Michael Aquino's MindWar: Satanism and Cognitive Warfare

If the Devil has a Pope, it's Dr. Aquino.

In the 1990 special The Devil Made Me Do It, journalist Ian Leslie introduced Michael Aquino, a psychological warfare specialist in the U.S. Army, a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, and High Priest of the Temple of Set.

Born in San Francisco in the 1940s, Aquino trained as a political scientist, enlisted in the army, and joined the Church of Satan founded by Anton LaVey, whom he met at a screening of Rosemary's Baby. By the late 1960s, joining LaVey's hedonistic, materialistic, and anti-Judeo-Christian moral stance was perhaps the most extreme option among the many proposed by the counterculture. It may seem contradictory coming from someone who simultaneously joined the army, but that tension is also one of his greatest virtues. These three facets would ultimately merge to give life to his magnum opus on mental warfare. How does an army officer who worships Satan theorize the future of geopolitical control and psychological manipulation?

How does an army officer who worships Satan theorize the future of geopolitical control and psychological manipulation?

The image Aquino paints of LaVey in The Satanic Bible: 50th Anniversary ReVision is that of a charismatic guru, a loving teacher, and a man who clearly did not believe in the literal existence of the Devil. This was the cause of their split.

Two months after joining the Church of Satan, Aquino went to Vietnam to serve as a PSYOPS specialist. During his time on the battlefield, he wrote in “old bombed-out buildings dating from the French occupation, in helicopters, in tents, and in the underbrush in the fire zones of the 'Iron Triangle' and the 'Trapezoid', on anything he had at hand: the backs of forms, maps, and psychological operations (PSYOP) posters,” shaping a text frequently interrupted or destroyed by explosions: the Diabolicon. The author claims this book was dictated to him by the god Set, whom he considers the creator of individual self-awareness and the source of human intelligence. According to Aquino, Set is the entity that Western culture knows as Satan or Lucifer, and its historical defamation only seeks to nullify the potential of pure reason and individual will.

By 1975, this difference in conception with LaVey would lead him to separate from the Church of Satan and found the Temple of Set. A few years later, he would produce a report for the army titled, in an explicit reference to Star Wars, From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory. This is an assessment of the performance of Special Forces dedicated to psychological operations in the Vietnam War and the predecessor of the book MindWar, which we will discuss later.

In this report, Aquino raises a series of fundamental questions regarding what he considers the future of warfare. First, he argues that psychological warfare is underutilized as it is used as support for war, a 'force multiplier', and operates on a given battlefield. Instead, he believes it is essential to take action before initiating any conflict to ensure that it begins with an inevitable predisposition to defeat embedded in the enemy: “MindWar must begin the moment war is deemed inevitable. It must seek to capture the attention of the enemy nation through all available means, and it must target potential soldiers of that nation before they don their uniforms. It is in their homes and communities where they are most vulnerable to MindWar. Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities?”.

What is striking and counterintuitive about the report is that it continues with a critique of the use of propaganda, in the sense of selecting or distorting reality to achieve persuasion. For this type of operation, Aquino states, it is crucial that the mind believes in its own decisions, that it feels it makes them without coercion, and therefore, one must work with a principle of absolute honesty. He adds that there are natural phenomena such as electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low-frequency sound waves that can induce minds to states “more receptive to ideas.” At this point, the influence of Satanism appears: he starts from the premise that every rational and intelligent individual will choose good over evil.

There are natural phenomena such as electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low-frequency sound waves that can induce minds to states “more receptive to ideas.”

Aquino continued his research and training on psychological warfare. By 1990, he gained some fame during the satanic panic, and the report From PSYOP to MindWar became an ideal piece for conspiracy theorists and chronically online individuals. In 2015, he published a more developed version under the title MindWar. It is dedicated to the figures who inspired him to develop his concept of mental warfare, including: Walt Disney, Isaac Asimov, Niccolò Machiavelli, Bruce Lee, and Mark Twain.

MindWar: For what and for whom?

The core of his proposal is the overcoming of physical warfare by mental warfare. Aquino seems to write with the vague hope of being read by some decision-making elite. Both the beginning and the end of the book contain a diagnosis of war as a form of conflict and the geopolitical role of the United States. He argues that war is inevitable, but taking it to the physical level is too costly in material and emotional terms; it is cruel and, ultimately, ineffective for its own ends.

The subsequent consensuses that war achieves are fragile, often reversed, and generate unresolved tensions. The only beneficiaries of the continuation of physical warfare are corporations, businesses, and branches of government that make up the military-industrial complex (which, according to Aquino, assassinated Kennedy). The author also states that “physical war has become too expensive, especially as the United States is the de facto police of the world and the main warring state. It can be argued that war and military policies are the raison d'être of the United States.”,

Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond this stage and replace it with “mental warfare,” which he defines as “the psychological and psychophysiological conditioning of all participants in a sociopolitical problem, first to stabilize it cooperatively without resorting to violence, and then to eliminate its basis by creating a moral community to replace it.” The bulk of the book will address how to put this idea into practice and what kinds of tools can be used. This takes place in an unspoken but evident—and at times almost verbatim—dialogue with The Satanic Bible. Later on, we’ll discuss subliminal methods of involuntary mind control and other topics.

All this behavioral engineering does not exist in a political vacuum. From a geopolitical perspective, the nation-state system inherited from the 18th century is clearly disintegrating and is on its way to being replaced by an international plutocratic corporation. With the United States as the sole surviving superstate, it is left by default with the role of defending and enforcing the sovereignty of the nation-state concept even as its own corporations are destroying it. Thus, Aquino argues, the official enemy of the United States in the 21st century is the non-state groups that challenge that sovereignty: terrorists. In turn, as the communist threat faded, the declared enemy became the main rival of the Judeo-Christian axis: Islam. He adds regarding the latter: “To test this, simply look for any mention of ‘Islamic terrorism’ prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; there isn’t any.”

Since the United States is the only surviving superstate, it is left, by default, with the role of defending and enforcing the sovereignty of the nation-state concept, even as its own corporations are destroying it.

Aquino disagrees with his own country’s doctrine: he asserts that this insistence on waging war until the other side is forced to adopt the “correct way of thinking” is, at its core, the same logic as the Crusades—conversion by the sword. He, in a clear departure from Satanism, places all his bets on the power of reason. In his view, the war of ideas does not seek physical destruction, but rather a kind of civic redemption. The goal is to restore the polis, reestablish order, and uphold virtue in the soul through cooperation. Nuclear weapons must remain a deterrent against potential conflicts; while he does not go so far as to advocate disarmament, he does believe their importance within the defense framework should be de-escalated.

The Old PSYOP Doctrine and the New MindWar

Aquino states that PSYOPS operate through propaganda, which can be of three types: white, where the source is open and explicitly stated; gray, where the source is not explicitly stated; and black, where the source is deliberately concealed and distorted. This raises a problematic ethical boundary, since the tools used have the potential for falsehood and distortion.

Now, what matters to him is that it's not very effective: the rational argument behind it would be that a credible message would lead the receiving audience to change their behavior accordingly. But it relies on the assumption that people build their beliefs and attitudes through reason, and that they can also be inspired to act on them through reason. False. People, explains the High Priest, mostly think through unconscious patterns established from sensory impressions. The update of the doctrine will consist of controlling “the external action thoughts of human beings by identifying and adjusting the sensory impressions that the mind uses to assemble, modify, and reinforce them. Human thoughts based on the senses form the foundation of their constructed outer personalities and, at a group level, their customs, prejudices, beliefs, traditions, habits, and taboos. Thus, through a gradual process, MindWar controls groups of humans.”

To resolve the enormous contradiction between proposing control over human groups and ethically overcoming the PSYOP doctrine, Aquino explains that the essential thing is to operate with criteria of honesty and absolute transparency: openly declaring war, the operations to be carried out, and avoiding lies or deception at all costs. He himself acknowledges that this is a gigantic naivety, but he dedicates a considerable part of the book to explaining how these diplomatic devices would work. It seems to respond to a personal concern or a theoretical exercise; it's the most forgettable part of the book.

The psychological control methods he describes fall into two main groups: voluntary and involuntary. The voluntary methods are basically an ideal of rational cooperative negotiation: individuals engaging in dialogue to solve a problem until they reach a point that satisfies their interests. Very boring.

When that consensus is impossible, the stars we came to see appear: the liminal and subliminal methods of involuntary psychological control.

Magic, Homo Electromagneticus, and Mary Poppins

Liminal methods operate on conscious thought: the information and education of individuals, the capacity for persuasion, etc. They first identify the thought patterns that govern a group and then stimulate their “lenses of reality” to interpret the information in the desired way. For this, one might, for example, eliminate economic resources to discourage prolonged conflict or take the time to train enemy individuals involved in negotiations.

The other variant of liminal methods he mentions, as possible in the near future, consists of “identifying thought patterns that have the same impact on all human beings and then generating and transmitting those codes artificially through electronic media.” Given the immense impact of networks like TikTok or Twitter, or the widespread use of cell phones in general, the proposal doesn't seem so far-fetched. Still, there is an obsession with the electronic dimension that he will develop in the next section.

Subliminal methods operate on the non-conscious receptors of the mind and body to predispose subjects to be more receptive to cooperation, without them detecting the external influence: “In action, a MFB team is ‘invisible’. Its members materialize without drawing attention, work to adjust the situation without giving the impression of interfering with it, and finally disappear as discreetly as they arrived. The MFB model is not John Rambo; it’s Mary Poppins.” In total, he lists fourteen of these tools, under the name of PSYCONS.

Subliminal methods operate on the non-conscious receptors of the mind and body to predispose subjects to be more receptive to cooperation.

In the PSYCONS from the first to the eighth, and in the eleventh, Aquino dedicates himself to analyzing biological phenomena of the body and their possible use to induce cooperative states. This includes things like using extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields (like a television) to alter reaction times, induce mental states of exhaustion or cooperation through alpha waves, alter the balance of ions in the air, use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt morality (this is so flimsy that it’s hardly worth delving into), manipulate circadian rhythms or the perception of space, and use colors and shapes that induce calm and cooperative responses. This entire section aims to create a kind of debate room where optimal conditions are established for negotiation among cooperative individuals, in which rationality, to which he is devoted, leads them to consensus.

The ninth and tenth PSYCONS are hypnosis, understood as the delivery of repeated messages to a tired audience to accept the information, and martial mastery, understood as the transmission of a “ninja” ethic that opts to avoid escalations of violence.

The twelfth PSYCON is magic, where he makes a textual copy of The Satanic Bible. Aquino establishes that the essence of magic in this context is the “manipulation of the other party's perceptions” to get the subject to redefine the problem and its issues for themselves, drawing conclusions about reality and their options based solely on that reconfiguration. The goal is for the victory to be “invisible,” leaving the subject with the belief that no external influence has occurred.

The twelfth PSYCON is magic, where he makes a textual copy of The Satanic Bible.

This view aligns with what he proposes in his review of the satanic text, where he defines Lesser Magic as the deliberate effort to identify and adjust the aforementioned “lenses of reality” of others to achieve a desired outcome. In both texts, he details a list of elements on which to operate to perform magic: controlling the environment, inventing a “persona” through clothing and body language that establishes a dominant relationship, restricting the subject's attention to chosen objects or procedures, defining the variables, instructing how one can participate to make the outcome more credible, channeling possible expectations, interpreting the result and the meaning of the event, and reinforcing the new perception of reality in the participant.

What he wants to convince the reader of when he writes about satanism is that one has the capacity, through rationality, to produce magic and rituals: one's own senses. When he translates this to MindWar, he makes it clear that it is more efficient and cheaper to alter an enemy's decision architecture than to drop a bomb on them. And, he quotes Philip M. Taylor, he says it’s more ethical: “Is it more unacceptable to blow someone's brains out than to persuade that brain to drop its weapon and live?.”

Unfortunately, neither MindWar nor The Satanic Bible includes a manual for brainwashing or detecting international conspiracies. The book on mental warfare includes information on PSYOPS (so trendy now), but fundamentally in a mode of denial: it points out things it does not consider ethical, like black propaganda, or that it judges useless, like MK ULTRA. And, although Aquino's proposal has an excessive rationalist yearning, he is very clever when playing on the edge between the biological, the psychic, and the narrative, opening many doors. How can one affect the state of mood, fatigue, or alertness to influence decision-making? What things are designed for this? Who is designing the decision architecture of those negotiating our future?