Florida Senate candidate Augustus Sol Invictus has admitted to two acts that you don’t normally hear about from politicians: sacrificing a goat, and then drinking its blood in a pagan ritual. Why? Well, the Libertarian Party’s candidate is also a devout follower of Thelema, and the sacrifice and blood ritual were intended to give thanks for a week of fasting and prayer Invictus had just spent in the Mojave Desert.
Augustus Sol Invictus–he changed his given name to the current Latin phrase, which means “Majestic Unconquered Sun”–is a 32-year-old attorney from Orlando. His campaign biography says Invictus is a “community leader,” as well as a “radical philosopher and infamous social critic.” Adrian Wyllie, the former chairman of the Florida Libertarian Party, resigned when Invictus received the party’s nomination for the Senate seat, calling Invictus “the absolute exact opposite of a Libertarian.” And Invictus himself is open about his desire for “total insurrection.”
In a recent Orlando Sentinel interview, Wyllie was blunt on the topic of Augustus Sol Invictus. “He’s a self-proclaimed fascist,” Wylie said. “He’s promoting a second civil war….It’s absolute insanity. We must explain to people this is the opposite of Libertarians. This guy has no place in the Libertarian Party.”
Invictus himself says that many of the claims about his pagan ways are overblown, and that Wyllie is running a “smear campaign” against him. He acknowledges that the goat story is true: “I did sacrifice a goat,” he told the Sentinel. “I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans. I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness….Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”
(Worth pointing out: Immediately following publication of the Sentinal interview, the hashtag #goatquibble began trending on Twitter.)
Invictus has also drawn attention from the FBI for his outspoken anti-government ways. For example, the eighth in Invictus’ series of Fireside Chats, “On The Insurgent Generation,” contains bold statements like “To be an American is to crave danger….The little children we once were would shudder at how weak we have become,” and “Let us return to the Old World, where everyone is happy to throw away empires and abandon both past and future.”
Invictus acknowledges that, as a Libertarian, his is a long-shot campaign: Wyllie was the most popular candidate in the Florida party’s history, and still received only 3.8 percent of the vote in the 2014 gubernatorial election. For Invictus, his is a candidacy of ideas: “If not elected, I still think there is a purpose for all of this and that is to get a message out there, waking [citizens] up. They are the ones that control the government and not the other way around.”
Reports that Invictus’ campaign had promised “the best barbecues in the state” could not be confirmed.
(Photo credits: Augustus Sol Invictus via campaign website; Goat via Flickr)
