For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit. Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in…
Category: Fifth Wednesday Post
Notes on the Lemurian Deviation
It’s been more or less standard practice on this blog for a while now that, whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, I ask my readers what they want to hear about, and write an essay on that subject for the fifth Wednesday’s post. That’s resulted in some of the stranger essays I’ve published…
The Way of Participation: A Response to Paul Kingsnorth
A fair number of my readers also follow the writings of the English writer Paul Kingsnorth, who writes from time to time (as of course I also do) on the future of industrial society. Thus it came as no great surprise a little while back when several readers asked me to comment on his recent…
Whispers From Antiquity
One of the things I find fascinating about the deepening twilight of industrial society is how rigid our modern notions of technology have become. Most people these days, asked to imagine a society with technology about as advanced as ours, present something all but identical to what we’ve got now; asked to imagine a society…
Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness
Psychotherapists figured out a long time ago that a roundabout approach is necessary if you want to tease out the origins of any serious psychological problem. You won’t get there by any direct approach, since the defensive maneuvers the patient uses to keep from thinking about the real source of his problems will keep you…
The Mask of Disenchantment
When I noticed at the beginning of the month that September had five Wednesdays, and I didn’t have anything in mind to post here for the fifth of them, I asked my readers for their suggestions, following an old custom here that I’ve recently revived. As usual, the resulting discussion was lively and quite a…
The Arc Of Our Future
In last week’s open post, I noted that I didn’t have anything in particular planned for this fifth Wednesday of the month, and asked my readers what they wanted to hear about. Quite a few subjects got brought up for discussion—among others, the novels of Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, and the metaphysics…
On the Far Side of Silence
Over the last few months I’ve been discussing the forgotten (or, rather, systematically ignored) history of American occultism, partly because it’s interesting in its own right and partly because it offers a good functional escape hatch out of the rigidly dualistic vision that has so tight a stranglehold on so many people’s ideas of the…
Delusions of Omnipotence
I hope my readers won’t object at this point if our conversation takes an excursion into the outer reaches of American popular spirituality—yes, that’s been spelled “occultism” since about a week after Helena P. Blavatsky got off the boat in New York and translated the term out of French. Very often, the best way to…
The Dream of a Perfect Diet
I’d meant to spend the last couple of days writing an essay about the astral plane, because this is the fifth Wednesday of the month, and we’ve established an informal tradition on this blog that my readers get to suggest topics for fifth Wednesday posts. My muse, though, is an opinionated lady; she inspires what…