Political Sorcery creates metaphysical tools for fighting specific evils. In proximity and with the support of others, we develop charms, rituals, prayers, curses and other metaphysical ways to affect reality through our bodies, drawings, objects, chants, words. We can draw from different cultures, but we'll mostly create our own sorceries and perform them together for greater effect. Its meta-message is that there are things beyond the power's understanding and control, that they're not untouchable. If “political” is to affect the power relations, Political Sorcery is a direct way of reclaiming its core. It is art that metaphysically acts on the world – art as political sorcery.
When politics are spectacle, when protests and other ways of "resisting" feel pointless, when it seems that they won and there is nothing we can do, maybe we can act from the other end of reality, on the metaphysical plane. No matter how "unscientific" or wacky it sounds, Political Sorcery might be a way to have a saying, an influence, it might be one of the few still possible ways to be political, with a twist. They think that we're powerless, and we might be in the sphere they function and understand, yet we're having power, and it's time to put it to good use. Political Sorcery is a way of acting at the end of hope.
This is not just a symbolic gesture. Sorcery is a human capacity that we have and there is clear evidence of its workings. There is vast documentation about sorcery capacities in shamans, witches, saints, and people in general. In the "pointing the bone" shamanic practice, people who had been ceremoniously pointed and cursed would go into a rapid decline and no treatment has been shown to prevent their soon to follow death. Puzzling studies show that, mysteriously and scientifically unexplainable, prayer can help in healing even the people that you pray for, no matter the distance. Our default scientism and physicalism-infused perspectives render these things inconceivable. Yet, in all cultures, Western European until recently too, the fact that we can affect events at a distance and be affected was an unquestionable experience. Our bodies were forced out of these capacities to become anatomic, medical, machinic, suitable for industrialization and capitalism. That's why we are still culturally pressed to shy away from these subjects.
Metaphysical practices have their meta-ethics – impersonal, supra-human justice that comes from beyond, above. In many traditions, sorcery only takes hold if it's ethical. For sorcery to be effective it has to serve a greater good. If you try to abuse it for greedy personal gain, it might turn against you. There used to be a metajustice at work and the metaphysical was keeping things in check – you cannot exploit and amass huge wealth if greed is a fundamental sin, or if destroying nature means killing your "mother", or your soul. Capitalism is radically incompatible with these metaethics. To "progress" they needed to get rid of the spiritual. They had to burn the witches so a body as a mechanism, suitable for industrialization, could appear.
If Sorcery is the power to affect and to be affected, interesting art is at least half-sorcery – it appears in a process of being affected, of being sensible to the world. What is not so much believed in our times is that doing art (image, object, text, performance) can directly affect reality, beyond psychologically influencing the viewers. And probably, if we culturally don't believe in this power, it does not happen, or it happens less. Yet, it might work even if you don't believe – Political Sorcery can generate belief and make itself real through practice.
These zones are still tabu in current art, not only as subjects but also at a level of art function, yet, politically, ecologically and maybe also spiritually (to use another tabu word), being in a full mass extinction event and horrible humanitarian crises, we have to explore uncomfortable zones, to open frames, paradigms, the world. It's time to reclaim metaphysical capacities and put them to good use. We don't know what a body can do when it stops being an empty anatomical mechanism, especially if it starts to believe in its sorcery possibilities.
Political Sorcery, documentation as text, notes from inside
Political Sorcery 4 - against the Epstein Class’ wars, genocides, ecocides and other bloody rituals. For peace.
April 6, Izvor Park Bucharest, on the side facing the Parliament, 16h. Also, as much as possible, anywhere else, anyone, anytime.
From time to time, reports and allegations of the elites’ rituals in which they rape, torture, sacrifice and eat children emerge. This is so shocking that nothing happens. As society, we don't know what to do with it. It's almost as if we don't want to know, as we would very much prefer that this sort of things would stay contained as “conspiracy theories”. But in the last years, it's like the events are insisting to confirm the media theorist M.C. Miller: “Conspiracy theory is something that if true, you couldn’t handle it.”. We would rather handle a Third World War, it seems.
From the point of view of Political Sorcery, those ceremonies are very on point – they seem like the right forms, the right rituals for our world and its elites – perfectly fitting their orchestrating and profiting from wars, genocides and nature's depletion, the killing and starving of millions of people, and their sending to extinction of hundreds of species every day. They just found the ritualistic form for the current necropolitical system.
But we might have the elites that we deserve. It's not only them, it's also us. They just embody our implicit and explicit “values”, and beliefs a bit harder:
In a society where amassing wealth is not anymore seen as evil, as in many previous ones, but as a respectable endeavor, a value. In a society that shapes us as homo economicus – numb cogs with some utilitarian artificial intelligence but otherwise alienated, insensible, empty and soulless. In a society in which, as I wrote in We are all Reptilians Now, “psychopathy is the job description for success”, some increasingly extreme experiences, distractions are needed, just to feel something.
This life centered on wealth acquisition produces more and more polarization between a few winners and many losers, so belonging to the right tribe, the “winning” one, becomes more important than truth or ethics. As one of their own put it: “if you weren’t in the files, you had to be some sort of loser”. So you do what it takes to belong, to make it. Taking part in their parties and rituals opens doors, saying no, closes them. It creates a sense of elite community and cohesion. “Everybody does it”. And with everything being empty, meaningless and soulless, as it should after years of conforming to the stifling demands of success in an economy oriented life, it might be also the only “fun” still available.
In the current culture hedonism is good, while restraint, asceticism (spiritual exercises) are bad and totally uncool. If you obey and pursue this line, a desensibilization follows and you just have to increase the transgression, the dose, for pleasure to kick in. At some point the result is an insensible, hollow, hedonistic, narcissistic form of life capable of doing the things from the files.
Yet, those things might be perceived as empowering by this type of subjects, twisted as progressive – you're in the avantgarde, deconstructing and surpassing the ultimate limits and taboos, liberating and emancipating yourself. Completely above laws, norms, old morals, “free”.
If God is dead even for the “religious” or “spiritual” people, and as Deepak Chopra said in one of his emails to Epstein: “God is a construct. Cute girls are real.”, power and sex are the last real thing in this world, the last standing religion. And, as elites, why not push it further than anyone else.
If everything is just matter that produces our biology, psychology and a subjectivity that can be constructed any way or another, why not just be a child rapist or even a cannibal, especially if this is encouraged and rewarded in your high circles, and it's the ritualistic form of confirming and affirming that you're above the others and the ordinary reality, that you're among the owners of the world.
If in the current materialist-scientific perspective, bodies are just mechanisms, with their sensibility and powers to affect reality denied, you can as well push their anatomy, sexuality, pain (of others) beyond their limits, for some sort of sensation of transcendence, transgression, “liberation”. Horrid rituals might be the only chance for a dead body to feel something.
All this is not just a matter of moral and political corruption, this is the ideological atmosphere in which we live. This is our system, these are more or less our beliefs, and these are our elites. They do nothing more than to push our implicit ideologies further, they're just the most advanced – the elites. From this perspective, we're not at those parties and rituals just because we're not rich and powerful enough, we're too unsuccessful.
If we don't like the elites and what they are doing, we should fight them, but also their corresponding “elitism” in us. We should go against them, but also against the corresponding elements in our culture and ourselves, against our world that produces the necroelites.
But they seem untouchable, in control, they won. They dwell in a supra-democratic layer of power that resembles more and more global organized crime, in which Epstein type of people, secret services and societies with horrible belief systems and rituals are involved. And from there they're pushing identity thinking left and right, creating strong antagonisms, cultural wars that leaves them completely unbothered – political numbness and endless horizontal conflict below, while power consolidates above – divide et impera. They make you fight over meaningless voting options, while increasingly the choice seems to be between Baal and Moloch.
Even the few of us that still want to operate politically vertical and we know that the important struggle should be against the oligarchic necroelites and their (and unfortunately largely our) worldview, we're much behind. We used to call for solidarity and cohesion, they have it through their rituals and parties. We used to say “eat the rich”, they actually do the eating of the poor, allegedly literally too. They are the true revolutionary class.
They are overwhelmingly strong. We seem completely under their spell, “resistance is futile”. Yet, there might be something that they're afraid of – a counter-sorcery, and an aware unsecret society. That was what they were most afraid of at the beginning of industrial capitalism. They were burning witches and dismantled the spiritual values and capacities that interfered with materialistic greed. They know that faith + practices maintain a world. For a different world, we just need other perspectives, beliefs and practices. That's why some sort of metapolitics might be needed, a metaphysical activism might be the only option left at the end of hope.
But here we're left behind as well. Not only because of their secret rituals and esoteric beliefs, but recently reality became like a spiritual warfare in plain sight: In Israel some powerful rabbis are pushing Netanyahu, for more destruction, to accelerate the prophecies, to actualize the image of their “promised Greater Israel” that is already patched on the Israeli military uniforms, and to hasten the coming of the Messiah. Prophecies in which the Cristian Zionists believe too, but with a twist, the Israeli Messiah would be actually the Antichrist, but is all good because it would bring the second coming of Jesus. And this Christian Zionism is quite influential. Recently we saw: the speaking in tongues in front of the soldiers by Trump's spiritual adviser; warmongers surrounding Trump, holding hands and mumbling some unhinged Christian Zionist stuff; military commander telling the army that they fight for Armageddon and the second coming of Jesus. On the other side in Iran (and some other countries) they burn big Baal statues as a preparation for the holy war against the Epstein Class (Satan). If starting wars for profit was evil enough, starting wars based on some unhinged beliefs feels even scarier.
To attempt a reversal of our political doom we might have to spiritually fight back. We might start forming and practicing some incipient gestures of political sorcery to start affecting the possible, the metaphysical foundations of our world towards good, and establishing in time a different spiritual substrate of reality, based on sensibility and embodied experiences, on love, instead of deranged ideology.
With Eliza Trefas, Giles Eldridge, Florin Flueras.
Political Sorcery 3 – metapolitics
In the frame of Invited Artist, March 30, 16h at Somn
We're
more and more captured in algorithmic vortexes of schematic, polarized
views on reality. From inside a vortex, one is amazed how the enemies
(there are always two sides) can be such idiots, or fascists (now in
Romania each side sees the other as fascist). The antagonistic dynamic
creates frenetic fundamentalisms, people who anxiously defend dogmatic
perspectives, generating anti-thinking, cult-like atmospheres and
oppressive realities. If you dare to propose a different perspective,
you get fiercely attacked, sometimes by both sides. It's a lot of
passion, conflict and drama, but, if you take a bit of distance, it's
difficult to see why. The world is getting only worse, no matter which
vortex tribe wins, because neither of them addresses the real problems,
and no one seems to want to. No side wants degrowth, or to exit the homo
economicus mindset, or to question materialism, progress, the
techno-scientific worldview and other implicit certainties that enable
our ecocides, wars, crises and general decline. Not even an alternative
to oligarchic capitalism seems to be wanted. Nothing political is
proposed, it's mostly tribalism, different types of identity politics
who amplify each other through antagonisms. At every “big change”, after
an election for instance, the system goes on, eventually with a
different vibe of antagonistic ideology in the background. That's why
corporations can actually embrace any of these sides without any
problem. There is an impossibility of politics in both of the important
senses of the word – no real debates between divergent perspectives, and
no attempts to change the real power relations.
In this hopeless atmosphere, Political Sorcery proposes:
-sorcery
in attention – to go from vortex, spectacle attention to aesthetic
attention – from quickly and predictably reading and interpreting news,
facts and images, to an aesthetic sensibility, to a capacity to trace,
embody and feel the movements and the processes behind images, facts and
discourses.
-sorcery in thinking – to introduce nuances,
paradoxes, contradictions and doubts, to complicate things and make
zealotry impossible. To complexify – where there are just 2
perspectives, “good” and “evil”, to propose a 3rd, a 4th… and a way of
simultaneously holding two or more incompatible ones.
-sorcery
in the body – the power to affect and to be affected by (political)
reality, through body practices and sorceries in relation to other
objects, bodies, events.
Political Sorcery 2 – Peace in Palestine, and everywhere
(2024, near the Parliament, Bucharest)
This is not a protest, is direct action. Political Sorcery proposes to come together and activate blessings for the ones that act towards peace and cursings for the ones that act towards wars and genocides, whoever they are. We don't even have to decide who is the most guilty for what's happening, if Israel, Hamas, the US, the military complex or other global capitalist interests are the worst. We might have our strong opinions, but if we really believe them, we will be open to test them. Just come with an intention for peace and for what is necessary for a meta-justice to happen, and let's see what Political Sorcery might do.
📷 Adriana Gheorghe, Petre Fall, Cătălina Gubandru, Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras.
With Eliza Trefas, Adriana Gheorghe, Cătălina Gubandru, Kira Valentina, lypkhan, Alex Trefas, Petre Fall…
Political Sorcery, notes from inside
Politica Sorcery 1 – green sorcery
(18.09.2023, IOR park Bucharest)
Bucharest is an ecological disaster. Parks, green spaces are filled with concrete, terraces, kiosks, coloured plastics... or they are illegally closed to the public, privatized (arenele BNR, Casa Poporului), or they are turned into parking lots, or they are fraudulently retroceded and the trees are cut down, poisoned, burnt as now in IOR, Grozăvești... Bucharest is a car hell, with the worst traffic in Europe, the few bike lanes are dismantled, the city boils and the air is poisoned by millions of cars and the garbage burned by the waste mafia. In the rest of the country it's much the same, plus the obsession with highways (other environmental disasters), the railways are left in disrepair and the forests are rapidly cleared.
Those who are supposed to do something are corrupt or involved in these disasters. Although it is known where the imported UE waste is burned, everything is allowed to continue. Probably under the influence of the powerful car lobby, all the measures that are taken are for more traffic - widening streets, overpasses, more parking lots, and nothing is being done against traffic and pollution - encouraging public transport and cycling, discouraging the use of cars through legislation and infrastructure - 30 km/h speed limit, cycle lanes, high parking, congestion and pollution charges, boulevards and parking lots turned into gardens. In IOR they are poisoning, cutting and burning trees in an area of 12ha and instead of the fraudulently retroceded land being urgently confiscated and all those involved sent to jail, the authorities ignore or rather pick on the protesters. They changed laws to remove trees and green spaces from protection. Camping has been banned and they also want to ban access to more than half of the forests, to be able to clear them without any friction.
Apparently nothing can be done, all that is left is metaphysical activism and that is what we will do. From the silent media, to the corrupt administration and of course to the real estate sharks will be all subjected to our Civic Sorcery in a similar way in which the trees were subjected to their physical abuse. Civic Sorcery will be centered on the IOR and Bucharest mentioned cases, but will also be extended to other disasters of this type. It's time for them to get afraid.
Political Sorcery, notes from inside
