John Michael Greer's Blog, page 11

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

These days I hear a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible to change the world, and if so, how to go about it. It’s understandable that this should be so, since the world around us is such a steaming mess.  Nor, despite the bleatings of true believers in progress, is it getting better.  Quite the contrary, for most people in the modern industrial world—and especially here in the United States—conditions have been getting worse for decades.

“Under the red, white, and blue” used to mean...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 8

With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival.  Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend reading the earlier posts in this sequence first; you can find them here.  Either way, grab your tarot cards and hang on tight.

If you can read French, I strongly encour...

The Return of Religion

Somalian-born author and erstwhile New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali caused quite a flutter in several dovecotes the other day when she published an essay announcing that she had given up atheism and converted to Christianity.  The Christian writers I’ve read who discussed her essay were of course pleased by it, while most of the others whose comments I happened to see were startled.  The atheist community doubtless wasn’t happy, but I noted mostly dead silence from that quarter. That’s not surprising...

Surviving Catabolic Collapse: A Case Study

One of the longstanding traditions on this blog is that when there are five Wednesdays in a month, my commentariat gets to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever topic gets the most votes ends up becoming the theme I write about for that post. That’s landed me in a pickle or two from time to time, when the topic my readers want to hear about is something I’d really rather not address; sometimes, by contrast, a reader request pitchforks me into unexpectedly interesting territo...

November 2023 Open Post

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 — but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with one exception.  There’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anyt...

Science as Enchantment

All things considered, this may seem like an odd time to start talking again about the nature, history, and future of enchantment.  That was one of the core themes I explored in posts during the first half of the year, granted, and I had much more to say about it when the pressures of a world system coming unglued made it necessary to talk about current events instead.

The fast lane to national bankruptcy and a default on the federal debt.

Those pressures haven’t abated at all—quite the contrary...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 7

With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival.  Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend reading the earlier posts in this sequence first; you can find them here.  Either way, grab your tarot cards and hang on tight.

If you can read French, I strongly encour...

The Relevance of Tentacles

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad f...

October 2023 Open Post

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 — but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with one exception.  There’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anyt...

Bracing for Impact

I think it was Lenin who said that there are decades in which nothing happens, and then there are months in which decades happen. It’s a useful reminder that the pace of historic change is not smooth. We’ve all seen immense changes take place over the last few decades, but in the industrial world, at least, most of them have happened slowly.  Recent headlines suggest, though, that the pace is picking up to a remarkable extent. A brief survey of the landscape of crisis ahead of us may thus be hel...