John Michael Greer's Blog, page 18

The Great Rehash, Part Three: Unsafe and Ineffective

In the first two parts of this sequence of posts (1, 2), I’ve outlined the background of the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab’s dreary rehash of the last half century or so of fix-the-world schemes, and used the creation and destruction of the Georgia Guidestones as a lens through which to see how those schemes have so reliably run face first into the brick wall of reality.  In this third part of the sequence I want to put those phenomena in a broader context.

My regular readers will not be surprised t...

The Doctrine of High Magic: Chapter 15

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 Great Rehash, Part Two: The Future’s Cold Eyes

Two weeks ago, as regular readers will recall, we discussed The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, the rest of the really rather dreary literature of planetary preaching in which that volume fills an overfamiliar role, and the usually disastrous consequences that follow when the clueless rich set out to tell the rest of us what the future ought to be. It may seem like a substantial leap from that subject to a collection of six bomb-damaged granite slabs in rural northeast Georgia,...

July 2022 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. (Well, with one exception: there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the current virus panic ...

The Great Rehash, Part One: The Best and the Brightest

July seems to be a good time for explosions, and not just in Fourth of July fireworks displays in the US.  Already this month, a bomb blew up a controversial monument in rural Georgia, while on the other side of the world in Sri Lanka an angry mob stormed the presidential palace and drove the president into exile.  These two events have more in common than a first glance might suggest.  A dull book in a dull blue cover sitting on the endtable next to my sofa will help explain the link between th...

The Doctrine of High Magic: Chapter 14

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 End of the Industrial Age

The fourth enduring theme of my blogging over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization, is also the one that most people try hardest to misunderstand. It’s not just that so many people blankly insist that it can’t happen and of course we’re on our way to the stars, just you wait and see.  Nor is it that most of the people who have gotten past that delusion are salivating over the thought that we’ll get flattened by exactly the kind of sudden apocalyptic end ...

The Subnatural Realm: A Speculation

One of the great ironies of the history of ideas is the way that cultures and civilizations go out of their way not to follow up on their greatest intellectual achievements. Look at the trajectory of every great culture, and you’ll find that the supreme breakthroughs of its thinkers don’t happen at the beginning of an arc of intellectual achievement; they happen at the end, just before whatever field of work led to those breakthroughs gets abandoned.

Classical civilization is a case in point.  T...

June 2022 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. (Well, with one exception: there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the current virus panic ...

The Twilight of Empire

The third of the topics I’ve discussed at length in my blogs over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of America’s global empire, is especially timely just now.  I noted in a post last year, while discussing the debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the remaining scraps of America’s global hegemony might not be long for this world. Since that prediction seems to be fulfilling itself around us right now in real time, it may be helpful to take a little while to talk about wh...