Category: Fifth Wednesday Post

The Castle of Heroes

John Michael Greer223 Comments

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

The Subnatural Realm: A Speculation

John Michael Greer290 Comments

One of the great ironies of the history of ideas is the way that cultures and civilizations go out of their way not to follow up on their greatest intellectual achievements. Look at the trajectory of every great culture, and you’ll find that the supreme breakthroughs of its thinkers don’t happen at the beginning of…

Slack! An Irreverent Proposal

John Michael Greer324 Comments

For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit.  Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in…

Notes on the Lemurian Deviation

John Michael Greer256 Comments

It’s been more or less standard practice on this blog for a while now that, whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, I ask my readers what they want to hear about, and write an essay on that subject for the fifth Wednesday’s post.  That’s resulted in some of the stranger essays I’ve published…

The Way of Participation: A Response to Paul Kingsnorth

John Michael Greer254 Comments

A fair number of my readers also follow the writings of the English writer Paul Kingsnorth, who writes from time to time (as of course I also do) on the future of industrial society.  Thus it came as no great surprise a little while back when several readers asked me to comment on his recent…

Whispers From Antiquity

John Michael Greer376 Comments

One of the things I find fascinating about the deepening twilight of industrial society is how rigid our modern notions of technology have become. Most people these days, asked to imagine a society with technology about as advanced as ours, present something all but identical to what we’ve got now; asked to imagine a society…

Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness

John Michael Greer413 Comments

Psychotherapists figured out a long time ago that a roundabout approach is necessary if you want to tease out the origins of any serious psychological problem. You won’t get there by any direct approach, since the defensive maneuvers the patient uses to keep from thinking about the real source of his problems will keep you…

The Mask of Disenchantment

John Michael Greer379 Comments

When I noticed at the beginning of the month that September had five Wednesdays, and I didn’t have anything in mind to post here for the fifth of them, I asked my readers for their suggestions, following an old custom here that I’ve recently revived. As usual, the resulting discussion was lively and quite a…

The Arc Of Our Future

John Michael Greer450 Comments

In last week’s open post, I noted that I didn’t have anything in particular planned for this fifth Wednesday of the month, and asked my readers what they wanted to hear about. Quite a few subjects got brought up for discussion—among others, the novels of Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, and the metaphysics…

On the Far Side of Silence

John Michael Greer467 Comments

Over the last few months I’ve been discussing the forgotten (or, rather, systematically ignored) history of American occultism, partly because it’s interesting in its own right and partly because it offers a good functional escape hatch out of the rigidly dualistic vision that has so tight a stranglehold on so many people’s ideas of the…