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, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, 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.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their followup comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
With that said, have at it!
I’d like to hear from the community, how important is breakfast? What foods if any do you eat for breakfast?
Hi JMG, I want to ask you about a book. Would Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch really help against the collapse of civilization? Have you ever looked at the book? It seems to me that it was written in accordance with the Zeitgeist. I would be happy if you could answer.
Hi JMG,
I suppose I should post this comment for this week.. Feel free to delete yesterday’s comment.
I received my paper copy of “The Annotated Ring Cycle: The Rhine Gold” (Das Rheingold). Here are details:
An English Reading Version of ‘The Nibelung’s Ring by Richard Wagner.’
Translation and Annotations by Frederick Paul Walter.
Pen and Ink Illustrations by Cliff Mott.
Amadeus Press.
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Lanham, Maryland 20706 [USA]
rowman.com
2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
German, with English translation.
Description: “A colorful new translation and notes by Frederick Paul Walter spotlight the libretto, lyrics, and stage directions of [Richard] Wagner’s colossal masterpiece, getting the most basic ingredient right: the actual story! It is gorgeously illustrated with dazzling graphic-novel artwork, plus classic pictures by Arthur Rackham and others.”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 9781538136683 (paper)
ISBN 9781538136690 (ebook)
LCC ML50.W14 R42 2020 (print)
LCC ML50.W14 (ebook)
DDC 782.1/0268–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037543
LC ebook available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037544
The cover is muted colors of turquoise, green, and yellow.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1538136686/
——-
Table of contents
The One-Minute Ring page v
Chronology: The Composition of the Ring Cycle page vi
Introduction page vii
Prelude and Scene 1 page 3
Scene 2 page 33
Scene 3 page 75
Scene 4 page 105
About the contributors page 147
——-
One-Minute Ring
[where it says “god,” I substituted “gods.”]
A. Dwarf steals gold from river; gods recover gold but gives it to giants. (The Rhine Gold)
B. Gods scheme to recover gold from giant and return it to river; fails. (The Valkyrie)
C. Dwarves scheme to recover gold from giant and keep it; human keeps it instead. (Siegfried)
D. Dwarves scheme to recover gold from humans; fail. Human returns it to river. (Twilight for the Gods)
Time frame: Three generations.
Motives: wealth, fame, power, justice, fear of death, humane love, and sexual love.
Consequences: 1 attempted murder; 2 manslaughters; 3 capital murders; 4 adulteries; many combat mortalities; multiple betrayals; countless deceptions; mass enslavement; self-immolation; and full regime change.
Gee, the storyline sounds like now.
—-
I lucked out and got a “Used-Good” copy for $13, but in this particular case, the book looks near mint.
I think this book is my Cliffs Notes👏🏼.
💨Northwind Grandma💨⛏️🎹🎶
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hello to you and the Ecosophia community! I’ve been looking forward to this post as I’ve had a topic in mind.
The three working tools of the magician are, as you’ve often said, the imagination, will, and memory. The first two I’ve found pretty intuitive in their importance since imagination allows us to build up patterns and the will allows them to be set in motion.
Memory, though, seems somewhat less obvious at first, though of course it’s useful for things like going over the events of the day in order to refine divination skills and for memorizing complex rituals and the like. But I have the loose impression that memory in the magical worldview is supposed to overlap heavily with some more unusual mental phenomena once it has been developed—perhaps linking with Platonic notions of knowledge as recollection. Am I onto something here? If so then I’d love to read a discussion of it.
You’ve doubtless heard the name “deep state.” Does it exist as a sentient entity on the astral plane and can it be attacked there?
Why is narrative so powerful even if it’s not true? The current political season is just so full of hoaxes. Disconfirming information has a tough time countering a preferred narrative. The culture says something like “The truth will out”, but it really does not seem to happen much. I’ve heard the powers that be want stability, so they’ll keep the story the same then suddenly flip to a new story, Any thoughts? Or if you’ve already written on the subject, a referral would be fine.
@JMG Re: Two Pseudomorphoses
Howdy,
Here and there, you’ve mentioned an elaboration on Spengler’s theory of cultural pseudomorphosis, specifically that you believe it is typical for any great culture to undergo two pseudomorphoses, with each contributing certain things to the development of that great culture. I realize this may be too big for an open post question (if so, into the “Fifth Wednesday” hopper it goes), but would you mind giving a short summary of your thoughts here? What do each of the two pseudomorphoses do for the great culture affected by them? What are some historical examples?
Whether this works for this open post or not, thanks very much for your time and thought, and I offer my blessings if you and those here will have them,
Jeff
I’ve been pondering the borderland between politics and “occult” thought (The King in Orange started this).
One of the things that I have noticed is, except for the current venue, the polarization in this area is as pronounced, perhaps even more pronounced, than the mainstream polarization. That being said, it seems to me that the left side of the political “spectrum” is pretty apt to try and pin the snarl-word of “fascist” on a lot of occult thought. But when you read the ideas of some of these supposed “proto-fascists”, you have to squint pretty hard to discern any substantive difference other than wording from the more acceptable “liberal approved” take on the issue. Maybe I am wrong (I often am), but I would love to hear from the commentariat here and perhaps an update from our gracious host.
Physicists are now rethinking the nature of space and time:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-20240925/
I was going to talk about this year’s arctic sea ice progression ( just another low year without breaking any records), but then i saw this article
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature
All i can say is WOW look at that curve!
For the last ~15 million years the earth temperature and CO2 levels have been plunging rapidly towards Snow Ball Earth and only very recently has the temperature and CO2 levels rebounded. Pan Piro Narrans to the rescue ( story telling fire chimpanzees aka humans)
If you look at the CO2 curve that matches up with the Temperature curve you see that ~750 ppm is average over the last 200 million years. ( currently at~420 ppm)
Climate change will wreck human industrial civilization but Gaia will love it long term and maybe Pan Piro Narrans will also thrive long enough to evolve into homo sapiens.
JMG,
Excuse my basic economics question. I ask it seriously, as I don’t understand economics well.
Can (or how can) the stock market crash crash if it’s propped up and subject to artificial manipulation? Stocks just keep going higher and higher. It seems there’s no real risk or corrections that correspond to real economic indicators. How does this all end, I wonder.
You have a way of boiling down complicated economic matters into plain English and wondering if you’d please share your thoughts/perspective on any of the above.
Thanks,
Jacques
Hi JMG and everyone,
just a heads-up that after an almost two-year hiatus I finally got back into doing mundane astrology charts for Germany. Here’s my current take for fall/winter 2024 in Berlin: https://mundanastrologie.substack.com/p/autumn-2024-in-germany (original German version: https://mundanastrologie.substack.com/p/herbst-2024-in-deutschland)
It’s amazing how long it took me to write so few words. I hope that doing it more regularly makes it easier and I’ll be able to write longer interpretations. Astrology is definitely not a mundane matter! (sorry, I’ll see myself out now.)
Feedback is very welcome.
Hello,
You mentioned a new edition of “The Retro Future” coming out soon. Is that basically the same content as the previous edition, or have you expanded / updated it?
Thanks,
Heather / adara9
#1 Anonymous,
For me, not eating breakfast is important. I gave it up several months ago as an easy way to control my calorie intake. I’ve found that I have just as much energy as before. My morning workout hasn’t suffered. And I’m slowly and steadily losing the middle-age fat on my belly.
I go to our local farmers market weekly and try and buy as much of our food as possible there. I have been paying close attention to the cars in the parking lot ( I bike myself) because something was odd to me. Then I realized it.
I live in an area between several Intel Campuses with the largest number of employees of that corporation in the World. As a result, we have one of the highest densities of EV’s on the road of anywhere. Finally it dawned on. me, and at that same instant a great title for a book popped in to my head. ” There are no Teslas at the Farmers Market.”
Commenters may recall Bill and I were invited to the Agatha Christie festival in Torquay, England.
We traipsed around Torquay, bookended by London, with a side trip to the Eden Project in Cornwall.
Some notes:
Overall, everyone we saw was fitter than Americans. It has to be the exercise because it’s not diet. We walked everywhere, on uneven footing that changed radically from one paving method to another. Thank God for my shiny, electric blue cane. Unlike the U.S., there were very few accommodations for disabilities, including in the tube stations where they were really needed.
I really understood the concept behind Tartaria.
Torquay in particular was like walking thru a once-great, now fallen on hard times empire. Gorgeous, gorgeous, monumental architecture dating back to late Victorian in a stunning setting that hadn’t been maintained in years. Or decades. Litter everywhere. Homeless people. Money was being spent based on the construction projects we saw, even while half the storefronts were abandoned long ago. This area should be tourism central based on location, climate, and scenic beauty. It was once but isn’t any longer. At the same time, a friend who attended the Agatha Christie festival told us that — as she wandered around Torquay — she kept meeting people who’d never heard of Agatha or the event.
The Eden Project was a stunner. We took the behind the scenes tour of the rainforest domes. Our charming young lady guide recited all the correct paeans to Gaia about how green they were while I gawked overhead at immense infrastructure, electrical use, high-tech HVAC systems, and so forth. That place isn’t running on windmills. Similarly, Heathrow Airport had huge billboards proclaiming the importance of managing climate change. This, at the biggest airport I’ve ever seen, with planes arriving and departing constantly and what must have been square miles of intensive energy usage.
I was amazed at the heavy infiltration of U.S. pop culture. Half the adverts in the tube stations were for plays based on American TV shows and films. There were genuine book adverts and I saw people reading real books on the train and the tubes. Otherwise, virtually everyone was glued to a cellphone. Maybe they were reading because I didn’t notice any eReaders.
The trip was overwhelming and eye-opening on so many levels. I kept saying, as we hiked past one gorgeous building after another, fallen on hard times, that decline is a choice. It may not always be a choice, but you do have to wonder.
The mountain building of late (in geological terms) lifted up the Himalayans, the Andes, the Alps, and Cascades, not the mention the Rockies which were a bit earlier. All that activity exposed a lot a new rock, and as rock weathers it reacts with CO2 taking it out of the atmosphere. The volcanos have not been keeping up, so CO2 has been dropping and the planet has been cooling.
Then the formation of the isthmus of Panama cut off what had been an ocean circulation route and that pushed the planet into the ice age cycle still in progress.
The last time CO2 was this high was the Pliocene about 3 million years ago. You can look up what the climate was like, the short version was quite pleasant. Sea level was about 25 meters higher though as there was no West Antarctic icesheet and most of Greenland was also ice free. Tell the grandkids to relocate accordingly. I noticed that Obama has two mansions just above sea level. He’s clearly not worried about sea level rise.
On a different topic I noticed Vega is nearly straight up last evening. Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BCE and will be so again around the year 13,727. Since it is basically across the circle the precession of the earth’s axis makes against the sky from Polaris (which will eventually need a new name) now a good time to meditate on the scale of time and space.
You might be addressing this next week, but…whatever happened to Loge? In Rheingold, he’s Wotan’s indispensable right-hand “man” (and one of the more sympathetic of the gods), then poof! he’s gone. Do you think Wagner meant something by his disappearance?
@kurt
They don’t understand the vacuum well at all. The math model says vacuum should be white hot with energy but it isn’t. I suspect that when that gets fixed, it’ll lead to a bunch of things getting upturned and rearranged.
What are some of the negative side effects of toothpaste and brushing your teeth with toothpaste every day? I remember when toothpaste first came out it wasn’t widely accepted by the American population and it took a concerted advertising campaign to convince Americans to start brushing their teeth.
Bradley (#6) asks:
“Why is narrative so powerful even if it’s not true?”
In a nutshell, because the world in which we actually/b> live and move and have our being is made up of stories, not of matter and energy. Muriel Rukeyser put it (in her The Speed of Darkness) that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
And Rudyard Kipling, in an address to the Royal College of Surgeons (1923), rightly claimed that “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
One of the several definitions that Aristotle proposed for humankind was “rational animal.” It’s hardly that simple: we are a story-telling animal, a rationalizing animal that on rare occasions manages to be a rational animal.
The dream of a future rational, empirically based life is but a pipe dream. Alas!
#1 As an endurance athlete, I find breakfast critical to fuel my workouts. I mostly eat either steel cut oats with a variety of fresh fruits and seeds, or fried eggs with homemade vollkornbrot (German rye bread…dense like a brick!). I had previously tried intermittent fasting in the form of an overnight fast lasting 16 hours, but I found myself staving off hunger with caffeine. Now, I can see I.F. as a means of caloric restriction, but I actually need to focus on taking in enough calories, so it’s three squares a day for this runner…YMMV.
Anon, it seems to vary from person to person. Me, I need a good breakfast or I’m not at my best all day. My usual breakfast is a bowl of rice with natto, and kimchi, or a cooked vegetable, or soup as a side dish. (Can you tell I learned to cook from my Japanese stepmother?)
Yiğit, not only won’t it work, if copies of that book survive they’ll become a dead weight on the revival of science and scholarship in any future Renaissance that might be burdened with them. One of the tasks that every rising civilization has to cope with is learning how to think its own thoughts instead of borrowing them from an old book. Aristotle’s writings were the burden that Western civilization had to overthrow to create its own science; Dartnell’s book will be a comparable burden to the future.
Northwind, glad to hear it. That’s not a bad summary!
Alex, fair enough. The secret is that memory is the past application of imagination, just as will is the future tense. Your will becomes powerful when you direct it at clearly imagined future goals. Your memory becomes powerful when you use it to reawaken vividly recalled past events. This very often involves revisiting your past, reinterpreting it, and sometimes reimagining it — not falsifying it, but fitting it into a narrative pattern you wouldn’t have thought to apply to it. What changes, for example, if you learn to see your entire past as the process by which you got ready for occult training?
AA, that’s a fascinating concept. Every social entity creates an astral egregor, so yes, you’re correct — just be aware that an egregor that large may be a whale of a lot stronger than you are, and it can and will fight back…
Bradley, narratives are the most important tooks humans have ever invented. They’re the tools we use to make the confusion of everyday experience make sense. Narratives are always fictional — that is to say, they always leave out much more truth than they incorporate — and there’s always a reason why they’re believed. If you want to overturn a narrative, you have to understand the payoff — what people get from believing in it, and why they’re committed to it. There are always solid practical reasons for it.
Jeff, let’s take Western civilization as an example. Its first pseudomorphosis came from Magian civilization, and gave it the framework it needed to grow in its early years. In the early Middle Ages, remember, Europe was basically a secondhand copy of the Muslim world, complete with petty kings and a dogmatic scriptural religion urging it on to holy wars. The second pseudomorphosis came from Apollonian civilization and sparked the Renaissance, which first inspired Europeans to throw off the Magian pseudomorphosis and then generated a counter-movement that threw off the Apollonian pseudomorphosis as well, launching Faustian civilization on its way. That’s a normal pattern for a recent civilization — Magian civilization’s two pseudomorphoses were Mesopotamian and Apollonian, for example.
Degringolade, the occult scene is much less distinct from the broader society than many of its members like to pretend, and so the schisms and the rhetoric within the occult scene aren’t especially different from those outside it. Thus “fascist!” is the snarl world du jour for the left both in and outside the magical scene. Of course it applies to the people who fling it much more than it does to the people thus shouted at; as Carl Jung pointed out a good long time ago, we always project the things about ourselves we like least onto the people we hate.
Kurt, I wonder how long it’ll take them to catch up to where the philosophers got two hundred years ago…
Dobbs, yes, exactly. Under normal conditions the earth is a jungle planet. I don’t know if you’ve read this post of mine —
https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
— but it talks about where we’re heading.
Jacques, it’s quite possible that it can’t crash. I’ve suggested in the past that the stock market will keep on rising steadily even as the economy crumbles out from under it, and the Dow Jones average will hit an all-time high the day before the lights finally go out for good. As Bertram Gross pointed out a long time ago in his book Friendly Fascism, economic indicators have morphed into “economic vindicators” that say whatever the ruling elite want them to say — and this is true of every quantitative measurement of the economy, including stock market indexes.
Bendith, thanks for this.
Heather, it’s basically the same. I cleaned up a few typos and edit-os from the first edition, but I didn’t find much that needed changing.
Clay, please write that book!!!
Teresa, thanks for this. Keep in mind that it may be neither diet nor exercise — it may be chemical pollution, which is why obesity in the US correlates inversely with altitude. (The closer you are to the mouths of rivers, the fatter you tend to be…)
Roldy, we’ll address that as he fades out. The next couple of Ring posts deal with the part of the cycle when he’s at his most active.
Anonymous, hmm — I don’t know. Anyone else?