Here is an interesting philosophical conundrum: what is the point of a border if it is specifically built to be breached?
Surely any pot that is intentionally full of holes is not a pot, but a colander. Likewise, though all walls should surely have at least a few doors in them, a wall made up of nothing but doors isn’t really a wall at all, but a turnstile.
Nowadays, it would increasingly seem as if the external defences of Western Europe and the United States are external defences in name only, purely performative barriers designed to allow anyone access who cares to seek it, no matter how unworthy, undesirable, or unassimilable. Catherine the Great’s Russia once had Potemkin Villages. In today’s West, we have Potemkin Borders.
Through the Keyhole
Mythically speaking, I hold Hermes responsible for all this. The ancient Greek deity Hermes, whom I have discussed previously on this website as being a central governing god of modernity, was traditionally the god of borders and barriers, from whom we get the adjectival phrase ‘hermetically sealed,’—a phrase which Donald Trump once optimistically applied to his plan for the southern U.S. border with Mexico.
This expression sounds as if the pagan deity would symbolise the desire to keep immigrants and refugees out. But Hermes was in fact a trickster god, a deliberate and gleeful subverter of rules and norms, and the precise sense in which he was a god of barriers was as someone who constructed them only to then take great pleasure in cunningly bypassing them.
One of the most famous myths told about Hermes is how he negotiated a locked doorway by transforming magically into mist and seeping through its keyhole; then, when asked whether he had effected entry by sneakily undoing the door’s locking mechanism, he was able honestly to answer “no.” When persons who have no true right or business being in the U.S. or Europe are asked whether they are illegal immigrants and answer “no” likewise, just because our liberal-leaning politicians have arbitrarily redefined the border rules and let the illegals enter ‘legally’ for no good reason, they are acting in a fashion analogous to Hermes, floating airily through his old Greek keyhole.
This metaphorical relationship has not gone unnoticed. There is a Canadian immigration consultancy named Hermes Immigration, aimed at easing refugees’ and immigrants’ path into the country. There is also an international “Border Management and Passenger Screening Solutions” product named WCC HERMES, designed to ensure “both state-of-the-art security and optimum passenger flow at all kinds of borders, airports and seaports”—that is to say, designed to ensure that the boundaries between nations can be more easily eroded and evaded in the name of that other great non-Christian god, Mammon.
Candle in the Bind
One particular individual who has definitely noticed Hermes’ natural affinity with borders—and, more specifically, with those who illegally cross them—is Michael M. Hughes, a left-wing American celebrity occultist, or “author, speaker, magical thinker and activist,” as his website describes him. Hughes is best known for his 2018 book Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change, a compendium of instructions for occult rites designed to defeat the Devil and all his works—the Devil in question being the wall-building, border-sealing, then-President Donald Trump.
Hughes’ best-known grimoire content is his Mass Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him—i.e., conservatives and Republican voters of any kind. Adopted by left-leaning white witches (if they can ever bear to use such a racially loaded term) throughout Trump’s four-year presidency, and performed once per month according to the phases of the moon, the spell was a ritual not of cursing but of binding: that is, intended not to kill or harm the man, but to prevent him from harming others, chiefly asylum-seekers, genuine or otherwise.
Given Trump’s ultimate failure to build very much of his promised wall with Mexico or reduce long-term mass immigration into the United States, did the spell in question work? Only in the sense that placebos do. According to Hughes, his ceremonies were more psychological than supernatural in nature, aimed at “putting gas in the spiritual gas-tank” of participants, “help[ing] change their consciousness and re-energize them” in their actual real world left-wing political activism. “The real magic,” he said, “is when you walk into the voting booth and change the course of America.”
A handy online description of Hughes’ spell indicates it required three main ritual objects: an unflattering photo of Trump, the stub of an orange candle (or alternatively a carrot), and the traditional tarot card of The Tower, representing Trump Tower, which Hughes’ witches wished to make topple down. Conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony thinks that the image of the collapsing Tower of Babel (which the tarot card is sometimes guessed to represent) is a sign of the inherent self-destructive quality of transnational, globalist imperialism; Michael M. Hughes thinks the opposite, transforming it into a symbol of joyously collapsing national borders instead.
To make Trump’s Tower and wall alike both tumble, Hughes said that spell-casters should etch Trump’s name onto the orange candle/carrot with a pin, lean The Tower card against something so it stood up vertically, and then recite his self-penned spell, asking the gods to “Strike down their [Trump-voters’] towers of vanity … In the name of Justice.” At this point, magicians and witches should pick up The Tower card and turn it upside down.
Then, they should burn Trump’s photo with the flame from the lit candle (or flaming carrot?) before blowing out the wick, “visualizing Trump blowing apart into dust or ash” as they did so—possibly whilst intoning The Donald’s old TV catchphrase from The Apprentice, “You’re fired!” (this isn’t my joke, this is Hughes’ genuine instruction). Finally, the used carrot or candle should be disposed of at a crossroads—one of the traditional haunts of Hermes, in his rival guise as god of travellers.
Crossing Boundaries
Hughes’ other best-known grimoire spell is his No Borders, All One Family: An Invocation of Hermes to Protect Immigrants, which in 2019 he said “should be considered an emergency working,” in light of deliberately emotive scenes then being broadcast by the mainstream U.S. media of “caged children [in “Trump concentration camps,” no less], ICE raids and continued scapegoating and maligning of refugees seeking escape from poverty and violence.”
Supposedly, said Hughes, his spell was “not an appeal for a ‘no borders’ immigration policy,” but only in the exceedingly misleading sense that the word “borders” itself apparently had no legitimate meaning to persons of his outlook anyway. If there are no such things as borders in the first place, how can you have a ‘no borders’ policy? It would be like America having a ‘no dragons’ policy or something.
In his own misleading, Hermes-style words, Hughes’ spell was “simply an affirmation that borders are arbitrary constructions and we are all one human family. As climate change, wars, and massive social inequality continue to create refugees all around the world, artificial, human-drawn borders will become increasingly meaningless.” So spoke Hermes in human form.
This is Hermetic language in itself, Hermes notoriously being the master of lies and dissembling—just like the Devil. Saying people are not illegally crossing borders because you have just acted to dismantle them, and therefore no borders now exist to be illegally crossed in the first place, is analogously the same as Hermes claiming not to have broken into a locked room by floating in through the keyhole. It is the purest sophistry.
Another example of sophistry is Hughes’ claim that his spell may not be a spell at all, but a prayer. Apparently, his magical rite was “an ideal prayer for progressive Christians – simply substitute God or Jesus for Hermes, and supplement it with a reading of Luke 10:30-37”—the parable of the Good Samaritan. Standing in front of a lit candle, a photo of Earth from space and an icon of Hermes, the wannabe border-exorciser should chant words like the following:
Come unto me, Lord Hermes
Protector of travellers
Crosser of all boundaries
Bestow upon me your grace and hear my prayer …
No borders, all one family …
May boundaries dissolve
And borders disappear …
So mote it be!
Once the rite is over, magicians should then “make a donation (however small) to an immigrant rights or refugee support organization,” just like Aleister Crowley.
Black Magic
Alternatively, if you felt more malign in intent, you could always choose to ritually curse Trump’s one-time immigration adviser Stephen Miller, as detailed in Hughes’ 2019 instructional essay about “Fighting Nazi Scum with the #MagicResistance.” This involves a racially significant small white candle, representing Miller and his ilk, and a “substantially larger” black candle representing “people of color, immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ and all those targeted by white supremacists.”
You place the latter behind the former, “visually overshadowing and overpowering it,” then concentrate your will and use “your third eye” to help “all those working to save our country and our planet”—i.e., the Democrat Party, BLM, Antifa, etc., etc. Lighting the candles, you tell the black one “You are powerful. You are strong. You are courageous and protected and loved”—like George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Brianna Taylor. Then, whilst keeping the black one lit, you snuff the white one out and kill it off completely. How very symbolic.
You then place the dead white candle into a sealed jar with various unpleasant noxious substances, whilst “imagining the screams and cries of Stephen Miller as his fate is sealed.” “May hatred be extinguished,” Hermes-worshippers are then exhorted to chant—excepting their own hatred for white conservative people who disapprove of uncontrolled non-white mass immigration.
The Almighty Dollar
Besides wishing to merge all races into one impossible and indistinguishable ‘human family,’ Hughes also seems to wish to do the same with religions. In an earlier 2017 essay, “Against Mammon,” he argues that Donald Trump and his evil right-wing Republican Party are nothing but greedy hyper-capitalist gold-worshippers, who aim to dismantle the welfare state and trample the poor.
Accordingly, these devils in human form must be fought against by all right-minded spiritually-inclined folk, Christian and pagan alike, as
we are a united spiritual force, whether we call upon the gods and goddesses of old, the elemental energies, the angels and daimons of the air and the underworld, or the Christ who advocated for the same poor and sick brothers [whom] the GOP [i.e. Republicans] would consign to poverty, misery and death. Our gods are many, but theirs is one. Though they may proclaim the love of Jesus Christ, their true allegiance is to one god—and its name is Mammon.
How ironic, then, that one of the main policies advocated by Mammon-worshipping hyper-capitalists on the liberal right these days is that of open borders, not closed ones, in order to ensure their lucky nations’ alleged future economic well-being (by which, of course, they actually mean their own).
What left-wing Hermetic border magicians like Michael M. Hughes singularly fail to acknowledge is that Hermes was also the ancient Greek god of commerce, being the patron of merchants, the presiding deity of the agora, or market-place, and even of theft—all things easily facilitated by an ever-more borderless, globalised world, the contemporary Bankers’ Babel dreamed of by our current ideologically transnationalist governing class in the WTO, IMF, ECB, and WEF. Rather than being interchangeable with the anti-capitalist Jesus Christ imagined by Marxist Liberation Theology, Hermes himself is more properly considered a variant incarnation of Mammon, god of capital.
Coin Tricks
The coin upon which the god’s head often appeared in the ancient world was the central technology of Hermes, being, as it were, ‘liquid’—a means of infinite exchange. Once handed over to a merchant, a coin could become food, clothing, a weapon, an ornament, a ticket, a man or woman for hire, or anything at all. Following its invention, the coin became viewed as a magical symbol in Greece: like the wand of Circe, it could instantly transmute one thing into another.
The introduction of the coin into early Greek society acted as a profoundly subversive force, since, before its appearance, Greek city-states were controlled by the age-old local aristocracy, who operated a more rigid economy based upon traditions of ritualised gift exchange. This social model depended upon systems of trust and close social relations, and as such was inherently conservative in nature, being resistant to social change.
Coins were destabilising, as they allowed anyone to participate more easily within a much freer and easier economy, even the poor and otherwise powerless. As such, the Greek aristocracy initially resisted their introduction, regarding merchants as thieves, who ‘stole’ across social, physical, and political boundaries in an illegitimate fashion.
When Hermes was rechristened ‘Mercury’ in ancient Rome, he shared his name with the famous liquid metal—melted-down liquid metals being the substance from which coins were minted. ‘Commerce’ is an old Roman word derived from the Latin com (‘with’) and Merx (‘Mercury’). So, when Michael M. Hughes argues for open borders on humanitarian grounds, whilst simultaneously and mistakenly decrying those who would seek to close them as being agents of Mammon, he does not appear to realise that, like Milton, he is the one who is actually of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
Being the traditional god of commerce, it would appear today that Hermes has also become the god of globalism. Once upon a time, national citizens were only allowed to take so much coin of the realm outside of the country with them on their travels. Now, we are exhorted instead to become citizens of the world and actively encouraged to facilitate international money transfers in an era of ever-more mobile capital—both financial and human in nature.
With Hermes as society’s presiding god, everything has now become fungible. With Hermes, walls are doors, and borders are turnstiles. Isn’t it about time we tried turning them all back again?
