Every month or so since the 2016 presidential election campaign hit high tide, somebody has asked me to say something about the weirdest and most interesting aspect of that campaign: the role played in it by a diffuse constellation of right-wing occultists who united for a brief time under the banner of a cartoon frog.…
Author: John Michael Greer
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Forces of (Negative) Evil
This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available…
The Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Left, and the Esc-Center
When I predicted back in January of 2016 that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, I suggested that his candidacy would mark a sea change in American politics and public life. That’s turned out to be even more true than I’d expected. It’s not just that Trump’s presidency challenges the…
June 2018 Open Post
As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month (well, more or less!) to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill…
An Astrological Interlude: Cancer Ingress 2018
Three months ago, we marked the beginning of the astrological year by discussing the Aries ingress chart for the United States. Those of you who weren’t part of that conversation may want to know that an Aries ingress chart is one of the basic tools of mundane astrology, the branch of traditional astrology that tracks…
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Dawn of Manifestation
With this post we begin a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s going to be a wild ride. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available editions of The Cosmic…
Bad Faith and Worse Hairstyles
For the last few weeks I’ve been making my way through the dense prose of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the most important work to come out of the existentialist school of philosophy. Why? Partly for no better reason than that a cheap paperback copy happened to turn up in the philosophy section of a…
On Occult Literature: A Diversion of Sorts
It so happens that last week’s post on reading books by dead people had a curious echo. In a forum I frequent where occultism is the subject of discussion, an earnest young person put up a plaintive post, asking why so much classic occult literature is so boring to read. As usual in such forums,…
The Choice of a Canon
Last week’s post on the spooky dimensions of reading—the one-on-one encounter, in the silent places of the mind, with another person’s thinking—sparked a lively discussion on the comments page, and no shortage of interesting questions. One of the points that was brought up repeatedly, though, focused on one of the points that I didn’t address…
The Taste of Another’s Thoughts
We’ve taken a somewhat rambling route in our discussion of how each of us can haul ourselves up out of the swamp of abstractions in which modern industrial society is sinking fast, and find our way to the solid ground of things that actually matter. I know some of my readers have been baffled or…