Tag: history

The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future

John Michael Greer352 Comments

As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week.  To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant.  That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…

An Empire of Dreams

John Michael Greer339 Comments

There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people.  Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes…

The Next European War

John Michael Greer346 Comments

The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society.  It’s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we’ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we’re constantly breaking new ground and going where no…

The End of the Dream

John Michael Greer378 Comments

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

The 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…

What We Can Still Accomplish

John Michael Greer356 Comments

One of the unexpected benefits of posting my reflections on the future of industrial society in public is that quite often I get advance warning of events on the horizon that others haven’t anticipated yet.  Sometimes, I’m glad to say, it’s because someone in my commentariat happens to have noticed an obscure news story or…

Whispers From Antiquity

John Michael Greer376 Comments

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

In Search of Immortality

John Michael Greer146 Comments

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

The Legacy of Luxor

John Michael Greer76 Comments

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

A Gathering of Long Lost Friends

John Michael Greer163 Comments

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