[Reviewer Johnson calls this book "a rich work that forces readers
to confront questions about the nature of anarchism, conspiracy
theories and knowledge."]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

OCCULT FEATURES OF ANARCHISM  
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Bethan Johnson
July 19, 2019
LSE Review of Books
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_ Reviewer Johnson calls this book "a rich work that forces readers
to confront questions about the nature of anarchism, conspiracy
theories and knowledge." _

,

 

_Occult Features of Anarchism, with Attention to the Conspiracy of
Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples_

Erica Laglisse

PM Press

ISBN: 978-1-62963-579-8

We live in an age of conspiracy theories. In the last decade, millions
of messages on social media, interviews on YouTube or on podcasts and
references in political speeches tell tales of QAnon and the American
‘deep state’, of the British royal family as shape-shifting
lizards and of how terrorist attacks are the work of governments or
faked. Add to these the influential anti-vaccination movement and
climate change denial, and it is hard to deny that we live in a moment
when many wonder if their lives and futures are in the hands of a
small yet nefarious cabal of people. We also live in a time when
anarchists are more visible than they have been in many years due to
their roles in the Occupy Wall Street movement and Antifa. Thus, in a
timely fashion, Erica Lagalisse’s book, _Occult Features of
Anarchism, with Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the
Conspiracy of the Peoples_, seeks to marry these new and
contemporaneous developments in our (political) lives, connecting them
in ways we perhaps had never considered.

Written more as a treatise in two parts than a book, anthropologist
Lagalisse attempts to study concepts of anarchism and the occult in a
part historical, part anthropological and part
autobiographical/ethnographical work. In establishing a foundation for
her research, Lagalisse first effectively demonstrates, partly through
anecdotal evidence as well as through more traditional academic lines,
how modern anarchists have come to value ideas of rationality,
secularity and a particular kind of empiricism, which has alienated
those whose activism is constructed along alternative lines, with
particularly patronising attitudes towards, and through the silencing
of, women of colour and Indigenous women.

Lagalisse then begins a series of chapters reminiscent of an
intellectual and book history, tracing the dissemination and reception
of particular books. She tracks how the perceived valuing of secular,
rational and empirical modes of thinking contravene reality. First,
Lagalisse tackles the topic of secularisation and its relationship to
anarchism as a function of historic ideas about the role of the state
in people’s lives. She presents arguments for the notion that the
dichotomy of the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ that undergirds
politics is infused with cosmology. ‘The transcendent God of
theological dualism’, she writes, ‘can be found just beneath the
surface of every argument for centralized authority, including most
canonical social theory (which anarchists, we may note, tend to
recognize as “authoritarian”)’ (17). Thus, despite the
protestations of secular ideology as part of anarchism, she contends
that ‘modern anarchism has never been purely atheist except in
name’ (18).

In subsequent chapters, Lagalisse works to demonstrate how various
forms of knowledge now valued as secular remain infused with religious
and notably occult thinking. She traces much of modern science and
mathematics through the ideas of Corpus Hermeticum, a mystical
document about the integration of all concepts into one entity and the
human as the microcosm of the universe itself. She shows the influence
of these documents on specific influential Enlightenment and
Renaissance individuals who are now identified as men of science,
rather than of mysticism: these figures include Réné Descartes,
Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus. To this point, Lagalisse
writes: ‘In retrospect, the European historian has enjoyed
categorizing certain forms of worldly operation as “magical” and
others as “scientific,” yet the distinction is anachronistic’
(29). Lagalisse goes on to connect these ideas to the rise of various
associations now affiliated with some of the most famous conspiracy
theories in the Western world: namely, the Freemasons and the
Illuminati. She charts how specific men helped to found these
societies, and how others expanded their reach.

Amidst all this, Lagalisse deftly defends herself against the charge
of having fallen into the conspiracy theory trope herself, clearly
noting when the connections she seeks to draw between thinkers or
ideas are more speculative or tenuous as regards evidence. She
meanwhile does not devalue all of anarchism simply because it has
forgotten some of its history. ‘The fact that Marx builds on Hegel
who builds on the Hermetica does not necessarily mean they are
wrong,’ she writes. ‘It simply means that a vast amount of
“rational” social theory relies on archetypes and geometrics of
thought stemming from a specific, historiographically situated
cosmology—as does the notion of “rationality” itself’ (70).
Thus, Lagalisse argues, the use of rationality or secularity to claim
a kind of superiority within anarchist circles should be taken as a
castle built upon sand.

Contrasting this charted history of ties between the rational and the
occult, in the final section Lagalisse transitions into perceptions
surrounding belief in modern conspiracy theories. In doing so, she
demonstrates how the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has been used as a
rhetorical cudgel with which to beat back and delegitimise. She claims
that while conspiracy theorists are associated with the image of the
solitary white man living in his parents’ basement or with a bigoted
Donald Trump voter in 2016, these images are stereotypes. They also
betray certain value judgements of the kinds of people who believe
conspiracy theories, an epithet that is often associated with
working-class people whereas wealthier people of the same opinion
avoid such judgement.

In its pursuit to hold a mirror up to anarchism and those who consider
conspiracy theories to be the stuff that only uneducated, bigoted
people could believe, _Occult Features of Anarchism_ is quite
effective. In one of the best interventions of the book, Lagalisse
proves especially incisive in her analysis of the elitist and gendered
nature of ‘truth-telling’ and ‘magic’. One discussion of
particular note is that of how, during the period when magic was being
converted into science and mathematics, women were contemporaneously
persecuted in ‘witch trials’:

After all, as “magic” itself was gaining respect in certain elite
quarters, women were being persecuted as witches precisely for
practising “magic,” wherein we may observe that the perceived
danger was not “magic” itself but the gender of its practitioner.

This discussion illuminates how elite, educated men (not the male
peasants who are often blamed) led the hunting of women who had
acquired a great deal of knowledge about the human body, and that this
was therefore a gendered and classed persecution.

Lagalisse also levels well-articulated criticisms of anarchism itself
for not being as inclusive as is often presented. She writes that:

As any anarchist around can see, fluency in a particular vocabulary,
knowing the names of certain historical figures, and being vouched for
by someone “in the know” is all requirement for entry into the
anarchist club, as is a commitment to a specific ideological
constellation informed by the history of its practice.

Convincing in many areas, _Occult Features of Anarchism _would
nonetheless have benefited from being slightly less like a treatise.
Lagalisse discusses her vision for the text as having utility for
academics to consider how they study topics such as anarchism, the
occult and conspiracy theories, and for those engaged in political
activism (108). For academics, though, more work could have been done
to flesh out the explicit connection between the earlier sections on
anarchism and its links to the occult and the later sections on modern
conspiracy theories, as well as simply more engagement with the book
history element of the earlier chapters.

While Lagalisse does stimulate reflection upon who is classified as a
conspiracy theorist and who gets to do this classifying, I also left
the work not entirely convinced by her flattening of the definition of
conspiracy theory and arguments about how conspiracy theorists are
viewed by the rest of the society. Do I really think of people who
talk about ‘Jewish lizard bankers’ (95) in such simple terms as
‘conspiracy theorist’? Are people sceptical of vaccines really
being treated with the same degree of contempt as those who think that
9/11 was government-sanctioned?

Meanwhile, in her introduction, Lagalisse makes reference to the idea
of enticing people away from conspiracy theories and other beliefs:
‘Of course, reasoned debate will not be sufficient to turn devoted
neo-Nazis away from their project, but it may affect the future
actions of those still sitting on the fence so to speak’ (11). The
question then becomes of whose duty it is to convince people not to
believe conspiracy theories. Often, this responsibility falls on the
communities already victimised by a conspiracy theory. Given
Lagalisse’s take on the difficulty many oppressed groups have being
respected within anarchist circles, how does she reconcile this
additional burden on their time? While this question does not have a
simple answer, some discussion of it felt warranted.

_Occult Features of Anarchism_ is a rich work that forces readers to
confront questions about the nature of anarchism, conspiracy theories
and knowledge. In many ways, it leaves us needing to do more than
simply consider the arguments on the page. Perhaps this is
particularly salient in this age of ‘alternative facts’ and
conspiracy theories, and we are better for taking a little longer to
consider what we consume.

 

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position
of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

If you are interested in _Occult Features of Anarchism,_ you may like
to listen to the podcast of an LSE event in which Erica Lagalisse
discusses her book, recorded at LSE on 20 March
2019: [link removed].

Bethan Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of History at
the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research explores the rise
of militant separatist groups in Western Europe and North America in
the mid-Cold War-era. The work explores the life-cycle of violent
ethno-nationalism, driving forces behind radicalisation along
separatist lines and authoritative methods for ending and avoiding
deadly conflicts. Her master’s dissertation, also undertaken at the
University of Cambridge, studied the manipulation of cultural
nationalism for political unionist purposes by Lady Llanover in
nineteenth-century Wales.

* Anarchism
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* the occult
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* secret societies
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* revolutionary organization
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* revolutionary movements
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