Month: April 2025

A Case Study in Stimulus Diffusion

John Michael Greer240 Comments

From an outsider’s perspective, the sibling rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a fascinating slice of religious and cultural history. Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences, especially when compared to religions elsewhere in the world. Both developed in the eastern penumbra…

April 2025 Open Post

John Michael Greer392 Comments

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)…

Lords of the Fall

John Michael Greer366 Comments

It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a…

A Vision: Preliminaries

John Michael Greer137 Comments

In the autumn of 1917 William Butler Yeats was at a turning point in his life and his two careers, the public one and the other, secret one. In his public career as an author, he had clawed his way up from among the crowd of writers whose work kept the British publishing industry of…

Parsifal: The Solution Assessed

John Michael Greer226 Comments

As we saw two weeks ago, Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal makes use of most of the same symbols as The Ring of the Nibelung, and thus provides a mordant commentary to the theme of that vast and sprawling work. The magic treasure, the magic spear, the antagonist who wins power by a terrible renunciation…