From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 3 (July 2021)
“The new magi [wizards] establish their art and realise social upheavals. They specialise in geopolitics, mass science, and they subjugate the elements; they tame the Atlanticist Leviathan, and they fatten up the continental Behemoth.”
– A. Dugin & S. Kuryokhin
In their 1995 ‘Manifesto of the New Magi’, Aleksandr Dugin and Sergey Kuryokhin set forth provocative statements calculated to realise a complete mystical transformation of society.
Reflecting on the influence of the ‘Manifesto of the New Magi’ in his interview with Charlie Nash for New Dawn magazine, Aleksandr Dugin explained that in the mid-1990s “the people around Kuryokhin and myself were artists, painters, musicians and filmmakers. They were a minority… totally countercurrent [to] the mainstream liberal tendency that surrounded us.” Adding “the influence of [the] New Magus was on one hand, very limited. Very small. But on the other hand, it was read by the [social] elite, the leading people. Many of them were perplexed.”
The idea for such a Manifesto can be found in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, among artists and writers like Kandinsky, Malevich, Mayakovsky, Bely and Yesenin.
Sergey Kuryokhin, noted Dugin, was always up to date and “didn’t accept the main moral line, didn’t accept post-modernity as the answer. For him, it was a question. And those who still, in Russia or outside, have the same position, for them the ‘Manifesto of the New Magi’ is still a source of inspiration.”
“Because new magic, the new magi,” the Russian professor emphasised, “is not only about some group existing in Russia,” but remains attractive “to all those who share the main principles.”
Manifesto of the New Magi
By Aleksandr Dugin & Sergey Kuryokhin —
1. We are facing a crisis of art, a lack of vitality, and the domination of pure mechanicalism. Post-Modernism – the very syndrome of degeneration – is itself deformed. Interest in art today is either tackiness (theatre, cinemas, and rock concerts), or das provozierte Leben (“the provoked life” in Gottfried Benn’s words), that is the occupation of a narrow and closed circle of “vampiric intellectuals” who have completely lost all orientation, but have not lost the need for food, social status, and vanity.
2. We are facing a crisis of politics, a lack of thought and fresh ideology, and the degeneration of politics since the splash of Perestroika. Politics has totally lost all logic and life. Politics today is either a pathological conjunction (in the centre) or a pathological caricature (in the periphery). Politics is always and everywhere equally uninteresting.
3. The critical low points in the degeneration of art and politics have now been reached simultaneously, all at once. This is not always how things go, but it is the case now. The lowest points of the two sinusoids have coincided.
4. In such moments in the cycle of decline, a new impulse must be acquired for development, one which lies generally outside the sphere of the process itself. Sometimes politics spurs art, and vice versa. But now both spheres are in decline. Impulse must be sought elsewhere.
5. This new realm is MAGIC. Magic is not events, things and objects but causes; magic does not simply describe but actively operates. Magic precedes art and politics. Art and politics became autonomous only upon being detached from their magical source. This source has not disappeared but merely slipped away to the periphery from where it exerts indirect influence. Secret societies, lodges and orders have governed history and inspired artists.
6. Indirect influence has not been sufficient as politics and art forgot the necessity of constantly appealing to magic. Only the direct, total replacement of art and politics with MAGIC can save the situation.
7. Today’s politicians and artists have outlived themselves. Nothing can save them. They are incapable of nourishing themselves with magic and liveliness. They ought to be written off and discarded. They are totally uninteresting. A new type should replace them.
8. This new type is not a politician or artist dealing with magic, but the NEW MAGUS engaged in politics and art.
9. All forms of art and all political ideologies have their occult parallels in operative magic. Paintings emerged as worldly depictions of the gods and symbolic signs. Political ideologies are secular expressions of metaphysical and religious doctrines, e.g. capitalism is, according to Max Weber, secularised Protestantism, while socialism and fascism are variations of Indo-European, Aryan traditions in which, according to Georges Dumézil, there is no caste of merchants. The source has gradually been lost sight of. With modern politicians and artists, we are dealing with incurable, inveterate idiots. The degree of talent and ideological success now directly depends on degree of acquaintance with occult doctrines.
10. This fact must be recognised and accepted as an inevitability.
11. Instead of a separate art, separate politics, and separate magic, a new synthetic discipline should be introduced, that of MAGIC, which directly establishes its own politics and its own art. The new hermeneutics is that historical context and aesthetic peculiarity should be discarded: it all comes down to occult paradigms. Goethe and Breton, Lenin and Churchill, can all be boiled down to magical paradigms (of the Masonic-Occultist and Hermetic-Rosicrucian bent) which they represented. All the rest can be discarded. Along with the new art and new politics will come a new approach to the study of art and a new political science.
12. The new scholars of art and the new political scientists will not be separate people from the new artists and new politicians. They will be one and the same figures. And these figures will be none other than the NEW MAGI.
13. Art thus becomes not the imitation of ritual or the imitation of the manufacture of fetishes, amulets, and idols, but the ritual itself, the manufacturing of amulets, fetishes, and idols.
14. Politics thus becomes not the captured “remake” of collective orgies or the realisation of vague indirectly perceived metaphysical projects, but the direct myth-making and occult architecture of the masses.
15. All of this is carried out and conceptualised by the NEW MAGI.
16. Magic is an operative science. It demands real results, real metamorphoses – of objects, phenomena, and the operator. MAGIC is an experimental science that does not allow “obscurantism” and demagogy. The result, not the project, is the aim. Without concrete “eidetic realisation,” there is no magical act. If everything remains essentially as it was before the magical act, then we are dealing with either failure or charlatanism. Idiots and intellectuals shall not pass.
17. The NEW MAGI affirm their art and carry out social coups. They specialise in geopolitics, large-scale science, and subjugate the elements; they tame the Atlantic Leviathan and feed the continental Behemoth. The minimum social scale of the NEW MAGIC is a country, people, state, or legions of human masses. Ascetics and marching bands of degenerate sects are of no interest to anyone. The NEW MAGIC deals with the phenomenon of the GIGANTIC, the GIGANTIC-NEW (a la Martin Heidegger).
18. Our aims will become clear only when people begin to participate in our practice, actively or passively, as subjects or objects. Magic solves all gnoseological problems through Praxis (like Marxism).
19. From the outside, the crisis of art and politics may seem to be something objective. But do not build illusions, for it was organised by US in order to clear the path for the NEW RACE, the race of magic kings.
20. We operate with abysses. For us, the invisible has its own geography. Black is not simply the absence of light, but a huge gamut of shades which earthly optometry has not even dreamed of.
21. Abyssus abyssum invocate.
22. In voce cataractarum.
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