Dearest friends,

A friend of mine is literally dismantling history. No, it’s not an overwrought metaphor for the collapse of Western civilization and its traditions. It’s an old building that the local government is unwilling to pony up the cash to maintain. So down it goes, as do all unloved relics. What matters about this old building is that it is a lodge of a secret society. In short, I am considering buying up one of the old murals so that an all-seeing Illuminati eye can watch me masturbate while I wear a funny hat. Glorious.

Now, most blogging about the occult talks about… well, the occult practices. I’m not going to do that. For one, others do it far better than me. For two, I don’t believe the actual occult practices do a damn thing. If Satan-magic worked, why’d Hillary get her ass beat so badly?

No, I’m going to talk about the occult as power mechanism.

In most organizations, you have the distinction between formal and informal power. Formal power is the power of process, meetings, procedure, and regulations. Informal power is the power of connections, backroom deals, and quid pro quos sealed by handshake. These processes are different. And the informal? The informal is where the real power lies. Anyone who has worked in a corporate workplace knows there is a formal process to getting a promotion, usually involving plodding forward giving your best work and putting in the time. People don’t get promoted this way.

No, you have to work the mechanisms of informal power. To get ahead, you have to do something sociologists would call reproducing the symbols and habitus of the dominant class. You have to find the dominant in-group, and make like how they do. We all know where the real loci of power lie.

What is the most basic meaning of occult?

Hidden.

The occult is the hidden. Informal power is occult power. The occult rulers are the hidden rulers. This isn’t just a language game I’m playing. In order to gate the informal, it must have memes to gatekeep it. It must operate memetically because it lacks the formal gatekeeping mechanisms of formal power.

Male societies are fundamentally LARPs. A LARP allows a man to propose a transcendent ideal to strive to, and because it is human, it can only be role-played, not truly lived. It is in reaching towards the transcendent we ground our moral codes. The Soros boys are a LARP of Star Wars, the Mafia and Yakuza LARP feudal chivalry, and the Triads ape the Taoist divine. One creates mysteries to serve as informal markers of authority – those who keep a certain level of mystery have a certain level of implied authority. Mysteries cannot be faked by the regime’s mens or aspirants. The older the society, the more complex the LARP. Since the idea is to remain hidden, each layer must become more obscure than the last. A LARP that fails to continually increase in complexity has all its layers probed and exposed by outsiders.

What happens when a secret society takes over? Well, r/the_donald is more or less a /pol/ony. You will see flashes of the controller memes pass by unheeded. Thus, one sees occult imagery all the time. Suppose I became rich and powerful (alas, alas, I am but a small fry right now). I’d commission a big statue of Leviathan. Secret Clintonians would start to network with me. It’s a powerful signal. But nothing about it is actually supernatural. Nor is the base signal, the statue, actually hidden. Much like a Secret Police, it cannot be truly secret, or it would fail to serve as an invitation to other members of the sect. People wonder why Satanic symbols are everywhere – wouldn’t effective worship demand it all remain hidden? Sure, but it’s a coordinating mechanism. It’s not actually mygikal power. Suppose 4chan took over the world. Kekkian frog magic would not be the cause! These memes serve as keys to govern a self-managing cell-based secret society. In fact, the base level memes of many an occult society are probably shitty jokes or half-remembered profundities like many 4chan memes. The genius of literary analysis is the ability to backfill and deepen complexities. The occult structure is inherently extremely resilient, at the price of rarely being able to mobilize its full force. Thus, we naturally see secret societies form across the world.

And occult memes do not necessarily have to correspond with any agenda. They might. But first and foremost, they serve as keys. The Triads captured such luminaries as Chang Kai-Shek and Sun Yat-Sen. If China was the imperial Republic of China, I have no doubt it would be littered with Taoist symbology, with the common Chinese puzzling over the sinister symbols of a Taoist mystery religion behind the professed Christianity of the rulers. But that wouldn’t be the agenda. The agenda of Triads was imperial restoration (of a sort), not any Taoist occult purification of man.

Or maybe I’m covering for masked and hooded brothers with a suitably materialist explanation. Who knows?

Crushed between Boaz and Jachin,
Monsieur le Baron