EDITORIAL
Last year ( FT359:2), we reported on the growing movement amongst witches in the US to oppose President Trump in the way they felt best qualified to do: through magic. Monthly meetings (at “every waning Moon”) were used to cast mass binding spells on The Donald, aimed at preventing him unleashing “harm and destruction” on the world at large. Nearly a year on, it’s hard to tell whether the spells have worked or not. Are things any better? Could they have been far worse? And how could we possibly tell if Armageddon had been narrowly averted by magical action?
Meanwhile, perhaps Trump has been conducting some sort of astral plane counter-attack of his own, aided by the forces of the alt-right movement. FT regular Gary Lachman’s new book (see p61 for a review) explores some fascinating modern intersections of the political and the esoteric. His article in this issue (p40) traces currents in American thinking that reveal an unsuspected continuity between the New Thought movement of the 19th century, the ‘positive thinking’ self-help manuals of the 1950s and beyond and the adoption of the techniques of Chaos Magic by the contemporary alt-right. If Lachman’s argument is convincing, then there’s a large dollop of irony to be enjoyed in the spectacle of Pepe the Frog displacing the similarly batrachian nightmares of HP Lovecraft, so beloved of CM practitioners, in bending the world to the will of the new meme magicians. One of the outcomes of a technique-based, results-focused practice such as Chaos Magic was, arguably, that the replacement of beliefs with ‘Belief’ allowed anyone to employ any mythic form for any desired end. Is Pepe merely a reductio ad
absurdum? On the basis of claimed results and subsequent synchronicities, it would seem not. Admirers of William Burroughs, Genesis P Orridge, Grant Morrison and other countercultural icons perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised to see their heroes displaced by the likes of Richard Spencer and Aleksandr Dugin.
Speaking of HPL and his nightmarish visions, turn to p32 for our cover feature, in which James Holloway explores the master of weird fiction’s complex, contradictory and uncomfortable relation with issues of history and race. And our third warning from history comes courtesy of SD Tucker (p46), who asks why the obscure Nazi apologist (and craziest of cat ladies) Savitri Devi seems to be enjoying a resurgence among the esoterically-inclined alt-right.
FT INDEXING UPDATE
Now that around 98 per cent of FT’s back issue catalogue has been digitised, Bob Rickard has launched phase two of the indexing project and here provides a progress update: “The initial work in preparing batches of pages for the indexers was the main bottle-neck here as I was faced with monumental drudgery. For example, the relatively simple process of assembling a work folder for each page – which involved creating and naming a set of sub-files and a special ‘results’ page – took, I estimated, about 25 key-presses. Since the pagination of FT has ranged from around 20 pages in the early issues to 80 pages per issue, I estimated that, at the FT360 mark, we probably had around 26,000 editorial pages. Just my simple folder-creation task, alone, threatened to become an RSI-inducing 650k keystrokes. Fortunately, my tech-savvy son-in-law Alex was able to write several simple programs to automate the worst of this tedium, allowing me to create sufficient batches so that I could send them out to our small ‘crowd’ of 10 volunteers sooner than I expected. The actual task of extracting indexable words from a page of digitised text is relatively straightforward, as I also supply a PDF image of the page for quality checking, and a page of 11 headings under which to file the extracted words, phrases, dates and references. Currently 10 volunteers have bravely stepped up to do the plodding. Obviously, a few more would be most welcome. You would only need a standard word-processor, and to be familiar with using a PDF file and simple cut-and-paste methods. It’s work you can do in spare time and all communication is via the Internet.”
If you’d like to help, contact Bob at bobrickard@mail.com.