C^{ounter Magic
by John C. Erianne}

I.

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” -- Revelations

“Kill a man, you’re a killer.
Kill many, you’re a conqueror.
Kill them all, you’re a god.”
-– Megadeth

We live in the action of death, in the bowels of history, on the edge of time. The history of the world is the history of calamity and death. The World Trade Towers, symbolic of the current empire, both its power and its decadence. A stand-in for the Tower of Babel. Also, a correlation: the mysterious destruction of the library of Alexandria. Four-hundred thousand scrolls lost.

Osama bin Laden – he and his organization Al-Qaeda, patterned after the first assassins who sought to maintain their spiritual purity through political murder.¹

The terrorist. The assassin. The lone gunman. Emblematic of the end of an age.

The airplane as bird of prey. The phoenix – resurrection through fire. The bow and arrow – a phallic symbol signifying divine power and light. Tension erupting into war.

The Bushmaster rifle – also, phallic damned by masturbatory darkness to plague the land. The natural order disrupted.

Calamity. The coming storm.

II.

It is a basic tenet of terrorism: if you want to destroy the shepherd, you must first destroy his flock. Washington, D.C., capital city of the global empire and the heart of sheepdom. See them graze in fields of concrete.

Arteries of traffic swell to the point of aneurysm. A blight of gas stations and mini-malls. The man with no name is on the move again. This is the end of history, he thinks, marveling at the speed of lights and cars. Life moves quick here in Lago – time to paint this town red.²

Destructive energy.
Chaos. Assassination.
Someone is about to die.

Is it the joy of terror or the terror of joy that sets the sniper’s eye on the woman? His brain a minefield tripwired to chaos. Implosions. Explosions. Spells of narcissistic rage working that raw nerve until the springs give out and he just says, “What the fuck?” a fatwah or curse for things that no longer matter. Nihilism – the belief that no values exist. A world without moral dimension. Nothing matters. Life and death are meaningless. The saint and the serial killer are one.

The sniper lies in the trunk of his car hiding inside the white box truck / blue Chevy Caprice? An Angel of Death in his chariot? He smiles as if he’s just remembered a good joke or a favorite song, Then –- pop –- the bullet pushes through the air and bursts a blossom in the woman’s skull, clips her thread at the point of impact. Red funeral carnations. Another offering for the Ferryman.

Charon, in Greek mythology. Son of Erebus, the dark place. Grandson of Chaos. Coins in the eyes serve as talisman to guarantee safe passage for the dead through the nether regions.

Escape from destructive
forces. Spiritual
transcendence.

III.

In 1964, the Counterinsurgency Information Analysis Center studied the use of magic among the rebel tribesmen in the Congo. Witch Doctors would cast spells on the superstitious rebels to make them impervious to attack by government soldiers and allow them to overcome their fear of death. American PSY-OPs believed they could use similar magic as a psychological weapon against the rebels in support of the Congo government. They called this technique Counter-Magic.

The spirit of God. Blind
Faith. Letting go of fear.

A tarot card left at the scene of one of his murders: the Death card. A calling card. In Vietnam, American soldiers would leave the Ace of Spades on the bodies of dead Viet Cong as a warning that they could kill them with impunity at any time.

The sniper’s warning: “POLICE: I am God. You can’t catch me.”

A god? Yes, perhaps. The trickster –- Loki, in Norse mythology –- the god of chaos and evil.

In Zoroastrianism, the trickster is the devil. Unlike in Christianity, this devil does not exist at the pleasure of God. The Almighty did not create him. Rather, they emerged together from the source, forever in opposition. The devil, foreign to the goodness of the world, infected the world of men, empire after empire.

The world after The Fall.
Temptation and obstacles.
Disorder.

IV.

To name the sniper is to summon him – John Mohammed. Then one becomes two. The devil gives birth to himself? John Lee Malvo – not quite a boy, but hardly a man. Dark claws for eyes. That picture of the two of them with arms around each other. Comrades in arms? Had they just come in from target practice? Did Mohammed show him how to squeeze the trigger? Tell him about the weapon’s recoil? The picture of them smiling together doesn’t tell the story; it only begs the question: Is the younger man a willing apprentice or a victim of counter-magic? The truth eludes us.

Endgame. Capture.
Possible death.

Loki, for his part in the death of Baldur, god of light, was chained to a rock with ten chains and a serpent poised above his head so the venom would drip into his mouth.

V.

“For the common people, whose personal gods no longer help them, a very different kind of semi-divine being now casts its terrible shadow over everyday life.” -– Julian Jaynes,from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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¹The word assassin comes from “hashish.” The first assassins, almost a thousand years ago, were the “hashshashin,” the “hashish-users,” a fanatical Muslim sect in Persia who considered murder of their enemies a sacred duty.

²The 1974 Clint Eastwood western, High Plains Drifter