December 2024 Open Post

Yes, it’s Christmas, and most of you have better things to do today than read the internet. That said, 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…

The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 17

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…

The Flight from Prediction

I think most of my readers know that my academic background, such as it is, is in the history of ideas. To some extent that was simply the best option I could find when I returned to college in 1991 to complete my degree.  Then as now, the University of Washington didn’t offer a major…

The Astrologer of Narragansett Bay

A month ago I recounted the story of Johannes Kelpius, the German occultist who crossed the Atlantic in 1694 with his fellow initiates of the Chapter of Perfection to make a new life for themselves in the woodlands of eastern Pennsylvania.  That made a good starting point for the discussion I want to set in…

September 2019 Open Post

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly (well, more or less!) 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 long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank — but since there’s no topic,…

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2019

A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2018

The autumn equinox is nearly on us, and with it comes the mainstay of the political astrologer, the ingress chart. Regular readers who’ve been following the discussions here for the last six months already know that the branch of astrology that forecasts trends in politics and society is called mundane astrology, and that horoscopes cast…