Dark Star Rising by Gary Lachman
Book Review of Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump
A longtime fan of the subjects Gary Lachman writes about and of his way of writing about those chosen topics (the occult, imagination, mysticism) and people (Steiner, Jung. Crowley), I jumped to buy and inhale Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump on first noticing its availability. Since I am writing this review in July 2018, five days after Trump’s controversial “summit” with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, I had to wonder how it would stand up to the currently evolving reality-tv drama that Trump was staging in daily dizzying installments. Could Lachman possibly insert something cogent into the helter-skelter fray between warring sides willing to spare no insult but brook no rational conversation?
While Lachman never suggests that he has all the answers to the mind-numbing enigma of the 2016 election and administration that resulted from it (in the interest of full disclosure and to avoid pretending that the winner of that election did not matter to me, I am an independent who never dreamed that Donald Trump would win), Dark Star Rising is filled with “food for thought” that parties on both sides might digest with benefit.
Positive Thinking and Chaos Magick
While it might not endear him further to the Christian fundamentalists who had to endorse him for lack of a better choice, Trump holds himself to be a devotee of “positive thinking,” proclaiming that he is the “greatest student” of the man who wrote the book, The Power of Positive Thinking: Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. Thus, contrary to a frequent criticism, he is not an unbeliever; he unconditionally believes in himself. And in addition to Dr. Peale, he is the good company of a whole sequence of spiritual teachers, mostly American, and often grouped together as New Thought.
The “Great Leader”
On the other hand and despite his old-dufferisms, Trump “seems to be something of a ‘natural’ chaos magician…like New Thought, chaos magick (the “k” a nod to Aleister Crowley) is interested in results, in ‘making things happen.’ It pursues ‘visible results by which the magician demonstrates to himself that he can do things which, a short while ago, never entered his mind as possibilities.” This description rang more bells for me about Trump’s modus operandi than the millions of words spewed about him since he came down the Trump Tower elevators and announced his candidacy for POTUS.
But a POTUS has to be elected with votes garnered fair or foul; and Lachman forwards an unflattering opinion of those who ushered Trump into the White House: “The desire Hitler and Mussolini met in millions of people was a simple one: to be free of the burden of giving meaning to their lives themselves, of fulfilling their hunger for ‘struggle and self-sacrifice,’ for some greater purpose than the satisfaction of their own appetites, through their own efforts. This is a temptation we all face at some time.”
“The great leader,” Lachman describes such populist dictators, “is antinomian, that is, not held back by the rules and not responsible to anyone but himself. He is beyond good and evil, and logic too, or at least is the author of their definition. It is this presumed infallibility that gives him his power over a flock or a nation.” If this shoe fits Trump, and Lachman makes a plausible case for it, our democracy is in clear and present danger.
While this book will provide further philosophical and even spiritual arguments to those already opposed to Trump, it could prove to be an eye- and mind-opener to those “true believers” who hold him infallible no matter what. Now, to get them to read it….