Her séances and mediumistic skills were so renowned she became president of the American Association of Spiritualists in 1871.
Woodhull so impressed the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt with her stock tips from the other world that he made her head of a Wall Street brokerage (the first run by women). They were also rumored to be lovers—he called her “Sparrow” and she called him “Old Goat.” When asked about how he became fantastically rich, he is reported to have said, “Do as I do. Consult the spirits.” 11
Vanderbilt helped Woodhull publish a weekly newspaper—one of the first run by women—in which she advocated for women’s suffrage, socialism, free love, vegetarianism, abolition of the death penalty, free education for every child, welfare for the poor, an eight-hour workday, labor unions, legalized prostitution, and birth control, among other radical ideas. “Free love” included the then-unheard-of notion that a woman should choose whom to marry and get divorced if she desired (and this in an era when women were supposed to be pure and sexless, and male doctors were performing clitoridectomies to rid women of the “dangers” of sexual arousal). The paper also did investigative journalism into corporate crime and published the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Woodhull ran for president in 1870 as a candidate for the politically progressive (and radical even for our era) Equal Rights party, which she helped organize, with the party nominating abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential candidate (Douglass, alas, was wary of Spiritualism and not on board with the idea). One only has to look at the blatant racism in response to Barack Obama’s election and the misogynistic attacks on Hillary Clinton to understand how mind-bogglingly radical the idea of a female president and a black, freed-slave vice-presidential candidate was in the late nineteenth century.
Woodhull was the second woman to address Congress, where she spoke for the suffragist cause to a nearly empty House Judiciary Committee (many of the committee members showed up late or not at all). One particularly appalled representative spoke up to say, “Madam, you are not a citizen.” Nonetheless, many newspaper reports noted the historical importance of her appearance and covered her arguments respectfully. 12
Her advocacy of free love put her at odds with other suffragette leaders, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The press ripped her apart, with cartoonists depicting her as a literal devil and earning her the nickname “Mrs. Satan.” She was referred to—not surprisingly—as a witch. Woodhull insisted on wearing pants and was told if she appeared in public wearing them, she would be summarily arrested. The ensuing notoriety threw her life into turmoil to the point where she had difficulty finding a place to rent in New York City.
Her exposé of the adulterous affairs of the respected preacher Henry Ward Beecher (shades of recent televangelist and GOP sex scandals) generated an intense backlash that got her arrested on trumped-up obscenity charges, bankrupted her, and ruined her reputation. The patriarchy had won.
She moved to England, where she spent the rest of her life as an expat, returning to the United States to again run for president in 1892. She died in 1927, but her powerful advocacy of liberalism, freedom, and social welfare was far ahead of her time—and still rings true for spiritual resisters today. She said in her speech “The Naked Truth”:
Free love means nothing more and nothing less, in kind, than free worship, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, free trade, free thought, freedom of locomotion (without a passport system), free schools, free government, and the hundred other precious, special systems of social freedom, which the great heroes of thought have fought for, and partially secured for the world, during this last period of the world’s growth and expansion. It is all one and the same thing, it is just freedom and nothing else. 13
Occultists versus Nazis
In the summer of 1940, with France defeated, Britain’s war with the Nazis was ramping up into what became known as the Battle of Britain. The United Kingdom was on high alert against a German invasion, with sentries posted along the coasts scanning the seas and skies for the expected onslaught of aircraft and ships. The country, having just watched the Miracle at Dunkirk, was prepared for the worst.
Also preparing for the invasion, according to the story told by one of their recent initiates, Gerald Gardner, was a group of witches known as the New Forest Coven. Gardner, who is now credited as the founder of modern Wicca, told the story of a magical working that became famously known as Operation Cone of Power.
As told in his 1954 book, Witchcraft Today, the witches of the New Forest Coven gathered on midnight on Lammas Eve 1940 to perform the ritual to cloud the minds of Hitler and the Nazi High Command and prevent them from crossing the English Channel and invading England. They danced naked (skyclad) in a forest clearing in Highcliff-by-the-Sea, raising a cone of magical energy that, when it reached its peak, was directed into the mind of Hitler along with the thoughts “You cannot cross the sea” and “Not able to come.” 14
“I am not saying they stopped Hitler,” Gardner writes. “All I can say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea into his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and though all the invasion barges were ready, the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come.” 15 He claimed the witches were replicating the spell their ancestors had used to repel Napoleon and Sir Francis Drake.
According to Gardner, the rite was so powerful that several of the older and more frail participants died of exhaustion in the ensuing days.16 Some have suggested those who died knew the ritual would kill them, but sacrificed themselves for the good of their country.
Although the veracity of the story has been questioned by some scholars, many feel that it is at least partially true. But a year earlier, another act of magical resistance targeted the Nazis. Although less famous than Gardner’s story, it was extensively documented. That working came to be called the Magical Battle of Britain and was led by the occultist Violet Firth, better known by her magical name, Dion Fortune.
In the aftermath of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, Dion Fortune, the leader of the occult Fraternity of the Inner Light (an order that sprang from the legendary Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), found that many of her members could no longer travel to take part in the group’s training and rituals. She began mailing out regular dispatches to her order with instructions on how to protect the country from Hitler’s invasion and support the Allied forces. According to The Magical Battle of Britain, Fortune removed the order’s rules of secrecy and opened the fraternity to anyone who wanted to join them, teaching formerly hidden techniques to create a “nucleus of trained minds” to resist Nazi Germany. 17
Letters were sent out every Wednesday with instructions for a meditation to be performed at 12:15 each Sunday, and every weekday thereafter. Subjects of these meditations included:
• Realization of the function of the Tide of Destruction in clearing the ground
• To assert the rule of law, absolute and inescapable
• The drawing down of spiritual power into the war effort
• The attack on the cloud of astral evil over Germany
Fortune’s method of resistance was to channel the will of the British people through powerful rituals, mantras, and meditations, as well as calling upon inner guides, angelic forces, and the spirits of Merlin, King Arthur, St. George, and Saint Michael. As she wrote in one of her dispatches: “Let us meditate upon angelic Presences, red-robed and armed, patrolling the length and breadth of our land. Visualise a map of Great Britain, and picture these great Presences moving as a vast shadowy form along the coasts, and backwards and forwards from north to south and east to west, keeping watch and ward so that nothing alien can move unobserved.” 18
Fortune’s group—separated in time and space, as many are today, and connected through their own postal social network—p
ersisted in their magical resistance even as bombs rained down on London. She continued to teach and initiate members into her fraternity and died a few months after Churchill declared victory in Europe.
Hexing Hitler
In 1941, Richard W. Tupper, a young American worker at a naval factory, sent a letter to author and occultist William Seabrook, author of Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, inquiring about how to hex Hitler. “Some mumbo jumbo and doll magic might help pass the longer winter evenings,” Tupper wrote. “And the movement might grow to tremendous proportions and end up successfully, if Hitler learns that thousands of people are hexing him.” 19
The delighted Seabrook sent complete instructions on how to christen a doll as Hitler, sing “vicious, repetitive, singsong doggerel” incantations, and stick it with needles, nails, and pins.20 He also suggested copious consumption of alcohol (Seabrook was a notorious alcoholic).
Seabrook explained that it didn’t matter if people took it seriously. The key was to have as many people perform the ritual, and to make Hitler aware that they were doing it.
Tupper began holding weekly hexing sessions, gathering with twenty of his friends after dinner and cursing Hitler until midnight. The girls, he said, made the best witches.
The group, which included Birdseye frozen food heiress Florence Birdseye and a number of government employees, sent an invitation for Seabrook to join them at a Maryland cabin. Seabrook was never one to turn down a good party, so on a wet January evening he joined the group at a cabin in the woods to perform the curse. A LIFE magazine reporter and photographer came along to document the evening and to make sure Hitler found out about it.
Inside the cabin the scene was surreal. A dressmaker’s dummy was clothed in a Nazi uniform, its face painted with a Hitler mustache. Nearby were log seats (a nod to Haitian customs), boxes of nails, axes, rattles, and many bottles of Jamaican rum. Tom-tom drums had been borrowed from the Department of the Interior. Several of the participants dressed up in robes as the rum was passed around for an hour before the ritual began.
Finally, the dressing dummy was baptized. “You are Hitler; Hitler is you!” the group chanted. Then “Chief Hexer” Ted Caldwell, dressed in an animal-skin, intoned the ritual Seabrook had written: “The woes that come to you, let them come to him. The death that comes to you, let it come to him!” 21
The other participants then took turns hammering spikes into Hitler’s heart. The Chief Hexer then led the group in a call-and-response chant: “Hitler, you are the enemy of man and the world .… We curse you by every tear and drop of blood you have caused to flow. We curse you with the curses of all who have cursed you.” The crowd responded: “We curse you!” 22
At the ritual’s climax, the Great Death Ouanga (Haitian Creole word for a charm), the participants invoked the dark god Istan, asking him to send cats to claw out Hitler’s heart and dogs to eat it. With each repetition of the curse, they drove more nails and needles into Hitler.
Finally, Hitler was decapitated by Tupper (his honor as the party organizer) and buried by the drunk, exhausted hexers in the woods. LIFE captured the entire party and published photos and a cheeky account on February 10, 1941. Seabrook had asked the reporter to publish the detailed ritual description and photos so that readers could hold their own Hitler hexing parties at home. They didn’t need a life-sized dummy, he explained. Any small, inexpensive doll would work.
The United States joined the war less than a year later, and Hitler wasn’t dead until 1945. The Hex Hitler party was largely forgotten. I didn’t even know about it when I created the Trump binding spell in 2017, and I was shocked at the parallels when I discovered it in my research.
William Seabrook committed suicide in 1945 (as did Hitler), but I have to think somewhere he is enjoying the rise of resistance magic over seventy-five years after his unforgettable party in the Maryland woods.
Levitating the Pentagon:
Radical Magic in the Sixties and Seventies
As has been extensively chronicled, the 1960s was a decade fueled by the struggle for civil rights, the rise of feminism, revolutionary politics, radical social movements, environmentalism, youthful rebellion, and rejection of the middle-class American Dream. It was a heady time of expanded consciousness, with a counterculture dropping acid, demonstrating in the streets against the Vietnam War, blissing out to Eastern yogis, promoting free love, and embracing everything esoteric, magical, and occult. As the popular song from the musical Hair declared, it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and with it came a renewed interest in the mystical and spiritual dimensions of political action.
On October 21, 1967, as the legendary Summer of Love was fading into fall, a hundred thousand protesters—the largest peace demonstration of its time—descended upon Washington, DC, for a march against the Vietnam War. There was the usual rally with speakers and musicians at the Lincoln Memorial, but Jerry Rubin, one of the protest’s organizers, had pushed for more direct action: shutting down the Pentagon.
Rubin and another soon-to-be Yippie leader, Abbie Hoffman, had wanted to do something different, something that would shake up what was becoming the normal routine of marching and protesting. So after the rally ended, they, along with poet Allen Ginsberg, pediatrician Dr. Spock, the rock group the Fugs, and thirty-five thousand of the more radical protesters marched across the Arlington Memorial Bridge for a planned rendezvous at ground zero of the military-industrial complex: the Pentagon.
Their goal? To ritually exorcise the Pentagon by levitating the building three hundred feet in the air.
Hoffman had visited the Pentagon the month earlier with artist Martin Carey to determine how many people it would take to surround the massive building (twelve hundred, by their estimate). They were carrying pamphlets, which got them arrested for littering. When they were brought before a general services administrator, Hoffman requested a permit to levitate the Pentagon three hundred feet. He explained how they planned to chant the exorcism in Aramaic, after which the building would rise, turn orange, and vibrate until all evil energies were dissipated. The war would end.
After some discussion, the permit was granted—but only allowing the building to be raised ten feet. Hoffman relented, and the charges against the two were dropped.
After the protesters crossed the bridge they were met in the Pentagon parking lot by twenty-five hundred federal troops, many with guns at the ready, while riflemen stood along the roof and helicopters buzzed overhead. A few hippies placed flowers into the guards’ rifle barrels. Others attempted multiple times to breach the armed barrier and were beaten with rifle butts, arrested, and dispersed with tear gas. Rubin, Hoffman, and crew had brought along the hippie version of tear gas, a hallucinogenic purple liquid they called lysergic acid crypto ethylene (LACE), allegedly brewed by legendary acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Whoever it contacted, Hoffman claimed, would take off their clothes, begin kissing those around them, and make love. (It was actually harmless disappearing ink from Taiwan.)
If the levitation failed, Hoffman said, “We will dye the Potomac red, burn the cherry trees, panhandle embassies, attack with water pistols, marbles, bubble gum wrappers, bazookas, girls will run naked and piss on the Pentagon walls, sorcerers, swamis, witches, voodoo, warlocks, medicine men and speed freaks will hurl their magic at the faded brown walls .… We will dance and sing and chant the mighty OM. We will fuck on the grass and beat ourselves against the doors. Everyone will scream ‘VOTE FOR ME.’ We shall raise the flag of nothingness over the Pentagon and a mighty cheer of liberation will echo through the land.” 23
As they gathered at the Pentagon, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and the Fugs, along with several hundred participants, began to chant and sing. Fugs member Ed Sanders had written the “exorgasm” ritual: “In the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis … in the name of the lives of the dead soldiers in Vietnam … in the name of Sea-borne Aphrodite … in the name of Diony
sus, Zagreus, Jesus, Iao Sabaoth, Yahweh the Unnamable … we call upon the Spirits to Raise the Pentagon from its Destiny and Preserve it. In the naaaaame—in all the names! Out, Demons, out!” 24
Unfortunately no one—at least no one who wasn’t tripping on 250 micrograms of LSD—saw the Pentagon rise. But the crazed surreality of the ritual was a direct response to the surreal horrors of the disastrous war in Vietnam. It became legendary and led to the formation of the prankish, guerrilla theater activist group known as the Youth International Party, or Yippies. Their later stunt—throwing handfuls of fake one-dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—also earned them a place in the history of creative protest.
As Jerry Rubin wrote in the Berkeley Barb: “The worst thing you can say about a demonstration is that it is boring, and one of the reasons that the peace movement has not grown into a mass movement is that the peace movement—its literature and its events—is a bore. Good theatre is needed to communicate revolutionary content.” 25
Keep his words in mind, magical activists, because they are as true now as they were then.
WITCH: Women’s International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell
A group of radical feminists took inspiration from the creative, shocking political theater of the Yippies. When New York Radical Women split over tactical disagreements, several of the members formed WITCH, or Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Their inaugural action took place on Halloween, 1968, when the members, dressed in stereotypical witch garb, marched to Wall Street to hex the financial district.
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