The King in Orange
The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power
John Michael Greer
Inner Traditions 2021
Pb, 201pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781644112588
Donald Trump may be the ultimate anomalous phenomenon – at least for our age. How did an elderly American real estate and entertainment magnate, with baffling coiffure and no record in public service, rise to the level of what monarchist Buddhists once called a global wheel-turner, changing the course of empire? In their search for answers to that question, pundits of all stripes have been scouring fields from economics and psychology to criminology and theology for nearly five years. John Michael Greer, no stranger to the seemingly impenetrable, takes the explanatory path less travelled. The Trump phenomenon can never be understood, he says, without serious consideration of the role of magic in contemporary politics.
Greer is a leading figure in American intellectual and occult networks seeking alternatives to establishments both Left and Right. In this book he brings his eclectic powers to bear not so much on Trump as on the Trump supporter, finding shopworn tropes of racism, sexism and deplorableness neither illuminating nor true enough to account for the reality of the ballcap revolution. He draws his title from Robert W Chambers’s The King fantasy tales, his notion of magic’s political impact from Ioan Couliano’s , and his paradigm of civilisational conflict from Oswald Spengler’s .
