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KEK, PEPE, & TRUMP:

A Study in Meme-Magic & Virtual Voodoo

From the primordial slime of undifferentiated Chaos at the Dawn of Time or perhaps just

before the Dawn of Time, even came a frog-headed critter, ahopping and ajumping, a

Lovecraftian voltigeur, who, via the miracle of meme-magic and virtual voodoo of the

internet, went viral as they say in the process casting its baleful batrachian influence over

the 2016 American Presidential Election (surely the most overtly Occult on record yet? But

more on this later.) And when asked Why? the only answer forthcoming was: Feels good

man.

This is the story of an Atavistic Resurgence, a kind of evolutionary reversion, and what

happens when an imp that should never have been allowed out, escapes and goes a-

wandering. Pepe the Frog went hopping into the world, and soon the World Wide Web

opened its digital doors and invited him in. Pepes origins may go even deeper into darkness,

but we shall come back to that later ...

It has been said that any action or desire of the human heart, however perverse, ridiculous, or

unlikely, will come to pass, in time, like the scaling of Everest, simply because its there.

What Can Be Imagined Can Be Done, or, at the very least, Attempted. Likewise, it might be

added that, whatever it is, there will probably be a Support Group or User Forum for it

online, somewhere.

You may be aware that privacy is all-too-rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The internet,

and Social Media in particular, have closed the distance between people, and it is now
increased proximity that is becoming a problem. The creation of the Web started with a bold

promise: that human beings would be connected everywhere, and that anyone-and-everyone

could now share all information and even experience instantly. Those big institutions of

power, always keeping their secrets and lies, would now have those secrets and lies shaken

out of them by daring hackers. Arise WikiLeaks and Bitcoin! The Military Industrial

Complex and Big Pharma could be interrogated now like never before. Computer owners of

the world unite: we have a new vision of Democracy, we can now all expose corruption and

safeguard human rights. But wait! Does not the Democratic process include everyone? Its

not just freedom-fighters and honest people who have computers: bigots, criminals, and

deviants of whatever description can use the internet, too, and even idealists may fall into bad

company.

This is the incredible story of a frog called Pepe, a god called Kek, and a man called Trump:

the sort of thing that could only happen on the internet, where whatever passes for truth is

certainly stranger than fiction where it may not be quite that Nothing is True, but certainly

Everything is Permitted.

The vaguely anthropomorphic Pepe the Frog started life in 2005 as the creation of cartoonist

Matt Furie in his web-comic, Boys Club, a deliberately lo-fi tribute to the twentysomething

slacker life of all-boys-together roommates (which should already flag up several warning

signs!) Recently published in a collected edition by the prestigious Fantagraphics imprint,

Boys Club was affectionately summed up on their website as:

... a series of comical vignettes combining laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment,

drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief ... a stoner classic for the Tumblr generation.

Amidst the adolescent, frat-house humour, one defining image was of Pepe, baseball cap

perched, back-to-front on head, as he grins over his shoulder at the reader, shorts pulled down
below his green froggy buns, urinating. When a housemate asks him why, Pepe replies,

simply, Feels good man. And so an unlikely catchphrase, and even unlikelier poster-boy,

for just doing-your-own-thing, not-giving-a-damn, political incorrectness was born ...

The real leap was when Pepes likeness started turning up on forums such as Twitter, Tumblr,

and MySpace, his laconic one-liners used as ironic comment on well, just about anything!

and then, in particular, 4chan. This last would turn out to be a particularly pernicious haven

for our unwitting amphibian anthropomorph, especially its /pol/ forum, proud to be the home

of political incorrectness. As online commentator (and author of Youre Imagining Things, a

user-friendly guide to navigating the new Virtual Reality of the Information Age), A.T.L.

Carver puts it:

/Pol/ is a place where the unspoken outsiders of Millennial culture gather en masse. Here

youll find the lonely and depressed, the socially inept, the generational dropouts, and all

shades of disenfranchised youth every one of them united with an unshakable underdog

mentality ...

Perhaps not surprisingly, /pol/ had also become an online home-from-home for those aspiring

to the so-called alt.right a loose group of people with Far-Right ideologies who reject

mainstream Conservatism in favour of White Nationalism. According to Wikipedia:

Alt-right beliefs have been described as isolationist, protectionist, antisemitic, and white

supremacist, frequently overlapping with Neo-Nazism, nativism and Islamophobia,

antifeminism and homophobia, right-wing populism, and the neoreactionary movement. The

concept has further been associated with multiple groups from American nationalists, neo-

monarchists, mens rights advocates, and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Thus, Pepe would make the transition from simple overgrown schoolboy style offensiveness,

to becoming the swastika-adorned mascot of this New Right.

Its the 2016 American Presidential Elections, and renowned Serbian Performance Artist

Marina Abramovi is in town. Shes planning a dinner in honour of the donors who helped

her with the Kickstarter campaign to get her Marina Abramovi Institute off the ground. Her

address book is a substantial one, and she has sent an email to Tony Podesta, brother of John

Podesta, Hilary Clintons campaign manager. Tony is a prominent lobbyist and major art

collector, and also a fan, having collected Abramovis work since the 1990s. He is in fact

one of Abramovis most generous supporters, having pledged a considerable sum to sponsor

a forthcoming long durational work. Tony emails John, saying that Marina would also like

him to come to her (Spirit-Cooking) dinner on Thursday, July 9th. Even though John never

sees the email, it soon goes viral. Why? Remember Pepe the Frog, has he something to

answer for?

Back in the 1990s, Abramovi staged a series of performances under the title Spirit Cooking.

These involved her painting with pigs blood on the walls. She also gave her audience the

benefit of some priceless ingredients of her spirit-recipes, such as: fresh breast milk mixed

with fresh sperm milk and as a special tip: with a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle

finger of your left hand and eat the pain. YouTube has video footage from 1997, showing

Abramovi doing the actual painting in pigs blood on the wall and then comes the

discovery of a photo from Vogue Ukraine of 2014, showing Abramovi holding a bloody

goats head, interpreted as a reference to the Knights Templars idol, Baphomet. The next

thing you know, Spirit Cooking is defined by the alt-right as an occult practice used during

sex cult rituals.


As Clinton and Trump are slogging it out, the mood is becoming feverish and ugly. There are

factions in the Trump camp who will do anything, anything at all to help cast aspersions on

Hilary Clinton, the first woman who might possibly become the first female President of the

US. Meanwhile, Pepe the Frog is making ready to show his hand, webbed fingers and all.

For the Trump camp, Marina Abramovi is a gift: John Podestas inbox is hacked, and its

Abramovis Spirit-Cooking dinner invitation that lights the touch paper. In Right-Wing

publications, John Podesta is branded a Satanist, engaging in blood rituals and cannibalism,

and by association Hilary Clinton and her circle are all Witches and Satanists, too. Says The

Drudge Report: WIKI WICCAN: PODESTA PRACTICES OCCULT MAGIC. And from

Infowars: SPIRIT COOKING: CLINTON CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN PRACTICES

BIZARRE OCCULT RITUAL.

In a later interview, a pained, but apparently even-tempered Abramovi responds to the

charges levelled at her, and the havoc theyve caused:

Anybody who wants can read my memoirs [adding that theyre available on Amazon, and

doing quite well!] and find out that [my work] is far away from Satanism ... My work is really

more about spirituality and not anything else.

Of the Right-Wing attacks, she said: Its absolutely outrageous and ridiculous. Tony

Podesta attended her dinner, which had a normal menu, but John couldnt make it. In fact,

she has never even met John Podesta. Though in good spirits, even laughing at one point, she

did say:

I mean, this world is really turning to hell ... I am completely amazed, something is taken

out of context for the purpose of winning.


Around the same time, something else was cooking on social media sites that was a small

enough deal by itself just one of those blink-and-you-miss-it internet trends but when it

made its way to 4chan, then /pol/, and collided with Pepe the Frog, a whole new meme,

greater than the sum of its parts, took on an eerie life of its own ...

Surely we all remember the acronym LOL, the online and text-speak abbreviation for

Laugh Out Loud? Well, sometime after 2010, due to a glitch in the popular online gaming

sensation, World of Warcraft, whereby LOL is replaced by the Korean game-coders version,

KEK, fans of the game started using KEK as a kind of ironic response in-joke, and as

significant numbers of them seemed to also hang out on 4chan and /pol/, KEK soon made

the (frog-like?) jump. Then the going got truly weird, when some anonymous user pointed

out to the 4chan faithful that Kek just happened to be the name of an Ancient Egyptian

Deity, and that his avatar, like many of the Gods of Egypt, was a humanoid figure with the

head of an animal: in this case, a frog.

According to pioneering Egyptologist and one-time Keeper of Antiquities at The British

Museum, E.A. Wallis Budge, in his The Gods of the Egyptians of 1904:

The cult of the frog is one of the oldest in Egypt, and the Frog-god and the Frog-goddess

were believed to have played very prominent parts in the creation of the world. According to

Horapollo, the frog typified an imperfectly formed man ... because it was generated from the

slime of the river ...

Budge also describes how Kek (also spelt Kuk, or Keku), and the snake-headed Keket or

Kauket, his female companion, represent the male and female powers of the darkness which

was supposed to cover over the primeval abyss of water.


Hey presto! The God of 4chan and /pol/ was Kek, and Pepe the Frog was his avatar! Thus a

new religion was born.

In his article What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right Deity Behind Their Meme Magic

David Neiwert explains:

Kek, in the alt-rights telling, is the deity of the semi-ironic religion the white nationalist

movement has created for itself online partly for amusement, as a way to troll liberals and

self-righteous conservatives both, and to make a kind of political point. He is a god of chaos

and darkness, with the head of a frog, the source of their memetic magic, to whom the alt-

right and Donald Trump owe their success, according to their own explanations.

There seems to be the opinion abroad that, just because we have electric light, a technology

that can take us to the moon, and the World Wide Web that can send video footage around the

globe at the click of a mouse, so they cant hide anywhere anymore, we are free from our

primitive selves, and the mentality of the cave-dweller. Not one to mince his words, Friedrich

Nietzsche said: You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm.

Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

We already know two salient things about the Kek-meme: it stems from an obscure Korean

language onomatopoeia. We also know that Kek turns out to have been an Ancient Egyptian

deity, and a frog-headed one, at that. Weird Tales writer H. P. Lovecraft would have liked the

supreme irony of it all, and what were about to suggest next might have given him

paroxysms of delight, for it brings us close to his Great Old Ones, those unspeakable alien

gods, whose loud croakings herald the emergence from Universe B of the Forces of Evil:
Tunnel 29 is under the influence of the moon and is the haunt of the witch typified by Hekt,

the frog-headed goddess and Lady of Transformation ... Hence the magical power

attributed ... is that of Casting Illusions and Bewitchments generally.

So wrote Occult scholar Kenneth Grant about Qulielfi, one of the denizens of the

unspeakable Qliphoth, who reside in the Tunnels at the backside of the Cabalistic Tree of

Life. The abode of frog-headed Qulielfi is that of leapers and jumpers, and those that traffic

with her learn to become as such themselves. Our much-vaunted technology finds it hard to

catch them, or even to see them.

The Cult of Kek is not an entirely unique development in American Counter-Culture. Since

the 1960s, the USA has had something of a tradition of parody religions. One of the earliest

was Discordianism, founded in 1963 by Hippy mischief-maker, Kerry Thornley, and his

childhood friend, Greg Hill. Put simply, Discordianism was based on the worship of Eris,

Greek goddess of Chaos, the argument being that surely She must be the ultimate power in

the Universe after all, just look around at how f*cked up everything is! Immortalised in the

three-volume underground cult-classic, Illuminatus! a combined tour-de-force of sci-fi

surrealism, psychedelic humour, paranoid politics, and over-the-top occult conspiracy

theories, co-written by Thornleys friend, Robert Anton Wilson, in collaboration with Bob

Shea on some level Discordianism can be thought of as a more female-centred, Hippy-

friendly precursor to Chaos Magic (which, after all, has always worn its Punk credentials

firmly on its studded black-leather sleeve, with a bit of a macho swagger, even to this day.)

In reaction to both the Hippies and the Punks, 1979 saw the birth of The Church of the

SubGenius, an altogether more knowing spoof on organised religion, based on imagery that

looks back both affectionately and ironically to the economic boom of the Post-War

Eisenhower prosperity years: think Mad Men re-written by PeeWee Herman, with a
soundtrack by Devo (whose frontman, Mark Mothersbaugh, is a longstanding member, as is

the comedian behind PeeWee, Paul Reubens.)

Latterly, The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and its accompanying faith,

Pastafarianism, originated in 2005, when Bobby Henderson, at the time a 24-year-old

Physics Graduate, wrote an Open Letter protesting the teaching of Creationism in Kansas.

Hendersons satire professed his belief that, whenever a scientist carbon-dates an object, a

supernatural creator closely resembling spaghetti-with-meatballs is there, changing the

results with His Noodly Appendage (eerily similar reasoning to that put forward by

Fundamentalists as to why carbon-dating and the Fossil Record dont disprove God.)

Henderson argued that his beliefs were just as valid, and called for equal time in Science

classrooms alongside Intelligent Design and Evolution. After the letter appeared online,

Flying Spaghetti Monster quickly became an internet phenomenon, achieving enormous

exposure and popularity, and became a mascot for many opposing the forced inclusion of

Fundamentalist Christian doctrine in public education.

Parody religions may have taken a slightly more sinister turn with Thee Temple ov Psychick

Youth, a Conceptual Art gag masquerading as a fan-club pretending to be a Cult, formed in

England back in the 1980s, by a collective of avant garde artists and experimental musicians

connected with the band Psychic TV. The Temple, or TOPY as it became known, played on

the image of an ascetic-austere cult with paramilitary trappings, dedicated to self-liberation

through Crowley-style Sex-Magick, Austin Osman Spares Theory of Sigils for bringing

about ones desires, and consciousness-alteration through Body Modification, at a time when

the newly emerging Neo-Tribalism of tattoos, scarification, and piercing was still in no-mans

land, legally speaking. The fate of TOPY should, perhaps, serve as something of a caution to

those who would seek to parody societys Control mechanisms and confront its taboos head-

on: in 1992, an American Fundamentalist Group, seeking to export their home-grown


Satanic Panic to the U.K., seized upon a video made by Psychic TV, claiming at last here

was actual proof of Ritual Abuse. It was broadcast on Channel 4s Despatches, made the

front pages, and even led to questions being asked in the House of Commons. What a pity the

research team hadnt done their homework a little more carefully: when the truth eventually

came to light, it turned out the video had been commissioned by Channel 4 in the first place,

and made in collaboration with director Derek Jarman, using money provided by the Arts

Council of Great Britain. But by then, the damage was done ... [Perhaps Marina Abramovi

should have thought twice before going public with videos of her art involving ritualistic

use of body fluids or at least before complaining that she had been so unfairly

misunderstood?]

In general, such faux movements have previously almost always been the creation of

anarcho-libertarians, or college-educated bohemian pranksters, and by-and-large appeal to the

same. With The Cult of Kek, perhaps for the first time we are seeing a parody religion that has

originated decidedly Right-of-Centre, and whose fan-base is, on the whole, from a lower

socio-economic stratum. Thats not to say there arent some brighter mischief-makers on the

alt-right scene: however much they may claim to be the voice of disenfranchised Ordinary

White Folk, it is hard to imagine many down-home, good ol boys having the kind of

familiarity with obscure Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths that would be needed to come up

with the Kek meme, yet alone the blend of Hinduism and Hitler-worship cooked up by

radical intellectual, Savitri Devi, that is referenced in Esoteric Kekism.

Just who is playing who here?

Emma Doeve & Matthew Levi Stevens, June 2017.

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