Tag: tools for thinking

A Vision: Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends

John Michael Greer53 Comments

Perhaps the most important thing that sets A Vision apart from other works of occult philosophy in its time is that its author was one of the greatest writers and poets of the age. The occult revival that Eliphas Lévi launched in 1854 with the first volume of Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic produced…

A Brief Guide to Status Panic

John Michael Greer356 Comments

Yes, I know I said I was going to return to the theme of climate change as soon as I got back from my working trip to England. Regular readers will know that my muse is an unpredictable lady, however, and what she decides to talk about is not always what I had in mind.…

Writing as Microcosm 3: The Spontaneity Trap

John Michael Greer197 Comments

Last month we talked at fair length about some of the ways that the writing business can serve as a microcosm of life in the declining years of industrial civilization. That same comparison can be taken quite a bit further, and I propose to do exactly that this week. As we discussed in those earlier…

Writing as Microcosm 2: A Door Will Open

John Michael Greer312 Comments

Two weeks ago we talked about the writing business as a microcosm of today’s economy.  Like nearly everyone else in the modern world, writers have to deal with a barrage of advice—no, let’s be honest and call it propaganda—that’s meant to lure them into choices that benefit the corporate system at their expense. Like nearly…

The Future At Five A.M.

John Michael Greer240 Comments

Yes, I know that bullets are flying and bombs falling in Ukraine as I type these words. Plenty of people are catching the latest variants of Covid-19; curiously enough, people who got vaccinated for that virus are catching it at a much higher rate than those that didn’t get the jab, but we don’t have…

The Unmanageable Future

John Michael Greer289 Comments

Explorers into unknown territory face plenty of risks. One that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves is the possibility that they know less about the country ahead than they think. Inaccurate maps, jumbled records, travelers’ tales that got garbled in transmission or were made up in the first place:  all these and more have…

On Domed Cities and Doomed Dreams

John Michael Greer284 Comments

Recently I’ve been reading the writings of the American philosopher William James. You won’t  see much discussion of his work among philosophers nowadays, and that’s not just because he happened to be white and male.  He had the bad luck to reach maturity as Western philosophy was in its death throes, and he added to…

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…

Strange Days Dawning

John Michael Greer484 Comments

Late in 2019 I wrote a series of posts entitled “Dancers at the End of Time,” sketching out certain weird and deeply troubling shifts in the collective consciousness of our time; you can read them here, here, and here, if you like.  They got about as much attention as my posts here generally do, and…

A Place For Books

John Michael Greer331 Comments

As one of my readers pointed out last week—tip of the hat to Patricia Mathews—we’ve now embarked on the most sacred season of the American year, the season of Salesmas, when the conspicuous consumption fairy sprinkles cheap plastic glitter over all those who max out their credit cards to place the latest fashionable offerings on…