Episode Details

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…

So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on war magic, which was used by the Fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner. He 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 — it wasn’t so much the esoteric practices and spells which the Fifth Dalai Lama, who was a great realised practitioner but also a good military leader, employed. The claim wasn’t that it was the spells themselves, but that the word got out that he was doing this. And this really disturbed the Karmapas, who were the other sect — we still have a Karmapa — but these battles were won because the word got out. That really fascinated me: war magic as propaganda.

The magic there was in the sense of esoteric practices, which I suspect go back, many of them anyway, to early Indo-European culture. They’re preserved in Tibetan Buddhism via India, where they were converted. I read that in 2016, 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 doing.

I would archetype exactly what you’ve just talked about in that way, because once you categorise it like that, you look at it more like an artifact in a museum. You can walk around it and look up at it and down at it — as you in fact are obviously doing — rather than seeing it as something to be worried about, something that’s going to trigger your negative emotions, which is obviously how the Russians want it to work.

I mentioned a bit earlier — I’m not sure it was when you’d joined — one of the really important things I’ve tried to do, and it’s helped me in Disinfolklore and in looking at mythology: especially when you’re looking at someone like Dugin, if you have a deep hinterland or a deep understanding, or at least a conscious understanding where you actually look up what this symbolism means, then it enables us to look at what Dugin is doing and what the Russians are doing as 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 Putin believes... I don’t know, and it’s not necessary to know whether they’re utterly cynical. I suspect they don’t have an understanding of, say — Wendy got this immediately when we talked about in the second week — emptiness, which from the Buddhist perspective is this idea that everything is empty of mana, of essence.

You can either go to one extreme and despair — that’s nihilism, the extreme of nihilism. Or you can go to the other extreme and make up loads of nonsense and come up with lots of nice stories to make yourself feel better about things. 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, is going to work. The aeroplane is going to fly.

What the Russians are trying to do with that kind of stuff, 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