Yes, I know we had a presidential election here in the US yesterday. The remarkable thing about it, after a campaign season so packed with improbabilities and absurdities, is that it was a normal election, with no more than the usual amount of vote fraud and a winner declared by sunrise. While everyone recovers from…
The Man with the Moustache
One of the lasting traditions on this blog is that whenever a month has five Wednesdays in it, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject for the fifth Wednesday’s post. For the last several years now, one of the perennial runners-up has been a straightforward question: why is it that Adolf Hitler…
October 2024 Open Post
This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered)…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold 2
In the last post in this sequence, two weeks ago, we watched Alberich steal the magic gold from the bottom of the Rhine. This reenacted in symbolic form the process by which our Western civilization, like every other civilization in recorded history, abandoned the traditional human relationship with nature as a community of persons and…
The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 17
With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold I
In this and the posts to come I’m going to be presenting a social, political, and economic interpretation of what’s going on in the operas composing Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. Now of course the usual reaction to such interpretations is to back away from the crazy person as quickly as possible, and…
September 2024 Open Post
This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered)…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Later Philosophy
At the end of the last thrilling episode of our journey through the tangled wilderness of The Nibelung’s Ring, Richard Wagner, fleeing from the kingdom of Saxony with a price on his head, had just reached safety in Switzerland. There he would remain, scraping by on the money he could make from writing and trying…
The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 16
With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend…
The Nibelung’s Ring: The Early Philosophy
One of the constant themes of middle class thought in modern times is the insistence that it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too. It’s for this reason that middle class activists demand world peace while also demanding lifestyles that can only be maintained at the cost of constant war, and middle class…