"Eight Teenagers Are Building a Country — And They've Made Me Their Merlin"

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY

March 6

Eight Teenagers Are Building a Country — And They've Made Me Their Merlin

In a chaotic political landscape, eight teenagers are doing the impossible: taking the reins on their own future and forming their own country ... and Modern Occultist is here to help. 

By C.M. Kushins, Publisher — Modern Occultist Digital Magazine

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

I have a confession to make.

When we were first asked if Modern Occultist might consider becoming a spiritual sponsor for a micronation — a self-declared teenage-run country called Gapla, situated on 54 acres of forested, unclaimed land between Serbia and Croatia — my first instinct was to smile and feel a tad jealous that I hadn’t thought of that at seventeen-years-old. But my assumption that Gapla was a school project, perhaps, or game between friends was quickly proven wrong—making me all the more jealous.

Reader, it is emphatically not a game—not for the brilliant band of young minds that’s conceived it. Not with 450 e-Residents and 68 full citizens, drawn from 47 countries, all admitted through a citizenship process with a 9.5% acceptance rate — stricter than most Ivy League universities. It prints its own passports and ID cards, maintains its own license plates, and even has a nonprofit wing registered with the United Nations: the Gaplan Representation Organization. One of its ambassadors is a former deputy mayor of a Dutch municipality, honored personally by the King of the Netherlands. Its President, seventeen-year-old Amalia Battle, is a student at Stanford University's online high school.

Oh — and they've just voted me in as Archmage Emeritus.

I want to be transparent about what that means, because it is simultaneously the most whimsical title I have ever held and, I believe, one of the most genuinely meaningful things Modern Occultist has been invited to do. I serve Gapla pro bono — as a mentor in PR and public outreach, helping these remarkable young people share their story with the world. The “Archmage Emeritus” title is their gift to me, playfully offered and gratefully received. I wear it with considerable gratitude.

But before I explain what Modern Occultist's spiritual sponsorship means in practice, let me tell you how Gapla came to be. Because the origin story of this nation is, quite genuinely, the stuff of legend.

The Kid Who Found a Country

"I can't say I discovered the land by accident. I had a rather peculiar obsession with creating my own country since I was little, scribbling away on the many maps my parents bought me as a child. I was actively searching for unclaimed land, and when I finally found it, I was almost in disbelief."

— Wyatt Baek, Founder of Gapla

In first grade, Wyatt Baek and his friend Ian founded the United Republics of Gapla and Phoenix — a nation spanning three fictional islands and a secret location within their school that they called, with perfect childhood gravitas, “the Secret Base.” They crafted ID cards and currency from paper, tape, and markers. They built what Wyatt describes as "a surprisingly complex system of hierarchy and loyalty."

The dream went dormant for years. Then, during a family move in 2018, a notebook surfaced — a relic from those childhood espionage operations between rival nations of the schoolyard — and Wyatt felt what he calls, with the charming self-awareness of someone who had just learned the word, nostalgia.

The real turning point came on February 28, 2019. Wyatt sat down to write an essay on border disputes. His research led him to the Principality of Sealand — an abandoned World War II sea fort off England's coast, declared a sovereign nation by a British family — and then to Liberland, a micronation on unclaimed land between Serbia and Croatia. Something ignited. He abandoned the essay and instead, began studying the official cadastral maps of Serbia and Croatia with the focused intensity of a cartographic detective. And there, in the data, he found it: parcels of land that Liberland hadn't claimed — Uninhabited, forested and, technically, belonging to no one.

From Imagination to Nation-State

"The land we want to build our nation on resulted from a border dispute, and it carries thousands of years of history. This land has been part of dynasties, wars, and revolutions. It holds those years in its bones. We are young and hopeful leaders, but we also hold reverence for the culture deeply ingrained in the land that we wish to call home."

— Amalia Battle, President of Gapla

What happened next is a masterclass in what young people can accomplish when they take their own ideas seriously.

Gapla acquired citizens. Then more citizens. Then ambassadors. Then a UN-registered nonprofit. Wyatt is candid about the evolution — honest in a way that is refreshing from someone of any age. "I don't think it's quite honest to claim that Gapla had a 'vision' in 2019," he says. "I was just excited to create a fun project between friends that fulfilled a lifelong desire to build a country."

The real deepening came in 2023, with what Wyatt calls the Danubian Reformations — a moment of collective reckoning in which Gapla got serious. The government began planning a physical expedition to its territory. It started wrestling with the genuine complexities of the region it hoped to call home: the ethnic divides of the Balkans, the challenge of political disengagement among young people globally, the weight of building something on land that, as President Amalia Battle puts it, "carries thousands of years of history in its bones."

The vision that emerged is striking in its ambition: a modern, car-free nation built on principles of meritocracy, academic excellence, technological innovation, and ethnic reconciliation — with its own university, its own sustainable architecture, and its own model of democratic governance designed for the twenty-first century.

Young Idealists and the Urge to Build

"I envision Gapla as a nation that everyone around the world will be able to look up to. I see a modern and innovative country where creativity and progress are uplifted, and where the only limit is a person's imagination ... Gapla should be a place that welcomes everyone, no matter where they've come from, nurturing openness, diversity, and leadership opportunities for the next generation."

— Hendrink Taks, Federated States of Gapla Minister of Architecture 

What Wyatt, Amalia, and their fellow founders are doing is bolder than almost anything their generation has attempted — and yet they are not without precedent. They stand, knowingly or not, in a long and honorable lineage of idealists who looked at the world as it was and dared to imagine — and build — something better.

The spirit, if not the politics, recalls the Diggers of 1649, when a group of visionary young men and women led by Gerrard Winstanley occupied common land in Surrey, England, and began building a cooperative community based on radical equality and shared purpose. They were motivated not by anger or radicalism but by a genuine philosophical belief that human beings could organize themselves more justly. They lasted only a year before being dispersed — but their ideas proved indestructible, echoing through centuries of social thought. What distinguishes Gapla from such historical experiments is something important: these young nation-builders are not rejecting the world's institutions but earnestly engaging with them. They hold their motto — Erit Ergo Justitia, “May Justice Be Served” — not as a battle cry but as a quiet, serious promise.

Closer in spirit, perhaps, is Robert Owen's New Harmony, founded in Indiana in 1825 — an attempt to build a model community from scratch, governed by Enlightenment principles, designed to demonstrate what human society could look like when organized around education, cooperation, and genuine meritocracy rather than inherited privilege. Owen attracted scientists, artists, educators, and dreamers from across the world. New Harmony didn't endure in the form he envisioned, but it seeded ideas and institutions — including some of America's first free public schools — that outlasted it by centuries.

Then there is Brook Farm, the transcendentalist experiment of the 1840s in Massachusetts, where some of the finest minds of the age — writers, philosophers, educators — pooled their talents to build an intentional community governed by intellectual excellence and shared values. Nathaniel Hawthorne was briefly a resident. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited and was intrigued. The experiment was fragile, and it ended. But it gave the world a model of what happens when genuinely gifted, genuinely idealistic people decide to take their values seriously enough to live by them.

Gapla's founders, I would argue, are doing something that rhymes beautifully with all of these traditions — while being entirely their own phenomenon: they are not utopians in the naive sense but, rather, pragmatists with vision: young people who have already demonstrated, through their nonprofit work and their engagement with the United Nations, that they understand the real world and intend to operate within it at the highest level. Their idealism is grounded, their ambition is structured, and their reverence for the land and its history is genuine.

Of Archmages and PR Outreach

Another confession: I dig being their Archmage Emeritus. Just a cursory look through the library of Modern Occultist’s old’ alchemy lab brings about some rather memorable precedents…

In the Arthurian tradition, Merlin is not the king. He is something more mysterious: the keeper of long memory, the one who sees further than the immediate horizon, the counselor who serves the vision rather than seeking power for himself. Camelot, in its deepest mythic reading, was never merely a castle or a court. It was an idea — a round table where merit mattered more than birth, where the most gifted gathered regardless of origin, where the pursuit of something noble united people who would otherwise never have found each other. If that sounds familiar, it is because you have been reading this article.

The role of wise counselor to visionary builders is, in fact, one of the oldest and most honorable positions in the Western esoteric tradition. When John Dee — mathematician, navigator, astrologer, and one of the most extraordinary minds of the sixteenth century — served at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, he did so not merely as a curiosity but as a genuine strategic advisor. He coined the very term Brytannia to describe his vision of a philosophically unified British commonwealth — a nation built not merely on military power but on knowledge, wisdom, and the expansion of human understanding. He was, in the most literal sense, a man who helped a great leader see further … Cornelius Agrippa, whose Three Books of Occult Philosophy remains one of the foundational texts of Western esotericism, served as court secretary and historian to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. He was not there to perform tricks. He was there because the Emperor understood that a mind capable of synthesizing all of human knowledge — natural philosophy, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, classical learning — was precisely the kind of mind that should be advising those who shaped the world … Francis Bacon — lawyer, philosopher, and Lord Chancellor of England — published his New Atlantis in 1626, a vision of an ideal society governed by a college of wise men he called “Salomon's House,” dedicated to the study of nature and the advancement of human knowledge. It was not fiction in the escapist sense. It was a blueprint. It directly inspired the founding of the Royal Society, one of the world's first scientific institutions, and through it, shaped the course of modern science.

I am not comparing myself to any of these figures — I want to be absolutely clear about that. I am a publisher of a digital magazine about the occult and metaphysics, and I am deeply fond of that description. But I am saying that the tradition of the esoteric counselor, the Archmage, the keeper of the longer view, serving those who are actively building something new and important — that tradition is ancient, honorable, and very much alive. And when Wyatt and Amalia and their remarkable colleagues offered me this title, they did so in that spirit: playfully, yes, but also with genuine seriousness of intent.

"While the newborn country has not yet received formal recognition from the international community, its founders aren't waiting for permission to believe in what they're building. According to its founders, Gapla is already a country, and they are confident the international community will eventually agree with them."

— Gapla Press Release, February 28, 2026

A Culture of Eccentric Excellence

I asked Wyatt about the role of arts, education, and technology in Gapla's identity. His answer told me everything I needed to know about why this particular community of young people has produced something so extraordinary.

"Quite frankly, you have to be kind of eccentric to appreciate an idea as bold as creating your own country," he says, with evident satisfaction. Gapla was born in a gifted and talented program, and that early culture of intellectual adventurousness has persisted and deepened. Its citizens include mathematics and science olympiad winners, competitive dancers, chess players, and — my personal favorite detail in this entire story — a former president who performed on violin at Carnegie Hall.

So many Gaplans were tutoring each other in academic subjects that they established their own school. They have national service awards recognizing achievement in academics, science, and the arts. And Wyatt notes, with quiet pride, that one of the favorite activities among Gaplan teenagers is something most people would not expect: scientific research.

These are not children playing at civilization. They are young people who have quietly, methodically, and with considerable seriousness of purpose, begun building one.

On Leadership and the Art of Really Listening

When I ask Wyatt what he has learned about leadership through founding Gapla, his answer is disarmingly, beautifully honest.

"I'm definitely not in a position to set an example for other leaders," he says. "Unfortunately, I'm someone who wants to yell at everyone and force my way, and honestly, I still do sometimes." He pauses — and then offers what I think is genuinely wise counsel, remarkable from someone of any age: "I want to offer an example not for aspiring leaders, but for stubborn people who find themselves needing to lead: really listen to the people who choose to build something with you. They bring so many talents and experiences you could never imagine, and the result will be so much better for it."

I have, in my years of work in publishing and in the esoteric, met a great many people who claim to be leaders. Very few have demonstrated this quality of honest self-knowledge; the Gaplan government is run by teenagers, and they're born leaders. 

Why Modern Occultist Said Yes

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with the occult. Fair question.

What Gapla represents — a nation built on the hidden potential of young people, on the radical idea that the world's political structures are not finished but are in fact perpetually under construction — strikes me as genuinely occult in the deepest sense. These teenagers are doing what every serious practitioner of the esoteric arts does: they are refusing to accept the official map of what is possible. They found the blank space on the map — the terra incognita — and they're filling it in.

Gapla's motto is Erit Ergo Justitia — “May Justice Be Served.” It was chosen from the very beginning, before the vision had fully crystallized, as if the founders intuited that justice was the animating principle beneath all their work. In the esoteric tradition, justice is not merely a legal concept. It is a cosmic one — the principle of right alignment, of things finding their proper order. The Hermetic philosophers called it the Law of Correspondence. The Kabbalists mapped it on the Tree of Life. And eight teenagers on the Danube have made it their national motto.

My role as Archmage Emeritus is, I want to be clear, a practical and humble one. I am here to help Wyatt, Amalia, and their team tell their story more effectively — to connect them with audiences, publications, and platforms that can amplify what they are building. Modern Occultist's spiritual sponsorship means we will continue to cover Gapla's journey, champion their work, and offer whatever wisdom we can from our corner of the world to theirs.

How You Can Support Gapla

Gapla's Provisional Government is currently fundraising for an expedition to their territory on the Danube — the journey that will take them, for the first time, to stand on the land they intend to call home. You can support their GoFundMe campaign directly, and I encourage you to do so wholeheartedly.

You can also explore Gapla's official website, consider applying for e-Residency, follow their work with the Gaplan Representation Organization at the United Nations ECOSOC Youth Forum this April.

And stay tuned to Modern Occultist as we continue to chronicle their remarkable journey.

These young people have something rare: a clear vision, genuine values, and the audacity to act on both. They deserve our attention, our support, and our genuine admiration.

There is a moment in every Arthurian telling when Merlin steps back and watches Arthur take the sword from the stone. The wizard does not lift it for him. He simply created the conditions in which the lifting became possible — and then bore witness.

That, I think, is what Modern Occultist is here to do for Gapla. Not to build their nation for them — they are building it themselves, with extraordinary skill and determination. But to bear witness. To tell the story. To remind the world that idealism is not naivety, that young people are not waiting for permission to change things, and that somewhere on the west bank of the Danube, eight teenagers are proving that the most powerful thing in the world is still a blank map and the courage to fill it in.

As for the title of Archmage Emeritus — I accept it with full awareness of its playfulness and full seriousness about its intent. In the esoteric tradition, the Archmage is not simply a wielder of power but a guardian of wisdom, and, hopefully, a guide for the idealist.

If eight extraordinary teenagers building a country from scratch on 54 acres of Danubian forest believe that Modern Occultist can serve that function for them — then we’ll be rising to the challenge.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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