it goes all the way to hell.
The Black Magic of Mental Warfare: A Retrospective on Michael Aquino's "From PSYOP To MindWar"
BY DUKE SMALLHOUSE
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The late Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino led a bipolar and deeply controversial career. Known both as an Army veteran with decades of work in the psychological operations (PSYOP) community and as a high profile occultist and professed Satanist, Aquino has justifiably received his fair share of suspicion from the conspiracy theory world.
As an occultist, he was known for founding the Temple of Set, a radical offshoot of Anton Lavey's Church of Satan. The introduction to Aquino's autobiography
Ghost Rides immodestly describes him as “arguably the greatest Black Magician of his generation.” (Intro, p15) Aquino first became interested in Satanism while serving in Vietnam, during which time he corresponded with Anton Lavey, founder of the Church of Satan. He became something of a protege to Lavey, rising through the ranks of the cult between 1969 and 1975. Eventually, dissatisfied with the non-literal, non-theistic Satanism of Lavey, Aquino broke ranks and founded the Temple of Set. A
1998 Washington Post profile on the Church of Satan describes Aquino's role as a schismatic:
According to his
CV (published on his website
Xeper.org) Aquino's other occult affiliations included such obscure sects as the Order of the Trapezoid, the Rune-Gild, the Esoteric Order of Dagon (a bizarre cult modeled on the horror mythology of sci-fi author H.P. Lovecraft), and the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. Aquino's sordid reputation has been further darkened by
allegations of pedophilia associated with the Satanic Ritual Abuse scandal of the late 80s and 90s (this was discussed at some length in the 2020 documentary
Out of Shadows).
But his career was not strictly limited to the black arts. A decorated Vietnam vet, Aquino boasted an extensive resume in psychological operations both during and after the war. Aquino's best known non-occult article,
From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory was commissioned in 1980 at the request of Colonel
Paul Vallely, at the time commander of the 7th PSYOP group. (Vallely is best known today as a Fox News military analyst and a conservative conspiracy theorist who, among other things, endorsed so-called “birther” theories about Barack Obama, and has
defended the QAnon movement as a “whitehat” psychological operation. The precise relationship between the politics of Aquino and Vallely is difficult to determine.) Aquino's article proposed a supercharged revision of PSYOP doctrine in the wake of post-Vietnam disillusionment in the PSYOP community. Although not officially intended for publication, Aquino states that
MindWar was circulated as a “talking paper” among “governmental offices, agencies, commands, and publications involved or interested in PSYOP” (p2) during the 1980s – apparently to lively response.
We read through
MindWar, and found it worth discussing. Its circulation among unspecified government agencies, and the broader context of Aquino's occupational “double life” raise many points of concern which ramify far beyond the idiosyncrasies of a Vietnam vet self-styled as a black magician. On the surface, the article in itself is not particularly scandalous, as its primary focus is ostensibly psychological warfare against hostile foreign powers. But the author is sneaky (which should be no surprise, considering his infernal patronage), and the devil is in the details. Aquino's best act of black magic might indeed be the impossible rhetorical backflips by which he simultaneously pays lip service to the illegality of employing PSYOP against the American populace, while at the same time using innuendo and semantics to suggest that MindWar (which, according to the author, is not propaganda because it always tells the truth!) must in fact target the American populace as well as foreign adversaries.
In the next section, we break down points of interest in Aquino's article.
From PSYOP to MindWar: A Breakdown
From PSYOP to MindWar opens with a reflection on the then-nascent field of
psychotronics, particularly “intelligence and operational employment of ESP.” (p4) Aquino calls such research “decidedly provocative,” but states that conventional communication technologies are adequate to the task of “map[ping] the minds of neutral and enemy individuals and then to change them in accordance with U.S. national interests.” (p4) Aquino elaborates:
Reflecting at length on the failure of Vietnam War era PSYOPs at home and abroad (he asks, elsewhere: “Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities?” [p7]), Aquino lands on a disturbing point. He writes:
This rebranding of PSYOP as MindWar is a sloppy and rather transparent attempt to bypass the patent illegality of using PSYOPS on the home front. This, in fact, is the main thrust of Aquino's whole argument. It becomes crystal clear that Aquino's rebranding initiative for psychological operations was ultimately aimed at finding a technical workaround to existing prohibitions against PSYOPing the American people.
Moreover, having only just condemned the domestic use of Nazi-style propaganda, Aquino claims that MindWar can be waged without deception, citing the orations of Kennedy and Hitler as glowing examples (notably, Aquino was well known for his strong interest in Nazi occultism – see
Out of Shadows):
Aquino's logic is admittedly baffling. How, precisely, does MindWar make any pretense to truth, when the very metric of said truth is based on nothing but an appeal to the dubious authority of the US government to bring about conditions that do not yet exist? If the argument of
MindWar is rather obfuscated, a condensed version of its basic structure runs something like this (my words, not Aquino's):
The conclusion of MindWar finally circles back to the question of
psychotronics. Recall that Aquino opens his article with an ambivalent attitude toward so-called parapsychological techniques as ESP, claiming that existing technologies are more effective than supernatural forces for the purposes of psychological warfare. In this vein, he goes on to claim that natural environmental phenomena such as invisible electromagnetic wavelengths can be manipulated, in conjunction with media broadcasts, to exploit vulnerabilities in the human psyche, and thereby can make targets more susceptible to MindWar.
Muckraker takes a deep dive into the disturbing links between Aquino's double life in the black arts and the PSYOP community.
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