This is so totally Tim Powers bait

For those of you who don’t know, Tim Powers is a science fiction/fantasy writer whose special brilliance is in coming up with wild stories about time travel, body swapping, bizarre occult activity and the like, but which routinely include actual historical characters and events. In particular, he looks for odd anomalies in the known record about these characters and events and then incorporates them into his stories in such as a way as to offer the *real* explanation for what lay behind this odd but seemingly innocuous remark or deed. Great fun! You wind up with British double agent actually involved in trafficking with fallen angels, with Albert Einstein inventing a time machine, some kid inhaling the ghost of Thomas Edison, and Lord Byron falling in with monstrously evil Egyptian magicians bent on immortality.

Why do I think of that? Because a reader writes:

So your post about Jedi training in the whitehouse reminds me of a book i just finished. It starts out funny, then turns scary and ends with just plain sad: Men Who Stare at Goats

It’s about the US military’s efforts to co-opt supernatural aid hidden within the deepest corners of the intelligence community and special forces. OK, so it’s kind of silly and humorous at first. Sure, the DoD is large enough to contain a few stray senior officers that might be wacked out enough to try and sneak in something like this under the undisclosed black ops category of appropriations. However, towards the end of the book, the author is suggesting that specific incidents such as Abu Graib may very well have been under the directive of military leaders that were willing to consider the viability of interrogation methods that bordered on occult practice.

Now, I don’t think the author makes an air tight case about the specific links. Certainly, there isn’t enough to go on to prosecute a case, Then again, …

I think it’s certainly the case that in giving ourselves over to certain evils we as a country have to fool ourselves into thinking that we can really employ evil for a noble over arching objective – the greater good and all that. It always works seems to work out though that any attempt to contract the devil seems to end with us working for him – rather than him working for us. The only way to overcome evil is to reject it – not employ it. Sometimes the devil overplays his hand and shows himself for what he is. This might be one of those cases…but then, we’ve also gotten pretty crafty with our plausible deniabilities.

I’m not giving the book a hearty recommendation but it does raise a few interesting points about how nutty it can get when the military activity goes all Nancy Reagan on our enemies.

During WWII, the Allies hired an astrologer for a few months on the theory that the Nazis consulted astrologers and we should be open to getting intel by any means necessary. I suspect the main idea was that he might forecast the same crap Nazi astrologers were forecasting, so we could anticipate Nazi decisions. But then again, Allied military men being mortal and as prone to superstition as Pontius Pilate or George S. Patton (who we know was an enthusiast for reincarnation), it’s quite possible some people really thought they might derive some information from The Beyond by occult means and trafficking with spirits or (a more popular subterfuge in our pseudo-scientific culture) “forces”. At any rate, the guy didn’t last long at MI5 and wound up going on to a rather remarkable career (once he abandoned the occult and repented his sins, became a Catholic, and started writing saints lives that are still published by none other than Ignatius Press!), but he does demonstrate that peoples at war will try anything, just as the Nazi interest in the occult demonstrates that a profoundly dechristianized mind (such as, oh, the contemporary American mind, particularly in our ruling classes) is not safeguarded from absurd superstition by devotion to ruthless and mechanized efficiency. So while I certainly don’t accept the testimony of a book like Men Who Stare at Goats, I also don’t find it prima facie incredible either. It is, as my reader says, quite possible that in bureaucracy as bloated and inefficient as the military/intelligence community, some buffoon with theories about Psychic Forces managed to enact some sort of Experimental Program somewhere. Nor would a tie in to such stuff with our fun and games with detainee torture be particularly surprising to me if it in fact occurred. The occult is *all about* the degradation of the human person because that’s what fallen angels are all about. Anybody fool enough to fiddle with the occult is generally fool enough to think torture is the quick route to success. Chesterton describes the mindset with acute accuracy in The Everlasting Man:

Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense, to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or even really understand their language, we should probably find that they were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black Mass.

Again, I have no confidence that the stuff in Men Who Stare at Goats in fact happened. I merely note that the part we *do* know for sure (i.e. that we have in fact enacted a program of torture and prisoner abuse) comports with the reality that people who go in for torture and are, shall we say, skilled and gifted in this area are also often people with a rather distorted understanding of the spiritual life who are often very interested in the occult. Whether such people brought their spiritual views to bear on their work is unproven, but it is not an obviously unbelievable thought to wonder if they may have done so.

That said, what interests me here is the novel that Tim Powers will hopefully write in about ten years, in which this bizarre tale gets told with all the imaginative brio he can bring to bear on it.