Search Results for: dion fortune

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…

Carl Jung, Occultist

John Michael Greer180 Comments

A longstanding tradition on this blog has it that whenever a month has five Wednesdays, the readers get to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever proposal fields the largest number of votes becomes the topic for that post. This time, the winning theme was the archetypal teachings of Carl Jung, the famous…

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 16

John Michael Greer154 Comments

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 Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 14

John Michael Greer131 Comments

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…

June 2024 Open Post

John Michael Greer469 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)…

A Path that Abides

John Michael Greer274 Comments

We could talk about a great many things right now.  Despite all the efforts of the political classes in the United States and its inner circle of allies, the world is shaking off the enforced stasis of the last few decades and moving toward an era of tumultuous realignment.  The remarkable success of populist parties…

A Primer of Magical Combat

John Michael Greer259 Comments

I’ve mentioned in previous essays here that our civilization’s age of reason is ending. That’s a familiar event in history.  At a certain point in the life cycle of every civilization—about the time that its artistic traditions are really hitting their stride, and before political and economic centralization sets in—intellectuals become entranced with the idea…

The Law of Consequences

John Michael Greer325 Comments

It’s a longstanding custom on this blog that whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, the readers get to vote on what they want me to write about for the fifth Wednesday.  Far more often than not the resulting contest is a lively one, and this month’s was no exception. By a significant plurality,…

The Nature of Enchantment

John Michael Greer319 Comments

Back in the autumn of 2020, as the Covid virus and the US presidential election monopolized headlines across the corporate media, I made a post here talking about Max Weber’s famous claim that “the disenchantment of the world” was among the core features of modernity, and the then-recent challenge leveled against that claim by Jason…

The Castle of Heroes

John Michael Greer223 Comments

I really wonder sometimes how many people nowadays realize just how drastically the great occult revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has been scrubbed from the officially approved histories of our time. It’s hard to discuss the matter without bringing in words like “censorship.”  Whole chapters of the cultural history of the…