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MATT BURGESS: Welcome back to the Free Mind Podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess, an Assistant Professor of environmental studies and a faculty fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. My guest today is Alexandra Cotofana. Alexandra Cotofana is an assistant professor of Humanities and social Sciences at Zayed University and the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Cotofana is a cultural anthropologist who studies a range of topics including the cultures of political elites. Our conversation focuses on one of her quite unique study topics, the role of beliefs and magic in the occult in the elite politics of Romania. Alexandra Cotofana, welcome to the Free Mind Podcast. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Thank you for inviting me, Matt. 

MATT BURGESS: You study several fascinating topics in your research, one of which is how beliefs in magic and the occult affect elite politics. I want to start by asking you, how did you get interested in this topic? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I'm Romanian and I started doing this research in 2010, 2011. I was working in an area that's traditionally been split between Ukraine and Romania, so sort of in the northeast of the country. And I was just interviewing people who do something that I call labors of the occult, right? Because it's sort of reductive to call them witches. And they do so many different things. Some of them actually work with weather. Thinking of my current research, some of them work with divination, some of them work with, they do exorcism. It's so many kinds of work that I came up with this term of labors of the occult, and it's also sort of a play on Marxism, which I can go into later if you want. I was interviewing these people in a bunch of different villages, pretty remote villages, and a bunch of them started to mention how either the Romanian dictator, communist dictator, Nicolae CeauÈ™escu or people very close to him, used to come and ask for their services back in the day. 

And the first time that happened, I was like, okay, that's interesting. And then someone else said it and someone else said it, and then someone else said it. I started to think about why that sound that so strange to me, and I realized that part of what my mind was doing is it was refusing to accept that communist politicians would be doing something so non-secular with their time. I remember this one story of how a black car parked in front of this one woman's house, and she completely freaked out during communism because people from the secret police came out and turns out it was just the wife of a very affluent politician who just came because the husband was cheating on her and she needed some help. Otherwise, she was a very prominent figure, as I'm sure in communism, women held equal roles to men in politics and in work in general. 

Yeah, that's also something she did. And so I realized there are some oversimplifications in my mind and potentially in other people's minds as well, and I started to try to understand if these are just stories from communism or if it's something that is continued into post-communist and democracy. And what I realized is that there are a set of continuities, which if you're not someone who studies Eastern Europe, if you're not someone who understands the specifics of Romania in this context, these continuities would be something that you would completely miss. One thing that happened in Romania, for example, unlike all the other Eastern European countries, is that the political elite other than the president and his wife who got brutally murdered on Christmas, and that's something we actually have to watch on national television every year on Christmas. That's sort of a weird Christmas ritual that Romanians have. 

Other than them, all of the rest of the political elite just moved into the new era as democratic politicians. And that's something that hasn't really happened anywhere else in Eastern Europe. While at the same time, these people who formed the language and the logics of communism, they're also some of the most aggressive neoliberal politicians and administrators in Europe. There are all of these strange things happening. And also some of these people who basically built a very consistent discourse of a political left wing and who accused right wing politicians of working with the occult and working with witches and discourses of the occult in general, which we know fascism has done traditionally. It has this association with mysticism. These left-wing politicians also employed laborers of the occult, practitioners of the occult, conspiracy theories and all of these things. I noticed that, once I stopped and I paid attention to all of this stuff, I noticed that there are certain decades that my mind would've normally oversimplified because that's what the mind does. 

It's just easier. But once you slow down and you look at it, there are all these very interesting things happening. And so I ended up starting with these stories from communism that these old people were telling me, and then I moved closer and closer to Bucharest, which is the capital of Romania. And I ended up interviewing very high level politicians, including the former president and the former prime minister at the time, who had used the services of the same gentlemen against each other in the elections. The gentlemen and the two of them are very highly educated men, several degrees, they're polyglots, they all speak several languages, they've been around, they're educated urban male elites in a European country, all three of them. And they're just one cluster, one part of a chapter, but all three of them, they're involved with witchcraft, if you want to call it that in one way or another. 

This is sort of what I wanted people to question because traditionally if you look at how anthropology, unfortunately, but also I think maybe anthropology mirrors society in some way. When we think of witchcraft, not only who practices it, but also who believes in it, we tend to think of people who are in the villages. I'm at fault of this too because that's where I started my research. We think of older women, women in general, not men, more susceptible to these beliefs. And so I focused intentionally on male urban educated elites to make a point that that's not the case. And you find these interesting overlaps wherever you go in society. And so my question was why is it useful? Why do people go to it? Why is it still happening? We think of it as something of the past and it's not. 

MATT BURGESS: Really fascinating. Let me ask you a couple of follow-up questions. First, just to give our listeners more of a vivid picture, can you describe some of these practices or services of the occult? If you're trying to manipulate the weather or you are trying to influence an election or you're trying to divine something, what are you actually doing? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Let's start with the weather witch, since I'm working on weather now, this is also a very interesting story. This is sort of a snippet of how neoliberalism works in Romania. There was a gentleman at the border of Ukraine and Romania who had learned from his grandmother how to work weather. When I went to meet him, it was storming out. We were really high up in the mountains and there was a storm. He wasn't home. And someone told me he's out gathering wood that was struck by lightning, which when you're in a context like that, you're like, "Fair enough. A guy's got to do what a guy's got to do." He came back and we sat down and we started talking about his practice. He told me that his grandmother taught him how to manipulate the weather. However, because Romanians are one of the largest migrants of Europe where they go for labor, and they have traditionally since the early nineties, to Western Europe, what happens is that people are not in agriculture as much as they used to be. 

They don't care about the weather as much. So people don't come to him for those sorts of services anymore. What he had instead was a big bowl of brass that women in the village gave him because they wanted him to do love magic on them. They wanted to get married. So even though he has this very specific knowledge of how to manipulate weather, which is insane to think about whether you believe that it works or not, he had to move into what neoliberal times asked for. Women are single, there's pressure on them to get married. People are out in France and Germany and Italy and Spain doing work. They don't need to work the land anymore, so he has to repurpose his skills. He had managed to repurpose the rituals, to redo them in a way that could make these bras work for love magic. But he was still using knowledge from his grandmother, right? Because he was still working with weather in a way. That I thought was an interesting thing. 

MATT BURGESS: That's very interesting. Another thing you said that I thought was really interesting was that although communism is thought of commonly as being a secular and in fact anti-religious often movement, that there were aspects of communist ideology incorporated into these occult beliefs. My question is to what extent is communism do you think relevant or not relevant at all to the prevalence of occult beliefs? And just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, we've been talking about Romania, but there's lots of belief in the occult here in the US. For example, among Americans, 46% believe in supernatural beings. 45% believe in demons, 45% believe in ghosts, one in five think they've seen one, 13% believe in vampires. I guess what I'm asking is belief in the occult and magic just a part of the human condition that adapts itself as you were describing in the case of the guy with the bras earlier, to whatever the surrounding belief system is in the society? Or is there something in particular about Romanian occult beliefs that is communist or non-communist in nature? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I think you're onto something with the fact that it's something in human nature. It's very important to, some of the listeners might be interested to know that there's a scholar called Roland Boer, B-O-E-R, who has, he's I think, the best archivist, archivist of the connections between communism and religion. He has a body of work, I'm sure if you just Google his name, some of the books will come up. And he looks in detail at how prominent figures of Marxism have had very intimate connections with religion, from Marx angles, to Rosa Luxembourg, to Lenin. People have been interested in theology, they've practiced or they've had questions about it. There's stuff in their writing that reflects the fact that they think about God and God is supernatural, right? No one can deny that, at least in our Christian mindset. We are still animals of our time and place as much as we try to purify our mind. 

Marxism is a project of, an offspring of enlightenment, right? It's an offspring of this way of thinking of we came from dark times, religion was a bad thing, and now we're better. We're modern, right? We're smarter than that. But there are still things that this modernity cannot fully explain. Listeners might also want to go to Bruno Latour's book "We Have Never Been Modern". Where Bruno Latour does a really good job of explaining how we try really, really hard to have this binary of zero and one like computers and to purify the world around us when it's really not that easy and when we never manage in practice to do that. Yeah, I think even during communism, and I'm sure there are examples from other communist countries, things like these were happening because if you think even of the communist leaders, they weren't born into communism, they were born into something else. 

They gathered beliefs and narratives and logics and ways of thinking from their family, from neighbors, from the culture that they were growing up in, and then they brought that into governing. No one's purely secular, no one's purely communist, no one's purely religious, either or solely believes in the supernatural. And what's interesting about Romania, and not only Romania, but this is the case we're talking about, is that state administrators at the time had a pretty close connection to the Romanian Orthodox Church, which is the largest religious entity in the country. And so if you go to the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, which is the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon with over a thousand rooms, it's this huge, huge building, you're going to notice that it's built right next to a cathedral and right next to a bunch of churches that have been there from the 14, 16 hundreds that never got destroyed. 

Communism built around them, and that alone is sort of, that architecture, those choices and infrastructure are very much a mirror of how the system worked at the time. Clergy had privileged roles in communism. Priests would actually use confession to then rat on people at the secret police, which took some of the legitimacy of religion in some of its sacredness away. 

MATT BURGESS: I can imagine. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yeah. But yeah, people still had hidden weddings, hidden baptism, especially if you were a party member, it was not accepted. But I don't think people's belief in the supernatural in general went anywhere because there are gaps in the spectrum of ideas that we have that you can't really fill with anything else but religion, I think. And we don't really have anything better than it right now, so we're still going back to it. 

MATT BURGESS: That's a really interesting point that I want to pick up in a bit about the connection between beliefs in the supernatural and search for meaning. But first I want to ask you something about elites. Obviously one thing that's fascinating about studying elite's belief in the occult is that there's something surprising or taboo maybe even about it. I think another thing that's fascinating about it is people wonder whether major decisions might have been influenced by beliefs in the occult and magic or some kind of ritual. For example, I can't remember where I read this, but I read somewhere that there's at least a rumor that Abraham Lincoln used to have seances in the White House and would sometimes consult his practitioner about some of the most important decisions that he was making. Was there any of that in Romania, either during the communist time or the post-communist time, significant political decisions that had some influence from this type of practice? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: There was, and actually Lincoln is not the only one. In my research, I came across the fact that the Reagan couple had a divinator. I think Jacques Chirac or François Mitterrand, one of these two French presidents also had a divinator, which is significant considering that France boasts on its secularism. The rest of us are sort of chill with our relationship with religion, but the French are really into their secularism as part of their nation making. But yes, [foreign language 00:15:56] also had a divinator, someone who was hired to tell them things about their future. 

Now, this woman got threatened with imprisonment when she told them and she was right, that they're going to have a very tragic death and that the people are going to turn on them and there's going to be a bloodbath. And they didn't like it very much, and she was threatened with prison and marginalized because dictators don't like to hear bad news, but then the bad news happened. However she figured that out, whether she figured it out through just watching the people and the turmoil forming, or whether she actually dreamt something or saw something, she was spot on about how their life ended. 

MATT BURGESS: Did that affect her status afterwards? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes. She was very, very popular afterwards. And I actually worked with, I talked to someone, I interviewed someone who was her direct apprentice and who told me a lot of her work. It was very interesting. Also a Roma woman. I don't know if your listeners know much about racial dynamics in Romania, but the Roma are a group that has traditionally been nomadic that comes out of South Asia. I think Romanians think they're a little more light-skinned than they are. Romanians tend to think that there's also a huge difference in melanin between the ethnic group that makes up the majority of the population and the Roma. 

I don't think that's particularly true. I think the biggest difference you see between the Roma and the Romanians is in dress, maybe social status indicators. But the Roma have traditionally been, if you look at the history of black people in the US and the Roma in Romania, a lot of things align, including slavery stopped around the same time for both groups. You understand the rest of the dynamic. A lot of the magical figures from Romania come out of the Roma, and I think this is significant that there's still disassociation between Roma women in particular and the occult. 

MATT BURGESS: Just as a point of clarification for our listeners, and I am not sure if this is to what extent this is or if this is a derogatory term, and I apologize if it is, but as a point of clarification for our listeners, is it correct that the Roma have sometimes been called gypsies? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes. 

MATT BURGESS: I just mentioned that because a term that our listeners might be more familiar with. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes. So that is the term that has been used, but it's an exonym, so it's a term that others use for them, they don't use for themselves. 

MATT BURGESS: Right, okay. That's what I thought. Let me ask you another question. Belief in the occult is, especially among elites, is somewhat taboo. Is that right or not? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I think- 

MATT BURGESS: At least publicly. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: From my research, I would say yes. And I would say there's a lot of shame associated with admitting publicly that you have a belief in the occult. Because the expectation is that if you're educated, and especially if you're male and educated, then you couldn't possibly believe such silly things. But then in Romania, and I'm going to come back to Roma women for a second because this is important. I have an article on this. Maybe around 10 years ago, the Romanian government, parts of the Romanian government decided they're going to tax witchcraft in Romania. And this was particularly aimed at Roma women. It was a bunch of, I call it white man law versus black magic women because this is exactly what it was. A bunch of whites, male politicians decided they're going to impose a tax on Roma women who are practicing witchcraft because they think they're phonies and they think that there has to be some proof that your service to whoever it is worked in one way or another. 

MATT BURGESS: And would that exempt you from the tax if you could prove that? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes. But what some of the Roma witches who I talked to brought to my attention is that what is shown to them through whatever forces are at work, is sometimes vague. For example, I can tell you your wife left you. She's going to come back in three points. Three points can mean anything from three hours to three days to three weeks to three years. Are you going to sue me after three weeks? What if she comes back in three years? Then do I get the case cleared? This is the point they were making. They were saying, these men don't understand at all the logic of witchcraft, and so they're trying to tax something that they don't understand. It's not going to work because they explained to their clients all of these things that I just told you about. 

What they did is they orchestrated a protest in front of the government building and they threatened these male politicians to attack their virility and their fertility. It was a very beautiful play on race, on gender, on all of these things. The tax law of course didn't pass, but it was an interesting moment. In Romanian politics. 

MATT BURGESS: There's kind of a genius to that protest in that if the politicians are using the taboo about that belief system to impose the tax, the protest only has potency under the assumption that the politicians have the same belief system. If they don't, right? If you don't believe in virility, hexes, then what do you care if bunch of people who claim to be able to do virility hexes are virility hexing you? In some sense, it's a protest that if it works, it also shows everybody that the elites have the same belief system as everyone else, which is really interesting. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: And also, I'm sure you're not going to be surprised. No one insisted with a tax law to try to pass it again. Something worked with that protest. 

MATT BURGESS: If it's taboo, if you're an elite to have this belief system, how did you get such high level elites to talk to you about it? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Well, it was very different. It depended from one case to another. What I need to say is that I had the misfortune of going back and doing my year of research because for the listeners who don't know this, for your PhD program in anthropology, you have to go to your field to where you're doing your field work for one full year and sort of record, because it's considered that if you get all the rituals of a full calendar year, you sort of understand how the culture works. So that's what you're meant to do. You get funding for it, and you're out in the field for a year. Because of the timeline of my PhD program, I landed in Romania when really, really big protests happened. Like half a million people gathered in Bucharest. They were protesting against the government corruption, same sort. And so when I got there, people weren't really interested in talking to anyone, let alone someone who they don't really understand. 

It's not every day that an anthropologist knocks on your door. Is that a journalist? Are they studying bones? If so, what are they doing on your doorstep? People didn't fully understand what I was doing. And one thing that I did is I started by interviewing young politicians. Far left, far right center, left center. I tried to look at four different parties, including some new unions that were created as alternatives to the traditional left and right, which by the way, I think is a really good idea. And so I started with those young politicians and I did something that we called snowballing. I would interview you and then at the end I would ask you, who else do you think I should talk to? And so I ended up to more and more senior level politicians, and one of them who was in the same party with the former presidents, I asked him how I could reach the former president who had been president for eight years and who was involved this situation with the elections and using the same person as his opponent. 

And he told me that if I just Google his phone number, his phone number is out there. It's not by accident. He wants people to contact him directly. I should just call him. And I said, okay. And that's what I did. And I called him and my hands were sweaty and my voice was shaky because I was talking to the president, the guy who I knew as the president for most of my young adult life, so it was a big deal. And I told him that I'm studying the way that religion and the supernatural play a role in the way that politicians make decisions. And he listens and he said, "Okay, I'm available at this time, at this place." And I went and interviewed him. Very important for some of the listeners who are interested in doing research and interested in studying up, which means studying politicians, people in positions of power. 

MATT BURGESS: People that have more power than you. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Which I highly recommend because it changes the dynamic that social scientists have traditionally had with the people who they study, where we have a lot of power over those we study, especially when we go to third world places. It's very humbling. It's very eyeopening to study someone who can tell you, no. It's very good for ethics, I think. I went to his party headquarters, basically, he had started a new party and the secret services were still working for him. They took my backpack, my whole backpack before I entered his office. And all I had was this little black notebook and my pen. That was it. And I write in my dissertation about how if I ever lose that notebook, I'm toast, because that's where everything is. So many of these high level interviews, I had no way to record and I would not have been allowed to record. And so when we got to the question of how he used this gentleman in the elections, he told me he's going to tell me, but that he never allows me to talk about it or publish on it, he said. 

MATT BURGESS: And you respected that. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: And I put my notebook and my pen down and I just listened. And then the next day I went and interviewed his opponent and I heard his side of the story and his opponent would not answer my emails until a senior member in his party met up with me at a cigar bar of all places, in a very affluent neighborhood in Boes, and asked me, who else do you want to talk to? He said sometimes being a young woman in these dynamics allows you to be like a daughter who needs help, sort of this is- 

MATT BURGESS: Sure, there's lots of research to suggest that women receive empathy more easily. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: And so this gentleman asked me who else I need to talk to? And I told him, and he made some phone calls then and there he said, I have a very smart young woman there. You should talk to her. And he set up some interviews for me with two very affluent politicians, both of which had accusations against the former president at different times. Both of them through the last two election cycles had accused the former president who I just talked to, of using the occult against them. And they were in the same party. They were left-wing politicians, he was right wing, center right. I talked to all three, but only the former prime minister had used the same practitioner of the occult as the president. 

MATT BURGESS: Really interesting. One of the things you mentioned earlier that I want to come back to is the idea that belief in the supernatural often fills a very important role in society and in people's lives. And then as a particular mystical belief system subsides, it can often be replaced with another. I wanted to ask, communism obviously itself was a time of major upheaval, and probably in some ways the totalitarian purpose of communism was to give everybody a belief system. But I imagine that it also left a lot of emptiness because people probably understood at least some of its problems, but didn't feel like they could talk about it. And then of course, when the Soviet Union collapsed and when communism collapsed in Romania, that also must have created some kind of a void. Do you see in your research any noticeable changes in how or how prevalently the occult was practiced before and after the fall of communism? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Very important for some of the listeners who don't know, not all communist countries in Eastern Europe were under the Soviet Union. Romania was at the border of the Soviet Union, so the Soviet Union stopped north and east of us with Moldova and Ukraine. We were always independent from the Soviet Union. That being said, now with the occupation of Ukraine and everything, the danger of the Big Eastern brother is looming once again. People understand it as sort of this occupation coming back, coming closer and closer. But Romania had its own government. It was target, right? It was autonomous. And once communism collapsed in the eastern block, including in countries like Romania, where it was independently communist. Neoliberalism filled the space real quick. And people already had desires for more visibly than anything else, consumption of material culture that they saw in the west and they felt like they didn't have access to. 

MATT BURGESS: Because of communism. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes, this was people's most, I don't know if they're deepest or they're most important, but the most talked about lack that they had. Neoliberalism came in and filled that void very, very quickly. With neoliberalism came a plethora of belief systems that people could choose from, and they chose from them very uncritically, whatever was available. You would see a lot of spiritualism workshops in Romania in the early nineties, and you would see Russian mystics coming, new reformed post-Soviet, Russian mystics coming to give talks. And you would see South Asian yoga figures that all of them... No one locally has any idea how important they are on the large scale of global yoga. But because of the melanin, because of the ethnic group, they seemed at least to be part of, they seemed important to the local population. 

MATT BURGESS: Can you elaborate on that because I'm not sure our listeners are going to understand. It sounds like you're saying that in Romania at the time, that there was a connection between if you had darker skin, you were perceived as being more exotic, more spiritually endowed. Is that kind of what you're saying? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: You would see posters on all of these places where you could advertise things, and there were all of these posters of renowned yoga mystic, and then there was a South Asian name comes to Bucharest on this date. And what I'm saying is the local population who had just heard of yoga had no idea how renowned this person was, but because they looked South Asian, Indian, they looked from the Indian Peninsula, they seem to be part of the ethnic groups of the Indian Peninsula that gave them authority in the eyes of the local population. We have no idea who these people were because if these discourses are new and illegible to you, you have no idea who is who. And are they even practicing yoga correctly? All of these things were new, but they were all accepted, they were all swallowed, unchewed basically. 

A lot of fascist ideas, the Blood and Soil logic was part of Romanian ways of thinking for a long, long time. And there are other books that I talk about this, but I think the Blood and Soil logic became more and more part of national discourse and fascist ideas got refreshed. They got a new face and post-communist. So now part of what's interesting is the Romanian Orthodox Church, which as I said is the biggest religious institution in Romania. There's something very interesting about it. Part of it is because it's orthodoxy, right? It's the oldest form of Christianity. There's pride in the fact that we never changed the way we do things. That's what orthodox means, the right belief, Catholic straight Protestants, straight neo Protestants, God help them. But we've always been the same. We've always followed the right path. That's the discourse. In practice, ideas from these Russian mystics ideas from the Western far right. 

All of these ideas have made their way into Romanian Orthodox Christianity and the high level clergy. So now for example, there are all of these discourses that the higher administrators of the church in Romania support like anti-abortion discourse, anti LGBT discourse, which have never traditionally, I've looked at all of the constitutions of Romania from the start of the country. It has never been an issue. The fact that in the Constitution it says that marriage is a union of two people, it's always said that suddenly we have a problem, it needs to say between a man and a woman. 

MATT BURGESS: Let me ask you a follow-up question about that, because I think a lot of our listeners would imagine that definition of marriage as between a man and a woman has deep roots in Christian belief systems. And it sounds like you're saying in this branch of Christianity that's not true, but is that an omission or were same-sex marriages routinely practiced before this or not? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: They were not, but it never seemed to need clarification. Gay people were never able to marry in Romania, but no one made it a point that the terminology needs to be changed. This is a Western worry that God's overlapped with the local culture in a way that doesn't make sense. We never had gay marriages in Romania, and the Constitution just said it's a union between two people. No one tried to breach that. It's constitutions from the 1800s on, so before fascism, before communism, before democracy, right, during monarchy. And so no one had a problem with that. But then suddenly, do you remember that there was a woman from Kentucky who was a local administrator and she refused to sign something for a gay couple? 

MATT BURGESS: Yes, I vaguely remember this. I couldn't remember her name, but I vaguely remember the story. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: We can look it up at some point. She came to Romania, she was invited, there was money from politicians, there was money from the church, unfortunately. And she was invited and she was basically a martyr of the traditional family, which is a new topic of interest in Romania. And she got to speak in front of Romanians about how she was crucified for her for supporting her beliefs. But this is what I mean. New evangelical beliefs are coming in Russian, far-right groups have people who keep having talks in Romania, and all of these beliefs are changing what Christian Orthodoxy is, first of all, which is important. But second, also how you know these beliefs in the occult and these beliefs in supernatural and these beliefs also in sort of who we are as a nation are changing in the last couple of decades. 

MATT BURGESS: Yeah, really interesting. Let's come to the American context for a second. And our listeners may not know this, but although you are Romanian and you live in the UAE, you have lived and worked in the United States for quite a while, and you have close connections to the United States. To the extent that religion and belief in the supernatural or mysticism is part of what binds many, if not most societies together throughout history, one topic of frequent speculation these days is as participation in traditional religions continues to decline in the United States, what will come next? And some people argue that maybe there was this civic religion of secular American patriotism a few decades ago. Some people argue that recently, some far left and far right movements like things that people call wokeism, things like QAnon are filling that void. I think that there was a generation of scholars that maybe were, I'm not an expert in the history of this, but my sense is that they were quite prominent around the turn of the century that openly wondered and hoped that some kind of a secular enlightenment centered humanism might take over. 

What's your thought on all that? Where do you see American spirituality going from here? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I will answer this by starting with an example. In 2016 when Donald Trump was elected as president, this really, really big movement started on Facebook, which was called Bind Trump. So a bunch of Wiccan or self-made Wiccan witches started this Facebook group, which I was closely following for comparative studies, for my research for a comparative case. And every full moon, they would do a ritual to bind Trump. 

MATT BURGESS: What do you mean by bind? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: It's a term in occult practices, which means when I bind you, whatever it is you are trying to do, I stop you from doing it. 

MATT BURGESS: These people who don't like Trump? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes. It's very interesting because at the time in the US, this was associated with left-wing people, right? Wiccans were for many, many historical and cultural reasons. This was the association between these new age self-proclaimed witches, and it's a bunch of things that we see like burning sage and crystal work and this and that. But people also thought they have this power that is in a number. The more people would try to do rituals against Donald Trump on a full moon when the potency of the rituals they thought was very high, the better it's going to work. Every month you would see on this group, the conversation was very heated, as you might imagine, especially in the first few years of presidency. And what you would see happen is every time Donald Trump did something that he was criticized for, someone in the group would post a link to the news and he would say, "Look, it works. We're binding him." 

But of course, if you looked at the larger context, it was just Trump doing some Trump thing. It wasn't the proof of the binding. If you follow the logic of your cult, it wasn't really there all the time. But anyway, when I was teaching at a liberal arts college in 2018 and 2019, and I had the freedom to create a bunch of courses, and one of them was witchcraft and politics, I taught a course on this. And so I invited to my class, the gentleman who started this group, and he talked to my class, and I told my class to prepare questions and do research on the group, and it was a very fruitful conversation. Now, the problem with that class is that I was asked to do a poster for it by the department secretary before the semester started to get full enrollment. As you might imagine, the class did not need full enrollment, did not need a poster, because full enrollment- 

MATT BURGESS: That topic is going to draw a crowd. Sure. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: But I sent her three images from the Bind Trump group because where else are you going to find art that people make on this topic inspired by their common hatred for some. And so one of them was, what's the name of this? The movie with Bette Midler where she's a witch. Is it Hex or something? 

MATT BURGESS: I do vaguely. Yeah. Yeah. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: There's a movie with three witches. One of them is Bette Midler. And so someone on this buying Trump group made an image of the three of them boiling Trump in a cauldron. So you see his head in a cauldron. So I sent that image in a couple others which were more benign, and I didn't know what the secretary chose. I just went about my life and I just trusted that things are going to be okay, or at least that the poster is going to come back to me for vetting before it goes out. And so what I received instead was a call from the department chair that the poster was out and that they received complaints from conservatives. 

MATT BURGESS: I can imagine. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Turns out that the secretary decided Trump- 

MATT BURGESS: To go with the provocative one. Yeah. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: It was going to be what did it, and she made the decision alone, which is fine. 

MATT BURGESS: Are there any stories about this in campus reform, crazy liberal professor fantasizes about boiling Trump into a cauldron kind of thing? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I don't know. But so the problem is that at this college, a political scientist had taught Trumpism the semester before, not criticizing, just explaining how Trump is doing politics differently than anyone else. And what was revealed is that there's a lot more support from parents, so there's a lot more concern with money than- 

MATT BURGESS: And this is in a red state, just so our listeners know. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: It's in a red state. And so the concern of the head of my department was that not only are conservative students going to do something that they're going to complain about it, but she said she's worried that someone is going to try to come and shoot me in my class. And so she suggested the idea that perhaps I would have a police officer at the door of my classroom while teaching this class. 

MATT BURGESS: But she didn't suggest you change your poster, or did she? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: No. 

MATT BURGESS: That's pretty interesting. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: They took it down. It was only there for a weekend. Needless to tell you, whoever enrolled in the class never saw the poster or they were- 

MATT BURGESS: The title of the class is all you need to sell it. Yeah, 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Exactly. But I remember as a non-American, being very upset to that, her suggestion was to have a police officer at the door of the class instead of any other anti-gun larger policy that could have been made. 

MATT BURGESS: I can relate to that too, in that I'm a Canadian, and although I'm a pretty politically moderate, open to various aspects of liberalism and conservatism, Canadians have a very different sensibility about guns than Americans do. Now that said, I imagine this person in your department is not expecting to be able to change the country's gun laws on short notice, right? And so it's a practical recommendation. Also, it's worth saying that I don't think that kind of concern is just about guns. For example, there's a Canadian professor named Gad Saad, who works for university in Montreal called Concordia University, and Gad Saad is a, I'm not actually sure how he politically identifies himself, but he certainly associated with the online right. And certainly the far left on campus associates him with the online right. And the university that he's at has a reputation for being especially activist and left wing in terms of its student and even its faculty. 

And I'm pretty sure I heard him say once that he, for several years, had to have a police escort everywhere he went on campus in Montreal where there's nothing like the quantity of guns there are in the US. I think there's just something about also our polarized moment where people on both sides seem to think that violence is okay in some context, or that opposition to violence has its limits. I'm against violence, I'm for democracy, except when it comes to those people kind of thing, which is just a really, really unfortunate aspect of our politics. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I agree. And just to tell you the story of how my class went, and needless to say, I'm here today. I've never been shot at no one other than my students showed up to my class. But it was an interesting class to teach, and we looked at cases from all corners of the world, and I made sure I focused on the Western world and politicians' involvement with the occults in order to de-exoticize the way that students think about it, because I'm sure how many cases of what they expected is what I'm trying to say is a lot of cases from the third world, and I wanted the class to question the way they were thinking. 

MATT BURGESS: Maybe as a final question, let me ask you, from the perspective of things that most people would agree are good, so peace, not any particular belief system, but peace, non-violence, political freedoms. Do you think that elite belief in the occult has been overall a positive force, a negative force or a neutral force? Obviously there's huge variation, but for one positive example, correct me if this is wrong, but I think the rumor about Abraham Lincoln having seances, there's also part of it that his practitioner was African-American, and his respect for her might have influenced his decision to abolish slavery. That I think we would agree is an example of a good influence in so far as that was an influence. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: I wish she would've also foreseen the way he died. Maybe she could have saved him, but that's perhaps a different question. I think in the case that I studied in Romania, unfortunately, the racial dynamics that have traditionally been there haven't changed that much. Even though Romania has been very avidly looking at the West for cultural influences and political influences throughout the last few decades, we seem to only pick up the bad stuff. And unfortunately, tolerance and lack of discrimination, I'm sorry to say, have not been at the core of how Romania has essentially changed after 1989. 

MATT BURGESS: Does that have anything to do with the occult though? Or is it just something that happens to be part of the society? 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Yes, because I think the people, the politicians who use the services of, let's say Roma practitioners of the occult, they'll do it in the hidden, because there's shame surrounding the fact that first they use the occult at all, but second that they go to the Roma for it. So they would never publicly affiliate with the Roma. That's there, unfortunately, that sort of dynamic is there. I don't know what the solution for that would be. I think the case of this gentleman I told you about who worked for both sides during the elections, this was different because he is of the majority ethnic group, and he's actually from the region where I started my research, which really helped during our interview, which it started very icy. And then when I told him where I did research, he started to ask me, he sort of lit up and he started to ask me about different figures he had worked with, which I fortunately knew about because I had just been there. 

He warmed up to me. But I think the case of the three of them, him and the two politicians worked with him. It became public, and he got to have a platform to speak publicly and state his opinion and say the ways in which the situation was good and bad for him. That was only possible because of his ethnic and gender identity. No one else had a platform like that on national television, given a slot in the news, several different channels with several different political leanings. That was a unique case, and I think that tells us a little bit about how things are going, despite this being a country in the EU and despite these policies of anti-discrimination being pushed forward for quite a while, I don't think it seeped in deep enough. 

MATT BURGESS: Well, this has been really interesting. I'm sure our listeners learned a lot. Alexandra Cotofana, thanks very much for being on the Free Mind Podcast and we'll see you soon. 

ALEXANDRA COTOFANA: Thank you, Matt. 

MATT BURGESS: The Free Mind Podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind@colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu/center/benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all @BensonCenter. Our Instagram is @theBensonCenter, and the Facebook is @BruceDBensonCenter.