This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available…
The Kek Wars, Part Four: What Moves In The Darkness
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how a band of outsiders linked by the network of online forums loosely called “the chans,” and armed with the tools of chaos magic, found themselves in the midst of a cascade of meaningful coincidences and strange happenings, more or less clustered around Pepe…
The Kek Wars, Part Three: Triumph of the Frog God
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how thousands of disaffected young people who’d been shut out of our society’s circles of privilege and denied the ordinary routes to adult independence turned to magic, for the same reasons that their equivalents have always turned to magic. As we discussed in the…
The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses…
The Kek Wars, Part One: Aristocracy and its Discontents
Every month or so since the 2016 presidential election campaign hit high tide, somebody has asked me to say something about the weirdest and most interesting aspect of that campaign: the role played in it by a diffuse constellation of right-wing occultists who united for a brief time under the banner of a cartoon frog.…
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Forces of (Negative) Evil
This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available…
The Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Left, and the Esc-Center
When I predicted back in January of 2016 that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, I suggested that his candidacy would mark a sea change in American politics and public life. That’s turned out to be even more true than I’d expected. It’s not just that Trump’s presidency challenges the…
June 2018 Open Post
As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month (well, more or less!) to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill…
An Astrological Interlude: Cancer Ingress 2018
Three months ago, we marked the beginning of the astrological year by discussing the Aries ingress chart for the United States. Those of you who weren’t part of that conversation may want to know that an Aries ingress chart is one of the basic tools of mundane astrology, the branch of traditional astrology that tracks…
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Dawn of Manifestation
With this post we begin a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s going to be a wild ride. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available editions of The Cosmic…