Tag: history

The Legacy of Luxor

John Michael Greer76 Comments

Late last year, before veering off on several necessary tangents, we brought the story of American occultism up to the point when the Theosophical Society was hitting its stride. Now that we can return to the story, let’s circle back to the same point in history.  Lodges of the T.S., as it was usually called…

A Gathering of Long Lost Friends

John Michael Greer163 Comments

Regular readers will be aware that many of last year’s posts on this blog were devoted to what we might call the history of American magic, or perhaps the magical history of America—the part of the history of the United States that deals with the rise, flourishing, and (most recently) neglect and collective erasure of…

The Last Years of Progress

John Michael Greer540 Comments

No, I’m not going to put much time here into discussing the last few weeks of political gyrations in the US. I grant that it was highly entertaining to watch politicians who spent most of 2020 insisting that rioting is a perfectly acceptable form of political activity throwing a fine tantrum when the other side…

The Grand Mutation: An Astrological Interlude

John Michael Greer225 Comments

Over the last year, and especially over the last month, I’ve fielded a flurry of questions about the astrological meaning of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that took place on Monday. I’ve been intrigued to note that quite a few of those questions have come from people who admit they don’t know much about…

Knock and Give the Password

John Michael Greer208 Comments

Over the the course of the last year we’ve explored quite a bit of the magical history of America, from colonial times up to the coming of Theosophy and the dawn of the golden age of American occultism.  Before we go deeper into that golden age in all its weirdness and wonder, it’s time to…

Theosophy: The Golden Age

John Michael Greer134 Comments

At the end of our last exploration of America’s magical history two months back, the fledgling Theosophical Society had apparently breathed its last.  Its original branch in New York City had stopped meeting, the handful of lodges elsewhere were struggling, and its two most important and knowledgeable members—Emma Hardinge Britten and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—had both…

Theosophy: The Dog and the Wolf

John Michael Greer114 Comments

In last month’s discussion of America’s magical history, we explored the nineteenth-century transformations of alchemy into a system (or more precisely several systems) of spiritual transformation that had little or nothing to do with furnaces, retorts, and chemicals. It’s a nice bit of synchronicity that the story we’ll be discussing this month is best framed…

The Secret of the Alchemists

John Michael Greer105 Comments

Most of the figures we’ve discussed in our survey of America’s magical history came from very humble backgrounds, and there’s a reason for that.  While social mobility has been an American ideal for a very long time, it’s always been subject to sharp though unmentionable limits, mostly rooted in the desire of those already prosperous…

A Prophet and a Loss

John Michael Greer250 Comments

A word or two about history before we proceed. Two weeks ago, in response to my discussion of John Chapman aka Johnny Appleseed, I fielded the inevitable comment from the inevitable reader who insisted that Johnny Appleseed was a Bad Person because he played a role in the westward expansion of the United States. When…

In the Company of Angels

John Michael Greer215 Comments

So far in our exploration of the hidden history of American magic, we’ve talked mostly about people whose place in this nation’s history has been forgotten—or, to be a little more frank, erased.  The one exception, John Winthrop Jr., is tolerably well known by those who have some reason to recall the history of colonial…