Michael Martin's Blog, page 5

The Canadian Peasants’ Revolt

As it so happens, for the past few months I have been researching into the history of enclosure laws as part of a book project, tentatively entitled The Land, about our/my relationship to land, both wild and cultivated. It’s a subject that has long interested me, and I write about it at some length in my book Transfiguration.

For those who may not know, enclosure laws were laws passed by governments from the late-medieval period through the early nineteenth century that chipped away at the comm...

Romanticism, the Nones, and the Future of Christianity

Among other things, this semester I am teaching an undergrad course of my own devising, Love & Romanticism. I taught it once before, in that ill-fated semester of 2020 when C0VID blew the whistle on teaching halfway through the semester and we all went home and online. Until that dreadful day, it had been the best course I’d ever taught—and the most enjoyable. The students were spectacular. It was not all that enjoyable once we went online, certainly not due to the students, but because of the w...

The War Against Reality

Okay, so the Gnostics were right: we live in a world created by evil beings and nothing we see is reality. Of course, that depends on what it is we see.

The news the past few weeks has been dizzying—and depressing. While most everyone’s attention is on the never-ending story of C0VID, the Archons of BigTech and BigScience continue to propose developments that glitter with all the warmth of a computer screen and promise a digital utopia. It sounds too bad to be true, but they really think this i...

A Spirituality That’s Not a Luxury

People often ask me what my “spiritual practice” is like. It’s a weird notion, when I think about it. Because I don’t think of it as something on the side, an a la carte indulgence for the leisure class, or for people with more leisure time than I’ve ever had. American Buddhists seem particularly interested in one’s “practice,” and a kind of judgmentalism often accompanies the inquiry. In that way, a “spiritual practice” becomes another idol of middle class consumerism, kind of like flaunting a ...

Twelfth Night and the Death of the King

I spent much of the Holy Nights revisiting a brace of books I haven’t read for decades, Jessie L. Weston’s anthropological excavation of the Grail literature, From Ritual to Romance, and the book that inspired it, James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Toward the end of Advent I watched (most of) director David Lowery’s The Green Knight (it stinks), and I write about the Grail in my most recent book, Sophia in Exile. In addition, I’ve taught college courses on Sir Tho...

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

I have a lot of books. Though I’ve never taken an inventory, my library probably totals in the low thousands, everything from farming to mead making and distilling, literature and literary criticism, arts and crafts, science, biography, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, not to mention many obscure works on magic, alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric subjects. I wrote my dissertation on a number of poets, mystics, and alchemists—John Donne, Henry Vaughan and his alchemist identical twi...

Ship of Fools

Well, it’s about time.

I was very pleased recently when my spiritual soul-brother Paul Kingsnorth finally came out in a series of blogposts and interviews that he thinks the world is sinking precipitously toward totalitarianism through the advent of the v@ccine passports and mandates that become more alarming by the minute, especially in Germany, Austria, and the Great Ahriman, Australia, but also in Ireland (where the Brit Kingsnorth makes his home) and a bewildering array of other countries, ...

The New Iconoclasts and the Sacrament of Forgetfulness

“Tell me, Campano, do you ever laugh at the arrogance of mortals? I often do. I ridicule it in the hope that I may avoid it. Boys cannot understand the counsel of their elders, nor peasants the thoughts of the wise. However, with unbecoming arrogance, the earthly creature Man often presumes to fathom the reasons of divine nature, and to search into the purpose of its providence.”

~letter of Marsillio Ficino to Bishop Campano [1]

Iconoclasm, the prohibition and destruction of images, particular...

Blesses All Creation: The Eucharistic Gesture of Thanks

I am really not one to post “The Thanksgiving Blogpost,” a move that I recoil from by nature, repulsed as I am by the maudlin, the saccharine, and the melodramatic. But this year is an exception. You’ll see why.

First of all, I am thankful that our farm had a good year. We had pretty decent weather, for the most part, and though we had a lot of rain, we were spared any flooding in our lower garden until November (which I hope will have subsided by planting time next spring). The previous year w...

The Sophianic Jihad

In The Butlerian Jihad, part of the Dune series extended by Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson, a future civilization calls for the destruction of all computers, thinking machines, and humanoid robots. This sensibility is succinctly articulated in the dictum “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” John Michael Greer draws on this idea in his book Our Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future, and, as I’ve written, I think his instincts are s...