Romania's Purple Flame

Following Romania's recent contentious election in which the Social Democrats won a second term in office, the party has been accused of using magical practices in order to manipulate the election - specifically, an occult force called the "purple flame."

The purple flame is said to be:

one of the blessings that God granted to the humanity. It is the ideal tool to help us in the physical, material, emotional and spiritual problems. Also called flame of the Pardon and of the Mercy, the PURPLE FLAME represents the vibration of the Holy Spirit. When invoked, its cosmic action is complete, transforming our karma healing our body, spirit and soul, elevating our conscience.

It seems odd that such a general spiritual force would naturally favor one political party over another, but by applying a series of strategic magical actions it seems that the Social Democrats may have in fact formed some sort of link with this force that allows them to draw upon its power.

In December 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, Viorel Hrebenciuc, the main political strategist of the losing team, made a series of statements which many of us treated with skepticism at the time but it is not creating a true hysteria in Romania. He claimed that he did not agree with the final presidential debate to be broadcast on a Thursday because that is when the purple flame hits its strongest moment. And that Traian Basescu, the man who won a second term in office, was clearly favored by the purple flame.

While I'm not familiar with Romanian magical traditions, purple is the color that you would want to use to elevate yourself to a political office using the Western ceremonial system, being the King Scale color for the path of Jupiter attributed to "political and other ascendency." Thursday is also the day with the strongest affinity to Jupiter, and the purple flame's affinity with the quality of mercy suggests the Qabalistic sphere of Chesed, again ruled by Jupiter.

To make things even more complicated, around the time of the presidential elections, most of Basescu’s staff was in fact seen wearing purple ties, shirts, coats or sweaters and the same happened with some of the notable social democrats leaders. Basescu later dismissed the accusations and stated that purple is the color of the year which technically raised more questions than solved the issue.

This methodology is actually quite clever - align yourself with an occult force that favors you in politics and then go out of your way to keep yourself and your political staff associated with that force through simple magical links like color matching as you go about the mundane activities of running your campaign. One wonders if one of these folks has a copy of Jason Miller's Strategic Sorcery. This sounds a lot like the sort of methodology that Jason would endorse.

One month after the presidential elections were over, the wife of Mircea Geoana accused the purple flame of making his husband lose the presidential elections. On January the 16th she said that: “I think that [during the last presidential debate] he [Mircea Geoana] was energetically attacked a great deal. The people who were causing those attacks were in the room that day. […] It wasn’t like that all the time. It just happened in the critical moments which made the attacks decisive. […]. I want to say that this is something I also felt at a personal level. I felt tired, I couldn’t do things, I couldn’t focus, I wasn’t myself.”

So finally, as one more piece of the overall strategy, you target specific magical attacks at your opponents during key moments of the race, likely determined by some form of divination. This passes the practical magick test with flying colors - the practitioners of the strategy won the election and thus achieved their goal. The main improvement to the strategy that I can imagine would be some way to keep it quieter, as it seems that media storm surrounding it has been building since the election and has yet to let up. It remains to be seem if this media attention will cause problems for the government in power.

As that was not enough, key party leaders from all over the Romanian political spectrum endorsed the possibility that various rituals and negative esoteric forces can affect politicians’ lives. In the meantime, a book on the purple flame was published in Romania, various “esoteric experts” are offering seminars on the purple flame, and some of the witchdoctors openly practicing the “white magic” are adapting to what appears to be a growing demand for “purple flame services.”

So following its successful application in the election, the purple flame now appears to be a legitimate esoteric fad in Romania. Whether or not it will prove particularly useful outside the political arena remains to be seen, but Jupiter is a good planet to invoke when you are trying to cast a spell for good fortune or prosperity.

This purple flame hysteria has to some extent taken astronomical proportions involving the president, the prime-minister, the leader of the main opposition party and various other politicians. The only political figure who openly dismissed the purple flame theory is former president Ion Iliescu who had this to say: “Are we going back to Nostradamus? We’re in the 21st century for the Christ’s sake.” Whereas other people appear to share that view with him, many of his colleagues have started wearing purple ties and shirts.

As with all effective practical magicians, you can go ahead and denounce all you want on the basis of science or logic or whatever - but when something works it's hard to deny that it works.