The end of The Twilight of the Gods, dramatically satisfying as it is, leaves the core questions raised by the tetralogy hanging in midair. The grand hope that motivated Wagner and his fellow radicals when he first sketched out the Nibelung myth as a scheme for a drama—the hope that a mighty upsurge of revolutionary passion from the working classes would sweep away the commodification of human life and all the other injustices of a hopelessly flawed society, while still leaving radical intellectuals comfortably perched in their positions of privilege—had gone up in flames in the real world as well as the operatic one.
A triad of unwelcome realizations had doomed that dream, at least for Wagner. He had realized, first of all, that any such revolutionary upsurge would shatter the social contract that guaranteed his own class its cozy place in society: that’s the meaning, or one of the meanings, of the shattering of Wotan’s spear in the third act of Siegfried. Next, he had realized that as soon as the revolutionaries he so admuired got within reach of genuine power, they would cash in their ideals for privilige, influence, and wealth: that’s the meaning, or one of the meanings, of Siegfried’s betrayal of Brunnhilde in the first act of The Twilight of the Gods. Finally, he had realized that the pursuit of liberty unchecked by any other value or virtue would quite literally destroy society altogether, and render liberty itself meaningless: that’s the meaning, or one of the meanings, of Brunnhilde’s self-immolation at the end of the whole cycle.
A lesser thinker might have left matters there. Wagner being Wagner, he couldn’t let it rest. He couldn’t do as some of his fellow radicals from the 1840s did: that is, pretend that nothing was wrong with the old dream, and set out to prove the old adage about insanity being what you call doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Nor could he do as George Bernard Shaw and some other radicals did: that is, sell out to the ruling classes and surround himself with a cloud of rhetoric the way squids fill the water with ink, in an attempt to hide his betrayal from himself and everyone else. Wagner’s vices were on the same grandiose scale as the rest of him; in his private life, he was a hypocrite, a bully, and a cheat; but when it came to the life of the mind, and especially when it came to his art, he quite often overcame himself and followed where inspiration led, no matter what the cost might be.
Where it led him this time, as he began work on his last opera, was the tangle of ancient myth and medieval legend around that enigmatic talisman, the Holy Grail.
To follow him there, we can start by taking a closer look at the Ring itself and the vast landscape of comparative mythology that Wagner compressed into that little golden circle. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as Wagner wrestled with his four great operas, the science of comparative mythology was in its heroic age, the period when pioneering scholars—many of them German—first began tracing the mutations of myth across time and cultural barriers. Wagner himself eagerly read the latest scholarly publications on mythology and incorporated ideas from them into his work. Some of the most important of the insights he borrowed revolved around that plain golden ring, the legendary treasure of the Rhine from which it was made, and the vivid mythic imagery of springtime sun banishing winter’s cold that was, in Wagner’s view, the origin of the whole theme.
Here it’s unnecessary to speculate, or even to go digging in Wagner’s voluminous letters. Just before his world came crashing down in the failed revolutions of 1848-1849, Wagner published a very strange essay titled Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Saga (The Wibelungs: World History in Saga). Much of it is dedicated to decidedly odd theories about history and myth, in which he tried to connect the saga of the Nibelungs with the medieval political struggles between the Guelphs, the supporters of the Papacy, and the Ghibellines, the supporters of the Holy Roman Emperors. In German, these two parties are Welfen and Wibelingen, so it almost works.
Central to the whole essay, however, is an archaic Indo-European myth I mentioned in a much earlier post in this sequence. In Wagner’s time, comparative mythologists had already noticed the deep structural similarities in a series of hero myths from cultures that spoke Indo-European languages. From these, they traced the outline of an ancient seasonal myth in which the springtime sun as a young strong hero slew the dragon of winter’s cold and took from him a rich treasure that represented the golden harvest of the season to come. That seasonal myth went through a cascade of changes over the centuries, as myths do, and took many forms. As Rome fell, one form of the myth blended with folktales about a hoard of gold that embodied kingly power—Wagner suggests plausibly enough that this was the treasury and official insignia of a Roman army seized by conquering barbarians—to give rise to the legend of the Nibelung hoard that plays so central a role in the Nibelungenlied and the Volsunga saga.
The Nibelung’s hoard thus became, for the German-speaking peoples of central Europe, the manifestation of a pattern nearly universal in the world’s mythologies. Call it the Treasure Hard to Attain, if you like; in terms Carl Jung made famous half a century after Wagner’s time, it’s an archetype of considerable power. Such a treasure is never just a heap of movable wealth. It always glitters, somewhere deep down, with the ambience of magic and power it borrowed from the springtime sun and the golden grain of harvest time. That’s why gold, among the most useless of metals in practical terms, is still the focus of such wild and desperate passions. It’s why monarchs across the western world were crowned and ornamented with gold and not with any other metal, even when other metals were more valuable. It’s why we speak of golden ages and golden years.
Yet any such treasure always carries with it a sense of impending doom. That’s the flipside of the myth we’re discussing: when Siegfried appears, you know that the dark rival with the spear is always near at hand, ready to send the golden sun plunging back down into winter’s cold and darkness. Yes, it’s usually a spear. It was, in many of the old accounts, Mordred’s spear-thrust that laid King Arthur low, just as it was Gronw’s spear that felled Llew Llaw Gyffes in the Mabinogion. The bright twin with the sword and the dark twin with the spear, the spirits of the waxing and waning year, go back a long, long ways. May I risk tiptoeing into controversial territory here? Echoes of the same old myth pervade the core narratives of Christianity.
John the Baptist, born at midsummer, has picked up some of the symbolic ambience of the spirit of the waning year, which is why he dies by the sword in the autumn in an underground dungeon and his head goes on a platter. Jesus, born at midwinter, correspondingly carries some of the ambience of the spirit of the waxing year, which is why he is pierced by a spear while suspended above the earth in the spring, and a cup or chalice plays such an essential role in the rituals commemorating him as well as the legends that clustered around him. The two don’t kill each other in an endlessly repeating cycle, as their mythic equivalents do in other stories, but the emblems of the old year-twins are still present and accounted for.
The sword, the disc, the spear, and the cup that play so vivid a role in Christian narrative will be familiar to some; those who know their way around symbolism will recognize those, just as they won’t be surprised that the town where Jesus was traditionally born, Bethlehem, literally means “house of bread.” When the god born in the house of bread says “this is my body,” again, the mythologically literate will recognize the theme. It’s very explicit in some places: “I must decrease,” says John the Baptist, “and he must increase.”
Yet the idea that the winner of the golden treasure is doomed is by no means just a myth, even though it generally involves something less symbolically rich on the death certificate. On the most prosaic level, we’ve all seen stories about people who won the lottery and promptly crashed and burned thereafter. Pirate treasure, once a compelling theme of story and rumor here on North America’s Atlantic coasts—not least because there actually was a whale of a lot of treasure stashed here by pirates during the era of the Spanish Main—gets half its allure from the bloody deeds that so often accompanied it. Hoards of Roman coins in Britain turn up tolerably often near the ruins of burnt-out Roman villas whose proprietors thought that storing wealth would keep them safe. Au contraire, bring gold into any situation, and sooner or later you can count on buckets of blood.
Beowulf, the first great work of English literature, weaves the same theme into its story line. When Beowulf dies fighting the dragon in the last part of that epic, and his people discover that the dragon’s cave contains a mighty hoard of gold, mourn the discovery as much as the death, because they know that once word gets out, raiders from far and wide will beat a path to their country to get the gold. That’s exactly what happens, too, and the end of the mighty kingdom of the Geats follows promptly thereafter. That same factor drove the fall of the Nibelung kingdom in the medieval stories Wagner used as raw material: there, it was the lure of the dragon’s golden treasure that gave Kriemhild/Gutrune the leverage she needed to turn Attila the Hun against her kinsfolk and bring about the final doom of the Nibelungs.
(And if you think, dear reader, that all of this is old mythology and ancient history with no relevance to our current situation, think again. As a writer whose work explores the ongoing decline and impending fall of Western industrial civilization, I routinely hear from people who are enthusiastically stashing precious metals and other forms of storable wealth under the delusion that this will somehow keep them safe during hard times. In today’s information economy, it’s nearly impossible to buy anything of value without leaving some form of paper trail, and in due time there will be plenty of people who make a profession of following those trails. I’ve said this many times, but of course very few people are listening—and so the old tragedies will repeat themselves in due time with literally epic inevitability.)
All this is straightforward enough. It’s one of the odd features of our civilization, though, that it so often tries to pry loose the two sides of every mythic equation from each other: that it so consistently tries to imagine summer without winter, good without evil, kingdoms that rise and never fall. Tolerably often this involves a splitting of the mythological image, with all the good elements assigned to one fragment and all the bad elements to the other; it’s the same image beneath it all, though I don’t recommend mentioning that to people who are emotionally invested in the division between the two.
The split between sacred and secular comes out of this process. Outside the imaginations of atheists, who insist on reversing the value judgments, good is assigned to the sacred and evil to the secular. Since it’s a weird but consistent habit in Western thinking to see the good as ineffectual and only the bad as competent, we end up with our odd modern vision of the sacred as the virtuous embrace of failure and defeat in the face of triumphant and efficient secular evil. You can trace this easily enough in a great many phenomena of our collective culture. Wagner traced it, too, but he didn’t choose one of the easier targets. Typically for him, he choose a line of fission that goes straight to the core of the issues he set out to explore in the Ring cycle.
Consider, for a moment, the phenomenon of money. What is it? In terms of straight economics, it’s a system of tokens we use to manage the exchange and distribution of goods and services. It’s not the only effective way to do this, not by a long shot, but it’s the one that has become central to our modern industrial economies. If you’re like most people, you exchange your labor for a certain amount of money per week or month; the government takes a slice of that in taxes, the medical industry and various other privileged groups take another slice, and your employer may steal some of it—wage theft is extremely common in today’s America—but most of the time you end up with at least a large minority of the theoretical total. You then exchange this for the goods and services you need and want, or as many of them as you can afford.
It’s not an inherently evil system. In today’s America it’s been gimmicked six ways from Sunday to minimize the benefits you get from it and maximize the benefits that go to giant corporations and government bureaucracies, but that’s the nature of life in a corrupt and decadent society. Rigged though the system is, it’s still possible to use that system of tokens to your own advantage. The great obstacle to doing so, and the one that very few people ever get past, is the way that money, this arbitrary system of tokens, has retained the emotional charge of the sun-treasure of the old myths. That emotional charge rooted in ancient mythis is why we cling to money the way Gollum in Tolkien’s Ring trilogy clung to the One Ring, and shriek “Precious!” as it sends us plunging down into the flames.
Take, for example, Elon Musk or any of the other absurdly wealthy godzillionaires who strut and caper across our national stage these days. There’s quite literally no possible way they can use the amount of money they have. No matter how gaudy your dreams may be, outside of one very distinctive class of things, they can be bought for much less if they can be bought at all. The exception? Preposterous acts of conspicuous consumption meant to display yourself as a Very Rich Person. Behind that, in turn, is the phantom of Siegfried the Sun-Hero. To be a Very Rich Person is to be, or rather to pretend to be, something more than human, a figure glowing with the supposed light of the springtime sun. It’s also to have that same surreptitiously borrowed gleam in the eyes of the clueless; humans being the social primates that they are, this is generally an even more important incentive.
We can leave aside for now the question of just how closely Siegfried’s doom dogs the footsteps of our current crop of ersatz Sun-Heroes. I’ll simply mention that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Musk does die on Mars, though if he does, the dark twin with the spear who lays him low will almost certainly be named “radiation poisoning.” (Mars has no magnetic field, and so it’s constantly bathed in streams of hard radiation from the vast unshielded thermonuclear reactor at the center of our solar system.) The point I want to make here is that the same principle isn’t restricted to the giddily oxygen-deprived heights where Musk and his near-peers caper about. It applies all the way down the social ladder.
Surveys have found that most people, no matter how much or how little money they make, are convinced that they would be happy if only they made twice as much money as they do. Partly this is a function of provisional living, a neurotic habit painfully familiar to old-fashioned psychotherapists. You may know someone who likes to claim that they’ll solve all their problems and get on with life just as soon as they quit their job, lose some weight, divorce their spouse, get that promotion, marry the person of their dreams, or what have you. For that matter, you may be someone who likes to claim something like this.
In either case, you know perfectly well that it’s all an excuse. The job you won’t quit, the weight you won’t let yourself lose, the spouse you’ll never actually get around to divorcing, the promotion or the partner that stays forever out of reach: those are all excuses you use to avoid taking the risks and making the changes that can’t be avoided if you want to solve your problems and get on with life. That’s provisional living: one of the main ways we keep ourselves from becoming what we could be. Making twice as much income as you do is another addition to that same roster. For most people, it’s sufficiently far out of reach that it has the added convenience that you’ll never actually have to put up or shut up. So it serves its purpose of justifying failure.
Yet there’s more to that belief than the convenience of having a nice unattainable excuse as the basis for your provisional living. Most people, unless they’re really absurdly rich, know people who make twice as much money as they do, and have every reason to realize that those people aren’t blissfully happy. Why, then, does the notion persist? Why do people fixate so intently on those arbitrary tokens we call money, and neglect all the other ways to achieve happiness and success in life? Why, for that matter, does our entire society rotate gyroscopically around that convoluted system of exchanging arbitrary tokens?
Wagner’s suggestion is as simple as it is profound. He proposes that the golden sun-treasure of archaic myth was split in half, like so many other mythic images: one half sacred, the other half secular. Money is the secular half of the mythic image. To borrow another turn of phrase from Carl Jung, we project the archetype of the sun-treasure, the hoard of the Nibelungs, onto the system of arbitrary tokens we call “money.” That’s why money, for most people, isn’t just a convenient medium of exchange, a tool of the will that can be picked up and put to work when it’s useful and set aside when it’s not. It’s ablaze with power and magic. It carries the full weight of the mythic image of kingship, of the Sun-Hero casting down winter’s gloom. Thus it obsesses us, it dominates us, and as often as not it ends up thrusting a spear in our backs.
And the other half of the old archaic image? To follow Wagner there, we have to turn to one of the most enigmatic emblems of the Western world, the image of the Holy Grail. We’ll explore that two weeks from now.
*******
Meanwhile, I have a new book to announce! As my regular readers know, I do Latin translations the way some people do crosswords — it’s a pleasant and relaxing pastime — and this particular pastime has resulted in a new translation of John Dee’s first published book, Propaedeumata Aphoristica (in English, that’s roughly Preliminary Instructions Briefly Stated). John Dee, for those who don’t know him, was Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer and wizard, the co-creator of Enochian magic, and also a first-rate astrological magician. Propaedeumata Aphoristica had an earlier, rather poor English translation by a scholar who didn’t know enough about astrology or magic to catch the technical terms Dee used; I decided that it was high time to do a more useful translation.
So here it is — Aphorisms on Astrology and Magic by John Dee, translated and with a detailed commentary by yours truly. It’s being published by Azoth Press, the same firm that did my translation of Giordano Bruno’s On the Shadows of the Ideas and the two-volume set of The Dolmen Arch. As with these earlier volumes, there’ll be a nicely bound hardback edition and an oh my God over-the-top deluxe edition; both will be released on May 31, 2025. If you’re interested in preordering — and given Dee’s popularity, this one may just sell out before it sees print — you can order the standard version here and the deluxe version here.
I’m greatly enjoying this series of blog entries on Wagner’s operas. Is there any chance of them serving as the basis for a book in the future?
Congratulations on the Dee translation. I gather Dee’s Latin was not the language of Cicero. How much had written Latin changed during the millennium and a half?
‘The sword, the disc, the spear, and the cup’ … Might we also call them ‘the sword, the pentacle, the wand, and the cup’?
Where your treasure is, there also shall your heart be, indeed—either among the things of the World, or the things of Heaven.
Axé
JMG,
To bring this discussion around to what happening now, I been thinking how more recent Marxist thinkers have levered the whole structure of social revolution off of its base of class structure, and onto issues of race and alternate sexuality (not that people of other races and sexualities are ultimately going to benefit from any of these ideas). I consider this to have been a desperation move, since the “other side” has been so successfully attracting the working classes left behind against the current professional/managerial class, which is where the radicals now reside. I’m sure the radicals also “grok” the unwelcomed realizations you’ve discussed about the working class.
Because it was a desperation move, the whole structure of radical activism seems even move shaky and unstable then it was in Wagner’s time, where it was pretty unstable to begin with – hence the Ring cycle. I finish by saying we’ll see where this goes in our time, and I look forward to your last installments on the Ring cycle regarding the Grail and its opera to see what final thoughts Wagner had on these issues.
I love it when current events come together with discussions on Wagnerian opera. Musk , a sun god, is going to go to Mars to meet his Chothian twin and perish. Okay, I took a great deal of liberty with this essay to come up with that sentence, but I found this week’s entry soothing to my troubled soul. I can live through mythic times as long as I know what point of the myth I’m currently living through.
Now I am really looking forward to the next installment. Thank John
James, I’m going to make the attempt, though finding a publisher may be entertaining.
Mary, it’s complicated. Latin changed quite a bit during the Middle Ages, but during the Renaissance there was a sustained attempt to copy Cicero and other fine Latin prose stylists, so some of the changes were undone (or tweaked further in an attempt to undo them). The sort of periodic structure standard in classical Latin prose survived only in the most ornate and mannered Renaissance prose; practical works like Dee’s had a sentence structure much more influenced by the local language, and of course the vocabulary mutated quite a bit.
Robert K., why, yes, we could indeed use those labels.
Fra’ Lupo, and either way you risk falling into a trap, as Steiner liked to point out.
John, the United States in particular is a miserably difficult place to be a Marxist, because none of the proposed candidates for Oppressed Class Chafing To Overthrow Capitalism will behave according to Marxist theory. Working class people, women, black people, other ethnic groups, gay men and lesbians — all they want is to be treated decently and, if they’re poor, to have access to plenty of jobs at decent pay. I suspect the reason the corporate left finally settled on transgender people as the oppressed class du jour is that they ran out of other options.
Elizabeth, Musk is really begging for a Wagnerian ending. I don’t wish the man any harm, but I’m pretty sure that he’s going to become one more example of the hard fact that hubris is the past tense of nemesis.
Raymond, glad to hear it.
“…this involves a splitting of the mythological image, with all the good elements assigned to one fragment and all the bad elements to the other…” This reminds me of the episode “The Enemy Within” from the original Star Trek, with Kirk split into good but weak and evil but capable incarnations. It clearly posited that the whole human being needs both the light and the dark within.
Thanks JMG! Book ordered, and anxious to get it…John Dee was an important historical figure with significant influence over Queen Elizabeth I, and IMO also influenced her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham…..
OT: but relevant to the Great Sell-Out _ David Kaiser. whose opinions I have respected for years, and ignored my hard-line-Democrat friend dismissing him as “a Republican,” has drunk the Kool-Aid, and his latest post on Trump et. al ended in those telling words, “Our Democracy.” I won’t be relaying his blog posts to you any more, alas. And another one falls off the center onto the opposite side of the fence.”Sic transit intellegentsiae.”
P..S. – There’s not room in any building for both Musk and his ego.
@JMG,
Even though I’m someone who’s interested in Wagner primarily from the music side, I still find myself looking forward to these essays. Granted, I think that Wagner, for all his gifts as a composer, suffered from a huge ego that led to him thinking his plots made more sense (both in terms of internal coherence and allegorical meaning) than they actually did. But still, I admire the man’s ambitions.
As for this week’s topics: While I look forward to hearing your thoughts about the Holy Grail (the “sacred” side of the split sun-disk), I am nowhere near convinced that the “secular” half of the Sun Myth is responsible for the way that so many people in the West idolize money, and keep believing that having more of it will make their problems go away. After all, don’t you see that same attitude in every culture that has used money? For instance the history of China (which had a very different set of myths than medieval Europe) is full of the same mixture of exuberant greed, and moral teachings counseling people against exuberant greed, often with the same arguments you used in this essay. And you can find the same attitude all over the biblical Book of Proverbs, which is itself rooted in a tradition of near-Eastern wisdom literature that goes back another two thousand years… and so on, mutatis mutandis, for every culture that has used money!
Thank you for this, and yes, I am intrigued by your connecting the story of the Ring, and also, in passing, the story of the Cross, in the cycle of the year and its seasons.
In this ancient indoeuropean cycle, each season is vanquished by the next – the summer is vanquished by winter, and winter by summer. Notably, the TCM five phase theory adds a nuance – and here I am considering the version of five phase theory mapping four of the phases upon the four seasons, with the fifth phase acting as the pivot in the centre which keeps the wheel turning. Here it is not so much the coming season which vanquishes the current, but receding one. Instead each current season contains the seed of, and nurtures and gives birth to, the coming season.
This theory can be applied therapeutically as follows – let’s say someone is “stuck” in a summer they believe cannot end (but is suffering from a lack of a winter in which to, say, rest and replenish resources – a common pattern found in some forms of insomnia, for example), you can incorporate an intention like “help summer give birth to autumn” into your treatment strategy .
I shall now go and have a think about what the consequences of using the IE mythic intention – “help autumn wield a spear to vanquish summer”, and what that might do.
Something interesting to think upon. 🙂
When pondering about how to handle the decline of our civilization, I realized pretty quickly that even if saving up a dragon hoard of gold was a good idea, I wouldn’t ever have the money to pull it off anyway! Instead I realized I needed to gain the skills I never learned as a kid- gardening, plumbing, woodworking, mechanics, etc. So far I’ve gone from a terrible gardener to a mediocre one!
Money definitely seems to have a magical allure on people that far outweighs its material value. It reminds me of the ‘high score’ in video games- we’ve got a bunch of billionaires whose whole being is consumed with making the number next to their name go up just a little bit.
Excited to learn about the Holy Grail, John.
Hi John Michael,
Congratulations on the new book. You may miss social cues, but you’ve clearly got a gift for languages.
I’m pretty sure that months ago I mentioned that Mr Wagner was cursed – and here you’ve gotten to the crux of the matter. It must have troubled his intellect deeply too, but I’m impressed with his chosen path out of the maze. You know, I see that option being used nowadays too, and we’ve spoken of this matter before, say with folks complaining bitterly about global warming. Incidentally, the reaction from the charity mugger from greenpiece (!) all those years ago, rocked my world. He truly loathed me that I’d countered him with a disinterested, yet potent dispell – you could hear it in his words.
And yeah, that’s been my observation as well. It’s a potent symbol isn’t it? To me it’s all a tool to be used, and no more, although just like everyone else, that world has to be walked in, and there’s no getting around that. The Big J had it spot on when he quipped: “Render unto Caesar”, or something along those lines. It’s a trap, but the wonderful thing about the trap is that the people weaving the spell, have fallen for their own magic, and so the trap will eventually disappear – that is baked into the cake, sorry to say. Then civilisation can get on with something more useful.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG, re Elon Musk.
I’ve noticed that most people have a difficult time thinking rationally about outer space.
Just consider the “satellite” button that you see in map apps like Google. If you guessed that clicking it gives you a map made of pictures taken from satellites, you’d be wrong. Only the remotest places, like Siberia or the open oceans, have actual satellite maps. All of the maps of cities and other places with high-quality images come from… airplanes. Because a camera mounted a mile or two up on an airplane is obviously going to give you much higher quality images than that same camera on a satellite, hundreds of miles away from what you’re photographing.
But Google still calls it a “satellite” map because of the associations it triggers in people’s brains. Satellite! –> Outer Space! –> Technological Progress! –> High Resolution Maps!
I also remember, a few months ago, having a long conversation with a (fairly intelligent) young man who thought that, in a few decades, all of our mining was going to be done by robots on the Moon. I wasn’t convinced – partly because I have a brother who’s a mine engineer and I knew that, even if Elon Musk succeeds in making it cheap to move stuff between the Earth and the Moon, it would still be a logistical nightmare to operate mining equipment there.
To begin with, there’s no liquid water, and modern mining equipment has to consume huge quantities of water in order to process ore – to the point that mining industries in desert countries like Australia and Namibia put huge strains on their water resources. (And Namibia is very, very lush when compared to the Moon!) And then there is the problem of keeping the equipment cool – people like me who have studied engineering and physics know that keeping machinery cool in a vacuum, without fluids like water or even air to carry away excess heat, is actually a huge challenge (hence the reason that spacesuits are white, and how much time the Apollo astronauts could walk around on the Moon was limited by their running out of coolant, not oxygen). So even if you got an all-electric, no-water-needed mining machine to run on the Moon, you’d have to run it at a glacially slow pace to avoid overheating. But after that you’d still have to deal with the problem of moon dust, which is extremely abrassive (due to the spikiness of the dust particles in an environment with no erosion to smooth them)… and so on and so on.
The man I was talking with nodded along to all this and seemed fully aware that there would be huge technical challenges involved in mining stuff on the Moon. But he was convinced that the problems were bound to be overcome, because of the huge amounts of money to be made by whoever figured out how to do it. Which to me was just proof of how deeply the mythology of progress had gotten into him… it’s one thing to say that it makes sense to do hard things when there’s money to be made; it’s another to say (correctly!) that mining the Moon would be extremely difficult and expensive, and then just assume, without much further thought, that it must ipso facto be a great way to get rich!
With all of that said, I would still be extremely surprised if Elon Musk died of radiation poisoning in outer space. While the guy obviously has very different ideas from you (and your commentariat) about mankind’s long term future, he is still a highly skilled inventor (as evidenced by his vertical rocket landings) and not the sort of person who would run straight into a brick wall with his own life on the line. The fact is, nobody really knows how much cosmic radiation an astronaut can absorb and stay alive. Leaving the Earth’s magnetosphere won’t give you accute radiation poisoning (as the Apollo astronauts proved) except maybe if you get hit by one of those once-in-a-year-or-two solar storms (though they had a plan for this – point the Service Module with its heavy propellent tanks at the Sun in order to minimize the amount of particles hitting their bodies). People who spend years in space will probably have a higher lifetime cancer risk than the rest of us, but nobody knows how much higher, and I think it’s very unlikely that Elon Musk is going to travel to Mars himself without sending other guinea pigs (figurative or literal) ahead of him to find out what the limits are.
So my expectations for the end game of Musk’s space colonization ambitions are either (1) he slowly loses interest in the whole thing, what with Tesla, Twitter/X, and DOGE providing more than enough shiny objects to occupy his attention well into old age, or else (2) he figures out that people can survive on Mars, maybe not for a whole lifetime but for the two or years or so needed for a “first voyage of exploration.” So he goes there with a dozen or so scientists and engineers, and then (without trying to build a self-sustaining colony) he plants flags, collects a bunch of rocks, and maybe even drill a deep well a few miles down to where there might still be warm water, in order to see if there are any microbes in it. Then he declares victory and goes home. (He might still die in a rocket crash though, or an air leak – there are more ways than radiation that space can kill you.)
The problem with a self-sustaining colony is, IMO, mostly economic. Keeping just a dozen or so people alive in space is so resource intensive and technologically complicated that it requires tens or hundreds of thousands of laborers toiling away here on Earth. Thus, space exploration will happen when there are lots of people on Earth who are willing to devote their resources to it (as was the case during the Apollo Program) and otherwise it will not happen.
In Revelation (21:15) there’s a vision of an angel with a measuring rod of gold revealing the dimensions of the New Holy City of Jerusalem. Since gold would be an unnecessarily heavy as well as insufficiently rigid material for such an instrument, when I first read it I wondered why. But amid the ancient monarchies of the Holy Land whence the narrative emerged, a golden measuring rod would be very useful indeed. When settling disputes about property lines and such, the King’s Royal Surveyor doesn’t care who’s right, only that the dispute gets settled, um, indisputably, to keep the peace. The advantage the golden measuring rod has over other more convenient and more accurate measuring rods is that no one else has one. (This revelation, so to speak, taught me a great deal about our present credential-ridden society. “You don’t like how we teach your kids reading? Where’s your doctorate in education?)
Similarly, it often seems as though the main value the billionaires perceive in their unusably vast wealth is that you and I (and everyone else) don’t have it. Dragons on their hoards, indeed. You may disagree, but you don’t have a billion dollars, do you?”
I do like the connection with sun-hero symbolism. I think it conveys the same idea in different terms. You can’t look at the sun, or associate with it. Consider Icarus and Phaethon.
Roldy, and notice how that episode bought into the assumption that good = weak. That’s really pervasive in our time, and depends on a very odd definition of goodness.
Pyrrhus, he was indeed — he invented the idea of a British Empire and devoted much of his energy to encouraging the idea of British colonization of the New World, so there’s a very real sense that he’s an important reason I’m writing this blog in English.
Patricia M, I’ve come to think of “our democracy” as a very telling phrase. It means, of course, their democracy — the one that belongs to the elite classes and their lapdogs in the media — as distinct from, say, the republic that belongs to the rest of us. As for Musk, granted — he’s one of the few figures of our times whose ego can give Wagner’s a run for its money.
Sandwiches, oh, I’m far from sure that Wagner was right. I simply want to make sure that his ideas get a fair hearing. One thing to consider, however, is that the sun-treasure and related ideas are also common worldwide; it might be interesting to trace the mythic imagery around money in other cultures, and see whether it leads back to a similar split.
Scotlyn, it’s very Indo-European to see the transition from season to season as one season conquering another — the old Indo-Europeans were a warrior culture that conquered much of the world, after all. The Chinese approach seems more sensible to me, but that’s my bias.
Enjoyer, delighted to hear it. A mediocre gardener can survive.
Chris, “cursed” doesn’t seem overstated to me; Wagner really was an object lesson, first, in how geniune geniuses can also be absolute jerks, and second, how being an absolute jerk is a great way to mess yourself over. As for money, it’s one of the great examples of a basic magical principle: the difference what happens when you control your desires and what happens when your desires control you. I suspect that in some form it’ll be around a long time, because it’s so effective a learning experience for souls.
Thrown Sandwiches, thanks for this. You’re certainly right that all you have to do is say the words “space travel!” or certain related words, and people lose their minds and plunge into a fantasy world where mere practicalities supposedly don’t matter. As for Musk’s fate, keep in mind the difference in distance between the Moon and Mars. The Apollo astronauts left Earth’s magnetosphere for a few days. A trip to Mars at the same speed takes months. Since the effects of radiation poisoning are cumulative and dose-dependent, I’m far from sure you’re right…
Walt, I like that — the golden measuring rod as credential! My father, who was a teacher, used to say, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can’t teach, get doctorates in education.” He had an MA, back when that wasn’t required for classroom teachers, and considered it mostly a waste of time and money.
Hi John Michael,
Man the times are getting interesting. Good to see that the US is backing out of the mess in Europe, I doubt that the Europeans have the resources to continue that adventure in the east, then they’ll have to live within their means.
Hey, did you see this little escalation. There’s a lot going on in the Pacific Ocean right now: Three Chinese warships sailing east of Sydney being monitored, ADF says.
Plus there have been a lot of recent incidents…
Cheers
Chris
Perhaps the duality of the archaic myth is one of the reasons the U.S. finds itself in conflict with the islamic countries of the Middle East so frequently. For the U.S. everything is done for money or power ( which is just a route to the same thing). So ultimately we go to war, sanction etc in the larger pursuit of money. While most of the islamic countries ( save a couple) pursue actions for religion, national identity or self preservation.
We of course can’t understand that, and the duality makes us angry and vengeful as nations. One among many of the reasons peace in the Middle East is hard to come by.
C.S. Lewis & Tolkien had a different view of evil, that effective villians have to make use of virtues (like intelligence, charisma, courage, faith) to succeed. Someone with no virtues would be little more dangerous to us than a crazed beast.
As the supposed Tolkien quote that the haters of Amazon’s Ring of Power series goes, “Evil cannot create anything new. It can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.”
I suspect that a Mars voyage would face technical difficulties before the crew manages to land and takes their first steps on the surface, and the failure to even reach Mars will dissuade future attempts.
I’m sure that America’s geopolitical rivals would gloat about the debacle, which is anothervreason not to go through with the project.
@ Thrown Sandwich “With all of that said, I would still be extremely surprised if Elon Musk died of radiation poisoning in outer space.” “The fact is, nobody really knows how much cosmic radiation an astronaut can absorb and stay alive. Leaving the Earth’s magnetosphere won’t give you accute radiation poisoning (as the Apollo astronauts proved) except maybe if you get hit by one of those once-in-a-year-or-two solar storms”
I have abbreviated your text for brevity. A fun little fact, all except for one of the astronauts that left the magnetosphere ended up with big vision problems and that trip was very quick compared with anything else we will ever do. The quiet part that NASA doesn’t talk about is that they are very confident on just how dangerous space travel is. For all the talk of Starship, it is estimated that the amount of water needed to provide an adequate shield is far heavier than any weigh payload they can manage. Any metals that can be used have been found to amplify the damage as they essentially shotgun the energy into a spreading cone of particles towards the craft occupants.
I pointed this out a while back, that while it is intuitive, the sun isn’t the biggest problem with radiation. Cosmic background radiation (from outside the solar system) is a far bigger issue. While we cannot see the vast majority of the stars due to the inverse law of radiation, if that wasn’t the case the entire sky would be a consuming blinding light. Once a high power particle escapes the local system of the star, the is almost nothing to stop its journey towards us. So despite how imposing and essential it is, the sun only takes up about 1:500,000th of the sky, the other other estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars more than make up the remaining sky and highly charged particles that come our way. It sounds bizarre at first but it is very logical once you realize it.
As for Elon’s smarts, I see him more like Steve Jobs. Knows how to get people excited about things and can definitely get people moving in a designated direction but any time he talks technical details, it is clear he is mostly clueless. There are many folks from Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter than are happier when he is off doing other things – they can actually get things done. When Elon was away the engineer pulled the circus trick of self landing rockets. To stretch the analogy, Steve Jobs was the same, could provide a vision but would talk nonsense to the engineers, when he was gone they got to work in realizing the vision with out the technical nonsense.
Today alone via DOGE, he was talking about Social Security fraud and it is clear he had no idea how date systems in COBOL work. Not surprised, very few people do nowadays – there is a reason we call them the gray beards that hold it all together. Not saying they haven’t found fraud but his claims were a little too shoot from the hip in terms of misreading the data. However, it just comes with the position, if you want to know about a companies products, the CEO is the last person you talk to.
He want’s to be everything but isn’t willing to admit his limits, he spreads himself too thin. It is a shame because he has a talent that so few posses but he risks biting off far too much to handle. As with everyone, I hope it works out well for himself and those around him, but it could become self destructive when it didn’t need to be. Time will tell.
Patrick, nah, I think a one-way trip to Mars is viable – the relatively well-grounded science fiction novels by Stephen Baxter about a round-trip to Mars and a one-way trip to Titan using 2000s era space tech are fairly convincing. Yes, the astronauts in both cases would have received a seriously unhealthy dose of radiation, as well as the myriad of other harms caused by prolonged zero-g, but sending a human to Mars and getting them back alive (although much worse for wear vs. leaving them on Earth) is completely possible, as long as the extraordinary resources needed to do it can be marshalled. “Making life multiplanetary” is what is impossible, unless you radically redefine life – which is why Baxter’s novel Titan is my favorite bit of science fiction.
We may very well get to see Musk lead a fleet of Starships to Mars in an attempt to create a glorious breakaway civilization and see them gradually fail as machinery and consumables brought from Earth are used up. I don’t wish the guy any harm, but I think it is plausible that that is how his story ends.
My favorite part about the Mars expedition fantasies is the return part. People assume that since we got to the moon, and the astronauts were able to return to Earth we can do the same if we go to Mars. But we were just barely able to return from the Moon by taking off with just a chunk of the landing craft. Also Mars is much further away so much more fuel will be used on the trip for life support etc., plus with gravity 3 times the moon it will take much much more fuel to land and take off.
The hardcore believers ignore this, or actually believe that in the near future we will have the technology to make fuel on the surface of mars to enable our return. Of course if we could do that with the huge constraints on a ” fuel creation mechanism” that could fit in a space ship, we would be doing it routinely here on earth.
It would certainly ruin the romance of the trip to Mars if the reality is that whoever makes the trip will never return, and probably die quickly from radiation.
Much has been lost in our understanding. Discussing the arrival of feudalism, the historian Friedrich Heer writes in his book The Medieval World: “Men at their prayer no longer raised their arms and turned towards Christ, their rising sun”. Of late, people shut their eyes and retreat indoors and wonder why they so often miss the answer to their prayers.
“While most of the islamic countries ( save a couple) pursue actions for religion, national identity or self preservation.”
The 1930s and ’40s gave a bad reputation to national identities. Then of course there was a counter swing too far the other way. Now we are supposed to be a collection of peaceably cooperating enclaves. That has worked so well in the Balkans.
More money is better is one of the few things the country as a whole agrees with. It’s not enough and there will be a cultural shakeup in the near future. Which way it will go I don’t know. You would think there is adequate room between “every sperm is precious” and “death to all babies to save Gaia ” to find a compromise, but the yelling is still going on.
JMG, I just finished Vico’s masterpiece, and wow, boy, howdy, is there a whale of a lot of stuff to process in there. I’m hoping it will help me read these pieces better. Wagner as ecbatic, warning prophet, maybe? Have to wait and see …I want to thank you for promoting the interest in Vico. He is deceptively sophisticated. I imagine moderns and ancients would hate him, so he has been worth the read
As always, quite interesting, something I realized is that this description of the use of money today reminds me a lot that we live in the age of the antichrist.
Let me explain, if I remember correctly Simon Sheridan’s blog (https://simonsheridan.me/covid-19/the-coronapocalypse-part-37-finale/) published a graph where he showed that we lived in the age of the antichrist, there is a lot to talk about this era and the different manifestations of the antichrist, one of these manifestations are the different forms of secular faith that exist (Marxism, science, etc.), a very long discussion, will JMG one day write about the antichrist and this era?
What I want to emphasize is that it surprises me that the myth of the golden sun-treasure would be used by the antichrist to channel himself (I come from anthroposophy and people used this myth, prostituted it and fell into consciousness), to bring misery and misfortune.
I knew that the influence of the antichrist in our societies was very strong, but what this publication says about money makes everything fit much more. If Simon Sheridan’s scheme is correct, from my point of view it is correct.
Will Musk be able to get his trip to Mars before America runs out of oil or the US dollar stops being the reserve currency of the world, with Musk’s investments / economic worth wiped out in the ensuring great depression?
To all those who keep insisting that, yes, we can go to Mars and live, etc….. the novel and movie “The Martian” sums up their view of this quite nicely. The tour guides on the Kennedy Space Center bus talked about it as if it were real. The same guides claimed that humanity has always, from Day One, longed to go shooting off into infinity. It’s a powerful meme right now. That “The Martian” piled impossibility upon impossibility – well, so did all those stories in Astounding Science Fiction. The triumph of the human spirit and a lot of know-how…. folks, that’s not just Kool-Aid. It’s a very powerful hallucinogenic. As JMG said in another book, “it’s like telling a medieval peasant that God and the saints and the angels did not exist.” Or a Roman, that the Empire was on its last legs. Or telling your toddler that “There is no Santa Claus. It’s like the Easter Bunny and the Devil. It’s only your dad.” [Dennis the Menace to his little friend Joey.] It breaks my heart, too, but so it is.
Brilliant post JMG!
Interesting tidbit about the Germans and threading an underlying syncretism to all myths… the character Casaubon in the novel Middlemarch spent his life working on the same theory but since he didn’t speak German, could never complete his book.
Congratulations on your beautiful new book!
Yogaandthetarot Jill C
@24 Justin
I do think a one-way trip to Mars is viable (and hopefully the return trip), but I think that the risk of something going wrong is higher in a multi-month voyage than in a three day trip. And if it does fail, no one will be willing to waste the resources on more manned Mars missions.
I’ve read some Stephen Baxter, but not Titan
Chris, it’s really amusing, in a bleak sort of way, to watch the little countries of Europe try to throw their inadequate weight around; if the US does back away from them — and I’ve been hoping for this for years — it’ll be even more entertaining to see how they handle it. I hope Australia is prepared for the same sort of withdrawal of support; the US is an empire in rapid decline, and one way or another your country is going to have to manage on its own, or find new allies — or become Aojou Nambien a little sooner than Cordwainer Smith anticipated.
Clay, that seems quite plausible.
Patrick, exactly. Evil is weakness. Even a crazed beast has some virtues — courage and fortitude come to mind. A being that was wholly evil would be wholly powerless and incapable.
Clay, I’ve noticed that next to nobody realizes just how far away Mars is. They think “the Moon, Mars, what’s the difference?” The Moon is 239,000 miles away from the Earth. Depending on where they are in their orbits, Mars is between 35,800,000 and 249,100,000 miles from the Earth — notice those extra zeroes. To get from Earth to Mars, you also have to go “uphill” against the Sun’s gravity, and you have to take into account the orbital speeds of the planet you’re leaving and the one you’re trying to get to. That’s why the only practical route to Mars, the Hohmann ellipse, requires around 8.5 months in space to get there and the same amount of time to get back. It’s a vastly more demanding project — but most people won’t think it through.
David, an excellent point. The Christianity we have today is a fragment — a heavily edited, bowdlerized, and rationalized fragment — of a much stranger and more complex faith.
Celadon, I’m delighted to hear this! Yeah, Vico deserves repeated readings and a lot of reflection. I’m far from sure I’ve gotten more than a small fraction yet of what he has to offer.
Zarcayce, interesting. No, I wasn’t planning on doing a post about the antichrist, but I’ll consider it one of these days.
Anonymous, good question!
Patricia M, oh, granted. I tried to address that in a blog post a long time ago, but very few people were listening.
Jill, thank you. I need to read Middlemarch one of these days!
I have loved Parsifal ever since hearing William Steinberg ( a greatly underrated conductor) as an undergrad conductit at the Met and overdosing on the Solti recording which my roomies gave me as a college graduation present (it’s not the best recording out there — not by a long shot — but Solti seems to have been the only conductor who follows Wagner’s instructions precisely in the treatment of the choral sections in the Grail scenes.) Like many (including you, I gather) I regard it as Wagner’s culminating work and perhaps the most profound artwork in any genre of the last two centuries. I’ve thought and read about it a lot (I think I’ve heard all the recordings and have attended at least ten performances). But it had never occurred to me that it could function as an allegory of some sort for the corruption that gold (and what gold stands for) visits on people. With the Ring cycle, sure. With Parsifal? Now that you point it out, well yes, I can see it. Thank you.
I had always figured that sexual disorder and the links thereto with social breakdown formed the underlying theme.. I had assumed that the Grail symbolized the ultimate life-giving force in our universe, the female sexual organs, while the spear is, well , kind of obviously phallic. Amfortas’s wound is sexual in nature. Klingsor has castrated himself and acquires dark powers by so doing. (I suppose it’s only a matter of time before trans activists try to “canceL” Parsifal performances as trans-phobic — maybe they are. ) Kundry is arguably Wagner’s greatest single creation as a character (if I’m not mistaken, Thomas Mann made this point in his magisterial lecture “Sufferrings and Greatness of Richard Wagner” after which he had to leave Germany its content being so offensive to the Nazis.) If there is any opera anywhere that contains a more powerful seduction scene than Kundry’s in the 2nd act, I haven’t heard it. She uses every weapon in the psychic armory — and she herself is in the thrall of a kind of mixture of religious and erotic hysteria (has any opera or any other work for that matter every probed so deeply the links between the two?) What does one make of the character of Titurel and the hold this half-dead father figure has over the Knights of the Grail? And Parsifal himself, an innocent youth straight out of a homoerotic wet dream “rejuvenating” an aging and decadent male fellowship. Whew! Has there ever been anything like it — and cloaked (inseparable indeed) from what has clear claim to be the greatest music ever written (note its effects on every important composer in the generation after Wagner — Debussy, Mahler, R. Strauss, Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg who were all awestruck — only Stravinsky resisted the lure.) And now you’ve illuminated one more layer of meaning. Can’t wait for what you have to say in two weeks!
I have a suspicion — of course I could be wrong! — that anyone who has unearned wealth has merely agreed to pay for it in future lifetimes. That’s why I will never, ever play the lottery and why I would much rather drive a 20 year old car and cook my own meals than be in a position where I could easily pay full price for a luxury townhouse directly from my bank accounts, no mortgage needed.
That said, I am finding it hard to dislike Elon Musk at the moment because he has found many trillions of dollars in government fraud that will now be stopped short of the washing machine. These trillions may have a tiny chance of returning in the taxpayers’ general direction… this would not have happened under the cackling Quid Pro Hoe. For those who asked “Who hired Elon Musk?” I answer “I did, and he’s the best employee I have ever had.” Honestly, I think if anything could ameliorate the karma of unearned wealth, it would be going after those who were stealing it and auditing them with weaponized autists and AI as DOGE is doing. I hope he stays on this planet and keeps auditing for as long as it takes.
Do you think unearned wealth has to be earned back?
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Jennifer, who is now 39+ weeks into pregnancy with the baby still in breech position, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who has been in the hospital since 1/20 with almost complete liver failure and 20% kidney function, have found the strength to survive and thrive when he recently came off of his respirator, and may he be blessed with robust healing that allows him to regenerate his failing organs to the fullest extent that the universe allows; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Heres a new twist on hiding gold for hard times. Recently it was reported by the new head of the EPA that the previous leaders of the EPA under Biden stashed $20 Billion in an outside financial institution just before the inauguration so Trump couldn’t get to it ( or so they thought). The part that was not widely reported is that $20 billion was stashed in the form of gold in a vault so it would not show up ( or so they thought) on any financial statements.
We combine that info with the latest revelations that earlier in the year $2 Billion was sent from the EPA to some kind of green environmental justice NGO run by democratic operative Stacy Abrahms. This was a group that up till that time had $100 in the bank.
I would guess that the Dem elite knew the gig was up as the election neared and they realized that they and all their friends would be out of work. So they stashed gold ( and other funds) like preppers waiting for the Trump Apocalypse. This secret ( or so they thought) war chest would keep them in the style they deserved as well as funding their guerrilla battle against Trump and Maga in the years ahead.
But I think the arriving Barbarians have figured out where the deposed royalty have stashed the gold and are on the way to get it and dispense some justice.
@Chris and JMG RE: Australia’s future. I think we will just take the easy way out, China and India. As for those war ships well… this one clip from the TV comedy series Utopia summaries our entire defense and economic situation in less than 2 minutes. It is worrying how accurate it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgspkxfkS4k
For JMG, it is a meeting about military spending and why they want a $400 billion budget expansion.
“The prime minister will have one simple question, who is this to protect us from?”. After being cagey the military finally admit it is to protect Australia from China. “So our number one trade partner. So we are spending all this money to protect our fleets supplying China from China?”
Mr. Greer,
I commend you on your latest post, which not only continues your fascinating discussion of Wagner’s works in particular and the Germanic myths in general, but is also chock full of great related concepts—including some that have been on my own mind independently for some time now.
First, I love “godzillionaires.” I had not seen that term before. If that’s your own coinage, congratulations.
Second, I appreciate your comment on the inherent worthlessness of gold, “among the most useless of metals in practical terms.” That metal’s hold on the human imagination, how it relates to the shininess of the yellow sun above us, and that infatuation’s consequences in human relations are continuing areas of interest to me. Your critique strikes me as spot on—except perhaps you left out how fortunate are those who are naturally blonde—those who have “gold” growing out of their heads…but that is, perhaps, another story.
As for the Christian interpretation and appropriation of the pagan symbolism, your comments instantly reminded me of memories from art history class and the mosaics in early Roman Christian churches that frequently depict Jesus in the role of Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun. Yes, the ancients definitely were conscious of the syncretism you describe here.
Finally, since you have confessed to being a Latin scholar, I hope you can provide some guidance. I’ve long held the belief that the scientific name for our species, “Homo sapiens” (“wise man”) is a gigantic error. Or worse, a deliberate lie. In fact, I wish to propose in an essay I’m preparing that the taxonomic name for humans be changed to the Latin for “lying man”—what my best use of internet-fu tells me should be translated as “Homo mendax.” Could you please verify that that is the proper translation, and if not could you offer a better example of the nomenclature? I want to be as accurate as possible in my writings. Best to consult an expert, if possible.
Thank you for your time and attention, and for continuing to produce such stimulating writings.
I was actually wondering if you were going to bring up the four suits of Tarot, as earlier during the articles on Siegfried I thought there might have been an archetypal connection between Siegfried as the Knave of Swords and Wotan as King of Wands, with Mime and Alberich probably duking it out somewhere in the Pentacle suit.
Hello, Archdruid, and the community!
I have been thinking about money lately, and i have noticed a peculiarity of modern times. When calculating the wealth of a nation and its people, we often calculating a kind of fictive wealth, using currency that cannot be accounted for in real, redistributable value.
Let me give you an example using Microsoft and Amazon, two massive American corporations. Microsoft has what we folk technology call a Mindshare. This means that they have set up a self-reinforcing cycle that assures them of a solid supplier and a solid customer base.
Here’s how it works: customers, choosing which kind of computer to purchase, will usually pick one that has Windows in it. This is because all the good software they make these days are available on Windows. Sometimes software is available on a Mac, and very rarely it is ported into Linux. But most modern software is made for Windows, and so Windows is what they intend to buy. This is, of course, especially true of games. Almost all PC games run on Windows.
But why do software vendors make their software for Windows? Well, the answer is simple – because that’s what all the customers are buying! And so, by a simple loop, Microsoft can assure itself of a market for Windows. Their suppliers, the software developers whose work gives their OS value by making software that run on it, will make software for Windows because that’s what all the customers use. Their customers, the software users, will purchase Windows because they anticipate all the software to be there. This is the Mindshare loop.
Now, how does a company establish a Mindshare loop for itself? The easiest method is to sell at a loss for a time, until your brand becomes popular enough to wipe the competition from the market. This is what Jeff Bezos of Amazon did. He sold books with a free return and refund policy for almost a decade in the 90’s, and many customers brutally exploited his business – they purchased books, finished the books, and then returned the books for a refund. But this technique allowed Amazon to get noticed and expand rapidly in the market.
Authors knew they could assuredly reach many readers if their books were on Amazon. So authors of a wide variety of books sold on Amazon. And readers, consequently, could find a wide variety of books on Amazon, so that’s where they would go for books. When Amazon finally retracted the refund policy, the Mindshare was already established.
Now consider the share holders who bought Amazon shares during this time, and the equity partners who put money into Amazon. Most of this money went into covering the protracted losses of the company while it was building its “market capture”. So when these equity partners value Amazon’s book-selling vertical, do they consider their money to have gone up in flames? After all, Amazon controls no tangible asset that this money was used to buy. Yet, the valuation of Amazon does consider its worth as though that money was put to good use. Why? Because Mindshare (politely refered to as “market capture” in MBA jargon), however intangible it might be, has a concrete value to the equity partners.
There are countless such examples of ethereally abstract things being valued through pure speculation. Aside from the obvious examples – Non-Fungible Tokens, Crypto-currencies, Intellectual Property Rights, and the like – there are also things like Mindshare that are given value.
So how much of the wealth of multi-billion dollar corporations can be translated into cold, hard cash? If a group of socialists decide to “eat the rich”, as their fetish is often articulated, how much meat would they actually even bite? If they were, for instance, to raid a real estate tycoon’s treasury and make off with a sheaf of title deeds that specify the tycoon by name would they even have robbed a penny?
Today, real estate ownership is purely on paper. This lexico-fictive property is usually exchanged for promissory notes, which are transferable promises to pay money at a later date. This promissory note is then used in lieu of money, and freely exchanged further down the line. Likewise, NFT’s are exchanged for cryptocoins. Intellectual Properties are exchanged for equities in companies, whose main asset is “market capture”. And all these things are values in billions, and these exchanges are economic exchanges that economists then take into account when determining the wealth of nations.
So what fraction of a country’s GDP is real money, and how much of it is as ethereal as the Nibelung’s Gold?
Hi John Michael,
Reading the news, the country is re-arming. Under the AUKUS arrangements I believe that the navy is intending to replace the Collins class diesel electric submarines with the Virginia class nuclear subs – a one off arrangement for any country, so what does that tell you about the future. And recently the European made Taipan helicopters were dumped (literally) and replaced with the Blackhawks that the military wanted in the first place. Compared to the land of stuff though, the locally military is certainly not as large, but traditionally Australia maintains close relationships with more muscular countries. It’s not lost on me that India and Japan are both also being courted.
Oh! Did you notice that a steel works down under appears to have been err, nationalised? There’s a lot going on, and change is definitely occurring, fast. Prime Minister says $2.4 billion package for Whyalla steelworks is an ‘investment in the nation’. Shame they didn’t have the gumption or foresight to keep the vehicle manufacturing going all those years ago.
It’s funny to see long held policies getting turned on their heads. The state government announced it would reduce the public service by 5%. Probably not enough.
Cheers
Chris
Re transgender people as the last desperate hope of the Marxists of a group willing to overthrow bourgeois capitalist society – have you been followong the story of the Zizian cult? A small group of vegan rationalists, quite a few of them trans, centred around a charismatic leader known by the nom de guerre Ziz. The cult is suspected of at least six murders…
https://nypost.com/2025/01/30/us-news/killing-of-border-patrol-agent-appears-linked-to-zizian-radical-leftist-trans-cult/
Considering the pushback against Musk by the media and the federal workers, is that a part of the mythic cycle? Also, this sounds like the medieval concept of ‘fortune’s wheel.’ Where fortune turns the wheel, and people’s lives change. I guess it is the religion of progress meets Fortuna and her Wheel.
—
A side note: As someone who worked in the Federal Gov. for decades, I am glad it is getting a clean out. There are a lot of fiefdoms and empire building. There are four agencies that supervise banking, and they don’t like each other. Also, the whole structure is cracking like a structure put together by spit and duck tape. I suppose when Wagner wrote his operas, he was noting similar things in Europe.
The elucidations about Indo-European mythology regarding the seasons are interesting. Since the Mabinogion were mentioned, I would like to add that the part of the Fourth Branch where Llew Llaw Gyffes is speared, makes on me rather the impression of an initiation rite; the aspect of the slaying of a season is not obvious to a reader who doesn’t know the background of the Indo-European summer-winter myth, because it occurs in the Fourth Branch in fragmented form together with much else. The First Branch of the Mabinogion contains the story of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and Arawn, which exchange their roles. This is easily visible as, among other things, as parable for the changing of the seasons. But the motive of slaying the summer season appears in the battle between Pwyll, disguised as Arawn, and Hafgan, which latter contains the Welsh word for “summer” (“haf”), with advece given by Arawn. Due to Hafgans name, here the season-slaying mtive is more clear, but it becomes also clear that the diverse mythic narratives and motifs of different age are quite muddled together in the Mabinogion and make it multilayered and complex.
When it comes to money, my take is that it is indeed useful not only to have enough money, nut also to have reserves, but for me, after all, money is a tool to achive other things, which are more important to me than amassing money for its own sake. It is when accumulation of money surpasses a certain amount that it becomes a matter of diminishing returns for quality of life.
Very early in your Eliphas Levi series you wrote the following:
The ternary, the key to so much of Lévi’s magic, is an essential part of this. Replace with ternaries the binaries that play so overwhelming a part in conventional thinking all through Western cultures—right or left, good or bad, this or that, and never any third factor—and you don’t merely distance yourself from the conventional wisdom of our time and Lévi’s; you place yourself in what Lévi calls a magic chain, a sequence of individuals linked together across space and time by shared states of consciousness. The triangles that play such an important role in the symbolism of magical ceremonies are meant to symbolize the ternary pattern, representing to the imagination what ternary logic represents to the intellect.
Christianity, like all other religions, has become obsessed with The Holy Binary. As humans, we can’t really help it. Our minds just naturally want to perceive everything as a dichotomy. Our minds work that way, but our brains don’t.
>The problem with a self-sustaining colony is, IMO, mostly economic
Bingo. That’s why if I had to go somewhere, I’d bypass Mars and go for all that ore in the Belt. I have no idea if shipping ore back to earth would be economically viable or not but I can almost guarantee you it would have a better chance than anything on Mars. Mars is a romantic notion but it’s not very practical. I think ultimately Mars will be like Nevada – bunch of desert with a few small towns and one big city and that’s it. And everybody will have to live underground if they don’t want to get deep fried with radiation. Cue the intro music to Silo, as opposed to The Expanse.
It could be he’s using the romance of Mars as the bait and plans on switching it for the asteroid belt when the hammer drops? I’m not sure with him. You should never be sure with him, that’s the problem. He often says one thing and does another.
>It’s a vastly more demanding project — but most people won’t think it through.
Oh that’s just the start of it. Mars has this nasty property of having just enough of an atmosphere to need you to deal with re-entry effects but not enough of it to help you slow down. The amount of engineering thrown at that particular problem is vast – and they still don’t get it right all the time – the number of vehicles lost during re-entry is high. They are slowly getting better at it. Or were before the DEI cancer kicked in.
And you do all of that to get access to – what, exactly? What valuable substance is on Mars that would pay for the cost of the trip? It’s one thing to justify going there based on science but if you’re in the business of colonizing the place, it won’t last long if it can’t pay its own way.
>More money is better is one of the few things the country as a whole agrees with
Zimbabwe agreed with that. Really really agreed with that. Are bigger numbers better numbers? Is infinity the best most awesome number in existence? I suppose this could get philosophical but then the distracting issue of why all the stores are shut down appears out of nowhere.
I guess there is a difference between zero and infinitesimal but it’s not much of a difference in practice, especially if you’re doing all your math with a slide rule and two decimal points.
JMG, comforting to hear that, on multiple levels, although I wish you more wisdom than I manage to delve. The question isn’t a small one, as it seems one could put it to Wagner as well: does Vico believe or know the ancient res gestae, in such a penetrating way, that he in some measure transcends them, or is he doomed to only handle them with barbaric reflection, despite appreciating their worth as guides? I suppose that putting anything to the question, particularly the deeds of the gods, ends by putting the questioner to counter question. However, I hold out hope that there is a creative third way of bringing opposites together even in this dangerous occupation, although only occult science has even the possibility of such. In short, can one be one a court historian to the gods, themselves? I do recall that king Xerxes or Darius used to have the history books read to them, when they were afflicted with insomnia…if as on earth, so in the skies, perhaps a historian, like a jester, stands in the courts before the king. It’s either carry it further, or back to the drawing boards, as Vico might want to say….
JMG and commentariat – is the spear-and-sword, dark twin/light twin a purely Indo-European thing? Does the pattern show up in any native cultures in the Americas?
Tag, thanks for this. Sexual disorder is certainly a core theme in Parsifal, and it’s something that Wagner brought to the story — in the medieval legends he used, Perceval/Parzival was married when he achieved the Grail quest, and Klingsor was a very minor figure. There are many different levels of meaning in Parsifal, and the symbolism of the Ring cycle carried over into this last of his operas is only part of what’s going on; there’s the sexual dimension, and there’s the very rich contribution that Wagner drew from Schopenhauer, most of whose philosophy finds its way into the opera in one way or another. The handful of posts I’ll be devoting to Parsifal will be able to cover only a small portion of what could be said about it.
Kimberly, that seems very likely to me. The lottery in particular carries a serious curse — have you noticed how often people who play the lottery seriously, to the extent of fantasizing about winning, stop growing and learning and doing much of anything else? It’s as though it puts their life on hold. I think of it as the extreme form of provisional living. I think it’s possible in some cases that unearned wealth in one life has been earned in a previous life, but even then it’s a real challenge — you have to be prepared to handle it well, and of course most people don’t.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Clay, yep. It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out; I suspect that Trump is waiting until all his nominees get through Congress before the knives really come out. Criminal prosecutions of bureaucrats and Congresscritters for misappropriation of funds, and a serious investigation into vote fraud — those will be where the rubber really meets the road. A lot of previously golden figures may find out the hard way that Hagen is waiting for them with the spear…
Michael, funny. It’ll be interesting to watch how that plays out, too.
Stephen, I don’t think “godzillionaires” is my coinage, but I’m not at all sure where I got it. Blonde hair — well, yes, that’s another point; the mythic symbolism of hydrogen peroxide probably needs to be addressed one of these days, too. 😉 As for Homo mendax, yes, that’s grammatically correct. I’m amused to note that in the Middle Ages, sapiens was the standard term for “wizard” — note that “wizard” literally means “habitually wise person,” as “drunkard” means “habitually drunk person” — so homo sapiens in a medieval text would mean roughly, “that guy, the wizard.”
Ben, did you know that there’s a Ring Cycle tarot, using the Arthur Rackham illustrations? It’s quite good.
Rajarshi, excellent. The gap between real wealth and money — that is, between actual goods and services and the torrent of tokens that more or less represents them — is something I discussed at length in my book The Wealth of Nature. There’s increasingly little actual value behind all those numbers, and that’s getting worse, as the economy of actual goods and services contracts while the economy of tokens continues to inflate.
Chris, an India-Australia-Japan alliance is probably your country’s best bet, though it also means that an invasion of Australia is China’s best move if it comes to all-out war. Those policy changes sound very sensible, but you’re right that it’s much too little.
Ozquoll, yes, I’ve watched it with some bemusement. America is the promised land of oddball religious cults, but a rationalist vegan transgender cult is odd even for us.
Neptunesdolphins, I get the impression that Musk is the current vehicle for the archetype of the Changer, and it’s part of the Changer myth in every Native American myth cycle known to me that the Changer encounters one obstacle after another on his way up the river to its source. Nobody wants him to change the world, so the People can come live in it! As for the Federal government, you and me both — and about 200 million other Americans, too. It’s quite something to see the imperial aristocracy forced to justify its existence and trim its budget for a change.
Booklover, that’s an important point — most of the mythologies we now have are garbled that way, since the inner meaning was lost centuries ago and storytellers who didn’t know the point of it all have been at work. As for money, sure — it can be a useful tool as long as you treat it as a tool. Like so many other things, it’s a good servant but a bad master.
Allen, all the more reason to make a consistent effort to establish ternary thinking as a habit, to keep from getting trapped in unproductive binaries. Just as you can learn to recognize and ignore manipulative advertising, say, you can learn to recognize and overcome internal glitches like the habit of binary thinking.
Other Owen, we don’t yet know if mining the asteroid belt really is economically viable — here again, gosh-wow science fiction stories are not a good guide to economics. What’s more, if life on Mars is difficult due to radiation, how is life in the asteroid belt going to be any easier, since there you don’t even have a planetary mass to shelter you from radiation!
Celadon, from my perspective, the historian is part of the historical process. Even if he as an individual can sometimes transcend the cycle, his actions are bound to it:
Notice that Darius didn’t use his historians to guide him in his actions, just to produce a gentle droning noise to help him drift off to sleep.
Patricia M, the twofold pattern is also found in Native American myth. There’s a grand tale from the Puget Sound country, the story of Northwind and Stormwind, in which Northwind is very much a Hagen character and Stormwind, the Siegfried character, is the mighty springtime wind from the southwest that sweeps the winter away. The two of them fight forever over who gets to rule the land. I suspect there’s quite a bit of the same thing in the Aztec legends of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, though I don’t read Spanish or Nahuatl and so can’t be sure.
On the use of transgender people by Marxist, topic started by JMG’s reponse (#8) to John of the Red Hood’s comment (#5), but already mentioned by several others (hat-tip to y’all).
I have come to believe that the most perfect form of the Savior Game requires a supply of Victims that cannot, under any circumstance, save themselves. Trans people do not match this category, but used to be the next best thing because there were (or there used to be) too few of them for most people to ever witness one trans person rolling their sleeves and doing the impossible thing their would be Saviors claim they cannot do unaided. This also limits their value as protected class, because too few people would ever notice one trans person suffering at all. Awareness campaigns would not move the needle enough in the right direction (pun intended), so psychological contagion among the underage population was *allowed to happen* (I don’t think anyone planed for it, but once it showed up, I suspect positive efforts where enacted against the healthcare professionals that tried to stop it).
But then, the Left has the problem that there are too many transgender people, many of whom would not sit quietly like a useless Fairy-tale Princess in wait of their Prince Savior; if anything because all these young people grew up with the Shrek movie franchise an many will recognize themselves in that situation. So a more pliable class of Victim will be produced in short order. I predict Animal Rights are going to be the next big thing, since our furry friends cannot follow societal norms without human intervention, or speak at all.
And in case you remember my ideological biases, I will fully recognize the Right also plays the Savior Game with gusto. Our own class of Perfect Victims is: Unborn Babies. That’s why I’d very much like to see the Abortion debate reframed into a Mothers’ rights vs Medical Industry’s rights; instead of the now prevalent Women’s rights vs Thoughtless lumps of flesh’s rights.
@JMG (responding to Clay)
“That’s why the only practical route to Mars, the Hohmann ellipse, requires around 8.5 months in space to get there and the same amount of time to get back.”
Haha, two years ago a colleague asked me to teach a high school physics class. The topic was “Flight to Mars” I asked him; how cynical he wanted it? He said; it was my choice.
So I did exactly that; Opened with a brief history of mars exploration. Drew a simple Sun-Earth-Mars orbit system. Had the kids do a quick calculation of radio transmission lag. And to think about why there is a difference if Mars and Earth are on the other sides of the Sun.
Then I asked where Earth and Mars have to be for the shortest trip? And showed them the direct route is not the optimal. Que Hohmann ellipse. I did not do the math, just showed them some simulations. We did however calculate the transit time. Then… there is a kicker… It is not just the transit time. “There and back again” no, you usually need to wait about 6 months for an opportune window to enter the return ellipse comes by.
We came up to a journey of about 2 years.
Then I did a quick intro into solar radiation and radiation safety levels.
And then had them calculate the amount of absorbed radiation during that time. (upwards of 2 Sv) And we looked up the effects on the human body. (high chance of radiation poisoning (death); and 60% chance of cancer in next 5 years if you survive)
“Elon Musk is inviting us on his trip to Mars. Who wants to go?”
(a class of highschoolers shaking their heads)
Chris @ 43 It has long been my decidedly non-expert opinion that American hegemony would be succeeded in the Pacific by a coalition of Australia, Japan and Canada with India as close friend and ally.
Ozquoll @ 44, I note that according to the NY Post article the dead member of the vegan duo was an HB-1 migrant from Germany. One of the “good” migrants who do get to stay. We can’t have those boring working class basics thinking that their kids might qualify for tech jobs. OK, the article said might have been or something of the sort, which I take to mean that is what he was only it might not be polite to say so.
>how is life in the asteroid belt going to be any easier, since there you don’t even have a planetary mass to shelter you from radiation
Once you’ve scooped out all the ore, you have a hollowed out rock. As long as you don’t hollow it out too thin, that should be good for radiation shielding. Two birds with one stone, sell off the ore, create a living space. Granted someone or something has to get crispy while that happens. If you hollowed out Ceres, that’s quite a bit of living space in there. Not sure Ceres has anything worth digging out though. But I bet you some of the smaller asteroids, do. Again, not sure the numbers would make sense, but I bet you could attract investor capital anyway. If you can get them to pay for littering city streets with scooters, you could get them to pay for this too. Sometimes you just have to throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.
In any case, living out in space would be pretty harsh on the human body, if it ain’t wasting away due to zero-g, the cumulative radiation exposure would get you. Would it be any harsher than what prospectors went through in the 19th c though? And lots of guys signed up for that.
Twins, or sometimes brothers, one of whom kills the other are not uncommon in legend and myth. Cain and Abel, for example, and Romulus and Remus. In Navajo legend there are the Hero Twins, about whom I don’t know enough than merely to name them.
Greek myth makes one of the pair female, guardian of wild nature, while her brother becomes patron of all kinds of civilized arts; they coexist because their different realms don’t intersect. Also, I seem to recall a strong taboo against killing one’s own sibling, child or parent. They do cooperate against any who insult their mother.
JMG, ha! I’ll go w that, and much thanks. I suspect I also agree somewhat w Berdyaev and the Russians, however: there are moments when you wake up and see, and sometimes, the collective even stirs in this way. To use king Darius as the example, once a blue moon, they read him something that makes a difference, and it wakens him to action. I don’t know what to call this…perhaps it’s some prime polarity or binary, but it’s when you hit rock bottom, that you finally have the chance to see up the vertical. Not that you can plan on getting either place. You can only cultivate the odds. I also like the definition you gave about the eternal game on the eternal sea shore. As you can tell I’m wrestling w the christian synthesis, which is not altogether without meaning for me, but I recognize that Vico and others are on to something, that the historical process is bigger by far than ideas or words about it, and that maybe even the Logos has rules for the game saint Augustine barely scratched. And maybe after all it is a ludi, and not some horrible secular and then eternal nightmare, if I can remember myself and work. History as the great game?? It only happens uniquely once, but there are rules that crop up. Thanks for your inspiration. May your awen increase! Imagine how far someone can go if they aren’t a jerk like Wagner?! And it will still only scratch the paint…
Thrown Sandwiches–The only remotely feasible way for humans to live on Mars would be underground, protected from the radiation, in the polar regions where there is still considerable water in the form of ice…It’s impossible to guess how many humans could live there, but I would guess not very many….
JMG, I wonder if you might want to do some future essays exploring your four tokens of myth. Or perhaps refer us to a book on the subject. The spear is perhaps the oldest of the four, being depicted on prehistoric wall paintings in France and other places. The cup would be next oldest, appearing once stone working, weaving and pottery had been invented. It also is a cauldron in some traditions. I think cups or cauldrons come from neolithic times and signify the bounty of the earth after the Neolithic Revolution; it is usually a feminine attribute. Swords are much more recent, being impossible to make without the melting of ores, a process which has itself long been seen as a magical enterprise. You may enjoy your Beowulf and Grendel, I am partial to the figure of Weyland Smith. Disc? That is new to me. What is the symbolic significance of a disc? Sun disc? I have always supposed halos, as seen in Renaissance paintings, to be a way of depicting the radiance of virtue, as would be the mandala which surrounds the seated Buddha.
@ JMG # 53
Thanks for the heads-up on The Wealth of Nature. It sounds like the kind of read I have been looking for for a while now.
I am quite annoyed by the emergence of the new digital spintria that are touted as alternatives to cash, such as crypto-currencies and promissory notes. I work with technology, but I have made it a point to avoid working with crypto-currencies at all, as a matter of personal ethos. Its one more layer of obfuscation in an already murky domain.
The thing about these – excuse the expression – hypertokens, which form an additional abstraction of value on top of money (which is already a token), is that they are a way to print a massive amount of token money without producing inflation. Whereas having too many currency tokens could cause the price of items to fall, hypertokens cannot be exchanged in most transactions, and are usually unusable for ordinary people (you cannot buy groceries with them). Instead, they are spintria for super-rich people to do super-rich-people things. They are mortgaged, exchanged, and cashed in using other, creepy means.
@JMG
Am I right in thinking that the PMC favors transgenders because they largely created the transgender/nonbinary community out of gender dysphoric people, fetishists, and confused children?
The other “oppressed” groups (blacks, gays, lesbians, the working class,various immigrant groups, etc.) already existed before the left-liberal elite took an interest in them, and so couldn’t be co-opted. But trans people are a product of wokeism, and the community would fall apart without the PMC propping it up. So the folks who join iy can be programmed with the left’s faux-revolutionary ideology.
John,
As you said in this post, modern society likes to split various things into dualisms. We have the mind/matter dualism, the society/nature dualism, the secular/religious dualism, etc.
To me it seems that the splitting comes from a yearning for transcendence. Spiritual transcendence can be defined as a final completion. It is the ultimate achievement. Nirvana, Henosis, heaven, etc. It is where reunion with the absolute is achieved and the cycle of birth, death, and suffering reaches its end. Once spiritual transcendence is tossed out the window, you are left in a material world which is full of cycles that never end. When people search for transcendence in this material world, they have to break the cycles apart to create a material equivalent of the spiritual transcendence. This is where we get the progress and apocalypse mythology, both take the secular cycle of civilizations and split it in half into parts which would ostensibly be a final completion.
I even see so much of this online with communities who are all searching for some kind of material transcendence. You see it in the singularity hypebros, the preppers, and people obsessed with longevity and halting aging. It gets even worse when the material improvements start to obviously fail and people grasp for something, anything that can give them transcendence.
Just spitballing here.
Thank you. I appreciate your response.
Perhaps it is this strata of of myth you have explored here that is what gives our more recent stories of lost treasure their large appeal. From Robinson Crusoe to countless others… though I’ve enjoyed the treasure of reading more. The library path, certainly hasn’t given me the fancier lifestyles others enjoy. But its a limit I accept.
The Chalice of Ecstasy by Frater Achad was my intro to the Parzival legend. I always liked his writing better than Crowley’s! I should look at it again.
Halfway through re-reading Hillman and Ventura “We’ve had one Hundred years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse”. 26 years after I first read it, strong and timely as before.
Going from myths taking up the ‘progression’ of celestial bodies, which must inevitable have its waning phase just as the seasons have them, to ‘progress’, the tale of the post-mythical, shadow-free solarium achieving an ever-waxing Enlightenment.
I’m glad I have the seasons to work with, and as part of.
Abandoning them may be what came to be called original sin.
As for the pitfalls of hoarding shiny objects without being a magpie:
I was reminded of something I think Nate Hagens relayed: Someone was summoned to what he thought was a talk before an audience, only to find himself in a room with a small group of very rich men, who wanted him to come up with a solution to their most pressing problem:
How to control their private armies in case of public order breaking down.
They came up with things like electric collars etc. and were completely unwilling to listen to his suggestion: Find a place to live, become a treasured (my pun; sorry) member of the community.
Hey JMG and Chris
I was going to mention this in the open post, but since you have brought up China I may as well mention this early.
I have recently been reading a book concerning the current conflict between China and the USA by former Australian prime-minister and current diplomat Kevin Rudd. It titled “The Avoidable War” and goes into quite a bit of detail about China’s, or rather Xi Xinping’s, motivations and goals regarding the world as well as the many relevant bits of history and geopolitical events. I have not finished it but I would suggest that you give it a look as it is bound to have some relevant insights, considering that Rudd had far more personal experience with the Chinese government than most of our other politicians, helped by the fact that he speaks fluent Mandarin.
CR, good. Yes, exactly — I commented in print a couple of decades ago that veganism and animal rights on the Left, and anti-abortion activism on the right, were the natural endpoints of the cult of self-appointed political saviors, since in all these cases the “victims” whose rights are supposedly being defended can’t talk back to their would-be saviors.
Marko, excellent! The whole dream really does fall apart once you pay attention to the realities.
Other Owen, sure…once you’ve scooped out the rock. If there’s anything in the rock worth scooping out. And you’ve got the trip out to the asteroid belt, which is about twice as far as Mars, and during which you’ve been soaking in radiation. As for scooters, I’d encourage you to look up the cost of that project, and compare it to the cost of a mining camp on Vesta. (Or, for that matter, look up the cost of a mining camp in California in 1849, including transportation costs, and compare that to even the cheapest mining camp on Vesta…)
Mary, good. I’m familiar with the Diné Hero Twin myth, and also with equivalent myths from all over the American West — it’s a common story.
Celadon, I see it as a massive mistake to try to map the Christian narrative onto ordinary history — that’s immanentizing the eschaton, as Eric Voegelin used to say, and it reliably produces false predictions and incompetent politics. If the Christians are right and this world is merely a temporary testing ground before souls go to their permanent habitations, after all, it would make sense for the world to keep lumbering onward in its current state, providing each generation of souls with the same set of challenges.
Mary, I’ll consider it. The disc takes a lot of forms: the coin, the pentacle, the shield, the platter, the halo, the earth itself, and so on.
Rajarshi, exactly. Exactly! Cryptocurrencies, like so many other essentially valueless token systems, are there to provide the illusion of increasing wealth at a time when real wealth is contracting.
Patrick, that’s certainly plausible.
Enjoyer, exactly. That’s the standard form of collective nervous breakdown in the Piscean age — if things get too stressful, pretend that you can have up without down, good without evil, and so on through the litany of binaries. That faux-promise of transcendence can be very intoxicating.
Justin, that’s my take. Behind all those imaginary treasures is the forgotten image of becoming the Sun-Hero.
Michaelz, I also recall that bit from Nate. Exactly; the rich can’t deal with the fact that loyalty can’t be purchased — it has to be earned. That’s why they’ll all be crow food fifteen minutes after the rule of law breaks down, and those who know how to earn loyalty will replace them.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for the heads up.
@Michaelz (#67):
That was Douglas Rushkoff’s experience. See his two posts at:
onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1
and
onezero.medium.com/the-privileged-have-entered-their-escape-pods-4706b4893af7
I saw them both and saved them when he first posted them.
JMG, duly noted! It’s an insight that bears repeated repeating! Yes, the best Christian historians are the ones who do this the least. Perhaps NONE would be even better. I’m wrestling with it. But my sympathy is all with the aboriginal camp. Any tracing of eschaton onto history would be fraught with peril. The only doubt I have is that there does seem to be some miniscule leaven or ferment, almost undetectable, like background radiation, that has some influence on human affairs including history. I’m trying …but I appreciate and need the warning…it is not unwelcome!
Hi John Michael and J.L.Mc12,
I’m in a bit of a hurry this morning… Kevin Rudd is clearly a smart bloke. However, given he works as a diplomat, yet seems to have a problem with the actual implementation of the concept of ‘diplomacy’, well his very actions suggest to me that he’s a theorist of the darkest stripe. If I were his boss, I’d have sacked him from that role given recent events. When you’re in a job like that, you are paid to represent the nations interests, not your own political views and leanings.
Gotta bounce, it’s going to be a warm couple of days, and there’s stuff to do! 🙂
And yup, the 5% was the politically tolerable cuts, the economically tolerable cuts have to be that much higher again, at all levels of government. It’s been more or less proven elsewhere that a government cannot run the economy. It surprises me that nobody seems to equate the fall of the Soviet Union with overly large bureaucracies. I don’t see why the parallel is not immediately obvious.
Cheers
Chris
Addendum to my earlier comment:
I see that Douglas Rushkoff has now expanded his two posts into a book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). Fascinating!
BTW, my first pass through Vico, I can’t grok his view on myth. On the one hand he takes it very seriously more seriously than anyone else. On the other, he seems to be saying, this is how they structured consciousness, we don’t do that that way now. Ironically, he fits himself into a moving picture of eternity, in that he foresees the return of barbarism. When the babarie della reflessione returns. On the other hand the dark ages weren’t as intense, or at least not as long, as the pre Homeric cycle. Fast forward to Wagner, are the coming dark ages going to be as intense or long as the medieval era? I feel like Vico would split the difference and say, well, because of the previous cycles and revelation, no …but it will still be intense and dark, it’s just that some groups will find along or submit to a king and plane out a bit faster. But I also think he’d insist on the possibility of going back to the start, if things go wrong, and no one, for instance, remembers their Wagner. Does that make sense? There’s a lot of “on the other hand”s involved, though, throughout.
“bring gold into any situation, and sooner or later you can count on buckets of blood” – oh, how that made me smile! Thanks, I needed that, JMG! I rank it right up there with, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?” (Sir Thomas Moore, in A Man For All Seasons) Aye, the obsession with the shiny yellow metal is far deeper than its monetary value. I think it should be renamed “dragon’s blood”.
“Echoes of the same old myth pervade the core narratives of Christianity” – thanks for having the courage to say that! Whenever I come across a Pagan who claims that Christianity was just a trick played on the gentiles by the Jews in order to control them, I just roll my eyes in amazement of their ignorance and shallowness and walk away. Amazing how the spear, the plate, the sword and the cup pervade European culture, including via Christianity.
Not totally related (but also not totally non-related!), I just today came across an interesting interview of a person (N.S. Lyons) who goes by the nom de plume ‘R. R. Reno’, author of a recent book “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West”. The author is a former member of a DC Think Tank (specialization in US-China relations) who got bored of the narrow and shallow interests of his political and bureaucratic ‘masters’. He doesn’t talk about gold, dragons, or anything mythological, however; rather, his focus is on the ‘spirit’ of the various ages of Western culture and how the effeminate, technocratic, open-borders spirit of post-WW2 has come to its inevitable dysfunctional end days – and that a more masculine, nationalist, closed-borders spirit is rising (of which Trump/MAGA is the most dominant manifestation) (I’m grossly oversimplifying here). He also discusses the extended 19th century, which had a relatively masculine/nationalist spirit, but was tempered and coloured by Liberalism. The new ‘spirit’ that he describes appears to be post-Liberalist in nature. Definitely grist for the intellectual mill! Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lNDgLR_DSI
N.S. Lyons also has a substack called “Upheaval” (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods)
JMG, I think this ability to earn loyalty is the thing that incenses the Democrats and establishment elites the most about Trump. They hate him because he is more like a war band leader than a transactional politician. Some of things he does that infuriate them are classic acts of bravado that endear him to his followers. Leading troops in to battle from the front is a classic way to achieve loyalty, and Trumps brush with death followed by a defiant fist is the closest thing a modern president could do to match the Warrior kings of history.
His four years of purgatory during the Biden Administration showed that there were many who were willing to work hard and show him loyalty with only a slim hope they would be rewarded. Perhaps we are already at the stage of Rome where they were invaded by the Visigoths, but instead, our Visigoths were lurking inside the border waiting for their chance. If that is the case the future prospects for the Democratic Party are grim as from here on in Tribal loyalty may be the main currency of power.
In the ‘hysterical fit of the giggles’ category: there’s now an ETF where you can invest in reverse engineered alien technology. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
“The proposed UFO Disclosure AI Powered ETF, which would trade under the ticker symbol UFOD, aims to invest in companies with potential exposure to advanced technologies derived from unidentified flying objects, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-etf-invest-reverse-engineered-alien-technology
Celadon, I may go too far the other direction, but my sense for many years has been that the leaven affects the individual and the individual alone. Each of us stands, knowingly or not, face to face with the Divine, and we are constantly offered the chance to rise above our historical context and engage with a suprahistorical reality — but we are offered that as individuals only, not as groups or nations or worlds. What’s more, all that any of us can do for other people in that context is to try to encourage them to that confrontation — the encounter and the choice are always for each individual soul. When Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses says “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” he says things more harshly than I would, but certainly history is a dream, by turns good and bad, and it’s a dream of the collective, not the individual. It’s the individual who’s called to wake up.
That’s my take, at least. Your mileage may vary.
Chris, I’m heartened that our new secretary of defense is working on a 40% cut in defense expenditures, and that so many bureaucrats have already been laid off that the Washington DC housing market is crashing. Our survival as a nation depends on getting the federal budget back in balance before the dollar finishes losing its status as global reserve currency, and slashing bureaucracy is a crucial element in making that happen.
Robert, thanks for this. I used Nate Hagen’s comments as the basis for a certain scene in Retrotopia; recently I’ve considered doing a deindustrial novel in which the slaughter of the rich by their own security guards is a crucial part of the backstory. It seems to me that if more people think and talk about that, it might begin to sink in among the absurdly rich that maybe, just maybe, turning their attention toward keeping the world from crashing and burning might be a smarter plan…
Celadon, one of the most fascinating things about Vico is his argument that consciousness changes over historical time, moving in a cycle from the barbarism of sense to the barbarism of reflection. For what it’s worth, I think he was right, if not in as exaggerated a sense as he believed, and he himself was much further from the barbarism of reflection than he thought — the age of reason is the first stage in the journey there, not the conclusion.
Ron, you’ll be amused to know that Al Stewart’s song “A Man For All Seasons” was playing right when I put your comment through! The Incas used to call gold the feces of the Sun, which I think catches the mix of magic and grossness as perfectly as can be. As for the mythic dimensions of Christianity, it’s sad that both Christians and Pagans so consistently evade those. In both cases, of course, the motive is the same: the Christian wants to claim that Christianity is different from all other religions because it’s uniquely true, while the Pagan wants to claim that it’s different from all other religions because it’s uniquely false. That it may simply be a standard eastern Mediterranean death and resurrection cult of late Roman vintage, with all the usual bells and whistles, and the same access to the Divine as all other faiths, is offensive to both.
Clay, now that Kashyap Patel has been confirmed for FBI chief, I expect Trump to fulfill another of his promises and launch a thorough investigation of vote fraud; by the time the dust settles from that, both the Democrats and the old-guard GOP are likely to be in a world of hurt. The GOP’s recovery will take the form of being wholly coopted by the Trumpistas; the Democrats’ recovery will take longer, as normally happens after an elite replacement cycle, and will involve the remnants of both the old parties allying with other groups opposed to Trumpismo and building a new consensus; see the Democrats after 1860 and the Republicans after 1932 for examples. A wild ride!
Pygmycory, I saw that, and chuckled. During the South Sea Bubble, one of the first modern stock market bubbles, one stock promoter issued stock “for an undertaking of great advantage, but no one to know what it is.” As I recall, he took in some £300 — a considerable sum in those days — and then quietly closed up shop and vanished. Some things never change…
“I don’t think “godzillionaires” is my coinage”
I haven’t heard that before, but gazillion has been in common usage since grade school.
Then Godzilla is a known quantity, although whether it’s chaotic evil, neutral, or even occasionally good is up to the director.
So godzillionaires for very rich agents of chaos with uncertain motivations fits just fine.
Clay- I followed up on the “gold bars” story, and it appears to have been a figure of speech. With USAID in the crosshairs, a staffer described moving funds into an external bank as “throwing gold bars from the Titanic”. (I assume that they were intended to go into a lifeboat, not lost to the ocean depths.) But, it was just digits on ledgers, not the shiny physical metal.
Indeed, I am amused (but, of course, not surprised) by the synchronicity, JMG!
BTW, I’ve also found N. S. Lyons’ substack that you, and/or others, may be interested in taking a peek at: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods
Yeah, that’s kind of what I figured is going on here. The guy in question is also big into AI. I wonder how much of that is racketeering, too.