John Michael Greer's Blog, page 21

The Unmanageable Future

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 laid their share of traps at the feet of adventurers on their way to new places and accounted for an abundance of disasters. As we make our way willy-nilly into that ...

The Doctrine 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...

Tomorrowland Has Fallen!

Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural landscape are frantically trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are ill just now—that’s what usually happens in the temperate zone’s winter, you know, when the latest respiratory viruses make their rounds.  I grant just as freely that hospitals are scrambling to kee...

Notes on the Lemurian Deviation

It’s been more or less standard practice on this blog for a while now that, whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, I ask my readers what they want to hear about, and write an essay on that subject for the fifth Wednesday’s post.  That’s resulted in some of the stranger essays I’ve published here. Readers who don’t know their way around the lingo of classic Western occultism may well have suspected, the moment they saw the title of today’s post, that it was going to be another addition to...

December 2021 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 ...

On Domed Cities and Doomed Dreams

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 that misfortune by having a mind clear and honest enough that he drew certain necessary conclusions from the intellectual struggles of his day.

William James

He hasn’t yet been forg...

The Doctrine 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...

An Empire of Dreams

There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people.  Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society, bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools.  It then sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who thought ...

November 2021 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 ...

A Season for Giving

As I write these words, Christmas is a little more than a month away. Normally I don’t look forward to that December day with any noteworthy enthusiasm. Granted, it’s nice to know that the auditory drool that  spatters down from loudspeakers every December is almost done for another year. It also means that my wife will no longer be excluded from most stores; she’s among those who are allergic to poinsettias—the plants in question are related to rubber trees,  you see, and their pollen sets off ...