Long before the advent of modern democratic republics, the world was ruled by priests, kings, and in some cases, priest-kings. To our ancestors in the ancient world, government had a religious ritual significance. It was the Pharaoh of Egypt who literally made the Sun rise and set each day, or so they believed. The Aztecs thought that the human sacrifices performed by the priesthood were staving off the world’s inevitable destruction. In Europe, the divine right of kings dictated that the monarch was literally the connection between the body politic and God in Heaven, and that through his or her actions, God’s will was represented.

Even as the Age of Enlightenment caused philosophical reason to trump superstition, bringing constitutional monarchy, and eventually, representative government, these beliefs and traditions simply became sublimated and took on new forms. The philosophers of the day may no longer have professed a belief in magic, but it was never lost by those who pilot the ship of state. Belief in the spiritual power of political structures instead became the purview of those who study the occult.

“Occult” is merely a word that means “that which is hidden,” that which goes unnoticed by the average man. It is no secret that many of the most powerful men and women throughout the last several hundred years of history have been members of secret societies that continue these occult traditions, and had blood lineages that can be traced back to the royal families of Europe. Not all of them are consciously aware of the traditions that they are actively continuing, but that is nonetheless what they are doing.

What we mean specifically by ritual magic is to “cause change to occur in conformity with the will” through means that are beyond the merely physical. Ritual magic is all about creating artificial mental constructs and then forcing them to have an impact on reality by infusing belief and spiritual energy into them. The constructs then take on a life of their own and reality begins to mirror them. This is called “sympathetic magic”, in which the desired outcome of the ritual is mimicked in some way, as is the case with a voodoo doll. In this process, written documents and diagrams become part of the “software” that governs how the program of the magic ritual is supposed to work. A good example of how this works can be found in Ezekiel Chapter 4, where God instructs the prophet to draw a map of Jerusalem on a tile and then act upon it in various ways in order to cause certain things to happen to the real Jerusalem. Each day that he lay upon his side during the ritual resulted in an equivalent number of years of punishment for the profligate kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

The way in which the hymns and ritual diagrams function as the “software’ on which the magic of the ritual operates is similar to the function performed by the written law in any society, as the Tablets of the Law did to the ancient Israelites. Those Tablets were placed inside of a ritual coffer (the Ark of the Covenant) and made into the centerpiece of the ritual, the altar upon which the sacrifices were made. The priests treated the Ark as if it actually contained the body of their God. This is because the Law acted as their primary bond with their deity.

To this day, legal, political, and financial systems, as well as the institutions that govern them, are all made up of imaginary ideas that we as a society make real by playing along. Indeed, the word “reality” comes from the root word “real”, which means “royal”, because historically the monarch defined truth within his own “realm.” Reality was whatever the king or queen said it was.

Even in modern times with our modern “secular” government, the functions of government, and the exercise of sovereignty, and largely ritual practices that get their power from their spiritual significance in the minds of men. Whether they know it or not, people in government and other powerful institutions are actually practicing ritual magic. Kingship and sovereignty, worship and priesthood, money, and laws governing commerce can all be traced back to the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians and Babylonians were very clear in their records stating that these institutions were handed down to them directly by their gods, and that legal contracts were believed to have spiritual power. Indeed, most religious rituals in the ancient world, as in the modern practice of ritual magic, involve the forming of a contract or covenant between the deity and the priesthood. In ancient times, the priests made deals with the gods and spirits on behalf of the entire community.

A deity whose symbolism was associated with the very idea of a divine contract was Mithras, whose cult flourished in Rome from the 1st to 4th centuries AD, but was based on the older tradition of Persian Zoroastrianism. Mithras was known as the “god of contracts”, and was attributed with having invented the legal system. People would invoke him as a witness when drawing up a contract of any sort between two parties, and it was believed that he would punish severely all those who broke their contracts. These deals would be sealed with a handshake, which, according to mythology, was another invention of Mithras, first taught by him to mankind when he was inducting priests into his cult. In these rites, the initiates were made to shake the hand of Mithras (usually played in the ritual by another cult member), as a seal of the pact between the inductee and his new teacher, referred to in the ritual by the nickname “the Friend.” Many aspects of this ritual were absorbed into the rites of Freemasonry.

A standard belief among those who practice ritual magic is that the spirit world is subject unto man, and commanded by God to do the bidding of qualified priests and magicians, as are all of the creatures of Earth. This stems from Genesis 1:28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Furthermore, traditions based on both biblical and extra-biblical lore tell of the angels that fell from Heaven being imprisoned in the Earth, and that they can be called upon by men when needed.

Koranic tradition states that Satan and the fallen angels rebelled because God tried to make them bow down to Adam, and they refused. After being defeated in the War in Heaven, many occult practitioners believe that the spirits were bound with a duty to serve man. Islamic legends of King Solomon enslaving the demon Asmodeus for help building the Temple derive from this belief. Commonly, it is thought that you can control a god, demon, or spirit of any sort if you know and can pronounce its “true name.” When you call upon them thusly they are compelled to answer. As Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess:

“In ancient times, once a god’s secret name had been discovered, the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it. The Romans made a regular practice of discovering the secret names of enemy gods and summoning them to Rome with seductive promises, a process technically known as ‘elicio’ … Naturally, the Romans, like the Jews, hid the secret name of their own guardian deity with extraordinary care.”

It is also possible to graft a new name onto the spirit, supposedly, and oblige it to answer to this substitute name instead. While the dominion of the children of Adam over the fallen angels is based on a covenant supposedly made in Adam’s time, it is customary for those “trafficking” with spirits to form further agreements with them, promising them rewards in exchange for their services.

But in addition to forming contracts with existing entities in the spirit world, there are many legends dealing with the artificial creation of servants through spiritual means. Just as God created Adam from clay and breathed into him the “breath of life”, in the Jewish mystic tradition of the Golem, human priests can do the same. However, in this case, the golem is more of a robot, kind of mindless. All it knows how to do is what the priest programmed it to do.

The golem is animated when the word “Emet” (“Life”) is written upon its forehead, and deactivated when the “E” is erased to leave the word “Met” (“Death”). Golems can be made of any inanimate material, even dead bodies. The art of reanimating a corpse through magic is specifically called “necromancy.” The Frankenstein story is based on a myth about a Jewish doctor who created a golem out of various human body parts stitched together.

These golem legends date to the medieval period. However, the Old Testament talks about rogue Levite priests who created “Teraphim”, which were human heads that were animated through magic and used for oracular purposes. Supposedly the teraph was animated when a scrap of parchment containing magic words was placed inside of its mouth.

Later on, medieval alchemists created the concept of the “Homunculus.” The word literally means “little man,” and using the alchemical process, you could allegedly create one that would actually germinate as a fetus and then grow into a baby right there in your flask! From that point on, the Homunculus is bound as your servant and can assist you in the rest of your alchemical works, including the creation of gold. The Homunculus plays a key role in the story of Faust, the character who made a pact with the Devil in exchange for the service of the demon Mephistopheles in his alchemical quest for riches and wisdom.

The most modern incarnation of this concept is that of the “Servitor” in “Chaos magick,” an occult tradition with its origin in the 20th century. This is basically very similar to the concept of the “imaginary friend.” It’s a fictional person that you create, usually just by making up a name, drawing a hieroglyph to represent it, and drafting a description of its purpose. You then infuse spiritual power into it through ritual, and it becomes animated, but remains invisible. However, its influence can allegedly be felt in your life, and it can be assigned any task desired, just like a demon.

Although servitors seem like a modern invention, it appears that our ancestors understood the concept as well. It is likely that most of the demons mentioned in grimoires and spell books are largely concocted by the author, although their names and descriptions may be based on others already known to exist at the time. And the ancient world was rife with compound gods that were combinations of deities from different cultures. These were usually created when one kingdom usurped another, and then amalgamated the pantheon of the defeated nation into their own. These essentially resulted in the creation of new gods that served the new master by combining the attributes of the old gods, and thus they were servitors. But instead of just serving a single magician, they were serving an entire priesthood, and indeed, an entire community.

A servitor that serves a collective and not just an individual is called, in modern parlance, an egregore, a group thoughtform animated through magic. Religions, governments, and businesses all make use of egregores, and can be thought of as egregores in themselves as well. In fact, the modern concept of the “corporation” is very much like a homunculus, servitor, golem, or egregore, and indeed, governments are just corporations.

We are constantly told that we live in a “Capitalist” society. But what does “Capitalism” mean? The word comes from the Latin “capitalis”, meaning “of the head”, and the relation of this concept to the later financial connotation of the word “capital” is unclear. Its first use in that sense was actually the word “capitale”, meaning “stock or property.” The basic building unit of capitalism is the corporation, and these first started in the 1600s. The development of the corporation was spurred on by the improvement of sailing and navigation technology, and the ensuing boom of the shipping industry. This is why the root word “mer”, meaning “sea” is at the heart of the word “mercantile”, and why we still say “shipping” when we are referring to the transport of goods, no matter the method. The improvement of seafaring led to the blossoming of a new form of economy. Now merchants could sail to India, Asia, Africa, or even the Americas, and trade an unprecedented variety of goods.

But ships and crew were still expensive, and the voyages dangerous. If one trip went bad, an investor could find himself in debt for life, and worse, in debtor’s prison. So the government of Holland, a leading power amongst the sea merchants of Europe, came up with a novel concept by which numerous merchants could pool their resources and minimize their individual investment risk. They created a “corporation”: a group of investors who would collectively invest in a business venture to form a company, which then became a “legal person” according to a declaration in the company’s charter, granted by the government. This “person” was then able to enter into legal contracts and business ventures, just like a regular person. But there was one important difference: unlike a real person, the corporation could not be thrown into debtor’s prison.

Indeed, there was, and is still, no real way to force a corporation to pay its debts. When the corporation determines that it is no longer viable, it declares bankruptcy and, more often than not, leaves those to whom it owes money holding the bag. This arrangement worked out well for the Dutch merchants of the seventeenth century, and soon the idea was picked up by other countries, like Britain. Thus the formation of the famous “British East India Company”( rival to the “Dutch East India Company”) was possible.

In a corporation, the total worth of the company is divided into “shares”, which are sold to the investors as percentages of the company’s worth – slices of the pie. The more shares each investor owns, the greater his slice of the pie. The price, or value, of each share fluctuates along with the overall value of the company. Dividends from the company’s profits are paid to the investors annually in relation to the number of shares that they own. At any time, an investor may sell his shares to another investor. It did not take the Dutch merchants long to realize that these shares of a corporation could be traded almost as a form of currency. This led to the creation of the first stock exchange in Holland in the year 1631, a year after “capitale” began being used as a financial term.

It is interesting to note that there is actually a connection between modern notions of “freedom”, representative government, and corporations. In feudal times, everyone was the “subject” of the monarch, and most people lived as serfs on land owned by noble families. The word “serf” is related to “servitude”, and implied exactly that. Only the nobles and royals who ruled their own lands had any “sovereignty.” Nobody else had any rights, autonomy, or control over their own affairs. It wasn’t until trade expanded in the Renaissance that the merchant class arose to challenge the aristocracy, because they had money to buy their own land. Then they were no longer serfs, but “freemen.”

The City of London is a prime example of this connection. Few people in America know that “London” is a much larger metropolis than the 1-mile-square area that technically constitutes the “City of London Corporation” from whence it originated. This had been a Saxon merchant city before the island was conquered by the Romans in 43 AD, and had been ruled by an “ealdorman” or “underking.” When the Normans took over, William the Conqueror promised to respect the city’s sovereignty, and basically built his kingdom around London, in cooperation with it, but not subduing it. Because of this, London became known as “the Sovereign City”, and is headed by its own “Lord Mayor” to this very day.

The traditional government of London has always been representational, and the voting power came from its “Freemen”, the members of the “livery companies” that are at the heart of its foundation. These were the trade guilds, such as the Scriveners, the Longbow Makers, the Master Mariners, the Parish Clerks, etc., and they usually had names starting with the words “Worshipful Company of …” The word “livery” is related to the Latin “liberare”, meaning “to liberate.”

You see, originally, “freedom” implied that one had, either by apprenticeship, or by payment, or by blood inheritance, been emancipated from serfdom by practicing a trade. It meant that you were free to form your own contracts and conduct your own business in the City of London, and in order to gain your freedom you had to belong to one of the City’s companies. You were granted the “Freedom of the City” when you took the “Declaration of a Freeman”, a ceremony that qualified applicants can still partake in today. These livery companies each had their own authority derived from their members, and these combined to for the “Corporation” of the City government, deriving its sovereignty from its Freemen. This concept of freedom is of course at the heart of the word “Freemason”, an institution at least partially derived from the Mason guilds of England. Later on, in the American colonies, “Freemen” were those colonists who had paid for their immigration fees through indentured servitude (usually seven years), and were now free from debt or other legal restraint.

In London, a symbiotic relationship formed between the City Corporation and the Crown of England. Indeed, to this day, the monarch observes the custom of obtaining permission from the Lord Mayor before entering the one-mile-square City. The City became the prime influence on English politics, and gained a reputation as the maker of kings. The City would always support the Crown, as long as the support was mutual. If not, the City would make sure that someone more cooperative took over. A book called London For Ever: The Sovereign City, by Colonel Robert Blackham, published in the early 1930s, explains it well:

“The City was, indeed, always loyal to the Crown when loyalty was possible, but its citizens have never hesitated to oppose the King when they considered that their rights were imperiled.

“By its action the Sovereign City expressed the national dislike for Republican government and England’s firm belief in constitutional monarchy as the best form of government for a free people.”

The Lord Mayor of the City was largely responsible for forcing the Crown of England to respect the rights of its subjects, through the Magna Carta. This document was the basis of English “common law,” upon which the law of the American colonies was founded, in which male property owners were granted the rights of “freemen.” The American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were grounded in common law. But here in America, after the Revolution came a truly revolutionary idea, influenced by the City of London Corporation: that a government could be formed to exercise the inherent sovereignty of freemen, and not just that of a monarch. The drafters of the Constitution recognized that We the People had formed the state governments to exercise our sovereignty, and thus the States became sovereign entities themselves. Those states then united to form a confederation on behalf of the sovereign people.

Interestingly, the colonization of the New World by Britain was done through corporations such as the Virginia Company. It was from London’s docks on the Thames that the ships departed. It was they who were ultimately in charge of the first colonial governments. And although we fought a war to remove the influence of England’s crown upon the American government, some question whether we ever truly broke away from the influence of British corporations. Indeed, the design of the American flag essentially stems from that which flew on the merchant ships of the British East India Company, which featured the same stripes, with the Union Jack as the standard in the upper left corner instead of the stars that later replaced it.

In a way this is altogether fitting, since it was through corporations and commerce that men in the New World had gained their freedom in the first place. But the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence indicate that this freedom is really inherent and “self-evident” in “all men”, not just something granted if you happen to have enough money to buy property. The founding fathers were influenced by Freemasonry, natural philosophy, and the belief in these “natural rights.” For religious people, the concept can be traced back to the previously-mentioned dominion over the Earth granted to Adam by God. This is what gives a man the right to form a contract with whomever he chooses (including spirits), and that’s what makes him free.

But something malodorous has occurred over the years since the American Republic was founded. Through a gradual process, the loose confederation of sovereign states became united into a national government. Originally, according to author John David van Hove in his book The Global Sovereign’s Handbook, the corporation called the District of Columbia controlled only the city of Washington, D.C., and the American territories, but not the sovereign states. There was a government located in DC, but it was merely exercising the power of the states through donation, which could be revoked at any time. Yet over the years, and especially after the Civil War, it took on the character of a national government, and asserted authority over the states. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which is thought to be responsible for freeing the black slaves in the South, actually had a much more sinister purpose: it defined the residents of the states as “citizens” of the national corporation located in Washington D.C. As Van Hove put it recently on this program, it actually “made slaves of us all.”

By signing this Amendment, States were not only forfeiting their own sovereignty, but that of the individuals within them. All of this, of course, was done legally, by getting the sovereigns to “agree” to give up their own power. Nobody realized that’s what they were doing, of course. Once they were owned by the national corporate government, the “USA”, as it became known, could borrow from private banks and use the slave labor of its “citizens” as collateral. This is of course exactly what happened. The privately-owned Federal Reserve was allowed to take over the entire country’s monetary system in 1913 as the nation’s central bank.

The Federal Reserve began printing money out of nothing, usurping the right of a sovereign government to coin money, or to issue a “fiat” bestowing value on paper money. The government could have done this on its own, but instead they allowed a private bank to do it for them, and agreed to pay face value plus interest for these “Federal Reserve Notes”, which took the place of US dollars. The government become so indebted to banks that it chose to “hypothecate” all of the property in America to these banks in order to secure more funding, as part of House Joint Resolution 192, “To Suspend The Gold Standard and Abrogate The Gold Clause”, signed in 1933.

From that time forward, the basis for our original legal and economic system — private property, and the exchange of goods and services through gold and silver coin — was replaced. People were forced to turn in all of their gold to the government, and were given paper dollars printed by the Federal Reserve instead. Really, they were no longer allowed to exchange real property, and thus part of the legal basis of their sovereignty was subverted. The land beneath their feet, unbeknownst to them, had been given away to private banks. This is why people now have “real estate” instead of actual property. The word “real,” again, comes from the French word for “king”, and stems from feudal times, when all serfs were tenants on the king’s land. We are in the same situation today. Many of us are paying a 30-year mortgage, paying three times the property’s actual value, for something that technically belongs to the private banks that own our corporate government. And that corporate government thinks that it owns us too.

America’s legal system, formerly governed by English common law, became replaced with “commercial code”, and all activities of the human subjects are now governed as though we are corporate entities engaging in international commercial enterprise. Thus, civil rights were brought to the south in the 1960s, not by government finally recognizing the inherent sovereignty of the individual regardless of race, sex, or property ownership, but by reinterpreting the Commerce Clause (governing interstate commercial activity) to apply to any activity which involves a product or service that has in any way, in whole or in part, been traded across state lines. Thus, schools using pencils or paper purchased from, or manufactured from parts purchased in, another state, must submit to federal statutes, etc. Most of our federal laws are applied to the states using the Commerce Clause.

Universal Commercial Code, first published in 1952, unifies the commerce laws of all of the 50 states in the US. It really stems from international trade treaties rooted in global maritime law (the Law of the Sea). In 1944, the Federal Reserve ponzi scheme was essentially extended to the rest of the world, at the barrel of a gun. Towards the end of WWII, when Europe and much of the world had been beaten into submission through years of combat, poor and desperate, 44 nations sent delegates to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to create an international monetary policy. The alleged rationale was that if all of these countries had their currencies linked, they couldn’t afford to go to war in the future, because it would be mutually destructive. They ended up deciding to make the US dollar the “reserve currency” of the world. The central banks of other countries would be linked to the dollar, and would hold at least a quarter of their reserves in US dollars. This put the privately-owned Federal Reserve essentially in charge of the whole global economy.

The International Monetary Fund was created at this meeting. This is the corporate entity through which the currencies in the international system are linked. The IMF forces loans upon needy countries, and if they can’t afford to make their interest payments on the IMF loans they’ve already got, the IMF loans them more money to make those payments. In exchange, of course, they demand complete control over the nation’s economy. This, in conjunction with the activities of the World Trade Organization, also created at Bretton Woods, is largely responsible for turning the entire world into a giant slave labor camp that runs for the profit of a handful of banks and corporations. They dictate to all of the member countries what labor costs will be, what sort of exporting and resource development they will do, who will trade with whom and at what price.

If you wonder why all of the jobs and production have been exported overseas, bear in mind that the US no longer has any control over its own trade policy. The IMF literally has a mathematical formula that they use to calculate what the optimal level of trade is for each country and for each commodity. They use this to “balance” the values of different currencies. And it has been their stated goal all along to try to “balance” the standard of living throughout the world so as to make currencies easier to control. Now let me give you a hint: they don’t intend to bring other countries up to our standard of living. It’s the other way around. So that is why, no matter who you elect, no matter how many letters you send and phone calls you make to your congressman, they will always pursue policies that inflate the dollar, suppress wages and export production. Because we have no control over our monetary policy or our trade policy. Since the dollar is a global currency the Fed considers the effects of their policies on global currency markets before it even thinks about how these policies affect the US economy.

Another thing we clearly have no control over since Bretton Woods is our foreign policy. The UN was created shortly after Bretton Woods. The intention when creating it was that there would no longer be such a thing as war. Coincidentally, the US Congress hasn’t officially declared war since WWII. Everything the USA has done since then has been an unofficial police action. Why? Because we can’t declare war. We no longer have the authority to do that if we want to maintain participation in all of these foreign agreements that hamstring us. But your President and your Congress will never admit that to you. They want to maintain the illusion that we are still a sovereign country.

Over time, just like the federal government, all of the state governments likewise became reincorporated as commercial entities operating for the benefit of their private owners. The same is true for almost all municipalities such as cities, towns, and counties. This can be seen in their new corporate names (IN ALL CAPS), and on their Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, which reveal all of their investments, revenue streams, and bondholders. With Bretton Woods, the private USA corporation became subsumed into a global private corporate structure. The owned slaves (the “citizens”) became pieces of merchandise, whose future human labor could be securitized and used as the basis for the formation of financial derivatives that the banks could speculate with. Each individual human resource product was identified with a corporate name (IN ALL CAPS) and an account number (the Social Security Number).This is what is known in common parlance as the “Straw Man”, a magical corporation created by the government that has the same name as you, but in all capital letters, and which the government asserts ownership of. If you recognize the Straw Man as being you, then you are under their control.

So essentially, our national government, our state governments, our municipalities, and we individual citizens have now been co-opted into a giant global Corporation Frankenstein, controlled by private banks. And the center of the international banking industry has always been, and still is, the sovereign City of London Corporation. It is they who assert ownership over our persons and property. Although this may chap our hides to think about it this way, the truth is that we have all unwittingly agreed to it. By responding to summons and demands made by the corporate government to the Straw Man, the Straw Man becomes reality, just as would a homunculus, golem, or servitor the first time it responded to the uttering of the name its creator had given it. And by responding that way, the servitor or straw man places itself in subordination to whoever summons it. Using Federal Reserve Notes, paying taxes, and receiving benefits from the government are all acts of subjugation.

In a way, a good portion of what’s accomplished with the creation of corporations, including governments, is separation of property from its actual owners in the eyes of the law, to shield them from taxes, regulation, and public scrutiny. Historically, monarchs and other sovereigns have used the magical power of their sovereignty to create imaginary realms or worlds in which things function by different rules, and then create a corporate entity to rule over it in his or her steed. Several tax havens have been created in the British Commonwealth using this process. The process was perfected in the late Middle Ages by the Knights Templar, the inventors of banking, who used the special sovereignty granted them by the Pope to turn all of their preceptories throughout Europe into such autonomous zones. So the real reason our government is now structured this way is to keep us from recognizing the illusion we are all locked into. It is a confusing maze that is meant to hypnotize you. As long as we all remain trapped in the illusion, our masters have magical power over us. But this can end if we all wake up.

Corporations are not inherently evil. It is an extension of the power given to children of Adam to have dominion over the Earth and the spirits, and to make contracts with whomever we choose. We have the right as men to form corporations, just as we have the right to create golems, servitors, and homunculi. But it is a severe perversion of the natural order for a privately-owned corporation to take over an entire government and then take ownership of its citizens. We must not allow our personhood to be subsumed by corporate entities owned by others.

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