By the late 1930s William Butler Yeats was an old man. He celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1935; his health, never robust, became increasingly fragile as the 1930s wore on. Gone were the days when he went on lecture tours across the English-speaking world, sleeping on trains to save expenses while giving one lecture or poetry reading after another for weeks on end. The rain and snow that sweep in from the North Atlantic and make Irish winters so bitter were more than his failing health could handle, and since he was no longer a poor man, he had alternatives. That was what brought him to Rapallo.
You can find Rapallo on a map in the northwestern part of Italy, on the shores of the Mediterranean, due north of the island of Corsica. Now as in Yeats’s time, it’s not a big resort town, but attractive scenery, a mellow climate, and modest expenses compared to more popular venues have made it a magnet for intellectuals and creative artists since the 19th century. Among its habitués were composer Jean Sibelius, painter (and occultist) Wassily Kandinsky, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote his magnum opus Thus Spake Zarathustra while staying there. In the 1930s it was also the home of American poet and general intellectual gadfly Ezra Pound, long one of Yeats’s close friends.
That made it entirely in character for Yeats to begin the second edition of A Vision with an atmospheric introduction about Rapallo, and to go on from there to a summary of the origin story of A Vision and a little letter to Pound. He published it as a short book in 1929, eight years before the new edition saw print. It’s a lovely atmospheric piece—and if you’re left thinking that this is all there is to it, Yeats has suckered you.
Let me pass on one simple trick that old-fashioned occultists know by heart but literary critics have apparently never noticed: it’s important to pay attention to the number of sections, chapters, or volumes in any work written by an occultist from Eliphas Lévi onward. Lévi famously divided each of the two volumes of his pathbreaking occult textbook Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic) into 22 chapters, corresponding to the 22 trump cards of the tarot deck. Lots of people after his time picked up the same habit, and not all of them were explicit about it. Quite the contrary, it became a wink-and-nod by which occult writers clued in those who knew enough to pay attention.
Thus J.-K. Huysmans divided his brilliant novel of fashionable Parisian Satanism, La-Bàs, into 22 chapters. If you know the meanings of the tarot trumps, furthermore, you’ll see the figure on each card appear in the chapter of the same number: a magician in the first chapter, a high priestess in the second, and so on through the sequence. Joséphin Péladan did the same thing, though on a typically more grandiose scale, by writing 22 novels, each of which focuses, you guessed it, on a character who corresponds exactly to the main figure on the corresponding tarot trump. There are other examples, and I’ve yet to see a literary critic mention any of them.
Now take a moment to count the sections of the three parts of “A Packet for Ezra Pound.” I’ll count them with you: five sections in “Rapallo,” fifteen sections in “Introduction to ‘A Vision’,” and two sections in “To Ezra Pound.” Ahem. Yes, Yeats just winked at you.
What makes this even more interesting that it would otherwise be is that there were two different standard orders for the 22 trumps in the occult community of Yeats’s time. There was the order that Lévi used, which began with the Magician and put the Fool between the last two cards, Judgment and the World. Then there was the order used by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its successor groups, which moved the Fool to the head of the line.
You might expect that Yeats would have used the Golden Dawn sequence in this essay, but he didn’t; the Golden Dawn sequence was still mostly secret in his time, though Aleister Crowley had splashed it around his writings by then, and Yeats would have considered himself bound by his initiatory oaths not to reveal it. The first section of “Rapallo” accordingly begins with a lightly disguised evocation of the four elements, the central theme of Trump I, the Magician, in Lévi’s book and the older occult tarot generally; the second focuses on the duality and complementarity between Yeats and Pound, corresponding to Trump II, the High Priestess; the sequence goes straight on from there, making more or less obvious references to each card in order, until it winds up with the Fool and the World in “To Ezra Pound.”
What makes all this especially charming is that none of it is forced or obtrusive. Here as elsewhere in our text, Yeats is at the peak of his powers as a prose stylist and essayist. Thus it’s entirely possible to read “A Packet for Ezra Pound” as nothing more than a lengthy introduction to A Vision, and enjoy it on those terms. For those who were attentive to occult symbolism, though, it had a twofold message. The first and more obvious part of that message was simply a heads-up to the reader to expect occultism, and plenty of it, in the pages to come. The second and less obvious part was a warning that not all the occult content would be obvious. Keep both these in mind and you’ll get more out of the journey ahead.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at this lengthy introduction with its occult substructure, and see what else we can extract from it. The first thing to look for is the pervasive presence of binary oppositions all through these 22 sections. A Vision, as later posts in this sequence will discuss at length, is structured throughout by the relationship between two pairs of contraries: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate.
The Will is exactly what the word implies, the active, desiring, motivating part of whatever being is under discussion, whether this is an individual, a social or political movement, an age of history, or anything else. What it seeks is the Mask, which is always the opposite of the Will, the sum total of those things absent from the Will that would make the Will complete. The Creative Mind is the perceptive part of the being under discussion, its intellect and understanding; what it perceives is its Body of Fate, the world of circumstances that surround it, and this latter is the opposite and complement of the Creative Mind, the sum total of those things not part of the Creative Mind that the Creative Mind strives to know. The Will seeks to embrace its Mask, the Creative Mind seeks to understand its Body of Fate, and each of these is a quest for its own opposite, the attempt by a light to unite with its own shadow.
Thus it’s not by chance that Yeats starts out the second section of “Rapallo” with the creative opposition between his poetry and criticism and that of his good friend and poetic rival Ezra Pound. Yeats does not exaggerate the difference; it’s hard to think off hand of two early twentieth century poets writing in English whose work is more sharply opposed than Pound and Yeats. The two belonged to different generations—Yeats was born in 1865, Pound in 1885—and their divergent poetic visions are partly a function of their different positions in the slow unraveling of the English-language poetic tradition that reached its nadir with Allen Ginsberg and his ilk.
Yet there’s more to it than that, of course. Yeats was Irish; he was born in a suburb of crowded Dublin but moved to rural Sligo in infancy, and his father was a successful painter who kept in touch with most of the cultural movements of the day. Pound was American; he was born in a tiny settlement in the mountains of Idaho when that was still a territory rather than a state, but moved to New York City in infancy, and his father worked in lumber mills and gold assay offices. Yeats was an occultist, while Pound rolled his eyes at occultism. The fact that the two men occupied opposite ends of the literary spectrum of their day amplified the opposition in their biographies, and their friendship thus made a fine metaphor for the mutual conflict and compensation of Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate.
Everything else Yeats mentions in “Rapallo” similarly echoes some aspect of the book to come. The intricate structure of Pound’s Cantos, outlined in section II, hints at the complexities of the 28 phases of the Moon that provide the basic structure of A Vision. So do the quarrelsome and varied cats that Pound feeds in section III, and there’s another contrariety: does Pound like the cats, or not? Notice a second opposition in this same section, between Pound and Yeats’s unnamed friend—this is Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the great pillars of the Irish literary revival and a major influence on Yeats; she was still alive when “A Packet for Ezra Pound” was published in 1929, though she died before the second edition of A Vision saw print.
Note also the wry political satire in section III, which will be repeated in “To Ezra Pound.” By the time Yeats wrote this, his uncritical admiration for the nationalist revolutionaries he knew in his youth had been tempered by decades of bitter experience. He had seen Ireland win its independence in a brutal revolutionary conflict and then plunge straight into civil war. His two terms in the Senate of the Irish Free State doubtless also did much to rid him of any lingering idealism toward the political process, and put an edge on his wry fantasy of organizing the cats in order to exploit them, “and like good politicians sell our charity for power.” His late poetry on the subject is even more harsh. Here’s his “The Great Day” from 1938:
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Sections IV and V of “Rapallo” introduces another theme that will be developed at great length in the body of A Vision, the opposition between primary and antithetical approaches to the world. The primary is rooted in the senses, and has to do with the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate, while the antithetical is rooted in the imagination, and has to do with the Will and the Mask. The English tourists whose red-blooded faith comes in for Yeats’s mockery offer a fine first glimpse of what he will call the primary tincture, while Yeats’s own more reflective but more anemic faith is a first sketch of the antithetical tincture. (If you’re not sure how to parse all this, don’t worry about it—we’ll be covering the tinctures in vast detail as the discussion proceeds.)
With the next part of Yeats’s notional packet, “Introduction to ‘A Vision’,” the play of opposites goes on, though here he also provides a tolerably detailed summary of the process by which A Vision came into being. Yeats included among his other occult interests a lifelong fascination with psychic phenomena, which he pursued with characteristic energy as an active member of the Society for Psychical Research. That background shows clearly in these fifteen sections: Yeats is concerned to note down the details of the process and to recount the various odd and eerie events—synchronicities, as his contemporary C.G. Jung called them—that surrounded the communications his wife brought through.
This section also takes pains to present Yeats as a baffled but objective observer who does not take the metaphysical dimensions of the system of A Vision any more seriously than he has to. This is one of the places where it’s most important to keep in mind the importance of masks in Yeats’s thought. I’ll be frank here: when Yeats insists that he thinks of the system purely as an aesthetic structure, a set of “metaphors for poetry” with no objective validity, I don’t believe him.
More precisely, I only half-believe him. It was precisely his point in this book and elsewhere in his work that no point of view is complete, that every belief has to be balanced against its utter opposite if it is to have any chance of embracing truth. Here also, curiously enough, he and C.G. Jung are speaking the same language; Jung’s essay “On Psychic Energy,” first published in 1928, makes the same point, arguing that only an “antinomian postulate” that embraces opposed and mutually irreconcilable visions can express the truth about the psyche.
Here again, though, the mask Yeats dons is another opportunity to prefigure the dance of contraries in A Vision. The point of the system, he claims, is “to hold in a single thought reality and justice”: the first of these two principles belongs to the primary tincture, the second to the antithetical. Yeats and his wife form another pair of contraries, as do the Communicators and the Frustrators, the two swarms of spirits who contended with each other in the process of communication. The records of the communications themselves make it clear that these two classes were by no means the nameless multitudes Yeats suggests here; he and George knew the personal names of members of both categories. That information did not further the image Yeats sought to build in the published version of the system, however, and so it was excluded.
Another important element brought up here is the relation of A Vision to philosophy. Here, for the sake of the mask he had donned, Yeats pretended an ignorance that he did not in fact possess. In his youth he had plunged into William Blake, and absorbed a wealth of philosophic insights from Blake himself and from the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose work so powerfully influenced Blake. Like every other serious participant in the Golden Dawn, furthermore, Yeats had made a systematic study of the literature of medieval magic and Cabala, with their deep roots in the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions.
Long before the first communications arrived, Yeats had followed up these earlier explorations by reading the works of Thomas Taylor, the Regency-era polymath who translated nearly every surviving word of ancient Greek philosophy into readable English. George, for her part, was even more philosophically literate than her husband; what they might have discussed over the dinner table is another question whose answer never found its way into Yeats’s chronicle. Keep in mind that Yeats is constructing a symbolic narrative out of the raw materials of the experience he and George shared, and you won’t be tempted to take it more literally than it deserves.
The rest of what can be learnt from the fifteen sections of this middle portion of Yeats’s notional packet can be left to interested readers. If they will simply note the figures and contraries in each section and match those up with the corresponding tarot trump, they will have no difficulty reading the message that Yeats has left for them here. Leaving those behind, let’s pass to the last part of the packet, the two sections Yeats titled simply “To Ezra Pound.” These correspond to the last two trumps in the French ordering, the Fool and the World.
In the first section Yeats passes on a warning that Pound was unwilling to heed. The Fool in the tarot deck is a foolish man in motley about to step over a cliff, toward which he is driven headlong by a barking dog. In Pound’s case, the dog was his own political and economic obsessions and the cliff was his enthusiasm for Italian Fascism, which would have seen him executed for treason after the Second World War if a clique of sympathetic psychologists hadn’t arranged to declare him insane and lock him up in an asylum as an alternative. (To be fair to the psychologists, Pound’s mental state was by no means especially stable by then, though the rigors of the war and its aftermath may have had something to do with that.)
As usual, however, there’s another level to this section. It portrays the world of the primary tincture as experienced by antithetical personalities such as Yeats and Pound: a world of practical politics and business, “all habit and memory,” to which sensitive and high-strung intellectuals such as Yeats and Pound were very poorly suited. Yeats had the good sense to recognize this. Pound did not.
The second section, corresponding to the tarot trump The World, presents the antithetical tincture in contrast to the primary. Here Yeats builds up an opposition of extraordinary intensity. He poses Oedipus, the sacred sacrificial hero of ancient myth, over against Christ, the sacred sacrificial hero of modern myth. He notes that Oedipus, having unknowingly committed the worst sins the ancient Greeks could imagine, lay upon the ground to die, and the redemption he brought to his age was signaled when the earth swallowed him up, while Jesus was traditionally without sin, died in an upright position on the Cross, and the redemption he brought to his age was signaled when he ascended into what Yeats calls the abstract sky.
These again are emblems of the primary and antithetical tinctures respectively, but they also have a relation to historical time. “Every two thousand and odd years”—that is, during each of the twelve zodiacal ages of 2160 years—one of these is sacred and the other secular: one of them the ground of everyday life, the other the contrary toward which an entire age must strive, without ever quite succeeding. The ancient world, in Yeats’s terms, was an antithetical age and therefore sought salvation from a primary redeemer; the modern world was a primary age and therefore sought salvation from an antithetical redeemer—and the age to come, the age Yeats believed was being born around him as he wrote, would be another antithetical age that would seek its salvation from another primary redeemer.
That was the message to which Yeats hoped to awaken Pound, reminding him with one of his own poems that it is these transformations of consciousness, not the squabbling of politicians, that poets are called to proclaim. That message will be central to a very large share of the discussions ahead.
Assignment: Over the next month, if you have the chance, read “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” and the poem that follows it, “The Phases of the Moon.” It’s going to be two months before we return to this, as I’ll be traveling in the first half of June and therefore on hiatus; if you need more reading material, you might make a first pass through Yeats’s essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae, as A Vision is built on the foundation laid in this essay, and so it will be central to a couple of future discussions. You can download an electronic copy free of charge here from Project Gutenberg.
In Desolation Row, Bob Dylan has the line “and Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot, fighting in the Captain’s tower, while calypso singers laugh at them and fisherman hold flowers”…What do you think was the relationship between Eliot and Pound!?
Pyrrhus, what I think is fortunately irrelevant here, as the details are well documented. Eliot and Pound were close friends — Pound helped Eliot prepare The Waste Land for publication, and Eliot dedicated that poem to Pound. They were both deeply conservative thinkers, though Eliot’s conservatism was a Christian traditionalism and Pound became a fascist. As for why Dylan had them fighting, I have no idea what he was smoking at the time. 😉
It seems that in times like ours, when one age is rising up from the wheel and another is sinking, and the various ways a tincture can pull or repel those currently incarnate, that people are more liable to fall into conflict over the way the collective Creative Mind is being expressed across the Bodies of Fate. Using various Masks to disguise the Will might be apropos in such a situation, so as to avoid knots in the web of fate and pull of destiny…
It seems that what Pound tried to weave really did get entangled on the Loom(is).
“Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist and a psychopath, but otherwise completely sane.”
From the Wikipedia article. It certainly fits the theme of “every belief has to be balanced against its utter opposite if it is to have any chance of embracing truth”.
That “sane except for the insanity” bit takes second place to this case of Russian culture going off on its own;
“Heroic Slavic warriors triumph over evil reptilian invaders to pounding phonk beats. These surreal showdowns have racked up millions of views and spawned a wave of spin-offs, including video games, comic books, and tabletop RPGs. What started as a mock academic lecture quickly turned into a full-blown cultural phenomenon – fueled in part by some deep-rooted medieval nostalgia. One of the most well-known stories in the Ancient Rus vs. Lizards mythos is ‘The tale of how the Russian hero Danila Trumpov drove the accursed Lizards from the Slavic States of America’. In this fictional legend, a Russian version of Donald Trump defeats a shadowy alliance of humanoid lizards, who are supposedly aided by Bill Gates. Trumpov wields imaginative techniques like the “Republican Egg Squeeze” and the “Texas Burger Bomb,” and even manages to sabotage the lizard lobbyists by replacing the dollar with the ruble.”
Someone on this planet still has a sense of humor and there is a poorly documented portion of Rus history that really begs for filling out.
https://swentr.site/pop-culture/617333-ancient-rus-vs-lizards/
Justin, oh, it’s much more tangled than that! Stay tuned.
Siliconguy, ah, so you’ve also encountered the Rus vs. Lizards phenomenon! I’ve been chuckling over that since I first encountered it. I particularly like the story line in which Danila Trumpov drove the lizard people, and their evil ally Bill Gates. out of the ancient Slavic States of America. It really is sane, except for the utter insanity.
JMG,
Thanks for the interesting article!
It’s news to me that Oedipus had a significant cult of worshipers beyond maybe a regional hero practice, and it seems weird to me to compare that to Christ (vs. another saint, like St. George or St. Martha). Was Oedipus more of a universal hero figure than Perseus, Ajax, or Heracles?
Are there other “primary” heroes that would seem more universally admired beyond the Greek diaspora?
Ah-ha! Perfectly sane but for the insanity explains quite a bit in my life. I was just thinking that my education hasn’t been particularly professionally useful and was obtained with doubtful sanity, but I wouldn’t be able to work on The Dolmen Arch or wade into A Vision without it. The non-rationalist, non-materialist aspects of literature were unmentionable by and anathema to my professors – so much so that I gave up on the whole of literature because I mistook “don’t look there” for “nothing there. (Green Wizardry ended up being the key to that gate, btw.) So, I’m looking forward to getting to know Yeats again for the very first time. Many thanks for the introduction.
And thanks to Siliconguy for the Danila Trumpov link. That explains everything.
About 25 years ago I took an adult Ed course on Yeats from a professor who did his PHD on Yeats and had based a lot of his thesis on interviews with Georgie Yeats, with whom he became friends. I don’t remember his dealing much in the course with their esoteric orientation. With his academic position that was perhaps understandable. I wish I had had the background of your essays in taking the course.
I also took a course from him on Pound, which I don’t remember that much of., though I think he focused more on Pound’s literary style than his fascism. I don’t remember how he began his correspondence with Pound, but he was one of few people who was allowed to visit him in prison/mental hospital.
Stephen
Another great read that is fitting of being in a college text book. Lots of threads to investigate. Great job.
Sirustalcelion, Greece didn’t go in for universal saviors in its classical phase; as an antithetical civilization, it had many local saviors rather than one unifying figure. Oedipus happens to be the salvific figure from Greek myth that Yeats (and Lévi, and a great many of their contemporaries) picked up on.
Rhydlyd, I know so many people who’ve been turned off literature by bad professors that I’ve thought more than once that most English professors should be flogged, and then put to work raising piglets, who won’t be harmed by their misbehavior.
Stephen, there’s plenty I don’t know about Yeats, but his occult background and mine have enough overlap that I can point out some things that the literary critics don’t know. I wish I’d met your professor, though! He must have been a fascinating cat.
Peace, thank you! Calling attention to those threads is what I do. 😉
You mention that Pound wasn’t one for occultism, but I think it’s worth noting that his wife and mother in law, Dorothy and Olivia Shakespear, were both Theosophists and members of the Golden Dawn. Dorothy Shakespear was also an ex-lover of Yeats, so, whatever Pound’s personal opinions on occultism were, he would have had a fairly strong second-hand exposure.
Sorry, I meant to say that Olivia Shakespear, Pound’s mother in law, was an ex-lover of Yeats, not Dorothy Shakespear
I have been looking for the contraries in the “Intro to A Vision” section. For section 11, he lists Faculties and Principles, experience and revelation, and understanding and reason. I see experience and understanding as primary and revelation and reason as antithetical, which makes me think that Faculties are primary and Principles are antithetical, except that in section 4 he makes a point of saying there are four Faculties, so are the Faculties just the senses? (And if yes, then why just four?)
Thank you.
JMG:
Regarding Rapallo section 1, I see the invocation of earth, water, and air but I don’t see the fire. Please let me know what I am missing.
Hi John Michael,
Ha! The man doth protest too much! I don’t believe him either.
If someone uses a mask to dissemble an act of will, then that’s an act of will in my books. A tricksy fellow is he.
The distinction between the two points is merely that of a continuum of existence. But either end displays a certain form of striving, to my mind anyway. Dunno.
Curious to see where this journey leads.
Cheers
Chris
That line about politicians jumped out and bit me like a rabid chihuahua.
Also I published the second article today that expanded on the benefits of embracing a more practical version of racism. I wish I had seen this first, as it adds an occult dimension to the idea of how competing cultures can cooperate with each other by pointing out habits and flaws that do not serve the interests of the greater community. On the other hand I’m grateful for the way the events played out, because it was gratifying to develop the concept of opposites as allies on my own and then discover that I might actually be on to something more interesting than just expanding on clickbait titles.
From eighth grade onward I had really great teachers in English lit and language and we went through many great authors, a few of which I detested at the time, but we never touched either Pound or Yeats. Never even heard them mentioned.
Siliconguy and JMG, there’s a lot of things western elites want covered up, about Trump and especially about the Russians, a topic where misinformation rules supreme. Talking about soundtracks, I’ll bet nobody heard of Olga Kassetsky and Eitrack Taeypov and their pioneering role in audio.
Excellent article! There is so little these days that requires serious mental exercise to read–this one does. Perhaps you should have been a professor. I am joking of course–you’d never be hired.
Since 1958, as a freshman, I have watched, and participated in, the steady decline of the college/university system. Oops, wait! Decline from what? It was probably ever thus, there’s just been an increase in noise these days. Your post leads me to think like this.
Thank you very much.
Calliope, true! I don’t claim to know what Pound’s early attitudes might have been like, either — like so many figures of his generation, he may have dabbled in occultism before rejecting it.
Random, no, the Faculties are Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate, and the principles are their equivalents in the higher self, Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body. Any of these can be primary or antithetical depending on other factors. We’ll get into all this in due time.
Chris S, the south wind is traditionally associated with fire.
Chris at F, tricksy indeed!
KVD, stay tuned. There’s a lot of material that bears on the theme of opposition as alliance. Have you read Blake, btw?
Smith, who gets deleted from literary history is at least as important as who gets mentioned. Is there a topic where misinformation doesn’t rule supreme?
Tim S, oh, it’s declined. Really bad can always get worse. I considered an academic career twice, but both times had the common sense to back away from it.
JMG@10
Yes my professor friend was a very interesting cat. He served in the 1st Canadian division from just after the Normandy landings until the German defeat, and then got into the English PHD program at University of Michigan with W. D. Auden as his advisor. In those days it was possible to do interesting original work even in the arts, especially, I suppose, if you were a white male. Now someone could probably do a PHD on his PHD and then go on to a career at Starbucks.
Even when I was in college in the 1960s, I considered a career in academia, and with the right choices it could have been an interesting path. Now, not so much. Talking to my daughter’s professors who were retiring in the 2010s., they were all glad that they were getting out of it.
I sense a certain amount of schadenfreude on the blog about the misfortunes of the PMC, as it were, which I feel is not entirely fair. My daughter and most of her friends got degrees because it seemed the way to get a more interesting and better paying job. I can remember a time when she was in college when job applicants without degrees were not considered for even the most menial jobs as a way to avoid looking at half the applications. I don’t think her peers thought they were better than anyone else for their choices. It was just the best way to survive.. If some of these people are now freaking out because of losing their jobs, it is only natural. Carpenters would freak out if there was a ban on building with wood. Yesterday’s best choice is not always today’s. There will be a lot of people who realize they didn’t make the best choice as we proceed on the decline.
Sorry to ramble on. Delete it if you want.
Stephen
Just reaching the end of Per Amica Silentia Lunae and, what do you know, the last part before the Epilogue is numbered XXII. Now I must go back and review it with my Tarot pack!
What Yeats was communicating to Pound seems so timely for today’s world. My problem with a lot of the folks looking at patterns in our contemporary world is they look at patterns from a scientific perspective but leave out history and story. Is it too much of a stretch to say that Yeats was playing Parsifal to Pound’s Fisher King? Thanks for giving us some homework while you are taking some time away. 🙂
Yeats apparently referred to Crowley as ‘that unspeakable mad person’.
Jung’s ‘antinomian postulate’ seems rather similar to the neutral position of the Tibetan Chod tradition. Tibetans shout ‘victory to the gods’ when crossing mountain passes but Chodpa shout ‘victory to the gods and demons’.
Just checking in to say I’m looking forward to this latest book study. I tried and failed with the first two. My grandmother, who came to the U.S. when she was fifteen, was born on a small farm in Sligo. And my good friend in town is married to the great granddaughter of Maud Gonne. And I’ve been dipping into Yeats’ “Autobiographies” over the past year. I’m confident these additional connections will see me through!
I don’t know how this fits into the post. I was reading in the posting about Pound’s insanity in contrast to Yeat’s sanity. At least, that is how I read it.
I have been declared both sane and insane by a judge. When I was young, I ended up in an insane institution for various reasons. Partly because I heard the voices of the Gods. My mother who had worked in them as a student nurse wanted me out. (At the time, it was lobotomy and shock therapy among other treatments.) So she worked hard to get me a certificate of sanity.
What I realized was that sanity and insanity in some ways is a construct depending on how the current society sees it. Now, in the institution, there were truly insane people whose minds simply could not process reality in any form. Then there were the dotty ones who could live in society but on the fringes or with indulgent neighbors. Then there were the rebels who were popped in by their families for simply being different or not following their families’ expectations. I was a cross between dotty and rebel.
I think that Pound’s insanity was a construct as much as Yeat’s sanity. They do balance each other since both in my opinion were dotty. Or they had crystal clear vision that their societies could either accept or not.
Focusing on transformations of consciousness, not the ramblings of shallow politicians.
Timely. Something I need to focus on just now. Politics as derivative of greater changes in the social consciousness.
I will have to re-read that intro now.
Stephen, I can’t speak for everyone here, but I try to reserve my schadenfreude for those members of the managerial caste who, not so long ago, were enthusiastically proclaiming their own self-interested agendas as universal moral truths, and condemning everyone who raised questions about those agendas as evil incarnate. I think a chuckle about them now and again is by no means unearned.
KAN, heh heh heh. Good.
Filho, in a certain sense, yes, that metaphor stands up very well!
Tengu, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Yeats also shoved Crowley down a stair in the “Battle of Blythe Road,” when Crowley tried to seize control of the Golden Dawn’s headquarters on behalf of Mathers, and made a muck of it as usual…
Mrollo, here’s hoping.
Neptunesdolphins, oh, granted, “sane” and “insane” are always value judgments, and always dependent on the values of a given culture. In Pound’s case, there’s good reason to think that the doctors who labeled him insane did it purely as a way to save a great poet from the gallows, so that adds yet another wrinkle to the fabric.
William, excellent! That’s a reaction I hope for.
JMG, you are a cornucopia of scholarly information!…One of my friends was a Harvard English major, and he didn’t know that about Ezra Pound….
Are the 22 trumps from the tarot just a secret handshake or is there more to the story?
Having 22 chapters with corresponding fools and magicians is definitely a wink to the aware, but is it also something else? Does knowing that thr chapters are organized by trump cards unlock anything else in the work?
JMG
Thanks for your reply. I have known, and known of some of the PMC types you are referring to. I guess I have just known a lot more, especially with natural science backgrounds, whose training and interests led them to jobs in academia, NGOs, government, etc. I guess the scythe doesn’t always distinguish the weeds from the flowers.
Stephen
Robert Pirsig: “”Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected.”
Other people have to have some idea of what you are going to do for society to function. Driving is fine example. If your actions are totally unpredictable how far will you get before sheet metal gets bent? Think of two cars going in opposite directions on a two lane road at 70 MPH. The lanes are 10 feet wide, closing speed is 140 mph. The cars will be four feet apart when they pass by. The margin of error is not large, yet accidents are rare because people do what is expected.
You can generalize that concept to the larger society.
As to Stephen Pearson’s comment, as they say hind sight is 20/20. But there is no point of belaboring it. All you can do is make the best decision you can with information you actually have at the time, and remember that indecision is a decision to opt for the status quo. If in 1985 I had known that the American mining industry was going to be selected for destruction in the next decade I would have picked a different major, or at least a different specialization in the field of metallurgical engineering.
What you don’t want to do is ignore information that does not fit your worldview. There is a series on Youtube called The Korean War Week by Week. It is just at the point where MacArthur got fired. The amount information he chose to ignore as the Chinese were setting up their offensive is most impressive. The Chinese are making their own mistakes to the point that the general in charge barged into Mao’s bedroom and screamed at him in frustration because Mao’s orders made no sense given the UN forces had complete air superiority.
Steve Jobs may have had the most effective Reality Distortion Field in modern times, but even so he got fired from Apple, Next was going nowhere, but he won big at Pixar, got back into Apple, made it a success, then died young because he thought a vegan diet would cure his pancreatic cancer. (That particular cancer was the reasonably curable version if you are quick enough.) So won two, lost three?
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
‘Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.’
I’ve generally taken this epigram as Yeats’ assessment of Parnell as having an integrity too proud to be an ordinary politician — too proud to pander. But it’s also a comment on revolution as such.
(Yeats, by the way, seems to have pronounced “Parnell” the old, Irish way, with the accent on the first syllable (“Parn’l”). [https://gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/371-pronounce-parnell] It changes the meter of the first line, and thus of the second as well. Yeats’ scansion was always fluid, to the annoyance of his father, but giving parallel scansion to the first clause in each line does make it more interesting.)
Pound’s aversion to occultism is a complex issue, since he was surrounded by it from an early date.
He was tutor, and lover, to the young HD, who followed him to London in about 1911, and HD had quite a connection to esoteric traditions, although it took her a while to begin to sort them all out.. There was an extensive presence of occultism in British literary circles, and even writers who officially disdained occultism were closer to it than might first appear. In addition to the Pound/Years and Pound/Eliot collaborations, for example, there was the link between Eliot and Charles Williams. And so on.
It might be that Pound’s aversion to occultism was primarily rhetorical and poetic, since many occult writers tended to be very “on the nose” about occult ideas and terminology, and use them too directly, rather than putting things, as they say, in their own words. Then again, Pound, like Eliot, may have been in Europe more for the High Culture than for the fertile loam of the back streets and servants’ quarters.
Well, i was having trouble with the idea of how you simultaneously hold an idea and its opposite in your mind.
Then it occurred to me that architecture is a great example.
To make a functional house you need to combine filled space with empty space. You have your solid walls, floors, and ceilings AND you have empty space and pathways that are enclosed. you have solid and static combined with open and flowing. You need both to make a house.
Then it occurred to me that biochemistry does the same thing with water philic and water phobic molecules (and parts of molecules). If you don’t combine both you can’t make an organism.
or chemisty is the combination of heavy, slow, positively charged nuclei and fast, light, negatively charged electrons.
I am willing to bet that if you think about anything that actually functions in the world it combines something and its opposite. (this would come as no surprise to a Daoist )
Pyrrhus, Pound in particular has had his biography, er, “curated” to keep him acceptable as a subject for scholarship. I just happen to read up on things you’re not supposed to read up on. 😉
Team10tim, good! A fine theme for meditation…
Stephen, I envy you their acquaintance! Unfortunately I’ve gotten too meet too many of the other kind. You’re right about the scythe, of course — great social transformations don’t pay a lot of attention to individuals.
Siliconguy, and yet Mao turned out to be right…
LeGrand, another fine example! As for Pound, it’s an interesting question — it may have been that having occultism all around him was part of what made him back away from it.
Dobbs, exactly. It’s not that hard in practice — just remember that each idea implies its contrariety, and make room for both in the world. A match flame is hot compared to your skin, and cold compared to a blowtorch…
JMG
just to add to my last comment, and then I will drop it: I have seen people enforcing their self righteous morality on others all my life in every country I have lived and from all sides of the social and political spectrum. Actually it has been much worse from the right/conservative side than the liberal, and both the moral condemnation and the punishments were far worse. Most of the woke excesses seem just silly. I can remember when it was difficult for women to get a passport or control their own money or their own body. As for non whites it was even worse. Obviously other cultures had their own taboos, though my experience was mostly in the Anglosphere and Europe. The ostracism of an unmarried pregnant woman or the lynching of blacks was was far worse than than being shamed for not calling someone by their chosen pronoun or letting them use the bathroom of their choice.. Sure it went too far, but it was almost farce compared to some of the excesses in my youth in the 1940s,50s, and early 60s.
Stephen
Hrmmm
I would have said a match flame is the combination of the solid wood and gaseous oxygen.
I wonder how many different opposites are combined in a match’s flame?
(is it more or less than the numbers of angels that can dance on the head of a pin?)
JMG:
“Chris S, the south wind is traditionally associated with fire.”
I completely missed that. Thanks, I’ll need to read more closely as we go on.
On the growing rot in US academia:
I’ve been an insider in academia. I quit out of it in 2005 (by early retirement at age 63). That was one of the best decisions I ever made, even though my own university wasn’t yet as far gone into the rot as some others. (I think it was around 1995 that I started to advise undergraduates not to go to graduate school or seek a professional career that required an advanced degree if ever they wanted to have a rewarding life.)
When I went to college myself (1960-1964), all undergraduate students were treated as junior adults, responsible for their actions and choices, and able to learn from their mistakes. One of the turning points for me happened when, sometime in the 1990s in a faculty meeting, our Dean of the College admonished us all never to forget that our students were just young children, who needed always to be protected by us faculty from all adversity. (She included graduate students in her observation, too. ) Ugh! That was one of the big shifts in higher education: the infantilization of the young adult. By now it seems to have reached the point of the infantilization of most adults, young or old, who are not themselves “managers.”
The other was the ever-growing dependence of universities on research grants to fund their growth. (Why grow at all? I asked.) Much of the scientific mendacity and fraud that came to my ears of was meant to keep the grant money flowing, and “justified” to me as such. (And I was in the humanities, so I didn’t get to hear all that much about such things.)
All this, even though my university (Brown) wasn’t as hide-bound as many Ivies back then. It even still had a few professors who studied occult subjects, usually as side-lines: S. Foster Damon, the William Blake specialist, also published on alchemy in The Occult Review and Curt J. Ducasse, in Philosophy, contributed to the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and The International Journal of Parapsychology. But they were both on the point of retirement when I arrived, and I never had the chance to talk with either of them.
All of which is just to say that our host’s observations on the state of academia seem spot-on to me.
Stephen, it really does depend on who you know, doesn’t it? I personally knew two white working class men who blew their brains out because they couldn’t get work, they couldn’t get public assistance , and the bureaucrats who were supposed to help them told them that their problems were their own fault — all of this because of their race and their gender. They were good men, they wanted nothing more than the chance to contribute to society and support their families, and they were ground down by the hatred and contempt of the managerial class until eating a shotgun shell was the only way out they could find. Their stories were anything but unusual — the people I knew when I lived in Appalachia winced when they heard about the deaths but weren’t surprised — but of course stories like theirs never make the corporate media and never find their way out of flyover country.
Dobbs, yes, you could do it that way too.
Chris, your brain probably isn’t marinated in occult symbolism the way mine is!
Robert, thanks for this.
” the south wind is traditionally associated with fire.”
Does that still apply in the Southern hemisphere?
JMG
It would be fortunate if the pendulum came to rest in the middle, but that would be a lot to hope for.
Stephen
Robert Mathiesen
The rot goes even farther down the line, though in a different form. I worked in the outdoor program at a private middle school in the 90s and early 2000s. Then if a kid fell down or something, you would pick them up, give them a hug and make sure they weren’t hurt. The little ones who were homesick on a trip would sometimes come and sit in your lap around the campfire. Now, unless you are the designated medical person, you can’t touch them. There is such a huge fear of lawsuits and sexual molestation charges that there is a level of fear in the faculty. Two colleagues of mine were barred from the campus over a false sexual misconduct charge that the head of school knew was untrue but enforced because the parents were rich and prone to sue.
Stephen
Siliconguy, occultists in the southern hemisphere squabble about that quite a bit. Never having been there, I have no idea.
Stephen, it may not be entirely out of reach. We’re at peak political divisiveness these days, and when that’s happened before, sooner or later the pressure decreases and the mutual hate dials down a bit.
Hi John Michael,
Just to weigh on the subject of south winds relating to fire, I can appreciate the southern hemisphere perspective of attributing those energies to the north wind, and that makes sense to me. But I’m also not entirely convinced that it matters. The symbolism here is important, but people do also enjoy quibbling. I could just as easily make the technical observation that the westerly winds are equally as troublesome from a fire perspective here, and they’re water (aren’t they?) 🙂 Rain here never arrives from the west, every other direction yes, just not west – that’s geography for you.
Man, it’s unusually dry here at the moment. Not record breaking, but right up there. With this in mind, I’ve been busy attending to the needs of the surrounding forest now while at least it’s cool. Still, the climate here in this particular location is remarkably variable, although the vast majority of the time it’s cool and damp. We’ll see how it goes, but a bit of prudent activity beforehand is probably the path of wisdom.
Cheers
Chris
Le Grand Cinq-Mars–Several years ago, I took a graduate seminar in Modernism is English literature. One of the things I noted was how small the literary and cultural scene was in the London of the early 20th Century. It seemed that everyone was related by blood or marriage or sexual affairs or having attended the same school. People would attend a play by GB Shaw one evening and a metaphysical lecture on Tibetan Buddhism the next and discuss both at tea the following afternoon. I also noted how strenuously academics would avoid the least implication that the occult was important to any respected writer, such as Yeats. This was in the mid 1990s, so discussion of unconventional sexuality was now acceptable. I mean one had had to admit the Oscar Wilde was gay, but for others there had been lengthy and unconvincing explanations that it was not sexual at all to write something like “My dearest Sydney, I long to have you beside me” to one’s secretary. But Yeat’s occult interests were treated as an eccentric hobby rather than as central to his life and art. Very strange.
JMG–The toll on white working-class men in this country has been terrible. Even worse when one considers the slow-motion suicides of drug and alcohol addiction.
RIta
@Stephen Pearson (#43):
Yes, I’ve seen that sort of fear of lawsuits at my old university, too.
And here’s another thign that felt to me like corruption. A daughter of a multi-multi-billionaire family never could get her student act together enough to pass any 32 courses (the number needed to graduate) even in (IIRC) five full-time years on campus. So the administration eventually persuaded some faculty to sign off on her missing course credits, even though she hadn’t taken those courses, by appealing to their compassion — whether compassion for the student or for the university was never made quite clear.
Strictly speaking, all this theater was unnecessary. According to University rules, all course grades are awarded by the University Corporation (the governing body), not by the professors or other teachers. We faculty merely recommend students’ grades to the Corporation. It would not have been much of a reach for the Corporation to have supplied her missing course credits itself.
In all fairness, it’s OK for a university to be extremely risk-adverse these days. One university lawyer of my acquaintance, some thirty years ago, happened to mention that her university had to deal with as many as — IIRC — a dozen or more lawsuits each and every week of the year, most of which were simply predatory or opportunistic. It sounded very much as if there were a whole class of people out there who enrich themselves by filing countless lawsuits against any handy wealthy, but vulnerable, institution. Some of them are even university faculty, who see their own institution’s particular vulnerabilities. [See El Gato Malo’s insightful post on “second world” cultures at boriquagato.substack.com/p/right-on-target]
@Stephen Pearson #36:
The ‘ostracism of an unmarried pregnant woman’ served a function, that of ensuring as few as possible women and children in poverty and dependent on the state. Considering the indebtedness of the modern US and its $1.5 trillion HHS welfare state budget, maybe that wasn’t entirely a bad thing.
Rereading those sections in light of the tarot connection was very interesting, thank you. Though I don’t doubt someone more familiar with the tarot would get much more out of it than I did. Even so, it tickled me that, for example, Yeats’ comment on “what must seem an arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism”, the start of a general disclaimer about how he doesn’t really believe in his system, was placed in the section that corresponds to the Moon, which I understand is associated with deception.
On the topic of Pound, it perhaps goes without saying that I had previously and recently encountered allegations that Yeats himself was a fascist sympathiser. Even if he had such tendencies (which is hard for me to establish conclusively), it seems clear that he wasn’t as taken in by it as Pound. His (hard-won?) cynicism had served him in good stead.
The part about oppositions made me think of Charles Fort, who I believe you mentioned before. I’m not sure how seriously you take him as a philosopher (then again, I don’t think he took himself at all seriously, to his credit), but personally I found his musings about how every concept must include its opposite and every thing or notion exists in “the state of the hyphen” between the real and the unreal, distinguished mainly by being comparatively and temporarily more real than each other, to be strangely enlightening. If nothing else, this framework helped me test and tease out the limits of both my convictions and my doubts about the convictions of others. Of course I figured Fort was not the only one to think somewhat along those lines at the time, though I had no idea about Yeats’ philosophy – which, while much more elaborate, seems to have some points in common.
“That was the message to which Yeats hoped to awaken Pound, reminding him with one of his own poems that it is these transformations of consciousness, not the squabbling of politicians, that poets are called to proclaim. That message will be central to a very large share of the discussions ahead.”
Recently, I came across the same way of thinking in Dion Fortune’s writings:
“The initiate works by what he is rather than by what he does…” , also “He works on himself, makes something of himself, and then the forces that radiate from him without effort on his part bless and illuminate” (Ref: The Magical Battle of Britain – Letter 51).
This philosophy must have come from Golden Dawn teachings but I wonder where the original school of this thought came from?
For anyone looking for second hand copies of the 1937 A Vision, this might be useful:
My experience of Amazon Marketplace, abebooks etc. is that almost all copies of A Vision are described as the 1925 version, or shown with a stock photo of the same.
I got the A Norman Jeffares version published by Athena (thinking I would need the 1925 anyway, so what the heck) to be pleasantly surprised that it was, in fact, mainly the 1937 material.
https://www.biblio.com/book/vision-related-writings-yeats-wb/d/1550065383
William Hunter Duncan wrote:
Focusing on transformations of consciousness, not the ramblings of shallow politicians.
Timely. Something I need to focus on just now. Politics as derivative of greater changes in the social consciousness.
—-
To JMG: I am sorry I missed that in the post. Where is it about? And what does it mean? Are we seeing signs of greater changes in social consciousness. I keep missing that. What I see is mostly the anti-Trump screaming. Or is that a change since the screamers can’t seem to gain traction with the great population, and scream louder.
>Why grow at all? I asked.
Because the debt ponzi demands it. Baked into the rules we all play by. Sad thing is they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Very busy this week (having a wedding) but just wanted to drop in to say that I read the chapter and loved it, and definitely didn’t catch the secret 22 handshake and a lot more!
Chris, I know people who use the standard northern hemisphere symbolism in your country and get good results from it. For that matter, here in Rhode Island the ocean is to the south, but I still invoke water in the west and get an answer.
Rita, thank you. It appalls me how few people are even willing to admit that such things have happened, and are happening.
Daniil, excellent! Yes, the Moon is a useful flag for misdirection. Yeats was affiliated for a while with the Irish Blueshirts, as close to a fascist movement as the Irish Free State ever got. There’s a tolerably good summary here. As for Charles Fort, he’s long been a major influence on my thinking; I see him as one of the great intellectual heretics of his age, and his mocking antiphilosophy is far more profound than that of the allegedly serious thinkers who sneer at him.
Scotty, that’s a fascinating question to which I don’t happen to know the answer. It pervades Taoist thought — Lao Tsu’s whole system presupposes that an individual who wants to bring about constructive change ought to focus on getting right with the Tao, and then the relevant changes will happen by themselves — but I don’t think Taoism was well enough known or understood at the time to be a likely source.
Matt, the Norman Jeffares edition, which includes several additional works, is very good — it includes Per Amica Silentia Lunae, for example. Glad you found a copy.
Neptunesdolphins, I commented as follows in the last but one paragraph of the post: “That was the message to which Yeats hoped to awaken Pound, reminding him with one of his own poems that it is these transformations of consciousness, not the squabbling of politicians, that poets are called to proclaim.” My commentariat, in their usual ebullient way, took that and ran with it. I suspect that being inside the DC beltway makes it hard for you to hear anything but the shrieking, since it’s the bureaucratic elite that’s getting worked over with a pruning hook just now. The only changes in social consciousness I’m seeing in general is that Trump’s approval ratings are rising again while the Democrats’ are still deep in the toilet; what I’ve noticed, rather, is that people here and there seem to be noticing that changing themselves is more useful than trying to get the rest of the world to change so that they don’t have to.
Isaac, congrats to all involved in the wedding!
@Daniil Adamov (#49), on fascism in the West, and particularly in the USA:
My father was a mechanical engineer working on military weapons systems (the Norden Bombsight) in the years before the USA entered World War 2. He made a point of telling me as a matter of history, before I went off to college, that of all the people he knew from work–engineers and military officers–only about one-third wanted to enter the war on the side of the Allies, and another third wanted the US to stay out of the war altogether. The final third greatly admired Germany for its science and its eugenic policies, and very much wanted the USA to enter the war on the side of the Nazis. After Pearl Harbor, once the USA entered the war, that final third didn’t change its views, but simply went underground until the time would once again be right for them to come out of hiding. That’s what’s happening now.
So Nazi-ism isn’t anything new in the USA, and probably not in the UK, either. It’s just come out of hiding once again.
(I haven’t seen many Europeans (including Russians) who are aware of how close the USA came to entering World War 2 on the side of the Nazis. This forgotten fact explains a fair amount of what is now going on in Ukraine.)
(Just to clarify, my father was a Danish-American. All four of his grandparents born in Denmark, and three of them had fled Denmark for the USA in the wake of Prussia’s invasion of their homeland in 1863-1864. He had no love for Germany, and very much admired what Denmark was doing to oppose its German and Nazi military overlords during World War 2.)
@JMG (#55):
As it happened, Taoism was fairly well known in Theosophical circles,. thanks to Isabella Mears’s translation of Lao Tze. It was originally published in 1916 in Glasgow, but in 1922 it was reissued with revisions by the Theosophical Publishing House in London (downloadable from google books and elsewhere).
It seems to me that Yeats picked the most beautiful, erudite, elegant, and thoughtful way possible of calling his friend an ass. Looking forward to the deep dive on this book and your new edition from Aeon.
I see in the comments some talk of the toxic polarization afflicting the USA. In one respect it can be thought of as magical combat. The two sides become totally enmeshed in each other. A curse flung at another links you to the person you cursed via raspberry jam. Retaliating only furthers the cycle.
These two images rather explain the cycle:
Polarization Trap:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a5ee20_954c0fe0a51a48b0b141177de21b2919~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_1143,h_1075,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/a5ee20_954c0fe0a51a48b0b141177de21b2919~mv2.png
Magical Attack:
https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Magical-Attack-by-CassBeanland/80515986.EJUG5
Opting out, and talking in ways less likely to just push each others buttons, is one way to end the cycle. The author Zachary Ellwood has also written essentially two versions of a book that might be useful. “Defusing American Anger” for a general audience and “How Contempt Destroys Democracy” aimed at liberals.
Off topic, but has anyone drawn your attention to the USDA report on Fireless Cookers yet? It’s good, has a lot of resources, but the main reason I think you’ll be interested in seeing it is that it directly quotes and cites Green Wizardry.
https://www.nal.usda.gov/collections/stories/fireless-cooker
WHD #26 said – “Timely. Something I need to focus on just now. Politics as derivative of greater changes in the social consciousness.”
I so appreciate your comment. This is exactly where I am at is really learning to see the forest while still being aware of the trees.
JMG, thank you for this book club. My being has been hungry for something this meaty to chomp on. I relish the challenge as I shift out of the US educational mindset of getting the “right answer.” This may also finally help me get consistent about discursive meditation. 😄
“William Blake. Like Yeats, he was up to his eyeballs in esoteric traditions — a detail many of both men’s more recent interpreters have tried their best to ignore.”
Last year I read William Blake vs. The World, by John Higgs. He alternates between biographical sections about Blake, which I enjoyed, and sections about how Blake’s thought actually agrees with all the latest neuroscience and physics and so on. Who knew that Blake was secretly in cahoots with Daniel Dennett? It’s an immensely frustrating read.
Anyway, so far I’ve found “A Vision” to be engaging but immensely obscure. Your commentary is going to be invaluable, I think.
I confess some difficulty in getting the tarot references. Aside from the fool (which correspondence seems obvious one pointed out – probably an in-joke of Yeats’ I guess), these largely seem opaque to me.
So I went back and reread Dogma chapter One to try and get some traction. The best I could come up with was that the Bataleur / Mage needs to be King and Priest – which would seem to correspond to the Primary and Antithetical you discuss. However in the first section of Vision, the main binary seems to be between the common people in town and the far off rich people. Both of these groups seem to be worldly, so I’m not seeing an Antithetical element that might correspond to the priestly function. Am I entirely off in these speculations?
I will mention that re-reading Dogma chapter one, I understood and noticed a lot more than two years or so ago. That did make me feel like even if I’m a dunce about this stuff, even dunces can improve in their own mediocratic way 🙂 I do attribute this to studying with you, so many thanks.
>Partly because I heard the voices of the Gods
I have to ask how did you know they were Gods and not the equivalent of some nonphysical stoner dude? Did you just believe them when they told you? And while I’m asking odd questions – what did they say?
JMG, Robert Mathiesen,
I think we had this discussion years ago about the prevalence of fascist sympathy and more in the western world in general. It was certainly wide spread in the UK and US. Many middle and upper class people viewed it as much lesser evil than Bolshevism (communism) and even as a defense of European culture against it. My father, who was a British WWI veteran working for a British firm in NY would certainly have leaned that way until WWII started. it would have been one of the reasons for the early collapse of the French army in WWII, in that many of the officers were pro fascist, while many of the men were communist, and didn’t want to fight Germany while the Molotov Ribbentrop non aggression pact with the USSR was active.
The 1930s were a time of huge turmoil in Europe, and Yeats would certainly have supported whatever he felt defended European culture.
Ireland was one country, like Italy and Germany that had troops on both sides in the Spanish civil war, although not serving members of the armed forces like the latter two. The Blue Shirts did have the blessing of the church and much of the government though, unlike Frank Ryan’s men in the International Brigades. Yeats actually refers to Owen O’ Duffey in one of his earlier poems, though not by name, as the brown lieutenant.
One of D. H Lawrence’s novels, Kangaroo, was about fascism in Australia at that time.
Stephen
JMG
Upon reflection, many of the examples of conservative repression of women, minorities, etc that I referred to in our earlier exchange were from 1940s,50s and early 60s.. They seem quite recent to me, but probably feel like ancient history to most readers. That is what being 85 will do to you. When my daughter was growing up, as a mixed race girl, in the 80s, 90s and early 00s, there didn’t’ seem to be much prejudice or favoritism towards her in US, Australia or Europe.
Stephen
Robert, thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that!
Kimberly, doubtless that was part of it!
Eagle Fang, excellent. Yes, exactly.
Moose, no, I hadn’t! Good heavens. I’m gobsmacked.
Angelica, if it does that, I’ll be delighted.
Cliff, oog. That kind of thing annoys the bejesus out of me.
Paul, you need to start with a good solid knowledge of French tarot symbolism and then apply the symbols of each card to the symbols in each section. You need to focus much more finely.
Stephen, exactly. It was much more nuanced than it’s been made out by later propagandists.
“It’s complicated.”
Michael Tratner’s “Modernism and mass politics : Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats” Is an interesting treatment of two people on the Naughty side (Eliot and Yeats) and two people on the Nice side (Joyce and Woolf), both sets, in the author’s account, united by a turn away from “bourgeois individualism” in literature and toward “literature from a mass point of view.” He takes as a starting point the widely read book by Gustave Le Bon, “The Crowd”, which he treats as a kind of prodromal manifesto of Modernist esthetics.
Basically, he treats “fascism” and “socialism” as both forms of orientation toward the masses, and Modernism as a turn from the bourgeois individualism of Victorian literature toward a deeper engagement with the collective life. It was published in 1995, and, as with all such books, one of its points of interest is seeing how it stacks up now.
One of Tratner’s big problems is that he doesn’t know what to do with Yeats’ occultism. Not only does he dismiss it as a sort of irrelevant or eccentric ornament, but he’s actually unable to read many of the poems that deal with politics simply because he can’t make the kind of sense of them that Yeats intended. (See the verses from “Under Ben Bulben” that I excerpt below — deeply enmeshed in Yeats’ system, but Tratner treats part III as an indulgence in bad temper.)
His section on Eliot, however, is very interesting (though he doesn’t seem to know the difference between Catholic and Anglo-Catholic). Anyone interested in understanding Lovecraft could profit from reading the chapter on Eliot. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do much with Pound’s work as tutor in poetics to both Eliot and Yeats.
Finally, it’s important to remember that Fascism (especially as exemplified by Mussolini) was widely admired not only by the many, but also by officials in the Roosevelt administration, including FDR. Remember that we’re dealing here with people for whom technical. managerial, “scientific”, procedures were central. (One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”)
(He writes rather admiringly, in connection with Woolf, about Harold Laski’s idea of representative government representing not unitary individuals (bourgeois!), but, constituencies, and thus each individual’s multiple (intersectional!) identities. So that a woman dentist Olympic athlete would vote for a representative of women, a representative of dentistry, a representative of athletes, etc. He does not mention whether this would involve attending political meetings for each of one’s intersecting identities. L’enfer, c’est les autres.)
***
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
As for Blake and neuroscience, David Worrall’s “William Blake’s Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia” is actually worth reading (if you can find a copy in a library: generally it’s an arm and a leg, and then some). I’ll say more about it on some other place, but since Blake and neuroscience came up, I thought I’d mention it.
It’s a pretty sensitive treatment of Blake’s art and his visions, from the point of view of the neurology of visual hallucinations — despite the fact that, again, Worrall doesn’t really know what to do with the “metaphysical” or spiritual content of Blake’s work, or experiences. He treats the visionary experiences fairly and sensitively, right up to the point where he might have to deal with what they mean, or how they might mean. At that point, a discreet curtain falls on the discussion. But it does provide a very useful review of the neuroscience.
One of the author’s quirks is that he wants to defend Blake’s visions from being treated on “psychological” terms, which for him would mean pathological. If they are neuroligocal events, no blame!
As for the French surrender in WWII, Ernst Juenger (in “the Peace”) makes the plausible point that part of the motive at least was to “collapse now and avoid total destruction”. People at the time could not quite imagine what surrender and occupation would actually be like. And, to be fair, they were not utterly wrong. Unlike many countries on the eastern front, for whom no plausible version of that choice existed, though some tried.
About the change in consciousness:
JMG:
These again are emblems of the primary and antithetical tinctures respectively, but they also have a relation to historical time. “Every two thousand and odd years”—that is, during each of the twelve zodiacal ages of 2160 years—one of these is sacred and the other secular: one of them the ground of everyday life, the other the contrary toward which an entire age must strive, without ever quite succeeding. The ancient world, in Yeats’s terms, was an antithetical age and therefore sought salvation from a primary redeemer; the modern world was a primary age and therefore sought salvation from an antithetical redeemer—and the age to come, the age Yeats believed was being born around him as he wrote, would be another antithetical age that would seek its salvation from another primary redeemer.
That was the message to which Yeats hoped to awaken Pound, reminding him with one of his own poems that it is these transformations of consciousness, not the squabbling of politicians, that poets are called to proclaim. That message will be central to a very large share of the discussions ahead.
—–
Me: I think I understand this to be Yeats thought that the modern age that came after him needed a primary redeemer.
What is a primary redeemer? I keep harking back to Christ, but I am not sure if that is what Yeats meant.
About change of consciousness, I was reading about the history of measurements. Going from feet to meters. As long as people measured in feet and yards, they were tied to the human body since that is how feet were first measured. When switching to the metric system of base 10, it changed how people related to measurement. Since the body does not measure in base 10, people became machines tooled for efficiency. I would that say that is a subtle change – from living in the physical world of the body to becoming a 24/7 machine.
About poets and change of consciousness,
I remember reading a review of Amanda Gorman’s poem at Biden’s inauguration. She was hailed as the poet of the hour and her poetry was profound. What the poetry review said was that she just simply jotted down memes off of social media and strung them together. It was not poetry but simply memes that people found profound – the people who supported Biden.
Here is the poem she wrote:
“Here’s to the women who have climbed my hills before,” Gorman tweeted.
Here is the text of Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” in full.
When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.
But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain.
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the West.
We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked South.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
—
I think the reviewer is right. Gorman is also an activist and a darling of the Democrats. I wonder if anyone’s consciousness was nudged in anyway. It does seem to be a lot of platitudes strung together. I personally was left cold by it. Yeats on the other hand (and even Pound) seem to work hard at crafting their work. Although Yeats was more profound in his.
The Other Owen.
>Partly because I heard the voices of the Gods
I have to ask how did you know they were Gods and not the equivalent of some nonphysical stoner dude? Did you just believe them when they told you? And while I’m asking odd questions – what did they say?
——-
Well I was raised by militant Atheists who decided there were no Gods. Meanwhile, my Grandmother was a Spiritualist, who was familiar with Spirits. Between the two, people were not sure of anything, but I knew it was outside of me. My experience was with Odin, which was overwhelming to say the least. All I know is that He was very real, and very powerful. No, I didn’t just believe Them since my father questioned everything that was numinous. Meanwhile, my Grandmother did not think it was Odin but a spirit.
Before this, I was having conversations with squirrels, mostly but also with birds. I thought everyone could talk to animals. The conversations were in pictures and concerned squirrel things like nuts and territory.
What did Odin say is rather personal to my situation, but He nailed it. I was having trouble getting well as I had been sick in bed for two years. Ended up finally in the hospital, which was an ordeal. We lived in the backwoods of Maine (Moosehead Lake) and were poor. So mostly home remedies. But Odin ended up guiding us to healing.
Off topic: I just came across the idea of the Chthulucene (via Runesoup substack) – https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/3118261/11-Haraway,-Donna,-Tentacular-Thinking.pdf
On topic: I had never read any of Yeats work before and had only ever heard of him as being a poet in a period where in my limited view poetry was beginning to lose its way. But after reading the first few pieces I am very impressed by his prose – even without the poetry I could see him making a name on his prose alone.
>What the poetry review said was that she just simply jotted down memes off of social media and strung them together
That’s as close as you’ll get to a definition of laziness.
Also on the French surrender in WWII; my puzzlement as to why they gave up was answered in one of the appendices in The Guns of August which the lack of people returning from the war in the smaller towns. Whole high-school classes wiped out, or maybe a couple back intact and a couple more maimed, etc.
The French army could have reformed a defensive line far to the south, but to what end? Was it worth losing another generation? They decided not.
LeGrand, thanks for this. Tratner’s blind spot toward occultism is of course anything but unique. I just finished reading Joshua Foer’s otherwise thoughtful book on mnemonics, Moonwalking with Einstein, and noted that he generally treated the Art of Memory fairly — except for Giordano Bruno, whose brilliant mnemotechnic innovations he dismissed as “loopy.” I’ve come to think that if you whisper the word “occultism” to most academics they suffer a sudden temporary loss of 30 IQ points on the spot.
Neptunesdolphins, no, Yeats saw Christ as the redeemer of the age that was ending, and thought that the redeemer of the coming age hadn’t been born yet. As for metrics, that’s something a lot of interesting people have discussed — the deliberately inhuman nature of the metric system, according to writers such as John Michell, is one of the things behind the sickeningly ugly nature of so much modern design and architecture. As for the “poem,” well, since Biden basically phoned in his presidency, it’s not inappropriate that Gorman phoned in a poem celebrating it!
KAN, it pleases me that the concept of the Cthulhucene is slithering through the crawlspaces of consciousness like this. As for Yeats’s prose, agreed — I wish he’d written much more of it, and in particular, that he’d explored his talent for humor. He was an extraordinary wordsmith.
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars (#68) and JMG (#77):
The (now mostly forgotten) Technocratic Party in US politics fits neatly in with the enthusiasm for Mussolini-style fascism during the 1930s. It advocated for (to simplify the matter slightly) a benevolent totalitarian administration run by engineers on purely scientific principles.
It was still a small, but active political party in the San Francisco Bay area as late as the 1950s, I remember my father pointing out its headquarters in a San Francisco building, with a large sign on top, as we drove past it. He commented that, being an engineer himself, he knew from experience how very unfit engineers were for governing a country.
There’s a wikipedia article on it under the rubric “Technocracy movement.”
And, yes indeed, “if you whisper the word “occultism” to most academics they suffer a sudden temporary loss of 30 IQ points on the spot.” I’ve seen it myself a lot.
In addition to the writings by Yeats that our host has already mentioned, I would add that his two short, very insightful articles, “Magic” (1901) and “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places” (1920), are highly relevant to our discussion. Perhaps also his book, The Trembling of the Veil, belongs here, too. I put PDFs of the two articles up on archive.org several years ago, and I’ll be posting a PDF of the book there later today.
Oops! I see that The Trembling of the Veil has already been uploaded by others to archive.org..
LeGrand Cinq-Mars: “So that a woman dentist Olympic athlete would vote for a representative of women, a representative of dentistry, a representative of athletes, etc. ”
Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) has one-third (30 out of 90) of its representatives elected by “functional constituencies” associated with particular professions. Hardly a major triumph for democracy. (20 represent directly-elected geographical constituencies, 40 are from the Election Committee, whose membership is basically hand-picked by Beijing. Also, candidates of all kinds are routinely disqualified by the courts.)
Robert Mathiesen, I used to live in San Francisco but never heard of Technocracy or saw the building. Looked it up just now, and holy shale! Thorstein Veblen and M. King Hubbert were in this, as was Elon Musk’s grandfather.
Neptune’s Dolphin, Amanda Gorman is the new Maya Angelou.
Robert M, Technocracy still had a presence in Seattle when I was a teenager. There was, as I recall, a storefront office on Greenwood Avenue in the north end of town, and a guy who used to drive around a station wagon painted concrete gray, with TECHNOCRACY and some slogans on it. I don’t happen to know when it finally folded. As for those Yeats essays, both of the first two and the essay “Hodos Camelionis” from The Trembling of the Veil were among those I chose for inclusion in my forthcoming anthology of Yeats’s occult writings, so I’m preening myself on my choices just a bit. 😉
Ambrose (if I may), except that Angelou at her best was a good writer and poet. If Gorman can write her way out of a wet paper bag with a machete in one hand and a blowtorch in the other, I have yet to see any evidence of that.
@JMG (#82):
Poking around in old San Francisco city directories, it seems that the building with the Technocracy sign in San Francisco was located at 234 McAllister Street in the 1950s. Google maps seems to show a more recent, larger building at that address now. Yes, gray was Technocracy’s preferred official color for cars and for clothing. I don’t know when it folded in the SF Bay area, probably sometime after 1964, when I left it for the East Coast.
I’m looking forward to your Yeats anthology. Will it include his 1901 essay on the Order of R. R. and A. C. as a magical order, with his postscript to it?
@Ambrose (#81):
Elon Musk’s grandfather! That explains so much about his grandson . . .
I found a cheap ($6.66!) paperback copy of Per Amica Silentia Lunae (relief for my screen-fatigued eyes):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1088592805https://www.amazon.com/dp/1088592805
The pile of books on my reading table is growing apace.; my mind is awash in images, ideas, memories, dreams and reflections. Should a coherent thought or question coalesce, I will write; until then, I read gratefully here, gathering seeds.
This is going to be so different than reading Lévi together! Both have lots of references that for me take looking up, tho in the Lévi translation you tended to explain a lot of them in footnotes. But where Yeats is a literary man and Lévi I sense was more like, just trying to get it all down, with a little puzzle-nature so folks must work at it a bit, Yeats is truly a poet and so the layers and layers leave so many mental paths to wander and so much that comes in feeling as well as in consideration of the structure of reality and how to work with it… it was fun to go through all 22 in short order, and I appreciated reading you first so that I knew to be making this parallel on my first pass, but I couldn’t believe how much less of the substance you had space to touch than in a similar number of paragraphs say of Lévi! It’s reading with the moon, ‘we can (those hard symbolic bones under the skin) substitute for a treatise on logic the Divine Comedy, or some little song about a rose, or be content to live our thought.’
As far as matching the prose to the major arcana, some still puzzle me, like the Muses w their deepest attachments to the nameless sailors in the low haunts being ‘The Sun’ . My favorite maybe is the Devil xv and it’s Vortex of Empedocles which mirrors with its unifying and dissolving forces of love and strife which also parallels Fortune’s Cosmos and Chaos… the Hermit with isolated study and intense effort to grasp ideas and application is really clean representation too… but… help with The Sun section perhaps forthcoming?
Re: Mathieson and Other Owen ‘Why grow at all’ and the debt Ponzi scheme, considering to join this Investment for a Regenerative Economy course by John Fullerton now of the Capital Institute https://capitalinstitute.org/ which I get to through the nRythm folks trained one way or another by savory institute and trying to rethink organizations and the economy in ways that *mimic living systems* . Would be badass if some of yall would join this cohort too and we can see what we can learn together with focused time on the concern of ‘economy’ with the most open perspective we can manage.
Robert, John Michael, and Ambrose —
I remember Technocracy in Seattle — or at least the office, and the vehicle. I must have first seen them when I first moved to Seattle in 1969 or 1970. They used a red-and-white yin-yang symbol. Looks like they still have admirers (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Technocracy+yinyang&t=brave&ia=images&iax=images).
I seem to remember that Robert Heinlein’s story, “The Roads Must Roll”, featured a Technocracy-like movement as the background for the villain of the piece. Heinlein probably had run into Technocracy during his political career in California. There’s a collection of Technocracy material on the Internet Archive, as well.
Thanks for the memories!
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Pygmycory find relief from her tendonitis and emotional exhaustion, and receive wise guidance in choosing which matters to address and which to let go. (If you choose to pray for her, she requests that this prayer go only to God as understood from the Christian perspective).
May slclaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is in the hospital undergoing dialysis due to impaired kidney function, be blessed and experience a full recovery to her kidneys.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Ron M’s friend Paul, who passed away on April 13, make his transition through the afterlife process with grace and peace.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Pierre in Minnesota be filled with the health, vitality, and fertility he needs to father a healthy baby with his wife.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG:
Ambrose (if I may), except that Angelou at her best was a good writer and poet. If Gorman can write her way out of a wet paper bag with a machete in one hand and a blowtorch in the other, I have yet to see any evidence of that.
—
Me. I know that is what they say about Gorman about being Angelou of today. That reminds me of Rod McKuen, who was at one time lauded as the “Greatest American Poet.” Does anyone read McKuen these days? He did partner with Jacques Brel for songwriting – “Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris.”
Hi John Michael,
Is it my imagination, or have 30 year US treasury bonds just broken through the 5% mark? Oh my! And gold is up yet again. Some things, like extraordinary deficits, are hard to continue without consequences. Gonna get ‘spensive to service the debt, yup.
Hehe! It’s funny you mention a station wagon driving around with hand painted logos on it, but… When we lived in an up and coming gritty inner urban once industrial suburb back in the mid 1990’s, there was an old station wagon being driven around the local area with the hand painted sign: ”He died with a falafel in his hand. These were days before the interweb where a person has to live with mysteries such as: What did the sign mean, and how did the death come to be? And was the falafel any good?
Turns out it was the title of book written by the local author John Birmingham about life in the 1990’s in share houses. Quite amusing, and was even made into a 2001 film.
As a side note, you know that people are in the middle of a serious economic recession, when milk crates substitute for furniture. 😉
What were we talking about again, oh that’s right, hand painted logos on station wagons, yes. I don’t know whether the vehicle was owned by the author, or the promoter for the stage version. Some mysteries, you just have to live with, even nowadays with access to the interweb… Just my thought for the day.
Cheers and apologies for my utter irreverence!
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Oops, meant to say 5% yields.
Cheers
Chris
>He commented that, being an engineer himself, he knew from experience how very unfit engineers were for governing a country.
I’d say engineers are not good at politics, because at some point, you start talking about tradeoffs and what you need to give up to get something else, ie. nothing’s free, you pay for everything. That’s anathema to the average voter who only wants to hear they can always have it both ways, all the time. Same reason engineers make poor salesweasels too.
And if you force an engineer to give you the illusion of having it both ways, oh boy, that’s when things really go off the rails. That’s why you have a windows system that takes 2 minutes after the main screen finishes drawing to be even remotely usable. “It’s gotta boot fast fast fast and I’m shaking my fist at you if you don’t do it!”, “Sigh, here you go, see, you can mouse around on the main screen, it booted fast.”
>Is it my imagination, or have 30 year US treasury bonds just broken through the 5% mark? Oh my! And gold is up yet again. Some things, like extraordinary deficits, are hard to continue without consequences. Gonna get ‘spensive to service the debt, yup.
Like Fleckenstein said all those years ago “None of this matters until it does. And then it’s the only thing that matters.” What concerns my mathematically inclined self, is that nonlinear growth of the debt. Exponential growth starts out looking linear, you can approximate it for small values as ~x. But at some point higher order terms start kicking in and then things go vertical quick. We’re at the “going vertical” part of that curve.
None of this matters until it does. And then it’s the only thing that matters.
>the deliberately inhuman nature of the metric system
I’d say it imposes more of a mental burden on the populace. Let’s take Centigrade vs. Fahrenheit. To report typical weather temperatures in degrees C, you inevitably run into two things – negative numbers and fractions. You may be saying “but that’s nothing, I can bat around negative rational numbers all day long”, but I’m thinking about the populace in general, and especially those people with the equivalent of 20hp mentally. Fahrenheit on the other hand can report typical temperatures in positive whole numbers most of the time. Even if you’re an Einstein, it takes less effort to absorb that positive whole number and leaves you more effort to put towards something else.
But for doing anything STEM, metric is the way to go, those powers of 10 make all the math easy.
The article is paywalled but I like the headline.
“Investors Have Accepted The Fact That U.S. Debt Will Expand At An Absurd Pace Until There Is Hell To Pay”
Also Moody Blue jokes everywhere since Moody downgraded US debt. The Moody Blues were a rock group back a few decades.
The Mexican tall ship that backed under the Brooklyn bridge is an unfortunate metaphor for the times. I’m amazed only two of the cadets died.
>the economy in ways that *mimic living systems*
In some ways, it does. There are organisms that do their best to grow grow grow and then they crash for the winter and then pick back up in the spring to grow grow grow. I’m particularly thinking of kudzu. The most autistic plant on the planet.
Oh, you’re thinking of something more like an oak tree? Yeah, that would require a different set of rules we all live by. And there are – tradeoffs.
Re metric measures: the US isn’t the only place that has a multiplicity of mensurations, of which the metric is in many ways a minor partner. (I remember having to memorize, in grade school, chains, fathoms, bushels, pecks, and so on, in addition to the more ordinary fluid and dry measures, lengths, and other delights. Then it was irksome enough; little did I imagine that it might come the whole ensemble might come to have an air of delightful whimsy about it!)
In Taiwan, where metric is official, but in many markets things are bought and sold according to various traditional measures. (Cloth, tea, herbs, and so on.) There is a specific type of ruler used in Fengshui that sets out felicitous and infelicitous sizes and proportions for things– doorways, room measurements, windows, furniture, and so on. Though sometimes expressed to clients in metric, the basis is traditional measurements, which in turn are based on the human body. I don’t know what the situation is in Hong Kong, or in the PRC in general, but I suppose the fengshui ruler at least has stayed much the same. And the calendar! Underneath the steady beat of the Common Era ripple the irregular pulses of various immemorial time-keeping systems (like the agricultural calendar, which is even better that Poor Richard’s Almanac at noting weather changes, and the inexorable ticking of the 60 year cycle).
Traditional measures come with their own stories; metric, while convenient for calculation, comes with a stainless steel, antiseptic-scented blandness that makes it at best minimally entertaining.
JMG
This is completely off topic, so don’t post it if you don’t want. Last week you were wondering about shale locations.FYI I just saw that one of the big US oil companies, EXXON I believe, got permission to frack in UAE during the latest presidential dog and pony show in Saudi.
Stephen
“But for doing anything STEM, metric is the way to go, those powers of 10 make all the math easy.”
Right up until you find that 1 atm or 14.7 psia is 101,325 pascals. Mathematically pure, practically useless.
>Right up until you find that 1 atm or 14.7 psia is 101,325 pascals. Mathematically pure, practically useless.
I don’t know what it is with all the pressure units. You forgot 29.92 inHg, 760 Torr/mmHg. And 1013 hPa, which is pretty common when reading metric weather pressure maps. There was some weird european guy who made a barometer in a town center water fountain, it was 34′ high or so (that’s why everyone uses mercury). The villagers supposedly made him take it down when it would dip right before a storm, that freaked them out. I guess ignorance is bliss. Or something.
The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from! However, I’d still rather deal with metric, let’s say you need to find out the total force being exerted on the hinges of the door of a pressure vessel, I think it would be easier to do the calculation if you stay metric.
@other Owen re: ‘And there are – tradeoffs.’
Um. Obviously. Also, the metaphor may work better with an ecosystem than with a single plant or species of plant. So, there is rarely exponential growth because there’s an interplay of many uniquely adapted beings checking each other and making use of each other’s waste projects, there’s death and composting…. but maybe the natural systems metaphors only go so far. Part of the reason I was considering taking the class, tho w a scholarship link that makes it cheaper. I watched Fullerton talk about it here : https://youtu.be/HxSCPs2DsRc?si=1wlE9SvfMWB8VMUT And found it interesting enough to consider. And I’m a person who basically started a Substack to do battle with the idea of natural capital markets and I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about. It’s just… finance is hard to follow and drives so much, wanted to invite ppl to join together and intently talk through it w a recovered insider leading and a big interesting cohort. Tho maybe astroherbalism and a vision is all I really have enough attention for in online learning world at the moment .
Forget about STEM. Embrace the HEM and restitch the world: Humanities, Ecology, Memory. Anyone who wishes to join me on the HEM bandwagon, please feel free. We need more people who know how to sow and sew, and so and so.
(HEM works well without any need for the metric system. )
Robert M, I considered that essay for the Yeats anthology, but ended up deciding against it — it would have required too much specialized introductory material. The pieces I included are “Magic,” “Witches and Wizards and Irish Folk-Lore,” “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” “Hodos Camelionis,” and the complete text of the 1925 edition of A Vision. It makes a nice convenient introduction to his occult ideas.
Goldenhawk, delighted to hear it.
AliceEm, oh, granted. All I can do in this case is offer a very brief overview of a very rich body of thought and insight.
LeGrand, Heinlein called it “Functionalism” in that story, but yeah, it was pretty clearly based on Technocracy. I doubt anyone who was in California in the 1930s and 1940s could have missed Technocracy — it was apparently very active.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Neptunesdolphins, my favorite thrift store has a steady supply of LPs of Rod McKuen reading his own poetry in its vinyl bin. Nobody seems to want to buy them, curiously enough. 😉
Chris, yeah, our national bankruptcy proceedings are going steadily ahead. The rising interest rates and the falling credit rating are signs worth watching. I like the anecdote about the station wagon; pity it was just advertising a novel. I may use something like that in a future story.
Siliconguy, the subtext here is that they’re finally admitting that there will be hell to pay. As for the Moody Blues, why, yes, and I have most of their albums in vinyl!
LeGrand, fascinating. Do you know of a source for those feng-shui rulers on this side of the Pacific? Inquiring sacred geometers want to know.
Stephen, yep. I noted that with considerable interest. Here we go!
Justin, it works very well with megalithic yards!
Robert M #78 and all thematically linked comments on the Technocracy Party, said to have “advocated for (to simplify the matter slightly) a benevolent totalitarian administration run by engineers on purely scientific principles.”
You’ve all been speaking of the technocracy party as some quaint, old world, now defunct entity, whereas it seems to me that its “demise” is only apparent if you can ignore its metastasis into the governing principles of practically every institution, polity and nation on earth, as evidenced by the Covid phenomenon.
“I’d say engineers are not good at politics, because at some point, you start talking about tradeoffs and what you need to give up to get something else, ie. nothing’s free, you pay for everything. That’s anathema to the average voter who only wants to hear they can always have it both ways, all the time. Same reason engineers make poor salesweasels too.”
Very true other Owen. Management took care to keep me away from the customers. I remember one time Marketing came to me saying the customers were worried about one of the quality specifications and wanted us to reduce an impurity. I said, “Sure, it will cost a dollar/kg to meet their request.” That was relayed to the customer and the impurity was suddenly not important at all, why, it was their new found friend.
The US budget deficit is about $1.7 trillion (1.7 X 10^12) per year. There are about 170 million employed people (1.7 X 10^8). To close the budget deficit therefore requires that every working person pay an extra 10^4, or $10,000 per year in taxes. “Do you have it?” I ask. They answer is usually shocked silence.
Coincidently, Medicare plus Medicaid plus the ACA subsidies Plus VA health care Plus some children’s health insurance program Plus the Indian’s health services program also adds up to about $1.7 trillion. All told it’s nearly twice the defense budget.
So yes, we are screwed. If Congress raises taxes that much the “consumer economy” implodes. If they don’t exponential runaway of the debt occurs. (The number of people who understand exponential growth curse is minimal.) If they were to cut government spending that much the economy also implodes plus there is rioting in the streets as the cutbacks in entitlements hit.
Wealth taxes you say? There are no Scrooge McDuck style moneybins. When Elon unloads 10% of his Tesla holdings to pay the wealth tax what happens the to stock price? It goes down. So he has to sell more, and everyone else also has to sell more to pay their taxes. Congratulations, you crashed the market. And next year everyone is poor, so a big enough wealth tax to fix the problem only works once. And since you imploded an economy based on finance unemployment is through the roof, government spending is up and the deficit is bigger than expected.
So we are in a pickle (baseball term for non-Americans. There is an equivalent chess term for alternating between two potential checkmates with no escape possible.)
@Scotlyn (@104):
The difference between the Technocratic Party and the current “governing principles of practically every institution, polity and nation on earth” seems to me simply to be that the former put power into the hands of professional engineers, whereas the current system puts power into the hands of professional managers and politicians. That’s a significant difference, or so it seems to me. The managers and politicians are largely working in the realm of perceptions and fictions, and acknowledge it, whereas engineers pride themselves on working with what they suppose to be absolute physical reality.
Apart from that fairly minor quibble, I quite agree with you.
@JMG (#103):
Yes, I think you’re right–you’d have to give far too much background for most readers to grok it. BTW, do you know anywhere on the web that gives a facsimile of the original edition. For once, I wasn’t able to find anything.
As for metric versus traditional standards, they both have pros & cons.
The key strengths of metric are that it scales consistently, conversions are easy with base ten, and it’s precise. This makes it well suited as a technical standard for STEM fields and an international go-between, in fact it’s right there in the name SI.
However, metric is a specialist, and its proponents forget that it has downsides too: namely the weak divisibility of ten, the unintuitive & impractical nature of its units which are often too small or large, and its lack of resonance with any particular culture.
Compare that to traditional measures, which are rather the opposite. Their relation to the human body makes them intuitive to use, their relation to everyday life makes them more practical, and they have superior divisibility compared to decimal, using duodecimal (12), hexadecimal (16), or in the case of some measures, scaling up by 2 or 4 (ie fluid volume). You see this in how there’s 12 inches to a foot and 16 ounces to a pound in Imperial/Standard, and the traditional Chinese system is mostly hexadecimal/16 I believe.
For fluid volume, there’s the relation of 1 fl oz to 2 tablespoons and 6 teaspoons respectively, then there’s 4 quarts to a gallon, 2 pints to a quart, and to a pint there’s 16 fl oz, 4 gills, and 2 cups, with 8 fl oz to a cup; at the higher end, there’s 32 gallons to a barrel, and 64 gallons to a hogshead; and at the lower end, a dram is 1/8 of a fluid ounce, and a minim is 1/60 of a dram (about a drop of water). As you see, it mostly scales up by 2 or 4, and is tied to tbsp/tsp which have a 1:3 relation; overall it’s practical and scales intuitively.
There are yet more examples: the majority of adult human heights range between 5′ and 6′, and the fahrenheit scale bases 0-100 on the range of temperatures humans can deal with.
Of course, traditional systems lack the technical efficiency or universal standardization of metric/SI, but unlike metric, they excel at common usage, and organically tie into a culture.
So you see, the two systems complement each other: traditional for common usage, metric/SI for technical fields, it shouldn’t be all one or the other. In a better world, each culture would use their traditional form of measurement, with metric relegated to STEM.
Awhile back, I analyzed the measurement system used by the Fremen in the Dune novels, and it turned out to be a hybrid of Standard and SI! It combined the unit types, and scaled them by 32, which means both consistent scaling and divisibility. To repost my research summary:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fremen water measurement is base-32, so that each unit consists of 32 parts of the next smaller unit. The units are:
liters > fluid ounces > drachms > minims
1 minim in Dune is roughly half the usual measure of a single drop of water, and a drachm refers to 1 mL (rather than ~3.7 mL), while liters and fl oz are similar to their real-world counterparts. Since minims are smaller than a normal drop by 40-60%, L/fl oz/dr would be offset by 20-0% depending, allowing a 5% error (±1 minim). All this is based on analysis of the text and contextual knowledge. It was Frank Herbert’s style to leave intentional blanks, giving us just enough clues to connect the dots, as I just did. So to be more specific, the deathstill produced 33 liters, 0 fl oz (0/32), 7 drachms (7/1024), and 3 minims (3/32,768).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A rather intriguing possibility, and a testament to the greatness of Frank Herbert’s work.
>So yes, we are screwed. If Congress raises taxes that much the “consumer economy” implodes. If they don’t exponential runaway of the debt occurs. (The number of people who understand exponential growth curse is minimal.) If they were to cut government spending that much the economy also implodes plus there is rioting in the streets as the cutbacks in entitlements hit.
In other news today, the Japanese bond market is wobbling badly. If you think our credit situation is bad, you should look at the Japanese. Or maybe they’re just a little bit ahead of us on the curve. Not affecting anything here yet. They’ve made all these systems interdependent and interconnected though.
None of this should be a surprise, people have been talking about this for years. Those people are probably going to go into spasms of “I told you so” sometime this year.
You forgot good old fashioned money printing, BTW. Which is essentially a regressive tax. And like with steroids, it has some nasty side effects. But it starts out awesome until the side effects kick in.
@siliconguy
You’re a chemist? Here’s a fun exercise. Express the federal debt in terms of moles. It’s around $3.7×10^13? Avogadro’s constant is 6.022×10^23? The result would be $.614×10^-10 mol? I betcha that’s somewhere between a picomole and a nanomole. A picomole is 1×10^-12? Then rewrite as $61.4×10^-12 mol? Or a federal debt level of 61 picomoles?
I wonder when we hit the nanomole barrier?
@Siliconguy #105 unfortunately your analysis is spot on! A famous quote : “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy”
To my mind Gates, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, the WEF and the Chinese ruling class reek of a Technocratic viewpoint. It could be argued that Plato’s Republic with its philosopher kings was an ancient Technocracy
John Michael (@103) —
Imagination becomes reality — in about five days.
Beardtree #111: Unfortunately true, Democracy as we know it is a toppled god, or soon will be. However, it does have its uses occasionally. I think the Chinese got it right with their Mandate of Heaven, in which democracy is used as a failsafe for replacing regimes/dynasties.
As for the economy, of course deficit spending & inflation are unsustainable, but that won’t stop short-sighted humans from embracing short term gain for long term pain.
Btw, I started editing my Dune research above, rewriting & adding stuff after I posted, so if I may, I’d like to add the new version (last time, promise!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fremen water measurement is base-32, so that each unit consists of 32 parts of the next smaller unit. The units are:
liters > fluid ounces > drachms > minims
1 minim in Dune is roughly half the usual measure of a single drop of water, and a drachm refers to 1 mL (rather than ~3.7 mL), while liters and fl oz are similar to their real-world counterparts. Since minims are smaller than a normal drop by 40-60%, L/fl oz/dr would be offset by 20-0% depending, allowing a 5% error (±1 minim). This is based on analysis of the text and contextual knowledge, such as irl unit correspondences, ie 1 L = 33.8 fl oz, 1 fl oz = 29.6 mL, 1 mL = 16.2 minims (or 32.5 half-minims), which lend themselves to the Fremen’s base-32 system. It was Frank Herbert’s style to leave intentional blanks, giving the reader just enough clues to connect the dots, as I just did. So to be more specific, the deathstill produced 33 liters, 0 fl oz (0/32), 7 drachms (7/1024), and 3 minims (3/32,768). Personally, I think it’s fascinating how the Fremen combined the strengths of imperial and metric, using both a uniform radix and easy divisibility.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Scotlyn, well, not quite. Technocracy had massive flaws but it was wholly public about its intentions, its plans, and its procedures. The Technate of America, the political entity it hoped to found, would have been a bureaucratic authoritarian nightmare, but it never pretended to be anything else. Among the most toxic things about our current system are its raw duplicity, hypocrisy, and cant.
Robert M, I wish I did! I’ve never seen a facsimile of the original, just a variety of reprints.
Xcalibur/djs, you get tonight’s Gold Star for geekery, for including a detailed analysis of Fremen fluid measure units!
LeGrand, thank you!
Robert M and JMG —
It’s possible that the British Library has a digitized copy, nut they seem to be still recovering from some sort of cyber event of 2023, and warn that not everything is available, or discoverable, on line.
Otherwise, I have seen transcriptions (eg in George Mills Harper’s “Yeats’ Golden Dawn”, which is up on archive,org), but I don’t know of any digital facsimiles.
It’s possible that one or more of the libraries that hold a paper copy (https://search.worldcat.org/title/9733483) have digitized it, though probably not to facsimile quality. It’s possible that one or more of them might lend it.
The National Library of Ireland has it, but not digitized. (https://catalogue.nli.ie/Search/Results?lookfor=Is+the+order+of+R.R.+%26+A.C.+to+remain+a+magical+order%3F+&type=AllFields&limit=20)
I haven’t seen that anyone has produced a paper facsimile edition, but I could easily have missed it.
Regarding a feng shui ruler, I found this item on the big muddy river.
https://www.amazon.com/FLaig-Precision-Measure-Woodworking-Standing/dp/B0CS98WDCK/
The product title is “Luban Ruler, Feng Shui Ruler, 7.5 Meters High Precision Steel Tape Measure, Woodworking Pure Copper Evil Spirits Town House, 7.5m*25mm Stable Standing Ruler”
“1. Product features, the first line of inches, the second line of Luban ruler , modern used to measure early door dealers. The third line—Ding Lan ruler is used to measure the tomb, the god position, the card position, and the fourth line of the metric centimeter.”
According to the photos, its built as a standard-looking steel tape measure. The tape is ruled in inches at the top, centimeters at the bottom, and in between, the Luban and Ding Lan ruler markings with Chinese characters in black and red, some at regular intervals highlighted by inverted printing.
There are no product ratings or reviews. Handy belt clip.
Justin Patrick Moore (no. 102), alternative initialism proposals for non-STEM subjects include STEAM (adding “Arts”), SHAPE (Social sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy). and HUMS (Humanities and Social Sciences). There are others covering business subjects. Most people just say “non-STEM.”
The paradigmatic course that exemplifies non-STEM in the public imagination remains, of course, Underwater Basket-Weaving. Although mostly mythical, it has been offered for real–if with a wink–at Reed College, the University of Arizona, and Rutgers. If you can find a way to incorporate “UBW” into your initialism, I bet that would improve its chances.
Hi JMG,
I’m still reading back over our assigned section. For someone not naturally inclined to high modernist literature I have to go over things a few times but it’s been worth it so far. You mentioned the tarot and the 22 Trumps correlating to the divisions in the text and I’m ashamed to say I missed that. Then again I’ve never owned a Tarot deck. I’ve always been overwhelmed by the sheer variety of decks and the like. Where should I start?
I’ve also been enjoying the validation of our your model of history as cycling between spiritually and politically focused eras. There is a lot of discussion of early 20th century European fascist politics (and I guess Japanese, though they always get left out of the fascist conversation) in this discussion about the esoteric nature of the poetry and writings of WB Yeats. It’s often forgotten that fascism in both Europe and Asia were essentially offshoots of the radical art scene.
For anyone interested I would recommend reading up on The Flight Over Vienna and D’Annunzio’s post WW1 Fiume project as well as the Futurist Manifesto for some interesting background. Also the arc of Yosano Akiko will provide useful data points for the Asian context.
Cheers,
JZ
Re engineers as politicians:
I studied Civil Engineering at university, like that great politician Yasser Arafat. (/s) We had to take one course outside our faculty. Most chose Computer Science, but I chose Political Science, being interested in politics. I assumed that with my rigorous STEM skills I would blow away all those long-haired, bull-dust-spouting arts types.
I did okay, but those arts types did much better. The top student essays were posted on the notice board, and reading them I had to admit they had superior insights to me. Human behavior has a biological squishiness that is not amenable to Newtonian analysis.
Incidentally, our lecturer was a young man called Jeremy Cronin. He was my favorite of all my lecturers. A really great guy. Much to my surprise in later years he was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act and served eight years in prison for distributing communist literature. He had given no indication of what ideology he supported in his lectures and tutorials. He eventually served as the No 2 in the South African Communist Party and was a deputy minister in the post-apartheid government.
My own political career was not so distinguished. In the ’80s I did a lot of party work and was a candidate in one general election. I lost my deposit. The damned voters don’t know talent when they see it. (/s)
@ Robert Mathiesen #106 “…the former put power into the hands of professional engineers, whereas the current system puts power into the hands of professional managers and politicians.” That is a very fair quibble. Thank you. 🙂
To which I would beg to point out that the professional managers currently running politically significant institutions, and politicians (at least those, a not insignificant number, who choose to defer to “expert” policy guidance), are not averse to seeing themselves as “behavioural engineers” and/or of “social engineers”, being guided by science to improve both people and society.
And what else was the Techocracy party aiming to “engineer”, if not society (and/or the behaviour of its moving parts) itself?
@Ambrose: I like UBW, and you are right, there is probably a good opportunity there. I am pretty sure they had UBW class at Antioch, where I briefly went, but I was too stoned hanging out in the library stacks or at the pirate radio station to be able to find it! … As for the other acronyms, they sound like something created by STEM types as most acronyms do! STEAM seems like an afterthought, a begrudging, oh yeah, I guess we should include the arts so people will accept our technocracy. SHAPE sounds like people trying to fit round people into SQUARE pegs. Conform them into a certain mold. The reason I like HEM is because it is about sewing and stitching… Maybe there could be a class about HEM Economics.
—
All
I know I am participating in this discussion as well, but it really surprises me how the work of an occultist poet can really generate comments about engineering. I’m used to that though, from hanging out with hams. Not to demean anybodies particular neurodiverse makeup, but so many of the hams I have met in my club could be described as what Taleb described as “techno-autistic.” I like hanging out with these people, but I don’t bother trying to interest them in my poetry. I’m somewhere on a flowing spectrum as well with my own obsessions and focuses (perhaps an electrical engineer can tell me using one of their spectrum analyzers). They liked the technology parts of my book The Radio Phonics Laboartory though, but somehow I can’t convince most of them to start listening to Stockhausen and Milton Babbit, even though the music is very mathematical!
@JMG: The megalithic yard looks very close to the method of the square and diagonal… thank you!
>engineers pride themselves on working with what they suppose to be absolute physical reality
Engineers are hoomans (it’s true!), with all their faults. There’s an old engineering joke, lemme see if I can find it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098947
I’d say that putting engineers in charge wouldn’t be as great as you would think. It would be different. Part of what made 2008 so extra speshul was all the financial engineering run amok. Imagine that applied to gubmint. Actually, don’t. Forget I said that.
@Scotlyn (#129):
You wrote: “the professional managers currently running politically significant institutions, and politicians (at least those, a not insignificant number, who choose to defer to “expert” policy guidance), are not averse to seeing themselves as “behavioural engineers” and/or of “social engineers”,”
I had not known that such folk have now co-opted the once-honorable professional term “engineer” for themselves. Thanks for the new data. Ugh!
Just one more sign of how wretched the modern world has become . . .
JMG Off topic, but pertinent to your interets
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2479332-how-an-ancient-alchemy-technique-is-transforming-modern-chemistry/
Oops! Scotlyn’s post I was replying to is #120, not #129. For me, “engineer” will always refer to people who work in terms of such disciplines as physics and chemistry.
I see no reason to think that there can ever be a hard science of human behavior, either individually or collectively, since human behavior is not limited to the universe of time and space, of matter and energy, but also (nay, chiefly) exists and happens in a realm beyond those parameters. Where there is no “hard science,” for me there are no engineers.
I confess, my recall of Tarot symbolism is a bit rusty from disuse. This book provided a number of excellent keys that unlocked my memory and moved me forward on this month’s assignment.
Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn. Kathleen Raine, (1972).
https://archive.org/details/yeatstarotgolden0000rain
Quite honored to receive a gold star for geekery! Once again, pardon the repost, but hopefully you understand what it’s like to write something out, then suddenly realize there’s stuff to add or change.
As for social engineering, it’s more accurately described as propaganda and mass manipulation. The key fault of the elites and so-called experts is that they can only work with the quantitative, and ignore the qualitative. As it turns out, much of what makes a society functional cannot fit into spreadsheets.