“That’s the thing about the universe,” she assures her 10,000 followers. “If you ask it questions it’s going to return with the answers. Where focus goes, energy flows, so if you focus on it getting better that’s what you’re going to see. You can call it delusion but I’ve never seen a version of delusion that doesn’t work. Magic is delusion, it’s the power of your brain. So let’s do this!” 

On the face of things, Meg’s trick looks a lot like neurolinguistic programming, a tenuous “behavioural technology” that’s bubbled away in business circles since the Seventies. As the theory goes: change the way you speak to yourself, and the barriers to success will crumble away. But there’s clearly more to it than a bit of cod business psychology. Meg, after all, is asking us to communicate not with our subconscious minds, but with the universe itself. By the time you read the Instagram caption — “delulu is the solulu” (“delusion is the solution”) — it’s obvious she’s making a metaphysical claim as much as a psychological one. 

By now, I’m familiar with this strain of spiritual-inflected self-help, having ventured deep into the Wild West of New Age Instagram. Once you click on a few videos about “delusional manifestation” or “money altar tutorials”, the algorithm begins recommending more, and before you know it you’re 10 reels in, doing a deep dive on something called “quantum jumping”. Search for the #spirituality hashtag, meanwhile, and the content proffered gets stranger and cruder. Angel numbers, repeating strings of numbers that supposedly augur great blessings, feature prominently. 

So too do pictures of deities — take this reel of Jesus superimposed over an ocean sunset — that must surely have been generated by AI. Some posts are vaguely therapeutic in tone: “Don’t forget your own power just because they didn’t see it.” Others resemble the spam you might receive from Nigerian princes: ‘‘Smile because Large Sum of Money is Coming To You right Now. Type ‘Amen’.” It’s a similar story on Tiktok too, except the influencers here are younger and sassier. For every person claiming that “you CAN manifest the most illogical things”, another posts in warning. “No wonder,” says one, that “this app induces psychosis.” 

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This, then, is the place that online spirituality intersects with the bewildering world of “delulu”. Starting life within the K-Pop community, as an insult for obsessive fans, by 2023 it had morphed into a term for radical optimism. Don’t just aim high, aim utterly delusional, and watch your dreams come true. There are currently more than 170 million posts tagged #delulu on TikTok, and though most of this content is light-hearted, as soon as the message gets metaphysical things start to get very weird indeed.

While it’s hard to say how many younger people use social media for spiritual sustenance, there are plenty of stats around their social media usage in general. In Britain, 15-24 year-olds spent an average of 58 minutes a day on TikTok in 2023, as well as 52 minutes on Snapchat and 48 on YouTube. We also know that younger people are growing wary of traditional forms of religious expression. In the UK’s latest census, over half the nation’s twenty-somethings said they had no religion, compared with around a third of the population overall.

As a 2022 report by Theos makes clear, however, that doesn’t necessarily translate to atheism. Of the “nones”, 36% agreed that humans are spiritual beings at heart, while 42% believe in some form of the supernatural. That, in turn, is sparking a rise in alternative spiritualities, which in many cases blur into (or emerge from) secular spaces. Consider, for instance, the overlap between spirituality, wellness, and self-care. Mix them together, and you get Instagram crystal healers promising to heal your trauma; “cord-cutting rituals” on WitchTok; YouTube astrologers explaining how Librans should deal with eclipse season. The spiritualities that have found the most traction online have a distinctly therapeutic bent. 

For some practitioners, though, there is more at stake than boosting mental health. Rather, they’re interested in harnessing spirituality to improve their material circumstances. That might involve asking the universe for your dream job or dream house or dream partner, exactly tailored to your specifications. At its most grandiose, it can mean hacking the source code of the cosmos, using whichever mystical tools are at your disposal to “manifest” the outcome you want. 

“We’re intrinsically connected through quantum entanglement,” says one TikTok creator. “Your thoughts, through this cosmic web, can link with your desires, influencing reality in the vast quantum field… Think wisely and let your desires manifest in this interconnected universe.” 

At its gentlest, delulu has less cosmic ambitions. It’s a playful concept, self-consciously silly. For many young people, posting “delulu is the solulu” is basically self-effacing, helping them embody a self-confidence that would otherwise elude them. Truly believe that you’re destined for greatness… well, that might be hard to achieve without a narcissism diagnosis, especially if you’re a spotty teenager who’s never been snogged. But embrace the delusion that you’re the next Dua Lipa? Suddenly you have carte blanche to apply for that job or smile at your crush in the canteen.  

While I wouldn’t want to trample on something so harmless, once it gets mixed up with all the stuff about quantum fields it becomes rather less benign. The world of short-form video content is not exactly known for prizing nuance. Rather, it favours the simple, the splashy, the outrageous. Apply that to your cosmology, and you’re left with something hollow: a jumble of bold promises and magical thinking that fails to engage with the human condition at all.  

As many people online have clocked, “delulu” is basically a rejigged form of the Law of Assumption: “Whatever you assume to be true will become your reality.” Together with the Law of Attraction — “Whatever you focus your energy on will come back to you” — the principle can be traced back to the 19th-century New Thought movement. Associated with the American mesmerist Phineas Quimby, the movement held that the mind was more powerful than previously recognised. To quote the modern New Thought principles, our thoughts “can be carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living”. 

Through the 20th century, the concept recurred in self-help bestsellers such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, the latter supposedly a favourite of Donald Trump. Yet if older iterations of the concept tended to invoke God, or at least divinity, today’s Instagrammers are more likely to talk about “the universe” in general — sometimes invoking cod quantum physics to give their claims a sciencey sheen. 

The basic point, in each case, is that our successes or failures are far from random. Rather than being at the whims of chance, we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginings. In fact, it’s only the strength of those imaginings that determines whether we become a street cleaner or a billionaire. For some Instagram influencers, that might be a positive message. It’s certainly an algorithm-friendly one. And it’s no surprise that, as social media makes spirituality more decentralised, we’re seeing a shift towards interpretations that emphasise personal agency. What could be more individualistic than controlling the actual universe with your mind? 

Yet look through the comments section of these videos, and buried among the chorus of assent you’ll spot at least a few naysayers. “Girl I’m trying but my dream jobs are not emailing me back,” reads one. “I was always delulu but it never worked. Something is wrong with me,” says another. 

The less-acknowledged reality here is that if your big wins are all your own doing, then so too are your losses. On some level, they’re appropriate penance for your thought-crimes. This is clearly a recipe for neurosis or worse. As one commenter on the Law of Attraction subreddit put it: “It’s extremely damaging. It put me in the worst depression imaginable.” 

Not, of course, that delulu is alone in disappointing its followers. Each spiritual tradition, across time and culture, has needed to grapple with the fundamental unfairness of life. But while each has come to its own conclusions, there’s a reason most have responded with something more nuanced than, life is fair actually — or, in the comforting words of one Redditor, “Sorry but this is all your own fault.” Most have dealt seriously with the reality of suffering, rather than trying to usher in happier circumstances with mindless positivity. Few have claimed that life’s hardships can be eased by begging the fates for a Ferrari. 

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More often, spirituality has been touted as a way to transcend our earthly privations (“storing up riches in heaven”), or else to ride out the storm of aversion and desire. No less important, everyone from Baha’is to Baptists generally offer some kind of underlying moral code. This is something conspicuously lacking on TikTok. You might learn how to manifest your dream job, but you won’t find much about how to improve conditions for the wider labour force. 

Far from helping you transcend anything, then, #delulu spirituality is very clearly a product of consumer capitalism, in which the hyper-atomised individual is enshrined as the ultimate point of focus. In a cut-throat society of winners and losers, #delulu simply calls you to join the winning side. Social media only makes this worse. However well-intentioned these online communities are in theory, TikTok and Instagram aren’t ideal temples for well-rounded spiritual reflection. And in a world where the most clickable content rises to the top, it’s surely inevitable that angel numbers are prospering where richer attempts at meaning-making struggle to be heard. 

Call me a realist (a curse word as far as the #delulu are concerned); call me an elder-millennial grouch. But I can’t help feeling that, at a time of economic precarity, young people aren’t well-served by a philosophy that offers to magic it all away. And comforting though it might be to slip into a haze of delusional thinking, it sounds oddly lonely too: just you in your mystical bubble against the power of the universe. Either that or I just need to quantum jump a little bit harder. 

Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss also dreams of being king of Germany. Despite his fashion sense of tweed and silk scarves, the 72-year-old minor aristocrat and property developer from Thuringia shares Reiser’s disdain for the powers that be. The only difference is that Heinrich is dead serious about it. So serious, that two years ago, thousands of police officers raided dozens of locations and arrested him and 26 others who were allegedly plotting to overthrow the Scholz government and install Heinrich as monarch. The elderly prince and his supporters, who include a TV chef, a judge, a doctor, and some ex-military guys who grew their hair long, are now standing trial for creating a terrorist organisation and plotting high treason. The case is so sprawling, it has been handled by three separate courts in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich. The evidence takes up several kilometres of folders.

This motley crew belong to the Reichsbürger scene, a catch-all term for the tens of thousands of people who reject the legitimacy of the Federal Republic. And for whom the democratically elected governments of modern Germany are vassals installed by the post-war occupying powers. No peace treaty was signed between the Third Reich and the Allies, they say. And so the Reich, for them, remains the legitimate state, though for them this usually means skipping back past the unpleasantness of the Hitler regime to the Second Reich, the era of Bismarck, the Kaisers and pointy helmets — still lurking, intact at the back. The Reichsbürger believe the Federal Republic is a corporation which funnels money to the US government and the Rothschilds — you know where this is going. As with many conspiracy movements, a large dash of antisemitism seems to be an essential ingredient. A state-owned finance agency does in fact exist in Frankfurt, but it solely manages the state’s debt and investments, explains the German Lawyer’s Association, which says it receives a surprising number of queries from concerned citizens on the topic.

Although standard Anglosphere rabbit-hole stuff is often mixed in — QAnon, Bill Gates is the devil, etc — the Reichsbürger are, at core, a uniquely German phenomenon. One aspect is their hatred of the modern technocratic state. As someone who has run a small business here, I have a certain amount of sympathy. German bureaucracy — its endless paper forms, its hyper-complex procedures, its myriad fees and taxes — can deaden your soul, drive you crazy, and make you shout “enough!” Several Reichsbürger groups print their own German Reich passports and banknotes, and refuse to pay taxes and social insurance contributions. It’s no wonder these groups are founded by and followed by Germans who have been burned by what they perceive as an oppressive, corrupt state that fails to protect their welfare, such as in the vast economic turmoil in eastern Germany in the aftermath of unification.

A lesser-known but still pivotal aspect of German yearning for a Kaiser is its New-Agey side. It’s no coincidence that the Reichsbürger group included an astrologer. During a protest against the government’s restrictive Covid policies in 2020, hundreds of Reichsbürger rushed up the steps of the Reichstag. It was a strange foreshadowing of the events at the US Capitol the following January. Among the flags of the Second Reich were Russian banners, rainbow flags, even signs with Donald Trump’s face. And it was a young woman with dreadlocks — a self-proclaimed alternative healer — who triggered the spontaneous stampede when she called from the demonstration’s stage for protestors to march up the parliament’s steps and take back “their house”.

The pandemic was a unifying moment for Germany’s discontented. A new anti-Covid movement, the Querdenker (literally lateral thinkers), managed to bring together everyone from Holocaust deniers to natural healers to normal people who felt their livelihoods had been shattered by the government’s heavy-handed approach to the pandemic. The alliance between esoteric types and retro-monarchists caught the mainstream off-guard — but perhaps it shouldn’t have. Already two centuries ago, exploration of the occult — the mystical and irrational — was wedded to a desire for national German consciousness. At the start of the 19th century, nationalism among the dozens of tiny German-speaking states was largely a reaction to Napoleonic occupation, with imported French rationalism and universalism seen as an alien threat to the German Volksgeist. Thinkers instead embraced Germanic mythology, folk tales and mediaeval alchemy. Painters such as the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich explored mystical, sublime German landscapes, while the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte embedded the love of the natural and the mystical in German nationalist thinking: the “natural” became synonymous with the “national”.

Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, this embrace of the “natural” by German subcultures stood for resistance against various “artificial”, “foreign” or “un-German” forces. Nudism, organic agriculture, homoeopathy, the wide-reaching work of philosopher Rudolf Steiner — these are some of the not-so-sinister outshoots of this stream of anti-modern thought. But Romantic anti-modernism also birthed the völkisch ideology of the Nazis that saw Jews as “unnatural” non-humans who had to be cut out of the “pure” German body politic.

It’s uncanny to see this current rear its head again among the Reichsbürger and affiliated conspiracy-based subcultures, which range from the AfD leadership who refuse to support the German national football team because it’s too ethnically diverse to far-Right back-to-the-land types who wear felt jackets and try to set up kindergartens blending esoteric Waldorf and völkisch thought.

Indeed, it is mostly outside of Germany’s large, cosmopolitan cities that these movements take root. Self-declared mini-countries are home to these ideas, sometimes headed by cosplaying middle-aged dudes with skullets. Peter Fitzek is but one example — before crowning himself as King Peter I of Germany in 2012, he ran a shop filled with New-Agey knickknacks in Wittenberg, coincidently where another German radical, Martin Luther, nailed his 95 Theses to a church door 500 years prior. Fitzek’s humble business of peddling dreamcatchers has long since morphed into a cultish make-believe monarchy with various properties that have seceded from the Republic and joined the new Reich. Financed by eager volunteers and believers, Fitzek’s fantasy state, “the Kingdom of Germany”, has its own currency, the Engel (Angel). Euros can be exchanged for Angels but not vice versa — ensuring an inflow of hard currency, a trick Fitzek surely copied from the former rulers of this territory, the German Democratic Republic. Fitzek’s “state” also has its own passport, which he claims he has travelled around the world with.

At some point, though, the game’s up for guys like Reuss and Fitzek. The site of Fitzek’s “Kingdom of Germany” was raided by police and fiscal authorities in June. Fitzek is totally upfront about his tax evasion. At some point he’ll be locked up like Reuss, but perhaps martyrdom is what he’s looking for.

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One thing all these people seem to agree on is a hatred of the United States and a belief that Russia is the natural partner of the German people. Prosecutors allege Prince Heinrich’s group had contact with Russian diplomats and the Russian biker gang Night Wolves. Reuss counted on Russian support for his Reich, while Russia perhaps considered using his gang for its sabotage and misinformation purposes.

On one level, there’s something rather pathetic about middle-aged to elderly men wearing homemade crowns and declaring silly little independent states in shabby old buildings in forgotten villages and small towns, often in the former east. It reeks of a loss of purpose in a society subjected to rapid technological and economic change — perceived to be increasingly dominated by American technology and American-style capitalism. The irony escapes these groups that it is the platforms of Silicon Valley that have empowered them to spread their message to their flock.

Germany’s mainstream media pundits and experts on the far-Right warn that we shouldn’t just dismiss the Reichsbürger around Reuss as some crazy, harmless old men. After all, they had plenty of weapons and a handful of ex-army officers who knew how to fire them. If they’d summoned the gusto to carry it, the Reuss group’s alleged plan to kidnap Scholz would have certainly failed.

For me, the story of the Reichsbürger tells an even more disturbing tale. They’re the canary in the coalmine pointing to a greater threat than an individual gang of wannabe putschists. It points to a country whose civil fabric is fraying at the edges. Whose sense of shared reality is fragmented into a thousand irrational, naive and antisemitic narratives. A country that is losing the plot. A country that’s yearning for that one strong leader who will bring everything together after the collapse

On my jog along the railway tracks in the north of Berlin this morning, I encountered a middle-aged man slowly, intentionally approaching a tree and then embracing it for several minutes. Harmless enough, right? You never know. Maybe he’s dreaming of becoming the next king of Germany.

It used to be a hotspot for secret societies and occultists, such as Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon. And it was here that the 17th-Century English philosopher would allegedly associate with a group of Rosicrucians — a Western esoteric movement based on Kabbalistic and gnostic thought.

This sense of rebellion is not confined to the past; swathes of millennials and Gen-Zers are turning to online occultism and ritual magic in what seems like a rebellion against modern disenchantment. 

Digital forms of New Age spirituality go especially viral on TikTok (or WitchTok) — from virtual trans-Atlantic covens gathering to cast spells on politicians (and planets), to the idea of “manifestation” that is currently in vogue. These trends are paired with politics, where magic is channelled into anti-capitalist “spiritual activism”.

Occultism tends to attract young people because it appears subversive. The idea of Francis Bacon and his cabal of Rosicrucians practising magic behind closed doors seems inherently subcultural; a mark of an “alternative lifestyle”. Even the word itself — derived from the Latin occultus, meaning “hidden” — suggests something dissident; a left-hand path leading away from the masses. Its compatibility with anti-establishment sentiments thus tends to go unquestioned. 

Today, though, these connotations are deceptive. While occultism may have been subversive in the context of 16th and 17th-century religious societies, it rapidly ceased to be so with the birth of modernity. Why? Because the heirs of Western occult philosophy were also the heirs of the secular liberalism and capitalism that dominates the West today.

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Far from being a black sheep in Western intellectual history, it was Bacon — along with Hobbes, Locke, and Hume — who laid down the norms of our time. He was the father of British empiricism and the scientific method: the cornerstone of liberal, rationalistic modernity.

Bacon was one of the most proactive actors in building a world free from tradition and “superstition”. He was part of the same revolt against religion that brought about the Age of Reason, and, ultimately, the materialist dogmas upheld by contemporary science, philosophy and politics. On a more conceptual level, Western occultism came hand-in-hand with the founding principle of the modern age: Man’s domination over nature.

It is no coincidence that Bacon straddled both worlds, when both emerged from the same reaction against religion and the will to seek more “rational” and autonomous ways of arriving at truth. Liberal capitalism and occultism are both fruits of the Enlightenment. Both place man at the very centre of the universe, attempting to emancipate him from the constraints of tradition and the natural world itself. Both also attempt to manipulate nature, be that with magic or brute force. Though one clings onto a veneer of transcendence and the other admits to its own materialism, both tend towards this same end: “liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”.

At least, this is what the early critical theorists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw as the Enlightenment’s end game. For them, the subjugation of nature that was justified by 17th century rationality was inextricably linked to “‘bourgeois liberalism” and capitalism — even though, ironically, they themselves ended up subscribing to the very materialism and atheism that defined these systems. 

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Given that this subjugation of nature is precisely what motivated Bacon to pursue the occult, it is clear that Western esotericism does not subvert the impulse behind capitalism, but compliments it. Nothing sums this up more perfectly than the “magick” of Aleister Crowley, the West’s most influential occultist after Bacon, which he based on the sole principle of “do what thou wilt”; a sentiment which can hardly be distinguished from that of modern liberalism.

This overlap is strongly felt in the New Age movement of the Sixties and Seventies — a strange and self-contradictory synthesis of quasi-transcendent freedom and consumerist self-actualisation. Despite its reputation for rebellion, the flower power generation only took the grounding principle of Enlightenment liberalism a step further, overthrowing tradition and nature in ways more forceful than ever before. Their attraction to the occult was hardly subversive; it simply served the 17th century urge to make man (and now, with birth control, woman) master of nature.

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Despite the deeply entangled roots of the Enlightenment and occult spirituality, the latter’s appeal is reliant on its performative claim to be an insurgency allegedly directed against the ruling forces of our society. Hence its attraction to young people as an alternative to “organised religion”, the Protestant work ethic, or whatever thin residues of traditional thought remain in the public sphere. 

But this relies on an outdated view: that there is such a thing as religious (and specifically Christian) hegemony. Numerous WitchTok videos play on this idea, sometimes stereotyping and mocking Christians for their alleged ignorance, “irrational” beliefs or lack of “critical thinking”. But far from being truly rebellious, their attitudes are simply echoes of those that govern the modern world.

WitchTok, being effectively stuck in the 17th Century, forgets that the status quo has shifted: it is now secularism that dominates in the Western world. Yet the members of its virtual covens continue to rebel against a phantom hegemony, using magic against power structures and religious dogmas that are too weak today to oppress anybody. It is out of this delusion that magic becomes merged with activism, as in the case of feminist witches hexing Trump. Despite sharing a philosophical genealogy with the modern establishment, acquiring magical power becomes a means of rising up against that establishment.

As with Francis Bacon, this power is of a distinctly individualist, rationalist kind, that looks to manipulate nature at the command of the human will — just like Adorno and Horkheimer’s “bourgeois liberalism”. Almost all of the practices that are popular on WitchTok are oriented towards personal gratification, be that “manifesting” money, beauty and success or casting hexes on enemies. Despite standing in opposition to modern capitalism, their individualism and materialism ends up succumbing to it; the very same paradox that ran through Sixties counterculture.

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One could even compare WitchTokers’ attempts to “manifest” or “reality shift” (a trend of inducing alternate states of consciousness — while filming oneself, of course) to the scientific method, in line with the double legacy of Bacon. When TikTok users sift through various magical practices to find which one works for them, they are undergoing the same procedure of experimentation to arrive at empirical proof as in scientific inquiry. That is to say, they are not really “superstitious”, but committed to the principles of modern science and rationality.

Once again, TikTok’s romanticisation of witchcraft as something subversive forgets the reality that Western occultism arrived in tandem with the very Enlightenment ideologies underpinning modernity. Its desires to forge transcendence “autonomously” and “rationally” do not go against the status quo; they are the status quo’s founding principles.

In reality, to be truly subversive in this day and age would be to free oneself from the shackles of individualism. It would entail drawing wisdom from the traditions that modernity has so violently delegitimised, and submitting to nature rather than seeking to manipulate (or mutilate) it. Prospects that are unlikely to appeal to many Millennials, Gen-Zers, or TikTok witches.

The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.

Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind.

No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will.

This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.

This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.

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Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product.

Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives.

Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed.

But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life.

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Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.

Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.

In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply.

Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands.

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By Matthew B Crawford

Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will.

That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here.

So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion.

Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.

Suggested reading

Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.

It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street.

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.

That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.