John Michael Greer's Blog, page 4

April 2025 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, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Lords of the Fall

It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a venture, as Donald Trump’s bombastic baritone and Kamala Harris’s fingernails-on-blackboard soprano rang out over a bellowing chorus of media pundits and election officials...

A Vision: Preliminaries

In the autumn of 1917 William Butler Yeats was at a turning point in his life and his two careers, the public one and the other, secret one. In his public career as an author, he had clawed his way up from among the crowd of writers whose work kept the British publishing industry of the time well fed, making a name for himself as a poet, playwright, essayist, critic, and one of the leading figures in the renaissance of Irish literary culture that would get its enduring name from one of Yeats’s o...

Parsifal: The Solution Assessed

As we saw two weeks ago, Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal makes use of most of the same symbols as The Ring of the Nibelung, and thus provides a mordant commentary to the theme of that vast and sprawling work. The magic treasure, the magic spear, the antagonist who wins power by a terrible renunciation of love, the ruler of gods or knights who can’t bring himself to make a permanent choice between love and power and so fails catastrophically, the hero raised in the wilderness who alone can w...

March 2025 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, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Parsifal: The Problem Restated

By the time Richard Wagner got to work on Parsifal, his last opera, the conditions of his life had changed utterly from what they had been when he’d started work on The Nibelung’s Ring. A composer of romantic operas who’d set out to make some point in his libretto as inescapable as possible couldn’t have come up with a more drastic set of differences. He began composing The Ring as a political exile living in poverty in Switzerland, over his head in debt, married to a high-strung soprano who was...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 22

With this post we conclude 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 43 months before this we’ve plunged 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 e...

Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail 2

The Holy Grail! Most people think they know a certain amount about it, even if their only exposure to the legends of the Grail come from watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and some forgettable film or other starring Harrison Ford. You can check this by asking a dozen of your friends to tell you everything they remember about the Holy Grail. Unless they’re serious geeks, or simply know nothing at all about the subject, most of them will tell you that it was supposed to be the cup that Jesus...

February 2025 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, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail I

The end of The Twilight of the Gods, dramatically satisfying as it is, leaves the core questions raised by the tetralogy hanging in midair. The grand hope that motivated Wagner and his fellow radicals when he first sketched out the Nibelung myth as a scheme for a drama—the hope that a mighty upsurge of revolutionary passion from the working classes would sweep away the commodification of human life and all the other injustices of a hopelessly flawed society, while still leaving radical intellect...