SPART Magick

Sorcery
(A short SPARTIST treatise on the politics and political use of magick)
In a world where ‘being’ has been replaced by ‘appearing’ perhaps the most radical and pragmatic thing to do is find a way to disappear. Instead of producing a spectacle of revolution, why not instead revolt against the spectacle: Disappear. No more well documented political art ‘actions’. No more performance art shows claiming to manifest the great ontological problems of existence, no more half-cocked claims about art as a revolutionary activity. How can something intrinsically visual i.e. caught up in the act of ‘appearing’ be revolutionary? It’s time to disappear.
For the Gods are dead and so is Art and with these things have died any claim to the validity of subjective experience as an organising principle of society. Now only the mighty dollar remains. What to do in the face of such misery? Over the past several decades the socialists, that is to say those who believe in social concerns being the central organising principle in society, as opposed to the capitalists who fix the dollar as the centre, have attempted through various techniques of lobbying, protest and sabotage to change the dominant political order. However, in recent years it seems that such attempts to effect social change are less and less effective. The reason being that those who govern have become too clever; the vestibules of power have become too nebulous, even virtual, and thus such old school styles of attack have been rendered all but obsolete.
In considering this sorry state of affairs we find ourselves asking ‘why bother?‘ Since the invention of the nuclear bomb we have entered a phase of history where we are locked in the continual aggression of warlike engagement without the violence of nuclear deployment. In this climate information has become the main means of warfare and the minds of the populace the new territories of conquest. Perhaps, instead of lobbying to change the political apparatus of the social machine, why not instead change the nature of our own personal mental machine: the psyche? If it’s alright for government and big business to continually attempt to affect our mental states using images and ethics projected to us through TV and advertising then surely it is about time we reclaimed this act of mind alteration for our own ends.
We’re not talking about blowing our minds out on drug or alcohol binges so as to destroy this territory, leaving it so desolate as to be unfit for anything. We’re not talking about creating a new political doctrine or resurrecting an old one; that would only be adding to the misery. No, what we want is something a bit more measured and personal. To this end we propose a new pursuit. A pursuit whose undertaking in today’s cold, dead, money driven, spiritually vacuous world is one hundred percent politically orientated and yet it requires neither acceptance nor permission from the powers that be. We propose the pursuit of Sorcery as a kind of psychic paramilitarism against the clandestine colonisation of the subconscious by big business and the State. And one of our first acts as Sorcerers must be that of necromancy, since what we seek to resurrect is the great spirit of insurrection.
The concept of Sorcery conjures up images of old men in dusty cloaks working as alchemists on crackpot ideas in secret dark rooms. Or masked woman priests presiding over occult rituals in front of huge bonfires in dark forests with drumming, wild dancing and blood sacrifices. We must say that while the inner teenager or bored overworked adult in us finds these things appealing, and while we have no objection to such hobbies, this is not the kind of Sorcery we are imagining as apt for the here and now. We want a new Sorcery fitting for the world we now live in: Something industrial, virtual, cheap, homemade, disposable, sexy and entirely void of any kind of inert hierarchy or power structures.