that we might be spared.”
I step off the porch, almost dropping my beer as I gesticu-
late wildly to gather everybody’s attention. “Through Gary’s
supreme sacrifice we have placated the gods and ensured
a bountiful feast. I propose we name this day in honor of
him. From now on we shall refer to December 22nd as St.
Gary’s Day!”

86
 “Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke!” My brother laughs in a fit of
stoned madness.
“What?”
“That’s funny man. Today’s the winter solstice. Like, we
had a Pagan holiday without even knowing it.”
The burgers are ready and everyone, even the roused
and newly risen St. Gary, stumbles towards the picnic table.
The realization that, unbeknownst to us, we had taken part
in an ancient cycle celebrated for millennia sticks to my
mind like Tupelo honey. Lost in thought, I gaze across the
table. How many other interactions occur among us ev-
eryday that we remain unaware of? As plates are loaded
and passed out a lightning bolt of realization strikes me: St.
Gary’s Day is communism in action.
All have given according to their ability, in the desire
that in doing so they can unite resources for a greater en-
joyment than they’d have alone. All have taken according
to their need, yet not taken everything because to do so
would be to rob themselves of the pleasure taken in others’
enjoyment.
Property, State, even Class have ceased to exist. For a
moment true intercourse between individuals had arisen
and had even begun to build a culture, all this free from
divisions of labor or coercive authority.
Even in this most communal of moments, none of us
have been sublimated to false generalizations or sacri-
ficed ourselves to some collective being. We are each of us
Unique, of different tastes and tendency, agreeing where
we ourselves desired to and always free to do otherwise.
The only compulsion was our own desire for self-enjoyment
through the vehicle of enjoyment of others.
The vehicle of this communization hadn’t been a soci-
ety, nor altruism, not even “love for our fellow man.” What
had created this liberatory moment was the “selfish” de-
sires of individuals coming together in a Union of Egoists.

Unions of Egoists
Individualists cannot understand how sharing and

87
 communal activity can do anything but restrict the Self;
Socialists accuse Individualists of being willing to sacri-
fice everything for their own desires. Both are true.
Communal activity, by itself, is neither good nor bad,
just like golf—both are activities. A round of golf amongst
friends can be quite enjoyable, while a company mandat-
ed golf outing demanding “proper business attire” in the
Southeast heat can be nothing short of grueling. When the
activity takes precedence over the Self, we will soon find
the haunted houses of ideology. When we must do some-
thing, we always find empty roles we are coerced into play-
ing, lives not lived but designed in theory, an invocation of
the imaginal realm.
Consider how people go to church, not because they
seek a space for contemplation or to join in prayer with oth-
ers, but because they must do so to be good Christians. It
is the same when we go to general assemblies and meet-
ings, not to confer with comrades and plan projects, but be-
cause we have to keep the movement alive. When we adopt
philosophies, lingo, and a respect for persons we’ve never
met, not because we enjoy them or find them profound, but
because to do so is to be a valuable member of the Pagan
community.
No wonder so many have sworn off of collective action.
What good is it to me when all I’ll ever be is a cog in a ma-
chine?
This same process occurs in Ideology. Binary systems
are products of the deluded, the leftover haunted battle-
fields of combat between spooks: fearful of the spread of
son-just-hasnt-read-atlas-shrugged.
net/articles/our-daughter-isnt-a-selfish-brat-your-
cessed 27 July 2016, https://www.mcsweeneys.
Your Son Just Hasn’t Read Altas Shrugged,” ac-
43. Eric Hague, “Our Daughter Isn’t a Selfish Brat;

“Cultural Marxism” libertarians teach their children not to

share, undoing thousands of years of psychological evo-
lution in the name of a giant misconception of “self-inter-
est.”43 Leftists, bitter over the global victory of capitalism,
disavow any self-desire and renounce any concept of the
individual, alienating millions as they flee into smaller
and smaller “identities” to gain any semblance of meaning,
or throw away any concept of “self” and pick up the cause
of Maoism.
Here again we see decisions, not arrived at by individ-
uals, but by possessed servitors responding lock-step with

88
ideological diktats. In a universe where everything is alive,
where consciousness flows from every pore and particle,
what does it say when we are so willing to lobotomize our-
selves in the service of something else?
Communal activity need not be so dreary and au-
thoritarian, and in reality such spooky organizations only
shamble on as zombies devoid of purpose. They’ve lost the
key component: the resonance and intercourse between
individuals. When we cease to act like people, we become
objects.
As long as profit and control remain the primary moti-
vator behind human activity (and in the Spectral Cage they
very much are), human individuality and the flowering of
our souls will forever be stunted. Each crude and usually
bungled attempt to allow a pressure valve for the captive
cattle to “be themselves” is almost always a cold and calcu-
lated method to extract more value from their labor. Com-
panies that pay just a little more don’t do so because they
want their workers to live well, but because they want them
to be loyal and expendable: “Plenty of people would love to
make what you do, I can always get somebody else…” You
can bet the “casual Friday” and “wacky Wednesday” you
think is so amazing and unique has been focused-grouped,
shrink-wrapped into a management text, and designed ex-
plicitly to take off just enough pressure to keep you moving
at the boss’s pace.
Everywhere we turn, Capitalism offers us the false in-
dividuality of products, the chance to “be who we are” pro-
vided we make enough money to purchase the things to
achieve it. We are ranked by brands, dressed up and acces-
sorized like disposable avatars in a virtual world played by
Communist Manifesto (1848).
44. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

mental constructs splashed with logos. Marx’s words now

seem prophetic when he said, “In bourgeois society capital
is independent and has individuality, while the living per-
son is dependent and has no individuality.”44
True individuality, the real individuality—the kind of
inner knowledge that killed Nietzsche and leads musicians
to starve rather than sell out—seems practically extinct.
The tale of each Sorcerer, each soul called away from
the banality of the Spectral Cage, is an individual one re-
89
 peated for countless generations and across many different
lives: a person stepping away from what they were told was
“right” or “acceptable” towards a path driven by curiosity
and fueled by a thirst for knowledge. What act could pos-
sibly be described as more individualistic than rejecting of-
ficial reality and setting out to explore it yourself, to make
your own judgments, to forge your own values?

The Self Imprisoned

It was this very same quest that caused Oscar Wilde,
lauded playwright and satirist, to denounce capitalism as
inimical to true individuality.
Oscar Wilde lived in an era where society’s bars were
kept locked with ruthless efficiency, a time where art was
seen not as a calling, nor even a purpose, but as a tool or
vehicle for “higher causes.” It wasn’t enough to write a book
for the sake of writing, one had to have a lesson that jived
with the prevalent Victorian morality; it wasn’t enough
to paint because your soul demanded it, you had to paint
something that would sell on the marketplace.
2015),14.
tage Library Edition,
(World Cultural Heri-
Picture of Dorian Grey,
45. Oscar Wilde, The

“Art is individualism, and individualism is a

disturbing and disintegrating force,” remarked Wil-
de, “There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is
to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyr-
anny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level
of a machine.”45

All things that Oscar Wilde noted were perpetuated by

capitalism and its sacred spook of “private property.” From
his groundbreaking text The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Private property has crushed true Individual-

ism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has
debarred one part of the community from being in-
dividual by starving them. It has debarred the other
part of the community from being individual by put-
ting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them.
Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been
absorbed by his possessions that the English law has

90
 always treated offences against a man’s property
with far more severity than offences against his per-
son, and property is still the test of complete citizen-
ship. The industry necessary for the making money
is also very demoralising. In a community like ours,
where property confers immense distinction, social
position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant
things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious,
makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and
goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long

oscar/soul-man/
reference/archive/wilde-
https://www.marxists.org/
of Man Under Socialism,
46. Oscar Wilde, The Soul
after he has got far more than he wants, or can use,
or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill him-
self by overwork in order to secure property.46

How right he was:

Individuals near the middle of the social hier-

archy suffer higher rates of depression and anxiety
than those at the top or bottom, according to re-
searchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School
of Public Health. Nearly twice the number of super-
visors and managers reported they suffered from
anxiety compared to workers. Symptoms of depres-
sion were reported by 18 percent of supervisors and

it-your-middle-management-position.
public-health-now/news/anxious-depressed-blame-
17 Jnuary 2016, https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/
it on Your Middle Management Position,” accessed
47. Columbia University, “Anxious? Depressed? Blame
managers compared to 12 percent for workers.
Prior research has shown that work stress and
job strain are important risk factors in developing
depression. Workers with little opportunity for de-
cision-making and greater job demands show higher
rates of depressive symptoms.47

Wasn’t the new house, the new car, and the new gam-
ing system supposed to make us feel more free? All those
commercials with people eagerly clutching products with
big grins on their faces, wasn’t the promise that the next
new thing would finally make us feel better?
The reality is those commercials, those television
shows, are indeed reality for some people, namely the up-
per echelon of global humanity, those billionaires so far re-
moved from want or care they spend thousands on doggie
track suits or theme parties “just because.”
The rest of us sweat and break our backs to pay for the
next person up on the pyramid, our dreams regulated to
hobbies only enjoyed in treasured moments stolen from
91
times.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html?_r=0.
the work week. We labor and deny our own existence, our
“US Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High,” accessed 18 July 2016, http://www.ny-
18 July 2016, http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/; The New York Times,
lence/any-anxiety-disorder-among-adults.shtml; AFSP, “Suicide Statistics,” accessed
48. NIMH, accessed 18 July 2016, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/preva-
own soul, to slavishly provide for those who would never
do the same for us.
Clearly the human beings roped into the pen they call
the United States are in crisis. We live in an age of instant
communication, yet studies show we actually feel more
alone now than ever. 18 percent of the population has anxi-
ety disorders; one hundred and seventeen people kill them-
selves everyday in the US, a thirty-year high.48 True, we’ve
made huge advances in health and technological prowess,
but our quality of life and the use of our time pales in com-
parison to those of the peasants before they were enslaved
by the proto-capitalists:
In the modern world most people have to adapt
themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe
other’ people’s timetables—or work under other
people’s orders, but we have to remember that the
population that was flung into the brutal rhythm
of the factory had earned its living in relative free-
dom, and that the discipline of the early factory was
particularly savage… No economist of the day, in
estimating the gains or losses of factory employment,
ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man
suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life
in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he
pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key
on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the
right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and
laughterless life of a prison.49

“The Pursuit of Property”

Co., 1913).
Longmans, Green &
(1760–1832), (London:
Village Labourer,
49. Hammonds, The

What a world we’ve created for ourselves, where the

natural rhythms of life are unacceptable and must be sac-
rificed for some spooky world of commerce, as if business
was some platonic kernel waiting inside the shells of free
time and art. The God of Capital has landed upon our world
like hellish Annunaki and shredded every natural bond we
once held dear; the life-cycles of the land and the spirits
have been denied to our bodies and mind, not for our own
benefit, but through the profit motive and the pursuit of
property.

92
 Property is a loaded word, often very divorced from
how it really exists. Personal property is what you really
own, things that belong to you that you use, that you really
have some control over. Private property is property that
is being used by other people for your benefit, often only
possible by the violent protection of the State.
It is a myth that private property is “just,” that in a di-
vine flash everything was doled out to the have’s and have-
not’s by some father figure motivated by justice. We are to
believe that those in the big houses deserve them, that the
landlords and CEO’s worked hard to be where they are. We
are told to stop complaining and to not be envious of the
work of others.
What’s never questioned is just what these others did
to win the property they claim as rightful. And this if for
a reason.

When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic

lands to the nobility, the latter “drove out, en masse,
the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings
into one.” This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable
land of England, was the first large-scale expropria-
tion of the peasantry.
Another major theft of peasant land was the
“reform” of land law by the seventeenth century
Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy abolished
feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the
land, until then “only a feudal title,” into “rights of
modern private property.” In the process, they abol-
ished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders
were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they
paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land
was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance, copy-
hold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold;
but since it derived from custom it was enforceable
only in the manor courts. Under the “reform,” ten-
ants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could
be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit
Another form of expropriation, which began in
late medieval times and increased drastically in the
eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons—
in which, again, the peasants communally had as
absolute a right of property as any defended by to-
day’s “property rights” advocates. Not counting en-

93
 closures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total
enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England.
E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclo-
sures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming
“something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage
from open field, common land, meadow or waste
into private fields…”
The ruling classes saw the peasants’ right in
commons as a source of economic independence
from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to
be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated “a dangerous
centre of indiscipline” and compelled workers to sell
their labor on the masters’ terms. Arthur Young, a
Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons
as “a breeding-ground for ‘barbarians,’ ‘nursing up
a mischievous race of people’.” “[E]very one but an
idiot knows,” he wrote, “that the lower classes must
be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” The
Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned
in 1800 that leaving the laborer “possessed of more
land than his family can cultivate in the evenings”
meant that “the farmer can no longer depend on him
for constant work. Sir Richard Price commented on
the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into “a
body of men who earn their subsistence by working
for others.” There would, “perhaps, be more labour,
because there will be more compulsion to it.”
Marx cited parliamentary “acts of enclosure”
as evidence that the commons, far from being the
“private property of the great landlords who have tak-
en the place of the feudal lords,” actually required “a
parliamentary coup detat… for its transformation
into private property.” The process of primitive ac-
cumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by
the same author:
“these new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became
sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed
of all their own means of production, and of all the
guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
for ease of reading.
text have been omitted
citations within quoted
Internal bibliographic
50. Carson, The Iron Fist.

arrangements. And the history of this, their expro-

priation, is written in the annals of mankind in let-
ters of blood and fire.50

What these “industrious” Europeans found when they

began to colonize the Americas in the hunt for more profit-

94
producing property was such a stark contrast to the Euro-
pean system it would be described as utopian if we didn’t
have evidence that it actually existed, entire civilizations
thriving in defiance of what aristocrats had described as
necessary for the wheel of progress. Howard Zinn writes:

In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned

in common and worked in common. Hunting was
done together, and the catch was divided among the
members of the village. Houses were considered com-
mon property and were shared by several families.
The concept of private ownership of land and homes
was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest
who encountered them in the 1650s wrote: “No poor-
houses are needed among them, because they are
neither mendicants nor paupers… Their kindness,
humanity and courtesy not only makes them lib-
eral with what they have, but causes them to possess
hardly anything except in common…”
Children in Iroquois society, while taught the
cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with
the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to
submit to overbearing authority. They were taught
equality in status and the sharing of possessions.
The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on chil-
dren; they did not insist on early weaning or early
toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to
learn self-care.
No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and consta-
bles, judges and juries, or courts or jails-the appa-
ratus of authority in European societies-were to be
found in the northeast woodlands prior to European
arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were
firmly set. Through priding themselves on the auton-
omous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict
sense of right and wrong… He who stole another’s
food or acted invalourously in war was “shamed” by
his people and ostracized from their company until
he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to
their satisfaction that he had morally purified him-
self.
… So, Columbus and his successors were not
coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world
which in some places was as densely populated as
Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where
human relations were more egalitarian than in Eu-

95
 History of the United States.
51. Howard Zinn, A People’s
rope, and where the relations among men, women,
children, and nature were more beautifully worked
out than perhaps any place in the world.51

You Could Never Win Anyway

The myths of many posit that private property won the
day, that the natives were “foolish” for trading their land
for baubles in a spin on the racist “ignorant savage” trope.
In reality, it was only after the largest spree of mass murder,
kidnapping, forced labor, and rape this continent had ever
seen that private property (that is, the ownership of things
ic-betrayal-dragging-down-generation-y-income.
com/world/2016/mar/07/revealed-30-year-econom-
accessed 1 August 2016, https://www.theguardian.
ic Betrayal Dragging Down Generation Y’s Income,”
52. The Guardian, “Revealed: The 30-Year Econom-

based solely on legal titles) spread to where it is today.

The can-do American entrepreneur is a gross and negli-
gent lie, especially in an age where millennials are doomed
to do worse economically than their parents.52 A large part
of what funded this absurdity was the ease of getting cred-
it: people were still poor, but they could borrow enough
money to at least buy things that made it appear to them
and everybody else that they were actually well off.

In 1946 the ratio of household debt to dispos-

able income stood at about 24 percent. By 1950 it
had risen to 38 percent, by 1955 to 53 percent, by
1960 to 62 percent, and by 1965 to 72 percent. The
ratio fluctuated from 1966 to 1978, but the stagna-
tion of real wages which began in 1973 pressured
households further to increase their debt burden in
order to maintain existing living standards, pushing
the ratio of debt to disposable income to 77 percent
by 1979. And keep in mind that accumulating debt
was necessary not merely to purchase more toys, but
to meet rising housing, health care, education and
child care costs. With prohibitive health care costs
the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, debt was
necessary for all but the wealthy to stay out of pov-
erty.
By the mid-1980s, with neoliberalism in full
swing and wages stagnating, the ratio began a
steady ascent, from 80 percent in 1985 to 88 percent
in 1990 to 95 percent in 1995 to over 100 percent
in 2000 to 138 percent in 2007. (See also Business
Week, Oct. 12, The Debt Economy, 45, 94–96) As
96
 class-have-most-americans-always-been-poor/.
punch.org/2015/08/28/the-myth-of-the-middle-
accessed 1 August 2016, http://www.counter-
Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?”
53. Counter Punch, “The Myth of the Middle
debt rose relative to workers’ income, households’
margin of security against insolvency began to
erode. The ratio of personal saving to disposable
income under neoliberalism began a steady decline,
falling from 11 percent in 1983 to 2.3 percent in
1999. (Economic Report of the President, Table 30,
2000)53

The “streets of gold” waiting for the eager shoes of the

American citizen are just as fake today as they were for
the Lithuanian immigrant in 1920. While a few of us may
scratch and rend our way to a higher economic status, the
value we create is increasingly getting funneled to the top
and at higher amounts. Today’s upper-income families are

us-wealth-gap-at-its-widest-in-decades/.
progress.org/economy/2014/12/18/3605137/
corded,” accessed 1 August 2016, http://think-
the Rich and Poor is the Widest Ever Re-
54. Think Progress, “The Wealth Gap Between
almost seven times wealthier than middle-income ones,
and the “middle class” is ceasing to exist yet apologists
point to “success stories” like Bill Gates and other billion-
aires to show that success is still possible.54
Is it really?

Is “free competition” then really “free?” nay, is

it really a “competition”—to wit, one of persons—as
it gives itself out to be because on this title it bases its
right? It originated, you know, in persons becoming
free of all personal rule. Is a competition “free” which
the State, this ruler in the civic principle, hems in by
a thousand barriers? There is a rich manufacturer
doing a brilliant business, and I should like to com-
55. Stirner, The Ego. August 2016, http://www.investope-

pete with him. “Go ahead,” says the State, “I have no

objection to make to your person as competitor.” Yes,
I reply, but for that I need a space for buildings, I
need money! “That’s bad; but, if you have no money,
you cannot compete. You must not take anything
from anybody, for I protect property and grant it
privileges.” Free competition is not “free,” because I
rich-what-are-your-odds.aspx.
dia.com/financial-edge/1110/getting-

What Are Your Odds?” accessed 1

56. Investopedia, “Getting Rich:

lack the things for competition55

In the United States about one in one hundred and six

people end up becoming a millionaire (and that’s measur-
ing property value, etc), leaving one hundred and five peo-
ple to struggle in the servitude of wage labor.56
“Do you know what it is to be a wage worker?” Asked
the Anarchist philosopher Proudhon, “It is to labour under

97
tribution to Anarchist Economics.” a master, watchful for his prejudices even more than to his
Foundations: Proudhon’s Con-
Anarchist Economics, “Laying the
tion of Freedom: Writings on
57. Iain McCoy, The Accumula-
orders… it is to have no mind of your own… to know no
stimulus save for your daily bread and the fear of losing
your job.”57 A society built to make one out of one hundred
people truly happy and successful is ludicrous, the equiva-
lent of simply making anybody who gets struck by light-
ning immediately Grand Poobah and Mafia Lord of the
town she was struck in.
Very few of us are actually benefiting from this system
of highway robbery, each workplace an alleyway where
stickup men threaten us with starvation or homelessness
ence, October 29, 1979)
Political" Panel: (second Sex Confer-
Comments At "the Personal And The
Never Dismantle The Master's House:
58. Audre Lorde, Master's Tools Will

unless we generate value for them. We are constantly ex-

tolled the benefits of property while owning none, we are
told that home ownership and car ownership are the keys
to success, yet they lead us into more debt and ultimately
put us under more control. They tell us we are free to com-
pete, yet ignore the things that keep us competing in the
first place.

“The Master’s Tools Can Never Dis-

mantle The Master’s House”58
Some collectivists have called for a grand reset, a cap-
turing of the productive and social property by a “worker’s
state” so that all may benefit instead of a tiny few. As Wilde
remarks, “It is to be regretted that a portion of our com-
munity should be practically in slavery, but to propose to
solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is
childish.”59
Every “worker’s state” that’s been established, every
governmental body dedicated to “serving the people,” has
Man Under Socialism.
59. Wilde, The Soul of

been a colossal failure. Lenin never did turn power over to

the Soviets, Mao killed peasants that rebelled against him,
all in the promise of an eventual freedom.
Wilde goes on:

All modes of government are failures. Despo-

tism is unjust to everybody, including the despot,
who was probably made for better things. Oligar-

98
 60. Ochlocracies: Mob rule.
chies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are
unjust to the few.60 High hopes were once formed of
democracy; but democracy means simply the blud-
geoning of the people by the people for the people.
It has been found out. I must say that it was high
time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades
those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom
it is exercised… “He who would be free,” says a fine
thinker, “must not conform.” And authority, by brib-
ing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
over-fed barbarism amongst us.61

61. Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

Max Stirner agrees:

The State always has the sole purpose to limit,

tame, subordinate, the individual—to make him
subject to some generality or other; it lasts only so
long as the individual is not all in all, and it is only
the clearly-marked restriction of me, my limitation,
my slavery. Never does a State aim to bring in the
free activity of individuals, but always that which is
bound to the purpose of the State… The State seeks
to hinder every free activity by its censorship, its
supervision, its police, and holds this hindering to
be its duty, because it is in truth a duty of self-pres-

62. Stirner, The Ego.

ervation. The State wants to make something out of
man, therefore there live in it only made men; every
one who wants to be his own self is its opponent and
is nothing.62

Voting for some new power to seize things for you

doesn’t really bring you any power or ability, because the
Thing Itself is actually doing all the work; a militia that con-
trols territory doesn’t mean the people they claim to protect
are in control, it merely means the militia is. Struggles of
liberation have been undermined again and again after
building a new god, whether it be the Party or the Revolu-
tion. Power usually becomes wedded to hierarchical sys-
tems out of ease and effectiveness and rarely ever comes
back down.
Every ounce of command we give away is one that is
never coming back.
A “worker state” keeps us just that: a nation of work-
ers. Tightly controlled schedules and minimum/maximum
99
 output ratios is not the stuff of witchery. I do not propose a
utopia free from work in totality, though as technology pro-
gresses such a thing might be a real possibility. What I do
advocate for is the abolition of toil, of loathsome, degrad-
ing work that destroys the human spirit; I reject that I am a
mere prole, a mere worker, and must exist as such, yet this
is precisely the identity that is handed to me today.

For the proletariat, being a class is the obstacle

that its struggle as a class must get beyond. With
the production of class belonging as an external con-
nization-present-tense.
Tense,” https://libcom.org/library/commu-
struggles, “Communization in the Present
Contestation, critique, and contemporary
63. Communization and its discontents:

straint, it is possible to understand the tipping point

of the class struggle—its supersession—as a pro-
duced supersession, on the basis of current struggles.
In its struggle against capital, the class turns back
against itself, i.e. it treats its own existence, every-
thing that defines it in its relation to capital (and it
is nothing but this relation), as the limit of its action.
Proletarians do not liberate their “true individual-
ity,” which is denied in capital.63

Under any State or Society people are to be made,

formed into the kind of people that the ruler desires; even
the most benign of States demand obedience from their
“children.” Every nation is an enchantment of the highest
order, nothing more than a cartel focused on controlling
and commanding the livestock beneath it; whether they
believe they are doing it for the “greater good” is irrelevant.
The history speaks for itself.

Working For Our Selves

The problem then appears to be not who controls prop-
erty, but how many do. There’s plenty of work to be done: a
planet on the brink of collapse, a food system in dire need
of repairs, children to be raised, structures to be built and
maintained, planets to explore, yet we still have people ei-
ther out of work or doing some bullshit job to keep them
busy. Plenty of real needs go unmet and we have an abun-
dance of bodies to change that. There is plenty of work to
be done.
100
 What kind of a world has crucial work to be done but
no people doing them? A world where work is not related
to satisfying our needs but is instead focused on profit at
any cost and as much property as you can steal and get
away with.
Our society lacks distinctly that permanence so often
found in the sacred sites of the ancients, where art and
meaning, not market shares and stockholder opinions,
caused one to build. If a company can squeeze out just
one more inch of profit, even if it destroys an ecosystem,
they will. If they can own more of the limited land mass on
Earth and charge people rent to use it, they will. Current so-
ciety, based on the limited egoism of the strongest, and as
such, on iniquity and oppression, denies you the ability to
gather the means (property) to fight back. As long as there
is property to be gained and profits to be made, that is all
that will determine what work gets done, and the people at
the top have a very clear interest in making sure you don’t
have the resources to challenge them.
How do we fix this? The answer is simple: take what
you require.
By refusing us the ability to live, society gives us the
right to steal. In the act of taking possession of the wealth
of the world the bourgeois have give us the right to take
back, however we can, what we require to satisfy our needs.
The bosses, judges, soldiers, and cops unite to bring us
down, to submit to the legacy of their great criminal act.
Why don’t we do the same?
Why don’t we start taking back what they’ve taken
from us?
Can it be that simple? Years of revolutionary study
have taught us how to read and dream but very little about
actually starting something. We’ve been told to hold out for
optimum conditions that never arise, a general strike initi-
ated by unions that don’t exist, or to wait for an educated
vanguard with all the answers to come in and save the day.
By waiting we have only learned to wait.

The Power We Hold In Our Hands

101
 The people hold an enormous power in their hands,
even with the onset of automation. The minute the people
stopped respecting fictitious “rights,” the minute property
became disenchanted, would be the moment the Proper-
ty Pyramid built by greedy aristocrats and profit-hungry
landlords came down.
Yet we wait. Tell me, dear reader, what are you waiting
on?
Property in the hands of conquerors is then described
as sacred. It has been stolen, yet we are now told it would be
immoral to steal it back.
Let us not wait on revolution, which may never come,
but start our insurrection at once; let us become criminals,
rogues, and brigands, fighting not for a better world tomor-
row but what we are owed today. Everything can be yours if
you have but the mettle to take it. Laugh at the customs and
laws, the fictions of right and wrong that cause your hands
to shake. Against you, all arms are good, your exploiters
free to kill or beat you without a thought of conscience. The
working class stands idly by as you are crushed beneath
the wheel of history. Why wait for them? Aim to free your-
self and let nothing stop your grasping fingers.
“Laws,” remarks Cesare Beccaria, “in the present state,
are only the hateful privileges which sanction the tribute
heroic-and-expropriating-anarchism.
org/library/renzo-novatore-in-defense-of-
1 August 2016, https://theanarchistlibrary.
and Expropriating Anarchism,” accessed
64. Renzo Novatore, “In Defense of Heroic

of all to the rule of the few… Theft is not a crime innate to

man, but rather the expression of poverty and desperation,
the crime of that most unhappy portion of human beings
to whom the right of property has granted nothing but a
cruel existence.”64
When Indigenous people once again occupy sacred
ground, it is not theft but a reckoning; when the exploited
seize the means with which they can truly begin to live, it
is not a crime but a returning of what was stolen.
Decide that you are tired of living for someone else’s
egoism and start living for your own. The enemy is he who
keeps you from living; take back the property you allow
them to have. Wherever it has been put behind fences
and locks, whether workplaces, homes, or forests, make it
yours. After you’ve secured yourself, continue to secure
those around you and share in the benefits. No woman can

102
work forty acres herself, and no man can live in four hous-
es. Own them collectively, property owned by all rather
than on behalf of all. Property that we cannot use becomes
owned for the benefit of our Egoism, for our lives, by the
creation of a union.
How does this Union differ from the usual Communis-
tic pleas?

You bring into a union your whole power, your

competence, and make yourself count; in a society
you are employed, with your working power; in the
former you live egoistically, in the latter humanly,
i.e. religiously, as a “member in the body of this
Lord”; to a society you owe what you have, and
are in duty bound to it, are—possessed by “social
duties”; a union you utilize, and give it up unduti-
fully and unfaithfully when you see no way to use
it further. If a society is more than you, then it is
more to you than yourself; a union is only your in-
strument, or the sword with which you sharpen and
increase your natural force; the union exists for you

65. Stirner, The Ego

and through you, the society conversely lays claim
to you for itself and exists even without you, in short,
the society is sacred, the union your own; consumes
you, you consume the union…
To come back to property, the lord is proprietor.
Choose then whether you want to be lord, or whether
society shall be!65

Instead of submitting ourselves to some spooky sense

of “duty” or influence from the Spectral Cage, we come to-
gether for our benefit. We take what property we need and
work collectively what we cannot do alone. “To each ac-
cording to their ability, from each according to their need.”
We create a world where the means of existence are shared
so that all may benefit, where people actually have a stake
in the things that determine whether they live or die rather
than leaving it to the mixer-like hands of the wealthy. We
desire a world “where nobody has one exclusive sphere of
activity but each can become accomplished in any branch
he wishes,” where the Unions are responsible for “general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one
thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning,

103
ology.pdf.
fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise
load/Marx_The_German_Ide-
org/archive/marx/works/down-
Ideology, https://www.marxists.
66. Karl Marx, The German
after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming
hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”66
A classless, stateless world run by unions of individuals
working together, a Communism built on working freely,
loving freely, and every day being able to come to know the
beauties of life and the planes of existence; to be healthy,
strong, and free; to work, to think, to be artistic. To demand
everything of life, that is our Anarchism, our Communism.
Compared to this, any system (whether Capitalist or Social-
ist) that would instead offer us hours of robotic labor in the
service of somebody else under authoritarian direction,
all in the hopes we can earn enough scraps to play video
games in a shanty town, must be dismissed out of hand.

An Other World Is Possible—We’re

From There
While the rest of the world may have fallen to the illu-
sion that “this is as good as it gets,” the magical folk view
vistas far beyond the fabricated reality most are forced to
gulp down. We have walked in sacred circles, spoken with
alien intelligences, run our fingers through the fabric of
reality. In our books and our histories are legends of great
magic wielders who, supported by their community, were
free to pursue the winding passages of the Esoteric to their
hearts’ content. These natural philosophers returned the
favor, caring for those who did the same for them and shar-
ing the fires of gnosis they had stolen from heaven.
This world, built on a great and shameless theft, has all
but eliminated us. We are forced to either practice our life’s
work on the side of our mundane slavery, or to exploit our-
selves and bring gifts before the altar of the marketplace.
We charge because we must, if we want to live, and I see no
hypocrisy in that. We are all trying to escape the confines
of wage slavery in whatever way we can.
Somehow amid neon lights and blaring sirens we’ve
stolen enough to hear the whispers of the other side, a
miracle in itself. On altars snagged from thrift stores we
104
hail gods once housed in marble, on bookshelves rescued
from dumpsters we house knowledge that Crowley would
have killed for. We have done all these things not because
of Capitalism but in spite of it. Denied property, denied
a means of subsistence besides humiliating servitude for
someone else, we have still climbed up the World Tree.
If this is the world we can create at our worst, can we
even fathom what one might look like at our best?
“A dream,” some laugh, yet I am also laughing. What
does it say for us, we spirit-seekers and weavers of fate, that
the summoning of such a world we deem too far outside
our power? What does it say about us that we cannot fath-
om a world based on individuality, art, camaraderie, and
wisdom, yet we do not bat an eye when others dream up
neutron bombs, genome-based biological weapons, and
satellite-based laser systems; not just dream them, but
build them?
Let those so inured to their slavery remain in their
chains. I have seen the other sides of reality and have
grown disgusted with our triviality. To those great Witches
and Wizards who desire true gnosis, I say we must sunder
the shackles that keep us tied down; we must kill the jailers
of want, limitation, and hierarchy. We must become more
than workers, more than human, not content with merely
a trans-valuation of values but of the conditions that give
rise to them as well.
As never before we stand on the brink of a life worth
living, a life that actually reflects the things we hold dear
rather than the mindless pursuit of profits and property.
Only in this new life can true individuality, the Hermetic
goal of “Know Thyself,” be achieved.

105
Starting Your Own
War to Get Free
“So the patient advocates of ‘free states,’ ‘free
speech,’ ‘free assemblage,’ what are they but deluded
children in the vicinity of forces they do not compre-
hend? If they want to assemble and speak without
let or hindrance, let them increase their own power,
their strength of arm until they can speak and meet
as they will. But to ask for free speech and free meet-
ing, what is it but an acknowledgement of tutelage,
inferiority…
There is only one thing the down-trodden with
retained dignity can do, and that is to Get Up.”
—Dora Marsden, The Freewoman, Volume 1
Number 1, June 15th 1913

T he foreign gods of State and Capital have

cast you into a world where their word is law. You are en-
shrouded by the edicts and norms of a society for which
you feel nothing but revulsion, and the nice voices on the
commercial all remind you how worthless you are without
their products. Everything is horrible, everything is built
on mind-numbing layers of cruelty.
All these things must be destroyed. Destroyed not out
of duty, not out of same grand religious ideal that the Revo-
lution is on the way; they should be destroyed the same
way you would take the whip out of a slavemaster’s hand.
We must put an end to that which seeks to put an end to us,
that true and Unique part of us that screams we deserve
107
 much more than this wretched existence. Everything in-
side you yells to fight back, to strike out, to rabidly rend
and gnaw the throats of the predators that have spent your
entire life peeling the flesh from your bones.
How can we put an end to this? That’s the real question,
isn’t it? Until now everything has been theory, nice ideas
to bat around or to clear the cobwebs out of your head. A
lot of so-called “revolutionaries” never seem to move be-
yond this stage, content to get high off the piddling fumes
of revolutions long since past. Book clubs are good, meet-
ings are fine, but none of these things bring you any closer
to freedom. There’s something strangely religious to it all,
isn’t there? These people with their chosen book getting
together to talk about how good everything will be when
justice finally sweeps down and fixes everything. They
flip pages, or gab endlessly, sure that if just enough people
heard the “good news” of one theory or another everything
would change. What’s a protest but an old school Protes-
tant revival dressed up in red and black?
The activists and theoreticians seem to believe, much
like their Christian brethren, that they battle not against
powers of flesh and blood but principalities, etheric sym-
bols, issues that are either good or bad. They fight against
the Bourgeoisie instead of actual, real rich people; they are
against all “structures of oppression” instead of the steel
and brick buildings where the people responsible for them
live, breathe, and eat. Is it any wonder modern Leftism has
been so toothless, spending its time chasing ghosts and
abstractions instead of actual enemies? Class War can be
a fine symbol to rally around provided it generates actual
conflict. Beyond that it is useless.

As In Ritual, So In Revolution
When we cast a spell we are shifting the writhing realm
of possibility into physical shape to suit our interests. We
put out sniper rounds of Will and Intent until that which
we desire either falls dead or joyously surrenders itself to
us. Why shouldn’t our politics focus on the same principle,

108
the same action-oriented praxis that makes practical sor-
cery so much more effective than prayer?
Magic is about doing. You can read every book about
sorcery you can get your hands on, but unless you do the
rituals you’ll never really know what sorcery is. Revolution
is much the same: you’ll never really learn anything until
you actually do it.
The priests of the Leftist cults, highly suspicious of
any individualistic tendencies that might lead followers to
think on their own, have called individual action against
the Spectral Cage as “adventurism” and “ineffective.” Their
choice of words betrays them.
They do not want you to act because they are them-
selves afraid to. They prefer to believe that their inactivity
is justified and morally righteous. They see activism as a
career, a lifestyle, and fear the day the mysterious and ab-
stract principle they seem so against disappears. They need
it to help define who they are. Why shouldn’t our lives be
adventurous? Wasn’t that what doing magic was about? We
got into the occult not to simply speak with the Dead or in-
voke goddesses but to get shit done. The process of chang-
ing our existence and liberating ourselves is perhaps the
greatest adventure we can undertake.
As for “ineffective,” this is simply a lie meant to protect
them from the truth: the party is ineffective, the organi-
zation is impotent. Even the Hells Angels and the Italian
Mafia have been infiltrated by the government and thrown
in jail, organizations that will kill any member who dares
to turn informant. Individual action isn’t ineffective; hier-
archical, large scale organizations are. Individual action, or
at most informal groups of self-acting individuals, have so
far been the only thing that’s worked.
In a report for the Department of Homeland Security
titled Countering Ecoterrorism in the United States: The Case
of ‘Operation Backfire,’ the forces in charge of maintaining
state power noted:

Radical environmentalist groups like ALF and

ELF have adopted a leaderless resistance model, in
which autonomous subgroups of trusted confidants
form cells for the purpose of carrying out illicit ac-

109
 tions based on a set of guiding principles (Joosse
2007, Leader and Probst 2003). New recruits are
warned not to join existing cells, but rather to start
their own cells with trusted associates (Joosse 207).
Regional and national press offices, which claim
no official affiliation with the individual cells, post
communiqués from the cells. The lack of a structured
hierarchy and clearly identifiable leaders makes it
difficult for law enforcement officials to infiltrate
CountermeasuresOperationBackfire_Sept2012.pdf.
http://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_EffectivenessofLE-
(College Park, MD: START, 2012), accessed 3 May 2017,
ism in the United States: the case of 'Operation Backfire,'
67. Nick Deshpande, Howard Ernst, Countering Ecoterror-

the groups. The leaderless structure also guards

against the type of ideological fracturing that often
plagued earlier radical environmentalist groups like
Earth First! (Joosse 2007). The net result is an amor-
phous organizational structure of loosely bound
illicit actors who are able to persist over time and
across vast geographic areas, posing tremendous
challenges to the law enforcement community at the
federal, state, and local levels.67

Comrades within ALF and ELF were very aware of this

strength, saying in an anonymously authored FAQ:

Law enforcement, particularly in North Amer-

ica are trained to recognize and deal with organiza-
tions that have a leader, a hierarchy and a central
headquarters. The ELF does not contain any of
these. Due to the autonomous and underground as-
pects of the ELF cells, an infiltration into a cell by no
way means the entire movement will be stopped. If
one individual or even one entire cell is captured by
authorities, other individuals and cells will be free
to continue their work as they operate independently
and anonymously from one another. The cell struc-
ture is a type of guerrilla tactic which has been suc-
cessfully employed by various movements around
the world for ages. It can be a successful tactic when
used properly against a greater military power.
tro.org/zines/3.
3 May 2017, http://www.zinedis-
Liberation Front (ELF),” accessed
Asked Questions About the Earth
68. Zine Distro, “Frequently

The ELF does not have any sort of physical

membership list or meetings you can attend to be-
come involved. Remember, the ELF revolves around
not a physical base or classically designed structure,
but instead an ideology. If you believe in the ELF
ideology and you follow a certain set of widely pub-
lished guidelines, you can conduct actions and be-
come part of the ELF.68

110
 This is a point echoed in a WW2 sabotage pamphlet
circulated among citizens of occupied Europe by the allied
powers:

It does not require specially prepared tools or

equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who
may or may not act individually and without the
necessity for active connection with an organized
group; and it is carried out in such a way as to in-
volve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and
reprisal…
Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thou-
sands of citizen-saboteurs, can be an effective
weapon against the enemy. Slashing tires, draining
fuel tanks, starting fires, starting arguments, acting
stupidly, short-circuiting electric systems, abandon-

SimpleSabotage_sm.pdf.
featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSS-
information/featured-story-archive/2012-
3 May 2017, https://www.cia.gov/news-
69. Cebtral Intelligence Agency, accessed
ing machine parts, will waste materials, manpower,
and time. Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabo-
tage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war
effort of the enemy. Simple sabotage may also have
secondary results of more or less value. Widespread
practice of simple sabotage will harass and demor-
alize enemy administrators and police. Further suc-
cess may embolden the citizen-saboteur eventually
to find colleagues who can assist him in sabotage of
greater dimensions.69

And also a point lamented by modern military strate-

gists today:

Insurgency undoubtedly presents a serious

asymmetric challenge to even strong conventional
military powers such as the United States. The strat-
egy is asymmetric, according to our definition, in
that it seeks to transform military advantages in
mass and firepower into disadvantages by exhaust-
ing the foe in a protracted campaign while goading
or misleading him into misdirecting force against
the civilian population. Conventional military
forces tend to orient on seizing and holding key ter-
rain, and to focus their destructive energies on the
dispatch of the opposing military force; meanwhile,
insurgents orient on the population and their con-
ventional opponents, routinely yield key terrain,
and tend to focus their efforts on symbolic acts of
violence that shift the balance of political power in
111
articles/2011spring/breen-geltzer.pdf.
ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/
the Strong,” accessed 3 May 2017, http://
“Asymmetric Strategies as Strategies of
70. Michael Breen, Joshua A. Geltzer,
their favor. In most formulations, the insurgency
then capitalizes on favorable shifts in the political
balance to alter the balance of military power to its
advantage. If it is unable to accomplish such a shift,
the insurgency simply continues to survive while
draining its opponent’s will to fight, until the blood-
ied and dispirited conventional military withdraws
from the conflict.70

In short the same actions the Lords and Ladies of In-

action decry are often the kind playing hell with some of
the most powerful nations in the world, Benjamin Locks
in Bad Guys Know What Works: Asymmetric Warfare and
The Third Offset went so far as to say that “the insurgents’
strategy was to use small-scale attacks… against allied
forces in order to slowly bleed us until we packed up and
left. Our most advanced technology could not change this
metric-warfare-and-the-third-offset/
com/2015/06/bad-guys-know-what-works-asym-
accessed 3 May 2017, https://warontherocks.
Works: Assymetric Warfare and the Third Offset,”
71. Benjamin Locks, “Bad Guys Know What

basic strategic fact.”71

These kind of direct attacks against the demiurgic grip
of the Spectral Cage can vary in size and scope: they can be
intensely local and carried out by a lone individual or part
of a larger campaign by a group of comrades. The writings
where responsibility is claimed for these attacks serve not
only to allow active cells to spread awareness but to engage
with other groups involved in similar actions without ever
meeting, a conversation happening in-between explosions
and never characterized by uniformity or ideology, a truly
Anarchist method that can allow global coordination. At-
tacks can orient around aspects of society rather than loca-
tion-driven coordinates, allowing members to strike in any
way they deem feasible:

Using specific campaigns as a strategy (for

example against the prison system or the plunder
of the earth and of animals) we can easily cause a
short circuit to the normal functioning of society.
For example, a campaign against prison that in-
cludes posters and leaflets against prison, sabotage
and arson against the companies that build prisons
and/or get rich with their management, letters to
imprisoned anarchists, attacks on jailers and prison
governors, explosive attacks on judges in solidarity
with anarchist prisoners, would unquestionably be
112
 Conversation-book.pdf.
wp-content/uploads/2013/05/
http://actforfree.nostate.net/
Anarchists, accessed 3 May 2017,
72. A Conversation Between
a strong campaign that would cause cracks in the
prison walls. This kind of mobilization can strike
the prison regime and create unpredictable situa-
tions inside the prison, and even help the comrades
who want to escape.72

The more widespread such attacks are, the more the

system weakens and grows fearful, a wounded animal
smelling its own blood. An increase in fear usually results
in higher repression, which can still be of advantage to the
Insurrectionist.

This effect is particularly problematic for

American leaders when the United States is engaged
in armed conflict with a weaker opponent, a situ-
ation that America’s superpower status makes ex-
tremely likely. The problem is that a pronounced
imbalance in strength produces serious moral and
ethical issues for the stronger belligerent, whose
strength, self-confidence, and will to fight are con-
tinuously eroded. Martin Van Creveld memorably

73. Breen, “Asymmetric Strategies.”

compares this “paradox of strength” dynamic to a
grown man confronting a small child who is attack-
ing him with a knife—virtually anything that the
adult might do will appear to be either weakness or
atrocity to an observer. When the American people
observe their own military in such situations, they
tend to react negatively.73

Ritual Always Ends In Manifestation

All the talk, even in this book, is cheap and meaning-
less unless wedded to real action.
We have been told that to do anything is useless, that
the time isn’t quite right for the exploited to rise up and
take what they need. Well, when is the time? Because there
is an essential economic infrastructure that any State
needs to function, that Capitalism and Society require to
exist, which can easily be disabled and even paralyzed
without the use of armaments and costly equipment, all for
the small investment of resources and time.
People have done and are doing these things, right now,
113
and winning. They are living as writhing flames of spirit,
free to pursue and fight for the kind of freedom so far from
our own shabby lives it appears beyond comprehension.
The “Comrades” that would dare call such unbridled and
exuberant individuals with the courage to live life as they
desire anything less than heroic only do so to hide their
shame.
They accomplish nothing and will walk back across
the Veil broken and disheveled. They know it, but are
afraid to lose what small privileges they’ve been gifted by
their jailors. The goal posts always seem to shift, always
seem to move just a little farther ahead. They want plans,
blueprints, fool-proof layouts for the kind of world they
wouldn’t risk an arrest for. Frankly put, they are waiting to
be led, to be carried to the promised land, and we’ve seen
where those revolutions have gotten us: new leaders, new
cops, new prisons, and new spooks for us to bow before in
eternal submission. The choice is simple: wait for a new hi-
erarchy to fool enough people to serve its interests, or begin
to strike out for your own. A liberated future is unknown
and unpredictable by the very fact of it being liberated, and
the only way it can be fine-tuned to suit you is to take part
in its creation.
Each spell we launch, each ritual we chant, offers no
guarantees yet we fling ourselves into it with wild aban-
don. Is life any different? Those who wait for certainties
still find their chains comfortable enough to keep.
Magic alone will not be enough to free the Witches of
the World, but it might be enough of an edge if we become
committed to our own liberation. To have a group of like-
minded folk doesn’t draw you money, doesn’t protect you
from negative influences. We’ve made the great mistake of
believing if we just surrounded ourselves with enough peo-
ple like ourselves, some magical transformation will bring
down everything we despise.
We’ve forgotten that every conjuration involves the
seizure of very real ingredients and the chance that some-
thing very bad might happen along the way. We do them
anyway, because they will bring us the world we desire. Re-
member that first spell, the first evocation, an act you were

114
told would instantly damn you to eternal hellfire? Where
has that Witch gone and how can we bring her back?
I can tell you how to do folk magic, show you how to
dress a candle for Boss Fix or Crown of Success, but if all
you do is learn about how to do it instead of actually doing
it, you get no closer to your desires. If you wait to light a
candle until being told exactly how a spell will manifest,
you’ll be left holding the match forever. We must act, we
must attack, with magic and physical might; by hook or
crook, guile or sheer guts, the time for foreplay is over.
Do you want to be exploited forever, to die a beautiful
soul trapped in a body-turned-machine, or will you rise in
armed joy?

115
Lock, Stock, and Two
Burning Candles
“We are not soldiers. We are criminals.
We have no fatherland, no higher cause, we do
not follow any directions other than those of our-
selves.
On the other hand, we are fighting. To find our
lives, explore our freedoms.
We fight the misery of our lives, the oppression
of morals, and the grids that imprison us.”
—Anarchists responsible for the bombing of
a police station in Belgium, April of 2017

T he Sorcerer who aims to liberate them-

selves from the grotesque chains of enslavement must fight
as only she can: one hand in each world. No activity should
exclusively belong to the mundane or the spiritual, but in-
stead reflect our own natures eternally betwixt all things.
The weapons of Anarchism and those that wield them are
in dire need of enchantment.
It is here we shall lay out some strategies. Each realm
of action will have with it one or more simple occult pro-
cedures, easily replicable for any situation, allowing the
would-be Occultnik to engage in activities immediately.
Like the bomb recipes of old, these are free weapons for
you to use and share in the hopes that each activity in-
spires more.

117
 The Lone Wolf
What can be undertaken on an individual level will be
perhaps the most widely varied. On a mental level, the Lone
Wolf can operate to push conversations and opinions ever
leftward and with an eye to increasing militant activity. Pow-
ers of speech and persuasion will be key and rootwork can aid
the aspiring propagandist.

A John the Conqueror root if male or a Queen

Elizabeth root if female can be carried and rubbed in
Commanding Oil to make one’s words and message ap-
pear awe-inspiring and compelling. Non-gendered roots
like Calamus and Licorice can be used in the same way if
found whole, or blended into a mix and sprinkled about a
room one plans to speak in if found in chips. Calamus and
Licorice chips, when mixed with Deer’s Tongue (Liatris
odoratissima, Trilisa ordorata, Trilisa odoratissima) make
a powerful incense to smoke the user and their clothes in,
granting an almost cult-leader level of charisma. If Deer’s
Tongue cannot be found, Bay leaves can be used in a
pinch, though it will be nowhere near as powerful. 

Ready for argument, make the rounds of the radical mi-

lieu and occult communities, penetrating wherever you can.
Everywhere propose a clear, brief, direct, and simple plan:
that cells must be organized immediately, arming themselves
as best they can, and begin working with all their might. Tear
down all the ideological blinds and screens concealing the In-
surrection, put an end to all doubts about ability or usefulness.
Say simply and calmly, in the plainest and most popular
form, as loudly and distinctly as possible: a struggle is inevi-
table. Given enough nudging, and ample evidence that oth-
ers are doing the same, the exploited will begin in earnest.
Supply information about both mundane and metaphysical
weapons that can be used and leave the rest to them.

Attacks easily available to the individual include a wide

variety of sabotage and destruction, all dependent on your
own resourcefulness. Texts like The Simple Sabotage Field

118
 Manual (1944), The Freedom Fighter’s Manual (1983), and any
of the ALF/ELF texts on direct action offer a host of things
one person can do to destroy that which destroys them.
Undertaking any of these actions involves some risk, and
the less attention from the dogs of the law the better. Occult-
niks would do well to carry a mojo bag for this express pur-
pose, one that will prove infinitely useful as they graduate to
larger and more daring acts.

In a blue flannel bag take Oregano, Fennel

seed, Black Mustard seed, and three chips of Cascara Sa-
grada bark, praying over each group of herbs that their
spirits awaken and keep you safe from all meddlesome
individuals and authorities. Add a piece of paper with your
name written on it and smeared with your blood, sealing
the bag up afterward. A candle carved with the words
“LAW KEEP AWAY” and dressed in an oil of the same name
can be burned as you do this, and the bag can be kept
near it as it burns to help charge it as you pray. Make a
blend of the same herbs that went into the bag and burn
them over charcoal, giving the spirit of the bag a name.
When named, soak the bag in whiskey. Now it is alive. Af-
ter all is said and done, feed the bag whiskey once a week
and never let anybody other than yourself see it or touch it.
If they do, they will kill the spirit and you will need to create
an entirely new bag. 

Insurgent Cells
While much work can be done alone we will always crave
others to unite with. Anarchists, Sorcerers, even follow Ego-
ists always aim to combine powers if it furthers their aims.
We do not seek to recreate societies, petty symbols that dic-
tate what we owe and what what we can have; each cell can
be thought of as an instrument or the sword with which you
sharpen and increase your natural force with others.
These cells cannot replace the greater Anarchist move-
ment, a sea which the aspiring Conjurer or Insurrectionist
must swim through. These two trajectories exist with quite

119
 different objectives: the greater Anarchist movement with
its assemblies and specific organisations draws people into
its ideas and provides relief to those poor souls crushed un-
der the wheel of capitalism; Insurgent Cells are but a simple
instrument to make war, strike, and then quickly disappear.
Cells communicate without ever becoming visible, and one
is only a member when one takes on the practical work of ag-
gressive class war in spell work or physical deed.
When not engaged in the actual tasks of insurrection we
go back to being ourselves, blending into the covens, assem-
blies, co-ordinations, temples, affinity nuclei, occupations,
communes, and struggles we were in before. These two tra-
jectories must be kept separate from each other for the safety
of all involved. Understand the nature of the cells as criminal
organizations, affinities between members of a grand con-
spiracy. Treat them not as local party offices or grassroots vot-
ing drives but as networks of smugglers, thieves, lawbreakers
and ne’er-do-wells.
Cells may be of any strength, beginning with two or
three people. They must arm themselves as best they can (ri-
fles, revolvers, bombs, pistols, knives, knuckle-dusters, sticks,
molotovs, gas masks, etc.). Under no circumstances should a
cell wait for help from other sources; they must procure ev-
erything themselves. Occult means can aid in gathering arms
as well as comrades.

A six of Diamonds card can be turned clockwise,

with a line drawn on each end of the diamonds to form
what looks like a road in the middle of the card. If confused,
just connect the diamonds on each side by a line. In the
center write the words “All Roads Are Opened To Me.” On
the back of the card, sign your name in your signature, fol-
lowed by your birthday, and write down exactly what it is
you wish to draw to you or to make more readily available
(weapons, comrades, etc.). Place a magnet on the card.
Take a white candle, rubbed in Attraction Oil (if available)
or olive oil you’ve prayed Psalm 23 over three times, and
sprinkle it with a blend of Nutmeg, sugar, and Cinnamon.
Burn the candle on top of the magnet and the card, pray-
ing that all the roads to what you desire be opened, and

120
that what you desire be drawn to you “like metal to a mag-
net and an ant to sugar.” When the candle burns down,
bury it at your front doorstep towards the east. 

As far as possible, the cells should consist of people who

either live near each other, or who meet frequently and regu-
larly at definite hours. They must arrange things so as to be
able to get together at the most critical moments, when things
go absolutely batshit and everyone else is left clutching their
genitals. Therefore, each cell must work out beforehand ways
and means of unified action: signs in windows, shoes thrown
over telephone lines, etc., so as to find each other easily; pre-
viously agreed upon calls or whistles so that the comrades
recognize one another in a crowd; previously arranged sig-
nals for meetings at the middle of the night. All these should
be drawn up, learned and practised beforehand. Chances are,
events most open to liberation will be the most unthinkable,
and catch you unaware. You should always assume you will
only come together under terribly difficult conditions.
As soon as the groups are formed, they must get down
to comprehensive work—both theoretical and practical. Theo-
retical, in the sense that they should study military science,
have an acquaintance with military problems, and aim to ad-
vance the reading, discussion and assimilation of documents
pertaining to street fighting and insurgency. Practical work
includes procuring all kinds of arms and ammunition, secur-
ing premises favourably located for street fighting, storing
bombs and stones, for use as a temporary headquarters, for
collecting information, for sheltering fugitives from the po-
lice, for use as hospitals. This practical work includes the im-
mediate work of reconnaissance and gathering information
about all kinds of suitable targets and learning how they are
guarded, what might be taken from them, and endeavouring
to establish contacts which could be of use (with employees
in police departments, banks, courts, prisons, schools). There
is a great deal of this last kind of work to be done, even by
those who are quite incapable of engaging in street fighting or
have no desire to. Efforts should be made immediately to get
into the great conspiracies by absolutely all those who want to
take part in the uprising, for there is no one who cannot fulfill

121
 some function to aid the Insurrection, even if he is unarmed
and is personally incapable of fighting.
Insurgent Cells should under no circumstances confine
themselves to preparatory work alone, but should begin
military action as soon as possible so as to train their fight-
ing forces, note and exploit vulnerable spots in the Spectral
Cage, inflict defeats on the enemy, rescue prisoners (the ar-
rested), procure arms, and obtain funds for the uprising and
the imprisoned by whatever means possible. The cells can
and should immediately take advantage of every opportunity
for active work, and must by no means put matters off until
a general uprising, because fitness for opportune moments
cannot be guaranteed unless proven by training under fire.
All things of course must be in moderation, including mod-
eration; sloppy, poorly planned, and petty terrorist acts will
only scatter and squander our forces.

To aid in these operations, build cell affinity, and

display insurrectionist tendencies, a black bandanna for
each member of the cell could can be stored in a bowl
with Bay leaves, Ginger powder, and Agrimony. The day
before a full moon (under a martial Lunar Mansion would
be even more potent), brew up fresh Chamomile into a
tea. Throw strips of paper with each member’s name into
the pot with the tea. Take about half of the rest of the col-
lected ingredients and toss them into the pot. Bring to a
boil. Take it off the heat, throw in the bandannas, let them
stew outside while calling upon Luna to grant each ban-
danna bearer strength, luck, and protection from the en-
emy. Take the bandannas out and let them dry. Wear as
needed in all manner of insurrectionary work. 

As for the composition of these insurgent cells, experience

will show how many members are desirable in each group
and how the work should be distributed. Beware the leftist
tendency of inventing complex plans and general schemes
that postpone practical work for the sake of long winded the-
oretical posturing, symbolic actions, or new theatrics for the
sake of theatrics. Any uprising will most certainly happen in
circumstances where the spontaneous elements will outnum-

122
 ber the planned; there will inevitably be cases when it will be
necessary to take immediate action, right then and there, in
twos or even singly—and one must be prepared to act on one’s
own initiative, and at one’s own risk.

Magical Aids for Revolutionary

Struggle in Regards to
Specific Targets
The following recipes are applicable to a wide range of
conditions and are not limited to use in the manner they are
described. Freely experiment, mix and match, and alert com-
rades through secure channels of your successes and innova-
tions.

Workplace
T he first thing everyone should do when they
get to a new jobsite is to put their boss under their shoe.
Take a King of Diamonds card if the exploiter of your labor
is male or a Queen of Clubs if she is female and write their
name and birthday on the card. Carry this card in the shoe
of your dominant foot and know that every day you walk
over them. 

A simple yet effective hex to put on your boss is

to write down their full name on a piece of paper, or bet-
ter to get something they’ve come into physical contact
with, and stuff it into a hot sauce bottle. Cram as much
Red Pepper, Cayenne, Black Pepper, Black Mustard seed,
and Sulphur as you can into the bottle, cursing your boss
aloud and with as much anger as you can summon. De-
mand them to be confused, harmed, and attacked by the
spirits in the ingredients. Place the bottle upside down in
a cup and burn a tea light on top of it, one sprinkled with
cayenne pepper, every time you want everything to go
wrong. 

123
 Home (Anti-Landlord)
Take four nails and pee on them. Take the nails
and pray over them for nine nights that no force on earth,
heaven, or hell will move you from the place you claim as
your own. On the ninth day, before the sun rises, hammer
each nail into a corner of the property you desire not to be
removed from, calling out your intentions as you do. 

Police
The name of a troublesome police officer can
be gathered and taken to a Catholic church. There the as-
piring revolutionary can inform a priest the name is that of
the recently deceased and pay for a mass to be said for
the newly dearly departed. An entire church will affirm the
officer is a dead man. Dirt and Holy Water can be taken
from the church during the event and utilized in voodoo
dolls. 

Valerian root, also known as Vandal root, causes

horrible accidents and bad luck to follow those whom it’s
been thrown at. It can be sprinkled on cop cars or mixed
with the dirt of a specific officer’s footprints. The dirt can
be thrown in a jar with vinegar, Red Pepper flakes, and
whole Black Pepper and buried in a cemetery. 

Wealthy
T he dirt from historic places where workers have
died (mills, factories, mines) can be scooped up and paid
for, brought to a suitable outside location (you must never
do this at home) and placed beneath a candle dressed
in Wormwood, Myrrh, and Patchouli. As the candle burns
the Sorcerer can call upon the restless and angry spirits
of the dead to attack and haunt the homes of modern-day

124
exploiters. The remaining ritual remains (wax, dirt) can be
gathered up with gloves and thrown into the yard, homes,
or onto the persons of the wealthy. 

R ed Pepper flakes, Black Pepper, Black

Mustard seed, Valerian root, Spanish moss, and
rusty nails can be thrown into a jar with water from
a horrible, nasty place. Add Psalm 109 written in
red ink to the jar and pray with extreme venom all
the terrible things you wish to afflict your victim
with. Seal the jar, throw it at the targets door with
all your might, and return to safer ground. 

The goetic spirit known as Raum, who empties

the treasuries of the rich, who makes also friends and en-
emies love each other, can be called upon at a door made
of corvid feathers, his sigil drawn upon the earth before
them. His sigil can also be used to bring fear in the sight
of the rich, as if the fear of plague. In return you may need
make peace with someone you do not like.
Raum’s sigil can be placed beneath a black candle
bathed in lemon juice to sour the luck and dealings of the
wealthy. Rub the candle with lemon juice thirteen times
downward, invoking Raum to destroy and sour the financ-
es of the wealthy, and let it sit until completely dry. The
targets name may be placed beneath the seal with black
pepper and red pepper flakes. Lite the candle and, as it
burns, hiss a litany of curses against the target with the
adage: “It is not I who says these words but Raum; it is not
my hand that makes this so but Raum’s hands.”
The candle remains can be thrown into a graveyard
with a penny to pay the dead. Or, if local, thrown against
the target’s house. 

Protection
Before any operation, or before joining in a pro-
test or place where agitation could occur, prepare a tea

125
of Bay leaves, Black Cohosh, and Star Anise before noon.
Take the tea as the sun is rising and asperge the members
of the cell taking part in the action, calling upon the spirits
of the herbs to grant them success, protection, luck, as
well as increased psychic perception. Throw the remain-
ing water eastward. 

A fter any operation, set up two white candles burn-

ing on either side of your tub or shower such that you’ll
have to pass through them as you step out of it. Plug the
tub to catch some of the water as it runs off of your body
or if you have a shower place a bowl inside the shower
where you can stand over it. Make a tea of Hyssop and fill
a bowl with it, letting it cool. Stand in the tub or shower and
dump the bowl of Hyssop water over your body, praying
you be cleansed of any evil conditions or bad luck. Wipe
the excess liquid off of your body, and step out of the bath
passing between the two lit candles. Air dry and dress in
clean clothes. Take some of the captured bathwater (ei-
ther in the tub or in the bowl) outdoors and toss it over
your left shoulder toward the east in the morning as the
sun is rising. Walk away without looking back. 

Weapons
T ake an empty glass bottle and pour in Red
Pepper flakes, Cayenne, and crushed styrofoam. Fill the
bottle half way with 50/50 blend of motor oil and gaso-
line, capping it. Take an Ace of Spades card and write the
number “792” thirteen times on the front of it. Tear the
card into little pieces and add it to the bottle. Tie, tape, or
use metal wire to wrap a rag around the neck of the bottle,
alternatively affixing the rag to the main body of the bottle,
leaving the neck free to be used as a handle for greater
throwing distance. Light the rag, throw the bottle far from
you (and very far away from children, pets, and anyone
else you do not wish harmed by its incendiary magic) and

126
laugh, calling upon Dionysus the Liberator. 

Find the grave of a soldier, using your gift of spirit

discernment to determine if the spirit in question is trust-
worthy or not. Ask the spirit to bless the specific weapon
you desire. Take a King of Spades Card and write the
number “899” at the top, the spirit’s name in the middle,
and “793” at the bottom. Bury the card in the dirt near the
hands of the grave for three nights, paying the spirit in
high-proof whiskey and tobacco to bless that card that it
might make your weapon accurate and deadly when you
do so. On the third night retrieve the card and write the
following on the back:

By the water in the wind and the fire in the trees, may all
Good Spirits bless and protect this tool. May it function well and
true, extracting justice and ensure protection. All those that hate
me must be silent before me; their hearts are dead in regard to me;
and their tongues are mute, so that they are not at all able to in-
flict the least injury upon me, or my house, or my premises: And
likewise, all those who intend attacking and wounding me with
their arms and weapons shall be defenceless, weak and conquered
before me. In this shall assist me thee mighty power of Him that
Control the Gates, which can make all arms or weapons of no avail.
So shall it be, now here and in eternity.

Take the card and burn it, repeating the written prayer
as it burns. Rub the weapon in the ash. Do the entire op-
eration strictly when the moon grows. 

127
Fighting for Ourselves
“And these tiny, exuberant, and daring mi-
norities, Dionysian and Apollonian by nature, now
satanic and now godlike, always aristocratic and
unassimiliable, scornful and antisocial, are the ones
who, invaded by the anarchic flame, form the great
perennial bonfires where every form of slavery is
burnt up and dies.”
—Renzo Novatore, In Defense of Heroic and
Expropriating Anarchism

Y ou were born with a piece of something inside

you, a nested connection to the greater and Weirder real-
ity. You were born most likely aware of this special gift, yet
told time and again to ignore it. You may have been told it
didn’t exist, you may have been told it was wrong, all ideas
stemming not even so much from your parents, but from
spooks outside them. You went through life half torn, play-
ing your socially-necessary role: smiling where you needed
to, nodding where you needed to, liking the same shows
and songs that were culturally acceptable.
All the while that Weirdling still stirred within you.
There comes a time when you can no longer follow,
where the heart and the strange creatures that dwell within
it must be free. At some point you yourself must supercede
the bonds that tie you, must manifest yourself. That in it-
self is a highly political act.

129
Politics And The Spirit World
The Spirit World is not as black and grey as our fore-
bears were lead to believe. In the background, perhaps
even unspoken, this is acknowledged by all those who traf-
fic in spirits. There is no one true religion, no single most
effective form of magic. In the days of old, we can imag-
ine Siberian shamans arguing with Hellenic oracles as to
whose god makes the thunder or who truly holds the reins
of life and death. The gods themselves seemed to care little
for these distinctions: African gods went where they were
called, and when their worshippers dressed them up as
Catholic saints we heard no commotion from the Invisible
Realm.
While no truth can be found in these fecund observa-
tions, there are certainly implications. We are left with a
world of wills, not edicts, a place where it’s who you know
and what they can do instead of what things are “supposed
to be.”
Republicans, Democrats, Communists, and Fascists
can all summon the powers of Spirit to achieve their own
ends. The childish idea that all bad people have the spirits
turn against them, or even more laughable that some kar-
mic score board will eventually punish them, is merely a
mutant strain of Christian thinking that has made magic
bearable for the woefully frightful.
The reality is as naked as it is terrifying, that the spir-
its actually don’t give a shit what they are being called for,
provided it meets their own strange, inhuman objectives.
St. Martha can be called to keep a cheating man at home
and the right herbs will make sure an abused wife never
leaves her captor. We can change these situations, but there
is nothing that demands they change other than the will of
those involved.
The Sorcerer produces changes in the world in accor-
dance with the will. This naturally assumes that the “world”
as it stands is not in accordance with the Sorcerer; that the
Sorcerer is limited yet seeks to overcome these limitations.
How many of these limitations are, in effect, political?
Are not the old values part of our social and material

130
 positions? How much of them came from me, and how
many were implanted within me for their own will, their
own egoistic desire? Doesn’t it serve the State well to be-
lieve a President is untouchable by even the most novice
of witches, even supposing she has a bit of his clothing?
Doesn’t it serve Capital for me to desire my prosperity can-
dle get me more shifts at work? Doesn’t it serve Society that
even in the midst of awakening the spirit of an entire for-
est, I believe myself to be worthless, small, and dependent
upon the approval of others?
Politics and culture mold every magical practice, just
as they do people and technologies. This does not make
them any more intrinsically “right” than anything else. The
different traditions are simply symbolic languages we uti-
lize to control and confront the tumultuous tempest that is
the reality we have only barely glimpsed.
Political philosophy is simply the same, a constellation
of opinions and dominant Geists that have replicated viral-
ly. Each ideology speaks to some centrally-held core in the
individual. To protect itself from other viruses, it deems
itself “sacred.”
If I can keep my landlord away, how sacred is property?
If I can bend my boss to my will, how natural is the divi-
sion of people into class? What does it say when an illness,
reputedly put there by god, can be removed by the force of
a practitioner and the help of her allies?
We come to a startlingly simple conclusion:
Spirits respect no nation, no class, no truth, no mor-
als, no human hierarchy, because these are simply human
inventions. What they respect is ability and relationship.
From the Nazi investigator to the Soviet psi researcher to
the pampered court magician and his starving peasant
counterpart, spirit will move where it is called.

The Great Dance of Wills

There is no final truth, no great arbiter. If I myself can
affect the very fabric of space and time with mere observa-
tion and if indeed it appears the very action of this observa-

131
double-slit-experiment/.
tion is what keeps the universe alive we must dispense to-
com/this-will-mindfuck-you-the-
Experiment,” http://highexistence.
Mindfuck You: The Double-Slit
74. High Existence, “This Will
tally with anything existing beyond a sea of intelligences
observing and influencing one another as their tastes suit
them.74
The world then is a massive orgy of creation and de-
struction, of repulsing and attracting, of forming and cor-
rupting forever and ever. There will never be world peace,
no Lillinzeit, no grand age of Aquarius, because for such
a thing to occur would require the final cessation of these
multitudes bouncing off of, and influencing, one another.
There exists only the force expressed by an intelligence.
This means that things like law and justice are a farce.
There is only what can be opposed. It means things like au-
thority, rules, and rights are an illusion. There is only that
which can be gained and held.
battle-of-britain/.
org/2015/07/27/the-magical-
https://godsandradicals.
Magical Battle of Brittain,”
75. Sable Aradia, “The

Nothing indeed is true, and everything, even the most

unspeakable of horrors, is permitted. No gods reached
down from heaven to shut down the concentration camps
of Nazi Germany.75 Nothing is safe, only momentarily de-
fended. The Law of Contagion has a gun on every forehead
and in every hand.
The dark glimmer of this hidden reality need not be
cause for despair. For the magically inclined, it should be
second nature. Rather than stare into this abyss and flee
into some religion where an “ordained” priesthood prom-
ises to dance fairy tales in front of us, we accept the writh-
ing dance of force and probability. We just happen to know
that as easily as it can be used against us, it can be used
for us.
The minute we free ourselves from any delusion of cer-
tainty, of anything being inevitable or immutable, we allow
ourselves to perceive things as they really are. Things exist,
have their own will, it is only by overcoming that will with
our own force that things begin to change.
We no longer demand equality, we enforce it. We no
longer wait for a better world, we make it, will it, birth
it, and destroy that which hinders its own desire to exist.
Grappling, borrowing, seizing, plotting, we take active
roles in our lives and the cosmos yet again.
We no longer respond to anything, we become anti-

132
 fragile. We do not ask permission nor live for concepts. We
affirm ourselves.
It’s this ability to create new valuations that makes the
occult so frightening to organized religion. Poverty is only
a virtue when we deem it necessary and just. To refuse this
answer, to see the riches of the world stolen from your labor
and swear to take them back by sword and spellcraft is a
philosophical and spiritual threat.
Things belong only to others as long as we acknowledge
them as such. The “world” and all its shapes are the result of
agreement. We have the power within us to stop agreeing
altogether. That is the great secret all ideology wants you to
forget. We are told only the system can guarantee results,
only the party can win our liberation, when ultimately we
are free to seek or obliterate whatever ties that bind us and

76. Stirner, The Ego.

forge new ones in the lives we live today. “By what then is
your property secure, you creatures of preferment?—and
give themselves the answer, By our refraining from inter-
ference! And so by our protection! And what do you give us
for it? Kicks and disdain you give to the “common people”;
police supervision, and a catechism with the chief sentence
‘Respect what is not yours, what belongs to others! respect
others, and especially your superiors!’”76

It’s this ability to no longer wait, to start seizing what

belongs to us that has been at the forefront of magical praxis
for generations. You and I are the descendants of piss poor
commoners that defied every social impulse and followed
their own. Why shouldn’t we have it all, why shouldn’t we
be healthy and happy? Why should we be happy with our
lot in life, our socially or economically mandated caste?
Rather than wait on courts or racist cops, we can begin to
seize our own justice.
The entire structure of the Spectral Cage is built to im-
prison you, denying you agency and forcing you to accept
that which was handed to you. In light of this, Sorcery be-
comes the ultimate defiant act, a wholesale affirmation of
the individual’s desires and wishes. In league with allies
of human or non-human origin we ride out onto the vast
emptiness of greater reality and weave our own song into

133
ting-to-know-our-distant-cousins/.
its grand chorus.
org/2016/01/18/forgotten-history-get-
Cousins,” https://godsandradicals.
tory: Getting to Know Our Distant
77. Dr. Bones, “Forgotten His-
The Sorcerer stands as an exemplary revolutionary
subject. Not only do they tap into a greater reality, one our
enemies have long used for their own advantage, but be-
cause they gaze onto both the Spectral Cage keepers and
their captives with unique insight.77
Up until now, even in our own myths and dramas, the
Wizards and Witches have been viewed as apolitical, not
stooping to the “crude” level of day to day power. We are
cautioned to remain like the priests of old, ambivalent to-
wards the “lower realms” and always thinking of the heav-
ens.
Which is fine. But that is not our full history.

The wild and desolate parts of the parish of

Whalley furnished a fitting scene for witch assem-
blies, and it was alleged that such meetings were
held at Malkin Tower, in Pendle Forest, within that
parish.
The Justices of the peace in this part of the coun-
try, Roger Nowell and Nicholas Bannister, having
learned that Malkin Tower, the residence of Old
Demdike and her daughter, was the resort of the
witches, ventured to arrest their head and another
of her followers, and to commit them to Lancaster
Castle.
When the old witch had been sent to Lancaster,
a grand convocation of seventeen witches and three
wizards was held at Malkin Tower on Good Friday,
at which it was determined to kill Mr.Covell, the gov-
ernor of the castle, and blow up the building, to en-
able the witches to make their escape.
The other two objects of this convocation were
to christen the familiar of Alison Device, one of the
witches in the castle, and also to bewitch and murder
cashire-witches/.
witches.co.uk/lan-
http://www.pendle-
78. Pendle Witches,

Mr. Lister, a gentleman of Westby-in-Craven, York-

shire.
The business being ended, the witches, in quit-
ting the meeting, walked out of the barn, named
Malkin Tower, in their proper shapes, but on reach-
ing the door, each mounted his or her spirit, which
was in the form of a young horse, and quickly van-
ished.78

134
 If we look beyond Europe we’ll see spiritual practitio-
ners, rather than stepping away from politics, either lead-
ing revolutionary movements or joining the fray from the
beginning.
There’s the legendary example of Haiti:

Bois Caiman, literally “Alligator Woods,” was

the site of a secret Vodoun ceremony held by slaves
from neighboring plantations. Risking life and limb
to practice their faith and seek communion with their
gods talk began to drift to the situations that made
such a meeting so dangerous. The weather was terri-
ble, clouds and rain raging above, yet the slaves were
undeterred. Anger began to rise as each person gave
air to a list of grievances, rage and hatred pouring
out from lips like molten lava. All agreed something
had to be done. Suddenly Ogoun seized the priestess
known as Dutty Boukman. In a flash of steel she slit
the throat of a nearby black pig offered as sacrifice
to Ezili Dantor, the Mother of Haiti, steaming blood
mixing with rain from the heavens. Dutty Boukman
collected the dripping blood from the creatures still
pouring throat and bade the assembled drink it as
she/Ogoun let loose a mighty prayer:
“Good Lord who hath made the sun that shines

call-for-violence/
org/2016/07/14/when-the-gods-
79. https://godsandradicals.
upon us, that riseth from the sea, who maketh the
storm to roar; and governeth the thunders, The Lord
is hidden in the heavens, and there He watcheth over
us. The Lord seeth what the blancs have done. Their
god commandeth crimes, ours giveth blessings upon
us. The Good Lord hath ordained vengeance. He will
give strength to our arms and courage to our hearts.
He shall sustain us. Cast down the image of the god
of the blancs, because he maketh the tears to flow
from our eyes. Hearken unto Liberty that speaketh
now in all your hearts.” 79
Press, 1985).
(University of California
80. D. Lan, Guns and Rain,

In Africa spiritual leaders often served dual political

and spiritual roles. The Zimbabwean liberation war saw
the spirits of ancestral rulers, speaking through their me-
diums, authorize armed resistance to the colonial regime.80

David Lan, for instance, relates how many

veterans of the Zimbabwean liberation war “… tell
similar stories of how long-dead members of their

135
 families had assisted them and led them to sources
of food or other supplies”, as well as furnishing prac-
tical advice. Nor did their adherence to ritual pro-
scriptions imposed by cooperative spirit-mediums
preclude their participation “… in the programme of
peasant mobilisation or of political education that
their political party put into action”, revolutionary
methods of which Fanon explicitly approved. Indeed,
the mediums of royal ancestor-spirits helped to le-
and-occult-strategies-of-resistance.
org/2016/05/23/revolutionary-spirits-
Resistance,” https://godsandradicals.
Spirits and the Occult Strategies of
81. Brian Johnson, “Revolutionary

gitimize and socially assimilate the guerrillas and

their revolutionary agenda in the eyes of the rural
populations among whom they operated, in part
through the guerrillas’ participation in local ritual
cycles. The ancestors’ uncontested, atemporal legiti-
macy, grounded in their provision of the land’s fertil-
ity and cutting across communal divisions by means
of ascribed genealogies, provided a common point of
reference for revolutionary consciousness.”81

The narrative that the magically inclined are removed

from the day-to-day realities of the political realm reveals
itself to be a sham. Even if we were copying the pretended
aloofness of the Christian priesthood it would be a self
deception. The Papal States certainly did not spend their
days deep in prayer: heads of State across Europe all kept a
witch or two in their back pocket as insurance should the
need arise, magic spells ensuring the bonds of feudal life
were upheld and maintained. Even King Saul consulted the
Witch of Endor to help support and guide his patriarchal
kingdom.
Everywhere throughout history those of spiritual in-
clination and ability have run the gamut of political lean-
ings and sympathies, from sex-crazed libertines to staunch
conservative traditionalists. Across this history they have
acted in league with many powers, many movements.
We have yet to see is an authentically magical rebellion
of the magic folk themselves.

No More Magic As Usual

Every movement, every battle, has been fought for
cause after cause and the magically inclined have been in
136
 the ranks of them all.
But it’s never been for us.
We’ve fought for ourselves as citizens, as workers, as
oppressed members of different genders and nationalities,
yet the sphere in which we find our true calling, that aspect
of our lives that makes everything hum with excitement
and our skin cells pulse with anticipation, is always an af-
terthought.
My life as a Conjurer is directly affected by the hidden
rules behind my material existence. My access to sacred
sites and places of power is not totally within my grasp and
is much a matter of the courts and laws as my own desires.
The woman working two jobs just to make ends meet has
little time to plumb the depths of her own soul.
But the occult leaders will deny this, make sure you
know that Ultimate Illumination surely can be stolen in-
between commercial breaks. Yoga and meditation are glee-
fully scooped up by forward-thinking CEO’s as a way to
“enrich” your work experience and keep you docile.
We must confront the horrid truth that so much of our
spirituality is being re-packaged and sold back to us, that
we are being recruited to serve the psychic vampires that
feed off of human suffering. The people whose lives and
bank accounts depend on you being content with a precari-
ous existence are the first to exclaim the wonderful abili-
ties of finding a job, yet are silent on the details of making
your boss kneel before you. They prescribe wonderful and
flowery sprays and perfumes to help bring peace to your
neighborhood, yet cough and shuffle when you ask how to
stop the police from killing your children.
Do not think I’m mincing words when I say that al-
most every person who tells you to be calm, to meditate
on some grand and gentle future for humanity, is feeding
off your inaction one way or the other. The majority of the
occult world, at least in the United States, is firmly rooted
in a white, middle-class existence and carries with it many
of those prejudices. Change must be slow, must be voted
on, and above all that grand star-spangling vision we were
all brought up on must be preserved and never questioned.
But these are different times, and that is the great spell be-

137
 ing cast over us: timelessness.
What kind of grand and disgusting comedy do we in-
habit when, rather than demand better lives (or better still
take them), we are taught spells on how to get bank loans or
to curry favor on the corporate ladder?
The call to Insurrection rings out across the globe, but
surely you’ve asked yourself… Why us, why the magic folk?
Why specifically call for the sorcerers to join the fray? Be-
cause for too long we’ve been in this fight without realizing
it.
You can burn candles on prosperity jars all day, but
that doesn’t stop wages from falling. You can ward for pro-
tection, but unless you can keep the police away, people
will die. You may craft a doll to keep your boss under your
foot, but that doesn’t change the fact he gets his orders
from the corporate office; when it comes time to cut loose
entire departments, how sure are you that you’ll be spared?
How many more sacred groves need to be replaced
with Walmarts before we begin to see we can no longer sit
idly by? How many more hours of your life are you willing
to trade away for sustenance? How many more years are
you willing to surrender the fullness of your personality
and play witch on the weekends?
We live in strip-mall lined deserts, rubbing dollar-store
candles with bargain-brand bay leaves in the hopes we can
pay our fucking bills. We cough into shirts and try to ig-
nore the blood as we call upon Saints of healing because we
have no insurance and can’t afford a doctor visit.
When will you break out of the bonds of thinking
they’ve penned you in to? When will your magic stop re-en-
forcing the world they’ve built and start crafting your own?
When do we, awash in auraic colors of fury, demand
what we require for our multi-dimensional selves? When
do we begin the wizard’s insurrection?

Sorcerers: To Arms!
My arguments need not be steeped in the language of
the occult and supernatural, because the points are clear

138
enough, but they are because that’s who I want to speak to.
I’m not speaking to the world, friend. I’m speaking to
you. I want you to forget every labor struggle you’ve ever
heard of, I want you to cast out every mighty victory and
brutal defeat you may have witnessed, and I want to ask
you one simple question:
Do you deserve a better life than the one Capitalism
has given you and the State has upheld? Do you, a multi-
dimensional conduit for the evisceration of probability in
accordance with your will, deserve to be regulated to the
status of “worker,” a simple gear in a gigantic and indiffer-
ent device that is slowly phasing you out in favor of ma-
chine slaves that cannot reflect on their subservience? Are
you hungry, friend? Do you long for a life free to devote to
that which makes you happy, to spend on the passions you
enjoy just like the ones above you do? Do you wish your
thirst for Esoteric knowledge could blossom into the life-
affirming gift you intuit it’s always been rather than a mere
hobby you engage in when your sciatica isn’t acting up?
Forget the bulk of humanity, forget the untold scores of
people continuing to live and die amid piss and shit. Don’t
you deserve it?
If the struggles for liberation are going to win they’ll
need us.
The biggest falsehood ever perpetrated on the species
at large was that magic/psi didn’t exist. Have you noticed
it’s always the regular people who are being warned off
magic, being told not to “traffic in spirits,” while the Kings
and Queens of the day always seemed to have someone on
hand, just in case? It’s because they knew it existed. They
just wanted it for themselves.
Crowley, when not working for British intelligence and
regularly battling his Nazi counter-parts, was summoning
up entities that seemingly kicked off UFO flaps. What are
we to make of these cryptic words: “My observation of the
Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence
and power of a far higher quality than anything we can
conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based
on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know; and
that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as

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 a whole is for individuals to make contact with such Be-
Without Tears.
82. Aleister Crowley, Magick
ings.”82
If nothing else, it’s time for the Witches and Wizards to
decide if the destruction of the world as it is will give them
a larger freedom to pursue their true interests: knowledge
and communion with the spirit world.
There can be no liberation without magic. There can be
no future without the magical skill to manifest it. There can
be no Insurrection without the Sorcerers.
How many people have you met running around with
bad luck or evil spirits clinging to them for years? Can’t the
same be said of entire ideologies? Movements? It doesn’t
take that great a seer to notice something has been pro-
foundly wrong with the success rate of liberatory politics,
and if we remove the religious notion that we just haven’t
found the right theory or tactic, things begin to look less
like a struggle and more like a concerted and magical effort
to keep the people down.
There are others out there just like you, that feel the
way you do: real comrades wanting to fight as hard and
eagerly as you might. The bonds of affinity, those real hu-
man interactions, are the bed-rock of occult practice: we
may work with a spirit plenty of others have, but it’s only
through a continued dialogue and engagement that each
party gets to know the other.
A Sorcerer is already a party to a million conspiracies,
each one more secret than the last: Crossroads that appear
banal by daylight made vortexes of power visit by visit un-
der the soft and supple rays of the moon. Particular trees,
certain areas, even words and symbols only we and the In-
visible know are born from intercourse, not theory. Gifts
flow from world between world in a never ending cycle of
reciprocity.
Our strength lies in carrying this model into a world
of political Direct Action. If we take ourselves as the center
(and not some new god set to captain the Spectral Cage), we
will fight for and win concrete victories instead of moral
scorepoints. If we refuse to kneel before any organization
and put its needs above our own, we keep each other in
check, no voice overpowering another because we refuse

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to give up our self agency. If we see our struggle as the
struggle of individuals pursuing the shared goal of a bet-
ter life under the umbrella of mutual affinity and desires,
connected not by ideology or issue but by personal relation
and benefit, all undertaken outside the state and beholden
to no rules or values other than that which we ourselves de-
fine moment to moment, we become something new, some-
thing unstoppable.

The first step is the goal: creating those unions of in-

dividuals. Isn’t this something second nature to the world
of the occult? Magical lodges weren’t just places to learn
spells, they were homes of hidden knowledge and often
libertine ideas. What are covens but loosely connected net-
works of people agreeing to come together for specific tasks
under a shared identity?
The germ of the new world has been within us all along.
It’s time we start spreading it.
Is it that much of a leap to transform magical asso-
ciations into something greater than societies, molded on
non-hierarchal relationships with the intent on getting
free? You may hold property in common or live together,
maybe you decide not to; ultimately the forms of this free-
dom are up to you and the individuals you forge it with.
Perhaps it takes the shape of a secret network of magical
agitators, stretched across the country. If it worked for the
underground railroad, why can’t it work for you? Maybe
you come together to help settle disputes in the commu-
nity. Maybe you build a temple in the woods where each
week, amid prayers to the Horned One, you practice guer-
rilla-permaculture. Maybe it’s an occult bookstore with a
room in the back for Insurrectionists to plot Direct Action.
Maybe it’s all these things connected in some secret milieu,
members bringing missions to the collective. Perhaps once
a week they have meetings on the astral plane, followed
by one in person to see how well their skills are increasing.
Perhaps your grand Ego-Comm cabal does readings at
a psychic fair, donating the proceeds to Anarchist prison-
ers. Perhaps your collective has no physical boundaries, op-
erating as an online guild of fortunetellers and spell-cast-

141
 ers sharing collectively in the fruits of your labors. Perhaps
you are the shadowy protectors of a sacred forest, putting
illness in demolition teams and wrenches in engines. Per-
haps the police become fearful of a local cult hell-bent on
recording their every move with cameras while chanting
oaths of baneful magic.
It could be something that only lasts for awhile or
something that is more permanent like unions of individu-
als who have freely federated and meet monthly on the
dark web, secure in anonymity. Perhaps they co-ordinate
rituals and actions, a shared fund to aid members in times
of distress. Perhaps it starts hyper-local and has a physical
building for it’s members to meet and aid the community.
Maybe they become renowned for their secrecy and nev-
83. http://www.oyotunji.org/.

er ending presence at evictions, landlord issues, and city

council meetings.
Maybe you go full-tilt, taking note of Oyotunji African
Village, an autonomous African territory in South Carolina,
or Christiania, or Dancing Rabbit Eco-village.83 Maybe Sa-
lem, Massachusetts declares itself an Autonomous Zone
and fights in courts and riots to have the State respect that.
Why not have it all and more, a new century defined
by a strong individualism with the notion that true creativ-
ity can never be achieved unless an equality of the social
resources is a reality? Perhaps CIA directors some day
soon will nervously brief whatever ass-hat occupies the
oval office on “the Witch problem.” Perhaps riot police will
become unnerved by the increasing calls to Chango by pro-
testers, molotov cocktails imbued with runic words of pow-
er and violence raining down on them as they continue to
be struck with those strange headaches that always seem
to start right before a demonstration… not to mention the
nightmares that never seem to end.
Maybe banks that screwed people out of their homes
become so riddled with ghosts and poltergeist activity, they
have to close their doors. Maybe one day the KKK and Neo-
Nazis will lobby the government for help, a never ending
stream of cursed dolls, bullets, and jars of War Water slam-
ming against the doors of addresses leaked by Anonymous.
These Sorcerers will forge a new world onto themselves,

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one that does not ask for permission to exist. Do you want
such a life? Steal back all that has been stolen from you!
Set your cause on nothing else but yourselves. Grasp what-
ever it is you require; you alone are the judge of what you
ought to have. Only to those that can defend a thing does
anything belong!
There is no justice but that which you make, no rules
but what you can get away with. Free yourself and declare
your unceasing war; everywhere at once, arise and set fire
to all you deem limiting. Become not prisoners of the world,
Comrades, but grasp it firmly as your own.
Take it and it is yours.

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About
Dr. Bones is a conjurer, card-reader and egoist-com-
munist who believes “true individuality can only flourish
when the means of existence are shared by all.” A Florida
native and Hoodoo practitioner, he summons pure vitriol,
straight narrative, and sorcerous wisdom into a potent
blend of poltergasmic politics and gonzo journalism. He
lives with his loving wife, a herd of cats, and a house full
of spirits.
He can be reached at Facebook.com/TheConjureHouse
and drbonesconjure@gmail.com
Help keep him writing more books by becoming a pa-
tron at patreon.com/doctorbones

About Gods&Radicals
Gods&Radicals is a non-profit Pagan anti-capitalist
publisher and daily site of beautiful resistance.
Find more about us at godsandradicals.org

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