Tag: america

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…

A Prayer for Nonbelievers

John Michael Greer505 Comments

I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print.  I have a dim memory of seeing a  newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed before…

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,…

Toward the Breaking Point

John Michael Greer599 Comments

The great changes, the changes that matter, don’t always announce themselves with the blare of amplified voices or the distant thunder of cannons and bombs.  As often as not they take place quietly, moving unnoticed through the crawlspaces of society, and it takes an attentive ear to subtle cues and whispers in the night to…

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,…

Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness

John Michael Greer413 Comments

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

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…