Essay: "Could It Be Magic?"

Read my essay on how Trump is really a primitive magician-king

I had a real blast writing this essay, which serves as the preface to Constant Von Hoffmeister’s recent book, Esoteric Trumpism (also featuring an introduction by James Kirkpatrick). For some time, I’d been wanting to write a piece about Trump that drew on James G. Frazer’s Golden Bough—I actually think the first time I floated my idea that Trump is a kind of primitive magician-king was on Gio Pennacchietti’s podcast a year or more ago—and then Constantin got in touch saying that he was writing a book about the esoteric aspects of the Trump phenomenon and would I like to write a few words as a foreword… Of course, I jumped at the chance.

As silly as it may sound to refer to Trump as a magician-king of the sort described by Frazer among tribal societies like the Wagogo of West Africa, I don’t actually think it’s silly at all. Hopefully, when you’ve read this essay, you’ll agree with me. Basically, as far as I can see, traditional theories of political charisma just don’t fully capture what’s going on with Trump, and liberal dismissals of populism as a phenomenon of the credulous and desperate, and Trump as a huckster who plays on that credulity and desperation, don’t cut it either.

I went on to develop these ideas in another essay for the first issue of the new Lotus Eaters magazine, Islander, and I may revisit them at greater length in a piece on the election, for American Mind.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments below the piece.

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When once a special class of sorcerers has been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power, till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings.

James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough

The politician as magician.

The magician as king.

In chapter VI of his masterwork The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer provides an account of how the earliest kings emerged from the mass of primitive tribal societies. Contrary to what you may think, these primitive societies—of a kind that was still visible in Frazer’s day, especially among the Aborigines of Australia but also in Africa and the Pacific islands—did not adopt kingship as a matter of course. If they had a political constitution, it was

“a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and influential men, who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the practical exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly answers to the senate of later times: if we had to coin a word for such a government of elders we might call it a gerontocracy. The elders who in aboriginal Australia thus meet and direct the affairs of their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their respective totem clans.”

These elders or headmen performed all the public duties necessary for the health and happiness of the tribe. This included performing magical rites to ensure the natural world functioned in the way it should. Wind, rain and sun must be manipulated by the skilled practitioners in the interest of the tribe, lest there be disaster in the coming seasons. Food, of course, was key.

A special class of elder-magicians emerges from a whole society of magicians, since in primitive society all men are magicians—the hunters, the farmers, the fishers—employing “magical practices in the pursuit of their callings.” But whereas the individual magician may perform a personal rite or manufacture a personal charm, such as fixing a particular kind of beetle into his spear-haft to ensure his weapon finds its mark in the hunt, the public magician works for the greater, public, good, performing rites on the grandest scale possible.

But even in a primitive society that is largely undifferentiated, not all men are made equal. Ability—or luck if you prefer—is always at work. Some clearly seem to do magic better than others. They are the men who first rise as powerful magical individuals, as sorcerers, to lead their people.

The evidence of African tribes, a rung up on the evolutionary ladder from the Aborigines of Australia, showed Frazer that the successful rainmaker was likely to be the first to step forward and become not just another elder, but a chief—a king. “Among the Wagogo of East Africa,” we are told,

“the main power of the chiefs… is derived from their art of rain-making. If a chief cannot make rain himself, he must procure it from some one who can.”

In Melanesia, the chief has privileged contact with fearsome ghosts, whose favour or displeasure only his mediation can elicit.

Ability or luck. In fact, it’s a mixture of both. Yes, the primitive chief or king has his magical ornaments, like special crystals he plunges into water when he wishes for it to rain, but he also makes use of shrewd practical judgment to ensure the desired effect for his people—and thus the continuation of his special office. For example, among the tribes of the Upper Nile region,

“Rain-making chiefs always build their villages on the slopes of a fairly high hill, as they no doubt know that the hills attract the clouds, and that they are, therefore, fairly safe in their weather forecasts.”

Fear of his powers and the wealth the successful magician accrues “may both be supposed to have contributed to his promotion.”

Fear and wealth.

But the role of public sorcerer is a precarious one, “beset with many pitfalls.” He is just as likely to be punished for his failure as lauded for his success. The incipient king is, if anything, a sacrificial king, whose person is not considered inviolable like the bodies of later kings. Exile or even death awaits the rainmaker who cannot bring the rain, the master of the winds who cannot quell the storm.

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It’s a commonplace to say that politics in the West is in the process of regressing, that we are heading backwards to a very dark and dangerous place indeed. That place is usually supposed to be Nazi Germany—fascism and dictatorship—and the people dragging us there are the populist leaders and, in particular, Donald Trump. Some even call him “Orange Hitler.” We’ve all seen the headlines.

In a sense, this is right. We are regressing. Primitive forms are reasserting themselves, as our current system degenerates.

How could it be otherwise?

Trump is a magician, a wielder of the most powerful meme magic, a grandmaster of 6000-dimensional chess. Somebody once told me his family hold the secrets of Nikola Tesla. Trump’s role in America today is analogous to that of the sorcerer who becomes chief and sole custodian of his people’s well-being. In his person and on his person rest the hopes of a nation.

America is a gerontocracy. Its ruling elders govern to the practical exclusion of everyone but themselves. The American Dream—the prosperity of the tribe which past leaders fought to secure—is now a waking nightmare. Something, or someone, has to give.

In his own life, Trump embodies that cherished Dream. Everything he does is—America. He has USA in his DNA.