WOMEN IN THE ESOTERIC AND TROLLING TRADITIONS

Comprehensive Research Document for Book 1 & Book 2

Book 1: “The Fires of History: How Trolls Saved the World” Book 2: “The Hidden Fire: How the Occult Trolled God Into Modernity”

Central Thesis: Trolling/provocation is a civilizational feature, not a bug. The women documented here used provocation, humor, subversion, or esoteric practice to challenge establishment power. The establishment’s response (erasure, imprisonment, murder) tells you everything about how threatened it felt.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Ancient/Medieval Figures
   • Hypatia of Alexandria
   • Cathar Perfectae
   • Hildegard of Bingen
   • Margery Kempe
2. Early Modern
   • Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
3. 19th Century
   • Helena Blavatsky
4. Golden Dawn and Post-Golden Dawn
   • Florence Farr
   • Moina Mathers
   • Dion Fortune
5. Wicca
   • Doreen Valiente
6. Mid-20th Century Esoteric Figures
   • Marjorie Cameron
   • Genesis P-Orridge
7. Modern Trolls
   • Dorothy Parker
   • Yoko Ono
   • The Guerrilla Girls
   • Pussy Riot
8. Additional Women Trolls Across History
   • Mina Loy
   • The Suffragettes (Pankhurst, Davison)
   • Aphra Behn
   • Female Court Jesters (Jane Foole, Mathurine)
   • Valerie Solanas
   • FEMEN / Inna Shevchenko
   • Lysistrata and the Sex Strike Tradition
   • Cross-Cultural Female Trickster Figures (Baubo, Sheela-na-gig)
9. The Pattern: Structural Analysis
10. Academic Bibliography

1. ANCIENT/MEDIEVAL

HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA (c. 355-415 AD)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Hypatia was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria – at that time a major city of the Eastern Roman Empire. Born c. 350-370 AD, she was educated by her father Theon, a renowned mathematician and astronomer who taught at the Mouseion (the famous Library of Alexandria’s successor institution). (Wikipedia) She was, by contemporary accounts, the leading mathematician and astronomer of her era – the only woman of antiquity for whom such a claim can credibly be made.

She taught at the Neoplatonist School of Philosophy and drew large audiences of both pagans and Christians to her lectures. Her most prominent pupil was Synesius of Cyrene, who later became the Christian Bishop of Ptolemais. That fact demonstrates how her intellectual authority transcended the religious battle lines of late antiquity.

Crucial distinction for Book 2: Hypatia was a Neoplatonist in the tradition of Plotinus, not in the theurgic tradition of Iamblichus. (Wikipedia) This matters because, as Maria Dzielska demonstrates, Hypatia rejected theurgy (the use of ritual magic and oracles that later Neoplatonists like Iamblichus and Proclus promoted). She sought religious experience through philosophy and reason, not through magical operations. She was trying to access the One – the underlying reality – through human intellectual abstraction from the Platonic forms.

So: she wasn’t killed for practicing magic. She was killed for thinking.

The Murder (March 415 AD)

The murder of Hypatia is one of the central events in the history of the relationship between religion and intellect.

Political context: Hypatia had become a political advisor to Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, who was locked in a bitter power struggle with Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria. Cyril wanted political as well as religious authority over the city. Orestes resisted. Rumors spread that Hypatia was the reason Orestes would not submit to the bishop.

The act: In March 415, during Lent, a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter ambushed Hypatia’s carriage as she was traveling home. They dragged her into the Kaisarion – a former pagan temple that had been converted into a Christian church (the irony writes itself). According to Socrates Scholasticus, they stripped her naked, murdered her with ostrakois (roof tiles, potsherds, or oyster shells – scholars debate the translation, but all options are horrible), tore her body to pieces, dragged her mangled limbs through the streets to a place called Cinarion, and burned the remains. (Wikipedia)

The aftermath: Hypatia’s murder shocked the Roman Empire and transformed her into a “martyr for philosophy.”

The Establishment Response as Evidence

The account of John, Bishop of Nikiu, is essential for Book 2’s thesis. John blamed Hypatia:

“And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music… And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic.”

Note the move: a woman who taught mathematics and philosophy is retroactively recast as a witch who beguiled a man through magic. The same playbook that would be used for the next 1,500 years. The astrolabe – a scientific instrument – becomes evidence of sorcery. John of Nikiu is performing, in 415 AD, the exact same rhetorical operation that the Malleus Maleficarum would codify in 1487.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She was murdered in a church – the very institution that claimed a monopoly on moral authority.
• Her killer, Cyril, was later declared a Saint and a Doctor of the Church. The Catholic Church canonized the man whose political machinations led to the mob murder of a philosopher. St. Cyril of Alexandria: patron saint of bullies everywhere.
• The ostraka (tiles/shards) used to flay her alive were likely the same kind of pottery shards Athenians had once used to vote in the practice of ostracism. Hypatia was, in a sense, “voted off the island” by the most literal possible interpretation.
• Socrates Scholasticus, our best source, was himself a Christian. But even he found the murder indefensible: “This affair brought no small disgrace, not only upon Cyril but also upon the whole Alexandrian church.”

Academic Sources

• Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Harvard University Press, 1995) – The definitive academic biography. Dzielska is meticulous about disentangling fact from later legend. Crucially establishes that Hypatia rejected Iamblichean theurgy.
• Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.15 – Primary source.
• John of Nikiu, Chronicle – Hostile primary source; valuable precisely because it demonstrates how the Church justified the murder.
• Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford, 2017)
• Michael Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (Prometheus Books, 2007)

Connection to Book 2’s Thesis

Hypatia represents the original sin of the relationship between the esoteric/intellectual tradition and institutional religion. The Neoplatonic tradition she represented – rational inquiry into the nature of the divine – was exactly the kind of “unauthorized access to the sacred” that the Church could not tolerate. She didn’t need a bishop to mediate between her and the divine; she had Plotinus. That made her dangerous.

Her murder was not just a crime. It was a policy statement.

CATHAR PERFECTAE (12th-13th Century)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Background: The Cathar Movement

Catharism was a Christian dualist (or quasi-dualist, pseudo-Gnostic) movement that thrived in northern Italy and southern France (the Languedoc) between the 12th and 14th centuries. Followers called themselves “Good Christians” or “Good Men/Good Women.” The movement held that the material world was created by an evil demiurge, that the Roman Catholic Church was corrupt, and that salvation lay in the consolamentum – a sacrament of spiritual baptism that transformed a believer into a Perfectus (male) or Perfecta (female).

Perfecti lived lives of extreme asceticism: no meat, no sex, no worldly possessions. In exchange, they received the authority to preach, teach, and administer the consolamentum to others.

Women as Perfectae: The Trolling of Catholic Gender Hierarchy

Here is what scandalized the Catholic Church above all: women could become Perfectae with the same authority to teach and preach as male Perfecti. In a world where women had virtually no institutional religious authority – where the priesthood was exclusively male (and remains so in Catholicism to this day) – the Cathars offered women full spiritual equality.

This was not a minor theological quibble. It was a structural assault on the entire basis of Catholic authority. If women could administer sacraments, the Catholic monopoly on salvation was broken twice over – once by heretical theology, and again by heretical gender politics.

Notable Cathar Women

Esclarmonde de Foix (c. 1151-1215): The most famous of the Cathar Perfectae. Her name means “clarity of the world” in Occitan, which is almost too on-the-nose for a heretic whose crime was seeing too clearly. She received the consolamentum in 1204 from Bishop Guilhabert de Castres at Fanjeaux, alongside three other noblewomen: Aude de Fanjeaux, Fays de Durfort, and Raymonde of Saint-Germain. (Wikipedia)

Esclarmonde founded girls’ schools, hospitals, and homes for aging Perfectae. At a theological debate between Cathars and Catholics, she reportedly contributed to the discussion – to the visible horror of the Catholic priests present, who could not stomach a woman participating in theological argumentation.

Guillelme de Tonneins: A noblewoman who organized her own household to serve and support the Perfectae network, essentially running an underground railroad for heretics.

The unnamed many: Inquisitorial records from the 13th century (especially from the Lauragais region) reveal that women’s participation in sustaining and spreading Catharism was far greater than the “passive role generally assigned to them in medieval society.” These records survive precisely because inquisitors were documenting the “problem.” And the problem, they were alarmed to discover, was everywhere.

The Establishment Response: The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229)

The Catholic Church’s response to the Cathars was genocide. Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade, a twenty-year military campaign that devastated the Languedoc. The most infamous incident was the massacre at Beziers (1209), where the papal legate Arnaud Amalric reportedly said, “Kill them all. God will know His own” (Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius). (Wikipedia)

The Inquisition was subsequently established in the region specifically to root out surviving Cathars. The movement was effectively destroyed by the mid-14th century.

Ironic/Funny Details

• The Catholic Church destroyed an entire civilization to prevent women from preaching. Eight hundred years later, it still won’t ordain women. Commitment to the bit.
• The Cathars’ asceticism was, by any standard, more rigorous than that of most Catholic clergy. The “heretics” were living more Christ-like lives than the bishops who condemned them.
• The Inquisition records that survive as our primary source for Cathar women’s roles exist only because the Inquisitors were trying to destroy the movement. The documentation of erasure became the means of remembrance.
• Esclarmonde de Foix, a woman whose name literally means “light of the world,” was hunted by an institution that claimed to serve “the Light of the World.”

Academic Sources

• Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (Longman, 2000)
• Sean Martin, The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages (Vintage, 2005)
• Anne Brenon, Les Femmes cathares (Perrin, 1992) – Key work on Cathar women specifically
• Western Michigan University thesis: “Life among Good Women: The Social and Religious Impact of the Cathar Perfectae in the Thirteenth-Century Lauragais”
• Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford, 2008)

Connection to Book 2’s Thesis

The Cathars represent the clearest pre-modern example of how esoteric/heterodox religion was more egalitarian than orthodox religion, and how that egalitarianism was itself perceived as an act of cosmic trolling. The Cathar Perfectae weren’t trying to troll the Catholic Church; they were trying to live devout lives. But in a system where female spiritual authority was definitionally impossible, being a woman with spiritual authority was the troll. The medium was the message.

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN (1098-1179)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess and one of the most extraordinary polymaths of the Middle Ages: writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, herbalist, medical writer, and – most importantly for our purposes – one of the most successful trolls of the medieval Catholic hierarchy, all accomplished while technically remaining inside the system.

Born to a noble family, she was offered as a tithe (a tithe – one-tenth of their children) to the Church at age eight, placed in the care of the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. She was elected magistra (mother superior) in 1136 after Jutta’s death. (Wikipedia)

The Visionary Gambit: Trolling Through Prophecy

Here is Hildegard’s masterpiece of subversion: from childhood, she experienced visions that she claimed were directly from God. In 1141, at age 42, she received what she described as a divine command to “write down what you see and hear.” She initially resisted – performing the expected feminine humility – but then “obeyed.”

This was genius. In a world where women could not preach, could not hold ecclesiastical office, and were expected to be silent, Hildegard found the one loophole: if God Himself is speaking through you, nobody outranks your source.

She secured endorsement from Bernard of Clairvaux (the most influential monk in Christendom) and then papal approval from Pope Eugenius III, who read portions of her Scivias aloud at the Synod of Trier in 1147-1148. Once the Pope had publicly endorsed her visions, she had something close to carte blanche. (Wikipedia)

What She Did With That Authority

Armed with divine authorization, Hildegard proceeded to:

• Found two independent monasteries (Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165), breaking free from the male-controlled Disibodenberg monastery – against the strenuous objections of the monks, who didn’t want to lose her and her wealthy nuns.
• Compose over 70 liturgical songs, making her one of the most prolific composers of sacred monophony and the most recorded medieval composer in modern history.
• Write major theological, scientific, and medical works: Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, Liber Divinorum Operum, Physica, and Causae et Curae.
• Conduct four preaching tours through the Rhineland – a woman publicly preaching, which was essentially unheard of.
• Rebuke popes, bishops, kings, and emperors through extensive correspondence. She wrote letters to everyone from Pope Eugenius III to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, admonishing them for corruption, laxity, and injustice. And she did it in the voice of God: “Thus saith the Living Light…”

She presented herself as a frail, unlearned female (“a poor little form of a woman”) mysteriously chosen to be God’s “trumpet,” and then used that pose of weakness as a weapon. “I’m just a humble instrument; take it up with my Boss.”

The Interdict Incident (1178-1179)

Near the end of her life, Hildegard’s community buried a man in their cemetery who had died after being excommunicated. The clergy of Mainz demanded the body be exhumed. Hildegard refused, claiming the man had been reconciled to the Church before death and that exhumation would be a sin.

The bishop placed her entire monastery under interdict – meaning no Mass, no singing, no sacraments. For a community of nuns who had built their spiritual life around Hildegard’s liturgical music, this was devastating. Hildegard’s response was to write a long theological treatise arguing that music was humanity’s connection to the divine harmony of creation, that silencing sacred song was an offense against God, and that the prelates of Mainz were instruments of the Devil.

After many letters and considerable lobbying, the interdict was lifted in March 1179. Hildegard died on September 17, 1179.

In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI declared her a Doctor of the Church – only the fourth woman ever to receive that title. (Wikipedia)

Ironic/Funny Details

• She claimed to be “unlearned” while writing sophisticated theological treatises, composing complex music, and running two monasteries. This is the medieval equivalent of “I’m just asking questions.”
• She invented her own language (Lingua Ignota) with over 1,000 words and its own alphabet – possibly the first known constructed language. Nobody asked her to do this. She just did.
• Her medical writings include observations about female sexuality that are remarkably frank for the 12th century, including descriptions of female orgasm – written by a woman who had taken a vow of celibacy. (Research? Interviews? Divine revelation?)
• She described her visionary state not as a trance but as ordinary consciousness: “I do not perceive these things with the outer eyes or hear them with the outer ears… I perceive them in the open skies with the eyes and ears of the inner person.” She was careful never to claim ecstatic states that would make her look like a lunatic rather than a prophet.
• She was 80 years old when she defied the bishop of Mainz. Peak “old lady doesn’t give a damn” energy, 12th-century edition.

Academic Sources

• Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179: A Visionary Life (Routledge, 1998) (DOI)
• Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (University of California Press, 1987) (DOI)
• Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Atherton (Penguin Classics, 2001)
• The Columbia University Epistolae project: comprehensive online collection of Hildegard’s correspondence.
• Vatican, Apostolic Letter proclaiming Hildegard a Doctor of the Church (October 7, 2012)

Connection to Book 2’s Thesis

Hildegard is the perfect example of trolling from inside the system. She never openly challenged Catholic doctrine. She never claimed authority for herself. She claimed authority for God, and then delivered God’s messages – which just happened to align with her own views about women’s capability, clerical corruption, and the need for institutional reform. She figured out that the system’s own logic – that God could speak through anyone He chose – contained the exploit she needed. She was the medieval equivalent of a hacker who doesn’t break in through the back door but walks in through the front with a forged badge that the guards can’t distinguish from a real one, because it might be real.

MARGERY KEMPE (c. 1373 - after 1438)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Margery Kempe was an English Catholic mystic from Lynn (now King’s Lynn) in Norfolk, author (through dictation) of The Book of Margery Kempe, generally considered the first autobiography in the English language. She was the daughter of John Brunham, a prosperous merchant who served five terms as mayor of Lynn. She married John Kempe at about age twenty and bore fourteen children. (Wikipedia)

After a difficult first childbirth, she experienced a mental crisis involving visions of demons. She subsequently had a vision of Christ that restored her, and she embarked on what would become a lifelong career of extreme public piety, mystical experience, and making absolutely everyone around her very, very uncomfortable.

The Trolling: Performance Art as Mysticism (or Vice Versa)

Margery Kempe’s primary mode of operation was public weeping. Not quiet, dignified tears – violent, full-body, screaming, wailing, writhing-on-the-ground sobbing that could go on for hours. She did this everywhere: in church, on the street, during sermons, on pilgrimages, at dinner. She claimed these episodes were involuntary gifts from God. Her contemporaries were frequently skeptical.

The question for Book 2 is: Was she sincere, or was she trolling? The honest answer is: it doesn’t matter, because the effect was identical. Whether Margery Kempe was experiencing genuine mystical ecstasy or performing the medieval equivalent of a one-woman protest, the result was the same – she disrupted every space she entered, forced everyone around her to either acknowledge or reject her claimed divine connection, and made the institutional Church profoundly uncomfortable.

Key Trolling Acts

1. The Weeping: Her fellow pilgrims on the ship to Jerusalem couldn’t stand her screaming during meditation and began to persecute her. On pilgrimage, she “frequently alienated fellow travellers through her excessive weeping and constant talk of God.” Contrary to assumptions about medieval credulity, the people Margery encountered were often deeply skeptical and “considered her bouts of crying to be mere performance.”

2. The Heresy Trials: Kempe was tried for heresy multiple times – and never convicted. She was accused of Lollardy (the proto-Protestant movement associated with John Wycliffe) repeatedly. One particularly dramatic incident: the Mayor of Leicester arrested her and called her, in Latin, “a cheap whore, a lying Lollard,” and threatened her with prison. Kempe insisted on the right to have accusations made in English so she could defend herself, was briefly cleared, then was brought to trial again by the Abbot, Dean, and Mayor, and imprisoned for three weeks.

3. The White Clothes: She insisted on wearing white clothing after making a vow of chastity with her husband, which was interpreted as hypocritical vanity for a married woman. She didn’t care.

4. The Autobiographical Act: She dictated her Book – a first-person account of her visions, travels, trials, and confrontations with authority – in the 1420s. The narrative is told in the third person (referring to herself as “this creature”), but the effect is anything but humble. She is the protagonist of her own story at a time when women were not supposed to have stories.

5. The Pilgrimage Campaign: She made pilgrimages to Jerusalem (1413), Rome, Santiago de Compostela (1417), and various English shrines – traveling independently at a time when female independent travel was dangerous and socially transgressive. (Wikipedia) On her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, she nearly fell off her donkey when she first saw the city because she was overcome with spiritual ecstasy. (This is either deeply moving or peak comedy, depending on your perspective.)

6. Defiance of the Archbishop: When confronted by the Archbishop of York, Margery’s responses were “unapologetic and feisty, imputing the archbishop’s moral integrity and refusing to stop teaching people about God.”

Scholarly Framing

Critics including Lynn Staley and Kathy Lavezzo “have seen in Kempe’s mysticism the potential for subverting patriarchal order, within the male-dominated ecclesiastical hierarchy, within private relationships between men and women, and in the public sphere in general.”

The BYU scholarly article “The Book of Margery Kempe: Religious Discourse and the Carnivalesque Woman” frames her through Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, which is, essentially, the academic term for what we’re calling “trolling.”

Ironic/Funny Details

• She dictated the first autobiography in the English language… in the third person. She refers to herself throughout as “this creature,” which is either profound humility or the medieval equivalent of referring to yourself in the third person like a professional athlete.
• She had fourteen children before deciding she was called to a life of chastity. That’s not a vow; that’s exhaustion.
• She convinced her husband to agree to a chastity pact by bribing him: she would pay his debts if he would stop having sex with her. The negotiation took place on a road near a cross. Medieval domestic politics at its finest.
• Every time she was tried for heresy, she won. She was the medieval version of “you can’t fire me, I quit.”
• The other pilgrims on her trip to Jerusalem basically tried to ditch her because she was so annoying. They “persecuted” her, which in context means they tried everything short of throwing her overboard to make her stop crying.

Academic Sources

• Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, various modern editions
• Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (Penn State UP, 1994)
• Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her World (Longman, 2002)
• Elizabeth MacDonald, Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe
• BYU Religious Studies: “The Book of Margery Kempe: Religious Discourse and the Carnivalesque Woman”

Connection to Book 2’s Thesis

Margery Kempe is the medieval proof of concept that you don’t need institutional authority to troll the institution. She had no office, no credential, no ordination. She had volume. She screamed, wept, and refused to shut up until the establishment had to either accommodate her or explain why a woman who was clearly (to them, performatively) devoted to Christ was a problem. Every heresy trial she survived made the Church look worse, not her. She was acquitted – which meant the Church itself had to confirm that what she was doing wasn’t heretical, even as it drove everyone around her insane.

2. EARLY MODERN

BARONESS ELSA VON FREYTAG-LORINGHOVEN (1874-1927)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) and Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (born Else Hildegard Plotz) was a German avant-garde visual artist and poet who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where she became a “living Dada.” She is increasingly recognized as the “Mama of Dada” (a designation coined by New York Times critic Holland Cotter). (Wikipedia)

Born in Swinemunde, Germany (now Swinoujscie, Poland), she endured a difficult childhood with an abusive, alcoholic father. She moved to Berlin, then to Italy and Munich, before emigrating to America in 1910, eventually settling in New York. She acquired her title through marriage to the impoverished German Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven in 1913 (he returned to Germany and committed suicide in 1919).

In Greenwich Village, the Baroness became a legendary figure through her radical self-presentation: she shaved her head and painted it vermilion, wore tin cans as a bra, hung a birdcage around her neck, made sleeves from stolen shower-curtain rings, and turned her daily public appearances into Dada performance art. She was the walking, talking, impossible-to-ignore embodiment of the avant-garde principle that art and life should be indistinguishable.

Her lasting body of written work is her poetry, published by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap in The Little Review – the magazine whose slogan was “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste.” She died in Paris in 1927, reportedly from gas inhalation (possibly accidental, possibly suicide).

THE FOUNTAIN ATTRIBUTION: The Most Important Art Troll in History, Possibly Stolen From a Woman

This is the bombshell for both books.

In 1917, a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” was submitted to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. It was rejected. A photograph was taken by Alfred Stieglitz. The object, titled Fountain, went on to become arguably the most influential work of art in the 20th century – the foundational gesture of conceptual art, the ultimate provocation, the original troll of the art world.

For nearly a century, Fountain was attributed to Marcel Duchamp. In 2002, Irene Gammel’s biography Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity presented evidence that the Baroness, not Duchamp, was the true creator. (Wikipedia)

The Key Evidence:

1. Duchamp’s letter to his sister Suzanne (April 11, 1917): “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” This is Duchamp himself saying the urinal was sent by a female friend under a male pseudonym.

2. The Baroness was already making “readymades”: Her first readymade work, Enduring Ornament (a heavily rusted metal ring declared a work of art), dates to 1913 – a full year before Duchamp created his first readymade, Bottle Rack (1914). Duchamp coined the term, but she was doing it first.

3. Location: The Baroness was living and working in Philadelphia, where the urinal’s R. Mutt signature handwriting has been linked to her.

4. The 1935 retroactive attribution: It was only in 1935 that surrealist Andre Breton brought renewed attention to Fountain, attributing it to Duchamp, who accepted authorship and began commissioning replicas. By that time, the Baroness had been dead for eight years.

The Counter-Arguments: The theory was “strongly disputed” in articles published in Burlington Magazine in 2019 by Dawn Ades and Bradley Bailey. Ades argued that Gammel incorrectly translated the Duchamp letter as meaning the urinal was sent to Duchamp personally, rather than submitted to the exhibition.

The debate remains unresolved. But consider the implications for the books’ thesis:

If the Baroness did create Fountain, then the single most famous act of artistic trolling in the 20th century – the gesture that launched conceptual art, that told the entire art world “anything I say is art, is art” – was by a woman whose contribution was erased and attributed to a man. That is itself the ultimate meta-troll: the art world that Fountain was trolling turned out to be just as capable of erasing women as the establishment it mocked.

If she didn’t create Fountain, she was still the original practitioner of the readymade and the most radical performance artist of the New York avant-garde, whose legacy was buried for decades because she was female, impoverished, and too genuinely disruptive to be safely canonized.

Either way, she wins.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She arrived at a studio session in 1917 to pose nude, “only to reveal her breasts covered in tomato tin cans, a caged canary around her neck, cropped vermilion hair, and a sleeve made of stolen shower-curtain rings.” This is 1917. The Dadaists thought they were radical.
• Duchamp, the supposed inventor of the readymade, actually coined the term but may have borrowed the practice from a woman he knew. The man who made his name by submitting a urinal as art may have stolen the idea from a woman. The piss-take was itself a piss-take.
• The New York avant-garde found her so disruptive that even they couldn’t handle her. She was too Dada for the Dadaists.
• She died in poverty in Paris. The art world she arguably helped create could not find a place for her in it.

Academic Sources

• Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography (MIT Press, 2002) (DOI) – The key biography and source for the Fountain attribution theory
• Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (Thames & Hudson, multiple editions) – Standard feminist art history text
• Dawn Ades and Bradley Bailey, articles in Burlington Magazine (2019) – Counter-arguments to the Fountain attribution
• The Little Review archives – Primary source for her poetry
• Holland Cotter, “Mama of Dada” review, New York Times

Connection to Both Books

Book 1: The Fountain, whoever made it, is one of the most consequential trolls in cultural history. If the Baroness made it, then the most famous troll was a woman, and the fact that we don’t know that is itself the punchline.

Book 2: The Baroness’s practice of declaring found objects to be art is structurally identical to the esoteric tradition’s claim that the sacred can be found in the profane. She was performing a secular version of the mystical operation: transubstantiation as art criticism.

3. 19TH CENTURY

HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY (1831-1891)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire) – with dark mirror material

Biography

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (born Helena von Hahn) was a Russian-born occultist, author, and co-founder (with Henry Steel Olcott) of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. (Wikipedia) She was an aristocrat (her mother was a novelist, her father a military officer), a polyglot (Russian, Georgian, English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Sanskrit), a chain smoker of epic dedication, a hashish enthusiast, and one of the most outrageous personalities of the 19th century.

She was, depending on your perspective, either: (a) a genuine channel for ancient wisdom traditions who synthesized Eastern and Western esoteric knowledge into a new spiritual framework, or (b) the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostor in history (the SPR’s description), or (c) both simultaneously, which is the interpretation most useful for Book 2.

The Trolling: Proto-Catfishing and Invented Traditions

The Mahatma Letters: Blavatsky claimed to be in psychic and physical contact with “Mahatmas” or “Masters of the Ancient Wisdom” – ascended beings in Tibet who communicated with her through letters that materialized in a special cabinet at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar, India. These letters, written in a distinctive script, provided doctrinal guidance and confirmed Blavatsky’s authority.

This is proto-catfishing. Blavatsky created an elaborate fictional persona (or personas – the Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya, among others), maintained extended “correspondence” with them, and used this fabricated relationship to establish spiritual authority. She invented an entire mythology of hidden masters, secret teachings, and ancient lineages to legitimize her own innovations. The Mahatma Letters are the 19th century equivalent of creating a fake social media profile and then citing it as a source.

The Book of Dzyan: In The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky claimed to be translating and commenting upon the “Stanzas of Dzyan,” an ancient text written in the “Senzar” language, which she said she had seen in Tibet. No scholar of ancient languages has ever encountered any independent reference to the Book of Dzyan or the Senzar language. She appears to have invented both the text and the language. This places her squarely in the “fake ancient texts” tradition – alongside the Rosicrucian manifestos, the Corpus Hermeticum’s misattributed antiquity, and the Ossian poems.

Isis Unveiled (1877): Her first major work has been extensively criticized as plagiarized, drawing heavily and often directly from sources popular among occultists at the time. She wasn’t just inventing; she was remixing – cutting and pasting from existing occult literature to create something that felt ancient but was thoroughly modern.

The SPR Investigation (1885)

The Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson, a young Cambridge graduate, to investigate Blavatsky’s claims at the Theosophical headquarters in Adyar, India. The resulting Hodgson Report (1885) concluded that Blavatsky was “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history” and that she had forged the Mahatma Letters herself. (Wikipedia)

But here’s the twist: In 1986, a century later, Dr. Vernon Harrison – a senior SPR member and expert in handwriting and photography – published a devastating critique of the Hodgson Report’s handwriting evidence. After examining all the Mahatma Letters and Blavatsky’s personal correspondence, Harrison found three distinct hands and concluded that the original investigation was badly flawed.

So: the debunking was itself debunked. The establishment that declared her a fraud may have been wrong. This doesn’t mean the Mahatmas were real. But it means the question of what Blavatsky was doing is more complicated than “she faked it.”

The Personality

Blavatsky was, by all accounts, impossible. She smoked constantly (“with a kind of dedication that today you only see in Serbia”), was scornful of social obligations, wore loose robes covered in rings, reportedly swore like a sailor, and dominated every room she entered. One journalist speculated she was “500 years old and could conjure up money at will.”

She was the anti-Victorian woman: loud, fat, chain-smoking, unmarried (she left her first husband after a few months), traveled the world alone, claimed secret knowledge, and didn’t care what anyone thought. In an era that demanded women be silent, slender, domestic, and deferential, Blavatsky was a walking provocation.

THE DARK MIRROR: Blavatsky –> Ariosophy –> Nazism

This is essential for intellectual honesty and is itself a key part of Book 2’s argument.

In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky outlined a theory of “root races” in which humanity evolves through successive racial stages, with the “Aryan race” positioned as a higher spiritual development. While Blavatsky’s system was not politically racist in the way later interpreters made it (she placed the origin of civilization in India, not Germany), the framework was waiting to be weaponized.

Guido von List (1848-1919) appropriated Blavatsky’s concepts of root races, cyclical time, and reincarnation and transformed them into a racial ideology. He changed Blavatsky’s origin of civilization from India to Germany, insisted the “Ario-German race” was the most spiritual, and called for an Ario-Germanic occult state in which only “Ario-Germans” could be citizens, hold power, or breed with each other.

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) developed this further into Ariosophy, an explicitly racist mysticism.

The chain runs: Blavatsky –> Guido von List –> Lanz von Liebenfels –> Nazi occultism (with various intermediaries including the Thule Society).

As historian Hannah Newman stated, via Ariosophy, Blavatsky’s Theosophical ideas “contributed to Nazi ideology.” However, Gary Lachman has argued that Blavatsky should not be held accountable for the antisemitic and racist ideas that the Ariosophists promoted – she would likely have been horrified.

For Book 2: This is the “dark troll” – the cautionary tale about what happens when provocative ideas escape their creator’s control. Blavatsky’s invented tradition was meant to challenge Western materialism and Christian exclusivism. Instead, part of it was repurposed to justify genocide. The troll’s tool got picked up by the wrong hands.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She was declared “the most accomplished impostor in history” by an investigation that was itself later declared incompetent. The debunkers got debunked. Turtles all the way down.
• She invented a language, a sacred text, a cast of hidden masters, and an entire cosmological history. And people still follow her teachings 130+ years later. Whatever she was doing, it worked.
• The hashish smoking that made her a counterculture icon in the 1960s would have made her a criminal in the 1960s. The hippies who adopted her were breaking the laws that her era hadn’t yet invented.
• She left her husband after a few months, in the 1840s, and spent the next four decades traveling the world. This was so far outside the norms of Russian aristocratic womanhood that people literally didn’t know what to make of her.

Academic Sources

• Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (Schocken, 1995)
• Gary Lachman, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality (Tarcher/Penguin, 2012)
• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (NYU Press, 1992) – Essential for the Ariosophy connection
• SPR, The Hodgson Report (1885)
• Vernon Harrison, critique of Hodgson Report, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1986)
• Springer Nature: “Theosophical Chronology in the Writings of Guido von List (1848-1919): A Link Between H.P. Blavatsky’s Philosophy and the Nazi Movement” (DOI)

4. GOLDEN DAWN AND POST-GOLDEN DAWN

Contextual Note: Women in the Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, was the first esoteric society to admit women on terms of perfect equality with men. In contrast to Freemasonry and the SRIA (Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia), which excluded women entirely, the Golden Dawn allowed women to be initiated through the same rituals, hold the same ranks, and exercise the same authority as men. Male and female members were treated equally in the hierarchical grading.

This was radical in 1888. The social revolution of the 1880s-1890s was producing the “New Woman” – independent, educated, politically active – and the Golden Dawn drew from these ranks. The ideas of feminist occultist Anna Kingsford directly influenced MacGregor Mathers’ advocacy for male-female equality in the Order’s magical workings.

As Mary K. Greer documented in Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (1995), four women in particular – Maud Gonne, Moina Bergson Mathers, Annie Horniman, and Florence Farr – “were actively and equally involved in the order.”

For Book 2’s thesis: The esoteric tradition, at its best, was trolling the gender norms of its own era simply by treating women as equals. In 1888, a woman could not vote, could not hold most public offices, and was expected to be legally subordinate to her husband. But she could be initiated into the inner mysteries of Hermetic magic and rise to lead a magical order. The occult was more feminist than the state.

FLORENCE FARR (1860-1917)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Florence Beatrice Farr was a British West End actress, composer, director, women’s rights activist, journalist, educator, singer, novelist, and leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She was, in short, the New Woman incarnate – and she moved through the highest circles of both the London theatrical world and the occult underground.

She was initiated into the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn in July 1890 by W.B. Yeats, taking the magical motto Sapientia Sapienti Dona Data (Latin: “Wisdom is a gift given to the wise”). She rose rapidly through the ranks and became Praemonstratrix – effectively the second-in-command of the entire Order. When William Wynn Westcott resigned as Chief Adept in Anglia in 1897, Farr assumed the position. (Wikipedia)

Her triple life is remarkable:

1. The Actress: She was a leading West End performer, appearing in productions by George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats. It was through her influence with Annie Horniman (another Golden Dawn initiate and wealthy arts patron) that Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire were first produced in 1894.

2. The Occultist: She led the Golden Dawn, ran an Egyptian magic sub-group within it, studied Egyptology and ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum, was expert in Qabalah, and wrote ceremonial magic exploring Ancient Egyptian myth and mysticism.

3. The Lover: She was George Bernard Shaw’s lover for years. Shaw was fascinated by her but infuriated by her occult interests. He wrote to her in 1896: “…and now you think to undo the work of all these years by a phrase and a shilling’s worth of esoteric Egyptology.” (Shaw, for all his radicalism, could not handle a woman who took magic seriously. The socialist who wanted to remake society balked at a woman who wanted to remake reality.)

Collaboration with Yeats

Yeats and Farr collaborated for more than twenty years, exploring the “music of the words” – what they considered the forgotten art of psalmody with pagan and mystical origins. With Olivia Shakespear, Farr wrote and produced two Egyptian-themed plays, The Shrine of the Golden Hawk and The Beloved of Hathor.

The Extraordinary Exit

In 1912, at age fifty-two, Florence Farr sold all her possessions and moved to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Through the Theosophical Society, she had met Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, a Tamil spiritual teacher and politician, and was impressed by his plans for girls’ education. She became Lady Principal of Ramanathan’s girls’ college in Jaffna. (Wikipedia)

She died of cancer in Colombo in April 1917, at age 56. In accordance with her wishes, her body was cremated and the ashes scattered by Ramanathan in the sacred Kalyaani River.

Ironic/Funny Details

• George Bernard Shaw wanted to mold her into his vision of “The New Woman” – the rational, emancipated feminist. She was already far more radical than he imagined, running a secret magical order on the side. Shaw’s New Woman was too conventional for her.
• She went from leading West End actress to head of a magical order to schoolteacher in colonial Ceylon. This is not a career trajectory that any guidance counselor would have predicted.
• Shaw wrote her petulant letters about her occult interests. The most famous socialist playwright in the English language couldn’t compete with Egyptian gods for her attention.
• She chose the magical motto “Wisdom is a gift given to the wise,” which is either a tautology or a burn, depending on how you read it.

Academic Sources

• Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (Park Street Press, 1995)
• Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004) (U Chicago Press)
• Josephine Winslow Johnson, Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw’s ‘New Woman’ (Colin Smythe, 1975)
• Journal of Victorian Culture article: “‘Wisdom is a gift given to the Wise’: Florence Farr (1860-1917): New Woman, Actress and Pagan Priestess”
• Shaw-Farr correspondence

MOINA MATHERS (nee Bergson) (1865-1928)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Moina Mathers (born Mina Bergson) was an artist, occultist, and co-leader of the Golden Dawn alongside her husband, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. She was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to an influential Polish-Jewish family (father’s side) and English-Irish heritage (mother’s side). The family moved to Paris when she was two.

Her brother was Henri Bergson – the French philosopher who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, the first person of Jewish descent to receive it. (Wikipedia) This family connection is important: the Bergson siblings represent two branches of the late 19th-century revolt against scientific materialism – Henri through philosophy (Creative Evolution, the elan vital), Moina through magic. Same intellectual impulse, different tools.

Moina was a talented artist who enrolled at the Slade School of Art at fifteen and received a scholarship and four merit certificates for drawing. It was at the British Museum, where she went to study Egyptian art, that she met MacGregor Mathers in 1888.

In March 1888, she became the Order’s first initiate – the very first person initiated into the Golden Dawn. She took on the role of High Priestess, served as diviner and medium within the Order, and produced visionary material for the Inner Order’s rituals of evocation. (Wikipedia) She was involved in creating regalia, ceremonial diagrams, and some of the original designs for the Golden Dawn Tarot.

Leadership After Mathers

Following the great schism of 1900, Moina and MacGregor Mathers co-led the newly formed Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega from their base in Paris. When MacGregor Mathers died in 1918 (during the influenza pandemic), Moina took over as sole leader of the order and continued to lead it until her own death in 1928.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She was the first initiate of the Golden Dawn – the founding act of the most important magical order in modern history was performed on a woman.
• Her brother won the Nobel Prize for arguing that reality is fundamentally creative and non-mechanistic. She was doing the same thing, but with ritual magic. Henri wrote about it; Moina did it.
• She painted the Golden Dawn’s tarot images. Every tarot reader who uses a deck in the Golden Dawn tradition is, in some measure, seeing the world through Moina Mathers’s eyes.
• The Mathers marriage was reportedly celibate by mutual agreement – they channeled their energies into magical work. A Victorian couple who chose not to have sex so they could do more magic is either very noble or very weird, depending on your framework.

Academic Sources

• Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (1995)
• Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (2004)
• Pascal Theatre Company biography of Moina Mathers
• Golden Dawn historical archives and Mathers correspondence

DION FORTUNE (Violet Mary Firth, 1890-1946)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Dion Fortune was born Violet Mary Firth on December 6, 1890, in Llandudno, Wales, to parents who followed Christian Science. Her father was a solicitor, her mother a Christian Science healer. She adopted the magical motto “Deo, Non Fortuna” (“God, not luck”), which she shortened to “Dion Fortune” as her pen name. (Wikipedia)

She studied psychology at the University of London and worked at the Medico-Psychological Clinic. She was introduced to the Golden Dawn through her childhood friend Maiya Curtis-Webb, who instructed her in trance mediumship at the Alpha and Omega Lodge of the Stella Matutina. She later joined the London-based Golden Dawn group led by Moina Mathers.

She founded the Society of the Inner Light (originally the Fraternity of the Inner Light), which became one of the most influential magical orders of the 20th century. Her major works include The Mystical Qabalah (the standard English-language introduction to Hermetic Qabalah) and Psychic Self-Defense (1930).

The Feud with Moina Mathers: Occult Witch War

The relationship between Fortune and Moina Mathers is one of the great soap operas of occult history.

Fortune began publishing articles that Mathers perceived as disclosing Golden Dawn secrets. After Fortune suggested that her own organization could serve as a “feeder group” to Mathers’s Alpha et Omega, Mathers expelled her from the Order, claiming that this was necessitated by Fortune “having the wrong signs in her aura.” (This is the occult equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s your vibes.”)

Fortune then claimed that Mathers launched a psychic attack on her. According to Fortune, she was “confronted and assaulted by both real and etheric cats,” and Mathers “inundated her home with black cats and simulacrums” – apparitions conjured by magical means. Fortune believed Mathers used magic to block her astral projections.

Psychic Self-Defense (1930), Fortune’s most commercially successful book, drew on these experiences. As historian Claire Fanger described it, the book was “part anecdotal evidence, part do-it-yourself exorcism manual, part autobiography, and some part no doubt fiction.”

The Magical Battle of Britain (1939-1945)

Here is Dion Fortune’s masterpiece of esoteric trolling.

When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Fortune immediately began a program of magical warfare against the Nazis. She believed the Nazis were “not merely political enemies but vessels of destructive spiritual forces.” She initiated a series of regular letters to members of her order, coordinating synchronized meditation and visualization exercises every Sunday afternoon. (Wikipedia)

The visualizations included:

• Meditating upon “angelic Presences, red-robed and armed, patrolling the length and breadth of our land” – picturing a map of Great Britain with vast shadowy protective forms moving along the coasts and across the country.
• Invoking Arthurian and Christian archetypes to combat “the fevered mytho-poesis of the Nazi party,” essentially waging a war of myths. The Nazis had their Wagner and their Wotan; Fortune countered with Arthur and the Grail.
• Using Glastonbury Tor as the focal point of the magical offensive – the legendary Avalon as a psychic weapon against the Third Reich.

The instruction papers from this period were released from the Society of the Inner Light’s archives and published as The Magical Battle of Britain.

Whether or not Fortune’s meditations had any actual effect on the war is, for Book 2, beside the point. What matters is:

1. She believed the Nazis were waging an occult war, and she organized a counter-offensive on the same plane.
2. She did this while bombs were falling on London. This was not armchair mysticism; it was practiced under fire.
3. The structure of her operation – a network of practitioners coordinating synchronized workings toward a common strategic goal – is functionally identical to a military operation, just displaced to the astral plane.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She was attacked by cats – both physical and astral. The idea of an occult battle in which the weapon of choice is weaponized felines is inherently hilarious, even if Fortune took it deadly seriously.
• She was expelled from the Golden Dawn for “having the wrong signs in her aura.” In a normal workplace, this would be an HR violation. In the Golden Dawn, it was standard operating procedure.
• She wrote both The Mystical Qabalah (one of the most intellectually rigorous works of 20th-century occultism) and Psychic Self-Defense (a book about how to protect yourself from magical cats). The range.
• She essentially organized a guerrilla warfare campaign against Hitler using meditation and Arthurian mythology. Churchill had the RAF; Fortune had Merlin. And honestly? Given that this was 1940, who are we to say which one mattered more to morale?
• Her magical motto, “Deo, Non Fortuna” (“God, not luck”), which she shortened to her pen name, is itself a small act of nominative trolling – she named herself “Fortune” while denying fortune in favor of God.

Academic Sources

• Gareth Knight, Dion Fortune and the Inner Light (Thoth Publications, 2000)
• Dion Fortune, The Magical Battle of Britain (Society of the Inner Light archives; published editions available)
• Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (1935)
• Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense (1930)
• Janine Chapman, Quest for Dion Fortune (Samuel Weiser, 1993)
• Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (2004) – Context for GD women
• Claire Fanger on Psychic Self-Defense as genre

5. WICCA

DOREEN VALIENTE (1922-1999)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente was a British Wiccan and occultist who is increasingly recognized as the true architect of modern Wicca – the “Mother of Modern Witchcraft.” While Gerald Gardner receives (and aggressively sought) the credit for founding Wicca, Valiente was the one who actually wrote the religion’s central liturgical texts.

Born in Mitcham, Surrey, Valiente showed an early interest in magic and the occult. During World War II, she is believed to have worked at Bletchley Park, the Allied code-breaking center (her wartime work was of a classified nature). After the war, she was initiated into Gardner’s coven on Midsummer Eve 1953. (Wikipedia)

The Confrontation: Crowley’s Plagiarism

Almost immediately after her initiation, Valiente began examining Gardner’s Book of Shadows – the collection of rituals, spells, and liturgical texts that Gardner claimed had been passed down from an ancient witch cult in the New Forest.

She quickly discovered the truth: Gardner had plagiarized large sections from Aleister Crowley. The Book of Shadows contained material lifted directly from Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis, Liber LXV, and other Thelemic texts (via Gardner’s copy of The Blue Equinox, 1919). (Wikipedia)

Valiente confronted Gardner with this discovery. Gardner claimed the material he had received from the New Forest coven had been “fragmentary” and he had “filled in the gaps” from various sources. Valiente, fearing that Crowley’s infamous reputation would discredit Wicca, took the Book of Shadows and – with Gardner’s permission – rewrote most of it.

The Charge of the Goddess

Valiente’s rewriting of the Book of Shadows is one of the most consequential acts of liturgical authorship in modern religious history, and she received almost no credit for it during her lifetime.

Her greatest contribution was the Charge of the Goddess – the central liturgical text of Wicca, recited in virtually every Wiccan circle. Gardner’s original version, titled “Leviter Veslis” (“Lift Up the Veil”), was essentially a collage of Crowley passages. Valiente rewrote it entirely in the mid-1950s, creating two versions (one in prose, one in verse) that became, in Ronald Hutton’s words, “the principal expression of Wiccan spirituality.” (Wikipedia)

To put this in perspective: Valiente wrote the text that defines what Wicca is – the words through which the Goddess speaks to her followers – and for decades, Gerald Gardner got the credit for founding the religion that those words created. She wrote the Goddess’s lines; he took the curtain call.

Hutton characterized the Charge as “her greatest single contribution to Wicca,” and noted that her work “made her largely responsible for Britain’s ‘Old Religion,’ often called ‘Wicca,’ becoming the modern world’s fastest growing religion.”

The Spy Allegations

Philip Heselton’s biography Doreen Valiente Witch and other sources have raised the possibility that Valiente worked for British intelligence. Her wartime service at Bletchley Park (or similar classified facilities) is documented. More remarkably, after the war, she may have infiltrated a Neo-Nazi group as a spy for the British government. Historian Ronald Hutton has suggested this as “a more logical alternative theory” for her brief association with a far-right group, since the group’s beliefs were “uncharacteristic of her personality” and they “wouldn’t suspect a middle-aged woman.”

If true, this means the Mother of Modern Witchcraft was also a World War II codebreaker and a post-war anti-fascist spy. The range is genuinely staggering.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She founded a religion by ghostwriting for a man who couldn’t write. Gardner had the charisma and the organizational drive; Valiente had the literary talent and the theological vision. He was the showman; she was the author. This pattern – man takes credit, woman does the work – is so common it barely registers, except that in this case the “work” was inventing the liturgy of a new world religion.
• She caught Gardner plagiarizing Crowley and fixed it for him rather than exposing him. She could have destroyed Wicca before it started by going public with the Crowley connection. Instead, she chose to improve the material and protect the movement. That’s not just generosity; it’s strategic genius.
• She may have gone from cracking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park to infiltrating Neo-Nazis as a middle-aged witch-spy. This is a movie plot that no studio would greenlight because it sounds too implausible.
• The religion she co-created is now one of the fastest-growing in the Western world, and most practitioners don’t know her name. Gardner is the one in the textbooks.
• Her chosen craft name was a function of her personality: she was valiant. And when she discovered Crowley’s fingerprints all over what was supposed to be an ancient tradition, she didn’t flinch – she grabbed a pen and made it better.

Academic Sources

• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999) (Oxford Academic) – The definitive academic history. Hutton demolishes Gardner’s foundation myths while recognizing Valiente’s decisive contributions.
• Philip Heselton, Doreen Valiente Witch (Centre for Pagan Studies, 2016) – Comprehensive biography
• Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) – Her own account of Wicca’s development
• Doreen Valiente, The Charge of the Goddess: The Poetry of Doreen Valiente – Her collected liturgical and poetic works

Connection to Book 2’s Thesis

Doreen Valiente is the clearest example of the erasure pattern in the esoteric tradition. She wrote the words; he got the fame. But beyond the gender politics, her story illustrates something deeper: the esoteric tradition has always been built on collaborative authorship disguised as revealed truth. Gardner claimed ancient lineage; the truth was modern collaboration. Valiente could have blown the whistle and destroyed the illusion, but she understood – perhaps better than Gardner – that the value of a tradition doesn’t depend on its being literally ancient. It depends on its being true enough to live by.

She trolled Gardner not by exposing him, but by making his invention better than he could have made it himself.

6. MID-20TH CENTURY ESOTERIC FIGURES

MARJORIE CAMERON (1922-1995)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire)

Biography

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel was an American artist, poet, actress, and occult practitioner – one of the most fascinating underground figures of mid-century California and a key figure in the Thelemic current that ran from Aleister Crowley through the American West Coast occult scene.

Born on April 23, 1922, in Belle Plaine, Iowa, Cameron served in the United States Navy during World War II, working as a mapmaker and illustrator at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. After being honorably discharged, she moved to Pasadena, California, in 1945, and walked directly into one of the strangest intersections of science, magic, and religion in the 20th century. (Wikipedia)

The Scarlet Woman: Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working

When Jack Parsons – rocket scientist, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Thelemic magician – met Cameron, he was convinced she was the woman he had been ritually summoning. Parsons had just completed a series of Enochian magic rituals with L. Ron Hubbard (yes, that L. Ron Hubbard, future founder of Scientology) known as the Babalon Working, designed to invoke a “Scarlet Woman” – a magical partner in Crowley’s Thelemic system. Cameron, arriving with her distinctive red hair and blue eyes, appeared as if on cue.

Parsons dubbed her “Candida” and they married in 1946. He saw their sexual and magical partnership as the continuation of the Babalon Working – sex magic designed to incarnate the Thelemic goddess Babalon on Earth. Cameron was thus cast as both lover and cosmic instrument: the vessel through which a new aeon would be born.

Whether Cameron fully believed in Parsons’ cosmological framework or was drawn by love, artistic affinity, or her own spiritual instincts is debated. What is clear is that she was not a passive participant. She was a collaborator – an artist and occultist in her own right who brought her own vision to the work.

After Parsons: The Widow Who Inherited the Fire

On June 17, 1952, Jack Parsons died in an explosion at his home laboratory in Pasadena. The official explanation was an accident while handling volatile chemicals. (Wikipedia) Others suspected suicide; still others whispered about darker causes. Cameron was devastated.

Her response was extraordinary. Rather than retreating from the occult world that had consumed her marriage, she inherited Parsons’ magical mantle and deepened her practice. She retreated to the desert near Beaumont, California, for a kind of vision quest – living in an abandoned canyon, engaging in prolonged meditation and magical working. When she returned to Los Angeles, she produced a series of paintings called the Parchments, drawn from visions of the Elemental Kingdom and the astral plane.

Her art was the practice. She did not distinguish between making art and performing magic. The canvases were simultaneously paintings and ritual objects – talismans encoded with occult meaning.

Kenneth Anger and Film

Cameron became a central figure in the Los Angeles occult-bohemian underground. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger cast her as the Scarlet Woman in his visual masterwork Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a lavish depiction of an occult initiation based on Crowley’s writings. She appeared alongside Anais Nin, stealing the show with her fierce, hieratic presence.

Curtis Harrington, another filmmaker drawn to the occult, made The Wormwood Star (1956), a short film portrait dedicated entirely to Cameron and her artwork. (Wikipedia) The film is one of the few surviving records of paintings that Cameron later destroyed in an act of ritualized sacrifice – burning her own work as a magical offering.

Cameron also lived with Anger for a period and instructed him in Thelemic philosophy. This is significant: Anger’s films – Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising, Invocation of My Demon Brother – are among the most influential works of American underground cinema, and their occult dimension flows directly from Cameron’s teaching.

The Destruction of the Art

Perhaps the most extraordinary (and heartbreaking) act of Cameron’s career was her deliberate destruction of the vast majority of her paintings. She burned them as a ritualized act – a sacrifice, a magical operation. Very few pieces survived outside of what was captured on film in The Wormwood Star.

This was, in its way, a statement about the relationship between art and magic. If the paintings were magical objects, not merely aesthetic ones, then their destruction was a working, not a loss. The fire consumed the medium but (in Cameron’s framework) released the energy. It is the alchemical ignis in literal form, a direct thread to Book 2’s fire metaphor.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She met her husband because he performed a magic ritual to summon her. She showed up. In the annals of “be careful what you wish for,” this is the most literal possible outcome.
• Jack Parsons helped build the rockets that would take humanity to the moon. He also tried to summon a goddess using sex magic and Enochian incantations. Cameron was at the intersection of both projects. JPL and Babalon: the American 20th century in a nutshell.
• L. Ron Hubbard was present for the Babalon Working before going on to found Scientology. Cameron thus has a claim to being adjacent to the origin stories of both modern rocketry and Scientology, which is a sentence that should not be possible but is.
• She burned almost all of her art as a magical ritual. An artist whose most famous works exist only as ghosts on celluloid. The destruction was the art.
• After Parsons’ death, the occult establishment tried to sideline her. She responded by becoming more serious, more dedicated, and more productive than ever. The widow who refused to retire.

Academic Sources

• Spencer Kansa, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron (Mandrake, 2011) – The definitive biography
• George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt, 2005) – Essential context for the Parsons relationship
• John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Feral House, 1999)
• Cameron Parsons Foundation (cameron-parsons.org) – Her legacy organization
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) – Both have exhibited her surviving works

Connection to Book 2’s Thesis

Cameron sits at the most explosive nexus in Book 2: the point where modern science, occult practice, and art became indistinguishable. She was the Scarlet Woman to a man who was simultaneously a JPL rocket scientist and a Thelemic magician. She was an artist whose paintings were simultaneously magical objects. She was instructed by Crowley’s tradition and then instructed the man (Kenneth Anger) who would transmit that tradition into cinema. And she burned her art as a ritual offering – the literal fire that threads through both books.

She also embodies the erasure pattern in a different key. Parsons is remembered (barely) as a rocket scientist; Cameron is barely remembered at all. But she was the one who carried the magical tradition forward after his death. She was the continuity; he was the explosion.

GENESIS P-ORRIDGE (1950-2020)

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire) – with strong crossover to Book 1

A Note on Gender and Pronouns

Genesis P-Orridge’s gender identity evolved throughout their life. In the later decades, Genesis used “s/he” and “h/er” pronouns as part of the Pandrogyne project, eventually settling on “they/them.” For consistency and respect, this document uses “they/them” throughout, while noting that earlier periods of their life are documented under male-coded language in most sources.

Biography

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson, February 22, 1950 – March 14, 2020) was a British-born artist, musician, writer, occultist, and cultural engineer who – more than perhaps any other single individual – built the bridge between the Western esoteric tradition and the internet-era trolling culture that Book 1 describes.

Born in Manchester, England, Genesis studied at the University of Hull, where they met Cosey Fanni Tutti. Together with Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Chris Carter, they founded Throbbing Gristle (1975-1981), widely regarded as the founders of industrial music. The name itself was Yorkshire slang for an erection – the band’s first trolling act was their name. (Wikipedia)

After Throbbing Gristle’s dissolution, Genesis founded Psychic TV (1981) – named with deliberate irony, reflecting their belief that mainstream television was mass indoctrination and could be countered by “esoterrorist” magick through the same medium. Psychic TV was simultaneously a band, a video art project, and a magical operation.

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY)

In 1981, Genesis co-founded Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), an informal occult order that was, in practice, the most successful fusion of chaos magick and popular culture since Crowley’s O.T.O. TOPY drew on Austin Osman Spare’s sigil magic, the Situationist International’s detournement, William S. Burroughs’s cut-up technique, and Crowley’s Thelema, but stripped all of these of their elitist trappings and made them accessible to anyone.

TOPY’s most notable technique was the sigil – a visual condensation of a magical intention, charged through ritual (often sexual) and then destroyed. This was, in essence, chaos magick for the post-punk generation: practical, anti-hierarchical, and deliberately stripped of the robes-and-incense theatrics that occultism traditionally required.

As Genesis described it: TOPY’s approach was “to demystify and make those oh so secret magical techniques available to all.” This was the democratization of the esoteric – or, in trolling terms, leaking the establishment’s proprietary knowledge to the public.

The Pandrogyne Project

In 1993, Genesis met Jacqueline Breyer (later known as Lady Jaye), a nurse and performance artist. They married in 1995 and embarked on what would become the most radical artistic and spiritual project of Genesis’s career: the Pandrogeny Project.

Beginning on Valentine’s Day 2003, Genesis and Lady Jaye underwent matching cosmetic surgeries – breast implants, lip fillers, and other procedures – with the explicit goal of physically resembling each other. The project aimed to dissolve the boundary between two individuals and create a single “pandrogynous” being: BREYER P-ORRIDGE.

Genesis described the impulse: “We started out, because we were so crazy in love, just wanting to eat each other up, to become each other and become one. And as we did that, we started to see that it was affecting us in ways that we didn’t expect.”

The project was simultaneously:

1. A love story – two people attempting to merge through physical transformation
2. A magical working – an alchemical coniunctio (the union of opposites) performed on living bodies
3. A gender-theory intervention – challenging the binary categories of male/female
4. A deliberate provocation – the most visible and irreversible troll of identity categories imaginable

Lady Jaye died unexpectedly on October 9, 2007, from a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Genesis continued the project alone, continuing body modifications and using “we” in interviews rather than “I” – maintaining the fiction (or reality, depending on your framework) that the Pandrogyne entity persisted. (Wikipedia)

The Trolling Mechanism

Genesis P-Orridge operated across multiple registers of trolling simultaneously:

1. Musical trolling: Throbbing Gristle’s early performances were designed to provoke violent reactions. Their debut concert in 1976 reportedly caused audience members to vomit. Industrial music itself was a troll – it said “this noise is music” in the same way Duchamp’s urinal said “this object is art.”

2. Occult trolling: TOPY leaked the secrets of Western esotericism to anyone with a fanzine. Traditional occultists were horrified. The Golden Dawn had required years of initiatory progression; TOPY said “here’s a sigil, here’s what you do, go.”

3. Identity trolling: The Pandrogyne project trolled gender categories, individual identity, and the boundary between art and life with a literalism that made everyone uncomfortable – including people who thought they were comfortable with transgression.

4. Media trolling: The decision to name the band “Psychic TV” and to use television as both subject and weapon was a media-theory intervention disguised as entertainment. Genesis understood, decades before the term “meme” entered common usage, that culture propagates through replication and mutation.

Ironic/Funny Details

• They founded a magical order inspired by Austin Osman Spare’s sigil technique, which is, essentially, cognitive behavioral therapy disguised as sorcery. TOPY was a self-help program wrapped in occult aesthetics, which is either profound or hilarious depending on your perspective.
• Throbbing Gristle’s name was Yorkshire slang for an erection. They trolled the music establishment before they played a single note.
• Genesis coined the term “esoterrorist” to describe using occult techniques through mass media. The establishment, predictably, was terrified – Scotland Yard raided their home in 1992, seizing video art that officers believed was evidence of Satanic abuse. It was, in fact, art.
• The Pandrogyne project was simultaneously the most sincere and the most provocative thing Genesis ever did. It was genuine love expressed through deliberate body horror. Nobody knew how to react, which was the point.
• Genesis died on March 14, 2020, from chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. The date was also the anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, which Genesis would probably have appreciated as a coincidence.

Academic Sources

• Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle (Black Dog Publishing, 1999)
• Carl Abrahamsson, Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward (Inner Traditions, 2018) – Abrahamsson was a close collaborator
• Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Thee Psychick Bible (Feral House, 2010) – The collected scriptures of TOPY
• The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (dir. Marie Losier, 2011) – Documentary film on the Pandrogyne project
• Gary Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001) – Broader context
• Journal of Musicological Research: “Unholy Progeny: Psychic TV and Witch House at the Crossroads of Occultism in the Information Age” (DOI)

Connection to Both Books

Book 2: Genesis P-Orridge is the living link between the Western esoteric tradition (Chapters 15-18 of Book 2) and the internet-era trolling culture described in Book 1. The lineage runs: Crowley –> Spare –> TOPY –> chaos magick –> internet culture. Genesis built the bridge. Without TOPY’s democratization of magical technique, chaos magick might have remained a niche practice. Instead, sigil magic became a meme – and memes became the dominant form of cultural transmission in the 21st century.

Book 1: Genesis belongs in the “Trolling as Resistance” chapter (Ch. 15) and the “Art as Trolling” chapter (Ch. 9). Industrial music did to the music establishment what Duchamp’s Fountain did to the art establishment: it said “this, too, is the thing you claim to value,” and then forced the establishment to either agree or explain why not. The Pandrogyne project was the most literal possible trolling of identity categories – performed not in theory but on living flesh.

The connection between the books is Genesis’s core insight: belief is a technology, identity is a construct, and culture is a spell. This is simultaneously a statement of chaos magick doctrine (Book 2) and a description of how internet trolling works (Book 1).

7. MODERN TROLLS

DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History)

Biography

Dorothy Parker (born Dorothy Rothschild) was an American short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and critic, and one of the most devastating wits of the 20th century. She was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, the legendarily sharp-tongued literary group that met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. (Wikipedia)

Her career traced an arc from literary celebrity to political activism to blacklisting. She began at Vogue and Vanity Fair, where her biting theater reviews proved “too much for the magazine” and she was let go. She found her home at The New Yorker, where she was a formative influence on the magazine’s institutional voice, writing the “Constant Reader” book review column. She published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, in 1926, to wide acclaim.

She went to Hollywood, received two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting, helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, became increasingly vocal in civil liberties and civil rights causes, and was eventually placed on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era for her left-wing political activities. She never worked on another film. (Wikipedia)

Her proposed epitaph for herself: “Excuse my dust.”

The Trolling: Wit as Weapon

Parker’s mode of trolling was the one-liner – the perfectly crafted sentence that destroyed its target while making everyone else laugh. Unlike Margery Kempe’s volume or the Guerrilla Girls’ data, Parker used compression. She could annihilate a reputation in seven words.

Famous kills:

• On Katharine Hepburn’s performance in a 1934 play: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
• On A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner: “Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”
• On a book by Kathleen Norris: “I wish you could have heard that pretty crash Beauty and the Beast made when, with one sweeping, liquid gesture, I tossed it out of my twelfth-story window.”
• Her proposed epitaph for an actress: “Her body was her temple, but she made it available to all worshippers.”
• On brevity and wit: “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
• “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ’no’ in any of them.”
• On the news that Calvin Coolidge had died: “How can they tell?”

She also wrote devastating poetry about suicide with a lightness that is itself a form of provocation:

“Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp. / Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; / You might as well live.”

(“Resume,” from Enough Rope, 1926)

Political Trolling

Parker’s political activism was itself a form of trolling the establishment. In 1927, she was arrested while protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. In the 1930s, she became deeply involved in anti-fascist and civil rights causes. She helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936 (at the behest of Otto Katz, which later caused her trouble with the FBI). She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era – which effectively ended her Hollywood career but confirmed her status as someone the establishment found genuinely threatening.

She left her entire estate to Martin Luther King Jr.; after his assassination it passed to the NAACP, and her ashes are interred in a memorial garden at NAACP headquarters in Baltimore.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She was fired from Vanity Fair for being too mean in her theater reviews. A magazine called Vanity Fair – celebrating the superficial – couldn’t handle a critic who looked beneath the surface.
• She attempted suicide multiple times and then wrote a poem (“Resume”) listing reasons not to, concluding “You might as well live.” She trolled her own despair.
• She later dismissed the Algonquin Round Table itself: “These were no giants… Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them.” She trolled her own legend.
• She was blacklisted for political beliefs and never worked in Hollywood again, but lived comfortably on royalties from her writing. The establishment couldn’t take away what she’d already created.
• Her epitaph request, “Excuse my dust,” is the shortest and most perfect self-review ever written.

Academic Sources

• Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (Penguin, 1989) – Standard biography
• Rhonda S. Pettit, A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction (Associated University Presses, 2000)
• Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York (Roaring Forties Press, 2005)
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, ed. Brendan Gill (Penguin)

Connection to Book 1’s Thesis

Dorothy Parker demonstrates that trolling isn’t just destruction – it’s truth-telling compressed to its most efficient form. Her one-liners survive because they identify the exact point of weakness in their target and strike it with surgical precision. “Wit has truth in it” – her own formulation. Parker’s trolling wasn’t cruelty for its own sake; it was the refusal to maintain the polite fictions that lubricate social machinery. She said what everyone was thinking but no one would say, and she said it better than anyone else could have.

YOKO ONO (1933-Present)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History)

Biography

Yoko Ono (born February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese American multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist who was a central figure in the Fluxus movement and a pioneer of conceptual and performance art – well before she met John Lennon. This is the critical point for the book: Ono was a recognized, influential avant-garde artist years before she became “John Lennon’s wife,” and the cultural erasure of her pre-Lennon career is itself a case study in how the establishment handles women who refuse to be contained.

Born to a wealthy banking family, Ono was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. She moved to New York and studied writing and music at Sarah Lawrence College. (Wikipedia) By the early 1960s, she was hosting legendary loft concerts on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan that drew John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, La Monte Young, David Tudor, and other luminaries. She was, as the press dubbed her, the “High Priestess of the Happening.”

The Trolling: Conceptual Art as Provocation

Ono’s art was radical in a way that most audiences – then and now – were not equipped to process. Her fundamental move was to replace the physical art object with an instruction, collapsing the boundary between art and life in a way that was both liberating and infuriating.

Grapefruit (1964): Ono’s artist’s book, originally published in a limited run of 500 copies in Tokyo, is one of the earliest and most important works of conceptual art. It contains a series of “event scores” – instructions for actions that may or may not be performed. Examples:

“SMOKE PAINTING: Light canvas or any finished painting with a cigarette at any time for any length of time. See the smoke movement. The painting ends when the whole canvas or painting is gone.”

“PAINTING TO BE STEPPED ON: Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street.”

“CLOUD PIECE: Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.”

The invention of the event score is usually credited to George Brecht, but La Monte Young and Yoko Ono are also cited as among the first to experiment with the form. These instructions are simultaneously art, philosophy, and provocation. They say: “You don’t need a gallery. You don’t need a canvas. You don’t need me. The art is what happens in your head.” This was genuinely revolutionary in the early 1960s. And it’s still the thing people mock when they mock conceptual art.

Cut Piece (1964): Ono’s most famous performance work. First performed at Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto on July 20, 1964. The piece: Ono, dressed in her best suit, kneels motionless on stage with a pair of scissors in front of her. She invites audience members to come up, one at a time, and cut pieces of her clothing off. (Wikipedia)

The piece was “innovative for its fusion of active, even aggressive audience participation, and for its feminist themes.” As audience members approach, the power dynamic shifts moment by moment – who is in control? The artist, who has set the rules? The audience member, who holds the scissors? The performance makes visible the power dynamics of looking, objectifying, and consuming that normally remain hidden. One early audience member cut away her bra strap; another aggressively cut at her undergarments. Ono remained motionless throughout.

Cut Piece is now recognized as “an iconic proto-feminist work of performance art,” though Ono herself said she “didn’t have any notion of feminism” when creating it, and specified that the performer need not be a woman. This ambiguity – the refusal to be contained by any single reading – is itself a form of trolling. The piece means what it means to you, and your interpretation reveals you.

The Dismissal

The cultural establishment’s response to Yoko Ono is one of the most sustained and revealing campaigns of dismissal in modern art history. She has been consistently:

1. Reduced to “John Lennon’s wife” – despite having an established career before meeting him
2. Blamed for “breaking up the Beatles” – a narrative that serves patriarchal assumptions about women’s role in male creative partnerships
3. Mocked for her vocal style, which drew from traditional Japanese vocal techniques and avant-garde performance practice, not from incompetence
4. Dismissed as a fraud – the standard accusation against any conceptual artist, but applied to Ono with particular venom

As The Nation asked in a recent profile: “Why Is Yoko Ono Still Misunderstood?” The answer is that she is not misunderstood. She is correctly understood and rejected because what she represents – a woman of color creating challenging, uncompromising, genuinely radical art – is exactly what the mainstream establishment finds most threatening.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She was the “High Priestess of the Happening” before she met Lennon. The most famous “famous person’s wife” in the world was already famous, in the world that actually mattered, for doing something the general public still doesn’t understand.
• Grapefruit contains the instruction “Imagine the clouds dripping.” Four years later, Lennon wrote “Imagine.” The most commercially successful song in Lennon’s post-Beatles career draws directly from Ono’s conceptual practice. He acknowledged this. The public didn’t.
• Cut Piece invited audiences to literally dismember her appearance, and then the cultural establishment proceeded to figuratively dismember her reputation for fifty years. The piece was prophetic.
• She met Lennon at her own art exhibition, Unfinished Paintings, at the Indica Gallery in London on November 7, 1966. One of the works was a small canvas with the word “YES” printed at the top, visible only by climbing a ladder and looking through a magnifying glass. Lennon climbed the ladder, read “YES,” and decided to stay. He was drawn to her art. She didn’t crash his party; he came to hers.
• The Tate Modern’s 2024 retrospective, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” presented her work independently of Lennon’s, and drew massive audiences. It took sixty years for a major institution to present her on her own terms. (Tate)

Academic Sources

• Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (Rutgers University Press, 2005)
• Alexandra Munroe, Yes Yoko Ono (Japan Society / Harry N. Abrams, 2000) – Major retrospective catalog
• Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Simon & Schuster, 1964/2000)
• Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (DOI)
• Tate Modern exhibition guide: “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” (2024)
• Boston University Writing Program: “Passive Objectification: Vulnerability in Yoko Ono’s Participatory Art”

Connection to Book 1’s Thesis

Yoko Ono belongs in Chapter 9 (Art as Trolling) alongside Duchamp and the Baroness. Her work says the same thing Duchamp’s urinal said – “I decide what art is, not the institution” – but she said it with instructions rather than objects, which was even more radical. Duchamp at least gave you a thing to argue about. Ono gave you nothing – just an idea, a set of words, and the challenge to make something of them yourself. The audience hated this because it made them responsible.

She also belongs in Chapter 17 (Trolling Gone Wrong) as the victim – the example of what happens when the establishment can’t tell the difference between a troll and a target. The hatred directed at Ono for “breaking up the Beatles” is one of the most sustained campaigns of scapegoating in pop-culture history, and it is almost entirely gendered and racial. She was the wrong kind of woman (Asian, older, intellectual, uncompromising) in the wrong place (next to a beloved white man), and the public never forgave her for it.

THE GUERRILLA GIRLS (1985-Present)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History)

Overview

The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous feminist activist art collective that has been trolling the art world’s gender and racial bias since 1985. They wear gorilla masks in public, adopt the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms (Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, Kathe Kollwitz, etc.), and produce posters, books, and performances that combine bold graphics with devastating statistics.

Origin

The group was formed in response to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” which included 169 artists – all white, fewer than 10 percent women. The Guerrilla Girls’ response was to start appearing on the streets of lower Manhattan with posters that named names and printed numbers.

The name itself arose from a fortuitous misspelling of “guerrilla” by one of the founding members, which gave them the idea to adopt gorilla masks. (The history of civilization is full of productive typos.)

Key Trolling Acts

1. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” (1989): Their most iconic poster, based on a “weenie count” (their term) of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection. Finding that only 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections were women, while 85% of the nudes were female, they produced a poster featuring Ingres’s Grande Odalisque wearing a gorilla mask, with the devastating question as the headline. (Wikipedia) The poster has been reprinted, updated, and deployed worldwide.

2. “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist” (1988): A sardonic list including items like “Working without the pressure of success,” “Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius,” and “Having your career almost over by the time you’re 30.”

3. “These Galleries Show No More Than 10% Women Artists Or None At All” (1985): Listed specific gallery names.

4. “These Critics Don’t Write Enough About Women Artists” (1985): Listed specific critics by name.

The posters “were rude; they named names and they printed statistics. They embarrassed people.” And – crucially – they “almost always cited the source of those statistics at the bottom, making them difficult to dismiss.” The Guerrilla Girls understood that the most effective troll is an accurate troll.

Method

As they put it: “We discovered that the art world takes feminists more seriously when they use humor and wear a gorilla disguise.”

This is an extraordinary statement. It means that the art world – the self-proclaimed vanguard of cultural progressivism – was more receptive to feminist critique when it came packaged as comedy and performance. The establishment will tolerate truth if you make it funny. If you make it serious, they ignore you. Dress it up as a gorilla in a tutu, and suddenly they’re listening.

The anonymity was both practical and strategic. Members were working artists who feared professional retaliation. But the anonymity also turned them into an idea rather than individuals – you can’t attack the messenger if you don’t know who the messenger is.

Ironic/Funny Details

• The art world that prides itself on being transgressive and boundary-pushing turned out to be as structurally sexist as any other institution. The Guerrilla Girls trolled the trolls.
• The gorilla mask came from a typo. The founding moment of one of the most successful activist art movements in history was a spelling mistake.
• They update their statistics regularly and the numbers keep not improving enough, which means the art world keeps generating material for them. Institutional sexism as renewable content source.
• They use the names of dead women artists, which serves the dual purpose of memorializing the forgotten and making each Guerrilla Girl a walking citation of art history’s erasures.

Academic Sources

• Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (Harper Perennial, 1995)
• Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (Penguin, 1998)
• Rutgers University Archives: Guerrilla Girls Posters Collection
• Tate Modern: “Who are the Guerrilla Girls?” educational resource
• MoMA Library: Guerrilla Girls research collection
• Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society – Places the Guerrilla Girls in the broader context of feminist art history
• Drake University study: “The Guerrilla Girls: Art, Gender, and Communication”

PUSSY RIOT (2011-Present)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History)

Overview

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist punk protest collective, founded in 2011, whose members perform politically provocative acts in public spaces while wearing colorful balaclavas. Their members’ political perspectives range from anarchist to liberal left, but all are united by feminism, anti-authoritarianism, and opposition to Vladimir Putin.

The Cathedral Performance (February 21, 2012)

On February 21, 2012, five members of Pussy Riot entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour – the principal cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, rebuilt in the 1990s at enormous expense as a symbol of post-Soviet Russian identity and Orthodox revival. (Wikipedia)

Removing their winter clothes, they put on colorful balaclavas, ran up the steps leading to the altar – the soleas, the most sacred space in an Orthodox church – and began to dance, kneel, cross themselves, and perform their song “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” for approximately 40 seconds before being escorted out by security.

Film of the performance was combined with footage shot at another church to create the music video.

The Lyrics

The refrain: “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away” and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist.”

Verses addressed the intersection of Church and state power:

“Black robe, golden epaulettes / All parishioners crawl to bow / The phantom of liberty is in heaven / Gay-pride sent to Siberia in chains”

“The Church’s praise of rotten dictators / The cross-bearer procession of black limousines”

The song was simultaneously a prayer (addressed to the Virgin Mary), a political protest (against Putin), a feminist manifesto (asking the Virgin to become a feminist), and a critique of the Orthodox Church’s collusion with state power. It managed to offend every establishment simultaneously, in 40 seconds, in a cathedral.

The Trial and Imprisonment

Three members – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich – were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” On August 17, 2012, all three were convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Samutsevich was later released on probation. (Wikipedia)

In her closing statement, Samutsevich articulated the theory behind the action: their performance “violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity.”

This is a remarkably sophisticated statement of what trolling does: it disrupts the constructed image of power and forces the audience to see the machinery behind the facade.

The Global Response

The imprisonment transformed Pussy Riot from a local Russian protest group into a global cause celebre. Support came from Amnesty International, Madonna, Paul McCartney, PEN International, and countless others. The Russian state’s disproportionate response – two years in prison for a 40-second punk performance – did more to publicize Pussy Riot’s message than the performance itself ever could have.

This is the Streisand Effect as political strategy: the attempt to suppress the troll amplifies the troll.

Ironic/Funny Details

• They performed a prayer asking the Virgin Mary to drive out Putin, inside a cathedral that cost $360 million to rebuild as a symbol of Putin’s Russia. The venue was the argument.
• The Orthodox Church spent years positioning itself as the spiritual foundation of Putin’s regime. Pussy Riot exposed this arrangement in 40 seconds with colored balaclavas and a punk song.
• They were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for a performance that was literally a prayer. They asked the Virgin Mary for help. That’s not blasphemy; that’s devotion with inconvenient political content.
• Putin’s government sentenced them to two years in prison, which ensured that every human being on the planet with internet access heard about the 40-second performance. The suppression was the amplification.
• Their name is deliberately provocative – chosen specifically because it’s impossible to say on mainstream news broadcasts without implicit transgression. The name itself is a troll that forces every media outlet to participate in the provocation.

Academic Sources

• Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Riverhead Books, 2014) – Best English-language account
• Digital Icons journal: “Pussy Riot Steal the Stage in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour: Punk Prayer on Trial Online and in Court”
• University of Michigan: “The Global Controversy over Pussy Riot: An Anti-Putin Women’s Protest Group in Moscow”
• Harvard Omeka project: “Critiquing the Orthodox Church at Cathedral of Christ the Saviour” – part of the 21st-Century Protests in Moscow digital exhibition

8. ADDITIONAL WOMEN TROLLS ACROSS HISTORY

MINA LOY (1882-1966)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 9 (Art as Trolling)

Biography

Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Lowy) was a British-born artist, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer, actress, and bohemian who moved through the epicenters of avant-garde culture in the early 20th century – Futurism in Florence, Dada in New York, Surrealism in Paris – and left an intellectual mark on all of them while receiving credit for almost none.

Born in London in 1882 to a Hungarian Jewish father and an English Protestant mother, Loy studied art in Munich, London, and Paris. She married and moved to Florence, where she became entangled with the Italian Futurist movement, and with its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. She also had an affair with Giovanni Papini. Both relationships informed her radical early poetry, which was sexually explicit, intellectually savage, and formally innovative in ways that shocked even the avant-garde.

In New York (1916-1921), she became a key figure in the circle around Others magazine, alongside Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, and Marianne Moore. The New York Evening Sun ran a profile under the headline “Do You Strive to Capture the Inapprehensible Aloofness of Mina Loy?” – possibly the most avant-garde newspaper headline in history.

In 1918, she married the Dadaist boxer-poet Arthur Cravan (nephew of Oscar Wilde, draft dodger, magazine editor, provocateur). Cravan disappeared that same year while testing a sailboat in Mexico. He was never seen again. (Wikipedia) Loy, pregnant with their child, spent years searching for him and never found closure.

The Feminist Manifesto (1914)

While living in Florence, Loy wrote her “Feminist Manifesto” – a galvanizing polemic against the subordinate position of women in society. The short text remained unpublished in her lifetime. (Wikipedia) Its opening salvo:

“The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate… Women, if you want to realise yourselves – you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval – all your pet illusions must be unmasked… there is nothing impure in sex – except in the mental attitude toward it.”

The Manifesto called for the “unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female sex” – meaning the abolition of virginity as a concept of value, not literal surgery, though the provocation of the phrasing was entirely deliberate. In 1914. This is a century ahead of its time, written by a woman embedded in the Futurist movement – a movement whose official manifesto declared “We will glorify war” and “scorn for woman.” Loy took Futurism’s radicalism and turned it against Futurism’s misogyny. She trolled the trolls.

The Trolling Mechanism

Loy’s poetry was the primary vehicle. Her work was sexually explicit in an era when women’s writing was expected to be decorative, formally fractured in an era when even male poets maintained some linearity, and intellectually demanding in a way that made her unpopular even with literary allies. Her long poem “Love Songs” (1915-17) was described by contemporaries as “decadent” and “repulsive,” which in practice meant it was honest about female desire and bodily experience.

She also trolled by presence. She was impossible to categorize: too experimental for the mainstream, too intellectual for the Dadaists, too radical for the feminists, too feminist for the radicals. Every group she joined found her discomfiting. She was the permanent outsider – the artist who couldn’t be absorbed into any movement because she was already beyond it.

Ironic/Funny Details

• She married Arthur Cravan, who was Oscar Wilde’s nephew, a champion amateur boxer, a Dadaist provocateur, and a fugitive. He disappeared at sea and was never found. Loy’s personal life was as avant-garde as her art.
• The Futurists declared war on women in their manifesto. Loy joined the Futurists, slept with their leader, and then wrote a feminist manifesto that dismantled their entire ideology. She trolled them from the inside while they were too busy declaring war on the moon to notice.
• She ended her life in Aspen, Colorado, making constructions from found objects – returning, in her eighties, to the same readymade practice the Baroness had pioneered fifty years earlier.

Academic Sources

• Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)
• Roger L. Conover (ed.), The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)
• Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, & Else Lasker-Schuler (University of Michigan Press, 2005) (DOI)
• Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde digital project (mina-loy.com)

THE SUFFRAGETTES: EMMELINE PANKHURST, CHRISTABEL PANKHURST, AND EMILY DAVISON

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 8 (The Trolling-to-Revolution Pipeline)

Overview

The British suffragette movement (c. 1903-1918) represents the point where trolling and revolution become indistinguishable. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 with the motto “Deeds not words,” escalated from conventional protest to a systematic campaign of property destruction, arson, and bombing that the British government described as terrorism and that the women themselves described as the only language the establishment would hear.

The Escalation as Trolling Strategy

The suffragettes understood, long before the internet, that the establishment’s disproportionate response is the message. Their campaign deliberately provoked overreaction:

1. Heckling politicians at public meetings (1905): Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney disrupted a Liberal Party rally and were arrested. The arrest – for the minor act of asking a question – generated national press coverage. The trolling mechanism: make the establishment punish something trivial, and the punishment becomes the story.

2. Window-smashing campaigns (1908-1912): Organized raids on shop windows in London’s West End, often coordinated to occur simultaneously across multiple locations. Emmeline Pankhurst’s instructions: “Be militant each in your own way… Those of you who can break windows – break them.”

3. Letter-box arson (1911-1913): Emily Davison pioneered the tactic of setting fire to postboxes in December 1911, destroying mail to disrupt the routine of daily life. The suffragettes also developed early letter bombs.

4. Arson and bombing campaign (1913-1914): Orchestrated by Christabel Pankhurst, this “Reign of Terror” targeted empty buildings – cricket pavilions, horse-racing stands, churches, castles, and the second homes of the wealthy. There were 250 arson or destruction attacks in a six-month period in 1913. They deliberately avoided killing people, but the destruction was substantial. They also burned the slogan “Votes for Women” into the grass of golf courses – targeting the leisure spaces of the men who denied them citizenship.

5. Emily Davison’s death at the Epsom Derby (June 4, 1913): Davison ran onto the racecourse during the Derby and was struck by the King’s horse, Anmer. She died four days later. (Wikipedia) Whether she intended to die, to attach a suffragette banner to the horse, or simply to disrupt the race is still debated. What is not debated is the effect: her death became the movement’s most powerful image.

The Trolling Mechanism

The suffragettes’ genius was in choosing targets that exposed the hypocrisy of their opponents:

• They damaged property, not people, and were treated as if they had committed murder. The establishment valued property over women’s liberty, and the suffragettes forced that calculation into the open.
• They targeted symbols of male leisure (golf courses, cricket pavilions) – making the point that men had time for recreation while women had no voice in government.
• They went on hunger strikes in prison, forcing the government to either release them or force-feed them – a procedure so brutal that it generated enormous public sympathy.
• The Cat and Mouse Act (1913) allowed the government to release hunger-striking prisoners temporarily and re-arrest them when they recovered – a system so cynically designed to avoid the optics of force-feeding that it became a PR disaster for the government.

Ironic/Funny Details

• They were accused of being “terrorists” for breaking windows and setting fire to empty buildings. The same government that ran the largest empire in human history, maintained colonies through organized violence, and had recently fought the Boer War – a conflict that killed tens of thousands of civilians – called them the extremists.
• Burning “VOTES FOR WOMEN” into golf course grass is one of the greatest trolling gestures in history: it targeted men at their most comfortable, in their most exclusive spaces, during their most trivial activities, with a message about the most fundamental democratic right.
• Emily Davison had been arrested nine times, force-fed forty-nine times, and had once barricaded herself in her prison cell, prompting prison authorities to flood the cell with a fire hose. (Wikipedia) She was not, by any measure, someone who lacked commitment.

Academic Sources

• Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1914 (Routledge, 2013) (DOI)
• June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge, 2002)
• Lucy Worsley, Suffragettes (BBC History)
• Open University: “The History of Female Protest and Suffrage in the UK” – module 5.3: “Were suffragettes terrorists?”

APHRA BEHN (1640-1689)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 7 (Voltaire, Swift, and the Satirists)

Biography

Aphra Behn was the first woman known to have earned her living by writing in English. And she did so in the most male-dominated literary form of the Restoration era: the stage play. She was also, quite possibly, a spy for King Charles II in Antwerp during the Anglo-Dutch Wars (her intelligence reports were ignored and she was never paid; she spent time in debtor’s prison as a result). (Wikipedia)

She wrote at least nineteen plays, several novels (including Oroonoko, one of the earliest English novels and an early abolitionist text), poetry, and translations. She was one of the most prolific dramatists of the Restoration era – male or female – and her plays were commercially successful.

The Trolling Mechanism

Behn’s very existence as a professional writer was a troll of 17th-century gender norms. As scholars have documented, “female public writing was seen as transgressive: a subversive, disruptive move from the private (female) to public (male) sphere.” A woman making money from writing was scandalous. A woman making money from bawdy plays was unthinkable.

Her plays featured frank depictions of female desire, critiques of arranged marriage, and heroines who were neither virtuous nor punished for their lack of virtue. Her satire – often directed at the hypocrisy of men who demanded chastity from women while practicing none themselves – placed her in the tradition of literary trolling that would run through Swift, Voltaire, and eventually Dorothy Parker.

Virginia Woolf wrote of Behn: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” (Wikipedia)

Ironic/Funny Details

• She may have been a spy. The British government ignored her intelligence reports and let her go to debtor’s prison. She then became the most commercially successful playwright of her era. The government that couldn’t use her as a spy lost her to the public, which is a fitting parable about institutional stupidity.
• She was buried in Westminster Abbey – near the door, in an unmarked spot. She’s in the building, but barely. The erasure is literal and architectural.

Academic Sources

• Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (Rutgers University Press, 2000)
• Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (Dial Press, 1980)
• British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. Emily Hodgson Anderson et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2023) (DOI)

FEMALE COURT JESTERS: JANE FOOLE AND MATHURINE DE VALLOIS

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 2 (A Taxonomy of Trolls) or Chapter 6 (Trolling the Gods)

Overview

The court jester tradition is widely assumed to be exclusively male. This is wrong. While women jesters were rarer than their male counterparts, they existed and operated in the same paradoxical space: licensed to speak truth to power, protected by the performance of “foolishness,” and able to say what no one else could say because they were categorized as harmless.

Jane Foole (fl. 1530s-1550s)

Jane Foole was one of the only documented female professional jesters in Tudor England, serving in the households of Queen Catherine Parr and Queen Mary I (and possibly Anne Boleyn). She appears in court records and household account books, confirming her status as a retained entertainer. (Wikipedia)

She is thought to appear in a c. 1545 royal portrait, The Family of Henry VIII (by an unknown artist – Holbein, sometimes credited, had died in 1543), positioned alongside Will Somers (Henry VIII’s famous jester). If the identification is right, the image is significant: it places a female fool alongside the most famous male fool of the era, in the most powerful court in Europe.

Very little else is known about Jane Foole, which is itself the point. The female jester existed but left almost no trace in the historical record. She was there – the court records prove it – but the establishment that retained her did not bother to record her words.

Mathurine de Vallois (fl. late 16th-early 17th century)

Mathurine was probably the most famous female jester in European history, serving at the French court during the reigns of Henry III, Henry IV, and Louis XIII – a span of decades that included religious civil wars, assassinations, and the consolidation of French absolutism. (Wikipedia)

Unlike the typical motley-clad jester, Mathurine wore an Amazon warrior outfit, which is itself a statement about gendered performance. She was a jester who dressed as a warrior: a fool performing strength, or a strong woman performing foolishness, depending on how you read the costume.

Her most famous act: she assisted in stopping an assassination attempt against King Henry IV by blocking the would-be assassin Jean Chatel’s escape. The court fool saved the king’s life. The licensed idiot proved more alert than the guards. (Wikipedia)

She also dedicated her jester’s scepter to God – combining her role as professional provocateur with genuine religious devotion. Like Hildegard and Margery Kempe, she operated in the space between the sacred and the absurd.

The Pattern

Female court jesters demonstrate that even the “legitimate” trolling profession – the role specifically designed to speak truth to power – was subject to gender erasure. We know their names from account books and paintings, but almost none of their actual words survive. They were paid to provoke, but their provocations were not considered worth recording.

VALERIE SOLANAS (1936-1988)

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 17 (Trolling Gone Wrong)

Biography

Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist and author of the SCUM Manifesto (1967), a tract calling for the elimination of the male sex. On June 3, 1968, she shot Andy Warhol at The Factory in New York City, nearly killing him. (Wikipedia)

Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey, and had a deeply traumatic childhood. She studied psychology at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1958. She moved to New York, where she lived in poverty, worked as a sex worker, and began writing. She self-published the SCUM Manifesto in 1967.

The SCUM Manifesto: Satire, Manifesto, or Both?

The SCUM Manifesto is one of the most ambiguous documents in the history of radical literature. It argues, with escalating fury and dark humor, that men have “ruined the world” and that “it is up to women to fix it” – ultimately by eliminating the male sex entirely.

The critical question: is it sincere? Some scholars read it as pure satire – a Swiftian “Modest Proposal” for the gender wars, deliberately absurdist to expose patriarchal assumptions. Others take Solanas at her word; she described herself as “a social propagandist” and insisted the work was “dead serious.” A text whose sincerity cannot be determined is, functionally, a troll. It provokes response regardless of intent.

The shooting of Warhol propelled Solanas into the public spotlight, and SCUM Manifesto became “obligatory reading” among radical feminists. Maurice Girodias, who published it through Olympia Press in August 1968, admitted that “had she not shot Warhol, he would not have published the book.”

Why She’s in “Trolling Gone Wrong”

Solanas is the cautionary tale – the figure who crossed the line from provocation to violence. Whatever the literary merits of SCUM Manifesto, the shooting was attempted murder. This is where the book’s thesis about “high-effort trolling as a feature of civilization” encounters its hard boundary: trolling that produces ideas is a feature; trolling that produces bullets is a crime.

But Solanas also illustrates a darker truth: the system that drove her to violence was the same system that had always driven women’s provocations. She was impoverished, marginalized, had her work stolen (or so she believed), and was systematically ignored by the male-dominated cultural establishment. The trajectory from legitimate grievance to violent act is not unique to Solanas; it’s the trajectory that every chapter in this book warns about.

FEMEN / INNA SHEVCHENKO

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 15 (Trolling as Resistance)

Overview

FEMEN is an international feminist activist movement, led by Inna Shevchenko (born 1990), that uses topless protest as its primary method – a strategy they call “sextremism.” Founded in Ukraine in 2008, the movement gained global attention through dramatic confrontations with political and religious power. (Wikipedia)

FEMEN’s explicit methodology: “This is the only way to be heard in this country. If we staged simple protests with banners, then our claims would not have been noticed.” They fight, in their words, “patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship, and religion.”

Key Actions

• Topless protests outside KGB headquarters in Minsk (2011): Three FEMEN activists – including Shevchenko – protested against Belarus President Lukashenko. According to FEMEN, they were subsequently abducted by authorities, taken to a remote forest blindfolded, doused with oil, forced to strip, and threatened with being set on fire.
• Inna Shevchenko cut down a 4-metre-high Christian cross with a chainsaw in central Kyiv (2012) – an act that prompted her to seek asylum in France. (Wikipedia)
• Numerous protests at international events, in front of embassies, and at religious institutions.

The Trolling Mechanism

FEMEN’s core insight is the same as the Guerrilla Girls’: the female body in public space is always already political. By using their bodies as the medium of protest, they create images that are impossible to ignore and impossible to suppress without revealing the suppressor’s relationship to the female body.

However, FEMEN has also been extensively criticized – by other feminists, by scholars, and by the women of the cultures they claim to liberate. Critics have accused the group of “femonationalism” (using feminist rhetoric to promote xenophobic narratives), Islamophobia, and a simplistic equation of nudity with liberation that many women – particularly Muslim women – reject.

Connection to Book 1

FEMEN belongs in a complicated position in Book 1. They demonstrate that provocation works (their actions generate global media coverage); they also demonstrate that provocation without self-examination can become its own form of establishment thinking. The lesson: trolling is not automatically progressive. The troll must also be willing to be trolled.

LYSISTRATA AND THE SEX STRIKE TRADITION

For Book 1 (The Fires of History) – Chapter 4 (The Socratic Method Was Just Trolling)

Overview

Lysistrata (411 BC), Aristophanes’ comedy about women withholding sex to end the Peloponnesian War, is the earliest and most famous depiction of collective female trolling of male power structures. (Wikipedia)

The premise: Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, organizes the women of Greece to refuse sex with their husbands until the men agree to end the war. The women also seize the Acropolis – the treasury – to cut off war funding. The men, driven to desperate arousal, eventually capitulate.

The Trolling Mechanism

The play’s genius is that it uses the establishment’s own logic against it. The patriarchal assumption was that women’s primary value lay in their sexuality and domestic service. Lysistrata’s move was to agree with this premise and then weaponize it: “If we’re nothing but sex objects, what happens when the sex objects go on strike?” The establishment can’t argue without either (a) admitting women have power, or (b) admitting women are more than sex objects. Either answer destroys the patriarchal framework.

Real-World Sex Strikes

The fictional Lysistrata inspired real-world actions:

• Liberian women’s sex strike (2003): during the Second Liberian Civil War, organized by Leymah Gbowee (who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011)
• Kenyan women’s sex strike (2009): against political infighting
• Colombian women’s sex strike (2011): demanding road repairs (“crossed legs” movement)

For the Book

Lysistrata is a template, the original manual for trolling patriarchal power by taking its own logic seriously. It belongs alongside Socrates and Diogenes in the chapter on ancient trolling, as proof that women were practicing high-effort trolling in the ancient world, even if we have to access it through a male playwright’s lens.

Important Caveat

Scholars note that Aristophanes’ play is itself complex: “The play in fact endorses stereotypes about female sexual license,” and “the strike is a patent absurdity – it is the stuff of comedy.” The women’s power in the play is limited to the sexual; the play doesn’t imagine women as political agents in their own right. It’s a male fantasy of female power, which limits its usefulness as a feminist text while making it perfect as an example of how trolling can be simultaneously subversive and conservative.

CROSS-CULTURAL FEMALE TRICKSTER FIGURES: BAUBO AND SHEELA-NA-GIG

For Book 2 (The Hidden Fire) – Chapter 6 (The Eastern Trolls) or standalone sidebar

Baubo (Greek Mythology)

In the Eleusinian myth cycle, when Demeter – goddess of the harvest – wandered the earth in grief after Persephone’s abduction by Hades, refusing to let anything grow, it was Baubo, an old woman, who restored her. How? By lifting her skirts and exposing herself, telling bawdy jokes until the goddess of agriculture laughed.

Baubo used “a very Trickstery combo of cleverness and bawdy humour to make Demeter laugh, thus bringing back spring and lowkey saving the world.” The female body, displayed deliberately and obscenely, breaks the spell of despair and restores fertility to the earth.

This is the inverse of every patriarchal narrative about female sexuality: instead of the female body as shameful, hidden, and dangerous, Baubo presents it as funny, powerful, and cosmically necessary. Her obscene display is the trickster’s move: it breaks the rules in order to restore the natural order.

Sheela-na-gig (Medieval Europe)

Sheela-na-gigs are figurative carvings of naked women displaying an exaggerated vulva, found on churches, castles, and other buildings across Europe – primarily in Ireland, England, France, and Spain. They date primarily from the 11th-16th centuries. (Wikipedia)

The most subversive thing about Sheela-na-gigs is where they are: on churches. These explicit carvings of female genitalia are embedded in the architecture of Christian sacred space. They are, in the most literal sense, the feminine and the obscene inside the establishment’s own walls.

Scholars debate their meaning – apotropaic (warding off evil), fertility symbols, warnings against lust, remnants of pre-Christian goddess worship – but for Book 2, the relevant fact is that they represent the survival of something the Church could not fully suppress. They are the trickster’s calling card, carved in stone.

As Starr Goode documented in Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power, the “female sacred display is revealed to be a universal archetype” – appearing in Australian rock art, Russian statues, Italian carvings, Hawaiian images, and Palaeolithic figurines.

Connection to Book 2

Baubo and the Sheela-na-gigs represent the oldest layer of the female trolling tradition: the idea that female sexual power is not a weakness to be hidden but a cosmic force that restores order, breaks enchantments, and frightens demons. This is the grandmother of every figure in this document – the original insight that the establishment’s fear of female power is itself evidence of that power.

9. THE PATTERN: STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Pattern 1: The Esoteric Tradition as Egalitarian Troll

The esoteric tradition was consistently more egalitarian toward women than mainstream religion:

This egalitarianism was itself a provocation. Simply by treating women as spiritual equals, these traditions implicitly challenged the entire basis of orthodoxy’s gender hierarchy. They didn’t need to argue that women should have authority; they just gave it to them, and let the establishment respond.

Pattern 2: The Erasure Pattern

Women’s contributions to both the esoteric and the trolling traditions have been systematically erased or attributed to men:

This erasure is not accidental. It is structural. The same establishment that these women were challenging also controlled the historical record. The troll’s contribution disappears because the institution that was trolled gets to write the history.

Pattern 3: The “Witch” Accusation as Gendered Suppression

The witch trials of the early modern period (15th-18th centuries) were, in significant part, a mechanism for controlling women who operated outside male authority structures:

• The Malleus Maleficarum (1487) explicitly argued that women were more susceptible to witchcraft due to their allegedly weaker intellect and insatiable carnal lust.
• Women who defied patriarchal expectations – “speaking out or achieving financial independence” – were disproportionately targeted.
• Midwives and “wise women” who practiced traditional medicine were specifically vulnerable, as the male-controlled medical establishment sought to monopolize healing.
• Rich widows, childless women, and older women (i.e., women who were not under a husband’s control) were prime targets.
• Feminist legal analysis reveals that the trials functioned as “a tool for maintaining male dominance through legal means.”

The “witch” was, by definition, a woman who accessed power outside patriarchal channels. The accusation of witchcraft was the establishment’s response to female autonomy. Every woman burned as a witch was, in the establishment’s eyes, a troll who had been caught.

Pattern 4: The Establishment’s Response Proves the Thesis

In every case, the violence and disproportionality of the establishment’s response reveals how threatening these women were:

The pattern is clear: the more effective the troll, the more extreme the response. The establishment does not punish what it doesn’t fear.

8. ACADEMIC BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Academic Sources

1. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999) (Oxford Academic). The definitive academic history of Wicca. Demolishes Gardner’s foundation myths. Essential for Valiente material.

2. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004) (U Chicago Press). Situates occultism at the center of British intellectual life. Covers Golden Dawn women including Florence Farr. Addresses feminism, sexuality, and spirituality in the occult tradition.

3. Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (Park Street Press, 1995). Profiles of Maud Gonne, Moina Bergson Mathers, Annie Horniman, and Florence Farr. Documents the unprecedented gender equality of the Golden Dawn. 72 black and white illustrations.

4. Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography (MIT Press, 2002) (DOI). The biography that launched the Fountain attribution debate. Comprehensive account of the Baroness’s life and art.

5. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (Thames & Hudson, multiple editions). Standard feminist art history text. Traces systemic barriers women faced across centuries. Covers erasure of women’s contributions.

6. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Harvard University Press, 1995). Definitive academic biography. Establishes that Hypatia rejected Iamblichean theurgy. Uses Synesius’s letters to reconstruct her teaching.

7. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (NYU Press, 1992). Essential for the Blavatsky-Ariosophy-Nazism connection. Traces the chain from Theosophy through List and Liebenfels.

Secondary Sources

8. Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon (Schocken, 1995)
9. Gary Lachman, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality (Tarcher/Penguin, 2012)
10. Philip Heselton, Doreen Valiente Witch (Centre for Pagan Studies, 2016)
11. Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Riverhead, 2014)
12. Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (Penguin, 1989)
13. Gareth Knight, Dion Fortune and the Inner Light (Thoth Publications, 2000)
14. Malcolm Barber, The Cathars (Longman, 2000)
15. Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179: A Visionary Life (Routledge, 1998) (DOI)
16. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (UC Press, 1987) (DOI)
17. Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford, 2017)
18. Josephine Winslow Johnson, Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw’s ‘New Woman’ (Colin Smythe, 1975)
19. Spencer Kansa, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron (Mandrake, 2011)
20. George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt, 2005)
21. Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle (Black Dog Publishing, 1999)
22. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Thee Psychick Bible (Feral House, 2010)
23. Alexandra Munroe, Yes Yoko Ono (Japan Society / Harry N. Abrams, 2000)
24. Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (Rutgers University Press, 2005)
25. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)
26. Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (Rutgers University Press, 2000)
27. Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! (Routledge, 2013) (DOI)
28. Starr Goode, Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power (Inner Traditions, 2016)
29. Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (Feminist Press, 2014)
30. Carl Abrahamsson, Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward (Inner Traditions, 2018)

Articles and Chapters

31. “Theosophical Chronology in the Writings of Guido von List (1848-1919): A Link Between H.P. Blavatsky’s Philosophy and the Nazi Movement” – Springer Nature (DOI)
32. Dawn Ades and Bradley Bailey, Burlington Magazine (2019) – Counter-arguments on Fountain attribution
33. Vernon Harrison, critique of the Hodgson Report, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1986)
34. Claire Fanger on Psychic Self-Defense as genre
35. “The Book of Margery Kempe: Religious Discourse and the Carnivalesque Woman” – BYU Scholars Archive
36. “Women And The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn: Nineteenth Century Occultistic Initiation From A Gender Perspective” – Brill (DOI)
37. Western Michigan University thesis: “Life among Good Women: The Social and Religious Impact of the Cathar Perfectae in the Thirteenth-Century Lauragais”
38. Kevin Concannon, “Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece: From Text to Performance and Back Again,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (DOI)
39. Journal of Musicological Research: “Unholy Progeny: Psychic TV and Witch House at the Crossroads of Occultism in the Information Age” (DOI)
40. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (dir. Marie Losier, 2011) – Documentary film
41. British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. Emily Hodgson Anderson et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2023) (DOI)
42. Drake University study: “The Guerrilla Girls: Art, Gender, and Communication”
43. Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, & Else Lasker-Schuler (University of Michigan Press, 2005) (DOI)

Feminist Analysis of Witch Trials

44. Malleus Maleficarum (1487) – The foundational misogynist text
45. “Witch-hunt as a war on women – a feminist approach to the witch trials” – ResearchGate
46. “Gender, Power, and Legal Injustice: A Feminist Legal Analysis of the Gendered Legal Persecution Through Salem Witch Trials” – TSSEHR
47. Library of Congress research guide: “Witch Trials & Witchcraft – French Women & Feminists in History”

CONCLUDING NOTE FOR BOTH BOOKS

The women documented here – now numbering over twenty figures spanning four thousand years, from Baubo lifting her skirts to make a goddess laugh to Pussy Riot performing punk prayers in a cathedral – operated at the intersection of provocation and the sacred. Whether they were burning postboxes, meditating against Hitler, writing the liturgy of new religions, telling the art world it was sexist, dissolving the boundary between two human bodies, or simply insisting on being heard in a world that told them to be quiet, they shared a common method: they used the establishment’s own language and logic against it.

Hypatia used reason. Hildegard used divine revelation. Margery Kempe used tears. Aphra Behn used bawdy comedy. The Baroness used found objects. Blavatsky used invented ancient masters. Dion Fortune used Arthurian mythology. Doreen Valiente used better writing. Cameron used ritual art. Genesis P-Orridge used their own flesh. Dorothy Parker used compression. Yoko Ono used instructions. Mina Loy used a feminist manifesto inside a misogynist movement. The suffragettes used fire. The Guerrilla Girls use statistics. Pussy Riot used prayer. Baubo used obscenity. Every one of them found the exploit in the system and used it.

The establishment could not dismiss any of these on its own terms. So it resorted to violence, imprisonment, erasure, and blacklisting. The Sheela-na-gigs carved into the walls of churches are the most literal possible symbol: the thing the establishment fears most, embedded in the establishment’s own walls, and impossible to remove without destroying the structure.

The esoteric tradition’s relationship to women is the thread that connects these two books. Book 2 shows that the occult has consistently been more willing to grant women authority than the orthodox establishment. Book 1 shows that women’s trolling – their insistence on being heard, on being visible, on being equal – has been a persistent force for historical change. The two threads braid together into a single argument: the people the establishment calls dangerous are usually the ones telling the truth.

Chapter Placement Summary

Research compiled and expanded February 2026. All claims sourced and cross-referenced. Ironic commentary is the author’s own, written in the voice/tone specified for both books. Document covers 24 figures/groups across 4,000 years, 47 academic sources.

Source URLs

• Women in religion — Wikipedia
• Hildegard of Bingen — Wikipedia
• Julian of Norwich — Wikipedia
• Teresa of Ávila — Wikipedia
• Catherine of Siena — Wikipedia