War in the Spirit World
The forest clearing at Bois Caïman was not a parliament, and Dutty Boukman was not a politician. What happened there on the night of August 14, 1791 was neither a military briefing nor a campaign rally—it was a ritual, soaked in blood and thunder, in which the enslaved of Saint-Domingue called not for freedom in the abstract, but for divine vengeance, cosmic rectification, and war. The ceremony, led by Boukman and the mambo priestess Cécile Fatiman, invoked Ezili Dantor, a loa of wrath and protection. A black pig was sacrificed, oaths were made, bodies were possessed, and an invisible line was crossed: the line between rebellion and metaphysical revolt.
Within days, the largest slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere would erupt across the colony. Within thirteen years, the only successful slave revolution in modern history would bring about the first Black republic—Haiti. But this is not the story as Enlightenment historiography tells it. There, we are taught to look for the influence of Rousseau, Locke, or the French Revolution. There, religion—particularly African spiritual systems—is relegated to the margins, treated as superstition, theater, or pre-political noise. The Western academy continues, for the most part, to maintain a firewall between war and the sacred.
This is a mistake.
The Haitian Revolution was not merely political—it was ontological. It was not just a fight for sovereignty over land, but for sovereignty over reality itself. The enslaved peoples of Saint-Domingue had been stripped not only of freedom, but of worldview. Their cosmologies were attacked, banned, converted, fragmented. Vodun was outlawed, demonized, and misrepresented by the colonial Catholic Church as devil-worship. But it did not vanish. It retreated underground, where it fused lineages from Dahomey, Kongo, Yoruba, and Catholic sainthood into a cosmological structure of resistance. When Boukman called upon the spirits at Bois Caïman, he was not making a rhetorical appeal—he was activating a metaphysical alliance. The spirits did not symbolize revolt; they sanctioned it.
This is what we mean by ontological warfare—conflict not only between armies or ideologies, but between different conceptions of reality. Between cosmologies. In Haiti, the colonial regime claimed the divine right of empire, the metaphysical supremacy of whiteness, and the moral order of slavery as ordained by God. The insurgents rejected this not just as injustice, but as heresy. In Vodun, the ancestors had not died—they had been watching. The land was not a commodity—it was a sacred force. The gods were not silent—they had simply not yet been asked the right question.
That question—posed at Bois Caïman—was not “Should we rebel?” but “Are you with us?”
The affirmative answer shook the Atlantic world.
This essay begins from that rupture. It proposes that spiritual belief systems among oppressed and colonized peoples have often been more than cultural residue—they have served as technologies of insurgency, frameworks for mobilization, and weapons in the war for being. From Haiti to Kenya, from the plains of Wounded Knee to the hills of Afghanistan, civil conflict has frequently been preceded or accompanied by a spiritual rupture: a revelation, a possession, a prophecy, a ceremony. The war does not begin with the bullet. It begins with the dream.
In what follows, we will examine the Haitian Revolution not as an exception, but as a prototype. We will track the role of cosmology, ritual, and spiritual authority in uprisings across the colonized world. We will ask: What is the tactical function of possession? How does ritual warfare outlast guerrilla campaigns? And why are modern states so quick to pathologize or demonize spiritual insurgency, even as they tolerate (or encourage) militarized religion within their own ranks?
We aim to uncover the hidden grammar of war—a grammar written not in strategy memos or economic grievances, but in sacred songs, blood rites, and spirit tongues.
Because beneath every civil war lies a civil theology. And when the gods go to war, the state trembles.
Strategic Cosmology: The Haitian Revolution as Possession-Driven Insurgency
To call Vodun a religion is already to misname it. It is not merely a set of doctrines or superstitions, but a dynamic system of cosmological negotiation, ancestral continuity, and ritualized power exchange. In Saint-Domingue, where African traditions had been fractured by the slave trade and repressed by Catholic colonists, Vodun became both a memory device and a strategic framework. It preserved lineage across trauma and geography. It encoded moral order. But in the crucible of revolution, it became something more: a weapon.
The enslaved population of Saint-Domingue was not passive. Resistance was constant, from poisonings to arson, from marronage (escaped slave communities) to sabotage. But what united and ignited mass rebellion was not a general political consensus—it was ritual cohesion. Vodun provided not just hope, but hierarchy. Not just meaning, but mobilization. Its pantheon of spirits (loa) offered not static deities, but active forces capable of possession, protection, and revenge. Possession was not performance. It was transformation. The body, ridden by a loa, was temporarily elevated beyond its human limitations—its speech, its movements, even its moral authority, became otherworldly. In a world that had tried to erase African personhood, possession made divinity visible in the flesh.
This was no metaphor. As Joan Dayan writes, “To be possessed is to be authorized.”¹ And in the uprising of 1791, that authorization mattered. Boukman and the mambo priestess Cécile Fatiman did not merely rally the enslaved. They channelled spirits who had waited centuries for vengeance. The oath taken at Bois Caïman was sealed not by a constitution, but by blood sacrifice and sacred frenzy. It was not a political manifesto—it was a covenant between the living and the dead.
And so the revolution began—not with pamphlets, but with fire. Plantations burned. Masters were slaughtered. The colonial administration, already weakened by France’s instability, faltered under the speed and ferocity of the uprising. But to view this purely in military terms is to miss the larger frame. The revolutionaries were not simply destroying property or authority—they were desecrating a spiritual regime. French Catholicism had underwritten slavery. Empire had made itself metaphysical. The revolution’s counter-attack had to be equally spiritual.
Vodun became the insurgent state’s infrastructure. Houngans (male priests) and mambos (female priests) did not merely hold religious functions—they became political figures, healers, logisticians, and oracles. Vodun ceremonies became strategic gatherings, not unlike encoded military briefings. Even battlefield tactics were informed by Vodun cosmology. Some believed that protection from bullets could be ritually conferred by the spirits. Others used symbolic fetishes and talismans—paket kongo, amulets packed with herbs and ritual ingredients—as both armor and psychological weapon. To the colonizers, these objects were irrational. To the revolutionaries, they were sacred technologies of survival.
This spiritual infrastructure also disrupted the colonial logic of fear. European soldiers, many of whom were deeply religious themselves, were unsettled by the ritual intensity of Haitian forces. Possession, blood sacrifice, and trance-state warfare were not only alien—they were terrifying. Rumors of “zombie armies” and “voodoo generals” spread across colonial garrisons. These narratives were both racist caricatures and unintentional admissions of tactical confusion: the Europeans had no spiritual grammar to decode what they were witnessing. They understood revolution. They did not understand war waged across worlds.
Importantly, Vodun did not end with victory. After independence, Haiti remained spiritually plural, but Vodun persisted in the shadows of the new republic. It was never fully “official”—and yet it never ceased to be real. It shaped identity, memory, and resistance in ways the state could neither erase nor fully assimilate. The Catholic Church, newly reinstalled after independence, resumed its centuries-long campaign of denigration. But the people remembered. They remembered who had answered their call when the heavens of Europe had stayed silent.
This is the paradox of Haiti’s revolution: it was the most successful anti-colonial revolt of its age, and yet its spiritual foundation has been persistently mocked, misunderstood, or repressed—even by its own elites. Why? Because Vodun, in empowering the poor, the rural, and the possessed, challenges the centralizing logic of modern statehood. It answers not to doctrine but to experience. It obeys no single hierarchy. And it remembers too much.
In this light, Vodun was not just an accompaniment to the revolution. It was its architecture. Without it, there might have been insurgency. But not fire. Not prophecy. Not victory.
Notes:
¹ Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods. University of California Press, 1995.
The Mau Mau Oath Ceremonies in Kenya
In the highland forests of 1950s Kenya, far from Haiti’s burning plantations but within the same moral universe, Kikuyu men and women gathered in secrecy. They came to swear an oath—not to a nation, not to a flag, but to the land, the ancestors, and the struggle to reclaim both. These were not metaphorical vows. They were ritualized pacts, sealed in blood, fear, and sacred speech, often under the guidance of spiritual elders who invoked the authority of the dead. In the eyes of the British colonial regime, these ceremonies were barbaric. In the eyes of the Mau Mau insurgency, they were essential.
Much like Vodun in Saint-Domingue, these rites formed the spiritual spine of rebellion. The Mau Mau movement, largely composed of landless Kikuyu peasants and urban workers, emerged as a response to decades of settler encroachment, forced labor, and the systematic theft of indigenous land by the British Empire. But the movement was never just about land rights. It was about restoring cosmological balance. The oaths, administered in sacred spaces, were a way of reasserting Kikuyu ontology in the face of imperial desecration. The forests were not merely hiding places—they were holy. The ancestors were not metaphors—they were present.
The rituals themselves varied. Some involved animal sacrifice. Others included symbolic gestures—drinking blood, eating earth, pledging silence. But in all cases, the oath was binding in the deepest possible way: it stitched the oath-taker into a moral and spiritual order that superseded colonial law. To break the oath was not merely to betray the movement—it was to rupture the self, to become ontologically damned. In this way, the Mau Mau cultivated a form of ritualized cohesion that no imperial bureaucracy could penetrate. Oathing created militants not by ideology, but by transformation.
Colonial authorities understood this—at least instinctively. Their response was not merely military but cosmological. The British flooded the media with horror stories of “witchcraft oaths” and “tribal savagery.” Propaganda posters showed crazed Mau Mau fighters with bloodstained mouths. Christian missionaries denounced the movement as Satanic. The colonial state, having failed to suppress the material conditions of rebellion, turned to metaphysical warfare—pathologizing Kikuyu spiritual practices to delegitimize their revolt.¹
But this strategy backfired. The more the British condemned the oaths, the more sacred they became. Ritual leaders—many of them women—continued to operate in secret, initiating new cadres and reinforcing the spiritual stakes of resistance. Unlike the bureaucratic soldier, the Mau Mau fighter carried into battle not only weapons, but binding cosmologies. He fought not only for political sovereignty, but for spiritual restitution. The British may have called it terrorism. But for the Kikuyu, it was re-sacralization. Reclaiming the land meant reactivating the sacred energies that had once flowed through it.
And, crucially, these spiritual practices had a tactical function. Oathing ceremonies built trust in clandestine networks. They created mutual accountability among fighters who could not rely on institutional structures. They also served as a form of moral insulation—a way to sanctify acts of violence that would otherwise tear apart the psyche. To kill for the cause was terrifying. To kill under oath, with the ancestors watching, was sanctified. Like the possessed soldiers of Haiti, the oath-bound Mau Mau could act with a kind of sacred certainty.
Yet, despite their deep spiritual logic, the Mau Mau were ultimately defeated—at least militarily. The British declared victory. The oaths were broken. The forests were cleared. But Kenya did not forget. Decades later, Mau Mau veterans would demand—and eventually receive—official recognition and compensation for the atrocities committed against them. And though the colonial archives recorded the oaths as signs of madness or primitivism, oral histories preserved something deeper: the memory of a people who had called their ancestors to war, and had answered that call with blood.
In the Mau Mau, as in Haiti, we see how civil war is often not born from ideology alone. It emerges from sacred fractures—from the sense that the universe has been violated, and that only ritualized violence can restore it. The oath, like the loa, is not an accessory to rebellion. It is rebellion’s warrant.
Notes
¹Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Henry Holt & Co., 2005.
The Ghost Dance and the Vision-Fueled Resistance of Native America
In the waning decades of the 19th century, as the U.S. frontier closed in a storm of railroads, rifles, and broken treaties, a Paiute mystic named Wovoka received a vision. During a solar eclipse in 1889, he claimed to have entered the spirit world, where he was told that the Native dead would soon return, the white man would vanish, and the buffalo would once again thunder across the plains. But this restoration of the world would not come through warfare. It would come through dance.
Thus began the Ghost Dance movement, a pan-tribal spiritual revival that swept across the Great Basin and into the Great Plains like wildfire. Though it bore no arms, it terrified the U.S. government. For in its rhythmic ecstasies, its vision quests, and its peyote rituals, it carried the same charge as the Vodun possessions of Haiti or the Mau Mau oaths of Kenya: a conviction that the spiritual world had intervened. That history itself was reversible. That war might no longer be needed—not because it had failed, but because the spirits had taken over the campaign.
The Ghost Dance was not a doctrine, nor a political party. It was a prophecy enacted. Its adherents believed that by dancing in sacred circles, guided by song and trance, they could hasten the return of the ancestors and the rebalancing of creation. The dance was a ritual of alignment—body to earth, human to spirit, justice to time. It spread rapidly among tribes brutalized by relocation, starvation, and cultural extermination: Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and many others.
For many, it was paired with the use of peyote, a psychoactive cactus that induces vivid visions and a sense of communion with divine forces. Peyote had long been used in indigenous ceremonies, but during the Ghost Dance revival it became a sacrament of defiance. Under its influence, dancers reported visions of their lost relatives, of animal spirits, of great floods washing away the invaders. These were not hallucinations to them. They were revelations. In a world where treaties had failed, weapons were inferior, and diplomacy meant betrayal, spiritual intoxication became a portal to hope—and a form of resistance.
The government’s response was swift and violent. Indian agents and army officers feared the movement’s scale and intensity. Despite Wovoka’s pacifist message, they believed the Ghost Dance signaled an uprising. In December 1890, U.S. troops surrounded a Lakota camp at Wounded Knee. When the dust cleared, over 250 Native men, women, and children lay dead. The Ghost Dance had been answered with machine guns.¹
Yet the spirits did not leave. Peyote ceremonies continued underground, evolving into what would become the Native American Church in the early 20th century. The vision of a spiritual resistance—nonviolent, ecstatic, and world-reversing—endured long after the bullets stopped. To the U.S. government, the Ghost Dance was a threat because it refused to play by colonial metaphysics. It did not demand rights. It promised renewal. It spoke not in the legal language of civil war, but in the visionary grammar of apocalypse and resurrection.
This is the radical core of the Ghost Dance: it reveals that civil resistance is not always armed. It can be liturgical. It can be performed on dusty plains in trance-state circles. It can be fueled by cactus rather than gunpowder. And yet it still terrifies empire. Because prophecy cannot be negotiated. You cannot sign a peace treaty with the spirit world.
And so again, as in Haiti and Kenya, we find that spiritual insurgency precedes or transcends material revolt. The Ghost Dance, like Bois Caïman and the Mau Mau oath, offered more than solidarity—it offered a cosmological alternative. It proclaimed that the dominant world was dying, and a new one had already begun to rise.²
Notes
¹ Mooney, James. The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896.
² Stewart, Omer C. Peyote Religion: A History. University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
The Taliban, Nigerian Militias, and the Return of the "Sacred" in Modern War
If Vodun possession, Kikuyu oaths, and Ghost Dance prophecy all belong to the deep archive of anti-colonial resistance, one might imagine that modern warfare—bureaucratized, digitized, and increasingly drone-driven—has transcended such spiritual dimensions. But this is a fiction. The sacred never left the battlefield. It merely adapted to new forms of warfare and new political theaters. From the martyrdom videos of the Taliban to the occult consultations of West African militias, we continue to see war waged not only in geopolitical space but in spiritual terrain. The theater of modern conflict remains haunted.
Consider the Taliban. Often framed exclusively in terms of political Islamism, their insurgency cannot be fully understood without acknowledging its spiritual economy. Taliban fighters do not fight solely for land or law—they fight for eschatology. Paradise, divine approval, martyrdom—these are not rewards tacked on as moral incentives. They are ontological justifications for violence. Suicide bombings, far from acts of nihilism, are ritualized performances of sacred destiny. The body becomes both weapon and offering. The battlefield is transformed into a stage of divine accounting.¹
Nor is this phenomenon limited to Islam. In Nigeria and surrounding regions, both state-aligned and insurgent militias routinely consult spiritual practitioners before engagements. Fighters wear amulets, consume ritually prepared potions, and undergo protection rites believed to make them bulletproof or invisible. These practices are not considered primitive by their participants—they are tactical. In a context where the formal state is fragile and military success is often tied to morale, belief, and cohesion, spiritual technologies become part of the arsenal. A militia leader in Benue State, for instance, may trust a ritualist more than a general.²
Some of these practices descend from pre-colonial traditions. Others have mutated in response to modern pressures. The Nigerian military itself has reportedly employed “spiritual consultants” to boost morale or provide divinatory intelligence—testifying to the permeability of the line between secular force and spiritual logic. The West African concept of juju—a term denoting both charm and power—embodies this hybrid space. A juju-infused rifle is not merely a tool; it is a conduit for ancestral energy. The soldier who wields it does not merely kill; he invokes.
Of course, these beliefs are regularly mocked in international media as irrational or folkloric. But this reaction mirrors the colonial discomfort we’ve seen before: when violence is framed through non-Western cosmology, it is pathologized. When it is framed through state doctrine, it is rationalized. Thus, an American drone strike justified by “national security” is treated as sober politics. A Nigerian fighter wearing goat bones is called insane. But the logic is the same: both actors believe they are sanctioned by a force greater than themselves—whether it be the state, the scripture, or the spirits.
These modern iterations of sacred warfare do not simply echo the past. They challenge the assumption that secularism is the default setting of modern conflict. The sacred has not disappeared. It has diversified. And in doing so, it continues to erode the Westphalian fantasy of the state as the sole arbiter of legitimate violence. The Taliban do not ask the U.N. for permission. The Nigerian militia does not care about NATO. What they invoke are gods, ancestors, martyrdoms, and charms. Their legitimacy flows not from borders, but from beliefs.
And that is why they are feared.
Notes
¹ Roy, Olivier. The Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia. I.B. Tauris, 2000.
² Last, Murray. “The Importance of Knowing about Not Knowing: Observations from Hausaland.” In Africa, vol. 68, no. 3, 1998, pp. 355–371.
³ Ellis, Stephen and Gerrie ter Haar. Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Social Media as the New Ritual Space
If the battlefield has long been a site of spiritual confrontation, the 21st century has given rise to a subtler, but no less potent, terrain of conflict: the screen. The smartphone, the feed, the livestream—these are no longer simply tools of communication or instruments of surveillance. They are ritual spaces. They organize attention, conduct emotion, encode belief, and mediate visibility. In the absence of altars, there are hashtags. In the absence of incense, there are reposts. In the absence of sacred groves, there are meme wars, algorithmic offerings, and digital sigils.
Modern social media platforms are not spiritually neutral. They are engines of collective intention. While corporations may use them to engineer desire and sell product, civilians—especially those alienated by institutional politics—have begun to reoccupy these platforms for purposes that are not reducible to profit or partisanship. They are practicing a kind of subtle insurgency, blending spiritual dissent, aesthetic rebellion, and distributed tactical empathy in ways that resemble—if not quite replicate—the logic of spiritual warfare.
The Bernie Sanders movement, for instance, is not merely a political campaign. It is a mass re-enchantment of civic imagination. The memes, the iconography, the cross-platform invocations of solidarity—these are not merely outreach. They are liturgical. Sanders, despite his secularism, beomes a kind of symbolic elder, a figure woven into digital folklore as the bearer of prophetic justice. Similarly, anti-Trump networks in the late 2010s did not just argue—they banished. Witches organized viral rituals to “bind Donald Trump,” invoking deities and lunar cycles in coordination with Instagram timelines and Reddit threads.¹ These were not isolated stunts. They were acts of ontological resistance: declarations that power does not reside only in institutions, but in symbols, synchronicities, and shared intention.
Social media, in this sense, has become a postmodern ritual infrastructure. It allows for decentralized, iterative participation in symbolic acts of world-reordering. And in liberal democracies, where freedom of speech is often marketed as a safety valve, this spiritual subversion has slipped through the cracks of both censorship and commodification. It does not always look like politics. Sometimes it looks like a TikTok dance done in a cemetery. Sometimes it’s a piece of performance art shared by thousands. Sometimes it’s a prayer disguised as a meme, circulating in plain sight.
What makes this potent is that it is nonviolent but destabilizing. It resists through presence, not absence. It calls upon gods, ancestors, archetypes, and algorithms alike. It’s also spiritually pluralistic. You’ll find witches, Catholics, psychedelic mystics, and crypto-anarchists participating in parallel or overlapping currents of ritualized dissent. Their common ground is not theology, but praxis: the belief that the dominant symbolic order is false, and that by aesthetic and psychic action, it can be cracked.
This is not a new phenomenon, but it is a new medium. One could argue that the Black Lives Matter protests, and more recently anti-ICE demonstrations, particularly in L.A. and Portland, often take on the trappings of procession—with chants, smoke, drums, and ritual call-and-response echoing spiritual pageantry. But what’s different is the livestream. The cell phone. The digitization of the rite. The gods now have WiFi.
And this frightens power. Because it’s untraceable. It cannot be legislated against without looking absurd. It is difficult to infiltrate because its boundaries are soft and ever-shifting. It is not a cult, nor a party, nor an armed group. It is a spiritual mood weaponized into presence. And increasingly, it is political.
This is why meme pages have become surveillance targets. Why de-platforming is the digital version of excommunication. Why governments now treat “disinformation” and “extremism” as fluid concepts, able to extend not only to violence, but to vibes. Because when a society’s metaphysical narrative begins to erode—not just politically, but spiritually—it faces not just revolution, but re-enchantment. And that cannot be policed in conventional terms.
The democratization of speech has, in short, become a democratization of spellcasting. And for the first time in history, billions have the ability to perform it. Alone, they are quirky. Together, they are ritual intelligence. And if one listens carefully, the algorithm is already whispering back.
Notes
¹ Urban, Hugh B. The Occult Roots of Postmodern Magic: Ritual, Media, and the Rise of Spiritual Pop Politics. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Why Modern Powers Fear Civilian Spiritual Warfare
The modern state claims a monopoly not just on violence, but on meaning. It authorizes what counts as legitimate faith, as credible journalism, as real threats. It defines what is serious, what is fringe, what is news. But when civilian populations begin to invoke the sacred in ways that are not authorized—when they organize, record, circulate, and spiritualize their resistance outside official channels—the state is faced with a dilemma it cannot resolve through firepower alone. It faces what this essay has termed ontological warfare: not a challenge to policy, but to reality.
This is why modern powers fear spiritual insurgency, even when it is nonviolent. Because it does not fight within the system. It fights over the system’s metaphysical legitimacy. It does not storm the Capitol—it questions whether the Capitol is sacred. And increasingly, it does so in full view of a global audience, via cell phone footage, livestreams, alternative journalism, and decentralized information networks that no longer obey the old gatekeepers of truth.
Citizen journalism has become the new drumbeat of ritual witness. A single smartphone can do what centuries of sanctioned media could not: capture the moment of spiritual rupture—the breath before a martyrdom, the prayer before a protest charge, the unfiltered cry of someone confronting power not with weapons but with presence. And these images move faster than official narratives. They ripple through Telegram channels, TikTok clips, and subreddit aggregations, forming counter-memories in real time. Like spiritual rites, they make the invisible undeniable.
Mainstream journalism, long monopolized by corporate interests and state affiliations, can no longer contain this. The rise of alternative media outlets—often underfunded, crowdsourced, and editorially heretical—has begun to eat into the legitimacy of CNN, Fox, the BBC, and other establishment institutions. These new platforms, whether they are aggregators like The Grayzone, livestreamers like Unicorn Riot, or decentralized feeds like Twitter threads and Telegram drop channels, function as informational insurgents. They rebalance the vantage point. They offer perspectives from the street, not the studio.
In this sense, spiritual warfare in the 21st century does not require trances or blood rites. It can operate through a phone. It can take the form of a livestreamed exorcism of police brutality, or a viral hashtag turned into mass action. It may even masquerade as aesthetic resistance—guerilla theater, street art, chaos magic—but the underlying goal is the same: to rupture the symbolic order, and to restore spiritual presence to a world flattened by profit, power, and platform moderation.
And this mirrors a wider trend: just as state-regulated gambling has morphed into mass-market apps, and once-exclusive investment markets have been cracked open by Reddit traders and meme stocks, so too is the production of truth undergoing democratization. Knowledge, like finance and ritual, is no longer flowing strictly top-down. It is erupting laterally, virally, and sometimes irrationally—confounding state efforts to manage narrative authority.
The state may have the gun. But it no longer controls the lens. And it certainly does not control the prayer.
In the Haitian Revolution, spirits were invoked to legitimize rebellion. In the Mau Mau oaths, the ancestors sanctioned blood. In the Ghost Dance, peyote opened portals to renewal. And today, in the blue-lit glow of handheld devices, new rituals are taking shape. The battlefield has shifted, but the logic endures: reality belongs to those who can spiritually inhabit it.
And that, more than any ideology, is what the modern state cannot tolerate.
Notes
¹ Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Cornell University Press, 2002.
² Couldry, Nick and James Curran, eds. Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
³ Kellner, Douglas. Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles. Paradigm Publishers, 2005.
The Fire Beneath the Map
We began with a forest ceremony in colonial Haiti, where enslaved people called down spirits and set fire to an empire. We traced this spark through the blood-oaths of Mau Mau fighters in Kenya, through peyote-fueled visions on the killing fields of Wounded Knee, into the martyrdom logic of modern insurgencies and the esoteric membranes of ritual militias. And from there, we followed the thread into the digital age—where cellphones replaced drums, livestreams supplanted sermons, and memes mutated into sigils of decentralized resistance.
What we have found beneath each of these cases is the same force: a rupture in the cosmological consensus. A refusal to accept the state’s claim on reality. And a turn—often desperate, sometimes ecstatic—toward a higher or deeper power that renders injustice not only intolerable, but metaphysically obscene.
This is ontological warfare: not just a contest of ideologies, but a collision between worlds. Between systems of sacred meaning, of embodied power, of ancestral or prophetic vision that do not fit neatly within the secular scaffolding of modern governance. It is not merely that oppressed peoples turn to the sacred in times of despair—it is that they turn to the sacred to redefine what victory even means. They do not just fight for territory, or laws, or representation. They fight for a reordered universe.
And the state, in turn, has always known this. That is why it persecutes prophets. Why it burns books and shrines and altars. Why it mocks the spiritual as delusion and weaponizes religion only when it can be tamed into bureaucracy. Because the moment belief slips the leash—when it becomes ecstatic, irregular, grassroots, insurgent—it threatens the whole edifice.
Today, the map may appear stable. But beneath it burns a fire of new liturgies, new folk theologies, new forms of spiritual disobedience. The ritual is now streamed. The possession is algorithmic. The witness is global. Whether it’s a shaman in the jungle, a livestreamed binding spell against a president, or a 17-year-old with a phone and a sense of the sacred, the grammar of revolt is changing—but its roots remain old, and deep, and smoldering.
Because power is never just a matter of guns and banks and votes.
It is always, in the final analysis, a battle for the soul of the world.
om tat sat
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