Category: Monthly Post

In the Footsteps of High John

John Michael Greer129 Comments

Two weeks ago, while winding up the story of the colonial Rhode Island astrologer Joseph Stafford, I noted that the kind of occultism practiced by Stafford and Johannes Kelpius—the learned occult traditions of the Renaissance, which were experiencing their last golden autumn in Europe during the years when the American colonies were being founded—was by…

An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2020

John Michael Greer399 Comments

Before we go on to the next vignette from the magical history of the United States, it’s time to glance over the annual Aries ingress chart for the United States and glean what we can of the next year of American history from that source. Readers new to this blog may not yet be aware…

Toward the Next America

John Michael Greer351 Comments

When I mentioned in a post two weeks ago that America was heading into a new phase of its history, and that I would be offering some suggestions about what that next phase might look like, I was far from sure how to begin that conversation.  As happens fairly often these days, however, current events…

“Wind is Changing!”

John Michael Greer415 Comments

Of late my mind has been circling back to a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, one of the passions of my insufficiently misspent youth. The scene in question comes early in the third volume of that sprawling trilogy, as the cavalry of the kingdom of Rohan hurry to the rescue of…

Dancers at the End of Time, Part Three: A Mortal Splendor

John Michael Greer389 Comments

Some of my critics like to insist that I never admit that I’m wrong. Those readers who have been following me for any length of time know that this isn’t true, but like so many of the fashionable distortions of our age, it points to a truth it doesn’t actually express. What offends those critics,…

Heating Up The Political Climate

John Michael Greer352 Comments

Yes, we need to talk about climate change again, and it’s probably necessary to start with a point I’ve made on this blog several times already: anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public. Many people these days don’t…

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2019

John Michael Greer208 Comments

A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…

The Dream of a Managed Society

John Michael Greer391 Comments

My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…

The Flight To The Fringes, And What Waits There

John Michael Greer280 Comments

Several of my readers alerted me over the last week to an online essay by Christian writer Rod Dreher on the rising popularity of malevolent magic and demonolatry (the worship of malign spirits) on the leftward end of the US political scene. For so loaded a topic, Dreher’s essay is thoughtful and admirably measured; what’s…

A Conversation with the World

John Michael Greer389 Comments

Over the last three and a half months, I’ve spent most of my writing time on this blog tracing a series of trajectories that all spiral in toward a common center. Each of those explorations started with some feature of contemporary culture and followed it back to its roots in a very odd set of…