John Michael Greer's Blog, page 6

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 2

Let’s take a moment to review our story so far.  In mythic terms, it’s a straightforward fairy tale: the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, stolen by the dwarf Alberich and turned into a magic ring, was then stolen from him in turn by the god Wotan, who then had to hand it over to the giants Fasolt and Fafner under threat of imminent doom. Fafner killed Fasolt on the spot, made off with the ring and the rest of the dwarf’s treasure, and turned himself into a dragon, the better to guard the treas...

November 2024 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...

The Century of the Other

As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes.

These have been getting plenty...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 18

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 Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 1

Yes, I know we had a presidential election here in the US yesterday. The remarkable thing about it, after a campaign season so packed with improbabilities and absurdities, is that it was a normal election, with no more than the usual amount of vote fraud and a winner declared by sunrise. While everyone recovers from their hangovers, let’s continue with our discussion of The Nibelung’s Ring; those of my readers who are paying attention may notice that what we’re exploring may not be quite as unre...

The Man with the Moustache

One of the lasting traditions on this blog is that whenever a month has five Wednesdays in it, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject for the fifth Wednesday’s post. For the last several years now, one of the perennial runners-up has been a straightforward question:  why is it that Adolf Hitler has become such an overwhelming presence in popular culture in the United States, and across the modern industrial West more generally? That’s the one that won this month’s competition....

October 2024 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...

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold 2

In the last post in this sequence, two weeks ago, we watched Alberich steal the magic gold from the bottom of the Rhine.  This reenacted in symbolic form the process by which our Western civilization, like every other civilization in recorded history, abandoned the traditional human relationship with nature as a community of persons and started treating it as a passive source of commodities instead. Alberich’s act thus sets the drama of modern history in motion.

Alberich makes his getaway.

This ...

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 17

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 Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold I

In this and the posts to come I’m going to be presenting a social, political, and economic interpretation of what’s going on in the operas composing Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. Now of course the usual reaction to such interpretations is to back away from the crazy person as quickly as possible, and there’s good reason for that.

You can fit just about any allegorical scheme to The Hunting of the Snark. (I’ll forego repeating that two more times.)

Crackpot interpretive scheme...