Category: Fifth Wednesday Post

A Tome of Forbidden Technologies

John Michael Greer561 Comments

Once again we’re near the end of a month with five Wednesdays, and as regular readers of this blog know well, that means that readers got to nominate and vote on the subject of the fifth Wednesday post. This time the theme that won the contest was a glance back over the landscape of rejected…

War In Heaven?

John Michael Greer287 Comments

As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, the topic of the fifth Wednesday post here gets decided by the readership via a flurry of nominations and votes. Since I have the weirdest as well as the best commentariat on the internet, fifth Wednesday topics so far…

The Rowling Effect

John Michael Greer293 Comments

Yes, I know I was supposed to go on this week to discuss downward mobility as a way to freedom, the next of the themes that took the three top spots in this month’s fifth Wednesday competition. It’s a topical subject, not least on account of the wrenching changes now under way in the political…

A Few Notes On Psychic Self-Defense

John Michael Greer329 Comments

It’s a longstanding custom on this blog that whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject I’ll discuss in the fifth Wednesday post. This month, by a large plurality, readers asked for an essay on psychic self-defense: the art of protecting yourself against hostile or…

A Few Notes on Matriarchy

John Michael Greer401 Comments

You don’t actually understand an idea until you know its history. That lesson is one that most people have been doing their level best not to learn in recent years. Their unwillingness isn’t any kind of accident. Once you know where an idea came from and what kind of vagrant wanderings it’s been through on…

A Case Study in Stimulus Diffusion

John Michael Greer240 Comments

From an outsider’s perspective, the sibling rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a fascinating slice of religious and cultural history. Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences, especially when compared to religions elsewhere in the world. Both developed in the eastern penumbra…

Carl Jung, Occultist

John Michael Greer180 Comments

A longstanding tradition on this blog has it that whenever a month has five Wednesdays, the readers get to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever proposal fields the largest number of votes becomes the topic for that post. This time, the winning theme was the archetypal teachings of Carl Jung, the famous…

The Man with the Moustache

John Michael Greer356 Comments

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…

The Neckless Ones: A Historical Puzzle

John Michael Greer320 Comments

A longstanding tradition on this blog allows the readers to nominate and vote on a theme for the month’s last post in any month that has five Wednesdays. July being so favored, the usual lively contest unfolded five weeks ago, and the winner this time was the question of why the cultures of the modern…

Music as a Magical Language

John Michael Greer273 Comments

Once again we have a month with five Wednesdays, and by time-honored custom I called on my readers to nominate and vote on their choice of topics for this post. This month, the relationship between occultism and music got the largest number of votes.  It’s an intriguing topic, and one that has attracted a great…