Still Not Occultists

I have talked a lot over the years on Augoeides about the almost complete non-existence of "occult crime." Time and time again, occultism will be cited as the motivation behind some horrible crime. And time and time again, it always turns out that the real motivation is something ordinary - usually sex, money, or revenge. Occultism makes a wonderful boogeyman because statistically speaking, nobody understands what magick is about. Ask a random person on the street and they are going to answer with something they saw in a horror movie.

Magick shows up in horror movies for the same reason that it gets blamed for any crime that includes elements of weirdness - again, because nobody understands what it's about. Ignorance about magick creates an information gap that filmmakers or criminal investigators can fill with whatever nonsense they want. As a teacher of magick, one of the things I have to keep explaining to new students is that magick doesn't work like it does in the movies. It also doesn't work anything like most "occult crime" scenarios propose.

You never see this sort of thing with Tarot or astrology - at least not anymore. That's because just about everybody has a pretty good idea of what Tarot readers and astrologers do. To be clear, lots of people out there think those things are bullshit, but even those people know what they are. Astrologers track the movement of planets through the sky and use those movements to predict future events and explain personality traits. Tarot readers work with decks of cards and interpret the symbolism of those cards for pretty much the same reasons.

Even a person who thinks Tarot or astrology are bullshit would never consider them reasonable motivations for weird crimes. The closest to that are scammers who exploit belief in them to con clients out of money - which is an entirely ordinary motivation, not anything occult. Magick doesn't get that same consideration because the practice is often secretive and kept out of the public eye. Magical organizations keep things like initiation ritual secret because they are based on the mystery tradition idea that initiations are more effective when candidates have no idea what to expect, not because anything heinous or diabolical is actually going on.

I keep my magical work and writings free and public in service to an idea that I call "exotericism." That is, I'm looking to demystify magick in the public sphere. I promote my books in an effort to make a little money, but it's not very much and my main goal is to make the material easily available. That way people can see what magick is and what magicians do, rather than some sort of horror movie nonsense. It's not sensational. It consists of study, analysis, and dedicated ritual practice. For anybody who doesn't have a passion for mysticism and the paranormal, the whole thing is actually pretty boring.

This is kind of a long introduction to get to the main point of this article. For years, the QAnon conspiracy has proposed that a widespread Satanic cult organization has been involved in child sex trafficking among the very wealthy for diabolical magical reasons. But now, with the onging release of the Epstein files, we know the truth. There really was a large child sex trafficking ring patronized by wealthy and powerful pedophiles. The people who ran it were Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who had access to almost unlimited financial resources including their own private island. Their clients included many politicians and financial elites. All of that is true.

But here's what isn't. First off, none of it was political. Some prominent Democrats show up in the Epstein files, but so do many prominent Republicans. Also, absolutely nothing in any of the files shows a connection to magick, occultism, or "Satanism." Sexual abuse of children absolutely fits the usual definition of evil, but it all goes back to the same old motivations as you see in other crimes - sex and money. I've previously talked about the "adrenochrome" idea is nonsense - adrenochrome, oxized epinephrine, is the black gunk I scrape off my racemic epinephrine asthma nebulizer when I clean it. It is not a psychoactive drug and it is not remotely hard to obtain.

Epstein made a fortune and we still can't track where his money came from, so the obvious conclusion is that he made it illegally, probably from running his trafficking ring. Pedophiles are relatively rare, but any pedophile billionaire is always going to be looking for somebody like Epstein who can procure children for the right price. It should also be pointed out that pedophiles were not Epstein's only clients - he trafficked adult women too. And to be extra-clear, he was not a magician or occultist and nobody in his circle was either. They were just a bunch of rich men looking to rape children.

Here's an odd connection between Epstein and QAnon that I only found out about the other day. The original QAnon conspiracy emerged from the /pol/ imageboard on the 4Chan website. This imageboard was created on the site the day after site creator Christopher Poole met with - you guessed it - Jeffrey Epstein in 2011. Is that a coincidence? It certainly could be, but I can't imagine any QAnon conspiracy theorist letting that tidbit go. While it is true that Q only showed up six years later in 2017, might Epstein have been involved in the creation of the conspiracy? He certainly seems to have been intelligent enough to play a long game.

/pol/ was instrumental in drumming up support Donald Trump's presidency and what came to be known as the alt-right. Even Trump admits he was friends with Epstein for years, and even though he claims to have broken that friendship off a long time ago his name is all over the Epstein files. Could Epstein have wanted "his guy" as President? Then, once Trump was in office, Q could have been a smokescreen to implicate Democrats rather than Epstein's actual bipartisan client base. This is especially true if Epstein had blackmail material on Trump that he could deploy if investigators ever got too close to his trafficking ring.

Now to be clear, I have no idea if this is what really happened. But it makes more sense than a massive Satanic cabal when there probably aren't even a hundred thousand total Satanists in the United States, and the biggest group of them is The Satanic Temple that doesn't actually practice magick. The Church of Satan, the next biggest, doesn't practice magick either. Neither organization professes belief in a literal Satan. The Temple of Set does practice magick, but they are WAY smaller than TST or CoS. And none of those groups include prominent politicians, celebrities, or billionaires. Back in the 1970's Anton LaVey knew a few celebrities who wound up joining the Church of Satan, but that's as far as it ever went.

Not only that, there's some evidence that years before the fist "Q drops" in 2017, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein fed information to 4Chan resulting in the original "Pizzagate Conspiracy." You know, the idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were running a sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor that has no basement. Again, we see Epstein involved in circulating conspiracy theories very similar to what he was actually doing, but blaming his political enemies for it. Occultism made a convenient motivation for the alleged ring because nobody understands anything about it.

The Poor Oppressed Christians are obsessed with "Satanism" and Pagans because they need an enemy to persecute them, but both groups are literally so small and uninfluential that they pose no threat. The only way to get the numbers up is to classify all Christians besides their specific sect as "Pagan," which is as silly as it is pathetic. At least back when they were fighting "secularists" they were facing significant opposition. The problem with that, though, is that in the political sphere secularism makes sense. It's the best way to run a society without having to grant special privileges to specific religious groups.

This fake "Satanism," on the other hand, is explicitly evil. It makes no sense to anyone, primarily because as the Poor Oppressed define it, it doesn't exist. Literacy about magick would be one way to clear this sort of thing up. As I mentioned beforee, nobody thinks of Tarot or astrology as believable motivations for crimes. Magick is just as ridiculous, and it's about time more of us dropped all the secrecy so the general public can understand what we really do. Once that's better known, I hope that we won't have to worry about anybody outside the Poor Oppressed Christian world considering it a serious threat.