"Q-Shaman" is a Thing?

They say that you eventually become what you hate. So I suppose it was inevitable that followers of the QAnon conspiracy, who hate occultists, would eventually develop their own school of magick. Or not so much a school, really, as an incoherent collection of paranormal beliefs drawn from various fringe figures from popular culture. The dude behind it is apparently Jake Angeli, who was seen storming the Capitol on Wednesday in a ridiculous getup.

One of the most visually striking of the angry thugs was the shirtless “Viking” dressed in war paint with a Viking-style horned headdress and tattoos associated with neo-paganism and white nationalism. The so-called “Q-Shaman” has been a regular fixture at pro-Trump rallies across the country, a longtime “Q-influencer,” and yesterday the man news organizations identified as Jake Angeli, 32, seized the dais in the Senate chamber in the name of Donald Trump. He is also a believer in wild conspiracies that are ripped straight out of Ancient Aliens and other similar cable TV programs.

I want to point out here that my Scandinavian ancestors would have had nothing to do with this douchenozzle. He's certainly no Viking. I doubt anybody from Finland is happy with him appropriating "Shaman" either.

Angeli appears to be the same man who operates a YouTube channel (which I will not link to here) that has posted a series of conspiratorial videos since the November election. The man in the videos has the same look and build and the same set of distinctive tattoos. He also identifies himself by the same name. In the videos, Angeli presents the standard QAnon belief system, including pedophile rings, a “cabal” of evil liberals and globalists, and a quasi-religious infatuation with Donald Trump—many of which were ideas that emerged from the 1980s satanic panic and were packaged as a right-wing mystery religion by Ancient Aliens star David Wilcock and other conspiracy mongers in the months before QAnon adopted them wholesale.

In one video posted two weeks ago, Angeli goes still further, claiming that superhero comic books are “soft disclosure” of secret supernatural government programs and that he had been part of a clandestine military “super-soldier” program to use Eastern occult traditions to create analogs of Captain America. He alleges that he participated in a space war whereby he used his psychic occult powers to manipulate “the timelines” and take out the ships of the mind-parasites trying to destroy this world. (Many of these ideas parallel the “work” of David Wilcock and Corey Goode, the latter also claiming to be a secret space warrior fighting the “cabal.”)

As a point, the United States government did have a military "paranormal ops" program back in the 1980's. It was called "Project Jedi" and is documented by Jon Ronson in Crazy Rulers of the World, the non-fiction documentary that inspired the film The Men Who Stare at Goats. "Project Stargate" ran until 1995 and employed psychic abilities in the form of remote viewing to conduct espionage. Angeli is too young to have taken part in any of those programs.

Now there were rumors about some of the "Jedi" and "Stargate" stuff being revived during the George W. Bush administration, but nothing definitive has been declassified at this point. One thing I will tell you, though, is that you can watch Ronson's documentary and get a pretty good idea of what the government was trying to do in terms of "paranormal ops." They never got anything resembling comic book superpowers to work because they just don't.

That thing about "mind parasites" on "ships" is just plain nonsense. There's no evidence in the "Jedi" or "Stargate" material that either of those things even existed, let alone were encountered. All of the Satanic Panic stuff was also crap. If you don't believe me on that, check out HBO's Paradise Lost documentary that shows the West Memphis Three convicted of murder based on the "Bloody Sacrifice" chapter from Magick in Theory and Practice - which in fact has nothing to do with bloody sacrifices.

Angeli spoke, too, of the “frequencies of energy” in the Egyptian pyramids, “ley lines,” “star alignments,” “monoatomic gold,” and psychoactive drugs to “expand” consciousness in order to reincarnate. These ideas are straight out of the Ancient Aliens playbook (all have been featured in episodes) and can be found in the work of fringe authors like Graham Hancock (whom his video quotes by name) and David Wilcock, and Angeli describes his self-mythologizing as an effort to find a religious meaning in life. Like Wilcock, Angeli thinks that movies contain secret messages about the true nature of reality. “These were all like breadcrumbs, you guys,” Angeli said. Naturally, his video namechecks not just Lucifer and QAnon, but also H. P. Lovecraft and the gods from outside.

Some of those things up at the top are part of real magical traditions. That's probably where the Ancient Aliens folks found them. But that doesn't mean this mishmash has any magical validity outside Angeli's confused (or possibly conniving) mind. I say possibly conniving because this guy has apparently amassed a vast following on YouTube made up of gullible believers who likely provide him with a lot of ad revenue. Videos about real magick are nowhere close to that. People want to believe bullshit over real esotericism.

And frankly, this problem is at least as old as the modern magical tradition. Aleister Crowley wrote in De Thaumaturgia that "man is so built that he will credit false miracles, and regard true miracles as false." That seems wildly applicable to the conspiratorial nonsense that has proliferated over the last four years surrounding what has become the cult of Donald Trump. And you could make a case that Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft shows that this tendancy dates back to at least the Renaissance.

Let's hope that whatever this "Q-Shaman" tradition is, it goes away once Donald Trump is finally out of office and Angeli is cooling his heels in prison - you know, for sedition or treason or whatever it is they decide to call taking part in an armed uprising against the United States government. He certainly took no steps to conceal his identity and should be very easy for law enforcement to find.