This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank — but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with one exception. There’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Before we go on, though, I’m delighted to announce two new books of mine — well, more precisely, one new book and one older book greatly revised and expanded — that may be of interest to my readers. The older one is Coelbren: Traditions, Divination Lore, and Magic of the Welsh Bardic Alphabet. This is a greatly expanded and revised edition of my first book on the Coelbren alphabet, somewhat unimaginatively titled The Coelbren Alphabet; it has everything in the earlier book — the history of this strange bardic alphabet and detailed instructions for using it as a divinatory oracle — but it also has new chapters on Coelbren magic and gematria. Readers interested in my work on Druidry will want a copy. You can get it from your favorite full service bookstore, or order it here if you’re in the US and here if you’re elsewhere in the world.
The second book is an adventure into entirely new territory. I think most of my readers have heard of the Five Rites aka Five Tibetans, a set of yoga-like exercises that have become very popular over the last half century or so. A chance encounter of the usual kind sent me chasing their origins, and I ended up plunging into a mostly forgotten world of American and European occultism and exercise traditions, and rediscovering the other practices that once gave the Five Rites their context. That’s the theme of this new book, The Secret of the Five Rites: In Search of a Lost Western Tradition of Inner Alchemy.
It was a wild ride, and covers a lot of unfamiliar territory, but the book gives complete details of how to use the Five Rites and the practices associated with them to awaken subtle energy in the body for health and spiritual development. Interested? Once again, you can get it via your local full service bookstore, or order a copy online here if you live in the United States and here if you’re elsewhere.
With that said, have at it!
Where do you think most people get their ideas about druids? Miraculix from Asterix the Gaul was my main influence until I encountered you. Asterix at one time was the world’s most popular comic character everywhere except the US. I suppose now it was because the non-heads of the empire related to it more.
I’m preordering the five rites book, but just a head’s up that the link takes you to the UK version of their site, and then you have to flip to US if you’re wanting to purchase in dollars, and when you do that, you lose the book page. But I guess that works great for your British readers. Congratulations on the publications!
One thing I’ve been wondering as I’ve read your blogs over the past few years is what your thoughts are on the growing “censorship-industrial complex” and how that factors into decline. Do you see this trend continuing, via legislation in the US similar to what Europe has embraced? Or will backlash and rejection trounce it, similar to what you said in the last comment thread about digital currencies? What impact will censorship in particular have on the landscape of declining empire? I note that there’s a sizable contingent on Gab already putting in place a “parallel economy,” by the way, to your point about CBDCs. Thank you for your thoughts.
For Mouni Sadhu’s _Concentration_ book, how many of the series would you recommend doing for people already committed to your occult study series?
Also, can this be integrated into the standard ritual/meditation/divination format, or should this be done separately?
Some people out Christmas cards to their families, but I started a tradition a number of years ago of sending out Halloween cards to friends and family. Last year I also included a quick short story. Here is another entry. I offer it all to you in the spirit of Samhain. Light on horror, no gore.
FRESH CUT FLOWERS
It wasn’t that long ago that Lucien Kali Breverman turned thirteen. He was Klay to his friends because Lucien felt to uptown for him, even then. It was the same year he’d gone into seventh grade, leaving elementary behind, and wound up at Gimble High, two neighborhoods away in the spotty streets of West Forest. He used to walk to school, but now he had to take the bus.
This was something he seldom looked forward to. In a car it would only take fifteen minutes or less to get home and up into his room where he could pick up his drumsticks and pretend Johnny’s face was the drum head, pretend Johnny was receiving a beating. Or boot up his Xbox to play Call of Duty and pretend it was Johnny who was the enemy. The problem was Johnny was always on the bus, and with all the stops, the trip took over an hour. Johnny was a sophomore and it was his second time being a sophomore. When Johnny was on the bus, it was never a smooth ride.
Klay’s best friend Raelon had moved to a different neighborhood and rode a different route. The choice of who to sit with, just like at lunch, hung over him like a cloud of smoke and dust from one of the raging wildfires that had blanketed his city with smog over the summer. Sitting in the back was more fun, but it was also dangerous. That turf belonged to Johnny and his minions. School had just let out and Klay lingered on the back of the sidewalk waiting for the bus to fill up, hoping Johnny would get on first, so he could sit closer to the front. It was unfortunate that the front was the place where the droolers and other dweebs congregated, but the strategy had worked for him so far. He didn’t see Johnny. Maybe he’d skipped school. The bus was filling up so he had to move, he had to get on. Then he felt a hard knock to his shoulder, as Johnny bumped into him on purpose from behind.
“Maybe we can sit together today, buddy, whaddya think of that?” Johnny said as he stood waiting for Klay to get on ahead of him.
Klay hesitated and Johnny pushed him in the back. “Go ahead, get on.”
Klay was flushed, and huffed his way on to the bus, hoping to find someone to sit next to who was sympathetic. The bus driver hadn’t once stepped in on Klay’s behalf to stop Johnny’s bullying, he never said a word to shut up the rowdiness in the back. The bus driver’s long hair often concealed headphones. He didn’t pay any attention to the kids, and barely paid attention to the road. He’d overheard his Grandpa Jason grumble to his Mom, who’d been discussing the situation after the second incident, and remembered him saying the driver was probably afraid of getting slapped with a lawsuit if he stepped in to reprimand the kids.
As Klay walked passed the driver, he crossed the rubicon into the netherworld that was the school bus. Three seats back an earth angel awaited him, a radiant girl he had never seen before.
“You mind if I sit here?” as he slid into the empty seat without waiting for a response.
“Sure. Be my guest,” she said.
“Would you do me a favor and switch seats, I need to sit by the window.”
“If you really have to.”
Johnny stood in the aisle and leaned over the girl to taunt Klay.
“Oh, so you don’t want to sit with me? I guess you’re going to have to hide behind this puny little girl. Well don’t worry, you’re gonna catch these hands again soon enough.” He slammed his right fist into the palm of his left.
“Well this ain’t the day, chief,” the girl said as she stood up. “Why don’t you go in the back derp, and shut your flapping face?”
She was a lean five foot three, but a chill seemed to emanate from her, and Klay new it wasn’t a blast from the AC; no such thing existed on this bus. Then he caught a whiff of what smelled liked mud, like cold sod on a day of heavy October rain.
A chorus of deep ooohs and laughter percolated around the seats, and someone said, “Come on now girl, you don’t want to trigger Johnny!”
But there was something in her iciness that caused him to zip his lip and slink down into the back where he did shut his trap.
“Thanks for that. I owe you one,” Klay said.
“Yes, you do. Care to make it up to me?”
“Sure,” he said, as he looked at her with care. “Did you just transfer here?”
“No… It seems like I’ve been going here forever.”
He smelled that scent of wet earth again though it hadn’t rained for days.
“Will you walk me home?” she asked.
He gave his ascent and asked “what’s your home room?”
“302, with Mr. Hagg.”
“Wait, I’m in 302. That’s Ms. Grundle.”
She just shrugged and didn’t say anything else. He tried to continue the conversation, but she wouldn’t speak. He felt grateful for what she’d done, and felt like his luck had turned, because she was a smashing beauty. Her style was half-preppie, half-punk, and her eyes were emerald green. Her strawberry blonde hair smelled like fresh cut roses. Yet the longer he sat next to her, the colder he got.
She didn’t say anything else until they got to the stop at Lake Grove Cemetery.
“Let’s go,” she said and grabbed her bag off the floor.
She managed to get off before him, and when he stepped onto the sidewalk he thought she’d disappeared. He turned around, and on the second turn, she was there again. He for sure needed a nap when he got home. He was tired, or maybe going crazy like his friend Raelon always said.
In quietude she led him into the cemetery. Maybe she doesn’t want to go home, he thought. Maybe she wants to give me kiss, or make out. He’d heard of kids doing that in the cemetery, and he hoped to join their ranks.
She took him along the winding paths, past the ponds and their geese, past the bone white mausoleums littered with orange maple leaves. She took him into a plot underneath a mighty oak as acorns crunched underneath his feet. No sound came from her.
“Thanks for bringing me home,” she said and bent to give him a kiss. The wind picked up just then and she was wisped away, gone before his eyes.
He looked down at his feet, bewildered, and noticed the fresh cut roses on the gray marble gravestone.
Jenny Wailings
Born January 15th, 1981, Died October 13th 1997
Beloved Daughter, Granddaughter, Sister
He pulled out his phone and googled her name. She’d died in an accident while walking home along the train tracks after being bullied off the bus by the resident mean girl.
The next year and every year thereafter on October 13th Klay would bring her fresh cut flowers.
-Justin Patrick Moore
Cincinnati, Ohio
October 13, 2023
http://www.sothismedias.com/home/fresh-cut-flowers
Oops – never mind about the book link. I think I just clicked on the wrong one. And it turns out my husband already preordered your book! I should get back to work…
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared across the Ecosophia community. A printable version of the prayer list current as of 10/24 may be downloaded here. 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.
(Also, if you think you might be interested in having anyone pray in support of your own self-improvement, please have a look at the Ecosophia Prayer List Autumn Special.* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May the brain surgery that Erika’s partner James underwent for his cancer on October 16th have gone successfully; and may he be blessed, healed and protected, and successfully treated for all of his cancer.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
May Jeff Huggin’s friends Dale and Tracy be blessed and healed; may Dale’s blood and spinal fluid infection clear up sufficiently to receive a heart valve replacement; may his medical procedures go smoothly and with success; and may Dale and Tracy successfully surmount these difficulties.
In the case of Princess Cutekitten and the large bank who is suing her, may justice be done, with harm to none.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
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 now 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.
Maxine Rogers, if you happen to come in here, I’d like to point you to here. I don’t have the experience or confidence to state it with the certainty of a huckster medium, but I do believe that Kameen is doing fine, and likely has been so for some time now.
JMG,
I’ve been doing the review of my day as suggested in your will training posts over on dreamwidth, and…well…it seems I can’t remember much of anything, at least not in sequence and without prompting. That would seem to suggest that I am not in fact conscious much of the time, but the thing is, if I look back at my daily agenda as a reminder, I find in retrospect that I do believe I was awake, aware, and willing during most of my activities throughout the day—I chose them consciously, my attention was engaged, I did not fritter away much time, and I was productive and creative. Certainly I zone out from time to time, but overall it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as my memory failure would suggest. But when I just try to remember the whole day without looking back at my agenda, all I can seem to recall is a rather sparse jumble of moments and activities in no particular order. It is much the same with life in general—many memories of my childhood or even adulthood I can’t pin down chronologically with much more accuracy than within five or even ten years or so unless I have outside clues such as photo albums, etc. Any suggestions for remedying this? Is it okay to refer to my agenda when doing the review or is such a crutch inadvisable?
BTW, the will training and Dorothea Brande’s work seem very helpful. Since beginning, my will seems much less divided and I am far more productive. In the ~3 weeks since starting I’ve knocked out several projects I’d avoided for months or literally years and done so with confident ease rather than my previous gun-to-own-head style of tackling such things if I tackled them at all. This despite my will exercises being of a rather minor and even silly character still. I’m honestly a bit afraid to talk about it too much so will say no more.
JMG, I know that you quite rightly favor that people patronize your publishers directly when possible, but I hope you won’t mind if I share that, for people like me who live outside both Europe and the U.S. for whom ordering your recent output directly from Aeon Books is untenable because of the painful shipping prices, I recently discovered Better World Books, which offers free shipping to many other countries (including mine) with any order that exceeds $15.
Quite a few people on the Internet are saying that the war between Israel and Hamas is the opening act of World War Three. Do you agree or disagree with this assessment, and if either, why?
two questions
1 you once told the story about Bedouins (?) who fought alongside some Brits (Laurence of Arabia times?) – when presented with a painting of themselves (in what we westerners would recognize as a clear realistic interpretation) couldn’t “see” themselves in the paint daubs. does anyone remember where/what blog post that was a part of – it’s one of my most re-thought of stories through time but I’ve lost the source.
2 I’ll be sitting in the west in our local lodge starting next month, entirely thanks to you mr greer. When I finish my year I’d love to do a much deeper dive on FreeMasonry’s history and connections – do you have any resources/book suggestions as to where is a good starting point past our local library?
Thanks!
Greetings, Commentariat.
I was wondering if anyone could recommend a book that prints the Nag Hammadi texts, or any Gnostic gospels? The ones I have found so far have been glorified Cliff’s Notes versions, and stories about the gospels, and not the gospels themselves. I have been immersed in a study of early Christianity, and the struggle to establish the canon, which was “won” by the Orthodox by organizing the church along the lines of the Roman legions.
I am not a Christian, by the way, but my upbringing and location are heavily informed by Christian underpinnings that have always struck me as adulterated and misguided. The gulf between the word of the gospels, and the actions of the clergy and laity have always rubbed me the wrong way.
~JohnPaulO’Neil~
Oh, and pardon my rudeness.
John Michael, congratulations on your two new publications! I’m looking forward to them.
JohnO
What of past lives: Is is good to try to remember (goals, skills, relationships, commitments, etc.)? Or better to take each life as a separate event (to the extent that is even possible)?
JMG in your various writings you’ve always seemed very grounded when it comes to finances. Is there any book or person that helped shape your attitudes and habits towards spending and budgeting? Most of the people I know who are interested in the occult are not very grounded, myself included, and I’d love to know how you manage it.
Hello JMG! I had a question, you had a chapter called ‘Technological Triage’ in one of your books, now I can think of what can create a skill set similar to a ‘handbag’ (what should be in the toolbox of someone who is interested in occultism, Christian mysticism and culture and admires Folklore?) Do you share your thoughts very much? I find it rich and wise and I look forward to your answer, it is very nice to talk to a wise person like you… Thank you in advance
The Israel-Hamas war – what are your predictions, and what will future historians say about this war and its place in the long descent?
On a related note, what would you say is likely to happen with Israel and indeed the Islamists on the other side during the long descent? Will the status quo be preserved there do you reckon?
Many of you have probably read that receiving a heart liver or kidney transplant can alter your personality or cause you to develop unusual new interests. These traits seems to be inherited from the donor. I now read that even receiving blood transfusions can change your personality.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12662925/Does-blood-transfusion-pass-donors-personality-too.html?fbclid=IwAR3SHMO0hKydpF5mPc90wmJPikkAPFxUHaqmq4AEquKLhVygcV3QEQzFMo4
All very mysterious. Just as mysterious is the idea of “junk DNA”. Does JMG have any theories about the purpose of this DNA?
Hi JMG,
Given that the Republicans finally managed to elect a new speaker and that his election appears as though it may somewhat advance the power of the populist right (emphasis on “appears”; I don’t really know), I’m curious if you would consider doing a chart for Johnson’s speaker term on your SubscribeStar account. I’m very interested to see how this goes and if it leads to any real changes or ultimately doesn’t matter much.
Also would be interested if you have any initial, non-astrological thoughts on this.
Thank you!
Hi John,
What is your longer term view of Islam? Do you think the religion might thrive better in the Long Descent?
On a separate point, the geopolitics is looking increasingly dire.
Even if the Middle East doesn’t blow up and cooler heads prevail (right now it looks 50 to 50 to me), Russia is slowly winning against Ukraine, the West’s military and industrial capacity is stretched to the limit and China looks increasingly likely to take Taiwan by the late 2020s.
It feels like something similar to your fictional book is coming (although my gut instinct thinks we are still a few years away).
Howdy All,
To Share: For any RPG enthusiasts in the house, Alexander Macris has launched a kickstarter for the even bigger, even more thorough expansion/revision to his already very good Adventurer Conquerer King System. It’s “retroclone” of ~80’s era D&D, but with changes to many of the subsystems to make the game scale better from 1st level sellswords and skulkers up to continent-spanning god-emperors commanding vast legions. If any of this sounds appealing, the books are written, the campaign is already very much funded and has achieved many stretch goals, and Macris has been doing this professionally for over a decade, so you’re pretty much pre-ordering a done deal, which you can find here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-imperial-imprint-acks-ii
To Ask: This may be a long shot, but do you JMG, or anyone else here, know the best way to find articles and/or books on the ethology of specific animals besides a search at an academic library? I’m interested in learning about local animals more broadly, but specifically, I’d like to try to work out why it is that my particular part of my city is crawling with boat/great-tailed grackles, and has almost zero crows, whereas other parts of the city have both, and some have crows but few grackles.
Thanks to everyone for contributing here, and my blessings to all who welcome them,
Jeff
Congratulations on the published books, JMG!
Thought I’d share some anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of doing the five rites long-term. Amongst other things—at least in the version my family know—they are said to support a very youthful appearance. That’s totally true for my mother! She has been doing them daily for about 20 years now, and gets very routinely and genuinely mistaken for being my (20-something) sister, a great compliment to my 50-something mother! She attributes much spiritual development in her life, and of course her unusually young appearance, to doing the rites.
Hi John,
I have a question about time: I’m about to turn thirty and I have noticed that the days and weeks and months are zipping by at an accelerating rate, which feels kind of scary. A few folks I have talked to tell me that it only gets “worse” / faster the older you get.
My question: is that normal? Is that something one should accept or is there something one can do to make it go slower, so that it feels like when I was in my early twenties? Does it have something to do with living deliberately?
Up until now I thought that I had been making the most of my time. Certainly not in a ultra Calvinist kind of way where I have planned out each minute of my day in devotion to God, but in a sense of where I’m enjoying the station of life I’m at and moving on when the time comes. I have also recently tried out time-blocking as suggested by Cal Newport, which does give me a greater satisfaction with the results and deeds of the day, but I have not felt it slow down time.
What are your thoughts?
In a post on magic a few weeks ago you defined magic and specifically excluded the supernatural magic that appears in Harry Potter movies, as an example. In Christian Sunday School 60 years ago we learned of the miracles performed by Jesus of Nazareth: walking on water, water into wine, loaves and fishes to feed a multitude, etc. These were never called magic- always miracles. In your view, at what point in western culture did magic become defined as acts that violated the laws of nature? Things like mind over matter, distance viewing, becoming invisible, changing one thing into another? Actual physical acts as opposed to changing consciousness?
Thanks in advance
Congratulations on the new books!
Do the energy centers used in the Five Rites (referenced in the book description) affect in any way those used in the Grail working from the DMH? In other words, is it safe to do both?
Greetings, one and all.
I’m surprised to see the reference to the Coelbren Alphabet. As a (currently) ex-pat Welsh girl, that whole thing has a distinctly nasty smell back in Wales . I have not read your book, Mr Greer, but I’m sure you point out in it somewhere that it’s massive invention by one Edward Williams (aka Iolo Morganwg) and that the claims he made about it are crazily risable. I make the point for your readership, as it maybe not so widely known.
Maybe I’m a bit touchy, but I really don’t like the cultural appropriation that seems to be going on over so much of Welsh history and culture. It is hard enough to keep hold of our traditions and language without them being stolen by any old Tom, Dick or Harry (even if like the self-styled “bard” Williams they are actually Welsh) to claim legitimacy and some form of ancient historical authenticity. It’s doubly bad when our own do it to us ourselves. Rant over – nerve touched much!
JMG, with so much talk these days of a “multipolar” world arising (and lots of evidence that such a world is indeed arising), I wonder if you can address a question that often enters my mind in this context – that is, how do you suppose the transition to a multipolar world will dovetail with the decline of industrial civilization? Are all bets off a few decades down the road once the hard limits on the global energy supply are on full display? It’s hard for me to get any sort of picture as to how this might play out….which is why I’m asking you. 🙂
@John Paul Oneil: You want “The Nag Hammadi Library”. It has all the texts as found, including the omissions from where parts of the original texts were missing. Possibly also called “The Nag Hammadi library in English” translated and introduced by members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity ; with an afterword by Richard Smith.”
@JMG: I also wanted to say congrats about the two books. I hope to get both, but I’ll getting a few copies of the Five Rites book, one for myself, and one for two older New Age hippie types who introduced me to the Five Rites when I was a teenager.
Question: What do you think of the idea that the Coelbren alphabet was found in parts of Kentucky, as handed down there by Welsh-Indians who were the intermixed offspring of Prince Madoc? It’s a good story anyway…
JMG,
“The Secret of the Five Rites” sounds quite intriguing. Is it compatible with OSA and AODA?
Thank you!
People on Magic Monday were discussing the astral weather having weird effects on the citizenry. The other day I I received a bizarre and cruel text from my brother, which is most unlike him—he’s always low-key and polite. And he and his wife, who’s also low-key and polite, got into a huge fight. AND the police have recently been over at my neighbor’s house. None of this is normal in Kittenville. (Brother actually lives in Beagleville, which normally is equally quiet.). Is there anything I can do to help settle the astral weather?
—Princess Cutekitten
Hi JMG,
I have two questions:
1) Would you mind sharing what news sites you read–I know you mentioned Asia Times fairly recently, but I wondered what others you found decent. I’ve given up on most US news sites.
2) Did you ever explain the purpose of the Johnny Appleseed chant? I love that poem.
Thanks
@cointoss #23: I’m not much older than you—I’m 36—but FWIW I find quite the opposite to be true. Days stretch on for ages and ages now, to say nothing of weeks or months.
“Fresh Cut Flowers.’ Wow, what a powerful story, and very well told.
I had assumed that once they had observed the now certain defeat of the U.S in its proxy war in the Ukrainian , and the welcoming of Iran in to Russia and China’s defense umbrella (SCO) the Israeli’s well honed survival instincts would have kicked in. Logically they should have approached the new multi-polar power couple on bended knee and gotten them to broker an arrangement with their neighbors and opponents to give them a chance at longterm survival. But their elites and political system seem to be even more insane than ours in the US. They have doubled down on their “ our way or nothing” shtick will cause much suffering for all and doom them in the long run.
Bradley, Miraculix? Okay, you were reading it either in German or in one of the Scandinavian languages. He’s Getafix in English, and Panoramix in the original. I came to Asterix le Gaulois somewhat late in my Druid education; I learned much more early on from the Dungeons & Dragons game, where Druids are a character class.
Brunette, you may not have noticed the earlier link for US readers, which goes to Bookshop instead of Aeon. As for the censorship-industrial complex, that’s one of the most striking signs just now of the collapse of legitimacy of the managerial class in the US and its allies. You don’t need censorship if you keep effective control of the narrative; once you have to start censoring things, you’ve already lost, because people very quickly figure out how to run rings around the censors. I expect ever more frantic attempts to be made to silence dissenting voices in the years immediately ahead, which will fail.
Jeffrey, the first three series are what Sadhu himself recommends for occult students. I’d encourage you to do them apart from your ordinary practices.
Justin, very nicely done. Thanks for this.
Quin, thanks for this as always,
Jen, many people have this trouble in the early phases of this exercise. It’s not that you weren’t conscious, it’s that your mind isn’t holding onto the memories — but as you practice the recollection, your mind will get with the program. Please don’t use an agenda or any other assistance; just do your best and keep at it.
Quin, duly noted and thanks for this.
Mister N, that depends entirely on what’s meant by the label “World War Three,” of course. What do you mean by it?
Stinkhorn, if I recall correctly it’s from Lawrence of Arabia’s own writings, but I don’t recall when it was discussed here. Congrats on your advancement to the West! David Stevenson’s fine book The Origins of Freemasonry is the place I’d recommend starting.
John, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer gives good solid word for word translations of all the books found in the Nag Hammadi library. You can also find all of the texts online here:
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html
Bentley Layton’s The Gnostic Scriptures includes the most important Nag Hammadi texts and a good selection of other Gnostic texts, again word for word.
Ken, I don’t recommend making an effort to remember past lives. When you’re ready, the memories will start surfacing; until then it’s best to take each life as an opportunity to experience the world in a new way.
Joshua, it wasn’t a book. It’s apparently something I brought into this life from previous incarnations, because I was a penny-pincher even as a child.
Yiğit, hmm. I’ll consider a future post on that.
Sam, I discussed the future of Israel at some length back in the Archdruid Report, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen no reason to change my views — quite the contrary. The current mess is one predictable step along the route to that future; exactly what will happen in the weeks to come is anybody’s guess at this point, since it depends on the actions of individuals rather than on broader social and historical trends, but the status quo is only temporarily stable because Israel receives a great deal of financial support from the US government and the Jewish diaspora here. Once the US loses its hegemony and the US economy can no longer prop up Israel, things will get ugly.
Batstrel, thanks for this. I don’t claim to be a geneticist, but my guess is that when geneticists label DNA as “junk,” what they’re actually saying is “we’re not smart enough to understand what this DNA does.”
JC, if you can get me the time for his election as speaker, within a minute or two, I’ll certainly consider it. My immediate response? Johnson is apparently not in favor of pouring more US money down Ukrainian ratholes, so a lot of US politicians who have been battening on that particular fountain of graft are going to be very irate with him; the result will be an increase in partisan squabbles. Now let’s see if Congress can deal with the debt ceiling…
Forecasting, it works fairly well to treat Islam and Christianity as siblings; take the current date, subtract 600 years or so to account for the difference in their ages, and see what Christianity was doing at that point and you won’t be too far off in predicting where Islam is in its life cycle. (Treat Shi’a Islam as an equivalent of the Orthodox Church and Sunni Islam as an equivalent of the Western churches and you won’t be too far off.) In 1423 Christianity in the West had mostly recovered from the shocks of the Black Death and the failure of the Crusades, but internal stresses were rising toward the explosion of the Reformation. Thus I’d expect Islam to be recovering from the shocks of European conquest of the Middle East, but to be facing internal stresses that will lead to serious rifts within the Sunna in a century or so.
Jeff, no, there I can’t help you. Anyone else?
Katya, many thanks for this. I hear this from a lot of people who do the Rites.
Cointoss, that varies from person to person. My dad told me the same thing many years ago, but I haven’t found it to be true myself. It may be that meditation, which of course I do daily, has an affect there.
Alan, that happened in the 17th century, when rationalists such as David Hume lumped magic and miracle together in an effort to disprove both of them.
Jbucks, the energy centers in the Five Rites were very cleverly chosen so that you can do them with just about any other system of spiritual practice. I’ve done the Rites alongside the Grail workiing and had good results.
Cerys, Iolo Morganwg — for all his opium-laced dreams and outright forgeries — contributed hugely to the revival of interest in Welsh culture among Welsh people in the 19th century; his fabricated ceremonies for the eisteddfodau helped keep the old forms of Welsh verse a living tradition, and his advocacy for Welsh poetry generally had a very significant impact in his time and after in keeping Wales from having its culture stomped by England. Of course the Coelbren aren’t ancient — but they’re a couple of centuries old at this point, and they were a source of great pride to many Welsh people at a time when they really needed such things. Furthermore, Iolo wasn’t simply a self-styled bard, he was a genuine poet — I challenge you to write verse in the style of Dafydd ap Gwilym that’s good enough to pass detection as a forgery for almost two centuries! I’d encourage you to read some of the more recent scholarship on Iolo — for example, Geraint Jenkins’ fine anthology A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg — before dismissing him as casually as you’ve done here.
Interesting JMG, you’re reply regarding Islam and Christianity to Forecasting directly contradict Spengler’s thoughts on the matter. He separated Orthodox and Western Christianity into entirely seperate fields with the latter arising around 1000 to 1100, throwing off the Magian cloak and therefore western Christianity was around 400 to 500 years younger than Islam.
Islam itself to him was the reformation and puritan movement of the entire Magian religious world, and has already well and truly been through its second religiosity. It wasn’t a new religion per se but the purification and hardening of the themes of Judaism and orthodox christianity.
Congratulations on your books. A few months ago I read two of your books that have been translated into Spanish (“the druid path” and “the occult book”). I must confess that I have always been very skeptical about the occult, and I am not a believer either. I was raised Christian, but religion never made sense to me, even as a child. I have a hard time believing in topics like reincarnation. I find some techniques of druidism interesting, such as the practice of meditation or the connection with nature. I was also practicing divination with a Cohen deck, although without success. Is it possible that some people have atrophied ability to connect with God or with hidden reality?
Hi JMG,
It appears he took the oath of office at 2:43pm EST, which I assume would be the correct reference point based on your inauguration chart. Thanks in advance of you’re able and willing to do it, and of course understood if you have a bit too much on your plate already.
It will be interesting to see how spending is handled under Johnson’s leadership. He already spoke of supporting Israel, but Ukraine is another matter. He announced a debt commission, but studying doesn’t equal action. It does seem like this is at least a bit of a power shift, though the establishment also fell in line which could always be a sign they don’t think he’ll disrupt things too much. Add it to the pile of interesting things to keep an eye on!
@ Cerys
If you are concerned with keeping Welsh culture alive – as you rightly should be – then I would suggest that you categorically reject any and all attempts to turn your people into just another collection of victim-mascots for woke PMC types to hold up every now and then to show how culturally literate they are. Yes, that includes throwing out notions like ‘cultural appropriation’. Welsh culture will have a better chance of *survival* with more people are taking an active interest in it. I have noticed a few commenters here saying that they have taken up the study of the Welsh language as a result of studying the Druid Revival traditions started by Iolo and his ilk. This can only help preserve Welsh culture and identity. How could it possibly be detrimental in any way?
Furthermore, as you are presumably based in the UK, the targets of your understandable frustration might be better placed than a handful of eccentric Druids hanging out on the corners of the internet. Right now, we are seeing a shockingly rapid dispossession of the native culture and heritage of European nations, including Wales. Unprecedented demographic change is making our fate look increasingly similar to that of the indigenous Americans, while a worryingly self-destructive impulse is worming its way through the liberal elites, manifesting as a sense that we ourselves do not belong on this land, that we do not deserve to stand up for ourselves and the continuation of our heritage for fear of being labelled ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’. if I may, I would suggest that these issues might be a more pressing concern than anything related to the Coelbren alphabet.
Now that you speak about books. Have you done some advancements on the book (a novel?) you are writing about the future in 100.000 years?
Also, I was waiting to continue my collection of The Weird of Hali and I saw that the new Publisher has increased the price by around 5 € (at least on Amazon – unfortunately I don’t have another way of acquiring it, o so I think). I hope you get at least 4 out of those 5 €!
JMG—Excellent, thank you! Will do!
Time for the September report on renewable energy within the Bonneville Power Administration.
For wind, the low point was 1.6% of nameplate capacity on 9/15. (That date will reappear shortly). The best day was 9/4 at 80.1%. The average for the month was 28.2%.
For solar the low point was 7.7% of nameplate capacity on 9/21. The best day was 9/15 at 38.7%. That day was clear, sunny, and dead calm. The average for the month was 26.2%.
The longest dunkelflaute started on the 29th. That was 16.25 hours. Average power demand over that period was 5,381 MW, for a total of 87,446 MW-Hr. This requires 22,422 Tesla Maxpower batteries to get through the period, and the total weight of these is roughly equal to 9.4 Nimitz class aircraft carriers. There were multiple nights of dead calm too, so if you were expecting the wind turbines to power you through the night you would have been most unhappy.
Locally the temperature switch has been flipped. Saturday was 70 F. Today is 40 at best, frost is expected tonight.
Hi JMG!
The analogy you drew at the beginning of the month – highlighting the similarities between Hitler’s hatred of the Slavic Menace! and the modern Liberal Establishment’s hatred of Orange Man! – has given me much to think about, especially in light of the very delicate position Israel now finds itself…
I am curious – do you get the sense that the Liberal Establishment’s crusade against Trump and his 75 Million supporters is manifesting (perhaps unconsciously, although just barely) its future nemesis? The endless stream of court cases, and the implicit (and increasingly explicit) accusations of Sedition! Insurrection! Treason! inherent in them, make me think that these guys are just begging for some sort of domestic version of Ukraine vs. Russia. Using the timeframe of that conflict as a rough measuring rod, it would appear we are already approaching the 2013 – 14 Maiden Riot/Azov Uprising phase of the conflict (i.e., enabling your most vicious attack dogs and hardening your future enemies’ resolve).
You’re novel Twilight’s Last Gleam (which isn’t even a decade old!) alluded to such a conflict but I was hoping we had at least until the late 2030s/2040s before we got there. In any case, would be curious to hear your present thoughts on the matter.
Thank you as always,
Chris W
@cointoss #23 – One theory I have heard is that time goes by slowly if little is experienced (i.e. if you’re bored a lot) but that long stretches of boring time shrink drastically when you try to remember them. On the other hand – if your days are full of life, they seem to zoom past but in memory, years turn into ages.
I find this to be a good rule of thump to some extend, but judging from my own experience there are two things to consider:
2) It might well be that life doesn’t feel boring but is largely devoid of meaningful experience anyway.
3) If this is the case, you might realize in retrospection. But in that case, time is wasted.
I have spent some time – one could roughly sum them up as “my 20ies” in this state. It was a very rude awakening and only afterwards I realized how much time I had spent in a meaningless way and how many clues of my subconscious to make a change (like thinking about time frequently…) I missed in those years.
Now of course I can’t know if the above applies to you. But being about to turn thirty soon, this may be a welcome opportunity to think about the content of your time rather than it’s subjective speed.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
I mostly mean it in the classic sense, where the great industrial powers duke it out, and it some point it turns into a maximal thermonuclear warhead exchange ala eighties T-movie The Day After. Though I suppose it could also be a ten-year long ordeal involving any number of world-powers that ends up significantly reducing the functionality of the United States as an industrial nation, as a remote viewer whose videos have been linked in these forums previously seems to have foreseen.
>Quite a few people on the Internet are saying that the war between Israel and Hamas is the opening act of World War Three. Do you agree or disagree with this assessment, and if either, why?
People said the same about the Russo-Ukraine War and it didn’t. One of these little wars will snowball into WW3 for sure. Which one though? Who knows? Let’s roll the dice and find out.
I’ll reiterate my rule of thumb to figure out whether you’re in WW3 or not and it goes something like this. Is GPS still working? Then it’s not WW3.
Hi JMG,
I pre-ordered the Five-Rites book from Aeon back when you first announced it in July. I see now that it’s being sold through Bookshop. Have there been any issue from people receiving the book from Aeon? I see the charge on my credit card statement, but I can’t find an email record or anything else, and have not received the book. Wondering if any one else has experienced this. Thanks.
Hey JMG
Apparently some Chinese warships have been spotted heading towards Israel, and I’m curious as to your opinion on what interest the CCP have in the current conflict? I assume that it may have something to do with control of oil, though I can’t see how Israel or Palestine could help them achieve that goal.
Alongside the study of occultism my other lifelong interest has been swordsmanship. I’ve just never become bored with either of these subjects (as well as the quarterstaff which I enjoy just as much). As I’m a Celt, I wonder whether there might be some ancestral link between these two pursuits?
JMG, what do you make of the demonstrations worldwide (but especially in the US) enthusiastically supporting Gaza, and people tearing down posters of Israeli hostages? If the demonstrations were against harming innocent civilians on both sides I’d understand, but I get the impression that they’re skewed in favor of Gaza and even in support of Hamas (!) As with most demonstrations, a lot of people just want to wave signs and yell, and probably could never articulate what they’re protesting and why, but this seems like mass insanity. My favorite is the photo of people holding a banner that says “Queers for Palestine,” when sex between men in that area is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
@Stinkhorn:
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/explaining-the-world/#comment-2818
Enrique says:
#78. June 25, 2014 at 11:07 pm
Wow, quite a few responses for such a new blog in such a short interval. I take this as a very good sign…
@ Eric S
I can think of at least one well known example of people from a non-Western culture who had difficulty comprehending Western artistic conventions and perspective. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) once mentioned a curious episode that he witnessed. A group of Arab chieftains and tribal elders who had led the Arab Revolt during the Great War was presented with a group portrait by a well-known British painter. They literally could not comprehend what was being portrayed. To them, it was just a collection of shapes and blotches of color on a sheet of canvas. One of the elders asked if the shapes were perhaps camels. Because of their unfamiliarity with Western artistic conventions and the Western concept of perspective, they could not see that these shapes and blotches of color were in fact depictions of them.
Wendy, multipolar world orders are normal between the fall of one global hegemon and the rise of another. We had one from 1914 to 1945, for example, when Britain lost its global dominance and who was going to take its place wasn’t settled yet — there were some wars fought over that. 😉 If we assume that the US loses its grip on global power in 2025 and it takes until 2055 or so for the next hegemon to consolidate its power, we’ve got several decades of political turmoil, global economic readjustment, and warfare to go through, and all of those things will either make it harder to transition in a controlled fashion, or burn more fossil fuels in a hurry, or both. So I think we can expect even more turmoil than was already on the way, with stabilization in North America and Europe probably delayed until after the world order is settled.
Justin, it’s a great story, but I’ve never seen any solid evidence for it. There were bardic groups among the Welsh diaspora in the US that used the Coelbren, however — there was, for a while, a Gorsedd of Bards in North America, part of the same Welsh language movement that kept my wife’s maternal grandfather and his family fed during the Depression. (He was a lay preacher who traveled from town to town in upstate New York, driving a beat-up Ford with his family in back, preaching sermons in Welsh at Welsh Baptist churches.) So it’s not impossible that Welsh expats in Kentucky wrote some things in Coelbren there…
Random, yes, it is. I’ve practiced the Rites alongside a very wide range of work with good effect, and those are among them.
Your Kittenship, sorry to hear this. Prayer’s always useful; other than that, I’m not sure what to suggest.
Pam, (1) I like to read news sources from opposing viewpoints. Thus I read the BBC and RT, which are always on opposite sides! Asia Times is good; Anadolu, a Turkish site, offers its own distinctive voice, and so does al-Jazeera. I rotate through different Indian newspapers, and then I also read more or less randomly chosen news sites from elsewhere — the news looks very different from Kenya or Uruguay or Malaysia than it does from the industirial-world mainstream, and there are plenty of good readable sites in English from these and many other countries. (2) It’s meant to help rekindle an older and healthier national image among Americans. We could use one of those.
Clay, Israel’s in a tremendous bind. They depend for their survival on money from the US, some from the government and more from the Jewish diaspora here, so if they align with hostile nations the US could yank their leash good and hard in an instant. Those hostile nations, furthermore, have nothing to gain by supporting Israel and very, very large amounts of oil and other resources to gain by supporting the Arabs instead. I don’t see any way Israel can get through this in the long run.
Weeping, it does indeed. I disagree with Spengler in some things, and that’s one of them. More broadly, I think he missed the fact that a given great culture can go through several cycles; Arab civilization isn’t simply a continuation of the older Magian civilization, it’s a second cycle on its own timeline, like Tang or Ming China, New Kingdom Egypt, etc.
XCO, plenty of people these days have grown up in societies that systematically taught them not to pay attention to their own capacities to perceive hidden realities, and it takes a lot of work and patience to get over that childhood programming. Only you can decide whether you want to put in that work now.
JC, got it and thank you! I’ll see what I can do; I also have a chart for the beginning of RFK Jr.’s independent run to interpret.
Xorx, the book set a hundred millennia in the future is on the back burner for the moment while I finish up other projects, but it’s still in the works. As for the Weird, I’m sorry to say that inflation gets most of the increase — everything costs more, including paper, printers ink, and shipping!
Siliconguy, ouch. Less than a third of nameplate…
Chris, the real struggle right now is going on in state and local governments, and there the conservative populists seem to be winning far more often than they’re losing: school boards and state legislatures are falling into their hands, and big city governments are being forced to back away from their advocacy for illegal immigration and unrestricted street crime, while the Left as a whole remains utterly fixated on Trump. Thus I don’t expect an explosion at this point; by the time the Left figures out what’s happening, well over two thirds of the country will be in the hands of their opponents, and the rest will be teetering.
Mister N, no, I don’t expect anything thermonuclear. I expect instead a long difficult struggle of proxy wars, economic crises, assassinations, and political conflict, quite possibly enlivened by a domestic insurgency or two here in the US, before it’s all over.
Mike, The Secret of the Five Rites technically hasn’t been released yet — it’s in warehouse but still heading to the distributors — so it’s no surprise that you haven’t got it yet; I don’t have my author copies yet either! Give it a couple of weeks and it should arrive.
J.L.Mc12, my take is that they’re there to evacuate Chinese nationals if a major war breaks out. Six warships isn’t enough to make a huge difference in the fighting.
Tengu, not that I know of, but there have certainly been styles of swordsmanship with a strong occult dimension — I translated a book on one of them, for example.
Yavanna, one of the ugly secrets of American culture is the long and bitter hostility between African-American and Jewish urban communities, which goes back well into the 19th century and remains very much a live factor today. That led a lot of African-American political activists to embrace the Palestinian cause — and most of the US left takes its guidance from the African-American activist scene these days.
Hi JMG:
In a recent post you commented on the role played by Dion Fortune in the magical defense of the U.K. Could it be that Aleister Crowley was involved for his part in those battles? I know very little of his biography, but I have always had the impression that in at least for a time he worked for his country’s secret service.
I am somewhat curious about satanic magicians (they call themselves this way), the ones I have seen, let’s say serious, don’t seem to “believe” in “supernatural” entities. It seems rather that they seek to deepen their consciousness by relying on an ancient and often obscure symbol of the antagonist.
I don’t know if this is a good idea.
Perhaps you could say something of public interest about this type of magic?
My apologies as I meant to include this question with the preceding comment. In a recent article Alastair Crooke wrote:
‘…As that early repression of ‘incorrect thinking’ took hold, John Dee, Elizabeth I’s confident, considered to be the greatest philosopher in England, died lonely, and destitute, vilified and attacked by an angry mob, his great library ransacked. And Giordano Bruno, the great Hermetic ‘thinker’ of his age, endured eight years of torture during which he refused to recant before, in 1600, being led out into the Piazza di Fiori (Square of Flowers), in Rome, and ceremonially burnt alive. Hopefully, the aftermath of our present inflection point will not be so traumatic — but don’t count on it…’
Is such a violent suppression of dissenting voices genuinely likely to reoccur?
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/a-1909-best-seller-said-war-couldnt-happen—-then-it-did
“Just as mysterious is the idea of “junk DNA”.”
There is a short article on Wikipedia for an overview.
Originally they didn’t know what it was for because it is not used for coding a protein. It does do other things, or some of it does. There are sequences that are not used anymore, and there are other sequences that are broken like the one for making Vitamin C. Humans have the gene, it just doesn’t work.
Which makes an interesting question. We could repair it and end the risk of scurvy, but what side effects would there be given this,
“It has also been noted that the loss of the ability to synthesize ascorbate strikingly parallels the inability to break down uric acid, also a characteristic of primates. Uric acid and ascorbate are both strong reducing agents. This has led to the suggestion that, in higher primates, uric acid has taken over some of the functions of ascorbate”
If we flood the body with internally generated ascorbic acid and create a surplus of uric air would there be a large surge of gout and kidney stones? Would we need to repair both enzymes at once? Definitely a proceed with caution situation.
I just saw a facebook person who posts clever memes about not trusting the government etc post that the earth is flat. What is your take on the flat earth psyop? Do you think the CIA created it to discredit people who are right about a lot of other things, just not that one? It’s so annoying as these people are right about everything else, pretty much.
i often come across comment on other sites that run along these lines, “I used to read JMG until he wrote <>. Frankly, I disagree with you on a handful of subjects, but I would never stop reading you because of those few areas. It actually leaves me a bit befuddled why anyone would take that stance. i can think of only a few solutions and am curious which one you think is most likely.
1) They really were a reader, and they really did stop reading you because of your stance on some subject. If this is true I despair of a society that feels they can only ever engage with someone with whom they are in complete lock step.
2) They’re lying. They were never really fans of yours. They just can’t post their venom on your sites so they do so where they can in the hopes they can run you down.
3) They were fans but got swept up in one of the many idealogical storms that passed by (Trump, Covid, Vaccines, the latest war, etc.). If that is the case it makes me nervous that people can be swept away so easily.
Thousghts?
AV
Over the last couple of decades we have seen a large influx of Muslim Immigrants into western countries, opposition to of which was of course deemed racist. Subsequently with this current flare up of hostilities western governments have actually banned demonstrations in support of Palestine (Simplicius76.substack.com pointed out that in Europe it is legal to burn a Quran, but not to protest against the Israeli response against gaza (I think both protest and burning should be legal)) both these decisions seem like bad ones to me (immigration and banning protest), taken together they seem catastrophic, how likely do you think this is to result in a new outbreak of Islamic terrorism and how destabilising is that likely to be?
JMG,
Another PR problem for the Israelis, in addition to the tension between the Jewish and black urban communities is the entire “ colonists bad!” Wing of the woke movement. With the active participation of the Jewish strongholds of Academia, Media and Hollywood an entire generation was taught that white settlers who stole land from the original inhabitants were one of the great evils of history.
So even though hippocracy is a main feature of woke and government propaganda , it is a bridge too far to convince a 28 year old gender studies major to sympathize with the white men dropping bombs on the brown people trapped in the “reservation”.
Greetings ADJMG,
Any plan to publish the heathen book you started several years ago?. I really liked that.
Thanks!
Hi there, JMG,
This is early, but I wish you and Sarah a blessed Samhain!
Now some thoughts and a question. I was considering the human etheric body in the context of “as above, so below” and how the etheric body does not become independent until after 7 years of life. Then, I compared that to the development of the mental body. We are developing our mental body, analogous to the etheric body, and working to be independent from “who”? Hmm, what is the equivalent to our parents?
I’m sure this is not a perfect analogy – nothing is ever fully independent, but do you have any thoughts along this line of thinking?
Cointoss, when you were 6 years old, a day seemed like a long time. Less so when you were 14, because a day was then a much smaller proportion of your life. And so on. This is a natural part of the aging process. You can’t stop yourself aging. Remember that nothing lasts for ever and nothing is perfect. Life doesn’t feel the same at every stage of your life.
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Eventually you will get tired of noticing time seeming to pass more quickly, then it will seem normal again. Once it seems to start to speed up again, you won’t feel the panic that you felt the first time round. You will have a chuckle at your younger self instead. Learn to enjoy the advantages of it. When I was younger, train journeys that took 3 hours really used to drag. Now I enjoy the fact that they seem to whizz by.
When I was 28, I noticed that I was getting a few grey hairs, and that I put on weight more easily. It occurred to me in real terms that eventually I would die. Before, it had just been theoretical. My panic lasted about 3 months before I grew tired of it. These things are part of the phases of life. Adapting to them is part of the tests that life puts you through. Try to accept them without overthinking them. The fact that you take things seriously means that you are not a frivolous person. Relax, and you will enjoy life more. Take comfort from the fact that what you are experiencing is not unique, at the same time as you are journeying though life as a unique person. Aging is part of life, and you will get used to its seemingly varying speeds.
Dear Mr. Greer,
First of all, congratulations on your new books! I’ve been meaning to comment this in last week’s post, but it’ll finally go here: thank you for hosting Frugal Fridays, I have so much to learn about that. Also thanks for the Master Conserver document, I got it printed and bound.
Open to the commentariat:
Lately I’ve been thinking about the possibility of relocating to a place better suited to live through the next few decades of the Long Descent. I agree that, in the long term, some areas of North America are probably the best positioned in the Western world, but they’re likely out of my reach. What’s more, I don’t have the necessary resources or circumstances to move anywhere currently. So, the best thing I can do right now is start planning carefully with different scenarios in mind. Whatever I’ll finally do will depend on how personal and world events unfold.
So as to not get blinded by my own biases, I’m trying to come up with a list of objective criteria to assess the suitability of a place to live during a certain future period (until around 60 years from now, in case I reach a ripe old age), in the context of our collapse. By place I mean a rather wide area, say a region or a state, not a specific city or neighborhood. Even if I limit myself to my country, Spain, different regions have huge contrasts in terms of climate, infrastructure, economy, and so on.
Has this ever been discussed in your books or here? It would be useful to compare my own list -it’s just a very early sketch so far- to what other ecosophians came up with.
Thanks.
Hispalensis
Hi JMG,
I recall you mentioning recently somewhere that some tribal societies in northeastern North America took measures to avoid developing a more complex civilization. Do you know where could I learn about that?
Thank you!
JacinBar, Crowley is known to have worked for MI-5 during the First World War; he was in the US doing an undercover routine, pretending to be pro-German and helping Britain identify and neutralize agents of German influence back when the US was still notionally neutral. I don’t know if he was healthy enough to take an active role in things in the Second World War. As for the “satanic magicians,” that whole business is an offshoot of chaos magic, which by and large embraced the rather odd notions that human beings are the only magically active beings in the cosmos and that gods, spirits, etc. are just human thoughtforms. No, it’s not a good idea; it doesn’t matter a bit whether you believe in demons or not, if they believe in you…
Tengu, dissenting voices are always being repressed — just ask Julian Assange. It’s purely a matter of what kind of dissent the establishment finds most threatening. In the 16th century, religious dissent held that title; it doesn’t seem to me as though it’s likely to come in for the same thing any time soon, though.
Bridge, where did you get the idea that the flat earth business is a government psyop? The Flat Earth Society was around when I was a kid — my mother was a member for a while.
AV, oh, I think it’s quite possible that many of them are quite honest, and stopped reading me for what they consider valid reasons. I write what I want to write, for the people who want to read it; I have my own highly idiosyncratic take on things, which conflicts with the conventional wisdom in a lot of ways, and so inevitably I go places and say things that many people find unacceptable or downright offensive. If they decide they want to read someone else, why should that bother me? Also, of course, fandom is a temporary state; very few people remain fanboys or fangirls of the same thing indefinitely, and I’ve watched quite a few people go through a few years of fannish adulation toward me and then grow out of it and do something else. Some of them get nasty about it on the way out, which is unfortunate but very human; if instead they simply say, “Yeah, I was into Greer for a while back in the day,” I have no objection at all.
Dagnarus, good question. I’m not sufficiently well informed about conditions in Europe to be sure, though.
Clay, there’s that. (Er, hippocracy would be government by horses. I assume you mean hypocrisy…)
DaShui, that project’s been passed on to other hands. You’ll find it here:
https://gullindagan.dreamwidth.org/
Matt, thank you and likewise. As for the mental body, why, each body has a wider context than denser bodies. At material birth we separate from the mother’s material body; at etheric birth we separate from the etheric matrix of our family; at astral birth we separate from the astral groupmind of our culture, and at mental birth — which of course most human beings don’t achieve — we separate from the mental environment of our species.
Hispalensis, I haven’t tried to set out such a set of criteria, partly because it seems very much an individual matter to me and partly because my own choices are strongly shaped by my wife’s health issues, to the extent that some other factors appropriate to many don’t even get a look in. (You do what you have to.) I’d be interested in hearing from others, though.
Jonathan, I don’t have access to those sources just now, but they were a variety of articles about the way that the Eastern Woodland peoples were influenced by their encounters with the Mound Builder cultures further west.
JMG, I wasn’t paying attention and spellcheck got me, I am on a phone today instead of computer. But right about now a “ government by horses” is looking pretty good to me compared to the “ government by horse’s behinds” we have now.
Hey Hispalensis,
As someone who’s currently based out of the American Southwest, I’ve been of the same mindset in terms of finding a future locale to relocate too.
Another ecosophian, next migration, had a great series on examining different US states and may provide a skeleton by which you can look at places in Europe..
https://next-migration.dreamwidth.org/
As JMG has mentioned, your particular circumstances (age, occupation, culture, health, skills etc) will greatly effect what a “good location” is. For myself, here are some general questions I’d ask in no particular order:
How much does X area rely on cheap energy to make the location liveable?
Do I get along well with X culture?
Do I have any friends or family support there?
Do I have skills that are useful for that area?
What’s the local water supply and food production like?
Can I handle cold or warmer weather better?
Etc
Hope this helps,
Andrew
@JMG #65 If you find the time to locate the articles you mentioned concerning the Eastern Woodlands cultures vis a vis the Mound Builder cultures, I’d love to read them. Thank you Jonathan for asking the original question.
JMG, regarding astral and mental birth – how do you know it’s happened?
A beef today: when it comes to real estate, especially residential, people get unhinged. Modern education helps the process along as it appears that not many people that enter institutions of higher learning graduate with anything resembling the ability to think, universities apparently having mastered the art of disassembling critical intellectual faculties.
Add the ministrations of the real estate industry and the utter bollocks peddled by Wall Street and people have got their heads so screwed around as to be unable to string together logical thoughts.
How many times have you heard that paying a mortgage is ‘forced saving’. So, you might question, ‘what is saving’? Maybe it’s me that’s the simpleton but I always thought it was putting away money, whether under floorboards or into a savings account, for future use. You know, cash, for the proverbial rainy day, or maybe not so rainy.
So, me being simple in thought and reason, could never square in my mind how is giving your money to someone else, in this instance to pay a debt, the same as putting it away for yourself? To me it’s not forced saving, it’s forced spending. Just try missing a couple of mortgage payments.
In my mind, money in a savings account is a claim on a bank, enforceable in court and FDIC insured, backed by bank statements and deposit receipts. It’s money that you can use, accessible at an ATM or a visit with a teller.
The greatly clever at this point smile broadly and utter the word ‘equity’. But then I look puzzled and awed by their business acumen. Nonetheless I object that money in a savings account is a hard number backed by that bank statement. By contrast ‘equity’ is just an opinion as to the difference between what you think your house is worth and what’s owing on it.
And what’s owing on it is another one of those hard numbers backed by signed mortgage documents. Your equity, on the other hand, only takes a legally enforceable form on sale of the house and when the money is in your account. Until that point, it’s nothing. It’s just a notion in your head. You can’t even buy a can of coke with it.
When higher mortgage rates bite into the housing market, see what happens to home equity. If people are forced to sell, that equity that they equate with money in the bank does a disappearing act.
@cointoss
I think it has to do with repetition, habit, learning, and memory. When you have the same routine, day after day, and you aren’t actively challenged to learn something new, you stop noticing things– your eyes stop scanning the world around you quite literally, and your brain just fills in the blanks from memory, with what you *know* is there– a cognitive shorthand– and then at the end of the day, your brain shuffles through the accumulated detritus… and throws it all in the dumpster because it’s the same as yesterday, and the day before, and the one before that, and there’s nothing important in there that needs to be remembered. Next thing you know three months have passed and you have no idea where it went!
The trick to making it stretch back out again, is to learn new things. Hard things. Things that require practice and experience to master. A new language. An unfamiliar instrument. A style of dance. A useful skill. Travel, even– particularly to places that have very little in common with where you live now, the amenities you’re used to aren’t available, and you have to pay close attention and re-learn how to do quite ordinary things (the unexpected delights of my own travels were things like learning how to use an unfamiliar bus system, do laundry by hand, and cook and plan meals without a refrigerator– but even learning your way around an unfamiliar neighborhood will do). Even something as simple as baking bread– if you haven’t done it before, or if you’re trying to learn new techniques and types– can serve this purpose. Bake every day for a while. Do it badly. Do it again. Try something different. Keep trying. Talk to other people about what’s not working. Troubleshoot. Learn. This is the sort of thing that will give you the time back. The stuff that forces your brain to wire in new circuits. The stuff you start dreaming about while you’re working on it, because your sleeping self is convinced it’s important and has to work to find a place to file it. It doesn’t go in the dumpster now!
Could someone please explain what is remote viewing? Is it a kind of enhanced intuition or something different?
Some book notes: Much to my surprise, I have concluded that the British writer Iris Murdoch is, IMHO, greatly overrated and a waste of reading time. If you want tales of sexual obsession, our own Joyce Carol Oates does those much better. On a library discard pile I found three volumes by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (sigh). One of those contains his three historical novels about ancient Egypt, which I am now enjoying very much. Everything good historical fiction should be.
If anything provokes WWIII, I walk out on a thin twig and say I believe it would be an out and out Chinese invasion of India.
In the spirit of John’s October 4th post, I had an idea. I would like to invite those who are so inclined, to join me to meditate on and emotionally charge the image of voters across a future America :
– Mail in and absentee ballots are severely limited
– Voting takes place within one day and in person
– Everyone must present an ID and each voter is checked against voter rolls
– Every vote has a paper back up, which is counted and audited
– All votes are compared to the registered voter rolls to identify irregularities
I also invite those who would like to add anything that could make this image more strong, more precise, and more vivid, to please do so!
John, your post of October 4 was a superb one, and has really got me thinking. When world attention turned to events in Gaza a few days later, it made me wonder about the intense emotional hatred that we hear many within the Arab/ Muslim world focus so intently upon Jews. It seems to be a magical attack similar to the example you gave of the hatred focused upon Trump. Do you have any thoughts on the likely effects that will result from this focused hatred?
Clay, duly noted! A contrast between hippocracy and hippopygeocracy is worth making. 😉
Scotty, I’ll keep it in mind.
Justin, your astral birth typically happens around the time of puberty — that’s why teenagers are rebellious and start trying to have their own opinions (though usually, at least at first, this simply involves getting their opinions from their friends). Mental birth? That’s a much more significant matter. It was when our souls succeeded in evolving an astral body that we made the transition from plant to animal. It’s when our souls succeed in evolving a mental body that we get past the transitional state of being human (a complex sort of animal with a rudimentary mental-plane presence) and become spirits, comparable in some systems to the lowest grade of angels. That is to say, you’ll know when you get there.
Smith, oh, granted. Most people don’t know the difference between an investment and a speculation. (For those that don’t: an investment is something that makes money for you while you own it; a speculation is something that you hope you can sell for a higher price than you paid.) Houses can be speculations, but unless you buy them to rent them out, they’re not investments.
Mary, “remote viewing” is a fashionable modern term for clairvoyance: being able to “see” at a distance by means of a visionary state. I’ll check out Mahfouz; that sounds interesting.
Blue Sun, since the hatred is apparently more or less equal on both sides, the most likely outcome is cascading disasters for both sides, ending in mutual destruction.
Mary Bennett re your comment that WW3 will spring from a Chinese invasion of India. Much of what happened in world history would have been considered by well-considered opinion to have been impossible before it actually came to pass. Just think of the unlikelihood of an Austrian corporal coming to rule Germany and that was after the equally impossible ouster of the Kaiser. So, a Chinese invasion of India? Personally I would never have thought of it, even given the long history of conflict at the border. Unlikely? Maybe. But impossible? Both have ambitions, both are nuclear armed, both have huge populations, both want to be Asian shot-callers. Good call on your part.
Hi JMG and everyone,
I am looking to develop my knowledge of Daoism. This is partly a result of visiting some Daoist holy places this year and finding the experience very powerful, and partly as an excuse to learn some Classical Chinese.
I remember JMG talking about harming himself from some qigong practices in the past. If our host or anyone has any tips related to Daoism, I’d be happy to hear.
My interest lies more in the religious rather than magical aspects of this tradition at the moment, things like the 8 Immortals rather than qigong.
Hi JMG,
Out and about in the greater Boise area today, I noticed a billboard: It featured a picture of a radiant, clearly pregnant young woman in an elegant bright red dress reclining on a swing bench above a caption that read something like “Do you love being pregnant? Consider becoming a surrogate.”
It seems like surrogacy may create some problems for the bio-mom and child, like what happens if the baby is judged “not what we paid for” by the client(s). What if the clients turn out to be abusive? Is this actually a form of slavery, as the child is indeed purchased?
What’s your take?
Thanks as always,
OtterGirl
Blue Sun, Jews and Moslems were allies of a sort for many centuries. I think the present conflicts exhibit the characteristics of civil war.
Hey John,
I hope you are fine and everything is going well. I was thinking about the problem of rising water levels due to global warming, specifically the melting of the polar ice caps. I am not sure others have pointed this out, but if you consider Physics and Chemistry here – specifically the properties of water, the sea levels aren’t supposed to rise due to the melting of polar ice caps.
I know this sounds weird, but hear me out. First, 90% of the icebergs are already below the sea level. Even if they melt, they cannot contribute to any further rise in the sea level because they are already under the sea level. If you take a bottle under the water in a pool and open its cap, the water inside the bottle will add to the pool’s water but it will increase the height of the water level no further, since it already did that back when you lowered the bottle under the water. That was when the water inside the bottle went under the water level of the pool.
Now while the 90% of the iceberg will not add to the rising water levels, it will actually cause a REDUCTION of the sea level. This is because of the anomalous expansion of water below 4°C. As water freezes, it expands. So conversely, when ice melts, it shrinks. This means that the 90% of an iceberg that is below sea level will actually shrink in volume as it melts into water.
Say there is an iceberg, and let us say its volume is 100X. X is a quantity corresponding to 1% of the volume of the iceberg, of course. Now out of this 100X, 90X is going to be below the water. 10X is going to be above the water. Now consider this iceberg melting.
First, the 10X above the water and adds to the sea. In melting, it shrinks. Let us say it becomes something like 9X in the process. Second,the 90X below the water also melts, becoming 90% of its volume, which is about 81X. So there is a reduction of 9X volume beneath the water. 9X from the melted ice cap above comes down and cancels out the 9X reduction. There should be no rise in the water level at all.
More rigorous calculations can be made by considering the densities of ice and water, applying the Archimedes Principle and the Law of Conservation of Mass. I am not sure if the results will be very different. I will be doing those calculations as soon as I find time (which is a rarity these days in my life).
We can experimentally verify this – take a glass of water, place an ice-cube in it. mark where the meniscus of the water is by sticking a post-it note to that part of the glass (with the top of the post-it specifically being where the surface of the water reaches).
Now as the ice cube melts, we check to see how much the water level rose. Of course, we have to account for the evaporation of the water from the glass which will interfere with the experiment. Taking just somewater in a glass and checking how much the water level fell by in the same duration as it took the ice cube to melt in the first glass will give us an idea of how much the water level lowers due to evaporation, and we can add that back into the first glass.
Anyway, I have been writing quite a bit here. I wish you and your family a great week ahead. Take care.
Rajarshi
@ JMG & Clay: you guys. 🙂
You know sometimes I think Caligula had the right Idea and we would get more out of our burocratsas stable boys, and girls (lets be fair).
You think Incitātus stock is still around? We would need a heard here.
clay dennis@#59: I don’t think you have to be a 28-year-old gender studies major to think colonialism is no longer acceptable or to have trouble sympathizing with people dropping bombs on children out of pique.
Hello JMG, I have been trying to work through your “Learning Ritual Magic” course despite not feeling like I’m getting much of a result. A friend who is an occultist and therapist suggested that due to my highly traumatic upbringing I may have subconscious defense mechanisms that are inhibiting my ability to perceive effects from magical practice. Do think this is a valid idea and if so can you recommend a remedy?
At Batsrel #18 re: Blood transfusion / habit transfusion.
As someone who donates blood whenever I can (O- Universal doner), does this mean I am slowly spreading a wave of calm frugal ecologically aware folks? If so that is really cool! 😉
I wish to run a hypotheis past you:
A while back, in your post “On Magic, Manhood & Masculism” you mentioned about how some people have differing gender polarities in their Astral body and Mental sheath that is typical. You mentioned being one of those cases.
I’ve been pondering something since that post. It is very common for people on the autism spectrum to be atypical in their gender expression or even transgender.
I am wondering if perhaps this is because the swapped gender polarities of astral body and mental sheath aren’t an affect of autism but rather one of its potential causes. This would do much to explain why medical science hasn’t made much headway in determining the causation of autism, if the cause is in an area where science dare not look.
Do you think there may be anything to this? If so, do you have any thoughts on what might be a good way to further investigate this hypothesis.
Mr Greer, thank you for your response. I hope you will understand if I decline your poetry writing challenge! I put my days of attempting woefully rubbish cywydd and cynghanedd behind me when I left school.
The eisteddfod today absolutely is a major force in the Welsh-speaking cultural calendar, but it is as you point out fabricated ceremonies, which is great so long as everyone knows they are dressing up and playing games. My problem comes when sight is lost of that, and the make-up somehow morphs in popular imaginings into the persistence of some age-old unbroken tradition stretching back to stone-age Stonehenge or whatever. Full disclosure, my aunt is a member of the Gorsedd, so I’m not sniping here.
As for the charge of casual dismissal, I’d say not. I have not read the book you mention, but his position in modern Welsh thinking is nuanced to say the least, and a whole chunk of my course at University examined the effect of his work and many others too on Welsh identity perception, particularly in the mid 20th Century. There are many arguments that it was not an entirely wholesome or helpful one.
I suppose it depends on what you are looking for, and many opinions are available. To me, a fraud is a fraud, but as I say before, for me it touches a nerve.
Can you explain the pincer grip of Islamism and Wokeism that Western culture is currently trapped in? The only thing those two have in common seems to be their hatred for said culture, but while I understand the Islamists using the wokesters as useful idiots, I can’t wrap my head around the enthusiastic support of the latter for the former, including the mass migration that they’re enabling especially into Europe. They do have to know that all their woke values like feminism, LGBETC concerns, and so on, are things these immigrants are fundamentally opposed to, right? And they would know about the fate of their leftist comrades in Iran after the revolution?
I remember ten years back, I was on a politics forum where a transwoman (never could tell if they really were trans or just a troll), an ardent communist, was in total support of all things Islam, and when I pointed out that s/he probably wouldn’t survive a day in the Muslim fatherlands (there was a meme going viral back then about Iran hanging a gay couple), they just laughed it off.
So, yeah. I don’t get it. Somebody help me understand it, because it seems that both Islamism and Wokeism are accelerating to full, raging insanity right now…
Hi John Michael,
Dunno, all other considerations to the side, I get the impression that over in the lands of sand and oil, there are culturally different attitudes to accepting losses during strife. That’s a problem, which is probably why things over there are proceeding the way they are with great displays of force, but a reluctance to send them in. I’d imagine the losses would be huge if it came down to street to street, and building to building action. It’s not an enviable proposition, let’s put it that way. And probably not winnable in any meaningful sense. Just chucking my strategy hat on. What’s your take on that?
I can’t remember where I learned of this recently, but during WWII there was an island defended by the Japanese (I forget the exact details), and the Allies repeatedly bombed the daylights out of it. And the defenders were just seriously hard to dislodge, and gave as good as they got. A frightening scenario to face. It looks like that over there to me. Bombs as a technology have their limits.
My gut feeling also tells me that the price of money will continue to rise. What do you reckon about that topic? It’s gotta be hurting the property bubble.
Cheers
Chris
Hi JMG,
I know you have mentioned before that you saw the growing homeless problem in cities as being a permanent and growing reality, that this isn’t some sort of temporary problem, and that the encampments of today are likely to be the favelas of the future. Do you have any advice for how cities might best approach dealing with this with that in mind? I ask because where I am there is a move towards trying to set up a tiny homes program (paired with clearing out unauthorized camping out in parks, etc). While I can see a lot of issues with this, this seems like it might be a good move with regards to your basic insight, in that it gets the discussion around where long term sites would be best situated, and this makes dealing with safety and sanitation a bit easier.
What is happening at the moment here is that initial program has been halted because enough neighbours close to the proposed site strongly opposed it, with meetings on the subject needing to be shut down because they got so heated. I am not sure if this sort of opposition will rise up every time this is attempted , but I suspect it may be the case. This may lead to the choosing of more remote spots, there is a large encampment right now on some empty industrial lots that seemed like it could possibly be a location. I was curious what your thoughts were regarding all this.
For some context, the city I am in is not huge, but it has a rust belt like story, complete with left leaning politics likely stemming from a history of unionized labour, and is a place that is known to have better than average social programs to help homeless people and the mentally ill, so for a long time other neighbouring cities have shipped their homeless here.
Thanks,
Johnny
JMG, you have talked of how when somebody receives a kinetic shock, they sometimes, if briefly, find that they possess a sudden new skill. You believed that such abilities come from previous incarnations. My thought was that maybe so called junk DNA stores information from previous incarnations that may be triggered in certain circumstances. Just a mad theory of mine, with nothing to back it up!
Hello Luke Dodson,
Apologies, I did not mean to be rude and ignore your comments. No I am not presently in the UK, but yes, Wales is home, of course. I’m not sure I’m turning my fellow country-folk into victim-mascots by what I was saying. There is very real dislike and nationalism back home for all forms of invasion, cultural, second homes erosion of language, the sway of English in the playground etc etc, but that wasn’t really my point. I know many are learning Welsh, though Duolingo have recently cut back on updates since that wave seems to have broken, and I know we should be grateful to the sainted Tolkein for basing Elfish on Welsh (hint here, many Welsh-speakers actually aren’t. I know, so ungrateful of us…)
I wasn’t actually targeting any Druids that might be hanging out here, but since you raise the point, like my aunt in the Gorsedd, who wears the lovely Druidic robes and parades around the Maes, but in real life works in Tescos, so long as they are aware that it’s a revival, not the genuine thing going back into the mists of time, legitimised by in many cases pseudo Welsh or reconstructed Brythonic high-sounding names, then I have absolutely no problem with anyone believing whatever they wish. It’s not about nationalism for me. For my own reasons, I just dislike falsehood and self-delusion.
I’m sure you are right that the issues you raise are of more immediate concern than Iolo’s invented alphabet . Not for one moment would I disagree with you there, not at all. But that wasn’t really the point I was trying to say.
Is the astral problem the reason that we [in the U.S.] have had so many more mass murders than usual in the past few years?
—Princess Cutekitten
@ cointoss #23
Note that we experience the passage of time differently than from the way a clock ticks.
Supposedly each tick of a clock measures an equal length of time, but what we experience is not “ticks” that measure a length of time, but “ticks” that measure an increasingly small percentage of our remembered experience.
When you are a year old, a year is 100% of the lifetime you have experienced, at 2 years old, the same year is half of the lifetime you have experienced. At 30 years old a year is 1/30th of the lifetime you have experienced, and so on… The more years you have experienced, the smaller each one is, considered as a proportion of the whole lifetime experienced.
This, I think, is why time “feels” like it flows more quickly as we have more of it experienced and available for reflection the older we get, while each passing moment is smaller in proportion to the whole.
Joshua, to save money you must become very aware of what you are spending. Keep track of all your purchases daily, then total them up at the end of the day, and total them up by category weekly and monthly and yearly. The categories will occurs to you: groceries, eating out, gas / petrol, presents, utility bills, etc. After a while you will have a much better picture of what you are typically spending and why. Also make a list of any monthly, 3 monthly, 6 monthly or yearly bills that must be paid and what they typically cost. Then before you make any routine purchase, be aware of all the bills that must still be paid in the future after you have made your purchase.
Do you subscribe to anything that you rarely use? Perhaps you could cancel a magazine or newspaper subscription and get news and views for free from internet blogs and channels, including non-MSM sources like rumble and bitchute. Ask your friends what they subscribe to or recommend, and which subscriptions they have cancelled. Friends and acquaintances often have good recommendations. Ask them how they save money.
Once I noticed this sound system in a new shop on my local high street. I was pleased that I’d saved enough to buy it by being frugal. So I splashed out, then told a colleague at work. “What did you buy it from there for?” he asked. “You should have asked me first. You could have got it for a much lower price from such and such a store”. Later I wanted to find a store that would make me some bespoke furniture, so I asked his advice. He told me it was much cheaper to visit a well known Swedish company and buy the units and put them together in the way I wanted. I’d heard of the company (this was years ago) but didn’t really know what they did or how they operated.
So before you buy anything, ask your trusted friends and acquaintances what they would buy and where they would get it from. Good advice can save you a lot of money.
While in fulltime work, I always used to buy books new. I discovered that you can often get them in very good condition for much less from second-hand book dealers. Also visit your local library. It often has intriguing old books that you’ve never encountered before.
Are you addicted to brand names? I used to buy brand name cans of baked beans. Then I tried an economy can out of curiosity, then only cost a fraction of the brand name. The beans tasted just as good! I couldn’t tell the difference. However, I was once in my suit and tie during my lunch break and bent down in the supermarket to pick up a couple of cans in their very plain and minimalist white labels. A nice looking, well-dressed middle class woman of around 40 was picking a couple of the brand names off the shelf, whose cans had nice colourful labels. She looked at my purchases and then at me, in my smart professional work clothes, with a mixture of shock and pity. I was amused by her response. You have to be ready for criticism and snobbery some of the time, when you make frugal choices, of course.
So don’t be afraid of what people think. Don’t be afraid to buy second-hand. The quality is often very good. And always ask for second opinions before making a big purchase.
I sometimes joke about my own frugality. My sister and mother were once talking about what they did for food when they were out shopping. My sister said she liked to stop off at a café. My mother said she preferred to save money by taking a couple of sandwiches with her. Then they looked at me. “What do YOU do when you’re out?” I said, “Me? I just greed off dogs in the street!” — “UGH!”, was their joint response.
JMG, I have learned so much history and philosophy from you, and you are such a courteous and considerate gentleman, that I will be a reader regardless of issues we may disagree on. Thank you.
Mac
I have uploaded a PDF file of my Samhain story “Fresh Cut Flowers” for ease of reading. The formatting got all wonky (I shouldn’t have copied and pasted straight from a .docx, so thought this would be easier on the eyes for anyone who wants to read a little ghost story.)
http://www.sothismedias.com/uploads/1/2/4/5/124587142/fresh_cut_flowers__final_.pdf
John, thank you for the kind words. Also, that’s fascinating about the bardic groups from the Welsh diaspora in North America, and your wife’s family. I’m going to see what I can dig up further on those threads, thank you.
I awoke this morning to news of a new mass shooting; this time by a weapons instructor who’d been undergoing some psychiatric care according to the news source I read. Reading between the lines, here, I see the word “medication.” So , my question to JMG or anyone is, has anyone considered whether SSRIs or atypical antipsychotic meds can open a person up to demonic influences? It’s pure speculation, of course, but iatrogenic mental illness (I think that’s the correct term) has been a topic of interest to me for years.
KBIN is recycled radio at its best. Your brain is the transmitter. Your brain is the receiver. This is central nervous system radio. All gates open. All bins out to the curb.
We have two different shows of KBIN this weekend, the first is Recyclables Only on Sunday 29th October 2023 at 2000 hrs UTC on 3975 & 6160 kHz.
The second is Normal Refuse, a few hours later via the transmitters of WRMI on Monday 30th October we have the second programme. The broadcast is at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz and then repeated at 0300 UTC on 9455 kHz. We’ve got more recycled radio for you including mixes from some of our Imaginary Stations favourite shows so tune in and catch yourself another great value for money transmission this weekend!
https://www.reddit.com/r/shortwave/comments/17gxf76/kibbles_bits_intermixing_neurotransmitters/
https://archive.org/details/@imaginary_stations
Interesting morning news;
Shares of Siemens Energy crashed 37% in Germany.
“Siemens Energy said the wind business Siemens Gamesa “is working through the quality issues and is addressing the offshore ramp up challenges as announced in the third quarter communication for fiscal year 2023.”
“Last week, solar equipment maker SolarEdge Technologies saw shares crash as much as 30% on sliding European demand.”
On the other hand,
“Oil demand alone is expected to increase by 1.7% next year, per the report. Natural gas demand is set for 2.2% growth, led by Asia and the Middle East, while Europe will continue to see depressed demand as it looks to save gas and energy.
Renewable capacity additions are set for a record high this year at around 400 gigawatts (GW) and will continue to rise in 2024, according to the report.
Global oil demand is set to rise by 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd) to a new record-high this year and by another 2.2 million bpd next year amid an improving Chinese economy, OPEC said in its latest monthly report earlier in October, leaving its demand forecast for both 2023 and 2024 unchanged, despite fears of slowing economies and demand destruction. World oil demand is set to reach a record average of 102.1 million bpd in 2023, driven by a 2.3-million-bpd demand increase in the non-OECD region, OPEC noted.
Coal demand globally is also expected to remain at record-high levels this year, said none other than the International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this year.”
Hey John,
I like to do computer programming for a hobby. A few months ago I started working on a game that is inspired by two of your books, Star’s Reach and the Ecotechnic Future. The game is made to resemble an old-fashioned roguelike, a kind of game from the stone age of computer games (the 1980s.) In these kinds of games, the player character navigates randomly-generated worlds and fights monsters. If you want to see what these kinds of games look like, here’s a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxF1osPkplA&ab_channel=ScottManley)
My game takes place in the United States in the year 2800, after industrial civilization is long dead and ecotechnic societies are beginning to develop. The player can interact with villages and towns, explore ruins and the wilderness, go on quests, and even build a base of their own. There will be different factions that have different ideologies, and the player can choose which ones they align with.
For example, there will be the Torchbearers, a faction that is trying to preserve knowledge. You can increase your relationship with that faction and get a reward for scavenging books from ruins and handing them over. Another faction could be a fanatic group of tech-worshippers, who are essentially a cargo cult that reveres industrial technology and still dreams of the tomorrowland future that was promised all those years ago. I have many more ideas for factions and how they’ll fit into the world but this comment is already too long.
I plan on adding a magic system as well, but I want it to be realistic and less like a Harry Potter kind of deal. Perhaps doing certain rituals will influence the odds of events happening. For example, forming a relationship with one deity could make your crops grow better, and another might increase your odds of success in combat. Magic would be subtle but effective.
What do you think of this idea? I know you’re not much of a gamer, so maybe you wouldn’t appreciate me making this kind of thing. I do see the irony in creating a video game about an ecotechnic world, considering video games are a frivolous use of energy and resources, the opposite of ecotechnic. That’s part of the reason I chose a very old genre of game that can run on basically any computer and doesn’t have fancy graphics.
I was thinking this morning about what Eliphas Levi says in chapter 11, about social movements as magnetic currents that have to run their course, and how standing against such a current at the peak of its power is to court personal destruction.
With that in mind, I wonder if anyone here has ideas about how long social justice fundamentalism as a destructive current has left in its run. I would say clearly a while yet, but meanwhile lots of people have woken up (pardon the expression) to how destructive this has been as social phenomenon. Those taking a stand now are indeed courting personal destruction, but they are inspiring others to take more subversive and ultimately more effective actions I think.
This is really a question about timing. When will it be time for wokeism to meet its destined end through open public resistance, do you think?
Bringing this forward from last week since I sent it so late–
Bacon Rolypoly wrote: “I have in the past written a guide to successful seed-saving so will dig it out and put it up somewhere if anyone’s interested.”
Yes!
Been saving seeds. Don’t really have enough room. Quality declines over time.
And we have an anthracnose problem here. I realize I need to find a way to heat the seeds just enough but not too much. But haven’t tried it yet. Have seen it suggested to do it in water using a candy thermometer to control the temp. Then redry the seeds.
Anyone tried this or another method of heating to kill disease?
@Jeff Russel,
if you can find a biology professor who specializes in animal behavior (probably through their university website and faculty bio) and have a chat with them, they will probably know where to look. A fair number of them really adore their subjects and will talk the ear off anyone who shows a serious interest in it and has an interesting conundrum to pose. Though you may also find some don’t have time, or are grumpy.
My own conclusion about Celtic magic and swordsmanship is that a forgotten sect of druids once practiced martial chi-gung. So the feats of skill of the ancient Celtic heroes were maybe not so mythical after all. If there was indeed a specialist school of druidic kung-fu 🙂 it would perhaps partly explain why this strange connection between weaponry and the supernatural has continued down to the present day.
Several of you wished me well in the voice competition. Just wanted to say that it was last night, and it did indeed go well. The runthrough with the accompanist beforehand didn’t – my brain decided to forget half the words to the second song due to nerves, but the actual performance went really well despite the fact I was shaking like a leaf, and both I and my voice teacher are happy with it. Both the songs I sang were also sung by someone else, and I think in both cases I sang it better.
It was also really interesting to meet the other singers and see what they can do. Quite a wide range, from an adorable kid who had the music down but couldn’t project so you could barely hear her, and people with assorted vocal issues mostly involving lack of projection or inadequate vocal support, to others who if you told me they were professionals I would have believed you. I discovered the lady who has lessons with my teacher immediately after me is extremely good, with a very operatic sounding voice and superb expression both vocally and in her gestures and face. I will be surprised if she doesn’t win the over 40 category. I don’t know the results yet.
@JMG,
“Yavanna, one of the ugly secrets of American culture is the long and bitter hostility between African-American and Jewish urban communities, which goes back well into the 19th century and remains very much a live factor today.”
Where does this hostility come from? I don’t know anything about it.
@Hispalensis,
things I’d look for in terms of regions in which to live:
-is it in danger of flooding due to sea level rise?
-is there adequate drinking water for the current population and enough water to grow food locally
-is climate change likely to make the situation worse or better and by how much?
-is there much local food production and/or can you grow some yourself?
-is this area especially likely to explode into violence/end up a front in a war?
-do you have connections in the area that will help you in hard times friends/relatives etc?
-are you an outsider who is especially likely to get scapegoated if things go sour?
@pygmycory #103 re: Biology professors as a source on ethology
Thanks very much for this! “Straight the source” is likely a good idea, and the fact that I have access to a .edu email account to reach out with might make it even easier!
Cheers,
Jeff
@Chris at Fernglade (#88) wrote:
“during WWII there was an island defended by the Japanese (I forget the exact details), and the Allies repeatedly bombed the daylights out of it. And the defenders were just seriously hard to dislodge, and gave as good as they got. ”
There was more than one such island. My wife’s father fought (and was badly wounded) on one of them (Anguar), where the enemy were entrenched in caves. Eventually the Allies had to use flame-throwers to take the caves, which depleted most of the oxygen in the caves and burned the last few defenders alive. He hated to think off the horrors of that battle.
War is a nasty, filthy business, which damages even the survivors on the victor’s side. Sometimes, however, when each side is sufficiently enraged, there is no real alternative.
My wife, a primatologist, tells me that our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, wage small-scale war also, with the winners sometimes even slowly torturing the losers to death. It seems to be a part of our genetic heritage.
This is why I do not believe lasting world peace is ever going to be possible, even if our species cannot otherwise survive the use of the weapons we currently have. People are not particularly rational animals, though we are good at rationalizing.
JMG, thanks for hosting the Open Post again!
A somewhat weird question, maybe, but hey… I wonder if you have ever written anything (or read anything by others) about how occultists could/should prepare for death. With that, I don’t mean any spiritual, emotional etc. preparations, but the practical stuff. What to do with the occult odds and ends which accumulate during a lifetime? What to tell family members (who might not be into the occult at all) about how to handle your Golden Dawn or Picatrix-style or … talismans? Etc etc.
And nope, I have no idea why that question popped into my mind – I sincerely expect (and hope!!) it won’t be relevant to me for a long time… 😉
Milkyway
Got to say, what Col McGregor has to say about the news of our day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJJ9zEPSAwo ~25min
absolute Powder keg we’re on and globally now, definitely beyond the imagination of many, especially on Capitol Hill, and he seems to know many there personally!
Oh my.
The astrologer from Vienna (search Wien Astrowolf, Tageshoroskop on YT) has some new predictions I’ll listen in on. I always download the audio, though his precise demonstration of his analysis on the chart are worth watching as well.
As I said, once 100% spot on recently in a very big way, once very spot on with another major event last year, once 100% in my personal life.
Worth listening.
Verily, I think we will see a Lenin’s ten days this year.
@JMG – Congratulations on having two ore books published. May they sell well, and reach those with ears to hear.
Re#65 – If a child is adopted at birth, whose etheric body is shaping it? The birth mother? Or the adoptive mother?
@Blue Sun #73: I am not a cripple, but standing in line is physical torture for me. I am thankful for the mail-in ballot because of that. Perhaps anyone eligible for a handicap placard in their car should be eligible for mail-in ballots.
@Beige Shiba – I think there’s a correlation but not necessarily a causation. I know the Circle I belonged to back home, run by a gay man, has had at least three members who are both lesbian and on the spectrum. (During one stretch, when we were all sitting on the same couch in his living room, I referred to “the Martian Sisterhood.” Two of us were also members of the local s/f fan club.)
Phutatorius, spiritual harm from pharmaceuticals is mentioned in Thomas Mayers covid vax book; it’s included here under “Poisoning the body with drugs causes blockages in the afterlife”:
https://veilofreality.com/2022/05/24/covid-vaccines-consequences-on-the-soul-spirit-and-life-after-death/
Otter Girl #78: “It seems like surrogacy may create some problems for the bio-mom and child, like what happens if the baby is judged “not what we paid for” by the client(s).”
Already one couple has sued a sperm bank because they had a healthy biracial child after they were sent the “wrong” sperm: https://www.todaysparent.com/blogs/lesbian-couple-sue-sperm-bank/. This illustrates the danger of reproductive technologies: that people view a child as a consumer item, and they think they’re entitled to get exactly what they ordered.
British writer Mary Harrington has addressed the problems of surrogacy at length; from one of her essays on the subject of surrogacy: “Surrogacy bakes mother-loss into a baby’s earliest experience — and inflicts this loss on a profoundly vulnerable infant, in the name of adult desire. Parents have a duty to put their children’s needs first. This is an inexcusable inversion of that duty.” https://unherd.com/thepost/khloe-kardashian-discovers-the-trouble-with-surrogacy/
Chris
That was Iwo Jima.
cheers, Stephen
Russell, the religious aspects of Daoism won’t give you any trouble at all. The difficulty comes when you combine advanced Western occult practices with intermediate or advanced qigong routines.
Ottergirl, that’s a complex issue. Of course there are all kinds of potential abuses, but that’s true in any human relationship; the basic process doesn’t seem harmful to me, though.
Rajarshi, icebergs aren’t the issue. The issue is Greenland and Antarctica, where you’ve got a layer of ice up to three miles thick resting on dry land. Antarctica is 4.3 times the size of India, and Greenland’s a little more than half India’s size. Imagine five Indias, each with a couple of miles of ice on top, and then melt it all. Yes, that’ll put sea level up 300 feet or so worldwide!
Marko, I like it! Maybe it’s time to run Incitātus for US president in next year’s election. I could see the slogan: “Why settle for a horse’s backside when you can have the whole horse?”
Roy, it very often takes a while for the effects of magical practice to become evident. A traumatic upbringing can make that more difficult than it might otherwise be, depending on the nature of the trauma, but a lot of it is simply the training we all get as children, teaching us to ignore our own subtler perceptions and inner senses. If you can handle being touched, you might consider arranging to get regular therapeutic massage — that can help release tensions that make subtle perceptions harder to pick up. If you have a lot of emotional baggage from your childhood, the exercises taught by the Order of Spiritual Alchemy can help you get some of that burden cleared away. Other than that, “keep going!” is the advice you’ll get from any operative mage.
Beige, that’s a fascinating hypothesis. I’m not sure how it might be testable, but it’s certainly worth further inquiry.
Cerys, and my book makes it very clear that the Coelbren is a late 18th or early 19th century invention and not a product of Celtic antiquity. In certain circles, I’m notorious for that sort of thing; the Druid order I headed for twelve years, the Ancient Order of Druids in America, was under my leadership the first Druid order in the Pagan scene to ‘fess up to its modern origins, to discard spurious claims of ancient lineage, and to point out that joining a modern Druid order doesn’t make anyone some sort of ersatz Celt. (The old guard was horrified when I told them what I had in mind, but gritted their teeth and let me go ahead with it; they were astonished to find people flocking to the order, saying, “Thank you for being honest!”) You’re certainly free to turn your back on the Coelbren y Beirdd and stalk away, emitting steam from your ears the whole way, but please be aware that it’s possible to enjoy and make use of the creations of the Druid Revival of the 18th and 19th centuries as products of modernity, and to take up the Coelbren in much the same spirit that so many people embrace the equally made-up scripts, languages, and history of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Athaia, I have no idea. It literally makes no sense at all.
Chris, the Israelis are frantically trying to find a way to deal with the impossible situation Hamas has backed them into. If they invade the Gaza Strip, it’s going to be an utter bloodbath, and not just there — I’d expect a ground invasion by Hezbollah along the northern frontiers, for example. If they don’t invade, they appear weak. It’s an utterly unenviable mess, and thus a brilliantly nasty piece of strategy on Hamas’ part. As for the price of money, very likely, yes.
To all the dedicated readers of Ecosophia, I’d like to remind you that a comprehensive list of JMG’s podcasts is readily available. If you’re eager to explore that content, you can access the podcasts through the links provided below.
John Michael Greer’s podcast links:
2023 – https://ecosophian.dreamwidth.org/4235.html
2022 – https://ecosophian.dreamwidth.org/2941.html
2021 – https://ecosophian.dreamwidth.org/1885.html
2005 to 2020 – https://ecosophian.dreamwidth.org/429.html
As a bonus, I’d like to introduce you to Mark Stavish from the Institute for Hermetic Studies. Mark Stavish is another modern authority in the field of esotericism, and his podcasts offer a wealth of knowledge and insights that are worth exploring. Happy listening!
Mark Stavish’s podcasts – https://ecosophian.dreamwidth.org/3901.html
@ Andrew #67
Thank you for the link! It looks promising as a resource for my project. I live in Southwestern Spain, and I’m particularly concerned about future water supply. Our climate is similar to California’s but it’s expected to progressively turn more arid as the Sahara shifts north. Even now, with access to energy and lots of reservoirs, water supply is very tight is some areas. So, even if the obvious direction for migration will be northward, I want to be a bit more precise.
@ pygmycory #107
Thanks for the suggestions! As I said to Andrew above, I’m seriously concerned about access to fresh water and all its consequences, like food production. Indeed, the reservoirs that normally provide drinking water to my city and part of its metropolitan area are expected to run dry next year unless Noah’s Flood arrives this winter, which is unlikely after years of drought. Add to this the wild card of climate change and you get a recipe for disaster.
@ JMG
A one size fits all solution, in the sense of “everyone should move here”, wouldn’t work, of course. What I’m trying to figure out is which factors each of us should take into account to compare the suitability of different places for us. Indeed, because some elements may not be obvious to me -I’m rather new to all of this- I decided to try the thorough framework Lunar Apprentice (tips hat) outlined in last month’s Open Post. I got some subjective results that I didn’t expect, but could be valuable to live a full life. One was my relationship with the natural environment itself, which reminds me of what you said about the spiritual importance of place. Anyway, the result should vary considerably depending on who does the analysis.
By the way, the new prime minister of Slovakia announced they will stop their military support to Ukraine. I know he’s favourable to Russia but it makes one think. Do you think the West will abandon Ukraine definitely sometime soon?
@Smith, #70: Everything you say is true about mortgages and forced savings. That said, there is still quite a bit of value in paying a mortgage. For one thing, the alternative is paying rent, and you know you won’t get any equity(or forced savings) out of that. In most cases, for most people, the money you pay towards your house winds up building at least some equity, which you can access when you sell the house. In some cases, appreciation makes for quite a large amount of money.
Of course there are also various tax advantages to paying the mortgage, at least in the US. And paying a mortgage on a two family house is an even better deal.
@ Rajarshi # 80: Absolutely true that melting icebergs don’t raise sea levels. I believe the issue is glaciers on land, such as Greenland and Antarctica. Any melting there will increase the sea level.
Rajarshi, as JMG says, it is the ice resting on land in Greenland and Antarctica that will be the major contributor to sea level rise. You can add a bit more from the glaciers of the third pole, the Himalayas.
Melting icebergs will also contribute. Take a 1000-ton iceberg. When melted it will fill a volume of 1000 cubic meters because it is made of fresh water with a specific gravity of 1. When floating, it displaces a ton of sea water which has a volume of 975 cubic meters because its specific gravity is 1.025. So the melted iceberg will fill the hole in the sea plus there will be 25 cubic meters left over to raise the sea level.
…it displaces a 1000 tons of sea water. (No edit function. *frowny face*)
JMG re: hippocracy – I never thought about it before, but as soon as you mentioned ‘government by horses’, I remembered the last (and my favourite) of Gulliver’s travels, the land of the Houhyhnms (the race of intelligent horses). Hmmmmm. That’s got me to thinking… which is never a good thing! 😊
Hey JMG
Your theory on the purpose of the Chinese warships does seem plausible, I can’t imagine that the CCP would want to do anything more “provocative.”
I’ve been reading this lovely book from a library called “The Tao of travel” by Paul Theroux, which is essentially a miscellany of excerpts and commentaries about the authors favourite fellow travellers, and it is definitely a good read with lots of references for travel books I intend to look into, like “No picnic on mount Kenya” by Felipe benuzzi, which talks about how he and some friends escaped from a British POW camp after the Italian-Ethiopian war just to climb a mountain within view of the camp.
This has made me wonder if you have a favourite travel book?
Hispalensis,
Look at what happened in your area in the previous civilizational collapses. You should have tolerable written records, being in Europe, of at least one, and archaeological records, too.
My area is high desert and belonged to nomads before irrigation was brought in by European descended folks, from, as best we can tell, the begining of the retreat of the ice. Warmer or cooler, but desert. (During the ice age was lush and fertile.)
Looking at paleohistory and recorded history should give you a decent idea of what climate shifts may happen, and looking at recorded history on how people lived in different areas in past collapses.
cointoss,
I’ve always wondered if, apart from efforts that tend to slow time down, whether a month, or a year, or whatever, just becomes a smaller fraction of your total life, and therefore seems to pass faster as you pile up the years. I know that right now (at 50) my days are flying by, but as I’m in a job that I don’t particularly like, and don’t expect to last for that many more years, I’m cool with that! When that’s done, and/or I get back to my intensive spiritual work, I expect time to slow down again.
Blue Sun #72
In order for your proposal to work, there would be a need to increase the number of polling places available. In some areas, the redistricting has gotten so bad that there is only one polling place for an entire county. Having voting take place in person only works if the polls are open long enough for people who are working are able to vote. I think making it a national holiday would make it easier for people to get to the polls without worrying about losing their jobs. I also support mail in voting for areas such as the Navajo Nation, large parts of Alaska, and any remote areas where the nearest town is a day’s drive away. I personally have been voting by mail for every election for at least a decade. Now that my mom has passed, I will probably go back to voting in person and volunteering to work at a polling station on election day.
I’ve been reflecting on various forms of neurodivergence, and reached a bit of a theory. Occult teachings hold that humans generally only have three permanent bodies at one time, for us at the moment, it’s physical, etheric, and astral bodies, with a mental sheath. When we develop a full mental body we cease the need to physically incarnate, although apparently that option is still available, through some form of soul ‘muscle-memory’. What I’ve found is that as we put effort into the next body stage up the hierarchy of layers – for us, the mental body – there’s a challenge as we are three and a bit, or three and more than a bit bodies for a period of time. That effort on being across more planes for a transitional period appears to introduce substantial stresses and strains in us humans, equivalent to being stretched too far (but necessarily far in order to advance).
I know there are also karmic takes on neurodivergence as well, but that is my current working theory.
Haha, well, I’m nobody’s fanboy, and I’m probably not your favorite reader, but I still read your posts and consider your words.
Have you read “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” by Thomas Ligotti; and if so would you review or criticize its premise from an occult perspective?
The earlier comments about studying early Christianity (ref the gnostic texts) reminded me of a story I heard years ago.
A new convert had asked the pastor where to start reading her bible and had been advised to start with Luke and Acts since they were chronolgical and written by the same author etc. A bit later the lady came back to the pastor who asked her how she had gone with Luke and Acts. She said that she had enjoyed them very much but wondered if he had a book on Church History that she could borrow. A bit perplexed the pastor replied that yes he did but no one had ever expressed any interest in reading it before and wondered why she might be interested herself. Oh that’s easy, she replied, I just wanted to see what went wrong.
Hi John Michael,
That’s my take on the strategic side of that story, and the most likely outcome. It’s not a winnable proposition. How could it be? The toll would be extraordinary. And the more civilians killed on either side, the more new angry combatants put up their hands to join in the fray (having lost reasons not to do so).
Chucking around some ideas as a strategic exercise, probably one way out of the mess is to clear the settlements and other activities along the border, and treat it like a proper no-go zone. Then treat it like a no-go zone. Let it be known that the cost of one rocket will be ten rockets of interest. Close the border. Let the internal politics sort out the mess, as it will. Both sides are in an expansionist mode, and there is a cost to that which is what we’re seeing, it reflects the internal pressures. There is also a cost to desiring cheap labour. The thing is, I doubt either side could afford such a strategy.
That’s my thinking too about the cost of money.
Cheers
Chris
I’ve been mulling over something that I think came up in a previous Open Post (so, no claim to authenticity if it’s not warranted!) and that’s the very striking difference between the pattern of China’s historical dynastic successions and of that of the US. Sorry, this is an embedded series of questions…
It seems that China has somehow cultivated the ability to survive culturally even when a particular dynasty loses the Mandate of Heaven. Obviously, there are things that have strained that cultural identity (Yuan and Qing Dynasties, PRC’s attempt to wipe out “the four olds”), but by and large, between and during political upheaval a thing that’s come to be called “Chinese culture” glued things together.
[Maybe it just looks this way in hindsight?]
In the US, we have a different way of handling political succession – and that only superficially – when one bozo with his clowns gets replaced by another who attended the sister clown-school across town – in spite of the nation’s founders intending qualified and civic-minded leadership . Instead, our ruling class would rather see cultural dissolution than dynastic change.
[Maybe I misjudge China’s history because of its length and really nobody wants their own dynasty replaced, elites everywhere cling to their power, and each failing dynasty in China looked like our horrid mess now?]
What might be the “something” of Chinese culture that has allowed for its continuity (if it’s not just an artefact of perception that’s cherry-picking Chineseness out of all the options and variations the (multicultural) people there have tried)?
Would we only know if such an “Americanness” exists (or gets created) if/when we go through a good half-dozen dynastic successions?
Unfortunately, I tend to agree with Robert Mathiesen regarding the likely prevalence of war wherever humanity is involved – but, are there factors that could be cultivated or shepherded that would allow for less violence with political change, and for a cultural cohesiveness even though we’ve tried to divorce ourselves from our cultural history?
This all came out more muddled than I’d hoped, and left me wondering if it’s kind of a silly line of questioning. Somewhere in there, there’s the thought of China’s long history of working (mostly) within their ecological limits and utilizing ecotechne based on renewable resources – recently enough that much could be reclaimed as global society unwinds, while we cling to high-tech, fossil-fuel-powered “green” cons and national wealth plundered, and while we’re corralled into competing social factions, severely unrooted in cultural/historical context just as we are in physical space.
[Leaving me with a final question: is a fundamental cause of our woes the fact that we are so terribly unrooted and don’t commit to place? While Chinese have traditionally travelled far and wide over the centuries, there was such strong embeddedness of place-identity, that people always knew who they were because of where they came from, such that an entire ethno-cultural group, the Hakka, are “guest people” because they migrated from their ancestral homeland beginning 1800 years ago and most recently about 200 years ago].
Gee, I’ll understand if you say, “that’s a question in need of a book.” 🙂
@TemporaryReality,
some of the Chinese dynasties were indeed a frightful mess by the time they exited power. The Song and Qing dynasties come to mind for me immediately, but there are probably other examples. The post-Han era involved invasions from the north and political fragmentation and the most thorough Chinese version of a dark age. What it meant to be Chinese seems to have shifted a fair bit afterwards.
Johnny, the only way to solve the homelessness problem in US cities is the one thing no city government is willing to consider: remove the legal gimmickry that keeps housing prices rising to ever more absurd levels, and allow the market to function. The reason that policy isn’t acceptable is that it would cause every homeowner to lose most of the notional value of their property — and so any politician that supported such a policy would be writing their political death warrant. Until the price of housing is allowed to move down to the point that the poor can afford a place to live, though, literally anything you do will simply become another way to keep real estate prices rising: i.e., those tiny homes will soon start soaring in price.
Batstrel, interesting. How would you test that?
Your Kittenship, yes, that’s an important factor.
Mac, thank you and you’re welcome.
Justin, thanks for this! I don’t know what you’ll find in your area, but when I lived in western Maryland where was still a Welsh Baptist church up the hill in Frostburg — no surprise, since it was a coal mining area.
Phutatorius, many psychiatric drugs have violent outbursts and suicide as common side effects, so it might be difficult to be sure exactly what is causing the trouble.
Siliconguy, yep. The problem with corporate green energy is that it doesn’t pay for itself. There are green technologies that do, but none of them can be used to feed the centralization of power (in more senses than one).
Enjoyer, delighted to hear it; I think it’s a fine idea. I don’t do computer games, but if there’s ever a tabletop RPG version I’ll want to see it.
Dylan, I think it’s quite possible that it’s breaking down right now. I note that several cities that defunded their police are frantically backpedaling and trying to control crime again, for example.
Tengu, since nobody knows, by all means let your imagination have at it.
Pygmycory, glad to hear things went well! As for the hostility between African-American and Jewish communities, it’s quite simple: they were two disadvantaged urban ethnic populations living cheek by jowl in big cities and competing for a limited stock of jobs and other resources. That kind of thing breeds bitterness quite reliably.
Milkyway, the traditional way is to include in your will a requirement that some younger occultist you know should get all the contents of the following boxes, trunks, etc. (and then list them). Then you talk it over with the younger occultist and make sure they know what to do.
Curt, well, we’ll see!
Patricia M, thank you! The etheric body that matters is the one that belongs to the child’s primary caregiver or caregivers — that’s why young children need to be held often. (They’re recharging their etheric bodies.)
Ecosophian, thank you for this. I highly recommend Mark’s podcasts and writings, for whatever that’s worth.
Hispalensis, I think most Western countries are trying to figure out how best to abandon Ukraine at this point, since it’s obvious that the Russians are going to win no matter what the West does.
Ron, maybe we can get the Houhyhnms to endorse Incitatus’ presidential campaign!
J.L.Mc12, no, I don’t tend to be much of a reader of travel literature.
Peter, hmm! That’s worth considering.
Cobo, that really is all I ask.
Void, I really do need to read it one of these days. The bits of Ligotti I’ve read from time to time have made me roll my eyes, though; to me, Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmic indifferentism is plain common sense. But we’ll see.
Dreamer, ha! That’s a good one.
Chris, the Israelis tried to make the border a no-go zone, and Hamas figured out how to hack their security systems. I’m not sure there’s any way out of it other than mutual annihilation — which seems to be the goal of both sides at this point.
Temporaryreality, that really does need a book, but I can sketch out one detail. We haven’t yet seen the end of one dynasty here in the US. Here are the dynasties of China:
Xia Dynasty (2100 B.C. to 1766 B.C.)
Shang Dynasty (1766 B.C. to 1047 B.C.)
Zhou Dynasty (1047 B.C. – 256 B.C.)
Qin Dynasty (221 B.C. – 206 B.C.)
Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.)
Jin Dynasty (265 – 420)
Sixteen Kingdoms or Dynasties (304 – 409)
Southern and Northern Dynasties (420 – 589)
Sui Dynasty (581 -618)
Tang Dynasty (618 – 907)
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907 – 960)
Liao Dynasty (916 – 1125)
Song Dynasty (960 – 1279)
Yuan Dynasty (1279 – 1368)
Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644)
Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911)
The United States was founded in 1782, so less than 250 years ago, or the length of one mid-length dynasty. The sort of corruption and fecklessness we see in DC right now is typical for the end of a dynasty. So we don’t yet know how American culture will weather the fall of one dynasty and the rise of another, because it hasn’t happened yet.
@Cerys Watkins #26,
If cultural appropriation is intended to make fun of a tradition, like the Halloween I see unfolding in front of me, with the Japanese not having the first clue or least interest in its origins, then it is simply disgusting. To the degree, however, that it awakens people’s curiosity about what the actual traditions and their significances were, it still has some value. (My students were surprised to learn that Halloween was not originally a Christian holiday.)
I’m part of a remnant sect of the magnificent Fuji Faith that flourished in Edo, Japan, enhancing people’s lives during that time and since. My sect owns the original documents and other relics. We are down to approximately ten people now, with the ‘Rona Response having taken a big bite. We were declining anyway, and the reason was that the largely octogenarian membership saw any attempt to modernize as an intrusion. They would have been glad to have their children succeed them, but their children are completely uninterested. Younger Japanese from the cities showed up and tried to join, but were treated so badly I can hardly believe it myself. I was trying to welcome them in. I didn’t have a chance to warn them how nasty the local people could be. (I am basically impervious to most of the bullying.) Two of us members in succession tried to start up a website, only to be vetoed by the sect’s leader. Meeting halls and their treasures go to waste, probably simply rotting like most unoccupied houses in Japan, or at best sold for scrap, as elderly communities die off and their children just ignore the white elephant. We lost two recently.
The sister organization, Fusokyo, that our sect split off from about 60 years ago, has a much younger following and appears to be doing much better. I only hope they will be allowed to take possession of the relics. I would propose a friendly merger, but I know how that is likely to be greeted. There are young people who find hope by turning toward the local mountains with their rich spiritual heritage. Any living religion is going to accommodate the younger generations somehow and encourage interest among anyone else who might benefit. Changes must be accepted.
Hello JMG and commentariat,
As #97, Phutatorius noted, we just had a mass shooting last night here in Maine. Please say some prayers/send some healing energy to the people of Lewiston.
Ellen in ME
JMG – In that case, the a lot of children in the past, or even the present, had the etheric bodies of slaves, servants, nannies, or day care center workers. I wonder what effect that had on their cultures over the generations.
Thanks for the list of Chinese dynasties. It surely does show signs of the same sort of upheavals that mark European history, repeated more often.
I think Japan’s culture changed at several points, one serious one being the rise of the Minamoto Dynasty and “The Barbarian-Subduing Generalissimos.” That one lasted until we pried the door open, which led right into modern history, climaxing in WWII.
Dylan @ 101, social justice fundamentalism will last as long as the people funding it find it useful.
Athaia, I don’t know either why the favoritism for Islam, which is found far beyond woke useful idiots. Imagine the outrage if Jews or Christians were caught wantonly destroying ancient monuments. part of the patrimony of all humankind. A few ideas, for what they might be worth: It is known that CIA, MI6 (or is that MI5?) among many others, have been funding and using Islamic militant groups for their own nefarious purposes. These orgs do have tentacles extending into mass media. Some have claimed the Moslem Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s, I believe, was a British creation. Furthermore, I think many folks don’t understand the seductive power of the ideology of multiculturalism. Also, it is known, that the oil rich Gulf nations spend freely in the Western world on propaganda and lobbying.
Hispalensis, you in Spain need to import beavers. They are circumpolar species. You need them yesterday. Not a panacea, but those little engineering rodents are experts in capturing and storing what water is available. Lots of good videos on YouTube about the benefits of beaver introduction.
Phil, what you say about there being value in paying a mortgage can be true. I’ve seen it presented as a no-brainer ie that housing prices always go up. But I’ve lived through real estate calamities of long duration where prices ratcheted downwards for years on end and then took many years more to recover to their former levels.
The problem is one of selective forgetting, like in the area where I live now. People ruined financially in the last downturn are down the memory hole I think because too many powerful interests profit on the upside of a housing mania and then, when it goes bust, buy up properties on the cheap that distressed homeowners (or mortgage companies) can’t unload.
It wasn’t just ordinary people going down the tubes, large real state developers also went bankrupt and also some age-old financial institutions.
But never mind suppression by the wealthy and well-connected, it looks to me that nobody really wants to remember what happened when the real estate bubble last met the interest rate pin.
All that said, people need shelter. It don’t come free. One way or another you pay for it. Just be clear about what you’re doing.
JMG, regarding the mental birth you describe, are there any occultists who equate this with what Jesus was referring to when he spoke of being “born again”? Because it sounds very similar to me.
JMG and Johnny, if you don’t mind my intrusion, there’s alternatives employed in other places to housing’s messed up political and economic and legal arrangements. It’s just that such alternatives are anathema, such as the one in Singapore. I know, Singapore is a different place with a different history, but would it kill to have a look at what they did? If we’re in a mess and can’t find a way out maybe it would help.
I don’t live in Singapore so my knowledge of the place is scant, but it’s no secret that the vast majority of people there live in public housing. Public housing estates were built over the last hundred years or so to deal with some dire problems with slums and squatters. I know the objection; can you imagine 80% of Americans living in public housing?
I don’t know if this is relevant but before we look down on them we should also probably note that Singapore came second in 2018 PISA scores after China.
Athaia, JMG,
One of the core dogmas of the Woke is that everything from Western Culture is inherently bad; and Western Culture has a long history of conflict with Islam. It therefore logically follows that the Woke worldview must, inherently, include support for Islam. The fact that this support means supporting a movement that despises everything they stand for is one of the many examples of irony the universe loves to throw our way; the fact that the more radical power centres in the Islamic World seem smart enough to exploit this promises to make it an unusually bitter one.
@ Bradley. Funny you should mention Asterix. I am reading those with my son right now. He is dyslexic so reading is a struggle. But he loves comic books and being read too. I that vein he also enjoyed JMG’s “The next 10 Billion years”.
@Jeff. Donated to the ACKS Kickstarter day one. It very good stuff for those that like their rpgs with some crunch…and functioning economics and logistics.
For everyone. One of my favorite podcasts is the martyrmade podcast by Darryl Cooper. He does multi episode long form and his first series is called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. It’s on the origins of the Palestinian conflict and he digs back a long way. I am listening to it again and it is well worth your time. It has held up pretty well after 8 years. Over the years he has covered quite a few other topics folks around here might be interested in.
https://martyrmade.com/page/5/
Other Dave
Hi Yavanna (#114),
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. And thank you, also, for the link to Mary Harrington’s essay. I wasn’t aware of Kloe Kardashian, but kudos to her for her honesty about her surrogacy experience. The comments below the article are worth the read as well.
I heard today that the going rate for this service is about $40,000 USD. And that my city of Boise is one of the top spots in the US for arranging surrogate services. Recruiting surrogate moms shares the same billboard space as oil changes and pet food. What an amazing world!
OtterGirl
Thank you, Ecosophian (#117)! It is lovely to have both JMG’s and Mark Stavish’s interviews in one handy place. Bookmarked!
OtterGirl
Yeah, that’s kinda what I figured – our bozo-replacing ritual is NOT the real deal.
I know enough about those transitional periods between dynasties, though, to feel a visceral shudder at what’s to come for us, a babe among cultures.
(Thanks, too, pygmycory 🙂 )
@ Peter Wilson
I think you might be onto something with atleast some of the neurodivergant. My family are all a mix of talent and neurodivergant. Interestingly I can see my children’s expressed reasonably clearly in their natal charts, they’re all different too.
What’s interesting is every generation in my family is quirky but each generation has managed to largely look normal but the issues are more obvious in the younger generation. I’m not sure if this has something to do with the astral and mental atmosphere our civilization is in or if these souls are choosing now to incarnate as the most appropriate time for them to work through things neglected in busy past lives.
The CEO of Intel just announced there had been no interruption in production in its chip fab in Southern Israel. This fab makes 7nm chips and is packed with the the most delicate, expensive and complicated equipment on earth. It employees 12,000 people and is one of the mainstays of the Israel economy , but it is less than 30 miles from the fighting between Hamas and the IDF.
One modest rocket from Gaza or Hezbollah would put this plant out of commission for months due to the dirt and contamination alone. A small fire in a fab, the size of a slice of burned toast, can shut it down for days because of the time it takes to clean and decontaminate.
The belief in business as usual and control over its enemies by Israel and its western backers is astounding. This might be the first example of how quickly the high tech world can collapse due to its fragility.
JMG,
I have a historical question. Why did the CSICOP types loath any sort of psychic or telepathy research? I mean sure you had transparent frauds like Uri Geller and the like, but there was something interesting there. And even in the straight laced slide rule and engineers 1950’s world of Heinlein era science fiction psychic powers were often alluded to. But then in the late 70’s there was this huge offensive launched on it. Do you know why psychic research specifically got the self-proclaimed skeptic movement worked up when it had been tolerated even in pretty hard science fiction circles only a few years prior? As I understand it the skeptic movement drew on a lot of science fiction readers and authors to buttress the movement.
Cheers,
JZ
Just to let you know John, your links from the email alerts I get at mail.com don’t load, but a warning instead. Along with [Recommendation Please do not visit this website.]
How would I test my idea about junk DNA containing information about previous incarnations, JMG? I’ve no idea.
Partly I got the idea from, I believe, Graham Hancock. His book “Supernatural”, I think it was, said something about junk DNA sequencing yielding regular patterns that suggest it is a language. My own kinetic accident came when we had smoke alarms put in our building (a Victorian house converted into four flats) after the Grenfell fire in London. The alarm on my floor has a green light, which initially triggered moving concentric circles that emanated from my eyesight. These circles were the same colour as the light on the smoke alarm. I went to the opticians the very next day (while these lights were still pulsing into my vision), and they did extensive tests on me but found nothing wrong. They definitely weren’t a migraine aura, which only lasts 20 minutes maximum and consists of sharp fractals that I can still see when I close my eyes. I had a few paranormal experiences during the 5 or 6 days that the lights lasted, and it was only after the lights had gone and the paranormal stuff stopped that I connected my experiences to the pulsing lights. When I mentioned it to you a couple of years ago, you suggested that I’d probably been a mage in a previous incarnation.
My first experience came when I saw a boy of around 12 in the queue at the supermarket. I saw he had a terrible cauliflower ear and felt sorry for him. The next time I looked at him, his ear was perfectly normal. I wanted to approach him and tell him about it, but given his age and the weirdness of what I wanted to say, I thought it would be too creepy and reluctantly said nothing. Back home I googled “joke cauliflower ears”, just in case (!) but found no such thing,.
The final experience involved clairvoyance. I was just falling asleep when I saw, as clearly as if I was standing at my window, a three-legged fox walking along the pavement outside. Foxes at night are common enough in London, of course, but I jumped out of bed to see if my vision was correct, just in time to see a three-legged fox limping away up the street. I shrugged, chuckled, and thought “Clairvoyance now! Whatever next?”, then went back to bed. In the morning the green lights in my eyesight had gone, and the paranormal experiences ceased.
So you see, you can’t trigger that sort of incident on purpose, in order to test my theory.
@JMG @Temporaryreality
On the point of people not posting here so frequently; occasionally you say something or ask a question that leads to quite a large scale project. That leaves less time and energy for commenting although the reading goes on. In my own case, I’ve written a long form piece on the pattern that accompanies the rise and fall of Western empires. I’m working hard with a publisher to get the work out into the world.
Part of that effort was spent researching a number of historical empires that I was unfamiliar with. I was surprised to see that although the familiar narrative could be applied to a number of Western empires it absolutely did not apply to any Chinese history that I could see. There really is a difference, I have no idea what it might be. There probably is a book there too.
I was wondering if your wife or any of the commentariate could recommend occult literature on all things female – hormones, the menstrual cycle, reproduction, breastfeeding, menopause that sort of thing.
“At material birth we separate from the mother’s material body; at etheric birth we separate from the etheric matrix of our family; at astral birth we separate from the astral groupmind of our culture, and at mental birth — which of course most human beings don’t achieve — we separate from the mental environment of our species.”
Hmmm. So was Jesus talking about the mental birth when he told Nicodemus unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And unless one is born of water and the spirit….John 3:3-3:15
“
Patricia M, thank you! The etheric body that matters is the one that belongs to the child’s primary caregiver or caregivers — that’s why young children need to be held often. (They’re recharging their etheric bodies.)”
So….if a child’s mother decides, when that child is 4 yrs old or so, that she no longer wishes to hold the child, tells the child she is too big to be held, and generally pushes her away….what does that do to the etheric body? What about children who never even got the first 4 years, who were neglected or abused from birth? Is the the etheric version of abortion (the etheric body will die) or a premie (the etheric body survives, but with probable lifelong health issues)
@XCO #37
May I suggest changing the way you are seeing divination?
I have the impression that you are asking the cards to predict the future for you, and it is failing. Cards do not know the future. No divination practice knows the future.
What divination does is letting your inner self to express while your outer self is paying attention. You are communicating with the “divine” part of yourself. The inner self is not very good at making deductions, but it is very good with intuition.
If you ask the cards, or the mirror, or the stones, or whatever fancies you, a good question, your inner self will offer you what it thinks about it in images. Then, you meditate on the answer and make your own opinion. The interpretation is sometimes accurate, sometimes wrong, but the divination is always right because it is the honest answer from your self that is in direct contact with the subtle.
So, instead of making daring questions like ‘Will my friend come to the party tonight?’, make yourself more useful questions like ‘How can I encourage my friend to come to the party?’. Or even, ‘Should I try to convince my friend to come to the party?’. The answer is usually vague, but after meditating on the answer, you are usually much better equipped facing the future.
As an example, I asked myself if I should change my internet dealer, since I am receiving good offers from a comercial. Divination answered with a battle tank, a bike helmet, and a carnivorous plant. I interpreted it as “Be careful, and watch closely the fixed phone line.” I did, and found several errors in the contract I was about to sign. The images arose in my mind as I was inspecting the contract, and it helped me finding the errors.
Divination practiced in this way really works.
Oh, and sometimes you may even be able to get images that are in the collective mind! They are not very useful, but this lets you know that your inner self is in contact with a much broader world than your conscious mind.
Hmm. goes well with my tip on the Frugal Friedays. I like it!
Hi John,
can you go into a bit more detail on how exactly dollar denominated assets will collapse in value once the US loses its global hegemony (lets say at some point in the 2nd half of this decade).
Presumably US stocks which are dollar denominated will collapse both in notional terms (or at least correct factoring in money printing by the Fed) and collapse in real terms.
Presumably the big dollar holders – e.g. the Gulf States that still maintain the petrodollar -, China, Japan etc still need to diversify and sell down their US Treasury holdings before China pulls the plug on US hegemony?
So, for ordinary folk like us, and for those who aren’t American, what type of currencies are you thinking that will hold its value vs v versus the US dollar. Would you avoid all currencies closely associated with the US e.g. UK, Canada, eurozone? What about the Swiss Frank (traditionally a safe haven during times of war and instability)?
Greetings JMG,
I hope you are well. I have a question: it seems that in popular culture, non-human life forms, spirits or similar are often depicted with horns or antlers. This seems to be consistent across time. For example, in German folklore the Krumpus is a horned beastie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus), in modern Netflix Ninjago, the esoteric bad guys have horns. The Baphomet is also depicted as horned. In photos of neo-pagan festivals, I notice that frequently the participants will wear horns or antlers too.
May I ask what this is all about?
Yours kindly, and with an ever-growing reading-list,
Boy
JMG:
Can you say when the next Moravec books are coming out? I loved the first one and looking forward to more Also, can you recommend an edition/translation of the “Emerald Tablet”?
@Hispalensis
Hi.
I am in the same situation, you know? My choices are between moving to Granada where we have some relatives and friends, or trying to fight climate change from here. Right now, I am planting trees!!
Well, not many trees, but I am trying to promote a regenerative agriculture with trees, in the hope that it will increase the green mass enough for some extra rain. The more asphalt and concrete we plant, the less it rains and the hotter it gets, so the solution should be clear.
It hurts me to see the naked hills around my city. I hope some day we will be smart enough to plant what can survive, instead of just more fire-loving pines. I suspect the reforestation efforts are not successful because it isn’t raining as it used to, so they are employing wrong strategies. Reforestation in a desert is different than in mediterranean.
The right location depends on you, and on who you bring along. Even in a big city which is about to collapse, even in a hot dry desert or in a battle zone, you can be the guy who has what it takes to thrive in such environments. So the search of a new home begins looking inside of yourself. Find what your character really is, what will make you happy and what you are willing to sacrifice, what your family may endure better (do they need amenities like the cinemas? can they do without? learning new languages? cyclying?), then the good locations will become evident.
For anyone with a fair amount of time on his/her hands and a high tolerance for PMC blather:
Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Says Net Zero is Within Reach by 2050 Due to Recent Federal Investments and Provides Comprehensive Plan for Reaching this Goal
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25931/chapter/1#iv
The summary is ~27 pages, as opposed to the ~640 pages of the full document.
I have a 5000 litre water tank that fills with rainwater, intended for garden use. If (when!) there are problems with drinking water supply, could you point us to information that would enable us treat water, to create safe drinking water (I’m in northern France, which presumably has some effect on the likely risks, and treatments necessary)? Thanks
John–
Re the replication crisis
Somebody must have hit the panic-button in recent years because I stumbled across this publication from the same source as the document in my previous post:
Reproducibility and Replicability in Science
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25303.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25303/chapter/1
Apparently, someone decided that Something Must Be Done and so wrote a 200-page report on why reproducibility and replication is a Difficult Thing. From the description:
Reproducibility and Replicability in Science defines reproducibility and replicability and examines the factors that may lead to non-reproducibility and non-replicability in research. Unlike the typical expectation of reproducibility between two computations, expectations about replicability are more nuanced, and in some cases a lack of replicability can aid the process of scientific discovery.
@Stinkhorn This book might interest you: https://www.amazon.com/Being-You/dp/0571337724/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
(IHO) One of the things the book deals with is we don’t *perceive* reality, we *create* it, and in fact, we only ever “see” a (our) construct of reality, never reality itself. Perhaps the Bedouins created different constructs of reality from Westerners, that better suited their needs, and because of their culture, experience etc, didn’t see (or need to see) images of themselves in paint. It’s a fascinating, thoughtful book.
One slightly amusing possibility occurs to me. You know when a kitten is playing with something in the air that “isn’t there”. Well it certainly isn’t there in your construct of reality… but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something there, only that there isn’t something there that is deemed important to particular human interests and concerns 🙂
@cointoss The speeding up of the perception of time passing is somewhat inevitable, and I never understood why until I read the following about ageing.
When you live from 5 to 10 years old you’ve just completed a period that’s 100% of your previous years living. When you live from 100 to 105 years old you’ve just completed a period that’s 5% of your previous years living! Inevitably, with memory, it seems much smaller / faster 🙂
About chinese history vs American history: you should also consider Europe because US is a branch of euro culture. France had some dynastic changes for example: the Merovingians, then Charlemagne and his progeny, then the long age of the Capets that, if you consider cadet branches like the ones from the 100 year war, went all the way to the French War of Religion and King Henry. Then the Bourbon like the Sun King and the guy that got beheaded by the Jacobins. After the Revolutionary Era we have the Republic that, even with it’s craziness (Bonney, then his stupid nephew, the corrupt bourgeois republic, world wars, De Gaulle, another corrupt bourgeois republic…) can be considered a single dynasty.
Each French Dynasty Era lasted a couple centuries. US, like all American countries is in the late stage of its first dynastic eras, where the colonial criollos take over the Colony from the overseas overlords and basically make a mess of everything. The real test for all colonial American countries will be when these dynasties fall. That’s when we will se if the cultures will survive. Also that’s when there will be transition from colonists to fully settled on the land.
Space mining.
https://www.wired.com/story/things-are-looking-up-for-asteroid-mining/
We can’t get the minerals needed from earth without digging lots of big holes in sensitive places, so to space we must go.
All we need is “massive government investment,” otherwise known as Free Public Money.
I do find it to be somewhat encouraging that the press is realizing that renewable energy takes a lot of highly refined materials. So the elite will have to choose between giving up on renewable energy, strip mining the parts of this planet outside of their line of sight, or giving up their lifestyles. We can guess which will be their least favorite choice.
On the brighter side, the British Empire avoided a crisis by shipping the excess production of elites to the colonies. Shipping vast numbers of elites to space colonies might work well for earth too. I got Peter Turchin book End Times from the library. I don’t agree with everything, but it’s interesting. It even fits with China’s youth unemployment problem. Years of intensive studying, agonizing exams to get into prestigious universities, more grinding, more exams, and then they hand you a hoe and point to the rice paddy. What a fine recipe for discontent.
#87 Athaia I have also asked myself this question more often and also have no clear answer to this. I can think of the following hypotheses:
1. although the leftists recognize that these migrants have fundamentally different values than they do, they assume that everyone can change their compass of values like underpants. So once these people come to us, sooner or later they will adopt our way of life.
2. maybe it is a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
3. another explanation of mine would be the habit of leftists to divide human groups into victim collectives and perpetrator collectives and then consistently ignore any bad characteristic of the victim collectives.
I suspect it will be a mixture of these three factors.
Procedural question: are you going to put up a new Frugal Friday post on Dreamwidth every week or shall we just continue to comment at the original?
With regard to Tiny Homes:
Another name for a Tiny House might be Double Wide.
The Double Wide style Tiny House doesn’t seem to be as trendy though for some reason, even though they’ve been at the game longer.
Many of them also live with what might as well be a “minimalist aesthetic” although its a bit more Dollar Store Chic.
JMG and Athaia, regarding the pincer grip of Islamism and Wokeism not making sense at all, the answer is clear: if the logic of the situation is petunias, then the explanation is most likely demons.
Smith, I am from Singapore. The only places that should look to Singapore as a model are small city-states with a convenient port along a major trade route, in the Americas, maybe Panama for example. Dubai is trying to replicate the Singapore model with Middle Eastern characteristics as well.
Public housing here has its own problems. We don’t have a homeless problem but we do have measures that are propping up housing prices for people who already have apartments, but making it harder and harder for younger people to buy. I believe Singapore has comparable home prices to New York or Miami, keep in mind that most homes here are flats, for a home the size of a typical American suburban home, you’ll easily have to pay a few million in USD!
A better model for a freer market in housing is Japan; outside of the heart of Tokyo and maybe Osaka, there are plenty of houses going for under $100,000
My wife and I have been watching a Polish detective show. One of the characters, Zofia Bławatska, had a photo of Helena Blavatsky on her wall. Not sure if she was supposed to be a relation, but I have you to think for knowing who she was.
Some years ago, I started reading your Well of Galabes posts with some hesitation. I had been reading the Archdruid Report for a while, though I cannot recall how I stumbled upon it. It may have been Brian Kaller’s blog, though I cannot recall how I stumbled upon that. A long, wandering journey through the Internet. My initial hesitation with the Galabes posts was due to my lifelong Christian faith. “This is magic talk, stay away” and all that.
I am, like many, trying to figure what is going on in the world and how we ought to live. If some of this talk about occultism, magic, past lives and all that is true, what does that mean for Christianity or some of the other more dogmatic religions? As you have pointed out, there have been plenty of Christian occultists. Were most of them a bit, shall we say, unorthodox, or did they see no conflict between their Christian faith and their magical practice?
Thank you, as always.
@ JMG, Temporary Reality & Geronimo
In his essay “The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival”, Glubb Pasha points out that on average, an empire has a lifespan of around 250 years and goes through a predictable lifecycle (shades of Spengler and Toynbee), which he traces out in considerable detail. So there definitely seems to be some sort of inner logic driving the rise and fall of many different types of regimes, from Chinese and French dynasties to empires. Those cycles in turn fit within still larger cycles, such as the civilizational cycles that historians like Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee discuss in their writings.
Hi John,
Each time there is a mass shooting it leaves me feeling so depressed. Depressed not only about the tragedy that affects those gunned down and their surviving loved ones but depressed that most people in American don’t seem to care anymore. People seem to react to a mass shooting as if it were just a natural disaster similar to the loss of life that we see when a tornado destroys a community in the middle of the night. My guess is that people do care but feel there is no remedy to the problem. I tend to think these these mass shootings are simply a symptom of a dysfunctional, industrial society yet other developed nations do not suffer from this epidemic.. What is the answer? If it is not gun control, then do we need to greatly spend more for mental health services or do we just need to wait for our way of life in America to collapse? I assume in post-industrial America, we’ll see tighter family and community bonds and that will end mass shootings. Your thoughts please?
Hi JMG, I hope you’re well.
A niche question, but hopefully thought provoking.
The “Gold Standard” therapy for people with OCD is usually a form of exposure (ERP). So, for example, if someone is performing rituals or behaviours because of anxious intrusive thoughts about their loved ones befalling some horrific accident, they’d be encouraged to actively imagine said event occurring. over and over, in order to take the charge out, eventually become better able to accept unwanted distressing thoughts without performing compulsions.
It does seem to work very well in many cases, but I’d like to know what your view is regarding this practice? I know some spiritually minded folks would be wary of such a thing due to its focus on, and potential to manifest, the negative imagined event.
Thanks!
>Another name for a Tiny House might be Double Wide
And another good question that leads you to interesting answers – why do those “tiny homes” have wheels on them in the first place?
>Shipping vast numbers of elites to space colonies might work well for earth too
See: Elysium, the movie.
On tiny homes
There is class division here. So, a tiny home around here costs around $100,000, some cost more. and they are very small.
First thought, this can realy add up if you think they are being built for the homeless. Then of course you need to connect them to clean water, dirty water out and electricity – with the associated costs. Then there is the cost of the land, where to park one, which is pricey too.
Second thought, so we have a new county building code law that approves ( but who knows how long or if more changes or requirements will happen) having one as a second unit on your property. It has to be a certified one, and it has to be on wheels, denoting the temprorary-ness. So, it cant realy be owner built, you have to buy it, and they are easily $100,000 to buy. They think this will help with the housing crisis. But, consider, if people with room, like my area on 1 care plus tries to do this, first, you have to have an engineered paved pad to put it on, you have to buy the darn thing, the normal costs to plumb and run electric, might not be too bad, but then there is the dirty water, the septic connection. They WILL require an upgrade, most likely a second tank, probably leach field expansion. So at least $50,000 in addition to the 100,000, I bet more. The property tax will go up, not sure by how much. Lets say you spend as little as $150,000 on the whole deal ( but it will be more). If you rent it for $1500/month, as it is quite small, it would take 100months, so lets just say 10 years. But you have likely borrowed the money, with interest ( and all this applies to a city or county doing this for the homeless, but they will certainly spend more, especially as they will have a paid employee seeing that it gets done, not the unpaid homeowner) I just ran this thru a mortgage calculator, 150000 needs $1,300 a month for 30 years to pay off. There will be repairs during this time, plus it will realy cost more than this. If anyone realy does do this, they will actually charge $2,000/month for this tiny spot. They would have to, if they could get it. SO, realy, the numbers do not pencil out and this is not affordable. A site built unit would cost less to build, in theory, but the permitting would be extreme.
Third thought, you might notice that a trailer would be cheaper, and better laid out and larger. Yes, it would be. But, it would be illegal in this county. Because of snobbery I guess. I see this as total class garbage, but there it is. There are people living in trailers on other peoples driveways, back yards, and on 1acre plus property, but you can be “called in” at any time by your neighbors. So, some neighborhoods look the other way and some dont.
Tiny homes are a marker of class division.
I’m listed as an organ donor, and as a consequence of the mess for the last few years I have a marked change in attitude towards modern medicine than the one I did when I made that decision, have chosen to reassess it. However, I realized there’s another attitude I’ve changed since I made that decision, namely that I now take the subtle planes a lot more seriously.
Do you know if anyone has looked into the effects of organ donation on the subtle bodies, especially when the donor is an occultist? My biggest concern here is my heart: I’ve done the Middle Pillar extensively in the form you discuss in Circles of Power, it’s awakened my heart centre, and I’m a tad concerned that if the energy is anchored to the physical heart in any way, this could have weird and unexpected effects when given to someone.
Lots of copper and tool theft going on at electric substations and on distribution systems. Reports come in almost daily on the national system set up to track grid security issues. Just saw a report about nearly 2000 feet of energized wire stolen off power poles of a rural electric system earlier this month.
Crazy times and desperate measures.
Is there any lore, about those whispy, spiraling mists that come out of the ground, in the mists or in low cloud cover, usually in the morning, or after a rain, in the forested hills? I’ve seen them all my life, in the Ouachitas and the Ozarks. The only other place I’ve seen something equivalent is over bodies of water, or on the bottomland crop fields in the river bottoms. They usually rise up and trail into the clouds or general mist.
Thank you, sir.
Pam,
In this article I summarized and compared what English language media from Argentina, India, Japan, Kenya, Qatar, South Africa, and Turkey have to say about the current crisis in Israel/Gaza. I added links to all publications. This should give you some good ideas of the views people around the globe have on all kinds of topics.
https://globalviewdigest.substack.com/p/israel-palestine-war-comparing-media
Smith @ 76, Thank you. Some Indian commentators here, such as Vidurawakened, have said they expect and fear such an invasion is likely. If India were faced with full scale Chinese incursion, it would have no choice but to call on its Asian and Pacific allies. Taiwan is a sideshow, useful for saber rattling to impress a declining group of mostly former military. The PRC finds it useful to keep Taiwan at its current status for a number of reasons, not least of which is as a conduit for Chinese nationals wishing to resettle in North America and for money laundering. What does matter is Japan. The United States WILL defend Japan at all costs, or rather, help Japan defend itself. I doubt anyone any longer believes that the Japanese, widely known as the best engineers in the world, have no advanced weapons. So, if it ever appears that China is trying to foment a “crisis” vis a vis Japan, India might want to look to its defenses.
Asterix was for a brief time in in the mid 1970’s in our local large city newspaper. They changed some things for the American market. They changed the druid’s name away from Getafix. They also re-did the drawings of the slaves to be far less racially offensive. One time I was surprised to find an Asterix DVD at the dollar store. The racially offensive slave depictions were almost certainly the reason for the drastic mark down.
Patricia, indeed they did. In at least some cases that was deliberate — it was standard among aristocrats in early modern Europe, for example, to hire strapping young peasant girls as nurses for the babies of the nobility, on the quite sensible assumption that the babies would thrive better that way. As for Japan, yes, very much so — the battle of Dan no Ura in 1185, which sealed the triumph of the first Minamoto shogun, and the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, which marked the victory of the first Tokugawa shogun, are good markers for the end of two dynastic-equivalent divisions.
Blue Sun, yes, quite a few Christian occultists make exactly that point.
Smith, that’s great if you’ve got a small country with a lot of money. The US is not exactly small and it’s effectively bankrupt.
Temporaryreality, granted. That’s why I put two major civil wars and a lot of less formal chaos in the equivalent period in my novel Star’s Reach.
Clay, I wonder why Hamas hasn’t attacked it yet.
John, the rise of fundamentalist scientism exactly paralleled the rise of fundamentalist Christianity, and drew on many of the same social forces. I well remember the older and frankly more interesting SF, in which psychic phenomena were a common theme — and I remember how it got squeezed out in the 1980s and 1990s as the fundamentalists took over. Both Christian and scientific fundamentalism were well-organized and tolerably well funded, and it would be an interesting question to sort out where CSICOP got their money from.
Tom, hmm! Interesting. Not surprising, but interesting.
Batstrel, so noted. That’s simply my usual response to hypotheses.
Andy, I’ll be interested to see how that project of yours turns out!
Sam, I’ll ask her, but I’ve seen very little on that subject — including from women occultists. Not sure why that should be.
Anon, there are plenty of Christian occultists who think so.
Marko, glad to hear it. The next Frugal Friday post is up, btw.
Forecasting, that’s impossible to predict in detail, of course. My working guess, though, is that we’ll see a mix of several factors: frirst, steady inflation cutting into the value of all dollar-denominated assets; second, serious crashes in the value of those investment assets that aren’t backed by anything but wishful thinking (i.e., most classes of assets); and third, actual defaults in US government bonds. So it’s going to be a ragged process. Assets that retain their value will be those that actually have value, and are not simply attempts to cash in on supposely higher prices in the future; currencies that retain their value will be those outside the US-centric system, which means probably not anything in Europe or the British diaspora.
Boy, that’s a fascinating question to which I don’t know the answer. Hmm!
Chris, thank you for asking! The second Ariel Moravec novel, The Book of Haatan, is iirc scheduled for release this coming spring. The third, The Carnelian Moon, is in the publisher’s hands but I haven’t gotten the release date yet. The fourth, The House of the Crows, is being written right now!
David BTL, I really wonder which planet they think they’re talking about.
Michael, I’m going to have to pass this on to readers with the relevant specialist knowledge. Anyone?
David BTL, funny! They can’t simply admit that modern science is riddled with graft and fraud, of course.
Geronimo, American culture is much less European than most Europeans think; that said, your point is a valid one.
Siliconguy, that would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
I was not able to make heads nor tails of Cosmic Doctrine until your posts on the book. Thank you so much for that.
But now this 2012 essay just screams Cosmic Doctrine at me.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2012/08/collapse-is-humanity-adapting-to-its-own-presence/
I hope and believe his optimism at the end is what happens.
When is a country or state an empire or a dynasty in the sense of the cycles discussed above? E.g. would Germany count as one – and if yes, where in the cycle would it be?
What about other smaller countries, or even obvious „vassal states“ of the bigger ones: Do they also have their own life cycles, and how do these cycles look like?
Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Or maybe it has been discussed somewhere?
Milkyway
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/people-are-sharing-even-more-outdated-or-obsolete-things-they-still-use-because-they-are-perfectly-happy-with-it/ar-AA1iXLfd?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=c662143cc4824be4dfac9bbfd0cbcea1&ei=20
https://www.forestriverinc.com/parkmodels/
Park model RV is a portable tiny home. Why they thought tiny homes were a new thing USA mystery. They are not rated to deal with the far north, but in the southern half of the country they should do fine.
@Michael #162 re: Treating Drinking Water
I’m not an expert on this, so take with an appropriate amount of salt. If you want to dive deeper, camping and prepper literature might be a good place to look.
There are three main approaches to making water fit to drink, and they can be used in combination if thought desirable or useful.
1. Filtration: This is essentially a mechanical process and is best for removing debris, sediment, and larger organisms like bugs. Depending on the filtration system you use, it might help with heavy metals or other minerals. For some in-house options, you might search for “passive water filters” or “gravity water filters,” which can be bought, put on your counter, and then you top off with whatever water you want to use. Many folks who use these suggest adding back in desirable minerals like salt and magnesium, because the process removes those too. You can also build your own filter on either a large or small scale (for a small scale, make it in a bottle or jug, for a large scale, a full barrel). The general idea is to put in layers of filtering materials from least filtering to most filtering, something like metal grate, mesh, big rocks, small rocks, sand, charcoal, then let the water flow through that before being collected in something safe to keep drinking water in. The big downside to filtration is that it has very limited ability to do anything about microorganisms that can make you sick.
2. Boiling: Boiling is kind of the flipside of filtration – it’s fantastic for dealing with microorganisms, but useless against anything suspended in the water (unless you make a still, I suppose). As such, if you want to play it safe, filtering water thoroughly and then boiling it is a pretty good way to render it safe to drink. Most microorganisms will be killed well before the water reaches boiling, so even just warm or hot water will be a bit less likely to make you sick, but if you want to be on the safe side, a full rolling boil for a couple of minutes ought to kill anything killable in the water.
3. Chemical Treatment: The well-known solution for municipal water supplies, which mostly use tiny, tiny amounts of chlorine to render water inhospitable to germs. Like boiling, this will only really help you with germs and microorganisms, not with anything in suspension. Campers tend to prefer iodine, because it’s safer to ingest in quantities that you can actually manage practically (“put a drop of iodine in your canteen, and you might have needed it anyway, unless you eat iodized salt” instead of “get this very tiny ratio exactly right or you will poison yourself”). For enough water for a whole household, I’m not sure how practical chemical treatment would be, as that’s the kind I’ve read the least about and haven’t ever done on my own. The chief benefit of chemical treatment over/in addition to boiling is that it stays in the water, so it should not get re-infected unless contaminated with something nasty.
Hope this helps and at least gives you some places to get started!
Jeff
@John Zybourne (#149) about CSICOP:
The original organization, which published the Zetetic Scholar, was much more open-minded, and included Marcello Truzzi among its founders and board members. One ofn the other board members, Paul Kurtz, was dogmatically against the possibility of anything paranormal, and won a few other influential members (e.g. James Randi) over to his point of view. He and they then stopped notifying Truzzi (and other genuinely curious skeptics) of upcoming board meetings and basically pulled off a hostile take-over of the organization and its publication by the dogmatic materialist faction..
For the complete original Zetetic Scholar (1978-1987) online see,
http://tricksterbook.com/truzzi/ZeteticScholars.html
It’s worth a look!
Since this is an open Wendesday…
Black Letter Press has Kickstarted a translation of three of Giordano Bruno’s memory books that followed On the Shadow of Ideas. Available at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blackletterpress/giordano-bruno-ars-memoriae for anyone who is interested.
@Michael (#164):
There’s quite a bit of scholarly literature by linguists about how people’s habitual thought runs in grooves laid down by their native language, and how different unrelated languages lay these groowes down quite differently from one another. One of the reasons, I would say, that Europe can function as a geopolitical and cultural unity of sorts is that most European languages are fairly closely related to one another. (The chief exceptions are Finish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque.)
There are a few early, very good seminal papers on this topic by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an MIT-educated engineer, and linguist (and also a member of the Theosophical Society). I have put two of his best up on archive.org: “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” (1941) and “Language, Mind and Reality” (1942). I recommend them highly.
His insights were more than a little derailed after his death by other linguists who advanced what they called “the Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis, which has almost nothing to do with what Whorf actually wrote and said. Their hypothesis has since been refuted, but that has little bearing on Whorf’s far more modest claims.
One of the few studies to examine critically what Whorf actually claimed is Penny Lee’s The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (1996). She understood early on that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was a straw man, set up for easy refutation, and proceeded to go back not just to Whorf’s own published articles, but also the vast archive of his papers held by the (IIRC) Yale University Library. See also studies by John A. Lucy and Dan Moonhawk Alford.
Most of the literature against Whorf seems to me to reflect academic discomfort with, even animus against, the very idea that human perceptiosn of reality might possibly be highly subjective, differing from culture to culture — as if that possibility rendered the entire program of Science™ impossible to carry out, and also had unacceptable consequences for the “universalizing” political programs favored by Western states. since WW2.
Celadon #182 – Where in the part of Germany where I live, we have the saying that when the mist rises form the forest the foxes are brewing coffee because more rain is coming.
I found it to be a good rule of thump. If the mist doesn’t rise after rainfall, it usually stays dry for a while. And I like the image 🙂
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Some years ago a sage sent me on a mission to deliver herbal medicines to an elderly religious artist. Near his house there was a famous ‘fairy mountain’ which was covered in old trees. There were plenty of ribbons tied to the trees, as well as coins and other offerings scattered around. A fresh breeze was blowing off the mountains so I decided to practice traditional kung-fu in a small glade on the summit. As I moved the wind became stronger and stronger and my movements became faster and faster, until they were completely unconscious and natural, and the trees were bent over by the strong gusts. After a minute or two the wind died down and I formally bowed in respect to the Sidhe. The trees seemed to whisper ‘we have not seen such a thing since the time of the ancient kings ‘.
‘…since nobody knows, by all means let your imagination have at it…’ My conclusions may be speculative, but it is not the case that ‘nobody knows’. The land itself remembers.
Roldy, there’ll be a new one every week. I put up this week’s post a few hours ago.
Christopher, the crucial point, to judge by the many Christian occultists I’ve known (including my teacher John Gilbert), is that there’s a difference between Christian faith and Christian dogma. John used to like to point out that Jesus said “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” — he never said “thou shalt blindly accept a long list of beliefs about religious matters.” Christian faith is trust in God as revealed in Christ, celebrated in sacraments, and expressed through a life of prayer and moral virtue. Many Christian occultists also accept one or another of the standard creeds, especially the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed, as authoritative — but it’s worth noting that neither of those creeds excludes magic or reincarnation, just for starters.
Ariel, a good point.
Peter, part of the problem is that the United States isn’t a developed nation. It’s a third world nation that, due to a chapter of historical accidents, ended up very, very rich for a while, but it still has all the usual problems of nonindustrial nations. Its death rate from homicide is quite modest for a third world country — 6.00 per year per 100,000 people, which puts it a little lower than Argentina (6.09) and a little higher than Cuba (5.02), and nowhere near such homicide hotspots as El Salvador (86.75), Venezuela (64.65), or South Africa (37.54 — all stats from https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/violence/by-country/ ). Gun control certainly isn’t the answer — did the War on Drugs stop anyone from using drugs? — and the gargantuan media hoopla over mass shootings, which arguably encourages copycat crimes, isn’t helping either.
Petros, that strikes me as risky, but there are ways to make it less so. In particular, if the person who is using that method makes the details different every time, and exaggerates things in unrealistic ways, it’s less likely to have any negative effect.
Anonymous, I don’t know of any research that’s been done, but yeah, I’d be concerned.
David BTL, good gods — they stole the wire while it had electricity going through it??? That’s somewhere betwee brave and crazy.
Celadon, not that I know of. They’re quite common in the Pacific Northwest where I grew up, too.
JustMe, thanks for this — I’ve bookmarked it to read when time permits.
Milkyway, an empire and a dynasty are two different things. An empire is a country that seizes other countries and strips them of wealth, the way England did to Ireland (and a quarter of the world’s surface more generally) and the US has done to Europe and Latin America. A dynasty is a particular family or, more broadly, a particular ruling caste, that holds supreme power in a country for a while.
Patricia M, heh heh heh.
Jeffrey, glad to hear it.
Tengu, I should have said “no human being knows.” There are certainly others who know.
Hi John Michael,
I see, we have a misunderstanding. I meant a much wider no-go zone than exists at present. Too often things are done on the cheap, with the forlorn hope that nobody notices. ‘cept they do.
Cheers
Chris
Where is Mexico on in the civilization journey? Is it still in pseudomorphosis or is it already a mature civilization like Europe or the Arabs?
Alvin, point taken. And, as JMG pointed out in his reply, the US is a very different country, of very limited means, meaning, without exaggeration, bankrupt. The US isn’t the only country in this boat, but it is the most prominent.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that Singapore was also in a bad state in past decades with the problem of squatters and slums. Nonetheless it managed its way out of this situation. So how did Singapore perform this trick given its limited means. Money doesn’t grow on trees after all.
Maybe the answer is partly in what was built and how it was built. You can only build and sell or lease what people can afford because otherwise people end up homeless and the housing ends up empty.
In this city where I live we have thousands living in the streets and in shelters. I’ve heard the number 10,000. A block away a hotel was turned into a homeless shelter. Our politicians make a big deal about plans for a few dozen affordable housing units here and there but what are needed are not hundreds but hundreds of thousands of such units.
We used to have reasonably good rooming houses. No more. We used to have what were called bachelorette apartments which were individual rooms with a toilet and shower and hotplate and bar fridge. No more. I know all this because I saw such places in my university days. They were affordable. They were for low income people like students, young people new on the job market, retirees, disabled and the like. Now we’d rather have the squalor we have.
The development industry and the nimby coalition and banks have a stranglehold on city hall. Our practical ability to deal with issues is gone. We are in a rut and we cannot get out of it.
As you suggest maybe we should look at Japan. Good idea. I will look into it. I am acquainted with our city councilor. Maybe he should too.
“if the logic of the situation is petunias, then the explanation is most likely demons.”
Or an Infinite Improbability Field in the area. 😉
Dear #10
The close of World War II is the Russian denazification of the Ukraine and Europe and the opening act of WW III is the Palestinian/Israeli war. WW III likely will not go nuclear (I hope). If Israel used nukes against other Muslim nations, Pakistan will nuke Israel according to some reports. The end of empires are away messy it seems.
Re: JMG @ #186, “American culture is much less European than most Europeans think”
I think it’s less European even than most Americans think!
Chris, there isn’t enough room for a wider no-go zone. Israel is less than a third the size of Tasmania, or just over twice the size of metropolitan Melbourne. It’s a tiny little scrap of territory. That’s one of the things that makes the situation so impossible: you’ve got 9 million Israelis and 5 million Palestinians crammed into that little wedge of land.
Mark, that’s one of the big questions of the near future. Did the Mexican civilization — the great culture that first flowered in Olmec times, reached its first peak at Teotihuacan, and had its second peak in the heyday of the Aztec empire — end definitively when Cortes and his conquistadors hacked their way into Tenochtitlan the second time? Or was that simply the arrival of a European pseudomorphosis that sooner or later will be thrown off, to allow a new Mexican civilization to rise in its place? My guess is the latter — the popularity of Santissima Muerte strikes me as a very good sign that the gods of old Anahuac, “the land between the waters,” are still very much alive — but we’ll have to wait and see.
Jonathan, I’d agree with that!
@JMG (#186), Jonathan (#203):
Most of the early settlers in what later became the United States were people who were fleeing Europe, who in many cases passionately hated and feared the Europe they had been living in. (Every last one of my own first immigrant ancestors, from the early 1600s to the later 1800s, hated the Europe (or at least the part of Europe) from which they had fled. )
This simple fact explains so very much about the history of the United States, and especially the huge cultural divide between the relatively few Europhilic elites and the numerous Europhobic masses. Some of what looks at first like class warfare is also warfare between the Europhiles and the Europhobes.
@SDI, @Nachtgurke, @batstrel, @John Michael Greer, @methylethyl, @ Scotlyn, @Grover Tibbetts, @Michael: Thank you all for sharing your explanations, experiences and suggestions. It has given me a lot of food for thought.
Michael #162,
I have lived with tank water for a large portion of my life. Sometimes it has been my only source of water and sometimes a supplement to the town water. We have just drunk it au natural and had no problems. We have had our tank professionally cleaned sometimes. Possibly about every 4 years or so. At present we use it for the garden.
However, it is best to have it run direct from the roof. If you go for the flash look and run it through a pipe that runs along the ground then up into the tank it can go stagnant. We did not get sick from this but it smelled off.
Once we were lucky enough to have it filtered through a mouse trapped against the outlet pipe. It smelled off and I felt off but was not even sick form this. Trust your nose.
Chris at Fernglade and JMG,
Re: mutual annihilation
After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, both Hutu and Tutsi combatants casually and commonly recognized that sometimes the Earth gets too crowded and a good war is required to give the survivors enough room to live…
After the abrupt switch in media focus away from Covid , which distracted from the mounting outcomes showing the promises the McKinsey consultants made to panicked governments on the one and only valid sanitary response possible failed, we were served an “existential crisis” for the West with the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Now that media focus is shifting away from the Russian-Ukrainian war, exactly at the time the required budgets to keep it going are lost in bureaucratic hurdles and difficulties in ramping up industrial capabilities, media coverage is now switching to a new “existential crisis” for the West in the Israelo-Palestian conflict.
A theory of mainstream media coverage, aka propaganda, should include the principle of “The Highlander Crisis: there can be only one”. This principle assumes the general public can only worry about one crisis at a time, and must keep worrying on pre-chosen targets. The coverage of a crisis must be thrown away once boredom settles in because the actual consequences are not matched with the worries. And the coverage of a crisis must also be replaced with that of another crisis to divert inconvenient questions that would eventually be targeted toward the crisis managers. It works better if public-facing crisis managers are different than for the last crisis so that the general state of anxiety can be maintained without ever discharging in backlash on propagandists. Proper choice of timing can achieve all at the same time.
@Nachtgurke #195 I hope you won’t mind me correcting you (I always appreciate my German friends correcting my German, which is necessarily often, very often): it’s “rule of thumb” not “rule of thump”. (Although the latter does bring some colourful images to mind). I only noticed you consistently using the saying incorrectly because I always read what you have to say with great interest here and on Dreamwidth.
Hi John Michael,
On Wednesday in a rare feat of long distance travel (for me at least), I drove across to the geographically other side of town to pick up a replacement trailer. I’m no fan of sitting in the car for a couple of hours, but very occasionally, one must put aside their niceties and do what needs being done. There were no suppliers of trailers of the size I was looking for, and with stock, on this side of town. I reckon the travel took about six hours all up, there and back again. Of course there was the time spent at the supplier. And another stop to get a coffee (yes, yes, I hear you! They probably do a decent tea you know! 😉 ) and muffin at a place I know. A bloke always has to know a ‘place’. The muffin was excellent – we could at least agree on that, if you were there.
But yeah, you’re right. Twice the land area, and twice the people. Plus a whole bunch more, hemmed in just over the border. It’s a powder keg, and honestly I’d thought it was bigger in land area than that. Not good. They’re in a whole world of trouble over there. There are times I feel I’m living in the early stages of a dystopian novel. Do you get that feeling?
Don’t believe the hype, we’re such an urban population down here. Outside of the main urban areas along the coastline, it’s pretty quiet. And the state here is about the same land mass as the entire UK, but with 15x less people, although the powers that be seem to be on a race to catch up. Bizarrely, the same lot seem to have problems allowing the creation of enough housing for everyone. It’s such a weird interaction of competing policies…
Anyway, what I was going to say is that vibe / aura or whatever you want to call it, of really densely packed in places would leave me feeling a bit frazzled. I’m not into it. How are you with that?
Cheers
Chris
Not a question, just musing out loud…
“At material birth we separate from the mother’s material body; at etheric birth we separate from the etheric matrix of our family; at astral birth we separate from the astral groupmind of our culture, and at mental birth — which of course most human beings don’t achieve — we separate from the mental environment of our species.”
This brought to mind the post you did on the polarity of the sexes and which ones projected and which ones were receptive at each level: physical, etheric, astral and mental.
The quote above underscored the need for women to project at the etheric level: to feed their children much like breast feeding, by holding and hugging them. I’m reminded of all the various cultures that carry their children on the mother’s back for a couple of years, and the result if that close bond isn’t there, such as the Romanian orphans and the lasting effects of neglect on them, or the failure to thrive of some girl babies in male-centered cultures.
But what was more interesting to me was the thought that at the mental level, women are doing the same thing for their children. They project the meaning and value which the child needs to make sense of what is happening at any given moment. I raised 3 kids and can attest that when confronted with something new, children look at mom to see how she reacts. What mom says and does is vitally important for the child not only in the moment but it also has a profound influence on the shaping of that child for life. “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world” and all that is still largely women.
Which brings to mind the thought that the meaning-making that women do make them incredibly powerful. More powerful than men in some ways, and not just because of what we do with the kids. However socially and culturally we don’t want to acknowledge or grant it. We seem to prefer seeing women as poor, weaker, inferior victims. But my musings took me to compare that with how we ask men to take responsibility for their greater physical strength (never hit a woman) and their penis (don’t force yourself on women) or their projections at the astral level (don’t mansplain, don’t be a misogynist, be respectful etc.) If we don’t acknowledge women’s power, we can’t talk about or teach women how to take responsibility for it.
As an example, imagine a schoolyard full of kids, and one little boy who is trying to impress a girl does something physically daring to show off, and the little girl looks at that and says “That’s stupid!” The little boy is crushed, but he accepts it. I’ve seen this scenario repeat itself at all age levels. The question is whether the boy will figure out a way to impress the girl that will gain her approval (the meaning that she attaches to his action.) A man can thump his chest and roar that he’s an alpha male all he wants, but short of grabbing women and assaulting them physically, it is the women who decide who he gets to sleep with.
I’m thinking Karens going off on a rant is meaning-making gone amok. Gossiping is group practice in meaning making. The asinine woke nonsense we are seeing is also meaning making gone wrong.
I’m not arguing that men don’t also create meaning, just as women don’t also act physically, but if JMG is correct about polarity, then maybe it might be a good idea to teach women to own their power and wield it wisely, kindly, and justly alongside men wielding their own power in the same way.
Your book The Secret of the Temple had a significant impact on me when I first read it, and I have been revisiting it recently. I’m particularly drawn to the idea that the technology could actually be revived and put into use again as you suggest in the last chapter of the book. Have you continued your research in that direction since the book was published? I did enjoy what was presented in The Ceremony of the Grail, but as you say in the book it is only tangentially related. I feel like I am in a unique position geographically, spiritually, and agriculturally to be able to further research and attempt to put into practice the technology, but it seems daunting to say the least, and likely a lifetime of work. What would you suggest for getting started in the right direction?
It wasn’t just me that had a really good year with the potatoes.
“In an unexpected turn of events, Northwest potato farmers are staring at the prospect of destroying an overwhelming surplus of premium french-fry-making potatoes. An estimated 165,000 tons, equivalent to 5,000 loaded semi-trucks, are slated to either be dumped into cattle troughs or be outright destroyed.”
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/report-northwest-faces-unprecedented-potato-glut-165-000-tons-set-for-destruction/article_e78b2ee4-7532-11ee-a344-bb97cbb7c793.html
Forecasting,
If I may. Well, gold and silver have been the traditional places to park money during currency collapses…that’s certainly what we’re up to at my house. But more broadly I think it’s a good question. Invest in the yuan, rupee, rand, and ruble?
@Stinkhorn, re: the story about the painting – I found the reference in the comments under JMG’s first post on his Well of Galabes blog (“Explaining the World”); comment #78 by Enrique. JMG has a link to the archived Galabes posts at the top of this blog under “Blogs, Essays, FAQs”. That whole post is fascinating!
@Ecosophy Enjoyer re #100,
I like the idea of a deindustrial roguelike! As a (formerly professional) game designer I could go on for pages about your question regarding in-game magic but I’ll try to stay succinct and focused. Wanting to represent magic as something other than just another form of hurty stuff to assault monsters with (or various other computer RPG standards like buffs, heals, fast transport, restraining enemies, and locating things) is admirable, but it seems to me like an uphill battle given the usual nature of such games. The player’s one essential task is resource management. It might be as difficult to make game magic feel truly magical as it is to make game combat feel physically invigorating or tiring.
That said, here are a few random ideas in no particular order:
– Effects that would typically be represented as magic in a typical fantasy game (or alien tech in a typical SF game) can be old tech instead in your setting. That does leave you more free to make the real magic something more subtle.
– Some of your factions being practicing mages; address magic on the story level regardless of its game play effectiveness. (But keeping in mind that if it’s not relevant to the game’s resource management, players will tend to disregard it.)
– Weave magic into the roguelike features of the game; specifically, the randomly generated world(s) and starting over when the character dies. For instance, some acquired magical skills break those rules, and carry over some benefit to a new character after death (a la reincarnation), or beneficially influence the world generation for the next run.
– Forming relationships with deities to receive skill buffs/success chance bonuses seems like it could end up feeling and playing very similarly to the skill trees prevalent in most CRPGs. One thing that might help it feel different is an element of give and take: maintaining such relationships through small rituals (perhaps carried out via basic game actions like movement) and/or adhering to manageable but noticeable restrictions to continue receiving the benefit. This won’t escape becoming just another part of the resource management task, but it might be a step in the direction you’re looking for.
– Any kind of advanced warning of nearby hazards (where or what type) in not yet explored areas would be invaluable in a roguelike. Something that deities, allied spirits, magical practices, or practiced intuition could provide, with at least a bit more magical verisimilitude than your typical fireball or heal spell. “Check for X hazard in this particular location” spells are common, and usually of limited usefulness in games, because it’s too tedious or resource-costly to check everywhere, and if you already know where to check you don’t need to. But the assistance of a friendly spirit or trained intuition that would actively warn you of X would be a much sought after benefit.
– There’s a novel I highly recommend, Engine Summer by John Crowley. I regard it as a sister novel to Star’s Reach. It’s a deindustrial (apparently north American) setting, and it’s laced with more magic than a generic epic fantasy world, most of which is derived from technological artifacts. It’s not the cliché of “ignorant future post-holocaust savage thinks a radio is a magic talking box,” though; it’s just the opposite: we learn how the characters see us past people as having been tragically ignorant of (or perhaps, too busy to appreciate) the obvious actual magical dimensions of such things as barometers, money, acrostic puzzles, kitsch commercial architecture, and cats. Makes me wonder if that might point to a whole different way of representing magic in a game. Anyway, consider reading it for additional ideas and inspiration for your game setting.
@ BoysMom #124
Thank you for the suggestion, I hadn’t thought of looking at paleoclimatology. About previous collapses, even if my knowledge of history is limited, I suppose we may be witnessing the equivalent of barbarian invasions in the late Roman period, this time coming from the south though.
@ Mary Bennet #138
About capturing water, ironically the European Union is forcing Spain to demolish dams which are no longer in use and hundreds of them have been destroyed within some years. To be honest, many of them were small diversion dams for agricultural uses that didn’t actually store water, but it’s probably not the best idea to get rid of them just now. I don’t know if beavers would solve water supply problems, but it would be fun to watch a bunch of furry rats metaphorically slap those Brussels bureaucrats in the face.
@ Abraham #160
Yes, we need more trees desperately. And a different agricultural model. The endless fields of chemically fed crops with no trees or bushes in sight of Guadalquivir River valley are unsustainable and depressing alike. It’s also insane that we’re growing vegetables in Almería, a literal desert, to send it to Central Europe in trucks. We’re exporting water for pennies. Some months ago I even came across this article: “Either we cut down trees or we die of thirst”. The ignorance is so daring it makes me annoyed. If the test HTML code I inserted is wrong, you can see the link here:
https://www.larazon.es/sociedad/talamos-arboles-morimos-sed_2023050864583e6673ab380001f3264b.html
About relocating, before I even heard about peak oil or read JMG I knew the typical metropolitan PMC lifestyle wasn’t appealing to me, even if it were to survive, so I started considering a change in the opposite direction. Collapse simply means I have to be extra careful about my destination. Moreover, once my parents are gone I’ll likely have no significant bonds with relatives, which means I’ll have lots of freedom.
Within Spain, I admit I have a weakness for the north, especially the space between the Cantabrian Sea and the mountains, as well as Galicia. It also seems to fill quite a few of the basic points I’m looking for. But I want to make sure I’m not just following a mirage because it looks the exact opposite of the near total wasteland where I am now, you know.
I am in no way an expert on Quebec politics and have only lived here since 2016, so will gladly accept correction from anybody who knows more. For decades, the main debate here was about “sovereignty” (a rather elastic concept) versus staying within the Canadian confederation. The last referendum on sovereignty was very narrowly defeated, in 1995, and since then the debate has seemingly cooled down. However, the Parti Québecois, the main proponent of sovereignty, presents each year a fictive budget for the next year in the case that they were governing an independent Québec. The party that has been in power since 2017 tries to downplay the constitutional debate and to foreground instead questions about economic growth.
A few days ago, the Parti Québecois leader presented the fictive budget again, but this time he proposed a Québec army and a Québec currency. His opponents claim this is the first time anybody has proposed a separate army and currency within that rather elastic concept of sovereignty. I don’t know if that is true.
Representatives of the governing party suggest that the current geopolitical situation, considering the war in Ukraine and the crisis in Gaza, favours playing safe and staying within Canada. I wonder if the Parti Québecois considers Ukraine and Gaza bellwethers of drastic change and therefore chose this moment to propose an army and a currency that would be separate not only from Canada’s, but implicitly also more distant from the US American ones.
Hi JMG,
I wanted to get your thoughts and a bit of a reality check on some thoughts I’ve had lately regarding a near immediate civilizational collapse (relatively speaking) as opposed to a long-term, stair-step collapse that is “normal” for civilizations.
It seems to me (and I think you’ve said this before, yourself) that those who think that civilization will collapse immediately and all at once usually try to cite reasons that are the same as the ones that have happened in the past, but are, to them anyway, “different this time” because of their degree, rather than being differences of kind. This is generally nonsense, and the normal patterns of history will take their due course. Perhaps things will happen somewhat faster because of them (say, a collapse in 1.5 centuries instead of 2) and perhaps one or more of the stair-steps will be larger than would otherwise be normal, but none-the less, generally following the normal process. You’ve stated something very similar to this in your writings and I completely agree.
I have, however, been thinking if there are any events that represent real differences in kind that might be applied to our current situation. At length, I can only think of two, neither of which would, I think cause immediate and complete collapse, but both of which would greatly shorten the time of collapse (say, 50 years instead of 2 centuries. These are as follows:
1. A full nuclear exchange between two major nuclear powers. While this has always seemed unlikely because, as you and many others have pointed out, no one is that crazy, I don’t think that logic can hold true as things really begin to come apart. I would counter argue that as things more and more go to pieces, the likelihood of someone coming to power in one or more of the major nuclear-capable countries who is, shall we say, of more dubious mental disposition than normal, or who is filled with ideological or religious zeal, becomes increasingly likely. Such an exchange could destroy large amounts of infrastructure and kill a number of skilled people at one time, when there is not enough energy to fund a replacement of that infrastructure and when there is no longer enough people with the skills needed to grow the food or build the simple infrastructure needed to set up even a somewhat simpler functional society. The result would be a much quicker collapse than normal.
2. Some of my sources with knowledge of the oceans have, of late, become very concerned with the possibility of large portions of the oceans becoming anoxic and sulfidic, something the call a “Canfield Ocean event”, caused by the slowing of ocean currents and the separation of those oceans into layers that don’t mix. Note that I am far less sure what the results of this possibility would be compared to that of the previous (after all, the consequences of large numbers of nuclear bombs going kaboom is not that difficult to visualize), I’m also less sure because my sources are less sure. According to those sources (who are usually quite accurate, or they don’t remain sources for long), this would likely result in a destruction of human access to a lot of the oceans, as the sulfur dioxide produced is toxic and no one can sail through those areas without death or at least serious health effects. Nor can people live along the coasts for the same reasons. Humans have never had to face such a situation before. It is very unclear, even to the experts in the field I have access to, as to the extent to which the oceans will be involved. Will it just be some areas of some oceans, or a lot of areas of all oceans. What will be the impacts on land. While the impacts at sea for the areas affected are fairly well understood, the extent to which coastal land areas would be affected are not understood very well at all. It’s reasonable, however, to assume that, if the areas affected are extensive, then the effects would be profound, limiting trade routes, possibly destroying underwater communication cables, certainly destroying fisheries and possibly eliminating access to some of those not destroyed. The argument is that such a situation could precipitate a collapse over a period of a few decades rather than a couple of centuries. I have no idea what the probability of this is, as none of my sources agree and they range in level of concern from moderate to downright freaked out. So, I’m assuming that, in actuality, it’s a greater probability than minor and less than a strong probability. None the less, as the consequences could be dire, I think it needs to be considered.
Anyway, I wanted to get your opinion and input on these ideas. Am I off base in thinking that these might be a real threat in causing a faster than normal civilizational collapse or do you think there’s something to these possibilities? Thanks!
@sam, #153
I’d recommend Xiaolan Zhao’s “Ancient Healing for Modern Women: Traditional Chinese Medicine for All Phases of a Woman’s Life”. Its emphasis is in health care but Dr. Zhao is a heck of a Traditional Doctor, and therefore well versed on the Classics. Comb the text, and specially the footnotes, to find lots of gold nuggets regarding the Chinese’s vision of the occult (mostly from Daoist, but sometimes Buddhist, perspective).
Throughout the ADR and up to your recent posts, you’ve re-iterated time and again, first, what any good occultist knows: that what one contemplates, one emulates, and second, that optimism, creativity, and, above all, the psychic energy of a positive image of a goal (positive in the sense of a presence rather than an absence, not the popular value-judgement-purr-word) is the only effective way to achieve any sort of result.
What I just grasped is that the explicit presence of such a unifying vision propels both the rise of civilizations and the expansion of empires, while its absence characterizes decline. I don’t recall you writing about that, per se.
What I see in today’s political climate, conservative populists are the mirror image of the liberal SJWs. Both sides are pretty much an ad-hoc grab bag of negative gripes, which result in them and their ardent supporters acting out exactly the behaviours they claim to abhor. I think is emblematic of being in a terminal phase of decline.
The SJW “left” spends all its effort focusing on being against “oppression” (even if there isn’t any, well by gosh they somehow find it!) and thus has become oppressive in their judgemental attitude to everything. I just today read an article about how afraid many parents are of dressing their kids up for Hallowe’en in case the costume is somehow deemed offensive or may become so some time in the future. We are not allowed to have fun, we are only allowed to be ashamed of our “privilege” and emote over the plight of some hard-done-by approved-victim-group-du-jour.
Meanwhile the ‘Freeeeeedom’-lovin’ “right” who, for example, gather every Saturday in Shelburne to protest for “Libertey not tranny” [sic] and shout, “the communist government of Trudeau must go” (I’m pretty sure not one of them ever stood and looked out at the East German border at real communism) and are anti-vaccine, anti-transgender agenda in schools, &c. &c. manage to sound and look like central casting icons of bigoted clod-hoppers. Cammo Hunting suits, rubber boots, and frayed caps with farm-fertilizer logos and all.
Both are spending all their energy complaining bitterly about things they don’t like, sucking up all the oxygen, and browbeating everyone who disagrees or demurs with their fanatical point of view, but neither group is actually articulating what they would like to see, and certainly not an inspiring image of how that would be better than what we already have. This absence of a core is why both have internally-incompatible agendas which drive away increasing numbers of rational citizens who can no longer even hold their noses to vote.
This, I think, is why we are seeing increasing intransigence and belligerence in politics in North America over the past 50 years since the first oil-shocks of the 1970s. Because we have no optimistic vision of a realistically possible future to unite us, we have no real leaders any more, just grifters one imminent conviction away from becoming the King in [an] Orange [jumpsuit], angry populists, and victimhood hustlers of various stripes, all of whom are tearing away at what once made us strong and stable. The 5-minute rant by Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) in the opening scene of “The Newsroom” over a decade ago is even more true today.
The problem is, it is very hard to articulate an optimistic vision of a future with less energy and fewer consumer goods that will appeal to a populace raised, for the past 150 years, to despise manual labour. Especially when even potentially positive and inspiring images of such a future are degraded into hyped up green smoke. I know I tried and failed 15 years ago to find a way, but couldn’t figure out how. Moreover, I found myself at odds with both the rest of the environmentalist movement who could only imagine techo-fixes to techno-problems and the general zeitgeist that percieves anything other than technology triumphant as negative at best.
Even though I, and I believe the other readers here, find your books and writings to be hopeful, saying, “Collapse now and avoid the rush” is cute, and definitely sound advice, but let’s face it: no latter-day Jacques Louis David is going to paint a flag-waving heroic band of people storming the barricades with that battle-cry. Not even as much as Buckminster Fuller said, “Do more with less”, and even though he was still talking about technology, it still wasn’t and isn’t as enticing as the sugar-candy-land vision of off-world exploration powered by magic energy crystals.
I fear the future will be increasingly miserable, not because manual labour is particularly onerous since it isn’t really (and Mike Rowe has also been making the point for decades now with his ‘Dirtiest Jobs’ series and repeatedly in his talks that people who do such jobs are usually happier than most people who work in offices), or because we haven’t developed a lot of labour-saving technology that can be quite productive within natural energy limits, but because the vast majority of people will be depressed at not being high-status desk-jockeys in a plastic world any longer.
Cointoss #23:
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls that “zenosyne”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgyEmYyQF4
The effect is mathematical. When you are 1 year old, then another year is 100% more. But when you are 50 years old, then another year is only 2% more. The effect is also neurological. The more of life you figure out, then less attention you need pay to it.
I say go with the flow, even though it’s down the drain. Smooth out your life. When a day disappears, call that a sign of success.
I ran into this small documentary on Medical Tourism, specifically Dental, which presents the border town Los Algodones, Sonora, Mexico. It is a few miles North-West of Yuma, AZ, and apparently the health care district is within walking distance from the Border Control Post. From this source claims, it is possible you can have high quality, out of pocket care for a fraction of your US Dental Insurance’s deductible/coinsurance. If you do video, you can check the details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwOlwQM3e_Y
Not an inhabitant of the area, I cannot share any details beside what the video shows (though I have acquaintances who do fly from GDL to Tijuana every other week, in order to work part time at the clinics there). I definitively think this type of arrangement should be in the toolbox for every collapse aware citizen of industrialized countries. I am all for healthy living and Alt-Med forms of healing, but some conditions, acute and chronic alike, can be best addressed by pharmaco-surgical methods (aka “Alopathic” medicine, a term that I find both biased and derogatory).
Dear Mr Greer,
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the Hopi legend of the man whose wife cheated on him. In his anger, rather than brutally punishing his wife (like men did in other Amerindian cultures) he prayed that famine hit the village, and that’s what happened. Link here to the Hopi legend:
https://www.learningtogive.org/resources/hopis-and-famine-0
It seems to me that many people have good reasons to feel cheated nowadays, not necessarily by their wives (if they have one) but by their government, or by society at large. They feel cheated because they can’t get a girlfriend, or a good job, or they notice that who they vote for has no effect whatsoever on their nation’s policies. I think that this “Hopi” mindset explains why so many people seem to wish that catastrophes befall their country, from an invasion by unassimilable foreigners or by hostile armies to some form of societal or economic collapse.
I talked recently to a young man, here in France, who told me quietly, and seemingly quite seriously, that if Russia invaded the country and he was drafted, he would desert and join the Russians. I know he has reasons to be angry, but in this politically correct, virtue signalling society we live in, he has no way to express his anger publicly for fear of losing his job and possibly his friends. So he turns his anger in another direction.
I think that one of the many causes of wokism is the great number of young educated adults who find it impossible be as wealthy as their parents were. It’s not “collapse now and avoid the rush”, it’s “I’m collapsing, therefore everybody else must collapse, too”. Of course there are other causes for wokism, that’s why the phenomenon is so hard to fully understand. Something so obviously wrong which has nevertheless become the official ideology of both the White House and Canada, and other places too, did not appear in a vacuum.
There’s something else I’ve been thinking of: when society collapses for good, for most of us, there will be nowhere to go. Your chances of being welcome in places where you are a stranger are very low. Think of the Gazans, for example. No country, absolutely no one, wants to give shelter to them. Not Egypt, not Jordan, not Saudi Arabia, and that’s three Arab-speaking, Sunni nations, geographically close to Palestine, one of which (Saudi Arabia) is rich and imports millions of foreign workers.
Robert, that’s a good point. There’s a very strong correlation between the Europhile/Europhobe distinction and class issues — since colonial times, it’s been the educated and privileged classes (and those who aspire to be among them) who’ve idolized Europe, for the most part — but then that’s something Toynbee talks about, without realizing that he’s discussing America! His analysis of native intelligentsias in colonial societies might as well be an anatomy of the US educated classes.
Grover, that’s an unsettling parallel, but not an implausible one.
Viking, the interesting thing is that this wasn’t always the case. Not all that many decades ago, the media kept people worked up about half a dozen crises at once. Consider the 1960s; the media at the time kept flogging the Vietnam war, the threat from Cuba, the drug “crisis,” the tangled issues around African-American civil rights and ghetto conditions, and more, all at the same time. Here’s a question for you: what changed? Why is it only one at a time now?
Chris, I do indeed get the feeling of impending dystopia. One question about Australia: I’ve heard it claimed by people who’ve been there that there’s a persistent, pervasive sense of something way out there in the bush that’s profoundly inimical to human life. (Supposedly H.P. Lovecraft read about that from someone who’d traveled down under, and wove it into his story “The Shadow Out Of Time.”) If so, that might explain why most Australians live in coastal cities, as far as possible from the GAFA…
Myriam, hmm! Many thanks for this. I think you’ve hit on something very important here — an example, if you will, of meaning-making.
Kwo, I’m researching it at the moment, in fact, but focusing on the kind of research I do best: digging through old books on Greek temple sanctuaries, Roman religious festivals, and medieval monasteries, looking for common factors and potentially useful clues. You’re certainly right that the whole question is daunting, not least because there’s so much to do! In terms of what to do in order to explore practical applications, well, do you have access to a garden, and can you experiment with putting up a small building nearby? That would be the most direct option.
Siliconguy, that’s really sad. I’m sure plenty of people would happily eat those!
Walt (if I may interject), excellent! Yes, Engine Summer is well worth reading as deindustrial fiction, and it also had some influence on Star’s Reach.
Chronojourner, a nuclear exchange between major powers would be a very large step down for the hemisphere where it took place. Of course one of the things about the Long Descent is that it can be very sudden for you personally if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time! Of course that was just as true in the past; the fall of Rome was very sudden if you happened to live in a frontier province that got overrun early on. As for a Canfield event, keep in mind that the Black Sea is already anoxic — fifty million years from now, there’s going to be a lot of petroleum where that sea used to be — and that oceanic anoxic events are fairly common in the history of the planet; they’re one of Gaia’s normal responses to a greenhouse event, and while they cause a lot of extinction in deepwater species, species elsewhere are basically unharmed. I expect an oceanic anoxic event in the tolerably near future, for whatever that’s worth.
Renaissance, good! Very good indeed. You’re quite correct, of course; all sides of the current political landscape are full of blame and anger, because none of them have a positive vision that makes any sense in the context of the world we’re actually entering. There are such visions and, ahem, I’ve been doing my best to get some of them into circulation; the soon-to-be-former desk jockeys don’t like them, but then I don’t have to worry about gathering a mob to storm the barricades; the barricades are full of dry rot and in the process of collapsing of their own weight. The people who choose to be miserable will be miserable indeed, and I have neither the right nor the power to force them to wake up and be happy instead. All I can do is provide an alternative for those who are willing to take it.
CR, there’s a lot of that going on these days. People from the US, in particular, go to Mexico or India to get health care, and even with the travel costs, it’s cheaper than getting the care here in the US. Oh, and the quality of the care is much better.
Horzabky, thank you for the Hopi story! That’s a classic. As for your broader point, no argument there at all. The nations of the West may be about to find out the hard way that if a minority of privileged people hogs all the benefits and makes everyone else carry the costs, the people who carry the costs may not be interested in lifting a finger to save the system when crunch time arrives.
JMG,
I finished my second read of Star’s Reach last night. I am puzzled about something. When Trey is in the place that has an answer to any question, the dead mean reveals the word “Curtis” to him and Trey realizes the word refers to a location. I don’t recall seeing any explanation of how Trey converts the word Curtis to the specific location of Star’s Reach. If it’s in the book somewhere I’ll be embarrassed, but I went back and skimmed a few sections I thought it might have been in and didn’t see anything. If it’s not explained, is that deliberate? Can you explain it? Is it in the book somewhere.
Thanks,
Luke Z
JMG
As someone who lives away from the coast of Australia in that bush that may not too imicable to humans I’m pretty sure it was just a colonial European feeling and cultural hangover. I imagine it was very unsettling to go into these forests and plains if you didn’t grow up around them but for those of us now it’s the opposite, we have such an attachment to it that most of us deeply understand what the aboriginals refer to as ‘being on country’. That’s not to say there aren’t malevolent things of the higher planes out here, but they are just part of the ecosystem.
I actually got the unsettling feeling in western Europe as if wild weedy nature had disappeared there. That’s the thing about Aus it’s so hard to tame that I think a lot of people just threw their hands up in the air and went back to the coast.
I don’t think it’s humans the continent doesn’t like but it’s the taming tendency that it actively resists and mocks.
JMG – you said “the United States isn’t a developed nation. It’s a third world nation that, due to a chapter of historical accidents, ended up very, very rich for a while,” Could you please elaborate on that? Especially since we were an industrial powerhouse for some time.
Hi John Michael,
What a great question! 🙂 It’s the sort of place where you can wake up in the morning with a dark sense of foreboding. The winds will be blowing hard, the sweat will be pouring off your brow, and you’ll do your best to hide from the sun. By midnight of the same day, fully a quarter of the state would have burned. That happened in 1851, only 17 years after European settlement. Imagine the outcry if a quarter of the UK land mass burned in a day! Not much has changed since those days in terms of engagement with the land.
The vast majority of people down here live in very urban environments, and can pretend that things ain’t so. Years ago, a lady who used to work for me and had family up this way, confided that she feared the trees. I never quite understood what she meant, but the fear seemed real enough. It’s there. I reminded a friend about a year ago that his house now sits where once there was open forest and swamps. Hmm.
A little flash of insight hit me when reading your words. The Indigenous folks urge a more active role in the environment, and I tend to agree that that is what is required. Western cultural preferences on the other hand in this regard are very passive and weak. I get the impression that the local spirits and gods are indifferent to western cultural preferences, and will stand by and let us humans learn the hard way time and time again. It’s probably quite menacing for people unprepared for that indifference to come face to face with it. Until we humans decide to get stronger, the land will be the greater power. And I suspect most people know it, and fear what it means for them.
Hope that gets to the heart of the matter?
PS: It’s a lovely day here today.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG May your research be productive and I look forward to one day reading about the results! As for access to a garden and land to build, that’s no problem and one of the drivers of my interest. I have 12+ years of gardening and homesteading experience and live on just under 6 acres of land. I’ve been on this land for about a year, and the way I came to live here was a series of synchronicities and things falling into place on a level I’ve never experienced before. So suffice it to say I am willing and able to experiment. For what it’s worth, I also have a fair amount of academic research experience.
Miow #210 – Thank you! Sometimes I notice the mistakes I make shortly before, sometimes – to my embarrassment – shortly after posting. This one I didn’t notice at all, I suppose there are many more I completely miss… I’m glad if somebody takes the time to correct me! This mistake was colorful, indeed 🙂 And thank you also for your kind words!
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Any must see sites in Greece as it pertains to the occult?
Of course, there’s Athena’s Temple, Delphi, etc., but soliciting input. I’m especially interested in anything associated with Poseidon and Hermes.
As a side effect of thinking about Enjoyer’s question about a computer game, I was thinking about other games and happened to remember the board game The Game of Life from the 1960s. It was published the year I was born. My family had a copy and we played it from time to time. (For a while I thought the word “spouse” meant a small plastic peg, because that’s what you added to your playing piece when the space on the board said “add spouse,” and I hadn’t yet encountered the word in any other context.)
It struck me that if there’s any encapsulation of the complete opposite of ecosophy, it’s The Game of Life. The players’ tokens on the board are cars. The winner is the player who finishes the game (dies?) with the most money. Except for a few high-payout spaces to land on by chance, the winner is mostly determined by how high-paying a career you randomly land on early in the game. That’s assuming you choose to go to college, one of the few decisions the game allows you to make, but if you don’t there’s virtually no chance of winning.
JMG, since you don’t exist at all in the game’s model of the world (no car…), I’m curious about whether the reverse is true. That is, have you ever played it? The mental image of you doing so is one of those total incongruities, like a fish tap dancing, but maybe you played it when you were younger and that’s how you learned all about what was wrong with the culture we were born into…
Horzabky – Rather than ““I’m collapsing, therefore everybody else must collapse, too”, how does this sound? “I’m collapsing, but if I can’t be rich, I can be heroic (in my defense of those people who must have been waiting for someone of my particular skills to come along, or they’d have rescued themselves by now).” Or, maybe this: “The greater society has failed to provide the prosperity I deserve, but my tribe will respect me for my participation in its rituals (e.g., political protest theater).”
A friend of mine was assaulted by a mob of union organizers because he manages a weekly farmers’ market in a parking lot next to a non-union grocery store. Somehow, marching chaotically through the farmers’ market stalls of small-business entrepreneurs was supposed to win friends and influence people? (My friend was not injured, though he was surrounded in a menacing manner as he tried to explain that the mob was focusing its attention on the wrong people.) But, now I wonder… is the union just as threatened by an independent Mom & Pop beekeeper (who have no interest in supporting a union) as they are by the grocery chain? BOTH threaten the ability of the union to control access to goods.
I am not, in general, anti-union. My boots are union-made, and the socks and underwear I’m wearing now are also. I seek out domestic, union-made products. But if a union ever attempts to monopolize access to labor, they’ll lose me. The next step is wrecking my kitchen so I need to buy from their restaurants.
Anonymous @171,
to my mind, the hierarchy of suppression (no immigrant can ever be wrong) and „the enemy of my enemy is my friend“ go all the way in explaining the woke-Islamist connection.
That would be an Occam‘s razor type explanation. I don’t dismiss the existence of demons, but they’re not the most likely explanation for petunia logic. Fanaticism works just as well, and I assume it’s more common.
My parents led impeccably upper-middle class lives, not so much by having superior earning power but by being socially connected and in the right place at the right time. My father was a bona-fide Southern aristocrat. Born 1900 and 1910. I have two brothers, neither of whom quite got that mix right to live as our parents hoped we would. They were both pre-boomers (one just barely). Me, I’m an early boomer. I never got the mix right either, nor did I care to. Settling down and having 2.5 children and a mortgage (among other things) never appealed to me. Consuming vast quantities and spreading my arrogance around the world as a tourist never appealed to me either. Thank heaven and a bit of determination on my part, but I never had to go off to Southeast Asia and kill people.
However, thanks to the immense prosperity that surrounded me as I grew up into early adulthood, I could live a fairly comfortable life on the income from the more or less downscale jobs I gravitated towards which didn’t present the usual options for ambition my peers had been propagandized to expect. Not that I ever had much ambition. My chief ambition was to live sufficiently comfortably to be decently fed, sheltered, and well supplied with books. Mission accomplished, so far.
As I have grown older, as even aspies such as myself are wont to do, I have to my horror discovered that my lack of community and communal feeling has left me (yes, even me) feeling rather frighteningly alone. I’m not getting younger, or healthier, or better connected. I’ve made modest (and modestly successful) attempts to be involved in a couple of local communities, and as an older person I still work. Some would say I’m stealing work from a younger person. It’s very detail-oriented and skilled bureaucratic work that requires knowledge of regulations and procedures beyond that which an AI program can easily emulate, so if I want to I can probably keep on doing it until I drop.
Given that I never intended to live this long, and cannot afford all the “eldercare” alternatives that supposedly exist (I suspect based on evidence that many are phantasms or even illusions of adequate care masking hellish situations), I probably will continue working. I’d rather not, but since like the proverbial grasshopper in the story of the grasshopper and the ant, I didn’t save up for winter, one does what one must. Retirement (ever) is increasingly a pipe-dream, if it’s even an option, for anyone younger than me.
Why am I reciting this exceptionally bald personal history? Only to say that, if you saw the civilizational handwriting on the wall early on, as I did (age five as I recall), personal history, timing and dare I say, karma play a role in just how you accomplish “collapse now.” I and my brothers have each in our own ways fallen out of the traditional middle class we grew up in. I’m the only one who went as far out on the limb from my birth culture as I did. I can’t say it’s ever been comfortable. For me it wasn’t a choice, it was what I was.
What I never had was truly like-minded partners and friends. With Uranus in the Fourth, for me that configuration has mostly described disruption at home, or having the rug being pulled out from under you…repeatedly. I’ve grown flexible and adept at dealing with not getting what I want (perhaps the big karmic lesson I’m to learn this time around) but contrariwise I truly wish all the readers of this blog a more enjoyable collaps-i-tude than I have enjoyed: one they could plan and implement. I’m not looking for an “aw poor you” response, I’m just hoping to broaden the scope of the “how do I deal with the end of the empire” discussions here to include the stuff that happens when you weren’t looking. Gotta be flexible and sometimes, ya’ gotta take it on the chin, get up, dust yourself off, and keep on trucking. I know many of you have done that, but for those more recently aware of the world that’s upon us, I want to repeat that lesson based on my experience. I hope it is something worth sharing again. Cue one each Rolling Stones song…
Peter @175
It‘s medication. Chris Martenson did an episode about it last year or so on peak prosperity, where he referenced research and a foundation that tries to shine a light on the matter. Don’t remember the details, but what I took away was that there’s a profound correlation between certain drugs prescribed for mental health issues, and mass shootings. Pretty much every mass shooter is on drugs that have violent outbursts as a side effect.
A few comments on comments.
Myrian #212 The society I grew up in (1950s) had pretty equal attitudes towards both men and women. In many ways they led very separate lives. When we visited family, the women would often gravitate towards each other to catch up and the men were left alone to talk or smoke together. They often disagreed but did not feel any need to shout or argue to make a point about who mattered more. The women were very confident in themselves and comfortable in their own bodies. So were the men. That is why feminism never made sense to me. You lived your life as you wished, of course always with constraints imposed by your obligations to others in your family. Not hard but too complex to go into here.
JMG #226 Re your point about something out bush profoundly inimical to human life. Well, if you go far enough it is desert so not very hospitable for dense human life. I have always lived in the coastal fringe but love the outback. I do not do well in extreme heat so would find it a challenge to live there but driving through and stopping in the outback, which I have visited surprisingly often, give me great pleasure. I have never heard about anything inimical to human life but maybe I need to get out more.
Luke, it’s somewhere in there, but then the book isn’t written in chronological order! I’m sure, though, that there’s a passage where Trey mentions that once he knew the secret he went into the archives at Sisnaddi and came out a short time later knowing exactly where Star’s Reach was. I’m pretty sure he looked up the place and found the words “Western Radio Telescope Facility” close by it.
PumpkinScone, fair enough! Thank you for this.
Patricia M, the accidents in question were, first, we broke away from Britain when we did and so had the chance to develop our own industrial plant rather than being dependent on Britain’s, and second, we had a whale of a lot of easily accessible petroleum in Pennsylvania and Texas, and being independent, we profited from it rather than being squeezed dry like Britain’s other colonies.
Chris, and thank you for this! It’s a running joke here in the US that every living thing in Australia is deadly to human beings, so I’d wondered if it was just an outgrowth of that.
Kwo, in that case, you might consider using dowsing or some other form of divination to find a suitable place for a shrine or chapel, build the foundation at least and preferably the walls and altar as well of paramagnetic stone, and choose a suitable ritual that involves incense and chanting. If my hypothesis is correct, the results on garden beds nearby should be measurable.
Anon1, I’ll have to leave this to my readers, as it’s not a subject I’ve researched at all.
Walt, yes, I remember that game. I played it a few times when I was quite young — think 6 or 7 years old — and even at that age considered it with a baleful eye and thought it was fake.
Clarke, thanks for this. Having a different horoscope, I’ve had a slightly different experience (including a lasting marriage), but I know the feeling of isolation; I have friends, including quite a few on this forum, but they’re scattered fairly thinly across five continents…
JillN, or maybe the people who wrote that were clueless. The Outback always sounded very pleasant to me.
Hello Mr. Greer,
I had a very strange experience a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to share with you. I went to work at my machine shop and was doing a normal day’s work, but something was off. My mind was slow. I was thinking through a fog and very tired. The blue tooth did not want to connect with my speak and play music from my phone. Oh, and the machine’s lasers kept reading that something was in the machine and putting the thing into slow motion mode. This is a safety measure in case I have my hand in the way, which I did not. Eventually I prayed and asked God to drive out any malign interference should it be affecting the area. Within minutes the speaker was working, the lasers were no longer “seeing” anything, and my mind and body recovered. What in your view could cause this kind of effect? I know occultism breaks the supernatural realm down into more detail than most contemporary religions, so I am interested to know if this sounds like anything in particular.
@JMG re: “at etheric birth we separate from the etheric matrix of our family”. This tends to happen with the onset of puberty. It occurred to me that in many cultures this is the time of important steps towards making a commitment to the religion of that culture (bar mitzvah / bat mitzvah for Jews; confirmation for some Christian sects; the sacred thread ceremony for both Hindus and Zoroastrians). I was wondering if this was deliberately timed so that the etheric birth of the individual happens in the context of joining the larger ‘family’ of the religious community and therefore prevents spiralling off into premature individuation?
@Myriam (#212): it just so happens that today my wife was facilitating a spiritual study circle among Hindu women in which the topic of the discussion was a saying by a famous Hindu saint (who happened to be a man) that men have three forms of strength, but women have seven forms of strength – and much of the personal anecdotes shared by the participants closely match your musings… In other words, maybe you’re onto something! 😊
Hi JMG,
May you give an analytical definition of the term “third world” and/or “undeveloped nation”?
Every so often, in your writings I come across your analytical definitions of terms, whose common dictionary definitions leave me often unsatisfied. Your definitions have given me greater clarity in thinking about various topics. I remember, for example, when I first came across your definition of an empire: a wealth pump designed to enrich one nation at the expense of another.
Aside from my curiosity in asking for your analytical definition, I’m also trying to resolve in my head your comments in #197 that
“the United States isn’t a developed nation. It’s a third world nation that, due to a chapter of historical accidents, ended up very, very rich for a while, but it still has all the usual problems of nonindustrial nations;”
with your comments in #240 that “we broke away from Britain when we did and so had the chance to develop our own industrial plant rather than being dependent on Britain’s.”
Since many third world nations have industrial factories, I’m assuming that industrial plants by themselves don’t qualify a nation as developed?
Thanks,
Eugene
Hi JMG,
I just listened to the Thoth Hermes podcast you did 3 weeks ago and would like to know more about the universal gnostic church. Can you please tell me how I can find out more? I tried googling it, but I don’t get anything, except something on the gnostic Celtic church. Can you please point me in the right direction? Thanks!
https://ashtarbookblog.blogspot.com/2023/10/i-want-to-be-left-behind.html
“The investment guide the Anti-Christ doesn´t want you to read”. Grossly inappropriate for Frugal Friday, so I post it here instead… 😀
Stephen, that could have been any of a dozen different kinds of malign influences. Your response was wholly appropriate, and of course effective.
Ron, it’s entirely possible that this is done quite deliberately.
Eugene, nope. The term “third world nation” is a vague one, of course, since there are more than three “worlds” in this sense. I use it to indicate that the US should be classed with nations such as Brazil and South Africa (which both have substantial industrial sectors, btw) rather than with the nations of Europe.
Chronojourner, oddly enough, I recently posted a mess of stuff about it on my Dreamwidth journal, which you can find here:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/universal+gnostic+church
Tidlösa, ha! Thank you for this; that’s seriously funny.
Jmg
I am here to tell you i dared to post your essay on Israel on another forum where there is not much moderation and censorship beyond don’t derail the conversation. The responses were a) too long b) was named as an autistic megathesis and a interesting read and no other responses
Also there has been many conversations about how people in the west avoid any sort of interaction people started to notice how people react to people approaching either for small chat or charity causes or just basic question about where to. Apparently people have become very not communicative and stand offish . I don’t know if this is just the west and a result of societal decline or sign of Aquarius age .
@Michael
Hi, RE #162. I’ll come out of lurk mode to offer some experience on this one.
I live in rural Australia. Everyone is this area lives on rainwater stored in tanks, there is no other option. This has been the setup for many decades. When it rains, water is captured via the gutters on the roof of one’s house. The vast majority of the rainwater systems in this area have no treatment of any kind applied to the water other than some fine mesh covering the gutters to keep leaves etc. out and perhaps another basic mesh type filter at the pump (mostly to stop debris entering and damaging the pump). No boiling, no adding of chemicals, no charcoal filters or other cartridge based filtering. Many many households here don’t even have the mesh to filter out debris, it just sinks to the bottom of tanks and stays there as sludge below the level of the tank outlet hole.
When I visit towns and cities and have to drink tap water there, my body reflexively flinches away from the glass as I bring it up to my mouth and nose. When I return home my body craves the rainwater and takes big gulps.
I don’t know what the quality is of the rainwater in your location. FWIW, we live approx. an hour drive away from a city of population 1 million and 2 hours away from a city of population of 3 million. However, Australia is vastly less populated (and thus subject to much less air pollution) than western Europe.
A common service here in Australia is to have water tested for its potability. It’s inexpensive to do that here. Perhaps a service such as that also exists near where you are? You could get a report of the water in your tank and know for sure if the rainwater is fit for drinking or not.
Cheers
Jez
@JMG wrote: “what changed? Why is it only one [crisis] at a time now?”
Good question. My immediate tentative answer would be: maybe the propagandists themselves can’t handle more than one crisis at at time. One might also argue, and following Toynbee’s argument, that they basically can’t handle any crisis anymore.
But that feels a bit more general than that. I am also getting the impression that there is also a significant part of the population that is in denial and withdrawing from engaging with larger issues, for lack of meaningful ways to do so. So one is the most they can handle.
Following your discussion with Renaissance, I must say thank you for consistently engaging with the larger issues and do your best to articulate a perspective that could be useful for individuals to respond to these in a constructive manner. Although the realization process has been hard, and I am still dealing daily with the tensions that arise between perspective that are aligned with longer term trends and those that are actually preferred by a majority of people, I feel much more agency in my personal situation now than I would have had without the perspectives you have put forth throught the last decades (!).
Michael (#162),
One of the best treatments I’ve seen on the subject of water storage is this book by Art Ludwig:
https://www.amazon.com/Water-Storage-Emergency-Use-Ferrocement/dp/0964343363
Cheers.
Athaia and Executed by Gandhi,
Here’s a great article on the subject of woke attitudes toward Islam backfiring:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned
“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”
Oh, you expected us to abandon our worldview and adopt yours just because you “rescued” us…I see.
Other Dave (#143),
I also found Daryl Cooper’s Martyrmade podcast about Jonestown quite interesting. It included a number of audio recordings recorded in Jonestown before the mass death and information about Jim Jones’ earlier life, a part of his career that was actually quite admirable.
I listened to a podcast that Cooper did about the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1923 and the defeat of the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw. Cooper presented that as a key pivot point in European history. He did not mention that the Soviet move was a response to the Polish invasion of the Soviet Union that was defeated at the gates of Moscow.
I have particularly low tolerance for people who write history leaving out large chunks that they surely know but that many of their readers most likely don’t know. Cooper doing this reduced my trust in him as a source. It particularly made me wonder what might have been left out of his long-form podcasts about Palestine. That is a pity because that set of podcasts is chock full of information and quite well-done.
(Also a one-sided source of information can sometimes be a kind of homeopathic corrective to information that is one-sided in the other direction.)
hey JMG
I was going to post this in previous post, but forgot.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/they-challenged-the-communist-monopoly-vietnam-regime-turns-on-its-climate-champions
Apparently the Vietnamese government is persecuting NGOs that have been involved in renewable energy projects funded by the G7 and other western powers since it feels they have too much influence in policy making for the governments taste, make of that what you will.
That being said, the Vietnamese are still working on renewables, I remember reading that they are working with Singapore to build a offshore wind-farm.
The term “3rd World” originated in the early 1950s to mean nations that were part of neither the US nor the Soviet blocs. (The term “1st world” was a later back formation that did not arise until at least the late 70s or early 80s.) Because most of those nations were poor, not yet industrialized, and economically not independent (even if they were politically), “3rd world” came to mean that, or often more simply “poor”. The term “global south” seems to be used now as a replacement term. The fact that Western media sources did not like the notion of nations sitting out the Cold War, especially nations that had only recently been colonies of Western nations, probably played a role in the shift of meaning. So too did the arrival of the 747 and the advent of mass travel from industrialized to non-industrial nations.
In the original geopolitical sense, nations like Brazil and South Africa were part of the US bloc, clearly not the 3rd world, but in the later, far more widely used economic sense, they were 3rd world because their industrialization was only partial, typical standards of living were low, and they were not economically independent.
I would prefer to frame it that the US as a nation whose leaders are making it 3rd world in its infrastructure, concentration of wealth in a tiny portion of the population, willingness to leave large parts of its population by the wayside, and its emergent dependence on more advanced nations for technology and technology products.
I don’t think it was an accident or temporary aberration that the US became a 1st world nation, arguably _the_ 1st world nation, rather than a colder Brazil. New England in particular and the North in general (in the Civil War sense) had resources that were of value in international trade (for New England, tall trees for ship masts) but that could not be extracted easily hit-and-run with coerced labor. The value of sugar (Caribbean, the slave-holding parts of Latin America) and especially silver (Mexico) and other minerals could be extracted with what amounted to forced labor camps, so that value could be and was funneled to the home countries back in Europe. (Tobacco and cotton were somewhere in between.)
What could be argued to have been accidental was that England was too busy with its political upheavals in the 1600s (beheading your king tends to be distracting) to keep the 12 coastal colonies on short enough leashes until they had taken off on their own path. (Georgia was only founded in the 1730s.)
Of course, our host may be using the term third world differently from how I am using it here. I wonder if it would point at more or less the same phenomena to say that the United States, appearances and transitory imperial power notwithstanding, has never fully congealed into a nation, at least in the sense that Norway or China are nations. If our host, among others, is correct, it never will.
Chris #230,
I understood that most of Victoria burned in a few days the 1890s (a magical decade in Australia if ever there was one). Embers from the fire were blown 200 miles out to sea and ships masts caught fire.
Farmers used to take a very pro-active role in land management, especially keeping the undergrowth down. Now that is not allowed by those who sit in air-conditioned offices (i.e. contributors to climate change) but who know all.
Hi John Michael,
Finding something that won’t kill you here is the trick! 🙂 It’s been a good season for the Echidna’s, and they seem harmless enough and impervious to the dogs curiosity. My largest dog leaves them alone, let’s just say that I had to pull some sharp quills out of his face the first time he encountered one. The other dogs are smarter, and leave them alone.
Around these parts, Wombats can bite, Kangaroo’s can punch you up. A Sambar deer stag will probably kill you, if cornered. Tree limbs and heads tend to fall randomly, and without warning. The spiders are incomprehensibly unpleasant. Bull ant bites are proven to be worse than fire ants. And the Eastern Brown snakes are the second deadliest on the planet – why is this so necessary for the adherents of Set? There’s a lot to go wrong, and quickly. Makes for an enervating experience! Lovecraft may have felt the energy, let’s put it that way. 😉
The snakes bother me the most, and I work hard to ensure that there is little reason (i.e. no food or shelter) for their species. That’s the plan, whether it works or not, remains to be seen.
Still, there are plenty of critters in your country too which are only too happy to rip your limbs off and feast on the remains. 🙂 Not a recommended experience if I may say so. Things are different here, they’ll kill you just as deadly, but mostly leave the body for critters with such tastes. It’s a bit more impersonal, if I’d had to hazard a guess at the difference.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG Thank you for the advice, I will start taking steps to make it happen! I have one spot I’ve been drawn to in a grove of 150+ year old white oaks that I will investigate further. Two clarifying questions for you though if you don’t mind, though they may need to be answered from experimentation. What would you consider “close by” when it comes to the effect on the land? And you may have addressed this in the book, but do you know how the technology may have worked in Shinto shrines built out of wood instead of stone? I was intrigued by the use of hinoki, as I have ready access to eastern red cedar which could possibly have similar effects, and find Shinto shrines aesthetically pleasing, but I also have access to granite and other rocks.
@Cerys Watkins
Concerning Iolo Morganwg: there’s a very interesting article in today’s Observer about the suicide of the teenage poet Thomas Chatterton, which it’s believed was precipitated by a dispute with the poet Horace Walpole.
Chatterton’s death greatly affected Iolo, who at the time was living nearby in London, and struggling to get his own English-language poetry published. The article notes that Chatterton had been writing fake medieval poems, and Walpole himself had claimed that some of his own early poems were really medieval discoveries; the article notes that such things “were all the rage at the time”. In other words, Iolo was only behaving consistently with the nature of the contemporary literary scene – only, with his Dafydd ap Gwilym poems, he did it in Welsh rather than English. Iolo was, by the way, a very good Romantic poet in English as well, though not to modern tastes. He’s recognised as being an important early influence on both Coleridge and Wordsworth, who were younger than him; he and Coleridge knew each other well.
That leads to another point: Iolo is often dismissed for his use of laudanum (which he took to manage his crippling asthma, not recreationally). Coleridge was also a laudanum addict as was, famously, de Quincy – and yet the English writers don’t get any criticism. Only Iolo…
Going back to history, it’s worth pointing out that historical authenticity was regarded differently then. Case in point: a lot of Welsh gentry families in that period failed to produce male heirs. The heiresses married up-and-coming English businessmen who craved the status of a gentry pedigree – and paid to get them, with the result that early editions of Burke’s Landed Gentry and its competitors were chockablock with Welsh lines of descent going back to Cunedda, Urien Rheged, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, and the like. I gather it was several generations before scepticism crept in at the publishing house…
The point is, Iolo did nothing unusual, or even blameworthy, by the standards of the literary and social circles he moved in, and of the time. His English contemporaries who did exactly the same things have been entirely absolved. It’s only Iolo who still carries blame, and we Welsh (ie, Cymro ydw i) are the worst at blaming him, which completely overshadows his far more significant contribution to preserving and strengthening Welsh identity and culture, as JMG noted above. We Welsh really are our own worst enemies sometimes.
Justin Patrick Moore,
I’ve always been a champion of a Mars colony, even ready and willing to help pay for it. As long as I get to choose the guest list…
Good stuff! Carry on!
@Jeff Russell
Thanks for that, very useful!
@Robert Mathiesen
Interesting, language is fascinating, particularly as I’m a Scot living in France. Apparently language affects how you think, that multilingual people find they think differently depending which language they are using. As my French improves I’m noticing subtle differences!
@John Michael Greer
Interesting point about the US not being a developed nation (more please, as someone else asked). I’m (unsurprisingly) rabidly pro gun control. We had a mass shooting in a Scottish school, followed by much tighter legislation, since then there have been no further problems (which may, or may not, be because of the legislation, although it’s certainly true that if you don’t have a gun no one is going to get shot).
So I was surprised to discover that France has a huge level of gun ownership (certainly compared to the UK), and yet has been little problem with repeated mass shootings, although there are several “accidents” every year as walkers and cyclists are killed by hunters, and some gun violence due to gangs, but nothing like on the scale in the US.
@JillN
Thanks, the tank is actually buried in the ground (where presumably the lack of light and heat will assist with keeping it “fresh”).
I say you, sir, have been doing an magnificent job articulating such ideas into the world, far better that I ever could, and have obviously been a source of information and inspiration to thousands, including myself. I am merely saddened that we will only ever be a handful and that such truths will never inspire the kind of romantic vision that would generate enthusiasm for a mass movement that they should. Then, again, maybe it shouldn’t be romanticized, as you did such fine critique of the back-to-the-land movements that failed because they romanticized country life, but not hard work. Longfellow came close with his smith and ‘the honest sweat of his brow’, but got thoroughly drowned in more enticing seas of lemonade and fantasies derived from a couple of years living in a small cabin in the woods.
President Carter in his sweater was, after all, aggressively rejected by a majority who could not, or would not, even find comfort, if not inspiration from his realistic vision.
Speaking of elite-overproduction, a long winded but interesting article.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-chinese-minds-still-bear-the-long-shadow-of-keju?ref=thebrowser.com
“On 7 and 8 June 2023, close to 13 million high-school students in China sat for the world’s most gruelling college entrance exam. ‘Imagine,’ wrote a Singapore journalist, ‘the SAT, ACT, and all of your AP tests rolled into two days. That’s Gao Kao, or “higher education exam”.’ In 2023, almost 2.6 million applied to sit China’s civil service exam to compete for only 37,100 slots.”
Why?
“Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …”
Hello JMG,
Do you happen to know if any of the rites or ceremonies of The Grange (the lodge) have practical effects on the growing of crops nearby?
Thank you for the reminder about the 5 Rites, dabbled in them a number of years ago. I went and bought another book besides yours (used, cheaper) I have been doing a morning tai chi/qigong routine. Even though I am now at the 3 rep beginning stage I can tell the 5 rites feel better, more energizing, yet with calm and focused results. Will switch over to it.
On another topic.
For me the exoteric/esoteric (out in the open, yet inwardly known) heart of Christianity is that through Jesus by the gift of the Holy Spirit you can know the Father and his love inwardly and with you and above you, a foretaste of eternity, a participation in Christ’s own knowing of God as he said to Mary Magdalene – “I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
@Athaia
Wokeism is better described as Victimhood culture, as different from Dignity culture which preceded it, and the older Honor Culture which preceded that and which holds sway in most of the world.
Basically in Honor Cultures, ones status is determined by the opinion of everyone else. Adhering to externally determined values is how one acquires any status within the group. The group, in turn, enforces adherence by whatever means necessary, including violence. In Dignity Culture, which was dominant in western countries in the 20th Century, self-value is determined within, and ones sense of pride self-worth consists of quietly adhering to ones own self-determined values in the face of external opinion, with the caveat that such values do not harm anyone else. Only those who cause harm are taken out of society. In modern Victimhood Culture one derives status by eliciting sympathy and pity through demonstrating how victimized one is. The more one can claim, the higher ones status.
So: Muslims are ‘victims’ of white western religious bigotry and oppression. Transgendered are victims of straight, western bigotry and oppression. Blacks, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC), LatinX, &c. are victims of White racism. Women are oppressed by the Patriarchy. Indigenous people are subjected to colonialism and their culture appropriated. &c. &c.
Two important tenets of belief (among others) to consider:
1) if one identifiable group is not as wealthy or successful in general as another group, it is because the first group is being oppressed by the second group who are exploiting them. Ultimately, the goal of equity and fairness is for everyone to have the same degree of wealth. (see The People’s Democratic Republic of Anywhere for proof of how well this works out.)
2) anyone oppressed is inherently morally just and all members of the oppressive groups are inherently and irredeemably evil. Therefore, all the morally just victim-groups could never do anything bad and must therefore all get along. (And they all join together hand-in-hand to destroy the evil white, straight (oops, sorry, ‘cis-gendered’), Patriarchy to bring in a happy world with rainbows and sparkly unicorns where everyone gets along and nobody’s feelings are ever hurt.)
You will note the Jews are not on the approved list. This is because a few prominent Jewish families became very, very wealthy and therefore they ceased to be morally righteous and became exploitative oppressors. (This is also the source of the utterly false fable that all Jews are wealthy and the horrific events that led to.)
No, this does not make sense. That’s because it does not comport with reality. What you are experiencing is cognitive dissonance. What makes the Victimhood culture so crazy is they are frantically suppressing it. It’s a tragedy and it is also inevitably self-destructive. It started to collapse in on itself when the #metoo movement turned against white women, BLM leadership aggressively dodged awkward questions about all the money they received in donations, and now they have to pretend they didn’t see the images of what Muslims did to Jews who “colonized” their own ancestral homeland.
Siliconguy @ 214
Well, look on the bright side.. at least said bovines get a windfall ‘;] .. if only temporarily, not having to subsist on gmo grains, candy, and other assorted junk!
Eiki with an ,,i” What, please, is ‘petunia logic’. I can’t say I’m a friend of the flower, though the older varieties are pleasant enough.
Anon1, off the top of my head, Dodona was an important shrine and oracle. There was a temple to Poseidon at the tip of one of the three capes of the Peloponnese. Eleusis, of course, and the island of Delos. I think there is or was a cave on Crete where Zeus was supposed to have been born. IDK about occult significance, but I believe the mound at Marathon where the Athenians and Plataeans buried their valiant dead can still be seen.
Do you blog? I would love to read about your travels.
@Emily (#247 about avoiding unscheduled interactions with others):
When I was still an active professor, before my retirement in 2005, I heard complaints from the college-age young people I was in daily contact, that a direct phone call was a small breach of good manners. Rather, you were supposed to text, because then the other person could reply — or not — at a time of their choosing. Otherwise you were violating their boundaries, at least in a small way.
JMG,
That makes sense, i’ll have to do a third read sometime. On this second read, it became pretty clear Trey’s journey is a good map of a spiritual/magical journey. The site of Star’s Reach could be seen as the Jungian Self, Curtis could be seen as the magical “Word”, somewhere in the burning lands or western desert you get the Abyss, and Trey setting out to work in the Remembers Guild mirrors the Rubedo phase of alchemy pretty closely.
Since Bogatyr (#258) has mentioned the poet Thomas Chatterton, I want to add that Chatterton was also at least interested in ceremonioal magic, and almost certainly practiced it, too. He owned a copy of (pseudo-)Agrippa’s “Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy [with other writings, suhc as the “Arbatel of Magic”] (the 1665 edition). That particular copy has been uploaded to archive.org by the Johns Hopkins University library.
I’m not sure of all the reasons why Wokism is as big a deal as it is, but have a couple of thoughts:
Firstly, the worst excesses could be partly explainable to competitive virtue signalling, creating a pressure to push the ideas further and further.
A reason that the corporate elite might be getting behind some aspects of it, is I think they’d be quite happy if the Left is preoccupied with ‘woke’ issues rather than getting too much into substantive economic issues, and then the right can come in and get people to vote for them by being ‘anti-woke’.
Renaissance Man, There a couple of rather large heffalump’s in the room your post #265 has left out. You typed:
You will note the Jews are not on the approved list
I also note, nor has it escaped the attention of many more than myself, that Jewish foundations, funded by those selfsame few very very wealthy families have been supporting the “woke” organizations. Even the Sierra Club was forced by a deep pocket Jewish donor to make statements in favor of immigration, an issue one would have thought not in the purview of a group dedicated to the preservation of wildlife and wilderness. Those foundations have their own agendas, a fact not in dispute at this point, which include, Israel has a right to exist, AND the USA must welcome all comers, but especially Moslems. To be clear, I do not dispute Israel’s right to exist, and I do very much resent the attitude that the USA, as a “colonial oppressor”–remind me again what long term colonies we ever had– has no right to establish and defend its own borders. I doubt we managed to extract very much wealth from The Philippines. Alaska and Hawaii are now states with all the rights of any other state. Also for the record I do think that Puerto Rico, Virgin Iles. et al ought to be able to send voting representatives and senators to Congress.
The 2nd. Snuffy, with apologies to the delightful character, is that folks can squawk about “oppression Olympics” all they want, but the reality is that, for the most part, Islamic migrants have simply not made themselves very welcome among the American public if not the media. BTW, if someone from the political right might want to do something useful, rather than just bloviate about “The Squad”, they could maybe dig into the true story of how Rep. Omar y familia came here. Because the official story don’t make no sense.
@Mawkernewek #272
I think the emergence of wokism and its popularity is related to the fact that it is the only way for the manager class to simulate anything like progress anymore.
There has been very little technological progress in recent decades, with the exception of information technology. There is also no economic progress. The belief in eternal progress therefore now clings to other areas.
Emily, thank you for doing that. “Autistic megathesis” is funny, not least because I have an autism spectrum disorder and my online essays are, of course unfashionably long. As for why people have become uncommunicative and standoffish, my take is that it’s a result of cancel culture; since people are always ready to stomp you if you say the wrong thing, and what counts as the wrong thing to say changes on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis, it’s a lot safer to keep your mouth shut and refuse to engage with people.
Viking, that seems quite plausible to me. You’re welcome, btw.
J.L.Mc12, I think a lot of people elsewhere in the world have begun to realize that Western NGOs are used to further Western political and economic goals, whatever their ostensible purpose might be. Good for the Vietnamese; my guess is that they’ll accomplish a lot more without NGO interference.
Jessica, that’s certainly one way to pick the concept apart. I use the term simply as an easy way of communicating the idea that the US has much more in common with nations like Brazil and South Africa than it does with European nations, starting with having been manufactured as a polity through the colonization process and going to our current state in which a relatively shallow layer of European industrial culture overlays an agrarian society increasingly resistant to European cultural forces.
Chris, I recall when it turned out that Australians have been eating an unknown species of fish for some years now. The classic comment here was, “Well, that’s a change! Isn’t it usually an unknown species of fish that’s eating Australians?” As for our American anthropophagi, yes, we have some, but our poisonous snakes are pretty mild compared to yours, grizzly bears are found only in a few regions of the West these days, and most of the other wildlife is pretty harmless most of the time. You have to go to coastal Alaska to have a good chance of being eaten alive by something, and even there the cold will probably get you first. 😉
Kwo, Shinto shrines show that it can definitely be made to work with wood, and cedar is a good choice — all the wood used in the temple of Solomon, and there was a lot of it, was Lebanon cedar. A stone foundation will probably be a good idea and you may choose to have a stone floor as well, but the rest could certainly be made of cedar wood. As for “close by,” the effect apparently extends over several miles; the temple of Solomon is said to have caused sharply increased harvests throughout the land of Israel, but it’s probably necessary to allow for exaggeration there.
Renaissance, Carter’s failure has been on my mind for many years. That’s one of the things that led me to a strategy I’ve adopted: set out the possibilities as clearly as I can, and see how many people are willing to make use of them before sheer necessity forces others to stumble blindly down the same route.
Siliconguy, oh, granted. I think elite overproduction is hardwired into every literate society, and every society that has it has to come up with some way to manage it.
Jen, not that I know of, though it would be worth an experiment. One of the reasons why I ended up developing my theory of the temple technology is that the type of building rather than the type of ritual seems to correlate best with traditions of improved crop yields.
Moose, glad to hear it.
Luke, glad to see that you’re paying attention. 😉
Robert, good heavens. I knew a certain amount about Chatterton, and have read some of his poetry — it’s pretty good — but I didn’t know of his occult involvements. Thank you for this!
@JMG (#245):
After posting my comment, I started poking around the web about Chatterton and magic, and found a few mentions of his father’s interest in magic here and there. (His father was also named Thomas Chatterton, so there’s some possibility of scholarly confusion.) The copy of Agrippa I mentioned with the note by John Lambert that “It was the property of Chatterton” likely refers to the son, who had been apprenticed to Lambert; the book itself probably first belonged to the father, and was then inherited by the son.
Ebenezer Sibly knew about Chatterton and is said to have published a chart to account for his unfortunate death astrologically. I haven’t looked for it yet in Sibly’s big book. (I wonder, was Sibly actually acquainted with either or both of the Chattertons?)
@Grover Tibbetts #259: The Village had a pumpkin-judging contest last week, with prizes for “Most Spooky,” “Most Creative,” and I forget the other category. The Most Creative was gussied up to look like a Faberge egg with silent-auction sheet beside it, offers to start at $50 million, with a sign-in sheet where residents filled in mock bids from funny bidders. I wrote down $50 Godzillion, and signed it “Elon Musk, F.O.B. Mars.”
@JMG – What I really wanted to know is, “How is it we’re a 3rd World country?” Besides having degenerated into one. You answered it, so thanks.
@Renaissance Man #265: Thanks for the Honor Culture/DignityCulture/Victim Culture distinctions and description. It’s as vividly clear as the difference between morning, afternoon, and twilight, and as necessary. I’m reminded of the parallel between “ladies and gentlemen; citizens; consumers.” Once you’re defined as a consumer, your dignity starts going down the tubes.
Just my $0.02.
@JMG, having just come off a binge-read of some of your writings: After finishing “Weimar America,” this morning, with the question, “When do you wake up and stop following the bright young budding dictator?” [Answer: when he does away with the checks and balances and rule of law.] “Ave, Caesar” popped into my mind instead.
P.S. Renaissance Man:
“Reputation is what others know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor, let your reputation fall where it may, and outlive the !#$%%’s.”
Lois McMaster Bujold, “A CIvil Campaign.” A high-ranking father is advising his grown son, temporarily caught in the rumor mill and accused of murdering someone he simply failed to save. Later, the young man is confronted with the rumor, remembers his dad’s advice, and says “If you believe that…..WHY ARE YOU STANDING IN MY WAY?” and the rumor-monger backs down in great haste.
Siliconguy,
What a shame to destroy potatoes when I’m sure someone out there would love to have them. I’d take 50 lbs myself!
Don’t we have an ethanol industry in this country? Turn them into vodka and run the stupid cars on them!
@Mary Bennett #268,
Thank you for the list.
I always thought of myself as well versed in history but I was surprised by how little I actually know about Greek history…so your list will help my research.
Sorry, I don’t blog but if I find anything relevant to the Ecosophian community, I will post it in a future open post, that’s if a war doesn’t disrupt my plans….
Dear Mr. Druid
Some analysts are suggesting that woke and climate change as ideologies will go away when the US looses its role as hegemon. Any thoughts?
A1
So, it appears that our newly elected house speakeasy, Mr. Johnson, hath voiced on the fox spews .. that Russia, China, and IRAN (not surprising..) are the new-n-impovised ***Axis• of • Evillly • Evillist • EEEEVIL!***
please excuse me while I now barf*….
this is why I no longer vote: because no matter the post – whether it be local on up to any including the highest of the Realm – the ones who ‘win’ are either grifters, power mongers, idiots .. or all the above.
Buckle up, Kiddies
Robert, oh my. Ebenezer Sibly is someone I’ve wanted to study for a while now; if I ever write a Regency romance (which I’ve seriously considered — under a pen name, of course!) Sibly and Francis Barrett will both be important characters. I’ll see what my favorite free ebook archives have of Sibly’s work.
Patricia M, you’re most welcome. As for “Ave, Caesar,” well, yes — because by the time Caesar puts in an appearance, the alternatives have discredited themselves so thoroughly that he looks like a better choice to most people.
A1, quite possibly, yes. Actual climate change will keep happening, since the global climate is always changing, but the ideology that insists that the weather is your fault and the only solution is more bureaucracy? Dead on arrival.
Polecat, did you think there has ever been a time in the history of the world when this wasn’t true?
Mary Bennet (#267) re: “petunia logic”. Our gracious host has, at least twice, referred to the logic of demons as “2+2 = petunias”. To a mathematician, 2+2=4, always and exactly. To an engineer, 2+2= somewhere between 3 and 5, since you might be rounding inexact measurements up or down before you quantify each as “2”, and the rounded result might end up as 3, 4, or 5. But with demons, there’s no such consideration. 2+2 isn’t even whatever number you want it to be, it’s anything at all, even fragrant flowers.
@JMG (#284):
My curiosity has been stirred up now, too. Chatterton was apprenticed to a Bristol lawyer, John Lambert, but discharged from his apprenticeship before completing it. The copy of Agrippa that had been Chatterton’s was given by John Lambert to one “John Paget, Newberry” in 1797, according to an inscription inside the front cover. You can download the whole book from archive.org.
I know of two other books on magic once owned by John Lambert. One is a copy of Paracelsus, On the Supreme Mysteries of Nature [that is, P’s Archidoxes] printed in 1656, with his signature and the date “Augt 23rd 1797” inside the front cover, and below it the more recent bookplate of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the general and alchemist. It’s in the Library of Congress, and they have a full PDF available for downloading gratis.
The other is at Brown, a manuscript copy in French of Les clavicules de Rabby Salomon. It was donated to the library by a personal acquaintance of Gurdjieff’s, Paul Beekman Taylor, probably sometime during the few years in the 1960s when he was a professor of English at Brown (where he had been an undergraduate, class of 1954). Formerly it belonged to Walter Moseley, and before him, presumably, to Frederick Hockley. This was hand-copied by Lambert himself in 1798. I have a PDF from a black-and-white microfilm which I’ll send you by way of Sara’s email.
There may be still other books on magic once owned by Lamberet out there.
Taylor seems to still be alive, in his early 90s. I am going to email him to ask how he came by the manuscript.
So it looks as though there was more to the lawyer John Lambert than students of Chatterton have realized. Hmmm ….
I came across this last week that think folks here might find fascinating.
An artist spent a year and a half recreating the city Tenochtitlan, currently Mexico City, before conquest. It is a fascinating view into a past civilization that also overlays the city layout onto the city as it stands today.
With all the talk and discussion of our path towards the future, it helps to look to the past and see that it wasn’t a dystopia.
https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/
@J.L.Mc12
Viet Nam is an interesting case. They live in China’s shadow, have been invaded by China before (and have some pretty acrimonious feelings about that) and goal number 1 in most foreign-policy matters is: don’t become a suburb of China. Goal 2 (related): nobody competes with the government. Until very recently, that meant real official persecution of religious people, because their first loyalty was to their religious authorities, not the government: Catholics, Buddhists, Cao Dai, Protestants (those are a specially bad case: the rest are basically endemic, but Protestantism came with more recent missionaries, and is seen as foreign infiltration, and attempts to encourage separatism among the mountain tribes) all faced lockout from government jobs, official harassment (everything from arrest and land confiscation, down to petty things like installing loudspeakers right outside the church, that blast patriotic commie tunes during service times). I’m not sure they even let Muslims into the country. They cautiously allow some international medical charities to operate there, stuff like doctors without borders, but are generally pretty leery of NGOs, for the reasons above: they might be aligned with China, and they might be looking like competition. Church charities sending medical supplies have to be extremely circumspect, because healthcare is officially the government’s job, and anything that implies the government maybe isn’t doing a good enough job… nope. Plus, the bo doi will want their cut, if they catch you at it locally.
So, it sounds like any G7-adjacent “climate” organization… could easily run afoul of both those taboos, very quickly. They’re all for foreign trade. Foreign “investment” is a whole other kettle of fish 😉
I happened to catch a couple of minutes of a Tucker Carlson speech on my internet travels recently. A little aside of his caught my attention. Somehow the subject of Scandinavia came up and Carlson referred to them as “my people”. This struck me as strange cos I always thought he was an America-first kind of guy. Out of interest, I checked his wikipedia page. Seems his family has been in the US for many generations and only one side is Swedish.
Is it common in the US for people to refer to their ancestral heritage as “my people”? This seems like another interesting little difference between the US and Australia if true. Nobody here would do that and they’d be thought very weird if they tried.
Every now and again I come accross references to the Breatharians … are there legitimate people who do this (we won’t include entities from the plane of air here of course) or is it something more along the hype/scam side of the equation.
At #226 JMG comments, “Australia: I’ve heard it claimed by people who’ve been there that there’s a persistent, pervasive sense of something way out there in the bush that’s profoundly inimical to human life.”
One of the most famous poems about Australia is MacKellar’s, where she wrote,
“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.”
It is an ancient land, geologically, without recent glaciation. There are no surviving large herbivorous mammals native to the land. This makes its soil sandy or clay, and not fertile. Without high mountains and extensive forests to moderate the weather, we can have floods and droughts in the same season. All this leads even someone praising it to speak of death of animals and bleak misery, and compare even the good rain making the grass grow to “the drumming of an army”. The words she uses are ragged, drought, flood, terror, tragic, pitiless, sick, flood, fire, famine, and die. She says that despite its bleak awfulness, she loves it.
Historically, apart from the aboriginal people, our country was settled by convicts, refugees from civil war and tyranny, and economic refugees. That is to say, most of the people who came to Australia didn’t actually want to be here. They had to be dragged here in chains, or fleeing genocide or starving poverty.
If memory serves, the term third world came out of the Jakarta conference in 1956 (?) where Sukarno, Nehru and Nasser, then heads of state of Indonesia, India, and Egypt coined it to define a third group of nations neither aligned with the western capitalist or the communist blocs. The first and second world terms got tacked on later to define the capitalist and communist blocs.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I have a vague recollection of hearing the newsreel at the time when they announced it.
Stephen
JMG
There is a certain wind that blows in Aus that Chris is referencing there that comes straight out of the desert, and is a scorching torrent that feels like an oven door has been opened and sends humans, animals and plants diving for cover. The blinding bright light of Australia in summer and how our vegetation reacts to it gives everything this washed out quasi apocalyptic look that is only heightened by the howling sound. It is the wind that brings catastrophic fire and definitely has a malevolent character.
There is also something that stalks the land at night in certain places, that aboriginal lore made reference to as well. It is definitely frightening and it’s presence is a certain unease like you’re being watched a sort of shadow that looms. Ive found it is particularly prevalent in the tall mountain forests (Chris’ reference to the trees not liking someone ring true here) and I’m not sure if humans are supposed to be there too long; the pattern of inland habitation before colonial settlement was focused on the flood plains, open woodlands and savannahs. The fact that mountain towns are routinely threatened by fire seems to me to be a sign that maybe they aren’t the best places for settlement.
As I said though these things all part of the ecosystem and make the place what it is.
Why is the left so anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian? Some reflections on my blog here:
https://ashtarbookblog.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-woke-and-gaza.html
The above, however, is predicated on the idea that the left is still *somehow* rational! I used to think that it was. It was actually quite simple: the radical left is opposed to the United States, Israel supports the United States, therefore the radical left opposes Israel. The current left emerged, to a large extent, during the Vietnam War. It was easy to draw parallels to the wars between Israel and the Arab states, the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai, and so on. Also, at the time, the Palestinians were dominated by secular nationalists and Marxists. They also pretended to be for a “democratic secular Palestine”, not an explicitly Arab Palestine.
Today, I´m not so sure anymore. It does look very, very bizarre when trans and queer people protest in favor of an Islamist movement like Hamas who would gladly kill them. Besides, the broader left isn´t as anti-American as it used to be – they clearly preferred Biden to Trump, or a US military presence in Afghanistan to its absence, and so on. So why the sudden pro-Hamas avalanche? It does look irrational and disturbing. Petunias?
Also, the Israel-Palestine issue has always been extremely divisive on the left. One of the few non-negotiable principles leftists seem to have is “no support for Israel”, making pro-Israeli leftists more controversial than leftists who, say, de facto support US intervention against the Taliban. The issue draws much of its power, I think, from the Holocaust and from the fact that many American leftists are Jewish. This makes it taxing to oppose a Jewish state, and the rest follows…
I sometimes wonder, almost un-ironically, if Jerusalem is cursed. Had I been a science fiction writer, I might consider writing a short story about how the last Jebusite priest curses the land of Salem before he´s killed by Joshua´s monotheist hordes. And here we are, thousands of years later…
Emily #247,
To me, the most likely cause of this anti-social attitude is the internet, and smartphones in particular. Predecessors to that would have been the T.V., and before that possibly prescribed labor, but smartphones kicked the process into overdrive.
Patricia Matthews,
Yep, he’s on my guest list…sharing a row with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Thanks for that!
Fauci’s there too, but he’ll be traveling in steerage with Pelosi…
Hey JMG
What you suggest is probably true, the Guardian obviously want to paint the NGOs in a good light so if these NGOs are being dodgy they would not say too much about it.
On a more personal topic, I’ve been struggling towards achieving my goal of polymathy for many years, and though I’ve made some progress I am very far from being as competent as was apparently normal in the past, let alone as good as polymaths such as Richard Burton or Robert Fludd.
There are many questions and aspects to this topic that I could make, but I will restrict myself to a few that I feel are the most important.
1-How many areas of study or skill can someone be reasonably expected to be competent in? I wouldn’t be surprised if this may be hard to quantify or if it is very variable from person to person.
2-One thing that seems to be a barrier to polymathy is anxiety about whether what you’re doing is a waste of time. There seems to be this strong internalised sense from society that if what you are studying isn’t something that relates to your job, helps you get a career ,or makes money then it’s a waste of time, and is somehow childish or frivolous. I struggle with this a lot more than when I was younger, and the bad economic climate doesn’t help but I am sure that this feeling isn’t actually true, or is at least an exaggeration since there’s more to life than money, and people in the past still thought of such things as valuable despite them being “impractical.” I want to know if you ever struggled with this, and what you did to get over it?
3-What is the best way to become a polymath?
So I’ve been thinking about what kind of scenario could prevent us from falling into a “Long Decline” as described by JMG.
His basic point is that the shortage of fossil fuels is what’ll do it. His basic vision of the future is that it will revert to roughly 1700s technology, with pockets of tech that is so high ROI that it is hung onto despite the rising costs. Inlcuding possibly AI in some pockets – although the supply chains for chips will need to be simplified.
Regardless, when thinking about possible “escape routes” from decline, it seems like there is some possibility in AI helping with Nuclear.
Since most of the costs in nuclear have to do with the up-front costs of engineering the thing, this is a “knowledge task” not a raw-materials input, so a good enough AI might possibly cut down on that upfront cost
Also, the other cost is having more advanced nuclear (e.g. possibly fusion). While this is still a glimmer in the eye that is constantly far off, if AI gets good enough to help with this it could keep us in the realm of cheap energy for at least a century or more
maybe not cheap oils for internal combustion engines, but at least energy to power our industrial plant
Given this possibility, would anyone here think it is a good idea / priority to try to stave off “peak civilization” by trying to “make nuclear affordable?”
Or it is just better to let society revert to 1700s level?
This cartoon puts things well (I hope the HTML tag embeds properly):
So seen and heard often!
That’s the bare link:
https://9gag.com/gag/a1PgEQR
I would be interested to find an online (or Halifax-based) group with whom to play the weird of hali RPG game. Not skilled enough to be a GM myself but I might be able to chip in for a stipend if an established GM wants to go that route. Anyone?
When visiting Paris, is there anything related to the occult that would be worth doing, or visiting, or …? (Or maybe a good related store or bookshop?)
Milkyway
JMG said: “The people who choose to be miserable will be miserable indeed, and I have neither the right nor the power to force them to wake up and be happy instead. All I can do is provide an alternative for those who are willing to take it.”
I agree that misery is a choice, but I also think that happiness and joy are infectious. Why not preach that instead? Won’t that produce a ripple effect, especially if it comes from a neutral heart space?
Hi John,
My very early exploration of places to emigrate to outside Europe continues.
I floated the idea of moving to New England recently and got a v negative response from the wife.
She suggested somewhere sunnier with nice beaches. This got my looking and Bermuda came up (outside the Hurricane season, a British territory (I’m British) and close to north east America (where we both have family).
From a Long Descent perspective could Bermuda work as a place to emigrate on the decades ahead?
I looked into islands near South America but they look very vulnerable to piracy and mass migration from South America.
“The ends of knowledge
Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end”
https://aeon.co/essays/should-academic-disciplines-have-both-a-purpose-and-a-finish-date
The authors are English majors who need to retake a technical writing class so they can get to the point, but the question is valid. Quantum mechanics is down to its last two questions, can gravity be connected to the rest of it, and why do neutrinos have mass at least some times. Some of the physicists want to build an even bigger collider to look for things they have no reason to suspect even exists.
On the other scale one new telescope has shown astronomy is nowhere near done. Will astronomy be the last unsettled science as it was the first?
@JMG
I’ve been wanting to purchase a paperback copy of your novel Star’s Reach. While some of the cultural contexts would of course not be immediately obvious to me, it’s the ideas explored in it that I’m interested in checking out. Unfortunately, none of the online booksellers have a copy available to purchase. Could you help me out here? Although I’d prefer a physical copy, an electronic one will still do, if getting hold of a physical one is not possible. Thanks in anticipation.
@Mary Bennett
I’d say there is a whole herd of heffalumps crammed into a small room, which is why they are stomping on each other. 🙂
You’re welcome for the explanation of culture, I cribbed it mostly off Jonathon Haidt and a couple of other sources.
@Viking @JMG
About handling only one crisis per cycle in a time of polycrises, I posit the dumbing down of the education system over the past decades (which you have noted before) coupled with the advent of smart phones and social media is a factor. The average person is taught not to think but to react emotionally, and scroll on to the next fake outrage.
Furthermore, the news itself has been changing. It was noted 30 years ago, in the 90s already that the average sound-bite in a TV news story had dropped from 15s in the mid 1960s to 9s. Twenty years ago, analysis of news in the U.S. already showed a marked lack of coverage about the world in general, tending to focus up to 80% on a single news story at a time.
@JMG Thank you for all of your advice!
JMG, I was wondering if you’ve read The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreesen and what your thoughts about it were?
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Here is a fairly good analysis of recent events in the ME:
https://neuburger.substack.com/p/iyad-el-baghdadi-analysis-of-middle
I don’t agree with the author’s take on American domestic politics,–Trump’s goal (supposing he ever had one) was never to reestablish white supremacy in the USA)–but the rest strikes me as sound so far as I can tell.
JMG, if I may? Aidawedo 304: some prophecies are made with the hope to avert them, and spiritual advice, like medicine, makes use of negative remedies to start cures. Why should the spiritual realm operate any differently than real life? There’s no absolute binary between them anyway, so it makes sense to give the bad news first. Hilarity and joy require grounding and roots. The sad fact is, not everyone can be salvaged. We got here in part by rosey colored glasses. The cure has to take that into account. At least so it seems to me…Joy comes at the end of the tether, to rip off a saying.
Well, the anti-semitism of the Left is no secret here in Europe and has a long tradition (apparently, Hitler greatly admired Islam and thought it to be a much more fitting religion for his Herrenmenschen than the weak-sauce, ‘love thy enemy’ stuff of Christianity; IIRC Stalin’s purges targeted Jewish communists in particular – though it’s been ten years since I was engaged in that particular internet discussion, so don’t ask me for sources; maybe I’m remembering it wrong; and today, we have the eco-socialists a la Thunberg standing strong with Hamas). Die Welt wrote extensively about the wide-spread antisemitic stance of the art scene in Germany (which is dominated by leftist ideology), and so on and so forth. I suspect that for the Left, Islam is just another ‘revolutionary element’ that they think they can use to destroy the current power structure, and then discared after they (the Left) have become the new rulers – so in their eyes, the leftist revolutionaries in Iran were maybe just unlucky, or sloppy, or whatever 😀 I mean, they already tried workers, women, and blacks; not much material left with which to start your revolution.
But if what Mary Bennet says is true, that it’s rich Jewish families in America who are behind the whole woke phenomenon and who encourage mass immigration of Muslims into the West, that doesn’t make any sense to me. The US are Israel’s most reliable ally and basically the guarantee for the nation’s continued existence; why invite their arch-enemies into the States? Even if you see the mass migration of Muslims as some sort of Revenge of the Jews for all the stuff they had to endure there through the centuries – there exist large Jewish communities throughout Europe, which are now basically under siege by these immigrants. Why would they put their own people in such existential danger?
As for the Woke foot soldiers, maybe it’s really just simple-mindedness. I’ll never forget that one leftist activist who was raped by a Muslim refugee in Germany shortly after the Great Welcome of 2015, who then wrote a public letter apologizing to her rapist, because he was now subjected to the racism of the evil rightwingers in Germany (who were upset that she was raped by him)… Apparently, race is the most important quality of a human being for the anti-racists, and if you’re of the right race, you are basically above reproach, because any criticism has to be racism. And there may be the naive expectation of reciprocity – since they support Muslims as the victims of white oppression, surely the Muslims will then also support them as the victims of cishet patriarchal oppression… or something.
Anyway, since Neptune is the Lord of Delusion and Martyrdom (and Drugs), I hold him responsible for this whole mass mania, and I hope this tsunami (see what I did there?) of who’s the most victimized victim, gender fluidity (see what I did again?), no borders, and the great migration across the sea, etc etc., will run out of steam when he finally leaves his stronghold in Pisces in 2025.
JillN #207,
Growing up, we had a borehole for bulk water pumped to a tank on a tower for pressure, and a corrugated iron tank holding runoff from an asbestos cement roof for drinking water. Occasionally the bath taps would gurgle and splutter and cough up orange clay. Then we’d get workmen in to clean the borehole.
I remember asking one of the workers, “Do you enjoy your job?” (I was about seven at the time.) He seemed to think it was a strange question. “It’s my trade,” he replied.
“Yes, but do you enjoy it?” I asked again. “It’s my trade,” he replied again, shaking his head to indicate that kids don’t understand you have to do your job whether you enjoy it or not.
Later our drinking water smelled off. The culprit was a bloated dead rat floating in the corrugated iron tank. My mother put her foot down. Municipal water or else. We were out in the country and the connection fee was way more than my father wanted to pay, but sometimes you have to bow to a superior force…
Walt F,
Thank you for your advice, I need all that I can get. Yes, I’ve been thinking that old industrial tech would serve the purpose that magic would normally serve in games like this, allowing room for real magic to be more subtle. You are absolutely correct that it needs to be woven into the world and its characters. Spells for checking for danger is a fantastic idea and I will make sure that is implemented. I had other ideas as well, such as clairvoyance and being able to sense the presence of other creatures.
I will read Engine Summer, I’ve heard of it before and it sounds like it could be helpful.
@ Australian Dreamer # 290: I have always assumed breatherarians were mostly a joke. It seems unlikely they will survive for very long if they stick to their plan. The only actual one I know about was a fellow in NYC who bragged about his discipline, until he was caught scarfing down chicken nuggets in the back room at some charity event.
@ Forecasting Intelligence #305: Bermuda is a lovely place, but they import almost everything, including energy and food. It might be able to survive at a much lower population. Oddly they have seen increasing crime, where once it was practically non-existent. That may tell you something.
@ Griff #299: I think you may be right about nuclear energy, though I have no idea about the AI part. It is not cheap energy, but it is reliable and consistent, and is currently seeing a resurgence. It supplies perhaps 10% of the world’s electricity, but much more in some places. Be warned, it is not very popular on this forum.
More comments on comments. No original ideas here.
Australian Dreamer #290: Yes, there certainly used to be Breatharians. Don’t know if they are still around. Well obviously the original ones would not be. I remember many years ago a woman dying of starvation for following this path. It certainly sounded like some kind of scam to me.
Simon #289: Certainly Australians would not refer back to where their family came from and call them “my people”. Some of us are interested in our past but it is the past. most of us are too mixed to bother trying to separate it all out. My grandfather said it doesn’t matter where your family came from we are all Australians now.
Hackenschmidt #291 About 10 years ago our premier declared the state of emergency when the drought ended and a new state of emergency when the floods began in the same speech.
PumpkinScone #293 You can tell a southerner by their reference to the northerlies. We don’t have them in Queensland, unless it is cyclone season when it is a different kind of northerly. We also never used to have really bad bushfires but we do now. We used to get many storms in September which greened things up for summer and we didn’t have hot dry searing winds to push them along.
Rainforests make me uncomfortable but I am a bit claustrophobic.
@Bogatyr #258
Iolo made a lasting and very positive contribution to Welsh culture. However there is a larger issue relating to the smothering of this fragile culture with a thick blanket of Celtic (English) romanticism. What actually remains of the druids? There is some Celtic poetry and music, some fragments of herbal medicine, the genealogical data of surviving Gaelic sennachie, the living folklore of the remoter regions of the Celtic West, and a large number of sacred sites.
Well, Mr. Greer .. for what ever its worth,
I’m in umm, good company (I guess…), as the excoriations by those readers at the z-hedge.. of said speaker .. are to a one, not at all favorable towards his sentiments concerning our ‘friends’ in that small slice of the eastern mediterranean, relative to the supposed evilly players, big or small.
And just today, a clusterfrak of some import is occurring in the comments section of our supposed brother-in-collapse arms, JHK … who is taking a considerable amount of flack for His rather similar sentiments with regard towards the I’s vs the P’s …. Strange times.
‘sigh’…
Blessed Samhain to those who celebrate it; blessed Calan Gaeaf to those who celebrate that.
TIdlösa,
nice speculation about the last Jebusite priest! But even according to the Biblical account, Jerusalem was not conquered before David’s time, and in a relatively bloodless manner. Of course, most secular historians doubt there was a monotheist invasion of Canaan in the 2nd millennium BC. Again, even according to the Biblical account, Jerusalem was monotheist at most a few years from David’s to the beginning of Solomon’s reign (plus much later), while most secular historians doubt there was anything like monotheism, or even official henotheism, before the Second Temple. The first truly venomous language against worshippers of other gods that I see is in the last chapters of Isaiah, probably written in the Second Temple period, and everybody agrees Ezra was enacting laws against intermarriage at that time.
I think you should see this video. There are some data points about the situation in northern Minnesota and about the fifth climate assessment you should know, if you don’t, already: https://youtu.be/8ThL05MD7LE?si=I_ZumZqy3CcsVbM3
JMG,
congratulations on new book!
On topic of “I well remember the older and frankly more interesting SF, in which psychic phenomena were a common theme — and I remember how it got squeezed out in the 1980s and 1990s as the fundamentalists took over”. [#186 replay to John]
I’ve read some Phil K. Dick, but not much more. what were your favorite books in that sub-genre? Any recommendations?
Mary Bennet, #273 re: USA as a „colonial oppressor“
By the mid-20th century, bragging about your colonies had become somewhat unfashionable, so the process was a bit more oblique than what the Europeans did earlier, but I think the case can be made that the policy of „banana republics“ constitutes a form of colonialism.
Australian Dreamer, #290
I recall a story of Western mountaineers encountering an old yogi in the Himalayans who, asked about his means of sustenance up there in his cave, claimed to have stopped eating altogether and basically live on breath. They took him to a hospital to have doctors look into the matter, and found some astonishing results, basically proving his claims. The story stuck with me because it was released in what I considered a serious paper at the time and had an air of believability to it – the dude was ancient and had spent his life training ascetic disciplines, plus his lifestyle was as low energy as it gets (sitting motionless and empty-minded in a cave).
Since I read that, and at the time, I had already heard about breatharians, I came to the conclusion that yes, as an extreme point to a life of discipline, it may be possible to reduce the already small need for calories that old folks tend to have to zero, and sit out your last years in an extended water fast, but that the idea of living an otherwise normal life in young or middle age without food is nonsense.
J.L.Mc12 #298
This may be very subjective advice, but having a conventional career in one field may be an obstacle on your quest. Getting paid for something is an incredible motivator, so having multiple legs to stand on in terms of income streams might be a way to look into – it certainly works for me.
Another trick to achieve skills in multiple fields at once is to pay attention to how skills in one field inform the other, and use the knowledge that improvement in one field will help in others as a motivator.
Griff #299
By and large, this crowd isn’t going to cheer much for AI + nuclear = the future.
Think it through: besides the fact that AI at the moment is still being hyped about as much as the .coms in the 90s, without people really understanding its capabilities and drawbacks, what would this scenario help save? The shallow consumerism? The narcissistic apathy in which people waste their time staring at screens? The feedlots and factory farms? Fast fashion? Childless thirty-somethings that call their cat a fur baby? Onlyfans?
I fail to see how this status quo is even worth prolonging. Signs of decline are everywhere, and most of the truly awful aspects of our time would actually improve if people just had a bit less energy on their hands.
“Or it is just better to let society revert to 1700s level?”
Why 1700s? 1880, just before oil production takes off would be more believable.. 1880 plus small scale hydroelectric is also very feasible. Computational Fluid Dynamics has greatly improved turbine efficiency which is important for low head hydro power. A priesthood with the measurements to cast the blades could keep that technology alive even if the last computer has expired.
Coincidentally, Apple just announced their new top of the processor, the M3 Max. 92 billion transistors. How you get 92 billion of anything going the same way in step boggles the mind. The catch is this wonder can be made in only one factory in the world. Can you spell brittle supply line?
Happy Halloween, everybody! 👋🎃👻
—Princess Cutekitten
Hackenschmidt #291 We had a hot north-westerly today. Should have kept my fingers off the keyboard.
Followup to the Breatharian query … they would be linked to air and fire (sun) … are there equally folks who do/claim to gain all they need from earth and water?
#299 I’m not expecting that AI as it is currently overhyped is going to help much with the cost of building a nuclear power plant. After all what most of what is hyped up at the moment is large language models of the likes of ChatGPT which are really just regurgitating a download from the Internet.
I know the UK has an ambition to use small modular reactors, because the argument goes is the reason nuclear power plants are so expensive to build is each of them is a one off project rather than a kind of off the shelf thing.
Athala (#313) – You ask (as I paraphrase) how could people of Jewish heritage support left-wing organizations that encourage immigration of people who practice Islam, which is in opposition to Zionism? One explanation I heard was that it is an article of Jewish faith that “the wandering stranger should be welcomed, just as we were welcomed (or would wish to be welcomed) when we were wandering strangers”. On a person-to-person scale, most of us (I suppose) believe in compassion and hospitality. But when we’re faced with a mass of people flooding into cities which are already crowded, it may be more humane to encourage people not to wander in the first place.
Also, given that Americans consume (directly and indirectly) vastly more energy than the people of the third world who seek to enjoy our American lifestyle, immigration into the US is driving climate change the wrong way! How does the climate-change activist coexist with the refugee activist in the same skull?
So I got home from work yesterday to find the news of my mother’s husband’s passing, just after lunch. Took the family out for an early dinner to toast his passing, and by the time we got back to the house there was a text from her saying “well, I’m sitting here with egg on my face, looking at my very much alive husband!” Whaa??
Can’t wait to hear more of this story! I’ll report back if there’s anything juicy…
Eike with an „i“, Oh, granted we have an empire, which IMO, was never needed and is more trouble than it is worth. what we have never had was the Raj.
Athaia @ 313, it is pretty much a matter of public record from whence the strident leftist organizations are getting their funding. If Moslems are to be ethnically cleansed from the ME, where are they to be sent? To big, dumb Uncle Sam, of course.
John, hi up on the list is a posting from Jen about training of the will in Dreamwith. I can’t find it and would like to read it as My wife is having problems with her short term memory
Thanks so much for your help.
Ron
@ Ron Cox #333
Training of the will. Good luck.
I know this is very late to post, but I hope JMG will find this interesting;
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/magic-sorcery-politics/675836/
Political Analysis Needs More Witchcraft.
Someone needs to send him The King in Orange!
# 299 On nuclear energy and artificial intelligence I recommend this quite illuminating article. https://medium.com/postgrowth/the-civilizational-cost-d0ed9c4300e1
Tengu I am also passionate about swordsmanship and basically everything that has to do with martial arts. I regularly practice Italian rapier, basque stickfigjting and sicilian knive.
@ Ron Cox #333
The link tag in my previous comment doesn’t seem to work for me. Here it is again:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/will
ugg
the link i provided was only to a teaser for the article. sorry about that.
here is a link to the whole article
https://www.theatlantic.com/feed/author/brian-klaas/
Political Analysis Needs More Witchcraft.
If someone wanted to reconstruct a baquet and try to figure out how mesmer used it. Where would one start?
Robert, fascinating. Got ’em and thank you!
Michael, many thanks for this.
Simon, yes, very much so. In the US, ethnic heritage is still a big deal; people you couldn’t tell from any other white American are into being Welsh, or Swiss, or Danish, or what have you.
Dreamer, there are claims now and then of genuine Breatharians off in the Himalayas or some other conveniently inaccessible place. The examples I know of in this country have all turned out to be frauds — e.g., the guy who lectured about Breatharianism in Seattle, but then was observed at the local convenience shop buying a bunch of frozen burritos to microwave and eat in his room!
Hackenschmidt and Pumpkinscone, many thanks for these. I don’t imagine I’ll ever visit Australia, but the more I hear about it the more intriguing it sounds.
Tidlösa, as an old friend of mine liked to say, it really does bugger the imagination.
J.L.Mc12, the problem faced by would-be polymaths today is that the sheer volume of information available has expanded by many orders of magnitude since Burton’s time, not to mention Fludd’s! It was possible as late as the mid-19th century to learn everything that was known about medicine, for example, out of three or four books. Mind you, much of the information gathered since that time is best described as trivia, when it’s not simply handwaving, but there’s been a considerable expansion of signal as well as the vast metastasis of noise. So the answer to your first question depends partly on how gargantuan the individual fields have become and partly on how deep you want to get in each one. As for the second, well, social pressure and the notions pushed by other people have never had much effect on me, so I’m not sure I can help you there; one thing I’d point out, though, is that I make my living now — and a tolerably good living — from a detailed knowledge of a range of subjects most people would dismiss as hopelessly useless, and you could quite possibly do the same. As for how to become a polymath, you’d probably have to ask one.
Griff, that is to say, you’re ignoring decades of evidence that shows that fission power is inherently uneconomic, and trying to insist that doing the same thing over and over again will get different results if we just throw the latest fashionable buzzword at it. Yes, I know there’s always going to be some new nuclear technology that will be cheap, safe, clean, and abundant — once it gets built, it’ll do what all the previous examples have done, and become just as unaffordable as the others. Fusion? Even if it turns out to be possible — and the verdict’s still out on that — a fusion reactor will be 10 to 20 times as expensive as a fission reactor and produce only about the same amount of electricity — thus hopelessly unaffordable. Waving the magic wand of AI at these problems won’t make them go away. Nor are we talking about 1700-level society; with a little cleverness it could be a lot close to 1920 — but not if we keep on flushing our remaining resources down ratholes like nuclear power.
Curt, funny!
Aidawedo, if that’s the path that makes sense to you, by all means pursue it. I have a different path.
Forecasting, depends on your estimate of sea level rise.
Siliconguy, the unstated subtext of that article is that university departments are struggling over increasingly unstable funding. There’s been an endless barrage of claims that the humanities are useless and should have their budgets redirected to the sciences; this is a counterblast in the other direction. My guess, as far as physics goes, is that we’re just a few years from some awkward discovery that will pitch most of current theory into the same waste heap as phlogiston and the luminiferous ether.
Viduraawakened, all my fiction (except for Twilight’s Last Gleaming) is transitioning to a new publisher, and so it’s temporarily out of print. Star’s Reach will be out in a new edition sometime next year.
Renaissance, that makes a great deal of sense.
Joshua, nope. There’s been a long, dreary string of these things, all hawking the same tired Tomorrowland future and all engaging in vast amounts of handwaving to try to conceal the fact that the myth of progress has failed, we’re fifty years into decline, and the predicaments that are driving that decline cannot be solved by technological means. I’ll pass on reading yet another.
Mary, thanks for this.
Polecat, strange times indeed.
Patricia M, likewise!
Chronojourner, lots of people think I should watch videos. If you can get me a transcript or, better yet, the documents on which it’s based, I’ll consider giving it a read.
Changeling, I’ll have to think about that — and you know, it might be worth a post.
Dreamer, not that I’ve heard of. Mudarians would be amusing, though.
Grover, it’s kind of the wrong season for resurrection, but you never know. 😉
Dobbs, ha! If you were to put a comment on that article to that effect, I wonder what the results would be…
Augusto, by reading Mesmer’s own writings and then getting the details on the construction of the baquet — there’s one surviving example, so this isn’t too hard.
>How you get 92 billion of anything going the same way in step boggles the mind
Says the chemist that regularly works with multiples of Avogadro’s Number of atoms, all doing the same thing. It’s all a question of scale. As far as digital circuit design goes, it’s all mostly automated, written in Verilog or VHDL. Code that defines the bare metal.
My cynical take is not that they are using that many transistors but that if they did it all by hand, if the number of transistors needed would go down from billions to millions. I suspect bloat at the bare metal level, just like software gets bloated. But see, it runs faster and does more! I guess. I wonder when that stops though.
re: Nucular
Nobody’s allowed to experiment with reactor design to see if they can be made cheaper. Most of what I see going on is people giving talks about what they might do if they were allowed to. The equivalent of someone singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.
If it survives the Collapse, as a technology, you might see a series of smaller civilizations, all with names you don’t recognize, one or two centuries from now, running off it, from people who did the experiments to make it economic. Nothing else other than coal has the availability and the energy density to run an industrial civ. I think we have a century or two of coal left?
However it is a fragile tech, not many people know how to recreate it in their backyard and the odds are good it will be forgotten, if a big enough collapse gets going.
JMG,
I know the veil between the living and the dead is thinner than usual this time of year, but I didn’t expect this…
😉
Hi John Michael, Jill, Hack, and Pumpkin,
Haven’t you lovely folks read: The Man from Snowy River short poem? It’s good!
The bloke at the end of the poem, was not the usual suspect. As I remarked before, it’s a dangerous place. I used to volunteer for the local fire brigade for a few years, and was informed that when things get bad, we’re on our own. I accept that risk.
John Michael – Had to laugh about the polymath discussion. Over the past year I’ve had to come to grips with performing all of the repairs and maintenance on the various machines used here – and then do the work, all of it. You’d be truly amazed at the quantity of information my poor brain has had to absorb, or then again, maybe you wouldn’t be amazed! 😉
Incidentally, over the years I’ve known a few people who have earned a PhD, and every time I get them to describe to me in simple English what the heck their research was about. I’m yet to hear a reasonable explanation – and that tells me everything I need to know. I’m not suggesting that the folks didn’t flog their guts out earning that distinction, but that there are diminishing returns to gathering additional knowledge in a field already crowded. I like your strategy in this regard, because it works.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
You make some good points, I don’t think I’d what to get extremely deep in a lot of stuff but definitely enough to be competent. Also your point about how society doesn’t really know what or isn’t useful is a good thing to keep in mind whenever I feel opposition to my goals. I mean, compare the usefulness of translating Latin which at least can end with the creation of a good book with the usefulness of housing speculation which seems to just increase homelessness.
Btw, who is your favourite polymath?
“Says the chemist that regularly works with multiples of Avogadro’s Number of atoms, all doing the same thing. ”
But the atoms in chemistry are not marching in lockstep. See first order kinetics, or kinetics in general. Then add in reversible reactions. Or for that matter, a simple titration. The drop goes in the color changes in the immediate area of the drop, then fades out. The color change gets larger and more persistent with each drop until you reach the end point.
In a distillation do all the atoms of the light fraction suddenly leap into the condenser at the exact second the boiling point is reached? No, they don’t. If they did multiple trays and reflux would not be needed. In chromatography you get a peak like a lopsided normal distribution as the chemical of interest comes through. You do not get perfectly vertical spike at the exact second.
Computer chips are marvels. But oh how delicate the supply chains.
Intel’s 8080 CPU came out in 1974 and had 4500 transistors. Fifty years to get from 4500 to 92 billion transistors on a chip. Sometimes “Whig history” is actually correct, though sadly not in politics.
@ Mawkenwerk # 329 “I know the UK has an ambition to use small modular reactors, because the argument goes is the reason nuclear power plants are so expensive to build is each of them is a one off project rather than a kind of off the shelf thing.”
The little town of Piqua, Ohio had its own nuclear power plant for a while. I guess the idea never caught on. The building is now a museum. You can probably look up the details on the know-it-all website. It’s kind of scary, really.
Grover Tibbetts @ 331
Oh my!!
To be a fly on the table… lapping up whatever familial musings that were uttered therein … a sort of Lazarus story, to be passed down to the proceeding generations perhaps?
*glad to hear said deceasement hath not passed forward, so far anyway… ‘:]
Was jawing with a fellow community plot gardener the other day… said he was going to get his “vaccinations” .. all 5 or 7 of them, including the jankyest of them all (well, that we know of..) – the BIG C ….
I wanted to grab his arms, and say ” Noooooooo, don’t !!!!! .. You know not what you doooooo!!!
I just stood there, and uttered “well, all right then…
A few days later, I see him doing his thing.. he’s still kickin .. gods bless him
All this whilst finding out that these insidious ‘potions’ allow not only synthetic RNA to be inserted into to the cell structure via the lipid protein envelope … but also short-stand DNA to be transcripted into the cell, straight to the nucleus.. to be likely passed-on to other cells – including the gametes!!
Consider, a contemporary replacement .. for those of you who’ve read ‘A Canticle for Liebowitz’, that the southwest ‘mutants’ described within the text were .. not necessarily derived from the prior affects of some past nuclear war, as the narrative states .. but in fact, caused by the terminally STUPIDITY of ‘modern’ man’s coaxing of his/her’s/they’s .. bag of genetic tricks .. to be brought forth, to where “we’re headed forthwith.
just a thought.
A mudarian druid trained in pre Roman times who had lived continuously since then and trained in a range of equally lost arcane disciplines walks into an Ecosophian hang out and sits down with a certain John Michael Greer.
I wonder how that conversation would play out 🧐
Other Owen, the claim that nobody’s allowed to experiment with different kinds of reactors gets rehashed at regular intervals, but it’s only true for a narrow range of Western countries. Do you think nuclear researchers in China care about what Western governments think? How about Russia, India, Iran, or North Korea? (And China and Russia are ahead of us, technologically speaking; they have hypersonic missiles, for example, and we don’t.) If there were all these marvelous reactor designs out there just waiting for someone to pick them up and produce the “electricity too cheap to meter” Eisenhower promised us, half a dozen large, technologically proficient nations would already have built them, and left the West in the dust. That hasn’t happened. At what point does the failure of the nuclear fantasy finally sink in?
Grover, no one expects October resurrections!
Chris, no, that’s a new one for me! It reads like Kipling and Zane Grey got drunk together and wrote some verse. That is to say, I like it. As for polymathy, I gave up on that a long time ago, and decided instead to focus on studying things that nobody in their right mind bothers to study. It’s always worked for me. 😉
J.L.Mc12, my favorite polymath? It would be a tough contest between Robert Fludd and J.W. von Goethe. Goethe’s the better writer but Fludd’s more in line with my interests.
Polecat, that seems plausible enough to me.
Dreamer, funny. I’d be up for it, though.
A heartfelt thank you for this blog—it’s a ray of sunshine in my day!