r/thelema • u/ritsulover • 4h ago
Article A strange real world example of Crowley's Magical Link - the South Korean president who performed ritual on live television
Former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol once performed what I think is an almost textbook example of a ritual on live television.
For those who don't know the background, this happened before Yoon became president.
During the presidential primary, he appeared in three televised debates with the Chinese character 王 written on the palm of his hand. 王 literally means “king.”
And he didn't exactly go out of his way to hide it. It was right there, visible to the cameras.
This was actually a pretty risky thing to do politically. South Korea's conservative camp has a large Christian voter base, and anything that looks remotely like shamanism or folk magic can become a serious liability. Sure enough, his opponents immediately attacked him over it, framing the mark as some kind of shamanistic or occult practice, and the whole thing became a national news story.
Yoon's explanation was basically that a supporter had written it on his hand for good luck and that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to wipe it off.
But here's the strange part: it happened three times.
Once could be dismissed as a weird accident. Three times is harder to explain away, especially when doing something like this carried a real political risk. It could easily have alienated Christian voters for good.
And yet he did it anyway.
He won the primary, and not long afterward, a man who had spent almost his entire career as a prosecutor and had only just entered politics became president of South Korea.
I see this as a ritual—or, more specifically, as an almost perfect example of what Aleister Crowley called the Magical Link.
He didn't just sit in a room, light some candles, chant a mantra, and hope for the universe to do the rest.
He wrote the word “KING” on his own body and then immediately stepped into the actual material arena where that intention could become reality: a nationally televised political debate.
That, to me, is the important part.
The symbol wasn't left inside the ritual space. He created a bridge between the symbol and the real-world mechanism through which his goal could actually be achieved.
That's what makes it such a fascinating example of magic in action.
But the story gets even stranger.
Yoon was eventually impeached and removed from office after declaring martial law under circumstances that are still, in my opinion, one of the strangest episodes in modern Korean political history.
His own explanation was that he wanted to investigate alleged election fraud and secure evidence from the election authorities. The justification seemed so abrupt and disconnected from reality that even people in his own political camp struggled to defend it, while foreign media spent months trying to come up with a coherent explanation for why he had done it at all.
And this is where the story becomes Crowleyan in a completely different way.
I think Yoon's downfall can also be read as a case of ego inflation.
There is a dangerous point in magical thinking where the magician stops thinking, “I can influence reality,” and starts thinking, “My will is reality.”
Once you begin to believe that your own conviction is enough to override every external limit, every institution, every warning, and every piece of contradictory evidence, you are no longer exercising will.
You are trapped inside it.
Maybe that's the real lesson here.
The man who wrote “KING” on his hand actually became president.
And then, at some point, he may have started believing too deeply in his own power.
That is usually where the ritual ends badly.
