So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and after that ruled Tibet until now.
The idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week…
Great question. Yes. So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and
after that ruled Tibet until now. And the idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week, it wasn’t so much the esoteric practices and spells which the fifth Dalai Lama, who was a great realized practitioner, but also a good military leader. It wasn’t the actual spells or the claim wasn’t that it’s not the spells,
but it was that the word got out. that he was doing this. And this really disturbed the Karmapas, who was the other, we still have a Karmapa, but it was these battles which were won. It was the words that got out. And that really fascinated me. as war magic, as propaganda.
And there the magic was in the sense of these esoteric practices, which I suspect go back, or many of them anyway, go back to the early Indo-European culture. And they’re just preserved in Tibetan Buddhism via India, where they were converted. And so And this was in... I read that in 2016.
So this is while I was working in Russia-occupied Ukraine and going across the bridge all the time and trying to work out what are they doing? What are they talking about? What is all this nonsense in their information space that’s brainwashing people? Ah, it’s war magic. This is what they’re kind of doing.
So I would archetype exactly what you’ve just... talked about in that way as a way of once you categorize it in that way then you look at it more like like an artifact in a museum you can walk around it and look up at it and down at
it and as you in fact are obviously are doing you know rather than you know rather than you so you see it as an objet dar rather than something to be worried about or something that’s going to trigger your negative emotions which is obviously how the
russians want to do it and i mentioned a bit earlier i’m not sure it was when you’re joined but one of the really important things I’ve tried to do and it’s helped me in distant folklore and looking at mythology is especially when you’re looking say at someone like Dugan
If you have a deep hinterland or a deeper or a deep understanding, or at least a conscious understanding, you actually look it up to look at what does this symbolism mean? Then it enables us to look at what Dugan is doing and what, as you’re describing, the Russians are doing as their gobbledygook. It’s a pastiche.
It’s a troll, but it’s a muddle of lots of different things. You get this sense in the Russian Orthodox Church, everything happens behind the veil, a bit like The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know whether or not Putin believes... I don’t know and it’s not necessary to know whether they’re utterly cynical. I suspect
that they don’t have an understanding, say, of... Wendy got this immediately when we talked about in the second week of emptiness, which from the Buddhist perspective is this idea that everything is empty of manna, of essence. And therefore, you can either go to one end of the extreme and despair, And that’s nihilism, the extreme of nihilism.
Or you can go to the other end of the extreme and make up loads of shit and come up with lots of nice stories to make yourself feel better about things. And that’s from the standpoint of ultimate reality. But in conventional reality, you have to accept that this chair, if I sit down on it,
it’s going to work. The airplane is going to fly. And what the Russians are trying to do with that kind of stuff is probably from a standpoint of their own confusion, is muddle all of these different discourses, ultimate reality where nothing matters, because they are ultimately nihilistic, to breaking the laws of physics,
which is the conventional view of what magic is, to using stories to scare people, And what we can do is develop an immunity, I think, to what they’re doing by understanding its absolute, well, Okay, so it doesn’t always help that it’s absolute nonsense because it’s not absolute nonsense because they’re mixing loads of things in.
And I started this evening at eight o’clock by quoting from Soliev talking about Ukrainians being demons. And one of the, this early, there was a bit of a controversy over whether early archaic Roman religion was called Numenism. with the MN in numinism or whether it was called demonism. And again, the MN is also in demon.
So this idea of manna is quite a helpful way of looking through all these things. But Solyov this week, yes, saying Ukrainians are demons. We heard this before about them being Satan worshippers. And if you don’t have any grounding in religious discourse, or if one doesn’t, as many of us don’t,
I taught myself this stuff because I wanted to know what they were talking about, then you can miss the significance of what they’re trying to do. You can be a bit... Because a lot of people don’t have grounding in religion, for instance, they will just try and ignore it. Like I’m just thinking of normal military people,
for instance, or many of our politicians in London or in Washington or something like that. though in Washington they might have some grounding in religion, but that demon chatter will work with them. So I feel, yeah, it’s a pastiche. So that’s, I think, what they’re doing. It is of no more significance than it is a pastiche.
But one of my early intuitions, and by pastiche I mean... They are taking, as you point out, the hazelnuts in Irish mythology, which fall into the river up in the Moran Mountains and then the salmon eats the walnut and then the fisherman eats the salmon and becomes the king. And this is... As we know now,
this is one manifestation of an essential story of what happens in the afterlife in Indo-European societies and in Indo-European religion. I once heard Putin talk about how he had been told there was massive freshwater reserves under the Azov Sea. And again, this is from an ancient Iran idea.
And I thought, okay, he’s been trolled by someone who’s been studying ancient Persian. And then a year later, I saw the story that they had drilled and they didn’t find anything. I was like, I could have told you that. So this is why I get the idea that they’re not coming from a standpoint of
we really understand this stuff and we’re just playing with it. We’re digging up these symbols and the symbolism, we’re putting them together and we’re toying with people like deities. I see it more that they are doing a pick and mix of different tropes and elements. Dugan, for instance,
he is clearly very bright and has a real grasp on symbolism, which is probably why he’s so successful because there’s not that many people around who do understand it. But as the Russians did with Wagner, which is really clever what they did with Wagner.
And I’m not even sure that they understand what they did by linking in with the foundation of the Germanic people. I think they just tuned into the Nazi aesthetic. But they really went, they ended up bringing in the foundations of Germanic culture and Manus and the sons of Manus who
founded Germanic culture and the Wagner operas and how the Germanic nation became a modern nation state and what they were doing with their distant folklore, creating a sense of identity, hacking, destroying existing senses of identity and creating a new sense of identity through using force
monikered as the Wagner by Purgosian who wrote a book of fairy tales himself. So I’m not ruling out. They are extremely... They know exactly what they’re doing. I’m not sure I’ll ever have that conversation. But my feeling from reading people like Surkov and Dugan very closely is it’s...
they don’t really understand what they’re doing, but they are brilliant at it. And they’re using symbols and tools which are politicians and are army people or are specialists in disinformation, for instance, they’re not at the races, they don’t get it at all. They’re not even valuing it.
Some of you might remember when I first brought up mythology in the context of the predecessor to Volia from the ancien regime, You know, they try and shut me up. And yet we were talking about Wagner. So it’s that attitude of, oh, I’m a bit intimidated by that. I don’t know anything about it.
So I’m just going to ignore that part. They’re probably just talking shit. So, yeah. So it’s good. It’s important. But we shouldn’t let it intimidate us because it’s just classic war magic. I’ll leave it at that. A great question. I have to. Thank you so much decoding. That was amazing. Thank you.
