Us in Times of Tyranny
The ‘Tower’ card from A.O.Spare’s personal training deck. Around 1906. Recently published by Strange Attractor Press, 2024.
Chapter 1
Preface
Magicians make the worst cheerleaders. Our constitution is considered to be grim and brooding. We tend to go to dark places, both literally and figuratively. And by the essence of our craft, we surround ourselves with bones, bark, and beasts. We mingle with monsters more than humans.
In times when the world seems to have drawn its shutters, casting everything in the dim twilight of decaying morals and shadowy deals, we may find ourselves well-placed to offer guidance. For when darkness sets, it might be wise to seek counsel from the creatures of the dark — those who know the paths, who have dwelled here longer, who have gone before us.
As solid magicians, then, we might have sound advice for Joe Schmoe: Meditate often, build an altar, honor the Lares, speak with the land, root yourself in what is real, here, and now. Become a co-creator of the more-than-human world. Set your sights on decades, even centuries. Listen to the heartbeat of stones. Be still, and break the silence only when truly necessary. Such might be our counsel — along with volumes more of wisdom, at which good Joe will likely shake their head and open the third bottle of red wine.
But where do we ourselves turn for good counsel? Who guides the guide? To whom are we the Joe Schmoes of darkness, the neophytes of the underworld? It seems we must venture a little further out into the blackness of a life marked by tyranny, terror, and loss, if we are to find our own Virgil.
The following pages are exactly that: notes from conversations between one such Virgil and me. The idea is simple: to draw practical advise for our own lives from those who have ventured far deeper into the dark than we ever will. Let us listen to their voices from the far periphery, where human life is barely possible. Let us transform their words into bandages, needles, thread, buttons, and knives — everyday tools that serve us all, helping us maintain some semblance of dignity, even in the most inhumane conditions.
What follows is the best I have to offer today, as a handbook for magicians, to engage with raw adversity as life greatest adventure.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Introduction
Suffering and pain are inherently subjective. Each of us inhabits our own spectrum of suffering, its peak shifting – gradually or abruptly – as we age. The crises of youth soften into quiet recognition in later years, while the struggles of old age remain invisible to the young. This is not universally true, but it is for many. To speak meaningfully about the human condition, generalizations are necessary, yet they inevitably clash with the deeply personal lens through which we each endure the world’s hardships.
People who have lived through unbelievable suffering have left us their testimonies. Their books stand open before us – like gates to hells we have never had to traverse.[1] From the edge of our bed, the sofa, or the train compartment, we can travel into these infernos. Reading about an embrace can never replace the embrace itself, but words can remind us what it feels like to be loved. The same holds true for fear – of death, tyranny, or terror. Books cannot alter the scale of our suffering, but they can help us see it in perspective.
If in the following we want to look at lessons from Primo Levi's 1945 book, Se questo è un uomo (Italian for If This Is a Man), this is not done with the intention of trivializing today's suffering - neither mine or yours. Tears are tears; and every one of them shed is an expression of its own suffering. Grief recognizes itself in them as in a mirror. Nothing can relativize my suffering except for my lived experience of survival, of looking back, of enduring in the face of pain, or the one-time return of silence, joy and a new horizon.
Survival in Auschwitz, as Primo Levi’s books was later also called, is a memoir of his experience as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Written shortly after his liberation in 1945, Levi describes the brutality, dehumanization, and physical suffering endured by prisoners, while also exploring the psychological impact of such atrocities. The book is both a powerful witness to the horrors of the Holocaust and a meditation on human resilience, morality, and the capacity to endure in the face of unimaginable suffering.
Eighty years on, we can read Levi’s book as a historic testament. However, we can also choose to study it as a textbook on resilience. For the premises that allowed Levi and his comrades to survive the reality of the Lager - without any means or authority out of sheer will to live - may still point us towards a humane life in our own times, despite the stark differences in age and context. Levi condensed the inhumane doctrine of the Lager into the cruel idea, "that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly." Levi's book serves as a handbook on how to resist this dangerously simplistic and all solidarity-denying rule. His book, therefore, can serve us as a primer for confronting the false primacy of the individual’s struggle against all others, as a primer to resist the draconic tyranny of victimhood and punishment, with however little life we have left.
You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, Without hair and without name With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold Like a frog in winter. Meditate that this came about: I commend these words to you. Carve them in your hearts, At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising; Repeat them to your children, Or may your house fall apart, May illness impede you, May your children turn their faces from you.[2]
II. Dignity is not bestowed but upheld
Perhaps the most significant misconception I’ve encountered in over twenty years of work is the distinction between what we are given and what we give ourselves. When I was 14, I heard Liam Neeson, portraying the 18th-century Scottish freedom fighter Rob Roy, declare: “Honor is what every man and woman give to themselves.” The words struck me to my core. I immediately asked myself: What is honor then, and how do I give it to myself? I found that the word honor only held value if I defined it according to my own terms. It became clear to me that an honorable life was one I had to define entirely for myself – not by following others, but by understanding my own nature and then attempting to honor it. Each step of the way.
This set me on a path I am still on more than thirty years later. Every day, asking myself: How do I not aspire to other people’s goals, but continue the struggle to settle into my own skin? To find the attitudes, the actions, and ways of being that I was meant to embody. Allowing myself to pursue this path, and then holding myself on it over decades, is what only I can give to myself. What I am being given, on the other hand, is for example a pay cheque. An employment contract. I am being given friendship, trust, community or a kiss. These things I cannot afford to myself, but I need others to find and fulfill them.
Under the conditions Levi faced at around twenty-five, any notion of honor had quickly faded – but not that of dignity. He describes one morning in the Lager as follows:
I must confess it: after only one week of prison, the instinct for cleanliness disappeared in me. I wander aimlessly around the washroom when I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude torso, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. Steinlauf sees me and greets me, and without preamble asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth. Does not Steinlauf know that after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference between him and me will have disappeared? The more I think about it, the more washing one’s face in our condition seems a stupid feat, even frivolous: a mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an extinct rite. We will all die, we are all about to die: if they give me ten minutes between the reveille and work, I want to dedicate them to something else, to draw into myself, to weigh up things, or merely to look at the sky and think that I am looking at it perhaps for the last time; or even to let myself live, to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.
But Steinlauf interrupts me. He has finished washing and is now drying himself with his cloth jacket which he was holding before wrapped up between his knees and which he will soon put on. And without interrupting the operation he administers me a complete lesson.
It grieves me now that I have forgotten his plain, outspoken words, the words of ex-sergeant Steinlauf of the Austro-Hungarian army, Iron Cross of the ’14–’18 war. It grieves me because it means that I have to translate his uncertain Italian and his quiet manner of speaking of a good soldier into my language of an incredulous man. But this was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.[3]
No matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, we never let hope vain entirely. As we learn from Levi and his encounter with former Sergeant Steinlauf, such an attitude has nothing to do with calculating probabilities, spiritual beliefs or even personal character. Instead, it is about the simple realization to value life under all circumstances and not to “begin to die”. Such an attitude is not expressed in grandiose gestures, but in precise routines and determined daily habits.
If Levi learnt to shower with cold dirty water without soap, what do you learn when it comes to defending yourself against hopelessness?
The answer, of course, is entirely and solely up to you. Still, I would like to offer you a few examples of how I try to utilize Levi’s life-affirming attitude for myself. No matter how bad or little I slept, I work out six times a week. At least every weekend I sit down to write, whether I find myself in the middle of a large book project or a blank screen lights up in front of me. More importantly, at least once per week I sit down for an hour and hold communion with my Holy Daimon; on bad weeks, I commit to doing this twice, Wednesdays and Sundays.
Washing with dirty water is the antidote to the poison of hopelessness, of bitterness, of getting lost in the onslaught of life’s adversities. Washing with dirty water does not have to make us clean, but it keeps us on a path that, at least outwardly, still gives life a chance. Every day anew. No matter how much reality wants to burn it in us that there is no more hope.
If you struggle with the words hope and discipline, try dignity. Steinlauf showed Levi the only possible way to hold on to their dignity - no matter how absurd or pitiful this might have appeared from the outside. Dignity, Steinlauf might have said to Levi, is what every man and every woman gives themselves. It is not bestowed but upheld. And he might have added: a single clean face defies a thousand chains.
Later in the book Levi expresses the same sentiment with regard to another fellow comrade; a doctor by the name Leonardo.
Three times, in three infirmary selections, he had been chosen to die in the gas chamber, and three times he had narrowly escaped his fate through the solidarity of his colleagues in office. However, besides good fortune, he also possessed another virtue essential for those places: an unlimited capacity for endurance, a silent courage, not innate, not religious, not transcendent, but deliberate and willed hour by hour, a virile patience, which sustained him miraculously to the very edge of collapse.[4]
Both Steinlauf and Leonardo imparted to the young inmate a lesson of utmost importance. Their teaching was not one of words, but of quiet, defiant deeds. Actions not of force or rebellion, but of silent self-assertion. In an age of tyranny then, Prometheus may not appear as the great liberator, but rather as the humble, unwavering one who persists, endlessly reaffirming their right to life – however little remains to connect them to it.
[to be continued]
Footnotes
[1] Four recent examples are: Frankl, Viktor E., Man's Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Press, 1959; Wiesel, Elie, Night, New York: Hill & Wang, 1960; Klemperer, Victor,* I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, New York: Random House, 1998; Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation*, London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1974.
[2] Levi, Primo, If This Is A Man/ The Truce, London: Abacus, 2014, p. 12
[3] Levi, 2014, p. 43-45
[4] Levi, 2014, p. 254
