The Origin Story: The Fifth Dalai Lama

The idea of war magic — it wasn’t so much the esoteric practices and spells which the Fifth Dalai Lama, who was a great realised practitioner but also a good military leader, employed. The claim wasn’t that it was the spells themselves, but that the word got out that he was doing this. And this really disturbed the Karmapas, who were the other sect — we still have a Karmapa — but these battles were won because the word got out. That really fascinated me: war magic as propaganda.

Source: Magic as Propaganda Disguised in Disinfolklore

The Fifth Dalai Lama (c.1560) defeated the rival Karmapa sect with the help of Mongols and ruled Tibet thereafter. The researcher George FitzHerbert showed that it was the Dalai Lama’s conscious use of publicity surrounding his esoteric practices — not the spells themselves — that constituted the first form of War Magic. When the Karmapas heard of the spells being cast against them, they lost faith in their own power. The word getting out was the weapon. This discovery anchored the entire “War Magic” concept in historical precedent and connected it to modern propaganda.

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