…wars are fought and won or lost not
on battlefields but in the minds of men…
From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory came about when, in 1980 AD, Colonel Paul Vallely (who became a Major General, USAR) asked the then Major Michael A. Aquino, PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader, “to draft a paper that would encourage some futurethought within the PSYOP community.” It was published under the auspices of the Headquarters, 7th Psychological Operations Group United States Army Reserve at the Presidio of San Francisco, California in 1980 AD.
In 2003 AD, Aquino, by then Lt. Colonel, Military Intelligence, USAR-Ret, wrote a new intro to the paper wherein he noted that “Colonel Vallely sent copies of it to various governmental offices, agencies, commands, and publications involved or interested in PSYOP. He intended it not as an article for publication, but simply as a ‘talking paper’ to stimulate dialogue.”
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7th Psychological Operations Group emblem published at the header of the MindWar paper. Michael Aquino and wife Lilith (the name of a folkloric demoness). Yellow Pages ad for the Temple of Set stating,
“Intelligent and ethical initiation into the arts and sciences of the prince of darkness”
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He noted “That should have been the end of MindWar: a minor ‘staff study’ which had done its modest job.” Although, why would it have been the end of it considering that which he refers to as “the extensive and lively letters he [Vallely] received concerning it” from those various governmental offices, agencies, commands and publications?
In any case, Aquino notes that it was not the end of it mostly due to the online conspiracy theory community:
With the arising of the Internet in the 1980s, however, MindWar received an entirely unexpected – and somewhat comic – resurrection. Allusions to it gradually proliferated, with its “sinister” title quickly winning it the most lurid, conspiracy-theory reputation. The rumor mill soon had it transformed into an Orwellian blueprint for Manchurian Candidate mind control and world domination. My own image as an occult personality added fuel to the wildfire: MindWar was now touted by the lunatic fringe as conclusive proof that the Pentagon was awash in Black Magic and Devil-worship.
Well, it may not be “awash in Black Magic and Devil-worship” but consider that which Aquino, former priest of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan who went on to establish the Temple of Set, regarding to the legal battle between another military man, US Army Maj Grady McMurtry and Kenneth Grant regarding the legitimate chartered of the US Grand Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO):
While sitting in the courtroom watching Judge Legge preside sternly over the slug-out, I couldn’t help wondering if he had any idea he was ruling on which group had legal claim to anal sex as the supreme religious sacrament in the United States.
—Scroll of Set, Vol. XII no. 5, Oct. 1986 AD
In his book Extreme Prejudice Michael Aquino notes on p. 197 (paragraph 20) that when it came to the Army there was no prejudice, extreme or otherwise, as he claims that his Satanism was known since his 1968 AD commissioning and he never experienced any negative backlash. In fact, he became the first ever official US Army Satanic Chaplain and in that capacity, he wrote the Chaplain’s manual.
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“Linda Blood” who is an ex-girlfriend of Michael Aquino is making a PDF of her book “New Satanists” available via the occult researcher Constance Cumbey. Just email Cumbey at cumbey@gmail.com and put “New Satanists” in the subject line.
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Back to the paper as Aquino notes that “it did – and perhaps still does – have something worthwhile to say.” Aquino succinctly refers to the paper as MindWar and noted that “The term ‘MindWar’ was coined by another PSYOP officer, Colonel Richard Sutter, and myself in 1977. After seeing the recent film Star Wars.”
He emphasizes that MindWar is a “Psychological means for achieving victory” according to which “The use of ‘ordinary’ military force (bombs, bullets, etc.) is regarded as a ‘last resort’ in circumstances wherein MindWar by itself fails…The advantage of Mind War is that it conducts wars in nonlethal, noninjurious, and nondestructive ways.”
He provides the following examples:
While in the 1980s I had no reason to think that this paper had had any official effect upon U.S. PSYOP doctrine within or beyond the Army, it was with some fascination that I saw specific of its prescriptions applied during the first Gulf War, and recently even more obviously during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In both instances extreme PSYOP was directed both against the object of the attack and upon U.S. domestic public perception and opinion, in 2003 to the extent of ‘embedding’ journalists with military units to inevitably channel their perspectives and perceptions.
In this way, he notes, “minor techniques of MindWar” lead to “A psychological climate of inexorable U.S. victory was created and sustained…Invoking as it does the most intense emotions and commitments of its audiences.”
In the next segment, we will get into the body of the paper From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory.
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Aquino claims that the sigil came to him whilst meditatively “invoking spirits.” For some reason, Anton LaVey modified the sigil so as to remove the 666. Yet, Aquino restored the 666 after making contact with these spirits which, according to him, are the very ones associated with the Nazi SS’s Heinrich Himmler: Aquino has visited the SS’s Wewelsburg Castle and received inspiration there regarding the sigil.
This is not directly relevant to the MindWar paper but interesting as a window into how such personages think.
Michael Aquino wrote that the “emblem” aka “insignia”:
…was conceived in the Wewelsburg Castle, Westphalia, Germany during the Wewelsburg Working [reference to a magickal ritual] on October 19, XVII [as per an occult accounting of the date] in the Hall of the Dead (Walhalla), was sketched out on a desk in the Wewelsburg caretaker’s office (when I returned the Walhalla keys to him following the Working) and was drafted in precise mathematical proportions on a table in Eva Braun’s tea-room in the Eagle’s Nest at Obersalzberg. I could have done the drafting before then, but wanted the environment to be magically appropriate. There were a few tourists milling around the main room of the Eagle’s Nest, but as it turned out I had the wood-paneled tea-room to myself.
The insignia is described in detail in the statement of the Order in the Crystal Table, but a few incidental comments might be added: In addition to the restoration of the phi-proportions, it was important to avoid all curved lines altogether, hence the head & tail of the Tcham-sceptre, the 666, and the flames (restored from the C/S medallion) were all “angled”. It will be noticed that the pentagram’s outline is complete, though it goes through three different “media” at the bottom: the flames, the “W”, and finally the pentagram itself.
All of the trapezoids are similarly unbroken, though several of them “change media” as well. Furthermore the angels of the flames together with those of the diagram above create more trapezoids and phi-ratios.
In “Evolution of the Order of the Trapezoid Insignia” “Sir Michael A. Aquino, Ph.D., GME” noted:
For a recent XX issue of the Cloven Hoof, Anton Stander [actually, Szandor] LaVey wrote a one-page commentary concerning the Church of Satan origins of the Order of the Trapezoid and its insignia. It is an interesting story, though inconsistent in some respects with Anton’s original 12/V Cloven Hoof definition of the Order (as cited in the Order’s Charter.) According to this new commentary, the original O.Tr. was identical with the pre-I Magic Circle, organized in 1957, that met at the California Street house. (if so, it was not previously mentioned, as during the Age of Satan the pre-group was always referred to formally and informally as the Magic Circle.)
The idea for the O.Tr. insignia, continues Anton, came from the open-bottomed pentagram of a Costa Rican Satanist group, Los Hermanos Diablo [The Devil Brothers], to which Anton added a surrounding trapezoid, the three 6s of the “Book of Revelation” and an upthrust trident, thus:
This emblem, says Anton, was worn for ritual use by all members of the Magic Circle. This I cannot verify, not having attended activities of the Church until IV—nor were any trapezoidal pendants in evidence at that time.
Anton’s illustration for the cover of the February V Hoof, however, shows a procession of the Council of Nine departing a trapezoidal tower topped by a crescent moon (presumably one of the “seven towers of Satan” cited by William Seabrook in his Adventures in Arabia, and the hooded Nine are shown wearing trapezoidal pendants like that shown above. This seems to suggest that the pendant was originally the emblem of the Nine, rather than of the entire Magic Circle.
In non-ritual situations, continues Anton, the trapezoidal pendant hidden by an identically-shaped trapezoidal panel embellished with a picture of the bat-daemon:
This, I might add, is a beautiful example of the LaVey artistic style, which combines graceful, flowing lines with claw-like twists and unexpected convolutions. As a pre-teen child in the 1950s spending occasional weekends in Forest Knells, a tiny forest community in the Marin Country backwoods north of San Francisco, I used to admite the painted sign of a bat on one of the houses tucked away under the trees of Tamal Road.
Twenty years later I mentioned this to Anton, and learned to my surprise that he had painted it for the house’s owner, someone he called “Crazy Charfie”. (I supposed it’s just as well I never tried to trick-or-treat there back in the 50s!)
