This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds.
*****
One more thing before we go on. My fellow occultist and longtime friend Mark Stavish, of the Institute for Hermetic Studies, recently posted a thoughtful essay with the uncomfortable title “The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Satanic Panic 2.0”. He’s pointed out that the leftist online magazine Jezebel publicly announced that they hired a witch to curse Charlie Kirk shortly before he was murdered, that this wasn’t a one-off event but part of a very general embrace of evil magic on the part of occultists affiliated with the extremist left, and that this risks blowback on the scale of the “Satanic Panic” hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s. I don’t think there’s much hope that the occultists who’ve embraced this incredible stupidity will recognize the danger — too many of them have fallen all the way into the extremist delusion that their cause is so important that it justifies any act, no matter how blatantly evil — but the rest of us may want to brace ourselves, and be prepared for serious trouble.
*****
With that said, have at it.
Any commentators on here keep a commonplace book? If so, what do you put in it?
I will ask the obvious question of the month. What effect do you suppose so much of the left’s cheering of Charlie Kirk’s murder has had on the national political conversation? Do you see that driving a significant number of people in a rightward direction in their political sympathies? I think it’s worth noting that you did not hear a massive chorus of malicious cheering from the right when those Democratic politicians in Minnesota were assassinated by a right-wing extremist earlier this year.
Two things:
1) A lasting impression from Dion Fortune’s book was the notion that prayer (or ritual, if you like) is enhanced by sacrifice – and that the sacrifice can be as simple as the taking of a risk.
In Fortune’s case, this was the risk of remaining in London to perform protective prayer while bombs were falling. But it could be many other things.
This is tremendously thought-provoking to me.
As your main subject of blogging has been the unsustainability of Industrial-scale civilization due to the limitations of fossil fuels, I have been wanting to ask you a question on this subject.
All of the Earth’s coal was formed in a narrow 60 million year period of geological history often called “the Carboniferous” in the Late Paleozoic Era. Trees were relatively new and weren’t even “barky” in their texture yet but more “pithy”. Hence, they grew to incredible sizes of around 100 ft. Yet, the bacteria necessary for breaking down tree matter hadn’t even evolved yet. Consequently, these prehistoric trees sank into the bountiful swamp environments that existed back then, were buried, and gradually turned into coal deposits over hundreds of millions of years.
https://emagazine.com/carbon-in-trees/
Apparently, coal can never be formed again due to the present-day existence of bacteria that can break down tree matter and prevent “carbon burial” in this fashion.
Petroleum, by contrast, is formed by the morphing of ancient algae and plankton across many periods of Earth’s history. Most of the Earth’s present-day oil was formed in the Mesozoic Era with smaller amounts made in the Cenozoic and Paleozoic.
The Industrial Revolution began with coal in the 18th Century with the petroleum extraction only taking off in the mid-19th Century. Given your views on the unsustainability of the Industrial Age, do you think humanity (if it still evolved) would be better off in a timeline where coal never formed in the Carboniferous even if oil still did? Do you think petroleum usage would have even taken off in that timeline (even if it happened later)
@Anon: re: commonplace book
I keep something like that. Not properly a journal as it’s irregular and not about day to day events. Even quite major life events don’t end up in there. It’s more of an auxiliary memory device, where I jot down things I think I might want to review later, but probably will forget if I don’t write it down: quotes from books I’m reading, short summaries of books I finished, particularly vivid dreams, thoughts on some current problem that’s bothering me, weird things my kids said, notes on medical symptoms (mostly nothing, but if it turns out to be serious enough to see a doc, they’re gonna ask “when did this start”– making a note, with a date, means I can get that info), and the occasional “11:53pm, WTF was that noise outside?” in case it’s important later. Mostly not.
The bigger worry for western occultism in my opinion is whether it will survive the upcoming collapse of the American empire and the resulting economic collapse, or whether it will head the way of the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn traditions into oblivian after the Great Depression for lack of funding from its formerly upper middle class patrons.
As usual, I’d like to invite everybody to sign up for blessings. Each Wednesday, I perform a formal blessing and bless the people who signed up via my website. More information and signup can be found here: https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
Also, for those of you interested in the Modern Order of Essenes, I’m re-publishing the material as online course. It’s essentially the same as on JMG’s dreamwidth (plus some comments of mine), but structured in two-week chunks. We’re currently somewhere in the Healer grade, but the course material will stay available, and anybody who wants to join can start at any time: https://thehiddenthings.com/topics/moe-course
In my opinion, the MOE is seriously underrated as tool for spiritual healing – especially for healing oneself. 😉
I hope everybody is having a good week! JMG, thanks for hosting the Open Post again and for the link to Mark Stavish’s essay. Given recent events, I presume we’ll see some lively discussion this month… 😉
Milkyway
JMG, about Mr. Stavish’s article. What he fears, with good reason, has been in the cards for decades now. I am glad to see that someone among occultists understands the dangers for themselves and others. Violence directed at “witches” will surely spill over to anyone the gunslinger, or rather, his or her paymaster, wants out of the way. It is an interesting article. I could have done without the name calling, “middling milquetoast cultural Protestants” was uncalled for, IMO. I do think his point about baseline ethics for admission to his movement is a good one, and a possible way to forestall entryism for many non-magical organizations.
Mister N, it’s too early to say. With any luck, the spectacle of watching supposedly decent people cheering at the murder of a man whose only “crime” was saying something they disagreed with will cause general revulsion against the violent rhetoric of our current extremists. Still, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Bofur, she’s quite correct. Partly, it’s the famous principle Samuel Johnson enunciated: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Partly, though, power comes from unity of will, and giving up anything that gets in the way of unity of will — such as fears for one’s own survival — is a good way to generate that unity. BTW, this is a place for human beings to talk to human beings, not for LLM-generated text to be posted; I’ve added something to the post to make that a little clearer.
David, I have no idea, and to be quite frank, the question doesn’t greatly interest me. Here we are; what concerns me is what we do with the hand we’ve been dealt, not what we would have done if the jack of diamonds in our hand had been a queen of cups instead.
Anon, that’s also a concern, no question. Still, I think the risk of having occultists’ houses firebombed by their own neighbors at 3 in the morning, because the neighbors are terrified that all their problems are the result of evil magic, deserves some attention as well.
Mary, Mark’s a blunt-talking sort, and I’ve met enough of the kind of people he’s described by that phrase that I sometimes sympathize! Still, thank you; I’m glad you’re also aware of the ghastly trap the moral collapse of Neopaganism has set for all of us who deal with the Unseen.
Dylan (offlist), nope. Nominations for next month’s Fifth Wednesday post will be welcome when next week’s post goes up.
Anonymous #1. Yes, I keep a commonplace book. I place excerpts and sometimes images from things I read or encounter and occasionally personal reflections on those things. I date the entries, because I find it helpful to match what I as reading with what was happening at the time. Sometimes I simply note that a book, movie, or what ever crossed my path, but I do not log everything, only what left an impression.
“If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We’re Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/wind-turbine-blade-transport-plane
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hi JMG and Commentariat,
(Posting this question anonymously for reasons of privacy, but my identity may be obvious anyway.)
I’ve had a series of strange experiences recently, and wondered if I could get your take on them.
On Monday, I went to perform my usual practices, and noticed that there was a hideous bug of an unknown type swimming in the holy water I’d consecrated a few days earlier. (This may be irrelevant, as sometimes a bug is just a bug, but sometimes it’s an omen.) I thought nothing of it, and began my banishing ritual, which opens with a variation on the Cabalistic Cross. It’s a simple ritual I’ve performed safely, hundreds of times, for around seven years.
Immediately I felt a horrific flood of energy surge through my body from my heart. I became extremely light headed and shaky, breath and pulse rapid, and filled with terror. I was honestly afraid that I would pass out, or have a heart attack, or that my body would simply explode.
That day, I woke up early as I usually do, and noticed that I hadn’t dreamed the night before. This was odd, and the thought kept playing in my mind, “Definitely no dreams. Yessir, not a dream to see here. No dreams at all.” Like a cartoon thief going on about how it’s a good thing he didn’t rob a bank today, yep, definitely no bankrobbers here.
When this strange thing happened, I was hit with a flood of memories of the dreams I had in fact had the night before, all of which seemed to involve the Charlie Kirk assassination and the Luigi Mangione affair. I can remember nothing now save that they were very realistic, as though I were seeing images of behind-the-scenes planning of these events.
Things calmed down after a while, but I’m extremely troubled. Until this summer, I had never experienced anything like this before, but this is the third or perhaps fourth time it’s happened since the gathering at Glastonbury. The first two incidents were connected with Glastonbury. The first time, I was sitting on the couch fondly remembering an elaborate pagan ritual I’d participated in while I was there– except that that never happened, and I participated in no rituals while I was there, and when I tried to talk about it I had a milder form of the experience I described above. The second was something of a continuation of the first: A friend asked me about my time at Glastonbury, and when I tried to tell him I had what was perhaps an even worse and more intense version of the above experience. The third was also connected to the Charlie Kirk assassination and occurred while I was driving and listening to the news the next morning. In each case, the commonalities seem to be unbearable, radiating energy from my heart or solar plexus, a sensation as though my body is going to burst open, and– in two cases– suppressed memories.
I’m finding the whole thing extremely troubling. Have you ever heard of anything like this? What do you make of it? Some of it could be past life memories resurfacing– I have plausible evidence that I was involved in the Golden Dawn or a related order in a prior incarnation, and participating in rituals at Glastonbury would hardly be out of the realm of possibility– but I certainly have no connection with Charlie Kirk, Luigi Mangione, or political assassinations of any kind. (Unless, of course, the events are triggering memories of similar situations in some past body.)
Thank you for your help.
What’s happened to all the beating of the drum on climate change? Is it because all these AI data centers for now will need tons of fossil fuels? Who issues the talking points for things like this? I was Facebook friends with someone I had known from college, and they would mention talking points a day or two before the New York Times would pick up on them. I don’t think that person would honestly answer where they got them from, but is there a weekly conference call where they put out what they decide are the acceptable issues to talk about this week?
Veering into geopolitics, as I keep tabs on a number of hotspots…. Trump crowed about sinking the 2 fishing boats off Venezuela that were purportedly running drugs. There was no proof, and against all common sense of how drugs are transported into the US. More units of the pacific fleet have been sent to the Caribbean side.. some marines sent… It all has the feel of a last gasp measure by the military industrial complex to grab a ‘win’ somewhere. Since US/NATO is getting its ass whupped in Ukraine… Israel/Iran resulted in more black eyes for the MIC… somehow they think Maduro/Venezuela would be easy prey instead. With its relatively vast oil resources, Venz must seem very irresistable… it’s really like Twilight’s Last Gleaming coming to fruition, as I’m pretty sure the Venezuelans have been more happy to accept any and all discreet help from Russia and China. I think you need to get your publisher to reprint TLG, as it’ll likely be a bestseller as events play out as per the plotlines. It seems almost inevitable at this point…..
Hi Archdruid John,
I like to discuss egregores of both magical and religious organisations.
What happens to an egregore of a declining magical or religious organisation? When there is a last member left, what happens to the egregore? Does the final member “inherit” any power remaining in the egregore? Does the last member get to shape the egregore to his/her will?
What about churches that are in decline? There are some once great churches which hollowing out. Do the last members inherit the egregore of the church? Will the egregore dissolve once the last member dies?
If one happens to be one of the last surviving members of an organisation, how should one breathe life back into the egregore?
Thanks!
JMG, thank you for that response. Perhaps I am a bit over sensitive, but I do very much dislike the contemporary habit of resort to in group vituperative slogans, whether “feminazi” or “fascist”, hurled at anyone the speaker doesn’t like. At this time, I can think of almost no group of any persuasion who does not engage in this kind of rhetorical trickery. Don’t bother to explain why you disagree with someone’s views, behavior or attitudes, just affix some emotionally resonant slogan. I have come to believe that commentator about politics who uses what I will call emotionspeak is probably bought and paid for. I caught flack on a usually sensible more or less leftist site for calling Jimmy Dore a shill, which I still think he is, BTW.
I don’t know if you’ve ever talked about this before but one thing i’ve noticed is most scientism believer’s tend to be lay people. The vast majority are not scientists though obviously there are scientists that are secular materialists. The way they talk about science, its clear they treat it as a god.
Another thing i noticed is that they pretend as if they have no biases and come to their conclusions objectively.
@Anonymous #1 re: Commonplace book
You ask an interesting question! I had to go and look up what a Commonplace book is. Unlike a journal, it seems to be more a place to organize thoughts, record things to look up later, collect quotes, list books to read, etc.
I have successfully used two “journaling” methods that might in some ways be similar to a Commonplace book. The first is Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which are three pages of longhand every single morning that are more or less getting things off your chest and out of your brain. I have loved doing Morning Pages for many years. If I miss a day, I get this vague discomfort that feels like missing talking to someone very close to me… and it is; I am missing talking with and engaging with myself. Morning pages help me get organized for the day.
The second technique I have used is bullet journaling, which functions for me more like a Commonplace book, as described above. My bullet journal has goals, to do lists, reading lists, stuff to remember, people to remember, etc. Both of these have been critical resources for me to be organized, to get things done, to remember things, and to vent in a safe place where I am not hurting anyone by saying things I might regret later. For me, doing both of these using pen and paper has been very important. First of all, it is private. Second, electronic devices are somehow not satisfying and don’t — I don’t know how to describe it — scratch the itch? Just my thoughts.
Since you don’t have a smartphone, I was wondering if you encountered any difficulties when you travelled to the UK earlier this year? Seems like electronic boarding passess and full time access to email and messaging is assumed these days. At this point I still get by with printed boarding passes but I wonder if they will become unavailable at some stage.
John,
I’ve noticed something about the breath as I get ready to do the relaxation and attention exercises each day. When I am “amped-up,” distracted, or craving some kind of material object or goal, I find that my breath feels very hot and dense in my throat, and I have to spend more time ‘cooling it down’ with rhythmic breathing, which clears my mind at the same time. On days when I am starting out more relaxed and focused, my breath starts out feeling cool and light.
I am wondering if this is related to the etheric body or if I am just overthinking it.
A subject that comes up tangentially in your work every now and then is architecture, unsurprising given your interests in sacred geometry and masonry/your temple technology work.
Architecture is something I’d be interested in learning more about the basics of–not in how to actually do it or design structures but in how to be “architecturally literate” so to speak, and how to analyze and critique architecture as a layman. Having grown up in pretty ordinary suburban America, a lot of modern styles are very normalized in my mind, and while it’s simple enough to learn the broad themes of historical styles I’m pretty much at a loss to engage when architectural enthusiasts point out various flaws or questionable design choices in modern structures or talk about what makes a city or building beautiful.
Do you have recommended resources for learning more about these kinds of things?
So i dont get a lot of time to follow so if i step (by accident) in something covered i apologize
Greetings from the bowl of death..
Regarding witch hunts there isan American exgeneral who is ideologically set up, and tactically very very well prepared (training + experience)for this. To my mind always his intent. He was very briefly in trump 1:0 so ya i see that coming at some point. Probably at some level, with pushback (kimmel) from the left it be a bit….but-who knows.
Ok now i am concerned about medicaid and inflation. I fear that were getting screwed. I agree corp. interests capturedthe left… and they cannot seem to figure that out. Just feel this (non-left) approach is just the same with less….uh, um. Ok i do agree, i think this to agree a place and time ( falling empire/ hedgemon w/powerful elites w/money w lots of leverage). But the question is how do we navigate this. Isn’t it really worse than the woke bs alternative.?
I foresee revolution from the locals in the bowl. I see where they are headed, gangsters. There are some here who as the majority got a taste for ownership. I like them ( love the culture) i DO NOT like where they are headed. 10 years. Not defeating the greatist army the world hasever known…NO. But finishing off the already shaky floundering economy behind behind it…yes. I’m guessing 10 years.
From the bowl
I think the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk was the starter pistol for a lot of things. None of them good. However, before they get to the occultists they’re going to chew through the queers, immigrants, and Black people first. That’s who they are talking about when the blame ‘the left’ for a killing that was the sole responsibility of a chronically online, nihilism poisoned internet troll. That’s who they were threatening to go to war against before Charlie Kirk had been declared deceased. The same ones that the Christofacists and the jokers and the Thielites have decided need to be purged and sacrificed on Moloch’s altar to make the world as it was.
I saw the memes celebrating his death. I find them disturbing too. I have no love for a man who called me an abomination, but I don’t think people should be murdered (which probably makes me a milquetoast moderate). Most ‘leftists’ I know, who are mostly queer and not white, aren’t celebrating. They are the ones who know a martyr when they see one. They are terrified.
Hi JMG and everyone,
the other day Milkyway asked about your podcast appearances. Since others might find it helpful: I’ve been using listennotes.com for that – most of your appearances (and mentions) can be found here: https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=“John Michael greer”&sort_by_date=1&scope=episode&offset=0&language=Any language&len_min=0
And a question: preparing for my future career as a natal astrologer, can you recommend a book about how to interact with clients as an astrologer? I’m looking for something that distills someone’s hard-won experience: Common traps to avoid, possible dramas to expect, good ways to structure readings, etc. Recommendations by the commentariat are obviously welcome as well.
Also, I might be travelling to Moscow in December (my son learned Russian in his Waldorf school and is doing an internship there, I wanted to come along for a few days). Is there anyone from Moscow here whom I can invite to coffee and Хворост or can anyone recommend good places to go to meet Ecosophians? (My Russian is still extremely limited, so communication would have to be in German, English, Spanish or frantic hand-waving.) My email is my username without spaces at mailbox.org.
Thank you for providing this space and creating this exceptional community!
@Anonymous: On and off. I mostly put passages from fiction I admire, poetry and lyrics in there. Sometimes a bit of masterful nonfiction.
JMG,
the Kirk assassination never ceases to beffudle me, from the sheer hatred the guy evokes among leftists to the worship and cult of personality his death trigerred among the MAGA crowd.
Watching this, as an outsider and as a non-American, feels truly deranged, and I cannot, for the life of me, begin to understand what this is all about. What’s your take on all this hysteria?
And another question : the Trumpian right, in a stunning about face, seems to have decided that hate speech doesn’t consitute free speech (and Trump seems to think that criticizing him is not free speech either). In Europe, it’s a step we already took quite a few years ago, and because of that, what constitutes free speech has become very relative this side of the pond. How do you see all this unfold?
I had a thought recently that I can’t shake. I was pondering why we have “swear words”, that no one is supposed to use in polite company, but pretty much everyone does anyway.
I remember being a child and figuring out what all the words were. You know, the “F” word, the ”S” word. It doesn’t take a genius to figure these out, and I would wager that every child knows all the “bad” words before they leave Elementary School. So, why the prohibition against using these words?
And then it came to me that the taboo against these words is exactly what gives them power. They are very powerful words precisely because they are forbidden. In relatively polite company you can drop one to strongly emphasize your statement without being considered profane, for instance the difference between saying “It really hurt” vs “It really f***ing hurt!”, but some eyebrows may go up, which is exactly the purpose.
So, that’s good to know. But it immediately leads to the realization of how the power of words is manipulated by social fashions. Media and other groupthink can create new taboo words. I believe JMG has called them “smear words”.
The flip side of that is, if you use a bad word too often, or indiscriminately, it loses it’s power. I think we’re seeing that now with “Nazi” and “Hitler” and especially “Fascist”. They have drifted from what they used to mean, and now just mean “very bad”. Double Plus Ungood, if you will. I wonder if in the future, they will drift even more, potentially morphing into nearly the opposite of what they once meant. I hear that happens.
This has been really eye-opening and I’m listening more closely to people’s syntax. I can see now how JMG’s moderation against the bad words serves not only as a marker for someone who is more likely to participate in civil discourse, but as a way to preserve the power of those words, so they may be used appropriately when needed.
Humans being human, if we got rid of the bad words we already have, we’d just make up new ones. I think we have an adequate supply as it is, although I gather native Russian speakers might beg to differ.
Allie001, Violet is that you???
(smile)
x
I’ll be honest, as time goes on, I have zero clue as to what exactly the current administration’s actions are meant to convey or accomplish, whether from a empire collapse perspective or otherwise. There’s a level of incoherency and arbitrariness to them that’s left me both puzzled and concerned for what happens when a genuine catastrophe comes our way. The constantly shifting positions on the war in Ukraine is one example of this incoherence playing out in real time, in my view.
Still, would it be fair to say that in the long term, there will be no global hegemon in the near future either way, as more and more resources are depleted across the planet? I ask this because there’s far less opportunistic plays regarding this situation than I expected.
RE: commonplace books
John Michael Greer had a blog post on the commonplace and commonplace books a few years ago that might be worth checking out:
https://www.ecosophia.net/returning-to-the-commonplace/
If only the members of the neopagan community had settled for being milquetoast…
If you ask me about Charlie Kirk’s murder, I think that the die of Leftist Reaction was cast with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Bryan Thompson on December 4, 2024. Whatever you may think of what Bryan deserved, the cheering was done then and was done now.
I see a couple other disturbing happenings in the wake of Charlie’s death:
1) The apparent sanctification of Charlie by The Right in equal measure to the cheering by The Left. It’s as if this guy has taken on a symbolism beyond what anyone alive could take.
2) The desperation with which both sides have tried to paint the killer as a devoted member of those they oppose.
In short, this killing has become to mean much more than one would have thought. What was likely a confused man child on SSRIs acting on a rabid desire for fame and/or revenge has come to drive people’s reactions for at least a couple of weeks.
has anyone heard from Random Acts of Karma? i wrote her last week but no dice. i just wrote again.
erika
Hey JMG,
You mentioned hunting lodges during the last Magic Monday. I suspect that much of their activity was secret but do you have any good pointers where I might look for their history and what is known of their activities?
Secondly, as you keep teasing your upcoming books, is there a good list available somewhere? Your bookshop.org page only shows Revisioning the Tree of Life under New and Forthcoming but you’ve announced quite a few more in various comments.
—David P.
Re: witches etc – Three weeks ago I was going through the books under my alter, as well as many other things, to help clear the decks for a massive cleaning-and-mold remediation. I came across books on witchcraft and spells and my immediate response was “NOT ME!” I kept Dion Fortune’s books and other along those lines, but the rest have gone to the Friends of the Library. For what that’s worth. And am so relieved that I did.
A TSW aside: The cleaning included a temporary relocation, and I was sure I’d left my Gypsy Witch cards in my nightstand drawer at home. (Found, after returning, at the bottom of a suitcase with a black silkish lining.) The next morning, my card draw showed disaster after disaster on a day when all looked rosy, and then realized that reading was dead-on for the day of the move, which coincided with a Village-wide disaster, a system crash which knocked out all their communications and systems.
I also have to ask, from what i’ve seen southern baptist christianity and calvinism and even some branches of pentacostalism seem married to the republican party. I don’t see any sigh of them pulling away and focusing solely on their faith. At the same time it seems the second religiosity is going to be charismatic/pentacostal and catholic?
I don’t keep in close contact with most of the Neopagan community, and the great majority of occultists I actually know personally are conservative. Until recently there has only been one real exception, a woman I’ve known for nearly 25 years who is a reasonably well known astrologer and shaman. A few days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination I discovered her making the usual vicious comments and immediately “unfriended” her on social media. If she contacts me, I will explain why, but in the meantime I simply prefer not to speak to or have anything to do with such people.
I read Mark Stavish’s essay the other day, and I think that you and he are very right that this is a cause for concern. The same friend is from Appalachia (as I am also), and members of her far more typically Appalachian family already see her as a “witch” in the traditional, negative sense. Meanwhile, I have at least one set of very right-wing neighbor who stopped speaking to me or let their children near my house for what are clearly religious reasons (We had been friends, and I caught the wife going through my bookshelf just prior to the break in contact).
I’m not really sure what to do about it.
@Bradley (#13)
You might want to take a look at this article: https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/may-sea-icealways-grace-our-planets-poles#anchor-yes-arctic-sea-ice-took-a-turn-in-2007 Nothing overly special to see here, just another example of competing hypotheses applied to the same dataset yielding contradictory conclusions. Darned if I know why this about-face has happened on the climate narrative, but for sure it’s a ‘thing’ now.
@David
All of the Earth’s coal was formed in a narrow 60 million year period of geological history often called “the Carboniferous” in the Late Paleozoic Era
I am a layerson, so I don’t know the details, but I know this is an oversimplification. Coal has been forming in small quantities since the Precambrian era, according to Wikipedia, and I’ve read that the coal deposits in western North America date to the Jurassic to early Tertiary periods. And of course, peat is forming today in some areas.
As David Ritz’s #4, post points out, since coal was a “one off” (it could only have formed BEFORE the evolution of a bacteria which eats it) and, thus, can presumably never form again in all of time to come.
So, doesn’t this pretty much mean that. (1) This IS the first time this planet has had an industrial civilization?And (2) This planet can NEVER AGAIN have an industrial civilization — not even a hundred million years from now, when liquid hydrocarbons have presumably replenished?
I was thinking about the implications of coal as a one-off event. And those were the sad realizations I was led to.
Since you have previously hypothesized that “the dinosaurs” might have had an industrial civilization and that some other industrial civilization might arise a hundred-million years from now and go to the moon again, I thought I would point out the implications.
Maybe there is some other way to overcome #2, but I question how well mining and smelting/forming could be done at industrial scale without coal to start with. It would seem, to me, to be a bit of a chicken and egg problem to make the equipment necessary to extract and utilize oil and gas at industrial scale without something like coal deposits to begin with?
I’m interested in your thoughts . . . .?
Assuming there is a witch hunt, should we all pretend to be Paul Kingsnorth and openly convert to some form of Christianity while practicing in secret and keeping our books hidden in the ceiling tiles?
I feel like all the interest in demonology and malefic magic didn’t occur until after the failure of the Mayan prophecy.
I agree with#14. I have read The Twilight’s Last Gleaming” twice, and I just lent it to a friend. It was eerie reading it the second time because more and more of it seems to be happening. Things are truly falling apart.
@Luddite
I’m a flip phone user with the same problems. When I first went back to flippin’ in 2015 (after a 2 year trial of an iphone that didn’t impress me) it was very easy. No one assumed you had a smartphone. Now, every business takes it as a matter of fact. Airlines are ok because I can just print a boarding pass, but I’ve encountered a lot more venues lately that insist that you scan a QR code or download the app to do some essential function. I have managed to find workarounds for the ones that are important, and to give up the ones that aren’t, but it’s becoming harder each year to do things due to Smartphone Assumption Syndrome.
This is a permaculture question about what a growth of crab grass means.
I have a plot in a community garden and I notice the main weed I deal with is crab grass. Do people here have any wisdom and observations as to what can do well in an environment where crab grass thrives? What does that tell me about the soil and water content?
I will appreciate any advice.
Within the last two months, you discussed the matriarchy and how women’s romance has morphed into something far more damaging than any category romance could ever be.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about the vast experiment we’ve been conducting on modern women since The Pill was introduced in 1957 (to regulate menstrual cycles) and then broadened to cover contraceptives in 1960.
Yes, it’s been that long!
Despite claims to the contrary, it’s hard for me to believe that taking a strong hormone for years to decades (some women are on The Pill for 20+ years) doesn’t affect the user in far-reaching, subtle ways. I’m sure most women are fine. I was, but I also took long breaks from The Pill when I was celibate and between relationships.
Yet I KNOW that The Pill can have dreadful side effects. Dear Daughter (27) suffers from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. She has endured dreadful, painful menstrual cycles since menarche. In late 2024, her gynecologist prescribed The Pill to regulate her cycle and hopefully minimize pain. The result was utter, far more painful misery. She stopped within 6 weeks. Nearly ONE YEAR LATER, her menstrual cycle still hasn’t normalized.
What did The Pill do to many women? It kept you from getting pregnant by keeping you from ovulating, which you would do if you weren’t pregnant. I.e., your body thinks you’re already pregnant and thus there’s no need to ovulate. It’s as though a body cycle is started and never allowed to finish.
Any thoughts?
I’m out of area visiting my mother and presenting at the Harrington, DE, book festival so I may not be able to keep up with comments.
*sigh*
I think it’s an understandable misperception or perhaps a callous misrepresentation to assert there is much of anything to “the left’s cheering of Charlie Kirk’s murder”, as if this were a widespread phenomena in America. I do not see it, nor believe that it is. I follow a couple dozen “left-leaning” if not outright “leftist” columnists and commentators and virtually none of these thinkers and writers expressed any positive feelings or opinions derived from the killing of Kirk. Rather, they mourned his death and deplored those who would perpetrate such an act of violence. Yes, you can find those who do express their politics in such an ugly fashion, but the implication and accusation that this sort of “cheering” is a common expression of “the left” (or “the right”) reveals I think much more about those accusing than it does about its supposed perpetrators.
(Oh, and btw–we didn’t hear much of anything from the right when those Democratic politicians in Minnesota were assassinated by a right-wing extremist earlier this year, not even the acknowledgement that this was a heinous political assassination, with amoral origins and drivers. But then again such expressions of sympathy from some right-wingers seems anathema to them. Yes, indeed, there are sh*ts–er, extremists–on both sides of the divide. *sigh*)
Anonymous, I don’t have a commonplace book per se, but I have several notebooks for texts and notices about several subjects.
Bradley, in Germany you would still hear and read now and then something about climate change. But the dissonance between the enormous energy hunger of AI and LLMs and the desire to stop using fossil fuels is just too big for comfort..
It is the enormous energy hunger of AI and LLMS on the one hand and the frantic rush to digitize every aspect of modern life (with different intensity in different countries) on the other hand, that all added to the declining competence of people, as discussed towards the end of the last blog post, which promises a world-class mess. I’m not sure how this all rwill resolve, since in Europe I don’t even see the kind of people who could lead an elite replacement cycle in Europe if such a thing like an elite replacement cycle even exists there anymore.
I underwent my first experience with general anesthesia about two years ago, to remove a benign growth on a salivary gland (pleomorphic adenoma, if anyone wonders). I had always been unsettled at the thought of being “put under” and now it was happening. Although I was relieved to wake up from the surgery as if the whole operation was a jump cut in time, I have since felt somewhat spiritually violated (though I’m not religious). On a philosophical level, I feel as though I had been dead and brought back to life. It was not the same as sleeping, where there is activity in dream states and partial waking when needed. In the field of modern anesthesia, its own practitioners don’t know for certain what happens to the mind when put under, so I wonder about the possibility of having been aware the entire time, but just without being able to form memories. But if I had been aware but with no memory, that would be the equivalent of another person being inside my body the whole time – just as we cannot tap into the thoughts and memories of other people.
I just wonder if I am alone in having this existential or spiritual questioning (“crisis” might be too loaded) after having my mind turned on and off like a light switch. I feel that I experienced temporary death and there was literally nothing there. I’ve read the perspective of experts and laypeople online and discussed it at the hospital. For some reason, I feel you are the one I really want to hear from on this. Sorry if there’s no specific question. I’d just like your take on this type of experience.
Yesterday our local newspaper ( an outpost of Advance Publications) put in place one of the adblocker-blockers. For the last five years they have in place a paywall which only allows the contents of most articles to be read if you have subscribed, which makes sense to me, they do need revenue. The. non-subscribers still provide revenue as much advertising is built in to the leading page, and the page then comes up when you attempt to read the article but get only the first paragraph.
There must be some sort of big revenue to be gained by pop-up adds to offset the loss of revenue from casual non-subscribing viewers, and the potential for these non-subscribing viewers to upgrade in the future. My question, does this seems like a desperation move in a fading industry? Or are the tech overlords pushing a new more intrusive push-add regime that required the proles to disable their sole protection against their digital masters, and they have enlisted the big publishing conglomerates like Advance and Carpenter in to their scheme?
I’ve finally started reading Spengler’s Decline of the West, and I’ve been noticing parallels with the Yeats’ A Vision posts (and text) as well as the discussion of the spectacle.
Spengler spends a good amount of time distinguishing between Space, Extension and “things become” as opposed to Time, Destiny and “things becoming”. My first inclination is to relate the space category to the primary tincture as well as the spectacle, and to relate the destiny category to the antithetical tincture as well as to myth.
Interestingly, Spengler (a more academic intellectual) seems very intent on presenting time/destiny as the primary foundation of life and consciousness, while extension is a secondary act. Yeats (a more poetic/mystical intellectual) meanwhile NAMES space/extension with the term “primary” although I much doubt he would categorize the antithetical as entirely dependent on and springing from the primary (we haven’t got into the tinctures too much yet in the book club posts so forgive me if I’m completely off base here).
Am I anywhere in the neighborhood of the right track with my musings? Do you see any relationships between these concepts?
Thanks for hosting this space.
Tyrell
I’ve kept a journal/drawings/bread recipes/written longhand of someone’s opinion that I found profound. This habit going back to early teen years. Almost 73 now. I’ll pull out a random journal, curl up beside the fireplace with a good cuppa and the long view from age and experience read what used to interest, worry, dream my early self. From sailing around the world to dealing with a borderline personality disorder spouse. So that long view really helps me stay sane in our current deranged time. And your dreamwidth( 5 years!) covid group has been a considerable support.
Thanks for the link to Mark Stavish’s essay, JMG. He mentions the millions of immigrants to the West since the Satanic Panic, and their general acceptance if not embrace of the reality of magic. Also, the countless individuals within our societies generally who are embracing their ethnic roots via folk magic.
My concern is if this increased respect, if you will, for magic will yield an even bigger crop of “get the bad guys” rookie revenge magic. I’m concerned we will live in a war zone of sorts, with icky nasty magic coming from almost everywhere aimed by a new breed of gung ho clueless people.
The image of St. Michael comes to mind for this polytheist. His influence is badly needed, IMHO.
OtterGirl
i heard from Random Acts of Karma, she’s okay.
i’ve been underground writing/thinking and I check on the people i have in my prayers.
by the way:
you all, i’ve been missing a lot of emails from Kallianeira and a couple of others, actually a FEW others, and i think it’s kind of on purpose to add to the egregore so be kind forgiving and give folks the benefit of the doubt.
Lilly noticed it pulls her out of the connection and fatigues her to not be answered. it’s part of the medium, but i’m noticing it’s trying to dull what connections we DO have online so beware and tend a little more carefully. you don’t need MKUltra to have an algo get sloppy and undermine our energy on purpose.
it’s James’ birthday and it’s appropriately grey outside. i used to looove his long email letters. he was even better in person. i was so lucky to live with the best conversation of my life. we were careful with each other even when i wanted to blow it off and act like it was nothing, he insisted we not live in the trailing off of ellipses.
x
JMG,
Russia is going to win in Ukraine in the not too distant future. Russia is going to dictate terms that the liberal west isn’t mentally prepare to accept.
Do you think that the liberal political parties in the west will take a big hit from the cognitive dissonance?
Allie@001 neither left or right “influencers”, nor just about anyone else is able to admit that our over drugged (including drugged by online sloganeering and chemically enhanced comestibles) society is making people insane. Add economic instability into that mix and comes the explosion. Fun and excitement for some folks, I guess, and a whole lot of misery for others.
That basic truth, at least I think it is truth, cannot be told nor even alluded to because somebody might lose money or their overpaid perch.
@Michael in Taiwan – I’m an anesthesiologist. When we induce general anesthesia in a patient, what we are essentially doing is inducing a coma. We often use a brain-wave monitor (the bispectral index) to measure the level of cerebral activity during anesthesia. The goal is to keep the patient’s brain functioning at its most basic level, while suppressing only the higher functions of consciousness, which are tied to specific wavelengths. And that is precisely why, after undergoing general anesthesia, you formed no memories at all: those functions, too, had been silenced.
Jews are now a few days into the 10 day period between the beginning of the year and the Day of Atonement. We are instructed to make use of this time to examine our behavior in the past year, ask forgiveness from anyone we have wronged, and try to make it up to them if that is possible. At the end of the Days of Awe, we are supposed to gather, collectively acknowledge our wrongdoing, and ask our Creator to forgive us.
JMG, you have written about reckoning and settling accounts for one’s deeds in terms of karma, an impersonal process which does not require a deity’. You have written about connections between what we do in a lifetime and what we will face in the next embodiment. You wrote that after death, a human soul (or spirit?) is forced to review everything they did during the life just ended. If I remember correctly, this is not a pleasant experience for the soul if it did not face problems caused by its behavior and deal with them while alive. The soul will not have the ability to do anything about this between incarnations, but will be set up for another life where circumstances make it more difficult to avoid responsibility.
My questions:
1. How accurate is my paraphrase of what you wrote?
2. You say that some people have specific and detailed recollections about former lives. I can see that the idea of karma might be concluded from these recollections. How does anyone know what souls experience between incarnations? I have not come across anyone claiming recollection. of that.
eHu, what a brilliant idea. The current oversized wind turbines are already brittle, ineffective objects that slaughter birds and bats and can’t make a profit without huge subsidies — so let’s make ’em even bigger! Here again, I’m reminded of the mania for ever bigger pyramids that seized the elite classes of the ancient Maya as their civilization came apart around them…
Anon, that’s very troubling — as I doubtless don’t need to tell you! Have you considered trying some journaling, and seeing if you can get a clearer sense of these images and apparent memories? There may be some knowledge, possibly from a previous life, possibly from some nonphysical source, that’s trying to come through.
Bradley, I don’t think there’s some kind of central authority that issues talking points. Groupthink is quite enough to generate that sort of effect, and there’s a monumental case of groupthink in the cultural mainstream these days.
Stubborn, I’ll talk to the publisher and see if it’s a candidate for reprinting.
Felix, very often, if a church or some other organization is in decline, a collapse in the egregor is at least part of the reason. It’s very rare for a declining organization to have an egregor of any strength — if it did, it would attract people and become strong again. When a church or an order has been disrupted by sudden external or internal crisis, that’s one thing — that’s why the egregors of the Cathars and the Golden Dawn are both robust — but if it’s a long slow decline, the egregor usually leads the decline by hollowing out first. As for breathing life back into an egregor, I’ve tried any number of things in cases of this kind, with zero success; I’m not sure it can be done.
Mary, of course he’s a shill, but if you call him that, aren’t you yourself engaging in the same behavior you criticize? “Shill” is a very loaded word, after all.
Seeking, of course! Genuine scientists know how fragile and tentative real science is. It’s the true believers, among laypeople and among careerists whose commitment to science is primarily about a paycheck, who convince themselves that science is an infallible god.
Luddite, I had no trouble at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Nephite, you’re not overthinking it. You’re sensing the quality of the ether in your breath.
Alex, I wish I did. Mostly I’ve just made a point of looking at, and reading about, buildings that I appreciate. Anyone else?
Alatar, I wish I could disagree with you. Life in a falling empire is always, er, interesting, and no side in the inevitable struggles will be safe to have close by.
Allie, I think you misjudge the intensity of religious belief and popular superstition around this. I’m sorry to say that trans people are likely to be first in line, in part because of the string of trans school shooters and of course the fact that Kirk’s apparent murderer had a trans partner; I’m very worried for the trans people I know, who are likely to suffer because of the actions of an extremist minority. But the occultists, and especially the Neopagans who have been swaggering around of late talking about curses and demon worship, are likely to be next. The thing to keep in mind is that a frightened mob is far more dangerous than an angry mob, and fear of supernatural evil is a terrifyingly effective motivating force.
As for queers, immigrants, and people of color, it’s important to avoid the kind of blanket logic you’re using here. Many gay men and lesbians are distancing themselves from the extremist left (and in particular from trans people), and some of those are finding homes in the populist right — are you familiar with Scott Presler, for example? Many legal immigrants support a crackdown on illegal immigration — and there are many, many people of color who are conservative and have traditional religious beliefs, and many of those are gravitating toward MAGA, as the 2024 election statistics demonstrate. One of the major mistakes the left has been making in recent years is insisting that it speaks for all sexual minorities, all immigrants, and all people of color. Significant numbers of all three groups beg to differ.
As for Kirk, I disagree with a good many of the things he promoted, but I respect profoundly the fact that he wanted to dialogue with people who disagreed with him. The fact that more than 40,000 leftists went onto social media to cheer his murder is a sickening testimony to just how debased the ethics of large swaths of the left have become. (The number? Those self-weaponized autists on the Chans kept track, and saved screen shots of every single post.) Your friends are right that Kirk has become a martyr, and they’re also right to be terrified. Unfortunately, the blowback won’t be limited to those who believed that the fact that Kirk disagreed with them and hurt their feelings was a justification for his murder.
Quos Ego, I’m not at all sure where this is headed, but our culture is very fond of its martyrs — look at the cult that built up around the generally undistinguished presidency of JFK. As for “hate speech,” that’s a vague label that can mean anything. So far, what it means to the right is that people who advocate or celebrate murder may face legal charges, but that law has been on the books all along. We’ll see if it strays, as it has in Europe, to speech that criticizes the effects of unpopular government policies.
Slink, nah, the term I use is “snarl word,” and I got it from Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. You’re certainly right that they’re a necessary part of communication, and also that languages vary dramatically in how many of them they have and how often they’re used! Yes, the taboo gives them power, and it’s the only thing that gives them power. I recall a Robert Silverberg science fiction novel in which “top” was the equivalent of “f**k” and “slot” the equivalent of c**t; it was a very clever way to indicate that in the society he’d invented in the story, sex was ordinary, uncontroversial, public, and unthreatening.
N, that’s generally what the desperate-scrambling mode of crisis management looks like in midstream.
Anon^2, oh, granted.
Donald, I know. We’re moving into strange times.
David, Dion Fortune writes about them in Psychic Self-Defence. As for a list of forthcoming books, aside from the Cabala book the revision of The Mysteries of Merlin, restored to its original title Merlin’s Wheel, will be out in October; the next Ariel Moravec novel, The House of the Crows, will be out later in the fall; the revised The Secret of the Temple, along with The Great Arcanum (my commentary on Lévi’s Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic) and my anthology The Occult Writings of WB Yeats, will be out next spring, and the revised The Ceremony of the Grail, along with the fifth Ariel Moravec novel, The Sign of the Phoenix, will be out in the fall of 2026.
Patricia M, probably a good idea! I’m not surprised that the Gypsy Witch deck had the situation pegged — I’ve also had good results with it.
Seeking, the Second Religiosity is always at least as much about politics as religion, because it’s an attempt by people in a declining civilization to rally around traditional values as the age of reason collapses around them. I expect the GOP denominations to do well.
Steve, that’s the sort of thing that worries me. There may not be much any of us can do at this point.
Gnat, it’s by no means certain that solid hydrocarbons are essential — and of course we don’t know what was close to the surface 182 million years ago, when a putative saurian civilization might have flourished. All those surface rocks got weathered away into sediment long before your ancestors and mine came down out of the trees.
Dennis, no, that’s exactly what people will be looking for. I’m hoping that those of us who live in parts of the country that are much less religious, and make a very public stand against evil magic, may be left alone, the way Hermetic mages like Agrippa and Ficino were during the age of witch trials.
Katherine, so noted!
Circle, I don’t practice permaculture so will have to pass on this. Anyone else?
Teresa, I have no idea. My late wife never used birth control pills, and neither did any of my other partners back before I got married, so I have no direct personal experience with it. I’d be interested if anyone else has comments.
Lucretius, more than 40,000 people on the left posted on social media cheering Charlie Kirk’s murder. (The self-weaponized autists on the Chans kept track, and saved screenshots of every single post — that’s why so many of those people are losing their jobs just now.) I quite understand that it’s very inconvenient for the left, which has preened itself for decades on being the Good People, that so many of its members displayed their real sentiments so blatantly, but there it is. As for the right, you’ll notice that there wasn’t any substantial outpouring of violent rhetoric from conservatives when those legislators in Minnesota were shot. Thus your argument is a classic case of false equivalency.
Michael, I have that experience every night. I dream, but my dreams are separated by periods of dreamless sleep in which my consciousness is completely interrupted. Yes, it’s strange, but for me it’s a familiar strangeness.
Clay, it smacks of desperation to me. More generally, the struggle to get the internet to pay for itself and still prop up the vast towering house of cards that is the modern financial economy is becoming tolerably frantic these days.
Tyrell, good! Yeats himself noticed the correlation between his ideas and Spengler’s. To my mind, at least, you’re on a productive track.
OtterGirl, that’s another dimension of this! There’s a lot of evil magic flying around these days: one more reason why that daily banishing ritual is so essential.
Team10tim, if they’ve been able to survive the cognitive dissonances of the last two decades intact, I don’t think that one more will trouble them.
Deborah, (1) that’s quite accurate, and (2) we know what happens between incarnations because living people can sometimes make contact with the dead, or with the spirits that have the task of working with the dead, and ask them. It also does happen sometimes that people remember. I have some very unpleasant memories of what happened immediately after the end of my last life.
OtterGirl @ 51 The well-known prayer to the Archangel Michael is printed in Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_to_Saint_Michael. You need not be a Christian to recite it. As commander of the heavenly host, he stands outside any particular church, even though he is an object of particular veneration by Catholics and Orthodox. (Use of the male pronoun is conventional. Angels are beings of spirit not flesh).
@erika
Sorry, not me 🙂 I hope you fine who you are looking for.
@Mary
Absolutely agree with you about the chemical and economic instability being essential to all of this, and the blindness of the commentariat. I came to the conclusion a while ago that the ‘mainstream’ left and right are both coming from a place of Nihilism, hopelessness, and denial.
i’ve been wrong about absolutely EVERYTHING but i don’t feel doom for the sensitives or mages. there may be a healthy skepticism but i actually fear more the rift in the conservative community between those who “hate” Tucker Carlson and others who seem quite rational and tend to have a more Christian view of the American Story and the horror of our economic reality and future for the kids.
i didn’t understand it because i’m new here as a former liberal, but was horrified at PowerlineBlog’s venom against Tucker when i went to check the saturday memes. There were others. it seems to come down to Israel.
the liberals are obvious, but some conservatives are just the other side of liberals and no third or other way.
i like Tucker Carlson because he’s humble admits he was clueless about certain stories, but at the bottom he is just as mystified as many of us are about how sick the current vision is.
Again, i think Charlie Kirk was calling out some dangerous stuff. He was criticizing the tenets and foundations of the economic system not just an election cycle. If he trained that many people how to respectfully debate, i think that is pretty powerful and will and can tone down the fractured hate shards going everywhere.
i could be in La La Land. i didn’t see any of the stuff coming at me over decades as some plot because it didn’t make SENSE to waste life on such tedious boring evil. but the liberals are losing it. it’s all a big death rattle and i get it. they’re dying as they are and are staving off the collective existential crisis that needs to happen.
As a Buddhist, i fear the chance of this coming turn towards a new Satan panic making Buddhism illegal. Fundie Christians don’t much care about accuracy, I’ve seen enough screeds by angry fundamentalists about the evils of Buddhism and eastern religions to see that. I don’t think it will actually happen but fears are irrational. I know even if it did, i would die Buddhist. I can do no other.
While the Neopagan community has long engaged in theatrical whining about the “Burning Times” and “Christofascism,” I think the threat may be genuine this time for a few reasons.
We’re on the edge of a worldwide hard economic downturn. To make matters worse, the Great Depression fell out of living memory a few years ago. That means that no living American has firsthand experience of a global economic collapse. During times of unprecedented collapse, people become more fervently religious and seek out a strong leader who can make things better. We’ve already seen the first stirrings of this with the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement, and the conditions that fed that populist movement are only increasing.
Strong leaders need strong enemies — or, more precisely, enemies that their supporters see as strong and threatening. We saw this with the rise of the Democratic left and the endless hysteria about “White Supremacists.” We also saw it with “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” We’ve already seen a lot of hysteria on the Right about worldwide Satanic Pedophile gangs that mirrors the 1980s Satanic Panic. And we’ve seen people on the Left bringing up Epstein and child grooming as a way to needle Trump. In the 1980s we were in an economic boom. That’s no longer the case. I could see the hysteria getting considerably worse this time.
Thanks to political polarization we’ve got a significant chunk of the country believing that their opponents aren’t just misguided, they’re actively evil. In that kind of a climate, it’s not hard to convince people that people cursing their opponents and declaring their hatred of Christianity are actually in league with the Devil and his minions. And those seeking political power will happily use those fears to gain votes and elected offices.
We’ve now had another shooting, this one at a Dallas ICE facility. I expect we’ll be seeing more in the near future. This happened in the 1970s with various underground movements and bombings. That last gasp ended with Ronald Reagan. I would expect to see somebody considerably less appealing take charge this time.
Thanks. Many books to look forward to, then—and perhaps time to start learning French, unless your recommendation to read Lévi in the original has changed?
—David P.
Michael & Bruno, 47 & 55 respectively; what do you know about “ante-post-retrograde-amnesia” and the drug midazolam? My own understanding is that the purpose of the drug is to produce ante-post-retrograde- amnesia so that the patient would not remember anything that he or she may have experienced during the procedure once the procedure is over. This might be useful in preventing lawsuits, and it might also erase NDE’s (as a side effect). Having said that, I admit that I awoke once during an endoscopy procedure and remembered it afterward. The phrase “ante-post-retrograde” is confusing to me; something like before-after-looking-backward amnesia. blerwm. blerwm…
A question for church or temple-going members of organized religions: is membership up in your area? I see some people speculating that the new religiosity is well underway and that churches, temples, mosques everywhere are crowded and seeing an uptick in membership. If you are seeing a swelling of the ranks, where are you and what faith/denomination?
@23 Allie001
Exaggerating the malevolence of people we disagree with is what lead to the murder of Charlie Kirk. We need to stop smearing conservatives in general as racists, or homophobes, or Christofascists. The Right could have responded to Kirk’s assassination with assassinations (and worse, lynchings) of leftists, but have refrained from it so far.
This is not the time for name-calling. This is the time for compromise with conservatives while they might still be open to negotiations. My suggestions:
–We should accept that the more fringe you are, the less influence you ought to wield on the current mainstream. The wells of white straight Christian guilt have run dry, and leftists are losing the even more important factor of financial backing.
–LGBTQ people should give up Pride (since they have rights and high status in our society now) and find some balance between personal expression and mainstream appeal. They should also criticize the entitled behavior of some people in their “community.”
— People should not publically air their grievances with Christianity, don Satanic imagery, or ceaselessly hate America while living in America.
–There’s no guarentee the causes you’re passionate about will be regarded by future generations as having been on the cutting edge of moral progress, or even remembered at all (excepting some specialist historians in whatever academies still exist in the future).
Alex,
With regards to architecture books, I can’t give much advice on modern architecture, except those by Francis K Ching. The books are exceptionally cheap when you get them used because they have been read by many architecture students.
For classical architecture, you can get some fine PDFs at archive.org called American Vignola, parts 1 and 2 and that will explain the basics of classical architecture. They are by William Ware. I also enjoyed the book by Steve Bass called Beauty Memory and Unity which discusses in detail the use of sacred geometry in architecture prior to the Reformation.
JMG,
Speaking of architecture, I successfully recited the Middle Chamber lecture for the first time. Talk about nervousness.
@ Alex #21
For Sacred Geometry and Architecture, I’d check out the works of Keith Critchlow.
Mr. Greer,
I was wondering what your thoughts were on the recent increase in UAP/UFO phenomena, particularly the associated high strangeness that seems to accompany such activity. Given that at least some of this activity is fairly clearly congruent with the fae, why the increase? Concern about us screwing up the planet? Among lots of other things? And what would be the purpose of the fae “manifesting” physical craft or “biologics”?–in as much as we can ever know the inscrutable ways of the good folk.
Would love to know if you have insights,
Thanks Chris
Teresa #44: “It’s hard for me to believe that taking a strong hormone for years to decades (some women are on The Pill for 20+ years) doesn’t affect the user in far-reaching, subtle ways.”
A book on this came out a few years ago, “This is Your Brain on Birth Control”: https://www.sarahehill.com/books/your-brain-on-birth-control/. From the author’s website: “Sex hormones impact the activities of billions of cells in the body at once, many of which are in the brain. There, they play a role in influencing attraction, sexual motivation, stress, hunger, eating patterns, emotion regulation, friendships, aggression, mood, learning, and more. This means that being on the birth control pill makes women a different version of themselves than when they are off of it…because the pill influences who women are attracted to, being on the pill may inadvertently influence who women choose as partners, which can have important implications for their relationships once they go off it. ”
I suspect the influence of Big Pharma has a lot to do with the popularity of the Pill and the fact that “fertility awareness” is so often denigrated as unreliable, although it’s been refined to the point that it’s nearly as reliable as the Pill when properly used, and abstinence is really only needed for up to one week a month (not to mention that it’s free and has no side effects): https://naturalwomanhood.org/topic/what-is-fam/
a) I don’t know how widespread this was, but the Conservative Christians where I was living all added the murdered Minnesota legislators to their prayers for the dead, and asked God to watch over their families and help them find peace. My very left-wing family suggested hiring the witches Jezebel did to target other right wingers. I’ve drawn my own conclusion here.
b) I have written a book. It’s a rough draft, and I plan to let it sit before editing it, but I am feeling very proud to have a first draft of a book done. Do you have any advice for the next steps to go from “finished rough draft” to “published book”? I assume waiting, editing ruthlessly, and looking for publishers who publish similar material would be a good idea; but I’m not sure what else I could do here. I would be extremely happy to make a living as a writer; and so I’ve already started work on the next book as well, and will work on it while I sit on the finished one.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is the particular linguistic game progressives have played over the past decade in which they would come up a label, apply it to themselves for years, then as soon as it accreted negative connotations, they would disown it to the point of pretending they don’t even know what it means. (Ex: “What is ‘woke’?”)
It’s a point Freddie DeBoer — himself as leftist — made rather forcefully in his essay “Please Just [Fracking] Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.” (No URL because it contains the uncensored un-Druidly word but it’s easy to find on your favorite search engine.)
Usually ideologies want to be known by name, even when their contents are vile: fascists are generally proud to call themselves fascists, after all. Their adherents want their ideology to triumph and be praised in song by its proper name. And even when the ideology is deeply unpopular and they know it, they usually just rebrand and try to hide behind some other less-threatening term (ex: “compassionate conservatism”), not just pretend it doesn’t exist at all while openly demanding all its tenants be implemented as policy.
But the Ideology That Refuses to Accept a Name continually tries to disown the fact that it even is an ideology: it’s just “basic human decency” (of a sort never conceived of before in all human history!). It just strikes me as uniquely bizarre and dysfunctional behavior of a sort I can’t quite wrap by head around.
I don’t want to get too Deleuzeinal, but the term “schizo-culture” does seem to be rather prescient these days.
I’ve been thinking about the intersection of stochastic violence, chaos agents (in the mode of Heath Ledger’s Joker), polarization, and civilization’s brittle veneer. I’m regularly thinking about the parallel between the introduction of the printing press and the explosion of easy access to information, misinformation, and opinion that upended monarchy and replaced it with democratic/capitalistic/managerialistic/individualistic identitarianism unravelling at present via the internet and its underlying algorithms.
It is no new observation to say “the algorithm” amplifies extreme positions, pulls everyone between these poles until society is taught. This state makes society, each of us, easy to play upon, like a guitar string. Extreme positions though protected speech and not specific acts of violence call to, cultivate, and emboldens actors, who break the string, sometimes, for the sake of chaos for the glee of seeing the string break. Opportunists then sort these actors right or left. I suppose who ever controls the narrative “wins” this event. Most of us loose because the divide deepens.
As I go about my business I see ordinary folks such as myself doing their best to care for their families, attend to their responsibilities, and make do. I don’t see hatred in these faces. I see worry, fatigue and sorrow. Because the tension is personal, infecting our relationships with our loved ones. Maybe that’s just me, projecting.
What differs, perhaps, in today’s instance of too much information such that there is no information is the scale and power of the machine underlying it all, the small number of us who control it, and the monetary incentive. The printing press was a weapon, to be sure, but its effects are quaint compared to “the algorithm.” I put this word in quotes because I don’t know yet what to make of it. Is it an entity in itself? a Boogey man? demon? scapegoat?
I want to turn it—the machine—off. If there is war in my heart, that is its target. But I am sticky with it. Entangled.
“My concern is if this increased respect, if you will, for magic will yield an even bigger crop of “get the bad guys” rookie revenge magic. I’m concerned we will live in a war zone of sorts, with icky nasty magic coming from almost everywhere aimed by a new breed of gung ho clueless people.” -Ottergirl #51
This is already the case in places where there are groups of immigrants who practice various forms of magic from their home countries. For instance, Islamic people flinging curses at each other in England, as has been described by certain active occultists I know.
I have been thinking recently, and I realized that statistics and machine learning play the same role in modern civilization as divination used to in the olden days. Back in the day, kings would ask astrologers to divine the intent of the universe to gauge the social and commercial health of the kingdom, predict the outcome of critical events, and guide decision with foresight. That is precisely what we do these days with mathematics.
Case in point, when a business draws a large loan from a bank, the bankers need to predict whether the loan will be returned over the entire period of its tenure, be foreclosed early by the client to avoid paying interest, or be defaulted on because the client goes bankrupt.
Now if the bank has a large aggregate of records from past loans it handed out, and it has painstakingly recorded the financial attributes of the borrowers and the economic indices at the time of borrowing, and the final outcome of the loan, then it can use machine learning to make predictions of loans handed out at present. The bank will hire data scientists – programmers who understand statistics. These data scientists will write a program that read in the historic data and compute a formula to predict the outcome of future loans. Using this program, the bank can make startlingly accurate predictions about loans and avoid paying loans that show a high likelihood of default.
The art and science of writing such prediction programs is Machine Learning. So this is sort of like divination. Most ‘rationalists’ disagree on grounds that divination, according to them, requires the intervention of supernatural entities. But Elipas Levi and operative mages hold that nothing is supernatural, but that there are subtler aspects of nature that the scientific mind doesn’t consider. So an astrological prediction is as natural as a machine learning prediction, although they vary greatly in the method and the area of application.
One major difference I notice is that most forms of divination acknowledge the intelligence of the Anima Mundi (or the Cosmos, for that matter). Machine Learning acknowledges that there is an order to the universe, in the form of statistical regularity, but does not attribute beauty to that order. It also refuses to acknowledge the intelligence of the Anima Mundi, preferring to use brute-force arithmetic to coax patterns out of records of past events.
But in function, the statistical methods employed by every scientific and financial sector – from ecologists and economists to banks and insurance – play the same role as divination used to in the past. Perhaps the fundamental need of foresight seeks some form of answer, and people have always sought means to acquire it.
so funny that i’m in Mordor fighting an onslaught of bullying against me in the punji pit of my apartment building, and am extra-blue because it’s James’ birthday, my economic prospects would seem to be evaporating with the take over of LLMs, i’ve already been banned from my library, lost friends, but i’m the most optimistic one here about the near future.
i think it’s because the Christian tributary has branched off bigger than i’d figured and people on all sides are tired of being enraged terrified and i’m also learning how to take the teeth out of my own friends without them raging back.
the one who said Kirk was evil when i said he was white folks’ MLK, calm but irritated at his intellectual laziness when we do art together, i asked for evidence and said i was sincerely curious. he withered. i’d told him before that i didn’t want to mix my art with his skills and couldn’t trust him if he was just going to react like a cartoon character.
i asked why he stuck around if my beliefs were so wrong, and i waited for an answer, and he admitted, “because… you’re more interesting.”
i laughed inside but was gracious on the outside and moved on to more interesting topics than me bad/you good.
this is Scotlyn’s advice. ah! i must write Scotlyn back here and keep the conversation open.
erika
Headline just came in and many of you will have red it until tomorrow, or soon as I am in Austria and many of oyu in the US:
“‘Anti-ICE’ message on bullets at Dallas shooting that killed two immigration detainees”.
I did not believe the story around the shooting of Charlie Kirk would change much of anything, felt too much of “everyday’s business” to me. Apparently it does, and now this.
It sounds like indeed the road to escalation. In the US, but Europe will watch.
Stay safe, all of you.
First, I wish for everyone reading this blog to have good health and a pleasant day.
Second, I’d like to recommend the “Culture” series of books by Iain M. Banks if you want some sci fi to read on a rainy day. I feel that the themes of these books would very much be of interest to the readers of this board. This series deals a lot with the ultimate aim of progress, “Full automated luxury gay space communism,” and the empty lives of the citizens ultimately living in those societies. Great reads and pretty good adventure at the same time.
For those of us whose likely-to-be-taboo views are not yet widely known, I wonder what would be a good strategy for keeping away from the lynch mobs? Obviously you don’t want to be publicly associated with anything even superficially resembling witchcraft, but trying to fit in in a conservative denomination is probably not going to go well for most us weird enough to be in that position to begin with.
Some Christian denominations, such as Episcopalians and Unity, generally don’t care what their parishioners actually believe as long as they don’t make a fuss about it, but these are the most likely to collapse in the coming years and may not provide shelter for long. Unitarian Universalism, even if it survives, has been associated so closely with the Democratic Party for so long you might well be painting a target on your back by being associated with it.
Buddhism, as Seeking pointed out, may paint a target on you as well, though I suspect this is mostly through its association with Hinduism (beyond the racism and resentment on the Right toward Indians, a lot of conservative Christians are quite angry about the large stature of Hanuman erected in Texas; so much for their principles of freedom of religion and private property, sadly). However, I suspect that Buddhists won’t be a primary target of Christian backlash; with Western Buddhism in disarray and no longer a particularly important cultural force, it’ll probably be seen as non-threatening enough to be far down the list, by which point Buddhists have time to make the case that Buddhist and Christian morality and similar enough that the former at least does not threaten the latter.
Probably it might be best to just keep our heads down, not talk about religion, and if asked about religion, prevaricate: praise Christianity’s good points but say we’re just “not ready” to accept Christianity as a doctrine. It doesn’t have to be dishonest, just don’t say what’s better left unsaid.
Hi All: I read the article you linked, JMG. Thank you for sharing it. I think that essay was on point, especially in light of the following.
M3gyn K3lly opened her show yesterday with a reported monologue about the curse. She talked for over 13 minutes about it. The Kirk’s knew about the curse. K3lly shared, apparently with Mrs. Kirk’s permission, that the couple spent Charlie’s last evening with a Christian friend praying over them in response. Heartbreaking.
Heloise
Mary (if I may), thank you for this. In my experience, angels and archangels are entirely willing to work with any person of goodwill, irrespective of religious affiliation. The angels have their work to do, which consists in part of spreading blessings and positive energies in the world, and those humans who want their help doing exactly that will normally get it.
Erika, I hope you’re right.
Seeking, unfortunately, history suggests that you’re quite correct. Too many fundamentalists seem to have skipped over the commandment about bearing false witness against their neighbors, and will spread the nastiest claims about other religions with no concern for accuracy.
Kenaz, the political dimension of all this is worrisome, but I’m also concerned about mob violence by the normally apolitical. If enough people become convinced that Neopagan curses and hexes are responsible for the bad luck they experience, especially in a period of economic contraction, spontaneous violence against known Neopagans — and anyone else who’s known to practice magic — is a real possibility.
David, get to work — Mark Mikituk and I did our best with the translation, but the French original is still better.
Bro. Jon, delighted to hear it!
Chris, have you read Carl Jung’s thoughtful essay on UFOs? He points out that UFO sightings are very closely correlated with periods of high social stress — and I think his hypothesis is getting a very solid test just now, and passing it with flying colors. Remember that not all UFO phenomena are related to what people in the Middle Ages called faeries; that’s one source, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. (Perhaps the most important reason the UFO phenomenon remains so puzzling is that most people are looking for a single explanation, and there is no single explanation; it’s not even a single phenomenon.)
Anon, that’s exactly what I would suggest. Put the manuscript aside and work on something else for a while. Then go back to it and revise it thoroughly, while looking around for small to midsized publishers who are interested in books like that. Once it’s been revised, get that puppy in the publisher’s inbox — paralysis by analysis is always a risk for new writers, and too much revision is not a virtue. Meanwhile, get that next book finished in manuscript!
Slithy, the hilarious thing about that is that the Situationists talked about exactly that habit. We’ll discuss that next week.
Catfish, I won’t argue.
Brandi, that’s a huge topic as well as a very important one, and I’m glad you’re wrestling with it. The more people do so, the better.
Rajarshi, ha! You’re entirely correct, of course.
Erika, excellent! Always be more interesting.
Curt, yes, I’d heard. Here we go.
Watchflinger, hmm! I may actually have a look.
Slithy, that’s certainly one approach. I also think that location is likely to be crucial — some places will be more likely to spawn religious violence than others, and being some distance away from the former is likely to be a very good idea.
Heloise, ouch. I’m very sorry to hear this.
Teresa #44. Mary Harington (https://www.maryharrington.co.uk) writes eloquently about hormonal birth control as the first major transhumanist technology and about its negative consequences on the individual and society. I don’t agree with everything she says, but her arguments are compelling and thought provoking. I hope you find her writing helpful. As for myself, when I attempted hormonal birth control in my early twenties it disrupted my emotional state alarmingly. I discontinued use and never took them again. I’m now entering menopause and will ride it out without artificial hormonal intervention.
Too late for last week’s post, I realized that South Africa is another example of the curse of the eighth decade:
1910: The Union of South Africa was established on May 31, 1910 by unifying the four British self-governing colonies of the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State, with people of color constitutionally excluded from the Union government.
1994: The Republic of South Africa becomes a non-racial democracy with a new flag and a new constitution and a black majority government. Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president on 10 May.