Scowcroft's Satanist: How to Spot Black Magic

On the late J.J. Brine, sex, and a meditation on evil

Cat Marnell and J.J. Brine

Let’s talk about magic. Did you know that Cardinal Avery Dulles won a PBK prize for an essay about Pico della Mirandola and the scholastic tradition in 1940? Pico was close to Savonarola, but after he died, the good friar implored people to pray for his soul, as it was experiencing purgation. In Pico there is the merging of esoteric traditions, neoplatonism, and Renaissance thought, ending up as, if you ask most normal Christian thinkers, a mess of sophistry. His Concordia was banned.

What this has to do with our times, and the stinking mire of mendacity and ignorance that passes for politics, I will show you.

The Christian perspective is that all magic is not to be trifled with. Stay away from all of it. However, even in pagan and Buddhist traditions there are important distinctions to be observed between types—it would be a mistake to think the pagan and the Buddhist do not believe in the concept of evil. Evil magic is black magic.

It’s not beyond the point I’m trying to make here to call the cult of the Vestal Virgins in Ancient Rome an example of what you might call pagan sex magic. It’s only recently that anyone has ever tried to divorce womanhood from the idea of fertility—most human beings throughout history have seen it as a fairly important part of being a woman. The concept of the Vestal cult is to set aside that reproductive potential as a sacrifice to the goddess of the hearth. Therefore, to take liberties with one was a capital offense, a sacrilege punishable by death, because it could invite disaster on the Roman state. The commonality of this and Tantric sex practices is that they all have something to do with restraint.

It’s another misconception that just because the Romans were pagans, they didn’t have a problem with witchcraft. In fact it was punishable by law. The idea that witches are harmless in the face of the Christian God and therefore one needn’t worry about them is an idea that comes from St. Augustine, who is one of the great doctors of the Church, but that doesn’t mean he was right about everything.

The black kind of sex magic is the kind that seeks to direct sexual energies for any purpose at all. This kind of sex magic takes human energy and gives it to something. The Christian perspective—and in fact the Buddhist one, too—is that you never know if you’re actually giving it to a demon. These acts exist on a spectrum on the other end of which is human sacrifice. In normal sexual intercourse, there is mutuality, you’re giving those energies to each other, and thus there is no danger. I’m not going to enter into the abortion wars here, except to say the trend of ritualizing abortion is a deeply disturbing one.

A basic presumption one must make when entering into a serious discussion about black magic is that neither Christian nor pagan nor Satanist believes it to be ineffectual. Even an institution like the Satanic Temple, conceived as a sort of advocacy-trolling organization not unlike the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, considers itself a sort of reformed version of the forthrightly and proudly evil kind of Satanism of Anton LaVey. One of the tenets of the Satanic Temple is that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.”

There is a bit of deception in this principle. On its face it seems liberatory. It’s a statement about “bodily autonomy.” A great deal of ritual magic, however, seeks to use a person’s body to channel various things. Freedom of this kind is the spiritual equivalent of the freedom to sell yourself into slavery. There is an element of consent in this, in that you have to give a demon permission to use you, but a great many people who have been caught up in these things would tell you after consenting to this kind of evil, it is very hard to revoke it.

The mixture of ritual magic—the tell is the sigils—with sex, as one sees with these O9A-linked cults, now being covered on both the right and the left, is one of the most evil kinds of things.

J.J. Brine was presented to the public as an artist, whose real name was Jonathan Friel. He died in 2021. He worked, early in his career, for Brent Scowcroft as a speechwriter, around the time Tim Naftali was running the Nixon Library. He went to graduate school in Beirut and interned at the American-Turkish Council. By all appearances, a promising start to a career.

He goes to New York in 2010 and becomes an artist. When I describe his “art” as satanic, I’m not applying a label he would not accept. He called his gallery “the official art gallery of Satan,” and himself the “Crown Prince of Hell.” Brine was involved with many of these Club Kids types, who were famously into drugs, including meth. He seems to have been fairly well connected, there’s a photo of him with John Waters.

If you watch this video tour of his studio, it’s fairly disturbing, he’s obsessed with Charles Manson. In 2015 he held a Satanic Mass, and under the guise of art restaged the Manson trial with the man believed to be Manson’s son. That year he got a Wall Street Journal feature. In 2018 he was feted for cursing Kim Davis.

It is interesting to consider Brine’s friendship with Amanda Bynes, which began around the time of her unraveling, in light of recent revelations about the rampant abuse at Nickelodeon studios. This sort of “do what thou wilt” antics seem like they would work fairly well for making someone who was close to all this look crazy.

I’m fascinated by this interview he does with Dave Navarro of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in which Brine asks about Manson, Navarro gives some frankly embarrassing and wicked answers, but Brine keeps the camera focused on the girl who’s with him. At the risk of overdoing the description here, perhaps the point is that she’s casting these flirty looks at him while they engage in a disquisition about the star power of a cult leader.

Brine was gay, but this, I think, is about the women. If you ask me, if there is a feminism worth defending it’s the kind that stands up even to a famous rock star who suggests there is any lesson worth learning from Charles Manson. It’s nauseating to watch this girl bite her bottom lip while Navarro says, about a cult that cut a baby out of a woman’s womb, “crazy used to mean something.”

The woman Brine worked with for many of his projects is a very sinister Russian erotic artist by the name of Lena Marquise. I don’t think it’s a stretch to call her a Russian witch. The main stunt for which she is famous, covered in Buzzfeed by Ryan Broderick of course, is called “Body as Commodity, in which, at Art Basel Miami, she placed a phone charger in her vagina and Usher paid $20 to charge his phone from it.

Pornography is fairly straightforward. This is more sinister than that. There is another of Brine and Marquise’s performances, a sort of burlesque thing that ends with an American flag being stuck inside her. Some of Marquise’s other creations are similar to this—ostensibly commentaries about objectification that are unmistakably also examples of it. Some of her others are explicitly called “rituals.”

These purported lessons about commodification and objectification, and their double-sided quality, also apply to the aesthetics of protest. A magician would tell you marching around with your genitals on your head saying “stop objectifying us!” is going to backfire.

One thing you see in both Brine and Marquise are these dualities that are something you see often in the esoteric traditions—neoplatonism, Freemasonry, these sorts of things.

In 2016 Brine is reported to be coming back to DC, and was covered in the City Paper, though I can’t find any coverage showing that it actually opened, and around this time he seems to have participated in a Troma production called Hectic Knife. It’s fairly clear to me that there is simply no there there when it comes to his art—the City Paper writer is far too sympathetic—but there are a number of strange claims in it. She correctly points out that they’re using the symbol of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. The timelines in here are all a little unclear, as far as I can tell we don’t know when exactly he worked for Scowcroft, but it says he was in Lebanon from 2007-2009. This whole section raises a whole lot of questions:

Vector’s self-proclaimed status as a sovereign state which has “seceded” from the U.S., then, is a real political proposition. When I ask him about Syria, I even sense a hint of uncharacteristic outrage. “Thank you, Russia. Thank you for intervening on our behalf.”

One time, he was kidnapped by Shi’a Islamist militant group Hezbollah, when his ex took a photo of him in a Shia mosque in Dahiye in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Security reacted by inspecting the photos on their camera and keyed in on one in particular. Security then confiscated their possessions, they were hooded, driven in circles, marched up a flight of stairs, and threatened by the sound of guns loading, begging for their lives. “After about seven hours of many questions and answers, they got the reaction they were looking for,” he says, and they were dropped off on the outskirts of Dahieh. The incriminating photo was a can with Hebrew writing on it, which JJ had picked up earlier that day at Hezbollah’s open-air exhibit in tribute to its “victory” over Israel in the previous year’s 33-day Summer War.

It’s insane that in some parts of the world you can get your brains blown out over a can, and I think about the incident alongside some of Vector’s more nonsensical performances, which tie pointed political statements to apparently random objects. Nobody really understood what the vagina cell phone charging station (performed by Vector’s Minister of State Lena Marquise) at Art Basel in 2014 was about, but JJ gave TMZ a succinct explanation. “We’re charging the Syrian regime. This is all really about advancing the interests of Syria.”

This is all just very strange. Is this, like, a Russian thing? There’s also a similar campiness to all this that seems of a piece with some of the weirder MAGA stuff, the “Twinks for Trump” event, or Milo Yiannopoulos. There are a lot of unanswered questions here. It seems fairly clear that Brine was not very well accepted in the art world, but that actually seems like it’s probably to the art world’s credit. He’s not an artist, he’s a practitioner of black magic.