Occult Features of Anarchism by Erica Lagalisse

I missed this book when it first came out. As soon as I heard of it, the title grabbed me; I would have loved such a book when I was 19 and living in an anarchist commune house in Sheffield! At that time I was trying to find my way through the apparent powerlessness of anarchists and leftists to drive positive changes, stumbling towards some sort of esoteric approach via Situationism. 

Most of the book is a rundown of symbolism and language in anarchism, showing the debts anarchism has to esoteric literature. And not only anarchism, check this contents listing:

Lagalisse asks the big question in this slim volume: How can our resistance to oppression become more effective? And for me the most interesting subsidiary question she addresses is: Can dualistic materialists work alongside people whose activism is founded in religious faith or magical perspectives?

Right at the start there’s an account of a conversation which opens up that question. At a meeting with Zapatistas in 2006, one of the attendees recommends the tired old antisemitic fake The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a guide to understanding global conspiracy. As a result, Lagalisse looks into esoteric-flavoured political discourses, including global conspiracy stuff, and deepens her awareness of how such discourses appeal to people. She assures us that she did eventually convince her comrade that ‘powerful capitalists and Jews are not one and the same.’ 

How can people work together who reach truth via different processes? In my youth, it tended to be the case that religious people were right wing, anywhere on the spectrum from blue rinse to jackboots. The enthusiastic embrace by the Catholic church of all and any European fascist groups underlined that observation.

But of course nothing is ever as simple as that. The question of how religious faith and activism can fit together was opened up for me during a visit to a family member in Colombia, when we went to some of the sacred sites of the Muisca people. We drove from Bogotá up into the hills, into fertile, beautiful mountainside lands that have been settled and farmed for many centuries. This is the land that gave rise to the story of El Dorado, who in actual history is a person, not a place, a king in a sacred lake, coated in gold dust. It’s easy to imagine, given the sacred sites and stories known to modern tourists, that the Muisca are something from the past; this is very far from the truth. We visited some ancient hot springs, now channeled through modern plumbing into modern, blue-tiled swimming pools. There’s a warm pool, a hot pool and a hotter pool. You’re out of doors, ringed around by mountains. How could this not be a sacred site? I worked my way up to the hottest pool and meditated awhile, honouring the Goddess of this lovely place. 

Then we sat by the pool next to a couple, maybe in their late 30s. He was playing a wooden flute, and a harmonica. D, who has good Spanish, got chatting with him, discovered he had English and brought us into the conversation. We chatted amiably about our different worlds. I am Muisca, he said. I asked if he is a musician. Yes, for prayer. 

What religion? Catholic. He asks if I have a religious practice, do I sing? I said we sing in our group, not exactly a religion, but Chaos Magic is a spiritual way. 

From what I gathered from our chat, this is a man who believes in God and in his own community within the church. But who is also Muisca, a proud heir to an ancient culture, who honours nature, and makes music in order to pray. And it all fits together; he lives in an integral world. And he brings all this to a belief in social justice. 

Lagalisse writes of her fieldwork and how she and others witnessed marginalization of non-Western frameworks of thought. She refers to indigenous activist Magdalena who ‘spoke of the need to maintain harmonious ways of life among the communities (pueblos) and the need to respect all of Creation—land, water, animals and people.’  

The Muisca guy I spoke with said something very similar: ‘We should get to know & care for the animals, for nature. Then the Creator looks after us.’

It seems that this kind of thinking is dismissed as ‘having no theory’ by some mainstream Western anarchists. Why is this? 

People soaked in the mainstream Scientism culture tend to regard their ontological perspectives as being superior to, more evolved than, those of religious people and mystics. The key word there is ‘evolved’ - there’s a persistent idea of progress in human society, that some perspectives are more evolved than others. 

This is a tempting belief to engage in. It’s a source of hope, because it tells us that most people will eventually wake up and get with the programme of human progress. In magic, this kind of thinking is often called Aeonics. We progress through various Aeons, phases of history with a particular theme or current. The first long piece I wrote about magic, for Chaos International magazine #1, was called ‘Magical Aeonics’, and at the time I embraced the idea of Aeonic progress enthusiastically. In the 30+ years since I wrote it, my views have changed; we magicians have decolonized our language quite a bit and the whole idea of Aeons has started to look a whole lot less believable.

There are some very nice connections in the text. Bakunin, ‘while he rejected the personal God of his Russian Orthodox childhood, put forward a pantheistic revolutionism. … he wrote “Let religion become the basis and reality of your life and your actions, but let it be the pure and single-minded religion of divine reason and divine love…”’ And anarchist C L James writing in 1902: ‘Scratch a Spiritualist and you’ll find an anarchist.’  

She traces the obscuring and denial of this braiding of radicalism, faith and magic to the rise of Marxist ‘scientific socialism’ in the academy and in the popular Left during the 20th century. 

The author examines a familiar way in which scholars and others informed by postmodern thinking feel obliged to include perspectives from other cultures in a superficially respectful way, whilst treating them simply as other, as alternative cosmologies which don’t really ‘apply across the cosmos whatsoever. The sacred is thus rendered as alterity, nothing more than a cultural accoutrement…’ Whereas if the sacred was taken seriously, ‘[it] would have to be taken as real and the belief structure of its practitioners as having effects that are real.’ 

‘Voiced one way or another, we all suggest the importance of actually considering the synergistic relationship between spirituality, faith and radical political movements, whether in present-day Latin America of eighteenth-century, up to and including the nineteenth-century New Age movement itself, with which modern anarchism co-evolved.’    

The book gives rich and fascinating examples of such contemporary practice and symbolism.

Lagalisse revisits ‘conspiracy theories’ at greater length and writes: ‘Perhaps social scientists might grant more often that “conspiracy theories” happen precisely because the public notices that secretive government institutions are continually lying.’ And ‘…no attempt is made to distinguish between theories that arguably involve valid lines of questioning … and those which are more obviously misguided…’ I recently found a questionnaire about popular conspiracy ideas and was surprised, as someone who thinks of myself as pretty sceptical about this kind of thing, at how many I agree with, some of them considered to be way into the fringe zones. I mean, of course there’s a Deep State; it’s the billionaire parasites, and it’s right out front, not at all hidden.  

Lagalisse examines the gulf between claims of ‘intersectionality’ in activism and the actual practice of dismissal of people with non-mainstream theories of the world. 

There’s a lot more in this dense and brilliant book. Unfortunately, in parts I found it very hard going for me. There are a number of sentences in it that are so dense with what are presumably specialist academic uses of familiar words that I cannot make any sense of them at all.

I was introduced to Erica Lagalisse recently, through my chaos magic community, and again at Breaking Convention psychedelics conference. We got on well. Erica, please rewrite this excellent book for a lay readership, not just for people with graduate-level sociology and philosophy!

With that caveat, I would heartily recommend this book for all activists who also do magic. 

It also has a Foreword by the excellent Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the classic Dancing in the Streets: a History of Collective Joy.