Category: Monthly Post

A Season for Giving

John Michael Greer229 Comments

As I write these words, Christmas is a little more than a month away. Normally I don’t look forward to that December day with any noteworthy enthusiasm. Granted, it’s nice to know that the auditory drool that  spatters down from loudspeakers every December is almost done for another year. It also means that my wife…

The End of the Dream

John Michael Greer378 Comments

There are times when the winds that shape the future blow strong enough to be heard over the jabber of everyday life, and this is one of those times. For a while now I’ve been mulling over a handful of often-repeated comments on this blog, and I find that if I look through them, into…

The Negative-Sum Economy

John Michael Greer355 Comments

There are tides and seasons in the comments I field for posts here on my blog, certain questions that get asked at regular intervals, certain saliva-flecked tirades I can count on getting whenever  certain things appear in my writings or happen in the world.  One of the more frequent of the questions is how to…

Potemkin Nation

John Michael Greer429 Comments

There are advantages to learning about history. One of the big ones is that patterns repeat themselves across historical time, and if you know what happened just before other societies went through the important inflection points in their life cycle, you can tolerably often figure out when one of those is about to happen in…

The Wars of the Roses

John Michael Greer102 Comments

At this point in our survey of the magical history of America, we’ve reached the period that can fairly be called the golden age of American occultism.  It’s a little difficult to date the leading edge of that period, but 1890 will do as well as any.  The end of the golden age is a…

In Search of Immortality

John Michael Greer146 Comments

The explosive growth of interest in occultism that followed the rise of the Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century set many currents of thought and practice in motion, and some of those were stranger than others. The one we’ll be exploring in this month’s adventure in America’s magical history is one of the strangest,…

The Legacy of Luxor

John Michael Greer76 Comments

Late last year, before veering off on several necessary tangents, we brought the story of American occultism up to the point when the Theosophical Society was hitting its stride. Now that we can return to the story, let’s circle back to the same point in history.  Lodges of the T.S., as it was usually called…

The Flight From Thinking

John Michael Greer348 Comments

For more than a year now I’ve been devoting a post or two each month to the magical history of the United States, and I’d meant to proceed this week to another of those. In the unfolding story we’ve been following together, after all, we’ve reached the dawn of the golden age of American occultism,…

A Useful Kind of Madness

John Michael Greer365 Comments

Like the last two installments in this blog’s discussion of the magical history of America, which you can read here and here, this post will discuss one of the factors that helped make the golden age of American occultism the astonishingly weird and creative period that it was. That said, the theme of this latest…

A Gathering of Long Lost Friends

John Michael Greer163 Comments

Regular readers will be aware that many of last year’s posts on this blog were devoted to what we might call the history of American magic, or perhaps the magical history of America—the part of the history of the United States that deals with the rise, flourishing, and (most recently) neglect and collective erasure of…