John Michael Greer's Blog, page 13

Notes on Stormtrooper Syndrome

For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world.  Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest.  Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many of those could be solved—or at least faced in a more constructive way—if our government and business elites could think clearly about them. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do this...

July 2023 Open Post

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly (well, more or less!) 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 current virus panic and r...

Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason

Over the last month, in the course of these biweekly essays, I’ve been exploring the fear of the metaphysical realm well expressed by Naomi Wolf in one of her recent Substack posts. A more recent post by her on the same theme takes the same discussion further, in a way that deserves respect.  She took the risk—a considerable one, in our society—of talking about her own personal experiences of metaphysical realities, and about the pervasive bullying that’s used in our society to keep people from ...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 3

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 encoura...

Beyond Thaumatophobia 2: The Night Forest

Two weeks ago we explored an intriguing essay by Naomi Wolf, which pointed out that it’s no longer possible to discuss our current collective situation without saying something about metaphysical issues. That’s a gutsy thing to say these days; it’s also true.  These two points are closely related. In an era where the most important issues are precisely the things the defenders of the status quo least want to talk about, starting a conversation about unmentionable realities is a profoundly revolu...

June 2023 Open Post

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly (well, more or less!) 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 current virus panic and r...

Beyond Thaumatophobia, Part One: A Door Into Springtime

Naomi Wolf, one of the few journalists who responded to the Covid-19 phenomenon by doing what journalists are theoretically supposed to do and asking hard questions about the party line pushed by government and corporate flacks, has continued to follow that shocking act of independent thought into wider territories.  It’s been quite something to watch.  A recent public post on her Substack went considerably further than she has before now, and suggested that the weirder aspects of recent history...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 2

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 encoura...

The Myth of Modernity

A few weeks ago I took the time to reread the book that launched my current sequence of posts about enchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm’s intriguing study The Myth of Disenchantment.  One test of a book’s value is whether it can handle being read more than once.  Josephson-Storm’s book stands up well to that test.  Each time I read it, it does the thing you’re not supposed to do while walking in the mountains in winter, and sets lumps of mental snow spilling downslope, setting off avalanches of i...

On Magic, Manhood, and Masculism

One of the traditions that’s evolved over the lifetime of this blog is that whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, the readers get to vote on what subject I write about for the fifth Wednesday post.  That’s landed me in some complicated territory over the years, and this month will be no exception. In recent votes, the subject of “sacred and toxic masculinity” began to field a good share of votes, and this month it came in a little ahead of the competition.

Left to myself, that’s not a s...