The No-Ego Ego Trip: An Interlude

John Michael Greer163 Comments

Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery…

A Vision: The Principal Symbol

John Michael Greer111 Comments

Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, it’s time for us to plunge into the depths of Yeats’s Vision. That’s easy, in a certain sense, because Yeats starts out the main body of our text by tossing the reader straightway into the deep end of the pool, launching at once into the core…

Situationism: Laughter from the Empyrean

John Michael Greer347 Comments

Tolerably often, when I’m reading any of the documents that came out of the original Situationist International, I end up feeling as though the author is caught up in a desperate struggle between his own Marxist presuppositions and the world as it actually exists. That’s common enough in 20th century Marxist literature from outside the…

September 2025 Open Post

John Michael Greer639 Comments

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)…

Situationism: Understanding the Spectacle

John Michael Greer416 Comments

Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of…

A Vision: Anima Mundi

John Michael Greer272 Comments

As we move from the first to the second half of Yeats’s programmatic essay “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” we leave the territory of poetry and the arts and plunge headlong into the second of Yeats’s lifelong passions, the realm of occultism. More specifically, he sets out in a single vivid paragraph the central theme of…

Situationism: A Voice From The Fringes

John Michael Greer402 Comments

There’s much to be learned from studying movements that thought they were the wave of the future, and weren’t. To begin with, there’s a distinctive tone of strident triumphalism that most movements doomed to fail seem to adopt, some at the very beginning of their trajectories, others once they pass their peak and start down…

August 2025 Open Post

John Michael Greer544 Comments

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)…

The Narrative Trap

John Michael Greer409 Comments

One of the experiences I’ve had tolerably often, over the more than nineteen years that I’ve been writing these weekly essays, is the discovery that a series of apparently disconnected posts I’ve written were all talking about the same thing. Yes, that’s happened again. It’s going to take some work to trace out the connection…

A Vision: Anima Hominis

John Michael Greer105 Comments

At this point in our exploration of Yeats’s great occult synthesis A Vision, it will help to step back and glance at an earlier work of his that provided that synthesis with many of its core ideas. That essay is “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” and we’ll explore the first half of it here, titled “Anima…