“A Magic Rite to Exorcise the Spirits of Murder, Violence & Creephood from the Pentagon”: Ritual Efficacy, Combinative Religion, and the Possibility of Revolution by Metaphysical Means

The October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon represented an expansive slice of nationwide dissent against US involvement in the Vietnam War. As part of the protest, counterculture leaders engineered an attempt to exorcise the US military headquarters via levitation, which comprised a ten-step ritual and spoken invocation that borrowed from religious traditions across time and space. The paper argues that the visibility of this action confounds a classic conception of ritual, while renegotiating the terms by which to adjudicate ritual success. Further, the paper resituates accusations of Hippie appropriation within a metaphysical tradition, while seeking to expose those reactionary currents stirred during a so-called revolutionary decade that remain salient today. A brief episode in the turbulent history of the American 1960s, the levitation of the Pentagon critically triangulates discourse around the efficacy of ritual, the ethics of combinative religion, and the possibility of revolution by metaphysical means.