Erica Lagalisse

There is no politics without conspiracy. The question is simply 'who' is conspiring to do 'what.' (103)

This slender volume contains a lot of food for thought. After methodological preliminaries, "Supreme Magus" Erica Lagalisse supplies a history of modern esoteric movements with attention to their roles as precedents for revolutionary and anarchist political movements. A five-page "coda" bridges from this first half of the book to the second, where she treats contemporary concerns. The first of these is the cultural underpinnings of anarchist socialization, and the second is the role of "conspiracy theory" in political organizing. With respect to the former, Lagalisse concludes that "anarchism has always been a gendered and racialized domain authorized by speculative elites as much as real builders" (87). On the latter count, she ponders the anarchist reactions to "conspiracy theories" and wonders:

"Are anarchists truly interested in mobilizing people and their discontent into resistance movements? Or is the priority among activists to distinguish one's self as having 'good politics' and protect their small, safe social enclave?" (101)

The author's academic discipline is anthropology, so in both the diachronic history and synchronic analyses, her perspective takes an ethnographic orientation. She anticipates two and a half audiences for her work here. She expects both scholars and activists to benefit from her overview and to pursue the many worthwhile resources for inquiry indicated by her footnotes. (Some of these references were new to me, and I will indeed be chasing them down.) In addition, she expresses "hope that some persons identified as 'conspiracy theorists' read it and feel both productively challenged and validated by my words" (110).

With a different motive than those "anarchist academics" asking Lagalisse "to authorize my texts by citing Carl Schmitt" (87), I could not help noticing a couple of key sources missing from her references, which would complement the exposition that she has undertaken in the first part of the book. Godwin's Theosophical Enlightenment remains a helpful unveiling of the leftist valences of occultism and its forebears, while Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance gives further insight on those topics for which Lagalisse appears to have relied on the work of Frances Yates, and reaches conclusions about the modern transformations of hermetic magic similar to those intimated in the final paragraph of Occult Features of Anarchism.

Lagalisse offers brief but trenchant discussions of some of the shibboleths of 21st-century social critique, including "cultural appropriation" (75-6) and "intersectionality" (97-101). Honestly, the book would have been worth reading for these bits alone, but to have them treated in the larger context of this discussion of esoteric history and political culture is highly worthwhile.… (meer)

This book packs one hell of a punch for how short it is. Occult Features of Anarchism is largely a survey of historical and biographical elements of occultism and esotericism influencing anarchist and related leftist political groups.

Occultism is often over-portrayed as right-wing, even among many practitioners. Lagalisse shows how many of the esoteric and occult societies were actually quite the opposite in both philosophy and practice.

This is not without criticism, as many historical institutions rarely live up to the ethics of the times they help create. Lagalisse is precise and pointed with her critiques of activist groups guilty of compartmentalizing their activism and embracing contradictory power structures, perhaps unknowingly or occulted even from themselves.

A fairly clear picture is presented of how exactly these features of left-wing politics are just as indebted to secret societies as their right-wing counterparts. Certainly a worthwhile read for any esoteric practitioner who is desiring a different perspective than the fascist-occultist trope routinely presented by most pop culture.

For those within occultism, the survey presented here is ripe with ideas to springboard from and begin research into your own society's philosophy and foundational documents. My only critique is that I wish this work was longer, but maybe that's really our job now.… (meer)

There’s a lot going on in this short book, which comprises a scholarly historical investigation (with a fascinating bibliographical essay), a feminist/ethnographic critique of radical politics in the 21st c., and an anthropological consideration of the problemata of conspiracy theories. Lagalisse asserts that the metaphysics of modern anarchism and its relation to a particular social and historical context have not received enough attention, due partially to the bias of many anarchists against religion and the bias of many scholars against anarchism, but also because the topics of revolutionary politics, occult philosophy and secret societies are particularly fraught.

Religion and revolutionary politics have long been associated in the West. As Lagalisse points out, European political theory and science have been preoccupied with theological questions since late antiquity, when pagans, Platonists and Gnostics disputed the emergent authority of Christian orthodoxy. Intellectual dissent and political resistance did not however produce a rupture with religious thought, and utopian socialism, anarchism and Marxism all came to rely upon a specific syncretic cosmology of immanent divinity, incipient in the Middle Ages and evolving through the Renaissance and Enlightenment and into the 21st c. The Corpus Hermeticum fed a wide range of eclectic and influential doctrines, fostered the scientific and mathematical investigation of the universe (Bruno, Descartes, Vico, Leibniz) and inspired various social movements against systemic power (from heretical to millenarian to revolutionary). Freemasonry and other revolutionary brotherhoods drew upon the pantheism articulated by Spinoza; the Illuminati’s resistance to the centralizing tendencies of the Holy Alliance (the ‘Conspiracy of the People’ v. the ‘Conspiracy of Kings’) relied upon a cosmological notion of ‘self-government,’ an idea that found practical application in the careers of Babeuf and Buonarotti and the mobilization of the International Workingman’s Association; theosophy inspired Ricardo Flores Magón and Augusto Sandino; the president of the American Association of Spiritualists published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto in 1872. According to Lagalisse, the various traditions drawn from “ancient magical wisdom… helped triangulate popular religion, modern materialism, and social discontent in new ways,” opening the way for anarchism as we know it. Ironically, she says, anarchists in the 21st c. are often unable to recognize the subversive potential of religious sensibilities, especially among women and indigenous activists.

The inability to respect the ‘difference’ or ‘identity’ of others is 21st c. anarchism’s greatest flaw, according to Lagalisse. (Time to rediscover the work of geographer-anarchist Élisée Reclus, who insisted on acknowledging the interdependence of all creation.) The ‘autonomy’ demanded by anarchists involves a fantasy of absolute personal power based on the presumption of a strict independence of individuals (or homogenous groups thereof):

Anarchist ideas of self-government and self-management rely in unacknowledged ways on the notion of ‘self-organizing system’ in the modern life sciences…21st c. biology finds symbiosis the rule, not the exception, as do the natural science traditions of many indigenous peoples, in which ‘sovereignty’ is a knot of human, material, and spiritual relationships…yet the anarchist person is still imagined as an independent, autonomous, and transcendent (sovereign) being that enters into ‘mutual aid’ with others of its kind, much like the state…and just as the state characterizes itself as benevolent to its citizens, the anarchist is benevolent to the people (women) similarly subsumed in his ‘autonomy’ and without whom he could not survive.

Lagalisse’s chapters on conspiracy theory are the most provocative. In addition to dismissing indigenous practices and female perspectives, she says, anarchists frequently fail to include the lower classes in their vision of a revolutionary politics. Stereotypes and the invocation of gatekeeping credentials (Have you read the right books?) enable educated radicals to justify their own comfortable disengagement from the working class. Self-proclaimed revolutionaries dismiss “conspiracy theorists” as thirty-something white men banging away on computer keyboards in their mother’s basement, but an anthropological perspective allows us to acknowledge the social commentary contained in many popular theories of global conspiracy—

The Illuminati is not in control of world government, nor are Jews in control of the banking system, yet is it also wrong to posit the ruling class as “conspiring” to destroy us? Is the globalized economy fostered by government policy over the past 30 years good for everyone? Does the FDA really have the public’s interests at heart? Are people really wrong to suspect the government and its agencies of conscious malevolence? Bourgeois professional associations arguably constitute a class-based and class making conspiracy in and of themselves. The fact is that all politics involves “conspiracy,” whether from above or from below.

“Conspiracy theorists” may sometimes be stubborn white men, says Lagalisse, but so are anarchists who cling no less ferociously to some frustrating ideas about power.… (meer)