Magical Defense Against Internet Harassment: A short overview
The internet is an awful place where people, distanced from their bodies and the bodies of others, wage social wars with each other like pubescent middle-schoolers. From unsolicited photos of genitalia to doxxing and social justice “cancelations,” all manners of harassment are enacted that humans generally would not have the courage to do were the person they are harassing standing before them.
That is, most of what occurs is enabled specifically through disassociation from bodies. Generally a person wouldn’t reveal their genitals to a person on a city street or a cafe, yet through the glorious technology of the internet they can do so anywhere, reaching their victim while they are having dinner with their family, or at work, or on the bus.
Likewise, to try to silence a person’s speech “in real life” requires lots of noise or physically harming the person to make them shut up, as occurred both to communist and anarchist organizers in the early part of last century or to alt-right and fascist-aligned speakers in the last few years. To silence a person required physical presence, bravery, and some bodily risk, and such decisions were rarely taken lightly. Now, however, all one requires is a social media following and a narcissistic sense of self-righteousness, and anyone (except the people with actual political power) can be harassed into silence and even suicide.
That is to say, internet harassment relies entirely on the physical distance of the perpetrators to the victims. False accusations, smears, violent language and images, and all manner of other forms of harassment can be accomplished from the safety of a person’s phone, giving them the sense they are utterly free of the usual consequences we would expect to see in embodied social relations.
Magic is a rather effective way of short-circuiting this technological distancing, however. While the modern neo-pagan definitions of magic usually downplay or even erase the relationship of magic to the body and the material world, older—and thus more true—understandings of magic recognize that there is no magic without the body.
Thus, while technology and the capitalist worldview—along with the pale social-media spawned transhumanist fantasies that we can “transcend” our bodies—promise actions without physical consequences (energy use without global warming, consumerism without trashing the earth), magic speaks “with tooth and claw” of the primacy of the body.
In addition, magic—especially curses—has long been used by victims to get justice for false witness, lies, smears, and other acts of social harassment which damage the reputation and the lives of those affected. These tactics didn’t go away just because Capitalism and the mechanistic worldview conquered our bodies and understanding of nature.
What follows is a short overview of the theory of magical defense against internet harassment. This is not meant as a “101” text on magic, and it presumes the reader already has some experience in the use of magic (and no, reading a Llewellyn book doesn’t count). If the reader is lacking in such experience, this will be of no use until they do the work of unearthing those skills in themselves (I wish you well, and hold tight your sanity). Those with such experience, however, should be able to adapt these principles easily into their own practice
And there is a caveat here. This text assumes that the target of harassment is innocent and undeserving of those attacks. Someone who has raped someone and has become target of internet harassment because of it won’t find this useful, because these theories are founded on the principle of getting justice for harassment and accelerating consequences for the harassers. A person falsely accused of rape or a person targeted because they said something “politically incorrect,” however, will be able to use these principles without fear.
Principle One: Reclaim Your Silence
There are two aspects of this principle. The first is that the absolute easiest way to defend against internet harassment is not engaging with it. “Cancelers” especially tend to be narcissists who enjoy the feeling of power and control that harassing someone (whether that is in the name of social justice or white nationalism) gives them. Not engaging, then, often will send the ones with more fragile egos off to find other targets. In my own experience, defending yourself to your harassers never goes well.
But more importantly, Silence is a crucial aspect of magical workings. Speaking to others and even bragging about your actions is quick way both to defuse your working and tip off the more magically aware people that you are defending yourself.
Because their harassment is meant to silence you, one of the most powerful things you can do is reclaim your own silence. Choosing to be silent, and holding strongly to your own agency to decide when to speak and when not to speak, re-inforces your will against those who are trying to dominate you.
Principle Two: Reclaim Your Egregore
Egregores arise when a group of people “imagine” a person, a thing, or an ideology in their head. For instance, when you are arguing with someone you have never met in your head, you are engaging with that person’s egregoric existence, not with the person. The accumulation of all the things people say and think about you contributes to the creation of that egregoric existence.
Social media greatly exaggerates and mediates this process. When we interact with someone online whom we have never met, we construct an idea of them based on everything they have posted, all our interactions, and especially their profile photos. This isn’t actually the person themselves, of course, but rather an egregoric version of them (the word “avatar” was used for online presences for a long time for a reason).
When someone then attempts to harass you online, they are reacting primarily to the egregoric version of you in their head, all those representations of you they have constructed from the cues you have provided them. And by harassing you—especially in canceling crusades—they are attempting to control your egregoric existence and shape it for others (“reputation” is a more basic but inadequate term for this).
For example, the social media crusade by “woke leftists” that occurred against the Black feminist writer bell hooks because of her criticism of Beyoncé was an attempt to control what people who didn’t know bell hooks would think of her when they encountered her. That is, their goal was that, when someone said “oh, have you read bell hooks?” people who hadn’t would say, “no—she called Beyoncé a slave, fuck her.”
Similarly, when people have smeared me, their intention is to attach those false accusations as “truths” to my egregoric existence. The ultimate goal is that, when people who don’t know me encounter my writing or work, they’ll think first “oh, I heard that guy is x fuck him” and thus not read me.
The thing with egregores is that, though they are independent from the person they arise from, they ultimately belong to that person. That is, the egregore of a person isn’t that person, but that person can claim control over it as a servitor.
There are various methods of doing this, and there are various uses for an egregoric servitor. These are ultimately up to the individual, and each have drawbacks and benefits. For instance, an egregore can be used for transference (as a witch bottle, for instance) or a shield, thus protecting the person using it from direct harm to their psyche from the harassment. Or, it can be used to haunt the attackers, especially since their obsession with the target gives the egregore an easy route into their psyche. In such situations, their neurotic obsession with silencing their target can turn into actual neurosis so that they are utterly terrified of their victim.
Principle Three: Accelerate Consequences
This is one of the oldest magical defenses against injustice. Inscribed on countless lead tablets in sacred sites across Europe are prayers to gods of justice that the person who falsely spoke of the supplicant will face the consequences of such behavior.
Ultimately, a lie or a smear (whether that is in person, in a court, or in a cancel crusade) is itself a curse. Curses always have consequences, and while the circumspect magician or witch learns very quickly how to shape curses which have bearable consequences, the average social justice warrior on twitter or the 4chan troll can rarely be truthfully called “circumspect.”
Accelerating the consequences of a malediction, then, is a very easy way to make the person stop. This can be done in many ways. If the magician interacts with gods and spirits, simple requests often suffice, especially if you’re already doing their work and have a good relationship with them. For those who don’t work with gods and spirits, simple devices such as the “mirror box” might be employed.
A key to doing this effectively is understanding what the consequences for certain actions tend to be in the body, and thus the magician needs to know their own body well enough to guess how these might manifest in others. For instance, when I lie I feel sick and anxious (so I don’t lie very often), and when I have lied about others when I was younger these symptoms manifested even more severely. Though not everyone experiences the consequences of a lie this way, many do, and thus accelerating the consequences of a lie others have told about you can involve making the person very ill.
On illness particularly, it’s useful to note that most people who engage in harassment tend to have poor health already, likely because they live vindictive, malicious, envious, and deceitful lives and the consequences of these actions manifest in their health. It should of course go without clarifying that poor health is not a cause of harassment, and people with poor health should not be accused of bringing such things on themselves.
Beyond that caveat, though, the point of the “pain body” is important to remember. Harassment causes sickness and anxiety in the victim often as a result of transference. That is, the troll or canceler is likely themselves experiencing sickness and anxiety and attempting to spread this to others rather than take responsibility for their own bodily health. This can be seen quite clearly in how much time such a person spends on the internet engaging in the harassment: if someone is on social media for six hours on a Friday evening trying to cancel someone, they obviously aren’t living a happy life with deep social connections and embodied presence.
Thus, when someone is trying to spread their bodily pain to someone else through the internet, accelerating the consequences can just as easily become “reflect the consequences.” Here, especially, magics that mirror attacks can be very effective.
Principle Four: Reveal the hidden
Especially useful for people who have received private harassment is the principle of making what is hidden unhidden. For instance, I have received multiple private threats of legal action and blackmail which I countered quickly by publishing them. Women I know who have received penis photos from harassers have forwarded them to me along with contact info so that I could contact the person for them (the sort of man who sends cock photos to women is usually unhappy when her male friend decides to “return the favor.”)
Unhiding what is hidden can be accomplished by magical means, however, by compelling a person to “accidentally” reveal their true motives for the harassment both to themselves and in public. Hermes and other gods who rule communication are often quite eager to help in such circumstances (I have found Mercury retrogrades are especially great times for these workings), as I have heard are many goetic spirits. For those who don’t work with gods and spirits, simple rituals of unbinding the tongue would probably suffice, though I have not tested these.
Regardless of how it is done, the ultimate goal here is to make the person stop their harassment by revealing to themselves the reasons underneath the ideological justifications and to trip up the leaders of mobbing crusades by making them lose credibility. I witnessed this once when some of the most vicious critics of bell hooks admitted they hadn’t actually read her, which made others stop giving them attention. While in that case it is doubtful magic was used, there are multiple ways of destroying tenuous social cohesion and sowing distrust (for instance, several goetic spirits, multiple “trickster” gods, the use of poppets or carved candles) that can be used to stop mobs, though these often take multiple days.
Principle Five: Time conquers all
The final principle here is probably most useful for writers, artists, and other people who create in the public sphere, but can be applied to anyone who has been the victim of internet harassment. Over time, people forget accusations, and though the internet acts as a kind of permanent record of abusive comments about people, the mobs always move on to new targets and forget their previous ones.
There are two parts of this principle, then. The first is to outlive the attacks by whatever means are available to you. Keep yourself sane and healthy by disengaging, logging off, being with real people in real physical space. Keep doing this and you’ll be fine. It’s only the internet, after all.
The other part of this is the old adage, “revenge is a dish best served cold.” The truth in this is that we are our most clear-thinking when the crisis is over and the anxiety is gone. After time has passed enough, we are then best able to decide whether any sort of action is needed and which action is best. And by that time, if we choose to act to defend ourselves, the person who has abused us is least likely to understand what is happening to them.
In fact, it’s this last principle which compelled me to write this piece in the first place. While working on another essay I checked on the social media profiles of some rather violent harassers to see how they were doing, and learned that, indeed, the magic I had worked to defend myself had taken its course as intended. A few of them no longer even have internet profiles at all, banned for their repeated abuse of others in the name of “social justice” but really under the drive of envy. Not only had the workings occurred after the crisis, but I’d also let enough time pass since those workings to allow them to work.
Other Considerations
There are of course more straightforward ways to deal with internet harassment that are used also in off-line harassment. Silencing a person (the cow tongue trick, for instance) can of course be effective, as well as using an image of them (printed from their profile) for direct workings. However, I find these to be more time consuming (cancel crusades are made of mobs and therefore have too many targets), and often times (especially for Twitter social justice cancelers) the most abusive people are too cowardly to show their faces. Runic defensive traps work well sometimes, as does merely asking a kind spirit or god you have a relationship with to stop the abusive behavior.
Regardless of what you use, I hope you’ll find some of these ideas work for you, too.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, an autonomous Marxist, and the director of publishing at Gods&Radicals. His erotic fantasy novella, “The Provisioner,” is scheduled for release 1 October. Support him on Patreon.