Demonic Democrats

Wallowing in Watergate, Part Two

In my last post I talked about watching the HBO series White House Plumbers and my mixed emotions about the casting of Woody Harrelson as E. Howard Hunt. (I did not mention Justin Theroux and his pitch perfect depiction of G. Gordon Liddy, worth the price of admission alone.)

But I neglected to talk about another aspect of E. Howard Hunt, one that would have made the previous article too long, but I am taking the liberty of including it here.

Hunt was a published author, with over 70 published books to his credit, most of which were fiction.  That alone is an astonishing record, regardless of the quality or general acceptance of his work by the literary world.  In fact, various literary lights – such as Gore Vidal, in a lengthy article in the New York Review of Books and Sol Yurick in The New York Times – analyzed Hunt’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate affair, sometimes as an opportunity for snark or at best motivated by a desire to understand the most enigmatic character in the events that brought down a President.

I won’t go into any kind of literary analysis here, for which the reader may consider themselves grateful, but I do want to pick out a few titles in particular because they prefigure everything from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s to today’s Pizzagate and QAnon: Hunt’s occult novels.

Yes, the Watergate Plumber and CIA action officer involved in the Bay of Pigs operation, in assassination plots against Castro, and who possibly haunted Dealey Plaza in November 1963, also published three occult novels from 1969 to 1972.  Previously, most of his fiction consisted of either detective yarns or spy novels that were obviously inspired by the works of Ian Fleming: the British spy-turned-novelist who created the James Bond character (and who was, himself, no stranger to occultism).  In fact, Hunt claimed that Richard Helms (then Director of CIA) tasked him with creating an American version of James Bond to improve CIA’s reputation at home and abroad, and Hunt happily complied.  But at the end of that creative writing spree there were those three last novels published under a pseudonym (after Watergate, his novels all bore his real name) that focused on occultism (or as Hunt imagined occultism to be).  In each case, the occultists were “Satanic” in the popular understanding of the term: there were the inevitable orgies, naked rituals involving some form of blood sacrifice, incantations to alien gods, hypnotic drums, drugs, oh …and the cultists were either Democrats or Communists. Or both.  Usually both.  And, by the way, there was a distinct racial component to Hunt’s depiction of them as enemies of the State.

The first of Hunt’s three occult novels, The Sorcerers, was published in 1969 and begins as a normal spy novel with the Soviets as enemies, and a plot involving a diplomat’s missing daughter.  The hero – Peter Ward – knows that the daughter is being used to blackmail the diplomat into working with the Russians, so he has to find the daughter and rescue her from the opposition. So far, so good.  But then Ward discovers that the daughter has been in Paris (for Hunt, the capital city of devil worshipers, as we shall see) and was mixed up with Satanists and ritual magic.  Evidently, this particular cult was actually created by the KGB as a magnet for disaffected youth, who could be turned against Christianity and the West by replacing both with Satan. 

Remember that those times were critical; the previous year in the United States saw the fallout from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, etc., while Europe was a tinderbox with massive anti-war protests and demonstrations in … Paris. In order to thwart this fiendish plot, Peter Ward infiltrates the cult during a Black Mass (shades of J-K. Huysmans and Là Bas, which by the way also is invoked in the novel) as well as a Communist training facility off the coast of Africa which also just happens to be part of the cult’s network, and which features an attack by spear-wielding “natives.”  I kid you not.

The second occult novel, Diabolus, published in 1971, centers on Voudon and the murder of Ward’s housekeeper.  In this case Peter Ward is vacationing on an estate somewhere in the Caribbean.  (Another nod to Ian Fleming.) This island is also home to a number of mysterious Chinese, which becomes relevant later.  Once again, our hero travels to Paris where yet another cult is operating, but this time it isn’t the KGB behind it but a radical French Maoist working for the Chinese (the “Chicoms” to be exact). As before, a damsel is rescued from the clutches of the devil-worshiping, Communist, interracial cult.  Sexual intercourse ensues.

In Hunt’s occult novels, people of color are depicted in a sadly predictable way, as are women in general.  And all are assumed to be weak reeds, easily manipulated by the Communists and the Demonolaters for ulterior motives.  The anti-war movement is part of the devil-worshipers’ enterprise.  There is a global effort to unseat Western white male Christian hegemony, as far as Hunt is concerned, and in that effort occultists and Communists join forces and include the youth movement, Black Power, Latin American and African revolutionary movements, and women’s liberation as well. Hunt has it in for everybody.  And we can see how his ideas evolved in the late ‘Sixties to include occultism and esoterica.  It almost had to. 

Let’s face it: leftist political meetings in the 1960s were dreary, boring, contentious affairs that focused on the minutiae of Marxist thought and Robert’s Rules of Order.  One three-hour long after-school SDS meeting was enough to turn anybody into a radical terrorist and not in a good way.  Occultism was interesting, gaudy, sinister; replete with symbol systems that could be manipulated to mean anything you wanted them to.  There was ritual, incense, candles, occasional nudity … and sex.  Communism was red flags, posters of Che or Mao, endless political discussions where everyone forgot the point, and the printing of countless, countless flyers. Okay, and sex:  but, of course, only as a means of cementing loyalty to the Revolution. (!)

Satan, on the other hand, was sexy.  Virile.  Inordinately powerful. A Bond villain.  Indeed, Le Chiffre – Ian Fleming’s very first Bond villain – was patterned after Aleister Crowley himself. Fleming had met Crowley during World War II when British intelligence toyed with the idea of using Crowley’s contacts in Europe against the Nazis. So, the idea of mixing occultism with politics and intelligence operations was nothing new.

Let’s take a closer look at The Coven as an example. It was the last of Hunt’s three occult novels, published in 1972, under one of Hunt’s several noms-de-plume: David St. John.  (St. John, it will be remembered from White House Plumbers, is the given name of Hunt’s eldest son.  For what it’s worth, it was also the name of Kim Philby’s father. You remember: Kim Philby was the Soviet mole inside MI5, British intelligence. David is the name of Hunt’s youngest son.) 

The Coven centers on the first-person narrative of Jonathan Gault, a lawyer who is investigating the murder of a beautiful young Black singer.  The main suspects are Senator Vane and his sophisticated wife, both characters loosely but unmistakably based on the Kennedys.  In 1972 both Jack and Bobby had already been assassinated and brother Ted’s presidential ambitions sank with his car when it went over the Chappaquiddick bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne still in it. But the Kennedy family remained a bugaboo for Hunt, a symbol of all that is evil about America. To reinforce that symbol, he throws in a cult that is something of a mixture of Afro-Caribbean religion and, again, popular ideas about Satanism. 

“Jonathan Gault” is an obvious reference to John Galt, of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, surely a tome whose message of libertarian individuality and disdain for the (socialistic, communistic) masses would have been attractive to Hunt. But there are even more sly references. 

The police officer conducting the homicide investigation is Ray Untermeyer. 

Aficionados of the Son of Sam mystery will recognize the name as suggestive of Samuel Untermeyer, after whom a park in Yonkers is named.  Sam Untermeyer was a fervent anti-Nazi and a Democrat politico, yet his park is where members of the purported Sam cult would meet and sacrifice dogs to Satan.  Maury Terry, in his The Ultimate Evil, the book connecting the Son of Sam to Charles Manson and a string of other murders from coast to coast, linked Untermeyer with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: that venerable British occult lodge that would eventually give birth to Aleister Crowley. I could not find proof of this connection, although the Golden Dawn did have two or three lodges in the United States around the time of the First World War.  It should be noted that the Son of Sam murders would not take place for another five years after the publication of The Coven, although the stories of weird scenes at Untermeyer were around before then.  Had Hunt any knowledge of Untermeyer’s involvement in occultism that might explain including a reference to the unusual name in this particular novel.

However, the Manson murders had taken place in 1969 (when Hunt’s first occult novel, The Sorcerers, was published) and the connection of the Manson Family to various occult and esoteric groups in and around San Francisco and Southern California at the time was well-known, as well as rumors that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were friends of Bobby Kennedy.  Bobby actually had his last meal at the home of Hollywood producer John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate … I know, I know: a little on the nose, but true nonetheless) at which Polanski and Tate were guests.  He was assassinated later that evening. The LAPD cell where accused Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan was held became Charles Manson’s new home after his own arrest for the Tate/LaBianca killings a year later.  Sirhan’s notebook revealed that he had attended meetings of the Theosophical Society and the Rosicrucians.  Manson himself was sentenced for his murders in March 1971: the year before The Coven was published, and ignoring the fact that President Nixon had famously declared that Manson was guilty while the trial was still ongoing (which could have caused a mistrial but didn’t). There is every reason to believe that these events inspired some of the paranoia concerning murderous cults that inform Hunt’s novel, but the political angle – Democrats in league with cultists and Devil worshipers – is purely Hunt’s own.

Hunt was an anti-communist crusader with impeccable credentials. Where Gordon Liddy was all talk – and a lot of it – wrapped in Teutonic bluster and Nazi aesthetic, Hunt had been running operations all over Latin America in the days when CIA was “Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean”, to quote Lyndon Johnson.  Hunt had helped overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala as part of the CIA operation known as PBSUCCESS and was instrumental in setting up the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  When that invasion failed spectacularly, Hunt – along with many Cubans – blamed President Kennedy directly, especially as the political fallout from the invasion impacted his own career.  Kennedy – and, by extension, the Democratic Party – became the target of Hunt’s hatred.  Thus, his identification with both Richard Nixon – who hated the Kennedys as much as Hunt did – and the conservative Republican cause. 

Hunt’s particular contribution to this “demonization” of the Democrats, however, was to go full Dennis Wheatley on their ass, and put them center-stage in a cult that mixed Voudon with European-style magic and even Wicca.  At one point in The Coven, during an orgiastic ritual, the high priestess of the cult screams out “Agrippa! … Sasa, Xilka, Iyouel, Legba, Nahema, Obatala, Malia, Damkina, Biscar!...”  Now, no ritual magician would ever shout “Agrippa” which is just the name of the author of the famous Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cornelius Agrippa.  But Legba and Obatala are familiar names to those who study Afro-Caribbean religions, except they would not be invoked that way in a ritual.  Interestingly, “Sasa” (i.e., Sasha) and “Malia” are the names of President Obama’s daughters …!  (Steady … steady … Malia would be born in 1998 and Sasha in 2001.  In 1972, when The Coven was published, Barack Obama himself was only 11 years old and, obviously, his daughters had not yet been born.)

“Xilka” is interesting, as it appears in the Necronomicon (the Simon version) as the incantation “Xilka Xilka Besa Besa” from the section entitled “Maqlu Text”, but the Necronomicon wasn’t published until 1977: five years after The Coven.  (Did Hunt have access to an earlier copy?  Nah, sorry to disappoint but it was a well-known incantation that had appeared in a number of other published sources since at least the nineteenth century.)

“Iyouel” appears in several places as a banishing spell, connected to King Solomon. 

“Nahema” appears as a demon of impurity and is possibly identical to the Naahma mentioned in the Zohar and other places as a female demon.

“Damkina” is a venerable Assyrian or Babylonian goddess, a consort of Enki.

“Biskar” is anyone’s guess.

Now all of this is intriguing and may be suggestive of some kind of “sinister force” operating just behind and below conscious appreciation, but there is a problem with this association of magic and occultism with the Democrats and by extension with some fantasy of Satanic socialists and communists, and that is – generally speaking – one doesn’t find many occultists operating within a socialist or communist milieu.  One remembers that Marx and Engels famously declared that “religion is the opiate of the people” and that the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China were both famously based on Marxist dialectical materialism and the rejection of religion in all its forms.  If religion is the opiate of the people, then – from a Marxist perspective – occultism is crystal meth.

As Theodor Adorno famously pointed out in the immediate postwar period, it is fascism that is fascinated (ahem) with occultism.  We saw that with Nazism, certainly, but also with the military junta in Greece, with the right-wing Argentine government under Isabel Peron, and with the Nazi occultist and diplomat Miguel Serrano in Chile. You don’t find much occultism in leftist movements as they tend to be much more pragmatic.  Even with the Putin regime in Russia, you have the spectacle of occultist philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin praising selected Nazis, such as Reinhard Heydrich.  And, anyway, can you imagine Che Guevara conducting occult ceremonies in the Sierra Maestra?  Or Lenin invoking Satan in 1917?  But there were occultists in Munich in 1919, such as the Thule Gesellschaft, that gave rise to the Nazi Party. And then there was the SS and the Ahnenerbe program. Archaeological digs in the Middle East.  Expeditions to Tibet. The friggin’ swastika.

So, for Hunt to accuse the Democrats of being occultists was a little like the cauldron calling the kettle black.  But, barring invoking Jewish bankers or international Freemasons, characterizing Democrats as devil worshiping human sacrificers was the next best thing.  The emotional impact of the characterization is hard to ignore.  Hunt knew he didn’t like communists or socialists or any group smacking of leftist sentiments, but he didn’t have the capacity (or most likely the desire) for arguing for his position in a poli-sci kinda way that would be appetizing to the kind of reader who favors espionage pot-boilers. Associating his ideological enemy with devil worship and human sacrifice was a short-hand, dog-whistle way of avoiding a direct anti-Semitic smear but also profiting from the “guilt by association” technique.  People were ready to associate the political party they hated with something else that seemed weird and ugly and dangerous.  The communists in Russia and China were anti-religion; the Democrats in the United States worshiped the Devil.  Same thing, right?

And then …

The Exorcist was published in 1971, and the film version released in 1973, making the Devil a reality in the minds of many people, even those who had previously been agnostic.  According to the proponents of what would become the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare, there were Satanic cults everywhere, and they were murdering infants in unholy rituals to that same Devil.  There was no immediate political association being made, however, but there was the assumption that some of these rites were being carried out under the auspices of US government programs.  This was also the period of the Congressional committees – such as the Rockefeller Commission (1975) – that were investigating CIA’s “mind control” operations, investigations that were being carried out in the wake of the Watergate revelations.  It was easy to blend the US government’s interest in drugs, hypnosis, “depatterning” and “psychic driving”, with ritual magic and devil worship to create this overarching narrative of government agents performing experiments on children in order to create robot assassins: a theme that was picked up and amplified by a number of popular books, films, and television series and which reached its apotheosis in the Netflix series Stranger Things but which was prefigured in Dark Angel, a series that starred a young Jessica Alba (2000-2002) and in Hanna (2011) starring Soairse Ronan, and many others.  And, indeed, in Hunt’s occult novels drugs are used as mind control tools by both sides in the Cold War conflict – both CIA and KGB and Chinese PSB – as well as by the cultists themselves.

Saigon fell in 1975.  One of the Manson Family members – Squeaky Fromme – attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford a few months later. In the late 1970s, there was the Son of Sam murder spree and the persistent hint of satanic cults behind them, including references to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, an offshoot of Scientology that was incorporated in New Orleans by Tommy Jude Baumler, who had worked in Guy Banister’s office back in the day when Lee Oswald haunted its halls with his old CAP squadron leader and occult aficionado, David Ferrie.  (Charles Manson also had been interviewed by the Process in the 1960s, so there was that.)

Then there was Jonestown, and the Cult Awareness Network was born in its wake and later taken over by … Scientology: a system that was created by a man who had conjured spirits in the desert with rocket scientist Jack Parsons, and who once claimed to have known Aleister Crowley himself. (Not true, but …)

December 1980 saw the assassination of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman, who claimed he was possessed by the Devil.  Or by J.D. Salinger.  Or both.

And then, in the 1980s, the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare reached full flower.  There was the infamous Geraldo Rivera television episode.  The McMartin School scandal. “Cult cops.”  And the insistence that there were generational satanic cults operating in the United States, responsible for hundreds … no thousands … no millions of sacrificed infants every year.  The enormous impossibility of all of that became apparent after a long, long while and the scare seemed to die down, at least for a few years.  And then …

By 2016, the theme had reached fever pitch.  The “US government” had become “the Deep State”, and its operatives were George Soros-type world government gurus as well as the Democratic Party (since Soros – a Jewish financier, wink wink – donated to liberal causes).  Democrats – notably Hillary Clinton and John Podesta – were conducting satanic rituals in the basements of Washington DC pizzerias (!) in order to harvest adrenochrome and thus gain immortality.  Or something. (Thank you, Hunter S. Thompson, you beautiful lunatic.) This would have been vintage E. Howard Hunt had he lived long enough to appreciate it. (He didn’t; he died in 2007.)  No one stopped to wonder why people like Clinton and Podesta with the considerable resources at their disposal would have risked performing murderous satanic rites in a pizzeria in downtown DC when they easily could have conducted elaborate rituals in any of the other properties in the States and around the world that they either owned or had access to.

And, of course, there was no basement at Comet Ping-Pong anyway.  So, the infant sacrifices would have had to take place on the astral plane.  Or something.

And let’s not forget that infant sacrifice was a key element in the blood libel that had been used for centuries to vilify the Jews, the story being that Jews needed the blood of Christian babies for their Seders. It was one of those hideous inventions that were so intense and insane that many people thought they had to be true.  Like Hitler’s “Big Lie” theory: people were more likely to believe an outlandish lie than a small one.  After all, small lies are easily disproven; big ones, not so much.

Oddly, the QAnon/Pizzagate/child sacrifice scare never seemed to involve Republicans. As weird as the story is, it is divided cleanly along party lines.  It’s only Democrats who are believed to conduct dark rituals and murder innocents. The CIA’s mind control efforts – beginning with Bluebird in 1950 and extending through MK-ULTRA in the 1970s – were conducted under both types of administrations, Democrat and Republican.  Richard Helms, a hero to E. Howard Hunt, was a firm supporter of MK-ULTRA until it was better not to be, and he ordered the files shredded before the Rockefeller Commission could get their hands on them.  (Some files escaped the destruction, which is how we know about it today.) 

But is it possible that one political party would have the monopoly on Devil worship? What is it about Democrats and the Democratic Party that allows some people to assume the worst?

The much-vaunted Democrat support for diversity may be at the heart of the problem.  If one celebrates diversity then one cannot remain ideologically “pure”. To be agreeable and “inclusive” is to be wishy-washy and morally corrupt.  There is simply no room for nuance in today’s political climate.  Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer, leaves no room for diversity.  It’s all Hatfields and McCoys.  Or Übermenschen and Untermenschen. With demons.

The QAnon crowd is basically Traditionalist.  They despise modernity.  They don’t trust science because something, something, evolution and something, something vaccines. They believe in a Golden Age (somewhere in the early 1950s) when the races knew their place, gays were closeted, and there was no kissing on television.  It was, after all, the last era in which the United States had actually won a shooting war. 

We saw what happened when Germany lost World War One:  they had to find someone to blame. And they blamed all the usual suspects:  Jews, bankers, international conspiracies, Berlin nightclubs, Freemasons.  When occultist Rudolf Hess flew to England to negotiate a peace deal on his own so that Germany could invade Russia without worrying about fighting on another front, Hitler went and banned all the occult lodges. 

Today one doesn’t have to talk about “Jewish bankers” the way Hitler did; one only has to invoke the name of George Soros. We still hear invocations of Democrats as Socialists or Communists, equating both with Devil worship, even though the Soviet Union fell 30 years ago, and Communism in China is barely recognizable today, to the extent that evoking Communism as a viable threat seems somewhat antique. (But hey, Archbishop Vigano, right-wing demagogue of the Catholic Church, still blames Freemasonry for everything, so there’s that.)  That there is no logic to the equation of Communism = Occultism is immaterial.  Both are presumed evil, so the polemical shorthand says they must be identical.  Even though the first is stridently materialistic and anti-religion and the latter is concerned with spirits and demons.  It doesn’t have to make sense.  It just has to sound cool.  It’s a live action role playing game, and we are all players.

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On June 19^th, 1972, two days after the Watergate break-in, as Hunt, Liddy and the Cubans are all arrested along with Jim McCord and Frank Sturgis, Time magazine’s cover that week was of a black hood-wearing cultist with an inverted pentagram and the title “The Occult Revival,” and the sub-title “Satan Returns.” 

You can’t make this stuff up. 

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Bonus round:

Towards the end of The Coven there is a session in which Madame Zilka (named after the Xilka of the incantation) performs a banishing ritual.  She shouts, in French, “Sasa, Lilith, Obayife, allez, allez! Delonge toi de la!”  Yes, it was a little disconcerting to come across the name of Ufology’s most prominent rock star in this context.  Delonge toi de la means “Get far from here.”  I know there’s a lyric there, somewhere.

A few pages later on, in a description of yet another ritual, there is the sacrifice of a “black pullet” by the indefatigable Madame Zilka.  I had forgotten this reference long before I wrote my own translation of Le poule noire (a grimoire or magician’s workbook, called The Black Pullet in English) in the 1990s and published it on amazon only a few weeks ago. I imagine this was Hunt’s way of including another occult reference, since “pullet” is itself a rather rare word in common parlance and Hunt was man of rare words.

And so it goes.