So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and after that ruled Tibet until now.
The idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week…
So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on war magic, which was used by the Fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner. He basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols, and after that ruled Tibet until now.
The idea of war magic — I mentioned it last week — it wasn’t so much the esoteric practices and spells which the Fifth Dalai Lama, who was a great realised practitioner but also a good military leader, employed. The claim wasn’t that it was the spells themselves, but that the word got out that he was doing this. And this really disturbed the Karmapas, who were the other sect — we still have a Karmapa — but these battles were won because the word got out. That really fascinated me: war magic as propaganda.
The magic there was in the sense of esoteric practices, which I suspect go back, many of them anyway, to early Indo-European culture. They’re preserved in Tibetan Buddhism via India, where they were converted. I read that in 2016, while I was working in Russia-occupied Ukraine and going across the bridge all the time and trying to work out: what are they doing? What are they talking about? What is all this nonsense in their information space that’s brainwashing people? Ah — it’s war magic. This is what they’re doing.
I would archetype exactly what you’ve just talked about in that way, because once you categorise it like that, you look at it more like an artifact in a museum. You can walk around it and look up at it and down at it — as you in fact are obviously doing — rather than seeing it as something to be worried about, something that’s going to trigger your negative emotions, which is obviously how the Russians want it to work.
I mentioned a bit earlier — I’m not sure it was when you’d joined — one of the really important things I’ve tried to do, and it’s helped me in Disinfolklore and in looking at mythology: especially when you’re looking at someone like Dugin, if you have a deep hinterland or a deep understanding, or at least a conscious understanding where you actually look up what this symbolism means, then it enables us to look at what Dugin is doing and what the Russians are doing as gobbledygook. It’s a pastiche. It’s a troll, but it’s a muddle of lots of different things.
You get this sense in the Russian Orthodox Church — everything happens behind the veil, a bit like The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know whether Putin believes... I don’t know, and it’s not necessary to know whether they’re utterly cynical. I suspect they don’t have an understanding of, say — Wendy got this immediately when we talked about in the second week — emptiness, which from the Buddhist perspective is this idea that everything is empty of mana, of essence.
You can either go to one extreme and despair — that’s nihilism, the extreme of nihilism. Or you can go to the other extreme and make up loads of nonsense and come up with lots of nice stories to make yourself feel better about things. That’s from the standpoint of ultimate reality. But in conventional reality, you have to accept that this chair, if I sit down on it, is going to work. The aeroplane is going to fly.
What the Russians are trying to do with that kind of stuff, probably from a standpoint of their own confusion, is muddle all of these different discourses: ultimate reality where nothing matters, because they are ultimately nihilistic; to breaking the laws of physics, which is the conventional view of what magic is; to using stories to scare people.
What we can do is develop an immunity to what they’re doing, by understanding its absolute — well, it doesn’t always help to say it’s absolute nonsense, because it’s not absolute nonsense, because they’re mixing loads of things in.
I started this evening at eight o’clock by quoting from Solovyov talking about Ukrainians being demons. There was a bit of a controversy over whether early archaic Roman religion was called numinism — with the M-N in numinism — or whether it was called daemonism. And again, the M-N is also in “daemon.” So this idea of mana is quite a helpful way of looking through all these things.
Solovyov this week, yes, saying Ukrainians are demons. We heard this before about them being Satan worshippers. If you don’t have any grounding in religious discourse, or if one doesn’t, as many of us don’t — I taught myself this stuff because I wanted to know what they were talking about — then you can miss the significance of what they’re trying to do.
Because a lot of people don’t have grounding in religion, they will just try to ignore it. I’m thinking of normal military people, for instance, or many of our politicians in London or in Washington. Though in Washington they might have some grounding in religion — but that demon chatter will work with them.
So it’s a pastiche. That’s what I think they’re doing. It is of no more significance than that it is a pastiche. But one of my early intuitions — and by pastiche I mean: they are taking, as you point out, the hazelnuts in Irish mythology, which fall into the river up in the Boyne Valley and then the salmon eats the hazelnut and then the fisherman eats the salmon and becomes wise. This is one manifestation of an essential story of what happens in the afterlife in Indo-European societies and in Indo-European religion.
I once heard Putin talk about how he had been told there were massive freshwater reserves under the Sea of Azov. And again, this is from an ancient Iranian idea. I thought, “He’s been trolled by someone who’s been studying ancient Persian.” And then a year later, I saw the story that they had drilled and didn’t find anything. I was like, I could have told you that.
So this is why I get the idea that they’re not coming from a standpoint of: “We really understand this stuff and we’re just playing with it. We’re digging up these symbols, putting them together, and we’re toying with people like deities.” I see it more that they are doing a pick and mix of different tropes and elements.
Dugin, for instance, is clearly very bright and has a real grasp on symbolism, which is probably why he’s so successful — there aren’t that many people around who understand it.
But what the Russians did with Wagner — it’s really clever what they did with Wagner. I’m not even sure they understand what they did by linking in with the foundations of the Germanic people. I think they just tuned into the Nazi aesthetic. But they ended up bringing in the foundations of Germanic culture — Mannus and the sons of Mannus who founded Germanic culture, the Wagner operas, and how the Germanic nation became a modern nation-state. And what they were doing with their Disinfolklore: creating a sense of identity, hacking, destroying existing senses of identity and creating a new sense of identity through using force — monikered as “Wagner” by Prigozhin, who wrote a book of fairy tales himself.
I’m not ruling out that they know exactly what they’re doing. They are extremely... But I’m not sure I’ll ever have that conversation. My feeling from reading people like Surkov and Dugin very closely is that they don’t really understand what they’re doing, but they are brilliant at it. And they’re using symbols and tools which politicians and army people and specialists in disinformation — they’re not at the races, they don’t get it at all. They’re not even valuing it.
Some of you might remember when I first brought up mythology in the context of the predecessor to Volya, from the ancien régime. They tried to shut me up. And yet we were talking about Wagner. So it’s that attitude of: “I’m a bit intimidated by that. I don’t know anything about it. So I’m just going to ignore that part. They’re probably just talking rubbish.”
It’s good. It’s important. But we shouldn’t let it intimidate us, because it’s just classic war magic. I’ll leave it at that. A great question.
Thank you so much, Decoding. That was amazing. Thank you.
