As I write these words, lean gray wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe. Dim rumbling sounds in the far distance, like summer thunder that’s strayed into the wrong season, don’t bother them. Nor does it trouble them that the forest around them is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned…
The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 10
With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend…
An Unfamiliar World
Last month’s post on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers…
February 2024 Open Post
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…
A Life Remembered
I don’t get into personal matters in these essays very often. Partly that’s because I’m a fairly private person, partly it’s because the cult of personality that pervades today’s literary and creative scenes is so dreary; this whole notion that literature and the arts exist so that writers and artists can “express themselves” belongs in…
Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance
This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly. The…
January 2024 Open Post
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…
An Anthropocene Worth Having
For more than two years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce a way of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature that cuts straight across nearly all of the conventional thinking on that subject. It’s been a challenge. I’m glad to say, though, that a project now being lauded by the corporate-enabler…
The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 9
With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend…