A longstanding tradition on this blog allows the readers to nominate and vote on a theme for the month’s last post in any month that has five Wednesdays. July being so favored, the usual lively contest unfolded five weeks ago, and the winner this time was the question of why the cultures of the modern industrial West slapped a taboo on the concept of a life force almost five centuries ago, and have kept that taboo rigidly in place ever since.
It really is an odd spectacle. Nearly all other cultures around the world and across the ages treat the life force as an ordinary part of human experience. It’s not something spooky or weird, it’s just a normal aspect of life. Most languages have words for it—qi in Chinese, prana in Sanskrit, pneuma in Greek, ruach in Hebrew, n|um in !Kung, and so on—just as they have words for “rock” or “sky.” What’s more, in most cultures, people work with the life force, using methods that have a great many common factors: controlled breathing, for example, and certain types of movements of the hands. Yet in the Western world, for the last five centuries, our political and cultural authorities, our educational institutions, and our mass media have insisted at the top of their lungs that all this is dangerous superstitious hogwash.
What makes this even stranger is that if you go back more than five centuries, people in the Western countries also recognized the existence of the life force and made much use of it. There was a common word for it, too: in Latin, the language of the educated in those days, it was spiritus, or “spirit” in English. Everybody knew about it. Among other things, the concept had an important religious dimension—when believers in those days talked about the Holy Spirit, they weren’t engaged in theological logic-chopping, they were talking about that particular mode of the life force that embodies the Divine, which they could expect to encounter and experience in religious services and in prayer.
Finally, capping off the weirdness, some of the most pervasive intellectual challenges in all of Western thought are only problematic because of this odd taboo. The classic example is the mind-body problem. We all have minds; we all have bodies. How do these two very different things relate to each other? Philosophers have gone around and around about that one for five hundred years. Before then, the answer was obvious: the life force, or more precisely the subtle body of life force that each of us has, served as the intermediary between them. It’s as though people insisted that there could be no such things as necks, and then devoted five centuries to the most absurd intellectual contortions in the attempt to explain how their heads could possibly be connected to their shoulders.
So how did we get into this bizarre situation? And where do we go from here?
Let’s begin with the historical question. While there were a few scattered thinkers in earlier times who ventured in this direction, the first one that matters in terms of Western history is William of Ockham (1287-1347), the founder of the Nominalist movement in medieval philosophy and the inventor of the famous rhetorical device called, after the Latin spelling of the place he was born, Occam’s Razor. Born in the little village of Ockham in Surrey, he was educated at Oxford and got his master’s degree but was denied a teaching certificate due to serious (and justified) suspicions of heresy. He then left Britain for continental Europe, stirring up controversy wherever he went, and ended up as the house intellectual of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, writing political screeds to support his patron’s struggles against the Pope.
You can read all about his voluminous writings and the debates they launched in various places online. The crucial thing to know about him is that the philosophy he founded, Nominalism, got its name by insisting that nothing exists except for individual objects. Everything else is simply a name (thus “nominalism”) that human beings use to classify individual objects. In particular, such words as “goodness” or “justice” are simply labels we slap on the behavior of certain objects we call “persons”—they have no other meaning. Ockham’s theology thus insisted that God could just as well have decided to make murder and adultery virtuous acts, and calling something “good” simply meant that God commanded humanity to do it.
“Occam’s Razor,” his famous debating tactic, was of a piece with all this. The version usually cited, Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate (“entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”), appears nowhere in his works but many variations on the same idea do occur there. This claim, that an explanation with fewer factors was more likely to be true than one with more factors, is of course very popular nowadays, and has been stretched in the usual way into the claim that “the simplest explanation is usually correct.”
It’s also complete balderdash. Occam’s Razor, in fact, might better be called Occam’s Fallacy. A glance through the history of science, for example, will show that there is no correlation between the number of factors posited in a theory and the accuracy of the theory: theories are as often wrong through being too simple as through being too complex. Dull as the old theologian’s razor has become, though, it’s stayed in constant use right up to the present, because it has two features that are extremely useful for thinkers of Ockham’s type.
The first is that it provides a convenient argument against the existence of anything that people in authority want to deny. You can see this at work in the insistence by scientists that meteorites did not exist, which continued well into the nineteenth century, or the similiar insistence by scientists that continental drift did not happen, which didn’t collapse until the 1970s. In both cases robust evidence for the phenomenon was dismissed using ad hoc handwaving, based on the insistence that it’s so much simpler to hold that rocks don’t fall from the sky and continents don’t move. Readers of mine who follow other disputed phenomena will find the arguments used in both these former controversies painfully familiar.
The second feature of Occam’s Razor that makes it popular unfolds directly from the first: it’s extremely convenient if you want to engage in the logical fallacy of argument from authority but don’t want to admit that this is what you’re doing. This works because that tricky word “simplest” is a value judgment, not an objective quality. Which is the simplest explanation of reports of meteorite falls—that meteorites exist, or that some complicated cascade of explanations or excuses is responsible every time people report seeing a rock fall from the sky? It depends on who you ask, of course. This kind of weasel-worded gimmick, in which a subjective value judgement is decked out in the borrowed finery of objective fact, is of course very common these days as well. Again, my readers will doubtless be familiar with examples.
That is to say, Ockham’s thought was ultimately political in nature. To argue that “goodness” is simply an arbitrary label imposed by divine whim is to lay the groundwork for an argument that other terms are equally arbitrary and can be imposed or erased by the whim of less metaphysical authorities. That was why Ockham was so useful to Emperor Louis IV in the latter’s ongoing conflict with the Pope. The Catholic church in those days, and the Guelphs (the political faction that supported the Popes in these quarrels), insisted that their side of the quarrel was supported by eternal truths; the Holy Roman Emperors and the Ghibellines, the faction that supported their side, needed some way to undercut that claim. Nominalism provided them with the intellectual ammunition they needed to insist that the Popes were just brandishing empty words to prop up a purely arbitrary claim to power.
The struggle between Nominalists and the opposite party, the Realists, kept medieval intellectual life hopping in much the same way that the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines kept the political life of the age astir. Both conflicts, intellectual and political, worked their way over time to an uneasy truce. That finally shattered at the dawn of the seventeenth century, after the political and religious climate in Europe had changed utterly. The Protestant Reformation, the rise of powerful monarchies in western Europe, and the birth of the first wave of mercantile capitalist economic systems set all Europe topsy-turvy. Behind it all was the revolution in transport that gave Europe tall ships capable of rounding the globe with holds full of cargo, and the first rush of the astounding and wildly destabilizing flood of wealth that this technological breakthrough brought back to Europe.
The philosophical and political struggles that resulted are almost always presented by modern Western writers in an oversimplified form, and also in isolation from one another. The political struggle, we are told, pitted the old aristocracies against the rising mercantile-capitalist class, and the latter won; the supposedly unrelated philosophical struggle pitted the old religious belief system against the first stirrings of modern science, and the latter won. Of course both victories were retroactively described as the inevitable triumph of progress and common sense over medieval backwardness. It’s a convenient fiction that allows a great deal of inconvenient history to be obscured.
In fact, there were three sides to the struggle, not two, and the philosophical contest was a direct reflection of the political struggle. At one point of the triangle were the old aristocracies and the ideology they supported, which was more or less traditional Christianity. At the second were the mercantile class and the ideology they supported, which was materialist science, which at the time was the the latest development of Ockham’s Nominalism. At the third point were an odd assortment of people, ranging from monarchs to members of the literate working classes, and the ideology they supported: Renaissance Hermeticism.
Let’s take a moment to unpack those last two words. In the twilight of the ancient world, the Christian church (not yet divided into Orthodox and Catholic camps) did its level best to suppress the rich magical heritage of antiquity while preserving a cleaned-up version of the theory, in the form of Neoplatonist theology, and practice, in the form of sacramentals. (This is a catchall term for all the various religious objects and practices that aren’t counted among the formal sacraments: for example, holy water is a sacramental.)
Fast forward a thousand years to the fifteenth century. A collection of essays written by pagan mystics in Roman times and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus surfaced in Italy and inspired a great many intellectuals to try to recover the lost treasures of ancient occultism. They argued that the same logic that permitted sacramentals could be extended to cover Christian magic, alchemy, and astrology. That view became widespread among members of the urban working classes, newly literate due to the effects of the printing presses; it was popular among a great many intellectuals across the class spectrum; and it also found a home among royalty and their courts, for reasons that deserve a close look.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, kings in various parts of Europe started allying with the urban proto-capitalist class as a way to counter the immense power of the hereditary nobility, which owned much of the land in each kingdom and could (and did) muster private armies large enough to overthrow monarchs. It was a smart move on both sides, since the proto-capitalists needed protection from the nobility just as much as the kings did, and the emergence of effective infantry weapons—pikes, longbows, and ultimately gunpowder—gave it teeth.
The problem for the kings was that by the seventeenth century, due to the immense wealth to be had from maritime trade, the new mercantile capitalist class had the money and power to start overthrowing kings themselves, and they had begun supporting materialist science and ascetic religious movements—Puritans in England, Jansenists in France, and so on—which undercut what was left of the magic of kingship. Elizabeth I of England started quietly cultivating the Hermetic movement as a counterbalance; her successor James I, called “the wisest fool in Christendom” in his day, who concealed utter ruthlessness and impressive political skills under a geeky pose, picked up on it and ran with it—but James’ son Charles I didn’t have his father’s gifts, and allied instead with the old nobility against the mercantile class while doing his level best, for religious reasons, to suppress the Hermetic movement.
The English Civil War followed. Charles lost and was beheaded in 1649. That set the Hermetic movement free to swing to the other extreme and embrace radical politics, which it promptly did. The Diggers, the Levellers, the Fifth Monarchy Men, and the other revolutionary movements of the 1650s, which sketched out to an astonishing degree the revolutionary ideas of the next two centuries, were heavily influenced by Hermetic ideas; Gerrard Winstanley, the great theoretician of the Diggers, drew his economic theory explicitly from Hermetic alchemical thought. This was not a feeble phenomenon; at one point in the 1650s the revolutionary movements came within an ace of seizing control of the army and the kingdom.
That sent panic through the mercantile and aristocratic classes alike, and forced them to find common ground. King Charles II accordingly was called back from exile and took the throne, religious and political differences ended in a series of awkward compromises, and England settled into the hybrid system of government it’s had ever since. Similar processes took place in other western European countries, but England was the one that counted, because that’s where the industrial revolution took off. It’s also where the system of centralized representative government, which concentrates power in the hands of capitalists and aristocrats while giving everyone else the illusion of participation in politics, first took root.
The suppression of the life force was part of that. The life force was the keynote of Hermeticism, the bond that united mind and matter and explained how magic and other occult sciences worked, so out it went. That expulsion was redoubled in the nineteenth century when the capitalists and the aristocrats turned on each other, using the squabbles over Darwinism as their excuse; once the capitalists won, the aristocrats were stripped of most of their remaining political power, and the Christian churches lost the last of their authority, today’s dogmatic materialism became the order of the day, and the new centralized systems of education that replaced older, decentralized, more or less religiously based arrangements all over Europe and North America proceeded to enforce that, ramming the new doctrine down the throats of each subsequent generation.
So that’s how most of us lost our necks, and became heads bobbing along somewhere vaguely above our bodies. That’s how a set of ideas that started out as the talking points of medieval Ghibellines trying to advance the cause of the Holy Roman Emperors, and then morphed into another set of talking points used by mercantile capitalists to undercut the authority of kings and aristocrats in the hope of replacing both by straightforward plutocracy, got turned into one of the core belief systems of the modern world and used as a bludgeon to beat down anybody who perceived something they weren’t supposed to perceive.
Yes, what all this implies is that worldviews—all worldviews—have a political dimension, and are accepted or rejected by societies far more often on the basis of politics than for any less gritty reason. Scientific materialism was embraced by the West because it justifies the authority claims made by scientists, and thus the claims to power and wealth of the people who pay the salaries of scientists. Of course science and technology have brought benefits; pour vast amounts of money and talent into any set of ideas, and that’s going to happen—and it’s worth noting that the propagandists who wax rhapsodic about the benefits of science and technology are remarkably mum when it comes to mentioning the corresponding costs.
Thus it’s anything but an accident that a great many people who want to take control of their own health back from the fantastically corrupt and abusive medical industry we have here in the US have turned to health care modalities that use the life force. (Yes, that’s spelled “quackery” in the jargon of today’s materialist pseudoskeptics; funny how they never apply that label to the many products of the pharmaceutical industry that provide little or no benefit.) It’s no accident, either, that magic has been practiced with passionate fervor all through the American underclass from colonial times on, producing first-rate systems of magical practice—African-American conjure is probably the best documented of these, but far from the only one.
It’s also why, whenever the political and economic systems of American society stop benefiting most Americans, that old nemesis of the establishment, Hermetic occultism, comes surging up again out of the crawlspaces of society. Think of it as the return of the repressed, or simply as the inevitable consequence of denouncing something to the skies when what you offer in its place isn’t working too well. As the world created by scientific materialism run amok proves to be unfit for human habitation, people are looking for alternatives, and the more strident the denunciation of those alternatives become, the more people will perk up their ears and embrace whatever will outrage their supposed betters most.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer a bit of advice to any Christian clergy who might be listening in on this conversation. You might consider looking back a few centuries and relearning all the ways that your churches used to direct spirit—that is to say, the life force, blessed by the divine influence—to help people with their daily lives. (Yes, that’s spelled “sacramentals” in Catholic jargon.) Your predecessors used to do a lot of healing and blessing; of course they believed in the real existence of their god, and I’m not sure how many of you still do, but that’s something you’ll have to settle in the privacy of your own conscience. If all you can offer is earnest moralizing and amateur counseling, that may not cut it any more.
In the meantime, teachers of the old occult traditions are still around, still helping people learn how to perceive the life force and work with it. As scientific materialism implodes around us, I don’t think we’ll have any shortage of students.
Great essay as usual! Tracing the intellectual genealogy of modern materialistic attitudes is always interesting and enlightening, especially since it undermines the implicit and deeply ignorant assumption amongst many skeptical types that their worldview is just straightforward reason and empiricism in a vacuum, unsullied by history or origin. I also appreciate your observation about Ockaham’s razor because people are much too lazy with it.
The use of breathing exercises, even when it’s not couched in notions of life force, does seem to crop up often–Wim Hof breathing has gotten really popular over the last few years. There’s another interesting example of this that I’ve seen some of–there’s a YouTube fitness influencer named Eliot Hulse who practices what he calls “bioenergetic breathing”, he describes the technique in simple terms (and forgive me for the vulgarity here but these are the exact words he uses) as “breathe into your balls”. My hypothesis is that it basically ends up stimulating the Yesod center. In any case I think the reason breathing exercises still come up often is because it’s relatively easy to describe them in fully material terms such that people who are skeptical of anything beyond the material can still participate in them without feeling weird about it.
“Wars to make the world safe for plutocracy”
That’s priceless. I’m gonna write that one down.
re. “Sacraments, sacramentals”: da Luuteran church we go to has all kinds of wild ideas about the power of sacraments. Seems that they believe in magic without realizing it. I wonder if you have any comments regarding the relationship between Christian sacraments and magic? I think a few weeks ago you used a word to describe those Christian churches which believe in the salvatory power of sacrament vs. those who concentrate more on the salvatory power of a faith relationship with the Creator.
The laziest explanation is the one I have to think about the least. Time to get back on TikTok.
Occams razor -whereby our heads are sliced off. I was wondering how it got there on the nightstand.
We’ve been told the contents of the Great Library of Alexandria have been lost due to its multiple destructions; however, I think a substantial portion of reached Constantinople. When Constantinople was sacked in 1204, these ancient writings found their way west, creating Hermeticism.
I noticed that most of money to rebuild Notre Dame came from scientific materialists in an attempt to neuter its spiritual power. They thought they succeeded but it only created a vacuum for the original Notre Dame: Venus/Isis
I think it is interesting that the the Washington Establishment has now coined a new term that they are quickly spreading through the controlled media outlets to describe both their enemies in the Trump Camp, but I am sure one that will be used against anyone who voices opinion different from those of the political elite.
Yes this very clever and sophisticated term is ” Weird”. It has quickly become the new ” deplorables” but has a much wider range of use as it can ( and I am sure it will be) applied to those who don’t likes Vax’s, the medical establishment, or believe in some sort of Life Force.
I think it’s snuck back in to the common parlance of the midwest, at least among the older folks where I came from. Listen to some of them use the word ‘heart’ (as in ‘His heart’s just not in him since his wife passed’) and is sure sounds like what you’re talking about. Or, talking about ‘losing heart’- when I’ve heard the phrase used it sounds more than a mere platitude…of course this is also usually said by people who haven’t had their common sense educated out of them…
Oh yeah. Love it when you put on the historian-of-ideas hat. I’ll make sure to revisit this one.
Gracias Don Juan (Micael)!
1. The graphics of some recent popular video games feature characters/avatars with little or no discernible neck, or sometimes even apparent attachment.
2. This puts a different light on Sebastian Morello’s idea of reconciling hermetic magic and Christianity. Both of these are now effectively belief systems of the underclass; it makes a lot of sense for them to forge an alliance to displace scientific materialism.
Clay #6: the “weird” phenomenon is entertaining for two reasons:
1) look up the etymology of the word – it’s actually related to fate or destiny, less about strangeness.
2) look at the people deploying the term. The Twitter right-wing meme sphere is having a field day with this.
Open question!
How can someone approach the “spirit” for physical healing, assuming they are steeped in the materialist views of today? The stereotypes of spiritual healing is that it is too complicated or fragile to attain, as opposed to current health science which provides rigid instructions (take this pill) and is in that way more approachable.
For mental health, meditation is effective, easy to understand and approach, and clearly better than pills, and this is so obvious it is held even amongst the “office fauna”.
So my question is more for physical healing. For example if you have a cold the science would tell you to take a fever suppressant. Is there common spiritual ways to approach common colds and such?
One of my bugaboos is Christianity, and how it has become denuded of meaning. I delved into Christianity in a dedicated way trying to understand it, and secondly, try to figure out what is wrong with it (where it went wrong).
I think one of the reasons why Christianity keeps failing, is that “spirit” and (if I must) “holy spirit” is absent.
First there is spirit, then God, then Jesus (Christ is optional, I am not a believer so I don’t use that word), in that order. With no foundation, the house falls down. With no spirit, God and Jesus fall down.
I might as well air a related grumble of mine. This one thing completely alienated me from Christianity forever (and I gave it a six-year try):
Christianity insists that spirit must be holy. Not so. They are flat out wrong. They skip spirit entirely. The way I see it, Christianity-now theologically ignores “spirit” when spirit is by itself, alone, nothing holy about it, neutral. This is why the simple act of “closing the eyes” is so threatening to so many Christians: because closing one’s eyes helps to feel spirit as it is, alone, nothingness, the void, the abyss, the universe. Feeling spirit, by itself, is absolutely, unquestionably verboten.
So, to be more accurate, in Christianity, first there is spirit, then holy spirit, then God, then Jesus (± Christ). I say, one absolutely MUST accustom one’s self/Self to “spirit” — by itself, often practicing for years or decades before moving on.
Some Christians, even in centering prayer, load up prayers with “you must think of Christ” right after you close the eyes. Yuck! Hell no, let me “be” first. Bunch of control freaks. If I bring in Christ, let it be in my own f’ing time.
Christianity had its chance, centuries even. It screwed up. It is a chicken still running around after its head is cut off. Plenty of people are able to find Buddhism, Hinduism, and a heck of a lot of other religious traditions that are exceptionally good at “sitting in spirit.” It is appropriate that European Christianity (and its diaspora) fail.
I am now a Buddhist. Buddhism and meditation help me persevere this rough-and-tumble incarnation.
💨Northwind Grandma💨⛪️🧐
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Synchronicity strikes again. I was editing an essay I wrote that touches on the English Diggers and the SF Diggers this past week. That is fascinating about the Hermetic connection about Winstanley!
Alex, I’m glad to hear this. Breathing exercises are the best way for most people to learn to work with the life force — it’s not accidental that most words for the life force, including “spirit,” come from words for breath.
Davie, I’m glad to hear the Lutherans haven’t forgotten everything! If I recall correctly, I referred to the older and more ritually oriented churches as sacramental churches. In terms of the relationship between sacraments and magic, Dion Fortune referred to the Christian communion ritual aka Mass as the most widely practiced ritual of white magic in the world, and of course she was quite correct. The older, sacramental churches still have at least some of the magical practices they adopted in ancient times — though I’m not sure how many priests and ministers still know how to do them, or have the training to do them well.
Justin, two nice zingers. Thank you.
Geoff, whether the library of Alexandria itself had that happen to its contents, Constantinople certainly ended up with some very good book collections of its own. The crucial date, though, was 1453, when the Ottomans finally took Constantinople. It was after that event that vast nmbers of old manuscripts made their way west — Ficino got the copy of the Corpus Hermeticum he translated in 1462.
Clay, I wonder if they realize just how comprehensively they shot themselves through all four cheeks with that coinage. By saying that conservatives are weird, the media just defined themselves right out there in public as the side of conformism, mediocrity, and blandness. Of course that’s been true of them for a good long time, but now they’ve admitted it openly. Their doom will not be long delayed.
KMB, hmm! Interesting. If I recall correctly, Owen Barfield speculated in one of his books that that was happening to the word “heart,” and in a few centuries some other word (I think he suggested “cardium”) will be coined for the biological organ.
Thibault, you’re welcome and thank you.
Roy, fascinating. Can you point me to a source or two on Morello’s ideas? He may well be onto something.
Alex, it depends on which system of spiritual healing you have in mind — there are many! In the Essene healing system I learned from John Gilbert, you’d enter into meditation, activate your palm centers, and then direct healing energy into your upper respiratory tract. In Do-In, the system of acupressure I practice, you’d check the point at the beginning of the lung meridian to see if it has deficient or excessive energy, then treat other points along that meridian, especially the one in the webbing between thumb and forefinger on each side, If you’re using cell salts, on the other hand, Ferrum phos. 6x and Natrum sulph. 6x, normal dose, taken together at 1-2 hour intervals until the symptoms go away. (Ahem: these examples are presented purely for illustrative purposes and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any illness, or divert so much as a single penny away from the overflowing bank accounts of the medical industry. See your properly licensed health care provider, blah blah blah.)
Northwind, so noted, but a lot of people disagree with you and find that Christianity meets their spiritual needs. Mind you, it doesn’t meet mine either, but for other reasons.
Justin, Winstanley’s worth reading. Did you know he was also the first Universalist to publish in English? His book The Mysterie of God argued that a loving and merciful God would not let any soul be damned for all eternity. I’ve considered proclaiming him a saint of the Universal Gnostic Church, with a feast day of 19 October (his baptismal date, since in the usual way his birth was not recorded).
You just mentioned my favorite historical person, Gerard Winstanley. I used my last pennies to buy a copy of “The Works of Gerard Winstanley” by George Sabine. My favorite writing is his “The Law of Freedom”. I think he must have been a really amazing person. The time of his living was a time of turmoil, because the feudal system was collapsing and people didn’t know what was coming next. I have long thought that those people (Diggers, Quakers, etc.) were living through a time not unlike ours, and trying to figure out how to survive. He’s my hero.
I’ve been practicing Reiki for some time now, with quite good results… I have come to the conclusion that it’s fundamentally just my life force reaching out to theirs to give it a boost..hatbut explanations don’t matter as long as it works…
In the excellent book How Doctors Think, by two medical specialists, they state that experiments have shown that people around the World praying for a patient, regardless of religion or faith, will improve outcomes, even if the patient doesn’t know that people are praying for him…..
John, no I didn’t. I haven’t, er, dug that deep into it yet. The Diggers were always kind of their in the background in some of my anarchist philosophy readings but I had no idea about these Hermetic and Mystical connections. I got the chills of truth from reading your words about this… I will have to find a copy of his book (I’m guessing on archive.org).
I just put this book on hold though: Radicalism and Reverence the Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley by George M. Shulman. There aren’t as many books on the Diggers as I’d like in our collection…
It seems to me the ideas of the Diggers are very relevant just now with the cost of food and the cost of housing for so many.
Here is my song for the week: The Diggers Song from Chumbawamba, sung accappella in classic folk style, from their album English Rebel Songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA4FTIz2Zrw&ab_channel=dprkspacemarine
Thanks for another great essay.
Mr. Greer,
Are there any sources out there where I can learn more about Catholic sacramentals?
Whoa! What a well-timed essay for me personally, as I’ve been reading the jurisprudential writings of Christian Hermeticist and legal philosopher Valentin Tomberg (the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism). The realism vs nominalism debate is at the crux of his analysis of the degeneration of jurisprudence that led to the Communist revolution and world wars. I’ll note that in his final work on jurisprudence he explicitly mentions Catholic doctor and saint Albertus Magnus publishing the Latin text of the Emerald Tablet.
I suspect that Christian clergy listening in are already persuaded of the merits of your argument and practice accordingly. Well, this one does 😉
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. 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 and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Heather’s brother in law, Patrick, who is dying of cancer and has dementia, go gentle into that good light. And may his wife Maggie, who is ill herself, find the strength and peace she needs for her situation.
May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget in Devon UK, who has recently regained consciousness after a week of sedation following a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
May young Azalea Troung of California, who recently had a life threatening reaction to the initial antibiotic applied for a finger bone infection, resolve her reaction without lasting issue; may the infection be completely cleared from her body; and may her family, including those physically separated from her, be strengthened against fear and dread.
May Rebecca, who has just been laid off from her job and is the sole provider for her family, quickly discover a viable means to continue to support her family; may she and her family be blessed and sustained in their journey forward.
May Just Another Green Rage Monster, his mother, and his Kiddo be blessed and healed as they deal with the loss of Monster’s father.
May Kerry’s dad Michael, who is experiencing extreme delusional behavior and overwhelming anxiety, be healed mentally and emotionally.
May Ian, who has recently been diagnosed with Diastolic Heart Failure, be healed and restored to full health quickly and completely.
Regarding Princess Cutekitten’s recently renewed problems with mortgage servicers causing her difficulties, may the situation resolve in the best way possible.
May MindWinds’ dad, Clem, be blessed and healed after his fall and consequent head injury.
May Jeff H’s cat Tuxy, who ran off from their new home in June, be safely returned home to Jeff’s family.
May Jennifer have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Ecosophian, whose cat Cheesecake (picture)ran away on Wednesday 6/12, be safely reunited with Cheesecake; and may Cheesecake be protected and guided on his journey home.
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.
Tyler A’s wife Monika’s pregnancy is high risk, and has now successfully entered the third trimester; may Monika and baby Isabelle both be blessed with good health and a smooth delivery.
May Jennifer’s mother Nancy G. in SW Missouri is still recovering from various troubles including brain surgery for hydrocephaly; may she be healed, regain her mobility, and be encouraged with loving energy.
May Erika, who recently lost her partner James and has been dealing with major knee problems (and who senses a connection between the two), be healed in both broken heart and broken knee, and be able to dance in the sun once more.
May Ms. Krieger’s hometown of Norwalk, Connecticut recover quickly and fully from the gasoline tanker fire that destroyed an overpass and shut down interstate 95 on May 2. May the anger and fire that has made driving in the area so fraught cool down in a way that benefits all beings. May all people, animals, and other beings around the highway, the adjacent river and the harbor be protected and blessed, and may the natural environment improve to the benefit of all. (update)
May Christina, who passed away on 5/8, experience a peaceful repose; may the minor child she leaves behind be cared for, and the needs of all affected me met; and may her family be comforted in this difficult time.
May Frank Rudolf Hartman of Altadena California (picture), who is receiving chemotherapy, be completely cured of the lymphoma that is afflicting him, and may he return to full health.
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 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.
Dear JMG & commentariat, what in your opinion is the best healing system to learn? I have experienced healing both to and from my hands, for myself and others. I feel I could perhaps nourish this spark to help folks. I was considering Reiki but someone told me they felt there were better modalities. Any advice very much appreciated.
KMB, consciousness of spirit never entirely disappeared. For one thing, it was misnamed, mislabeled and exploited under the title ‘enthusiasm’, most often by conformists in positions of authority for whom a simple contract (I perform X task as per instructions and you pay me Y cash at designated times.) was never good enough. Oh no, they had to have enthuusiasm, meaning your spirit in thrall to their egos.
I take a mordant pleasure seeing folks being denounced as ‘weird’, when, for decades, in my experience, that particular faction was all about demanding cultural conformity from me and others.
Having no neck would also eliminate the throat chakra; is that significant in the context of this essay?
Northwind Grandma: it sounds like you were the victim of something that I was also a victim of, years ago, which in my case was a sermon laying out the proper formula for prayer. It was rigid and formulaic and I abandoned it quickly, but even so I believe that it did do me some damage. I find much more efficacy in starting with a simple prayer from my childhood “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep…etc.”, or the Lord’s prayer (the Our Father for Catholics) and letting God direct the rest of it. Blessings on your journey.
Sebastian Morello writes essays regularly in The European Conservative https://europeanconservative.com/articles/author/sebastian-morello/
He also wrote a book titled “The World as God’s Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas” which is on my reading list, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
Some essays that might be relevant:
“Can Hermetic Magic Rescue the Church? Part III: The Magi Return” (links to parts 1 & 2 in the intro) https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/can-hermetic-magic-rescue-the-church-part-iii-the-magi-return/
“Mysticism as the Foundation of Philosophy” https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/mysticism-as-the-foundation-of-philosophy/
“The Magic of Christmas is Real” https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/the-magic-of-christmas-is-real/
“Incarnation and Egregore: Two Principles in Opposition” https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/incarnation-and-egregore-two-principles-in-opposition/
“The Theurgy of Deer Stalking” https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/the-theurgy-of-deer-stalking/
I haven’t explored his ideas enough to have any idea of where he might be going with this, but he seems to know his way around Hermetic philosophy, so I guess we will see. I’ve got a lot more investigation to do.
Relatedly, just last week I discovered something called “Radical Orthodoxy” that is a movement founded by John Milbank and which also seems to be interested, at least to some extent, to engaging with Hermeticism. I’ve done no further exploration of that thus far, but it’s on my list.
I think adding the Latin Mass to the Catholic Church would inject a lot more life force into those boring, dreary masses that have devolved into pop psychology. I went to a Catholic school for 18 years and literally feel more life force on a forest walk alone than I ever have inside a Catholic Church teeming with people, with one exception.
St. John Cantius in Detroit, an old Polish church built in 1911 and then rebuilt in 1923, felt magical. Its last mass was over 15 years ago, but that was the only place I ever felt anything spiritual inside a Catholic Church (although some of the songs are nice).
re: conservatives being ‘weird’ and therefore bad. Being weird was basically the school bullies main charge against me as a child. That particular word usage doesn’t make me want to side with the people using it…
Clay #6, Roy #10, and JMG: “weird” is a dog-whistle term for autistic/neurodivergent, too. Aspie folks are one of the few remaining “communities” (lordy, how I dislike that term) that it’s OK to demean.
I see the System™ scrambling to find ways to ostracise Trump, Vance, and conservatives; hopefully this little foray into calling them weird, i.e. autistic, will have a lot of blowback, since the very medium they’re using (the Internet) is a product by and large of those self-same weird autists.
Alex wrote, “‘breathe into your balls’. My hypothesis is that it basically ends up stimulating the Yesod center.”
Since there are various different ways to map the tree of life onto the human body, I recommend also trying out the hypothesis that ‘breathing into your balls’ could naturally stimulate the Malkuth center. By testing out both of those visualizations while practicing that deep breath exercise, you will then be able to compare their different effects on the life force within your body. Any practice that encourages energy movement all the way into the root, where the kundalinis lie dormantly coiled, is going to awaken all sorts of energy flows that our insecure culture has gone out of its way to keep repressed and unacknowledged.
There are always three sides to everything, but billions of years of evolution have left all living things, sentient or not, doing everything in twos. The third way of seeing the world, as you say, went underground. One proponent of it, Wilhelm Reich, called it “orgone”, and claimed to have discovered it.
Hi John,
I was always annoyed by this sort of rhetorical question against dualism: How on earth could two distinct substances ever interact with each other? They’ve made “the inability to interact” a defining characteristic of what it means to be a distinct substance, which begs the question of whether their definition is useful. On the other hand, if the rhetorical question is taken seriously, then the answers are to be sought in experience.
The last two words of Occam’s Razor, “beyond necessity” rescues the principle. Of course, any entity used in an explanation should contribute to the explanation in some way, but “beyond necessity” leaves open the question of how many entities are in fact necessary.
Nominalism appears to deny mathematics, which is in itself a fatal flaw. There is an unmistakeable reality of “two” that lurks behind two hands, two oranges, two tables, etc.
@Northwind Grandma,
I find Christianity meaningful, and my practice of it also. Clearly, our experiences have been quite different.
The idea of life force is taking center-stage in the Star Wars movies. I really like how George Lucas wrote the Force in the original trilogy, Yoda’s description of the Force is almost exactly what the Holy Spirit is, except the Holy Spirit has agency and is not just a senseless part of the Universe.
Although that changes with the Phantom Menace, where the Force appears to have a sort of mind and desire and decides to create Anakin Skywalker inside a woman without male “assistance” in order to bring balance to the Force.
Then there’s the midichlorians … I don’t know about them 🙂
The Weird of Trump?
Coincidentally***, I was just reading some essays by Kevin Dann, who wrote a biography of Thoreau, called Expect Great Things. Dann said that Thoreau was a phenomenologist and he told people that he conversed with fairies, or nature elementals. Antebellum science in the US was more focused on nature and that was all lost after the US Civil War.
Dann brought up something that you’ve talked about many times, JMG, and that is that the average person in the US used natural magic all the time. Transcendentalism, which came from European Romanticism, had no problem with this belief.
*** I don’t think it was a coincidence.
Fascinating essay, JMG, and, ahem, Axé. : )
@Northwind Grandma, I suspect many older variants of Christianity still retain their proper understanding of the spirit, although these may be obscured somewhat by the materialistic impulses of folks these days. The Holy Spirit is, after all, the bond between the Unmanifest God (the Father) and the Manifest God (the Son), extending “outward” and throughout all creation. The sacramentals still abide…so long as there is faith.
What I suspect is lacking is discernment of spirits, as there are a plethora of them…hosts, you might say, and not all of them have our best interests at heart. These days, people are apt to seek out any old spirit, and…well, take a look at some of the cults out there, espeically seemingly in the ’60s and ’70s, and you can see what happens.
Katherine, I’m delighted to hear this! I managed to get a collection of his writings from a university library many years back, and thought he was a fascinating thinker.
Pyrrhus, mention the healing effects of prayer sometimes to some dogmatic atheists if you want to see the saliva fly. For extra credit, show them the controlled double-blind studies that prove that it works. It’s really quite fetching if you enjoy shrieking tantrums.
Justin, given your background, I think you’ll find Winstanley very congenial. Here are some equally congenial introductions to his ideas, published mostly via mimeograph by anarchist communes:
https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-4053/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/anarchy_is_order_2003_winstanley_diggers/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-3646/mode/2up
And here’s the man’s own books, as originally published:
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Winstanley%2C+Gerrard.%22
Ennobled, I’m going to ask the Catholics who are reading this to comment, as I don’t know the literature on the sacramentals at all well. Anybody?
MJ, hmm! I’m familiar with Tomberg but I didn’t know he wrote on jurisprudence. Interesting.
Sam, I’m delighted to hear this.
Quin, thank you for this as always. Er, this comment was also doubled — I clipped the repeat.
Larkrise, that’s like asking what is the best set of exercises to practice or what is the best musical instrument to play! It depends entirely on yourself — your gifts, talents, interests, and limitations. What works best for me may not work at all for you, and vice versa. I’d encourage you to do some looking around via books and the internet, try some options, and see what works best for you.
Phutatorius, hmm! I don’t know; it’s a good theme for meditation, though.
Roy, many thanks for this. As time permits I’ll check out what he has to say.
Dennis, oh, granted. It’s partly the Latin, with the very deep egregor that’s established, and partly that the new version of the Mass promulgated by Vatican II gutted the magical dimensions of the ritual and turned a profound theurgic ceremony into a somewhat gawky community singalong with stale bread.
Pygmycory, me too. I got called “weirdo” so many times I started using “normalo” to refer to those who did that.
Bryan, true. As the history of the Chans demonstrates, Trump already has a magnetic attraction to autists; the more the term “weird” gets used by the Democrats, the more often I expect to hear the far-off, froglike call “Autists assemble!” on the Chans, gathering self-weaponized autists for another round of creative disruption aimed at the Democratic side…
Allen, Reich called it orgone, Reichenbach called it od, Mesmer called it animal magnetism, Hieronymus called it eloptic energy, Lévi called it the astral light, and the list goes on. People keep on discovering it — and they keep on figuring out neat ways to use it.
Greg, ah, so you’re a Platonist when it comes to mathematics. That’s a respectable thing to be. (In my tentacle novels I had fun making shoggoths so un-Platonic that they are unable to conceive of numbers — it makes no sense to them that two apples and two tables have something in common. Of course they don’t have fingers to count on, except as temporary extrusions of protoplasm…) As for Occam’s razor, not at all — those words “beyond necessity” make the entire claim meaningless, since there is no way to know in advance how many entities are actually necessary!
Rafael, nah, remember this exchange:
Obi-wan: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.
Luke: You mean it controls your actions?
Obi-wan: Partially, but it also obeys your commands.
That suggests that it has the capacity to make choices, and thus control what a Jedi does.
John, weirdly enough, that hadn’t occurred to me yet. Funny! (I probably should have slipped a reference to voor in there somewhere…)
Jon, exactly. We have lost so much — but a great deal of it can still be recovered.
Fra’ Lupo, thank you! (Ahem indeed.)
Long time reader, first time commenting.
Today I concluded my medical training, qualifying as a doctor, and this article could not have been more timeous for me as a full circle moment.
I started my journey to medicine by first studying and practicing homeopathy for a number of years – a field that is regulated and accredited in my country.
After being subsequently immersed in both schools of medical theory, the major distinction between the two is not the infinitessimal dosing of homeopathy, nor is it the treating by like curing like.
The essential element to distinguish the differences in theory and method is that of vitalism, a term that none of my medical classmates were familiar with.
Thank you for shedding light on the history of how this almost nameless taboo came to be in the Western World.
As for the future of healthcare, I am excited at the thought of reductionist materialism loosening its feverish grasp on our health care options, like the recent medical tyranny seen the world over.
As for me, I hope to assist many people for years to come, using the best of both approaches.
Hertz
I can guarantee you if that’s how we all woke up in the morning, my cat would be right there, persistently guiding my hands and making sure that everything connected properly, so she could get fed. She doesn’t stop until that food is in the bowl.
You know, I’m truly amazed that hoomans have made as much progress as they have. People with equally bad ideas are willing to go to war to defend their bad idea against someone else’s bad idea. MY BAD IDEA IS THE ONLY IDEA.
Duly downloaded. Thanks for rounding them up. These pamphlets will fit well as an appendix to the Gaianomicon I’ve been assembling.
I found this version of The Mysterie of God to be easier going on the eyes, for anyone else who wants to read it. It doesn’t look to be all that long:
https://www.mercyuponall.org/gerrard-winstanley-the-mysterie-of-god-1649/
John, while we we are on the subject, I was struck by Winstanley’s idea of Seven Dispensations as potentially correlating to the Seven Swarms of the Cos Doc / Occult Philosophy Workbook… just for starters.
JMG – Could you speculate on the placebo/nocebo effect in light of today’s topic? (Such a terrible term for a demonstrably effective aspect of healing!)
Quotations below are from a Vox article on placebos: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/7/15792188/placebo-effect-explained
“Studies show that post-operative patients whose painkillers are distributed by a hidden robot-pump at an undisclosed time need twice as much drug to get the same pain-relieving effect as when the drug is injected by a nurse they could see. So awareness that you’re being given something that’s supposed to relieve pain seems to impact perception of it working.”
“The research also suggests that fake surgeries — where doctors make some incisions but don’t actually change anything — are an even stronger placebo than pills. A 2014 systematic review of surgery placebos found that the fake surgery led to improvements 75 percent of the time. In the case of surgeries to relieve pain, one meta-review found essentially no difference in outcomes between the real surgeries and the fake ones.”
PERCEPTION is mightily influenced by expectation!
>By saying that conservatives are weird, the media just defined themselves right out there in public as the side of conformism, mediocrity, and blandness
I think it’s a bit more than that. They so very much want to say out loud “WE HATE YOU” but for whatever reasons they can’t quite bring themselves to say it out loud. So they tiptoe around what it is they really want to say. But you are right, they are now the dorks in the room.
I find it amusing if you teleported a conservative from 40 years ago to today and told him he’s now weird, how honestly confused and disoriented he’d be.
Clay Dennis #6
The word “weird” is straight out of the 1960s hippie movement. I was there. I was a hippie between 1969 and 1973.
Hippies were (using those specific words) “freaks” and “weirdos.” There were other words like strange; peculiar; odd; nut; sicko; all implying out of the ordinary.
If someone called me a “weirdo” (which they did back then), I would have replied, “Thanks for the compliment‼️” Same for now.
My guess is that Trampers would be called “weirdos,” and I hope they reply, “Thank you ma’m/sir. That is so kind of you to say.”
Since I will be voting for Tramp*🤫🤐, I am a weirdo. And a freak. Somehow this weirdo survived 70-odd years whereas half my age-group are dead. “Weirdo” feels right. Let it rip.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🤪🤗
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
70-something
(*) After months of thought, soul-searching, and study. No sh__.
It’s certainly true that the double-standard surrounding Occam’s Razor is alive and well. The mouthpieces of the managerial class just love using it to denounce “conspiracy theories” with that tired old refrain, “Do you know how many people would have to be in on it?” But they have no problem spinning the most convoluted narratives imaginable to justify their own claims.
For example, those surrounding Covid-19: “It’s a deadly pandemic!” “Social distancing is effective!” “Surgical masks are effective!” “The vaccine is effective!” Et cetera, et cetera. Their attempts to explain away the contradictory data were the absolute antithesis of Occam’s Razor.
And the funny thing is, I’ve seen far more evidence for the existence of the life force than the existence of the countless Covid variants.
Thanks, JMG. You keep rescuing me from from the ills of scientific materialistic education and cultural experience. I knew about Xi from traditional Karate training and, like you, Taichi. A friend of mine has made her living for 40 years providing Pranic Healing. My 94 year old father just passed to the next existence. I got a first hand view of the Capitalistic Sick System in action. As it continues to fail, we might get our necks back. As usual, Thank you!
I think there’s a very real chance the “Trump is weird” thing is going to blow up badly in the Democratic Party’s face: the majority of my graduating class of 2013 was bullied, and everyone I know who’s younger than me has said it’s gotten worse. All I can say is social media and teenagers or children is a terrible combination. I know someone who is normally a die hard supporter of the Democrats who is now considering supporting Trump, because she had the same reaction I did to the word “weird”.
I wonder just how strange the media reaction will be if the Republicans win the 18-30 demographic…
The democratic establishment seems to have no sense of historical or cultural context in choosing the word Weird to be used as a bludgeon against their enemies.
For the last 20 years or so that unofficial Mantra of the west coast city between Seattle and San Francisco has been ” Keep Portland Weird”. This was embraced in the form of bumper stickers and Murals all over town. But it referred to Portlands irreverent Liberal identity well described in the TV Series “Portlandia”, and certainly not to anything conservative.
If they keep on insulting the Weird I think it is possible that the weirdos in Portland might just change their voting habits and go for Trump. As they say, ” Stranger things have happened.”
Larkwise #22
I prefer ✨acupuncture.✨Since 1995, my husband and I have gotten acupuncture treatments twice a month (“maintenance”), going on thirty-years, pretty much without fail. The first few visits were twice a week, then once a week, then twice a month. Once a month was too little—I could tell because I “cratered”: went off the deep end, so to speak.
I attribute, having lived to 70-something, much of the good life I have been honored with🧎🏼♀️➡️, to twice a month acupuncture visits.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🪡✨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Clay Dennis wrote, “Yes this very clever and sophisticated term is ‘Weird’. It has quickly become the new ‘deplorables’ but has a much wider range of use”
The mash-ups of all the bobbling talking-heads suddenly trotting out their newly mandated “Weird!” epithet are embarrassing to behold. Whichever myopic advertising-think-tank idiots minted that derogatory ejaculation and cannot see it for the sneeringly smug self-goal it so obviously is, really ought to update their résumés quickly — they’re going to need them again soon. Since its great reveal came right after Vance’s VP nomination and has gotten hurled at him more than anyone else, my best guess is that the technocratic class, trapped inside their own linguistic gymnastics, are convinced that “Weird!” can become an uncancelable, teflon-coated, dog-whistle substitute for “redneck”, “hillbilly”, and “deplorable”. Poor dears, they actually think the majority hears those as derogatory terms anymore!
Twenty years ago, I was throwing pots at a DC studio, whose owner used “Weirdo” as a substitute pronoun when refering to anyone. She had clearly been ridiculed and heckled mercilessly in her childhood, and then imagined that she had somehow triumphed by reclaiming that abusive term. All I ever could experience around her was an unstated demand for codependent conformity, allowing her to stay in the delusion that she had put in the necessary effort to recover from her trauma, and a bitter but cowardly bully lurking inside her. My god, she was toxic!
While I doubt that our technocratic class were often the targets of relentless heckling, given the pampered and protected status they have grown so accustomed to, I would not be at all surprised to discover that they are now feeling as fundamentally threatened as that damaged potter did. Their synchronized shrieking of newly-minted epithets is a deafening call for codependent conformity to protect their cherished delusions. Likewise, anyone insecure enough to hope to find some unassailable stand-in put-down for “redneck” or “hillbilly” clearly has a bitter but cowardly bully lurking inside. I believe their new “weirding” campaign points to a serious collapse of their power and influence, as well as a settling into their upcoming role as a bitterly reminiscing former élite. The White Russians couchsurfing their way across Europe comes vividly to mind. I wonder if the fallen technocrats will eventually refer to each other’s laudable past glory using titles like Grand Duke or GS-11 or simply Weirdo.
Hertz, as a qualified medical doctor you have a unique opportunity to give people their necks back. I’m delighted to hear that you’re aware of the role of vitalism in homeopathy — too many homeopaths aren’t. (I use biochemic tissue salts for my home health care, thus have had a lot of opportunities to experience the interface between homeopathic preparations and the life force.) I hope all goes well for you.
Other Owen, you mean your cat wouldn’t knock your head off the nightstand? 😉
Justin, hmm! “Mr. Winstanley, permit me to introduce you to Miss Firth. I think the two of you have quite a bit to talk about.”
Ken, the life force can be directed by consciousness — roughly half the modalities for working with it take advantage of that fact. The placebo and nocebo effects are simply very broad, crude categories for the positive and negative impacts of consciousness on the life force.
Other Owen, oh, they’ll get there. They’ve come so far already!
Sam, exactly. So have I.
Mac, you’re welcome. I do my best.
Taylor, at this point that wouldn’t surprise me a bit. It strikes me that the US media and the political class they prop up have exactly the same vibe as the popular kids at my high school — obsessively groomed, conventionally attractive, smugly confident, and utterly clueless.
Clay, I know. It’s potentially among the most astonishing own goals in modern politics.
I don’t think it was just the autists getting called weird or treated as such. Granted this was Canada not the USA and a while back now, but a group of people I hung out with at Uni included a number or people who’d felt marginalized for multiple assorted different reasons throughout highschool. We’d happily refer to ourselves and each other as being weird, and I think being a bit different is part of what brought us together in the first place.
I wonder how well democrats using weird as a pejorative is going to go over with people who are, say, non-neurodivergent but with issues like ADHD, practice a minority religion or one that democrats don’t like, are LBTQ+ (queer and weird are awfully similar in meaning), just plain contrary or that which does not fit. I suppose some may have managed to forget bad experiences from youth and childhood, but a lot of us haven’t. Even if the things that made them formerly ostracized are now seen as okay or even celebrated by the group disparaging others as weird, it must set up some cognitive dissonance in some.
ennobled,
For understanding Catholic thinking on sacramentals, the Catholic Encyclopedia article is helpful;
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13292d.htm
The most common sacramentals: holy water, blessed religious articles (Rosaries and medals and scapulars), palm leaves blessed on Palm Sunday, blessed salt, blessed chalk, blessed food (especially at Easter).
Larkwise #22
Oh yeah. Homeopathy and flower essences too. I have been using flower essences since 1995, at the same time as acupuncture.
I considered becoming a flower essence practitioner, but nixed it due to my sad state of health, and by 1995, age 40+.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🌻
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
It would seem that, in the latter part of ages of reason with their eventual over-centralization of power, whichever gaggles of élites end up vying to grasp at the rings of control would always benefit from trying to suppress common understanding of the life force and how it can be effectively worked with without sanctioned intermediators. Do you know of any serious contenders among élite power blocks that tried instead to unleash the populace’s appreciation of unmediated life force as an age of reason came to a head? I know that both Jesus and Buddha passed on very enlightening hands-on training to their followers, but, by the time those followers turned out élite power blocks of their own, had they just turned into alternate gatekeepers themselves?
As for the word “weird,” now there is also Joseph Henrich’s recent book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiat and Particularly Prosperous (2020). Henirch uses WEIRD as an acronym for “Westerm, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic,” and these are the characteristics of people and societies he praises highly, contrasting them to all the other peoples and societies in the world, whom he judges to be less “prosperous” and less successful than the WEIRD are. He also claims that growing up in a WEIRD society rewires the human brain, and that this rewiring is hugely advantageous.
The book seems to have caught on in the US to some degree, but its main point, that we Westerners are specially special with a side of special sauce, and thus superior to the rest of the world, is pretty ignorant. (Ugh!) I recommend the longer among the 27 critical reviews of it on amazon.com, especially the very long one by Charles Freeman.
I have to protest against your characterization that, say, opposition to continental drift was just bad faith by stubborn idiots who argue from authority. You say: oh, these bigots refused to consider that continents could move because that is simple. Nah, of course they did consider. There just had to be a force that got continents to plow through solid oceanic floor. And no one could explain which. This is not just Ockham’s razor. It’s common sense. “OK, so you claim continents drift? Where are the holes they leave behind? And those continents don’t just move themselves, ya know? What then is tugging entire continents? ” Alfred Wegener proposed gravity from the moon and sun, but that just does not really make sense. Other early drifters proposed that radioactive rocks could melt the ocean floor and lubricate it right where required for the drift to occur, allowing continents to glide. That was just as much ad hoc hand waving as anything their fixists opponents had. Both theories had problems. When a better model of the earth interior began to appear with plate tectonics, there was now an answer annihilating the very valid objections that were raised against continental drift, and the field quickly turned ‘from continents do not move’ to ‘continents do move’.
Another excellent piece! i was particular interested to learn of the Hermetic alchemical influence on Winstanely et al. Could you please point me to some sources where I could read more about that?
The mind perhaps is just a phenomena of neural activity. Mind and body are one.
Dear JMG, what are your views on astral projection ; do you have experience of it and would you recommend it? Thanks ever so much for your advice.
Ken quoted “Studies show that post-operative patients whose painkillers are distributed by a hidden robot-pump at an undisclosed time need twice as much drug to get the same pain-relieving effect as when the drug is injected by a nurse they could see. So awareness that you’re being given something that’s supposed to relieve pain seems to impact perception of it working.”
Well, that article trying to explore placebo effect grasped one aspect of what was going on, while completely overlooking others. The patient’s mind does have a profound effect on healing, but maybe the nurse’s does too. That doesn’t even begin to get into the healing power of touch being channeled through the nurse’s hands, nor the impact that the nurse’s mental body overlapping the patient’s mental body can have on both of them. I wonder, if a caring nurse just came in, sat beside their patients, held their hands, and talked to them without administering any drugs, would that have a pain-relieving effect as well?
Forgive me. I probably won’t follow this thread, but this essay meant a lot to me. Thank you. I spent a lot of time in hospitals with my extremely sick husband these days. When I get home I usually listen to Tyler Childers Way of the Triune God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqrxHOKhOBE
I’ve recently gotten the preacher’s blessing to mix up and christen some Appalachian conjure, herb medicine mixed up with psalms and see what I can come up with. Decades ago, I looked like some of the white women in that music video. My husband used to look like the lunatic on the motorcycle when he wasn’t working on the huge mining equipment ripping mountains down. I know you don’t like videos and it ain’t Wagner, but I think you might like the song despite yourself. Even if you don’t, it’s kind of my heart’s response to what you’re saying here.
You’re one of the people keeping me hanging on right now. Peace and love to you all from Southern Appalachia.
Bravo, that was an intellectual tour de force!
For starters, just two questions of comprehension:
1. When you say that “at one point in the 1650s the revolutionary movements came within an ace of seizing control of the army and the kingdom”, do you mean the succession to Cromwell the Elder? I know almost nothing about the younger Cromwell and his rule. Or some earlier point?
2. When you speak about an “uneasy truce between Ghibellines and Guelphs”, do you mean that both the Emperor and the Pope lost most of their power in the 14th and 15th centuries? I don’t know up to what point the label Ghibellines was still used.
Hello Mr Greer,
Thank you for the excellent article. It has changed my thinking on the subject as indeed quite often posts and comments on this site do. My initial thoughts were that there might be something about life force that makes it difficult to integrate into the corpus of Western science – perhaps lack of repeatability, unpredictability, or resistance to measurements. But these hardly preclude topics from being studied at academic institutions. That the main reason modern science cannot wrap its collective head around life force is that the political consequences of considering it seriously would have unpalatable consequences for certain interest groups makes perfect sense, and it was great to have the historical background on how the current situation developed. I stll find it somewhat surprising that none of the iconoclastic men and women of genius who were capable enough to overturn previously held erroneous dogmas in their own fields were not curious enough to do some further revolutionary work on this most worthy of concepts. Maybe their success in conventional science was made possible by a certain blindness towards somewhat esoteric ideas?
My personal opinion is that strains of thought that take life force into account have an in-built advantage over the mechanistic model of the universe, will always survive, and in the long run, prevail. The reason is that the modern science, as much as I am fond of it, requires complex institutional machinery, significant funds, and often complex technology, to try and answer a limited list of questions that these days very often are just not that interesting (and it appears that there are not many major breakthroughs left with the current approach). In contrast, working with life force is open to anyone interested as long as they have some guidance, which is not difficult to find in the age of the internet. And the topics to be worked on are potentially whatever is most important to the practitioner – something that modern science would find positively immoral.
An interesting exception to the total exclusion of the concept of life force in modern science is China, which of course has a venerable tradition of studying qi in the context of traditional Chinese medicine. There are many institutions and scientific journals there dedicated to the field, all sadly only subjects of mockery to their Western counterparts. Do you see these attempts to work with life force in an academic setting as marginal, or do you think the potential to redefine what science can be about is here?
How does James I.’s persecution of witchcraft fit into the power play you have outlined here?
The early Stuarts do seem to mark a fork in the road for Britain, or maybe a road not taken. I have mentioned before that I own a tiny edition of Horace dedicated Domino Henrico Magnae Britanniae Principi. It was printed in 1606, and at that point the presumed successor to the throne was not Charles Stuart, but his older brother Henry. Toulmin’s Cosmopolis proposes that the early death of Henry Stuart and the murder of Henri IV of France closed the door on the more humanist Renaissance and opened the door to the spread of Descartes’ solipsistic rationalism. Be that as it may, there are also the close connections between the Stuarts and the Bohemian court in 1618, Bohemia being the land of the Rosicrucians… I am sure you would have gone into these connections if you were writing a longer essay or a book!
JMG,
I thought I would mention this. My wife listens to NPR. She just called me downstairs to listen to a report on the radio. It was on peak oil. Naturally, they confusingly talked about peak oil and the mythical beast peak oil demand, so an uninformed listener couldn’t distinguish between them. I wonder about the significance of this.
Well .. Mr. Greer,
The idea of the ‘necklace ones’.. brings to mind the imagined ‘immortals’ as per Director John Boorman’s cult classic – “ZARDOZ”. Just substitute say, an ‘IronMan’ Elon Musk, or .. a Jeffery ‘the-flying-penis’ Bezos .. or that realllly weird libul – ‘he’s a Goddamed Android! – Mark Z….. who else would one cast nowadaze, as those who coast non-$top churning through the um, cloud** … broadcasting their bilious dreck to those below: the nasty, dirty, ignorant ‘BRUTALS’!
**Who can I arm-twist into obtaining a Giant Floating Head…?
For a few years now I’ve been contemplating a book, working title _The Dragon in the Livingroom_, on the subject of the damage done to growing children when their perception of subtle phenomena is denied and suppressed. The material of the book would be based on testimonies from within the neopagan community. As Raven Kaldera pointed out in _Dealing With Deities_, one of the reasons people with little or no belief or interest in the gods are nevertheless drawn to neopaganism is that they’ve had supernatural experiences and are looking for an environment in which they can speak freely about those experiences.
My first thought to make it a self-help book along the lines of the many self-help books out there for children of alcoholics and other difficult parents. Until I read this essay it never occurred to me to consider the political dimension.
Several years ago I got acupuncture for a shoulder injury. At my first appointment, the practitioner took a deep breath to explain how and why acupuncture works, and I said, “oh, I get that we have a life force, and you are redirecting where it’s stuck. That’s why I’m here. “
The look of relief on her face, that she didn’t have to explain to a skeptic who was trying the treatment as a last ditch effort. The treatment was always both relaxing and invigorating.
#56 Could it be that the Weird epiteth is something that describes the people who are using it perhaps more than those they apply it to, so that on a certain level maybe subconsciously it is projection?
I like the typo you wrote as Peculiat which it makes them sound like a specific class.
Pygmycory, oh, granted. Anyone who diverged in any way from the bland and mediocre norm got labeled “weirdo” when I was young. I doubt it’s improved any since then.
Christophe, no, not to my knowledge. Ruling classes never want people to own their own power, and the ability to shape and direct the life force is a great power.
Robert, ha! Thanks for this. I may have to hold my nose and read that book one of these days. At a time when the West is sinking fast in economic terms and Asia is rising just as fast, there’s quite some irony in those claims…
Jean-Baptiste, that’s another logical fallacy commonly used by defenders of the status quo — “If the cause is unknown, the effect didn’t happen.” Logically speaking, “did it happen?” is a separate question from “how did it happen?” but conflating the two, especially when combined with a denial of research funds to any project that attempts to find a sufficient cause, is a common way to suppress unacceptable ideas. The massive geological evidence for continental drift was flatly ignored by geologists, especially in the US, until magnetic surveys of the sea floor turned up spreading zones with traces of regular magnetic reversals that could be explained in no other way. Even then there was a lot of handwaving — I was just old enough in the early 1970s, as a paleontology-obsessed kid, to follow the arguments.
Luke, I’ve been trying to track down the book on Winstanley I read back in the day. In the meantime, you might try Margaret C. Jacobs’ The Radical Enlightenment, which iirc discusses Winstanley.
DT, yes, that’s the standard materialist claim. Philosophers have been pointing out since the time of the Upanishads that it’s based on circular logic, since the only evidence we have that matter exists at all is a set of phenomena in the consciousness of observers…
Larkrise, I have no particular talent for it, and it’s mostly a stunt, but it does happen and it can be induced. W.E. Butler’s book Apprenticed to Magic includes, among many other things, useful instructions.
Christophe (if I may), it’s been tried; I’ve lost the reference, but as I recall there’s considerable evidence that simple human contact has robust healing power.
Nellperkins, no need to apologize — thank you for this. I’m delighted to hear that your preacher encouraged you to do the sensible thing and apply some conjure. Is your husband on the prayer list for my readers to help, btw? If not, you might consider having him added — Quin at comment #21 is the keeper of the list.
Aldarion, (1) this was in 1647, before the elder Cromwell succeeded in securing absolute power. Look up the Agreement of the People sometime:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Agreement_of_the_People
(2) The Italian wars that began in 1494 are generally considered to be the point at which the Guelph-Ghibelline rivalry stopped being a significant force in European politics.
Soko, there was a steady sequence of scientists who decided to investigate the life force, some of them — look up Carl von Reichenbach sometime — very eminent figures. They were ostracized and vilified, and one of them — Wilhelm Reich, arguably Freud’s most innovative student — died in a US prison and had his books and research notes burnt by officials of the federal government. That’s why other scientists stayed well away from the subject. As for Asia, yes, that’s the exception to the rule. It’s not just China — first-rate work has been done on the chakras by the Japanese scientist Hiroshi Motoyama, for example, and there have been some useful studies in India as well.
Aldarion, it was precisely because James I took magic very, very seriously that he persecuted witches — his political enemies in Scotland used witchcraft, among many other things, against him. Toulmin may well be right, and yes, if I were writing a book there would be a lot more to cover, including the Bohemian connection!
John, peak oil is like Dracula in those fine old Hammer horror films — they keep on claiming that he’s been killed once and for all, but then there’s another round of bloodcurdling screams of “Dracula has risen from the grave!” No matter how much they invest in garlic and wooden stakes, here he comes again…
Polecat, now there’s a blast from the past. Sometime after I’ve finished the Wagner sequence and dealt with whatever else has to be talked about, I should use ZARDOZ as an extended metaphor for our age…
Joan, oh dear gods. PLEASE WRITE THAT BOOK. I can think of few things more necessary just now; a vast number of people come out of childhood with bitter emotional scars as a result of the bullying they suffer because they weren’t quick enough to shut up about seeing things you’re not supposed to see. It’s precisely equivalent to the damage suffered by children who have to shut up about domestic abuse, or any other ugly secret — but this is society-wide in Western cultures.
(It occurs to me to ask: did you ever read the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson? The whole business about “seeing the fnords” in that tale is relevant.)
Katsmama, thanks for this! I’ve had similar experiences, and I know the sudden look of relief when you both find out you’re both already on the bus.
Mawkernewek (if I may), the peculiat, like the proletariat or the precariat? Ooh. I like that.
Thank you, Mr. Greer, for putting my comment/question through.
@ SamChevre #53
Thanks for the link!!!!!
@Aldarion, the younger Cromwell’s rule was short and incompetent. You didn’t miss much.
@Mawkernewek (#70) and JMG (#71): It was indeed a typo, but sometimes typos make more sense than what the typist intended. I likde it and I am going to keep on using it!
@JMG (#71): There’s a summary article by Henrich in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010) which I’ll email you soon.
@Joan (#68):
Yes, please do write it! It might get some hard pushback, but it will do many children a world of good. (I don’t know whether it would be more useful if it were written for parents or for the children themselves. Maybe two books, one for each audience?)
I was such a child, but I was hugely fortunate in that my family, on my mother’s side, had been on board with all sorts of weirdness for at least three generations before her. My mother herself regularly saw fairies in her garden on Woolsey Street in Berkeley until she got married and moved out of the family home.
Robert Mathiesen, I read Henrich’s book but I personally did not really feel the “Whiggish” interpretation of history that many reviews see in it is necessarily implied in the work itself. I felt that it largely covered some of the ways that Faustian (in Spengler’s sense) civilization differed from most other peoples in recorded history and some historical reasons for how it developed that way, for instance the clannishness vs individualistic axis and how it’s linked to the fourth Lateran council etc.
To put in another way, as an Asian, living in Asia and who had lived in the West before, the book put to words for me how “white people” are so weird and different from most of the cultures around me. There is no value judgement in that, but simply put for example, generally it seems to me that almost every other culture I have had some acquaintance with has stronger family ties than the Faustians, this isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing in itself, but it is quite a visible phenomenon.
I could be wrong and the Heinrich did indeed intend a Whiggish reading but this is just what I got out of it.
Another note is that many of the ideas that he put into the book had been floating around online among the HBD crowd, which is itself a fringe community (search for “HBD chick” for example). Henrich has been legitimizing study of cultural, and indirectly genetic, differences in this way IMO.
You wrote “That expulsion was redoubled in the nineteenth century when the capitalists and the aristocrats turned on each other, using the squabbles over Darwinism as their excuse.” I am well aware of the struggle between capitalists and aristocrats, which was decided in France by the restoration of the republic in 1871, in the UK by breaking the power of the House of Lords in 1911, and in Germany and many other countries in 1917-1919. Can you point me to any discussion of Darwinism involved in these events?
More generally, I have been thinking along Soko’s lines. You present a strong case for the initial political constellation of mercantile and industrial capitalists that installed materialism to break the power of monarchy and aristocracy, and also for continued political suppression in capitalist countries, like the USA in Reich’s case. However, I am currently reading (and greatly enjoying) Doctor Zhivago, which describes the total melt-down of societal norms and expectations during the 1917 revolutions and civil war. The political situation in the USSR was quite different from the initial capitalist constellation. There have been other revolutionary movements, such as Mussolini’s, Hitler’s, Salazar’s and Franco’s. Even in Western countries, the owners of capital lost a lot of power after 1929. It surprises me that all through these different régimes the philosophical position of materialism would have been maintained in such a constant way.
Isn’t there some collective psychology involved, too, an egregore if you want, even after the initial constellation had disappeared? And this collective psychology did not extend in the same way to China or even to Japan.
JMG, you have described yourself as a dumpster diver of philosophy. This is the perfect example of this in action. Bravo!
I have mentioned him a few times but Stephen Harrod Bruner was always one that integrated life force into all his works. Be it herbalism, fasting or just life experiences. He was very in tuned to this force and more than willing to write about it in clear meaningful terms.
Related is the way the Taoists/Buddhists are completely open/aware of folks that are influenced by the lunar cycle, many call those impacted ‘lunatics’ derogatively and rationalists try to explain it away completely. And yet, we have all seen the lunar impact on people in action.
On a personal level, I have found Occam’s Razor to be a useful tool but with a BIG tweak so that it is not an end all path of thinking. Call it Occam’s butter knife.
Start with the simple explanation first and then work upwards in complexity as the simple explanations fail.
Was that light in the sky an alien ship or a plane? Well that is most likely a plane.
Could you sense something wrong in another person long before they showed any signs of it? It is just coincidence. Nope, that doesn’t sound likely at all! Time to investigate further.
I was watching a very technical presentation, when someone asked how to know which technology to commit to, and the reply surprised me. They said to get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and see if multiple companies were investing billions into a new technology. I suppose most thinks will work if you pour money into it. Douglas Trumbull ( Movie special effects wiz and director of Silent Running) was famous for saying, “Ideas are nothing, financing is everything.”
It is easy to realize the problems with Occams Razor if we examine in hindsight many phenomenon or events from the past where the answer is known to the wise ( not necessarily to the mainstream). For instance the question , ” Why did small fuel efficient pickups such as the Chevy Luv disappear from the auto market?” The simple answer ( preferred by the establishment) is because people no longer wanted them. The real answer is that they changed the complicated gas mileage standards for vehicles to divide the gas mileage by the size of the vehicle giving an advantage to larger vehicles ( hardly simple).
Another would be; why did the World Trade Centers Collapse? The simple answer, Because Terrorists who hated America flew airplanes in to them. The real answer: Much Much more complicated.
Robert M, thank you! I’ll look forward to it.
Aldarion, Darwinism wasn’t directly involved in any of them. Don’t confuse the final political settlement of the process with the ideological and cultural proxy struggles that led up to that point. As for the collapse of materialism in revolutionary times, I’d encourage you to look into the history of Russian Cosmicism and the broader explosion of occult thought in late Tsarist and very early Communist Russia, before it was stamped out by the dogmatically materialist Communist regime; the history of occultism in Germany, especially but not only in the light of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s fine book The Occult Roots of Nazism; or the history of occultism in Italy before, during, and after Mussolini’s regime, just for starters. You might find those and the many other examples eye-opening.
Michael, long ago, before I got into print, I worked as an aide in nursing homes. All the nurses and aides knew that patients with dementia would be more active, confused, and difficult near the full moon and mostly somnolent close to the new moon. Those homes that had the staff would make sure there was extra coverage around the full moon. Of course the physicians all insisted it was pure superstition, but then they had next to no personal contact with the patients…
Bradley, exactly. Every new idea has flacks trying to sell it; if someone’s putting serious money into it, there’s more likely to be something there.
Clay, two fine examples.
Has anyone made a serious study of links between life force and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics? There are all of these contorted ideas in QM such as the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation, and they don’t even count as proper hypothesizes for the most part. Generally they amount to little more than admonitions to, as the saying goes, “shut up and calculate.” On the other hand, accepting a life force that simply makes indeterminate probabilities become real seems to flow pretty naturally – once of course that one accepts the concept of a life force.
Has anyone here come across any such works linking these two fields? Thanks for any pointers.
To Jean-Baptiste Moquelin (post #57),
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting your comment, but it strikes me as a very un-scientific reaction that I have noticed that to be very common in the ‘science’ community, particularly in academia: the refusal to accept or even acknowledge an observation or datum that does not come with a full-fledged and unassailable explanation to support it.
I have noticed this particular glaring lack of logical thinking from many in the scientific (sic) community for decades, and have never, ever understood it. So WHAT if on observation, or even a theory, has no ready explanation? How does the apparent or temporary lack of an explanation automatically refute or deny observational data? I have always found this kneejerk reaction by certain members of the scientific community to be not only completely irrational, but also an instant discrediting of the name “scientist” to anyone engaging in it.
Good article. Can you recommend a book dealing with Renaissance Hermeticism, in particular this aspect: “They argued that the same logic that permitted sacramentals could be extended to cover Christian magic, alchemy, and astrology.” I’m not as interested in the later radical politics, although if there is a good book covering the lot of it, that would be great.
More generally, I’m curious if you have any go to history books on the Hermetic tradition or the broader “esoteric” traditions in the West. For Years I’ve looked for a good history of Platonism book (from Plato, to the Academy, to Plotnus and Iamblichus, to the Medieval Christians, to Ficino, to the modern Cambridge Platonists and Guenonians). As far as I can tell such a book does not exist, but I wish it did. I’ve gotten similar impressions when looking at books on the history of Hermeticism. Although some of Gary Lachman’s books have been recommended to me.
Thanks, hope you’re doing well.
Wow! This is a fascinating post! For me, this helps to interpret one of the more obscure Christian concepts. I have often wondered what the Ruach HaKodesh really was. This provides a fresh perspective! The only thing that still doesn’t make sense to me is why Jesus said it was something “the Father will send in My name” as if it was something new. Obviously something I can begin to look into further through this new lens….
I can confirm, via my daughter the nurse, JMGs observation about full moons and their effect on patients.
I wonder, why is that? The moon does not change in shape, size or path through the heavens no matter how much or little of the sun’s light it reflects.
Thanks, JMG, for sharing your gift these many, many years for empowering weird people!
As a relatively new gun owner, I’ve realized that one of the reasons this sport attracts me is that it repels so many “normies.” It’s a satisfying finger in the eye of the Establishment. Anything our elites don’t like is just about guaranteed to intrigue me enough to try it. I suspect I’m not the only one.
OtterGirl
JMG,
I was wondering if the term “aether” or “ether” as it once applied to physics is the same as, or something akin to, the life-force. As I understand it, aether was thought to be a universal, invisible substance that served as the medium through which the planets, stars, and light traveled, a theory apparently undone by Einstein’s Relativity Theory.
I’m thinking that the aether theory is actually correct – it does sound very much like the notion of a universal kundalini, ie., the life-force …. and that what is called “dark matter’ may be an aspect, a particular vortices maybe, of the aether. Thanks.
For folks being call “weird”, too many that is a whale song. They hear it and go “My people are calling!”. For instance the podcast Rune Soup, of which JMG has been on before, the 1st question they ask everyone is “Where you a weird kid?”. 100% of the time the answer is yes! There are a lot of folks that wear that label with pride.
About 5 minutes of conversation with me is enough to be labelled weird. I’m not a fan of Trump, I wouldn’t vote for him if I had the opportunity, but the weird label is not going to push folks away. It will only attract them like a flame.
@Ken on Placebos. There is a joke I have seen in the occult space that is “Science doesn’t believe in magic, and yet they test for placebos.” As JMG said, placebo is a blunt tool but it points to something greater.
@JMG “Wilhelm Reich, arguably Freud’s most innovative student — died in a US prison and had his books and research notes burnt by officials of the federal government.”
Nothing says “please look into this” more than destroying something while saying “Nothing to see here!”
On Occam’s razor, the version that I’ve heard trotted out is: All else being equal, the simplest explanation is likely correct.
The qualifier ‘likely’ implies a probability, but I’ve never seen any statistics or even hand waving to support the assertion. Ignoring the qualifier, the phrase ‘all else being equal’ is designed to support the establishment view/conventional wisdom. It only takes the slightest bit of curiosity to render that phrase into the empty rhetorical garbage that it is.
The assassination of JFK, for example, has two very simple explanations, the lone gunman explanation and the CIA explanation. Pretty much anything you care to name can be reduced to trivially simple statements that accurately describe even the weirdest phenomenon. Quantum mechanics may seem complex and convoluted, but saying that the physics at the smallest scales if fundamentally different than the macroscopic scales is a very simple and very accurate description of reality.
As for the notion of a secular universe, it has always troubled me that some of the scientific revolutions sharpest minds and greatest heros, Newton, Bohr, Bacon, Jung, etc., didn’t hold with the notion of a secular universe at all. It hurts the head.
It’s a total coincidence that I just published a new version of my arrangement of the Orphic Hymn to Hermes… Please enjoy! It is also available for free as a high-quality music download at queenmusic.bandcamp.com
Very interesting, as this topic happens to be the direction of my PhD studies on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato very recently – so a nice coincidence. So I just want to offer a slightly different perspective on this exclusion of life-force in our scientific era, characterised as it is by black and white thinking.
Some say there are two roots of the distinctive western culture – ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’ – however a good case can be made that both these currents – ‘rationality’ and ‘monothesism’ – have their roots in Plato and in particular the Republic and the Parmenides dialogues (there are two characters both called Cephalus – meaning head – in these dialogues).
In the second half of the Parmenides there a number of dense groups of arguments called ‘Deductions’. They look at the Form of the One from at least nine different perspectives. The first Deduction is the foundation of negative (apophatic) theology since it seems to say that the highest Form (God in effect) is totally above Being and any descriptions – it is transcendent. the next Deduction starts from other assumptions and seems to show the opposite – the immanence of the One in all beings. This total separation of God (In himself) and the Universe led to this idea propagated down into the middle ages – then with Ockham it became possible to cut out that separate God, since what purpose did it serve if it was totally separate? how does it affect us? no satisfactory answer was found.
However Plato in the Parmenides was only showing this separation on the surface – in fact the Form of the One in the first Deduction can be said to be part of everything (but nothing is part of it). This is the full story not just the negative – “nothing is part of it”. The positive side – “the One is in everything” (all things are full of gods said Thales) was left implicit and is not easily recognised when reading this difficult text.
History would have been very different if Plato had presented openly his full account of the essential immanence of God in all things.
What about the Protestant prohibition, that theory, that I increasingly subscribe to, that all of this was organised from the inner planes, to prevent the misuse of the life force?
As above, so below, including with the political and commercial forces of hard core materialism, as I think it was engineered by whatever entities cared enough about humans, including potentially some advanced human souls themselves, to prevent some disastrous mistakes of the past being repeated. The risk of a misuse of life force at the time of a rising materialist science, and nearly unlimited energy resources was just too damned risky. A society of Dr Frankensteins, or worse, was a potential.
Fortunately, the deletion of the term for life-force from the dominant culture has that risk receeding into the distance, but it’s still not entirely gone. It might be one day.
That’s my decidedly non standard take, having had the benefit of research into the temple technology now, and what those folks found.
Michael – ask any paramedic, or even a cop who is trusting enough to talk about their experiences – they’ll all report spikes of bad behaviour, accidents, and general madness/craziness on or near the full moon. Of course that data must be discarded to fit the theory.
I may have forgotten to link to the song that I was talking about, the Orphic Hymn to Hermes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-QjC9tyMjkA&si=Q1EwrS5hTMvYIQ0l
Enjoy!
Back in the Stone Age when I was being educated to become an electrical engineer, I took many courses the gist of which was to generate differential equations to describe the behavior of physical systems. This typically involved the use of idealizations, simplifying assumptions, approximations, disregarding second (and higher) order effects, and the like. These steps are necessary if you want to generate a system of equations you can solve, or physically implement (especially in the analog world). Low and behold, the systems we built off these equations did exactly what we expected them to do. It dawned on me that the essence of engineering was not truth, but usefulness.
I regard Occam’s Razor as similar. It is at best useful, but if you don’t pay attention, you can mistake its results for truth. I cherish that insight from my engineering days.
–Lunar Apprentice
Just yesterday, I read Atkinson’s strict insistence that there is no chance in the universe, no place for chance in the universe and that all would descend into chaos and dissolution if there was chance in the universe. Funnily, as the scientists of his time were just beginning to discover, this is very much not the case and quite possibly, this has a link to the life force.
It is most likely true that macroscopic events, for example the throw of a die, can be described as pseudo-random (or chaotic) and the chance aspect is merely a result of our incapability to perceive and control all the little details that determine the die’s movement, which some call “subjective randomness”.
But there’s also true objective randomness to be found in the microscopic behaviour of quantum objects, the most basic being probably photons and electrons, although anything small (and cold) enough displays quantum behaviour. On which spot of the screen will the photon that just passed a double slit appear? Or is the atom that was in an excited state already back to the ground state? For these questions it is impossible to predict an answer and the theories that tried to sneak in determinism through the back door (like “hidden variables”) have (as far as I know) all being falsified.
What prevents the universe to descend into chaos and dissolution is probably the fact that while there is true randomness, the possible results of a quantum process are very much not random but determined. The photon that passed a double slit can’t appear anywhere but there are certain areas where it is quite likely to show up and others where it will never be observed. The atom will not sit eternally in an excited state but we can precisely predict how likely it is that it has transitioned to the ground state after a certain amount of time has passed. And so on.
What made me think is that the few direct, conscious observations of the life force I had and the many more stories of others I heard I had so far all have the smell of some “quantum like” behaviour, for example results being more in patterns than specific events, non-locality, etc. At the same time it seems that the life force is NOT electromagnetic in it’s nature but it shows some characteristics that makes it appear quite closely related. A theory that I read years ago proposed that there are structures in (for example brain) cells that (despite conventional wisdom telling otherwise) might display quantum behaviour. Maybe that’s the link? Maybe the subtle life force is capable of interacting with the on a microscopic scale also quite subtle matter in the way that it shapes the patterns in which matter (or other things) behaves.
Seen in that way, science is probably truly not far away from understanding things that others have already understood on a practical level for a long time. But of course, the theories linking the behaviour of physical objects to non-physical entities receive only very little enthusiasm by science as we know it…
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Hey JMG
Firstly, if I remember correctly, the Vietnamese word for the life-force is just a Chinese loan-word, “Khi” in rising tone.
Secondly, I have a book about Chinese medicine that describes a Qigong exercise for increasing awareness of the life-force in the body, that in essence involves passing hands over your body and trying to feel the Qi currents. It has a similar principle to the “Ball of energy” exercise you have often described in writing.
Ennobled,
Here is a good speech by a traditional priest on Sacramentals. It’s very technical even getting to the different levels of holy water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMJhN-onNzg
There are lots of things I’d never realized before like how exorcised bells at churches used to fight the ‘demons of the air’ and would benefit anyone within hearing distance in the community.
He also points out the difference between how priests bless sacramentals in the old rite (exorcise object then bless) vs the new rite (bless the object) and how people find it less effective. He says that even new rite priests are realizing this and some of them are using the old rites on sacramentals to get the power back.
If anyone doesn’t do video, no worries, it’s just an audio file set to pretty pictures so you can easily skip the picture part and listen as if a podcast.
Can I ask, why Charles I would ignore his father’s successful example of political manoeuvering? Was it just the religious angle, or was there more to the story?
While the duels of the Guelphs and the Ghebellines started the course towards necklessness, and then the scientific materialism propagated by the plutocrats completed the guillotining, I do not think that we can simply dismiss the role of the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the Soviets focussed on large infrastructure projects, so they were able to build up space-faring technology faster than the USA. They credited athiesm for their technological primacy. Caught in a desperate rat-race against a rapidly growing USSR, American scientists feared that their country’s Christian religiosity would drag them down. After all, about the same time that the Russians launched the Sputnik, Dr. Urey was forced to flee the West because of the reprisal he faced for showing that protoplasm could form naturally in the early Earth conditions.
In this situation, people like Dr. Carl Sagan decided to go head-on against the religiosity of his nation. I have read A Demon Haunted World, and I repeatedly see the urgency in his tone – his desperate attempt to hurriedly convince his countrymen to drop religion and superstition, aliens and astrology, mediums and monster hunters, and instead accept science, since it works. His intended audience was clearly his country. He didn’t seem to care too much what the people of distant places believe.
Yeah, before the cold war maybe the educated classes had their necks removed. But the mass de-necking did not start until Sputnik and Apollo.
(Yes, that’s spelled “quackery” in the jargon of today’s materialist pseudoskeptics; funny how they never apply that label to the many products of the pharmaceutical industry that provide little or no benefit.)
Even if one were to insist on looking at the matter through the lens of scientific-materialism, one could still easily classify the offerings of the modern pharmaceutical industry into three categories: Substances that yield substantial benefits are “medicines”. Substances that yield no benefit but also no harm are “placebos”. Substances that yield little or no benefit but cause great harm are “poisons”.
Where you can see the actual practice of scientific-materialism going haywire is precisely in the issue of the Covid vaccines that turn the cells of your body into spike-protein factories, amongst other likely harms. An honest look certainly indicates that this constitutes a poison, yet the so-called rational people would have it that anybody who points this out must be vigorously censored and anyone who doesn’t want the vaccine because it is a novel therapy (in the case of the mRNA vaccines) that was given only the most perfunctory testing, must have it forced on them with the most totalitarian of measures. And alternatives that actually are medicines such as ivermectin are, in turn, reclassified as a placebo and prescriptions for it not filled in the rare event in which they are actually written.
What else can explain all this irrationality of putative rationalists other than an ideology which isn’t working the way it was originally advertised anymore? And it’s but one example of the sort of thing that turned me from being a first-class Larry Lefty in 2014 into someone who can hardly wait to vote for Donald Trump (even if the significance of doing so is largely symbolic to me) ten years later this coming November.
Having always thought that Occam’s Razor is question-begging garbage, I took pleasure in reading your article. My grasshopper style of associational thinking brings to mind another term – ex-prime-Minister John Major’s favourite, “subsidiarity”, which he used to sell the Maastricht Treaty to Parliament. “Subsidiarity” was supposed to provide a useful principle to justify subordination to the European Union: the idea was, decisions were to be taken at a level appropriate to the scope of the issue involved; hence we needn’t worry about interference from on high (Brussels) in matters which didn’t concern on-high. The only snag is – inevitably someone has to decide what the ‘appropriate level’ is; and that ‘someone’ is of course the EU. Big comfort, eh?
>All the nurses and aides knew that patients with dementia would be more active, confused, and difficult near the full moon
Long ago, I used to listen to Loveline at night. At some point, Carolla and Pinsky started asking “Is the moon out right now?” because of the weirdness of the callers. Something about the moon brings something out in some of the people out there.
Yeah, the moon and its influence are of those things We Are Not Supposed To Talk About.
Thank you for this essay, JMG. My mind is busy chewing on a stew of ideas which may or may not go well together in the pot, but which leads me to think that that which binds also separates and that which separates also binds.
In your essay and the comments that follow I see glimpses of this idea. The neck separates the head from the shoulders yet binds them together. Our worldviews are separated from the life force yet bind us to it by the effects of its absence. Childhood bullies separated us from them yet also bound us to them by the effect of the bullying. The king that wields the life force prosecutes witches for using it. Using the term “weird” to separate the hated group supplies them with power. God the Father (heaven) and Jesus the son (incarnated on earth) are bound by the Holy Spirit (life force) which connects the immaterial to the material, mind to body, otherwise separate.
And from the pantheon I follow, An (heaven) and Ki (earth) were one until Enlil (their son) separated them, making life on earth (incarnation) possible for humans, yet he was the only god with direct access to An, thereby being the bind.
Still musing…
Interesting thing scientific materialism. On the one hand, materialism doesn’t survive a scientific examination of the typical human life. On the other, while the scientific method *can* work on planes other than the material, it requires the contexts be either identical or irrelevant, and context is only irrelevant on the material plane. So the temptation to limit inquiry to just the material probably comes with the method.
I do think the scientific method is a jewel of Faustian society, just as the alchemical method is a jewel of Magian society. Are there similarly significant methods-of-arriving-at-truth from other cultures that folks are aware of?
It looks to me like the Democratic strategy of calling Trump and Vance weird is a response to the recent practice on the part of social conservatives of calling themselves normies, intending to imply that they, the socons, are the normal, healthy, sane ones, while anybody who disagrees with them is abnormal, unhealthy, and crazy. (I believe Rod Dreher started this.) The strategy also calls attention to the cognitive dissonance that is inevitably involved when socons vote for a Hollywood sleazeball type like Trump.
That the strategy might alienate people on their own side seems not to have occurred to them. What’s more, socons are perfectly capable of looking at recent history and recognizing that, while they may not like Trump as an individual, voting for him will get them closer to their goals. The reversal of Roe vs. Wade, for instance, was a result of Trump being president even though reversing Roe vs. Wade was unlikely to have been a priority for Trump personally. Thinking that the other side’s voters are stupid is another recurring Democratic Party failing.
@PrayerGardens: I have an interest in the lore of bells (including, even, my research into work done at Bell Labs)… most church bells received a special baptism. And there are lots of interesting stories about magical happenings around and with bells. The story of Dick Whittington is one of many.
Hello JMG and Kommentariat:
What do you think about the Arab/Muslim idea of “Baraka”?
One of the interesting things is how the life force has been reintroduced to the West via Eastern pop culture. Dragonball Z, both the Japanese comic and anime, was definitely at the forefront of this for my generation worldwide, as it was translated into dozens of languages, was aired on TV in over 80 countries including most of the Western ones, and was and still remains one of the most popular shows among boys and young men. Basically, it’s a kung fu fighting show where characters spend a lot of time working out, meditating, and channeling their life force into qi blasts that at first can flip over cars and later, through lots of training, can destroy entire planets.
It also introduced polytheism, as the main characters spend lots of time training with different gods, and Dragonball features a rather eclectic, hierarchical cosmology, much of it heavily centered around kung fu fighting of course.
Thanks for this essay, as usual you delivered more than I expected even if I did vote for it.
For me personally, putting additional caveats on Occam’s Razor is very useful in remembering it still boils down to definition of what is “simple” and “sufficient”.
I’d also request any pointers to what a Renaissance Hermeticisms society would look like if it was wider than people gathered around the courts of the rulers. Is it something like classical China in which there are many practitioners, but like in more societies, the average person (peasant, merchant, soldier, whatever) is mostly a passive participant such as standard church attendee? Thanks again, Drew C
* like in “most” societies, – a slight correction to avoid confusion due to my error. Thanks, Drew C
Most if not all medicines provided by Big Pharma are at best mild poisons with medical side effects. Anti life materials suitable for temporary emergency use.
JMG, concerning the “weird” stuff, you should read this: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-youre-being-weird-works-so-well
They think it’s going to work great.
@Lunar Apprentice #96: “It dawned on me that the essence of engineering was not truth, but usefulness.” That’s a very good description! During my training and working days as a physicist, much of the practice was the same – building differential equations that describe physical systems. And the linearized equations work, because the systems they describe are designed to behave mostly linear. The fun (and much of the work of physicists) begins, when things stop to behave linearly and, oh my, then you very quickly run out of mathematically feasible options.
I guess those who attend to the church of Science praying to the god of Progress, saying things like “Look, there is a LAW, it’s Science!” are overlooking that nobody has ever seen an actual natural law and that their linearized systems of differential equations are only clumsy expressions in a language of which we don’t know if it’s even remotely capable of describing a true law (despite even if it is, nobody will ever see an actual natural law). But useful tools they are, that much can be said. And sometimes they are not even linear.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Before we go on, a question for those of my readers who have blogs. Are you suddenly getting much larger amounts of spam, or is it just me? It’s not a problem — my spam filters are getting nearly all of it, and I flag and then delete the one or two that get through when I moderate comments — but I’ve gone from ten or twenty a day to over a hundred yesterday and well on track for that today. Most of it, too, is not obviously commercial — a made-up first and last name (“Belenda Borblegorm” isn’t one, but it’s that kind of thing) is the whole attempted comment, and the website and email address are fake. If anyone knows what’s driving this, I’m all ears.
With that said…
Dr. Coyote, I haven’t, but it’s an intriguing idea. Anyone else?
Bonaventure, start with Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment; those will give you an overview. As for good one-volume histories of any of those traditions — Platonism, Hermeticism, you name it — I know of none. I wish there were some, but it’s only very recently that scholars were willing to talk about such things at all, and most of them will still only talk about them with other scholars.
Blue Sun, the teachings I’ve read about that in Christian occult texts suggest that the Incarnation redefined the relationship between God and human beings, opening a connection that did not exist before, and it was through that connection that the Paraclete was able to act. It wasn’t a new thing in any overall sense, but in its ability to be manifest in human beings? Entirely new.
Mary, it’s not a matter of which body reflects how much light. The earth has a body of life force, just as you and I do, and it increases and decreases in strength in a cycle keyed to the moon’s phases: it’s strongest at the full moon and weakest at the new moon. That’s why planting and gardening by the moon work so well!
OtterGirl, I get the impression that’s a very widespread feeling these days.
Will M, well, certainly a lot of occultists borrowed the word for the life force — in occult texts you’ll very often run across discussions of the etheric plane, which is the plane of the life force, and of etheric bodies, which are the bodies of life force all living things have. Myself, I think they just decided to start calling the ether “space-time” — light and gravity are now supposed to be waves in space-time, where previously they were waves in ether, and so on.
Michael, agreed on all counts.
Team10tim, good! Nicely put.
Kimberly, thanks for this.
David, fascinating. Will you be publishing on this?
Peter, oh, it’s quite possible that this is what’s going on. One of the advantages I have as a fringe thinker is that I can talk about such things in the serene certainty that nobody in the cultural mainstream will ever listen to me, and that what I have to say will only reach those who are supposed to hear it. (I gather also, from the way that once-secret occult teachings are becoming more and more public, that if such a prohibition was ever in place, it seems to be lifting, at least in part.
Lunar, that’s a valid point. Useful rules of thumb also have their value, so long as they’re not mistaken for truths.
Nachtgurke, this is one of the places where I disagree with Atkinson, of course. He was very much a creature of his time, and not all of his rules have stood the test of time — though they’re always worth studying and thinking about.
J.L.Mc12, the same thing’s true of every other country in the Chinese sphere of influence — the Japanese word is ki, for example, and gi in Korean. The influence of the Chinese classics reaches far! That exercise is quite a good one, btw.
Kfish, how many sons have you met that really, truly learned from their father’s habits? Far more often, they convince themselves that Dad was an old fool and they know better. That passes off eventually, but Charles didn’t survive long enough.
Rajarshi, trust me, if I’d been writing a book about this, that would have been included as well — but the de-necking goes back much further.
Mister N, no argument there. I simply wanted to point out that the term “quackery” is only used for those methods of health care that don’t make profits for Big Pharma.
Robert G, that’s a classic example, and another place where the fallacy ad auctoritatem got smuggled into the discourse. A real principle of subsidiarity would start by giving the power of judgment of what the appropriate level is in individuals, families, and local communities, who would pass it to a higher level of centralization only when they decided, “This ought to be settled at the county level.”
Other Owen, and like many of those things, it’s something that most people know about.
Myriam, a fine meditation! Thank you for this.
Christopher, the meditative method, the jewel of Hindu society, is one that comes to mind.
Joan, quite possibly so.
Chuaquin, I don’t know enough about it to have an educated opinion. Anyone else?
Dennis, and before that by Asian martial arts. My first introduction to qi was via taijiquan. The rediscovery of the life force is one of the great gifts of America’s post-World War II Journey to the East.
Drew, that’s a fascinating question. In early modern Europe, what seemed to be shaping up was a society in which royal courts were one center of Hermetic practice but urban centers were full of less exalted practitioners, who typically made a living providing services to local clienteles — horoscopes, geomantic readings, herbal and mineral medicines, spells for finding lost items, and so on. That radiated out into the countryside and reshaped the older folk magic — by 1700 or so you routinely had rural witches doing spells out of Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy and stuying William Lilly’s textbooks of astrology. It would probably have worked out to something like classical China, and just as in China, anybody who aspired to become a practitioner could pretty much count on finding a teacher, if only a local witch or the like.
Bruno, of course they do. It’s never occurred to them that everyone else — with the exception of a few deplorable weirdos — doesn’t gaze admiringly at them and dote over their every word and deed. The smug self-satisfaction that pervades that essay is really quite endearing.
This is kismet in ones practice of concepts you speak of here. Yes musicians in the occult who would of thunk. Had to go through failed experiments of this practice you speak of here sure glad its not exploding metal in my face. Although cant say that has not happen early in my metals class they used to let us teenagers mess around with in a class room with just a face shield and a leaded apron and leather gloves, do not think we even signed a waver if recollect correctly. Ah the days of give it a shot and see what manifest. I don’t say this with nostalgia but rather how teachers would actually pull characters such as myself to show the others, because obviously they had enough insight that maybe had an understanding and a careful spirit to take care in my actions around me and show my peers. Because I sure didn’t know when i look back, but they knew something. Parallel at the same time found knowledge more intriguing it was far more enticing to read about Bruno, Blavatsky, Crowley, and other such stuff that actually got my neurons in my brain firing to learn of spirit, more than lets say Catcher in the Rye not that its a bad read. Could go on and on but not necessary. Just that Music is the plane i find it is notably potent for alchemy and that is very obvious when we see the dark arts practice by this class of capitalist when they use it in commercialism, just sayin, Thank you once again JMG your are a light in the darkness.
Hi JMG,
This is my favorite thing you’ve written in some time.
“Occam’s Razor, in fact, might better be called Occam’s Fallacy.” You know, I hate to admit it, but this is one of those points that I’ve been thinking for some time, but that I didn’t quite have the intellectual courage to say in public. Thank you for saying it out loud! In practice, from what I’ve seen, “Occam’s razor!” is the first resort of the midwit and very often his last resort as well. The formal version tells us that we shouldn’t multiply unnecessarily, even when we know from our experience that many events have a great more causes than actually seem to be necessary! The informal version, as you say, is based on a subjective value judgment where the word “simple” in practice just means “whatever might earn a pat on the head from an atheist college professor.”
Regarding Christian clergy…
In my experience, there’s one branch of Christianity which, for better and, often, for worse, makes extensive use of the Life Force, always named the “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost.” I’m referring, of course, to the Charismatic movement. I had a friend who grew up in a Charismatic church. After losing touch after high school we reconnected many years later, during a time when I was working extensively with qigong and energetic healing. I was very surprised to find that when he described phenomena church events he’d attended, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I remember once he described a “healing event” at which “the air was crackling with the Holy Ghost, it was like electricity.” I did not tell him that it was similar to something I’d felt once when approaching a group of Falun Gong practitioners. And Falun Dafa is another movement which makes extensive and, in my experience, very effective use of the Life Force. As both they and the Charismatics have also had their identities firmed through persecution or discrimination, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them become or continue to be major forces in the years ahead.
In former times as now, magic is directly connected with politics. This also relates to the issue of the failure of magic in the mainstream churches:
The Charismatic friend I mentioned (who was also one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known, in the usual sense of the word) was raised by parents who had been Catholics. Initially, they were part of a Charismatic Renewal group in the local Catholic church, in Western Pennsylvania where we grew up. When the local Bishops got wind of it, they disbanded the group, sending the priests and nuns involved to different parts of the country. My friend’s parents left the Catholic Church after that, and started their own church. This church quickly exploded in popularity among the local people, who are also generally very poor and live on rural farms or in broken down onetime industrial or mining towns in the Pennsylvania hills. Many of its members are formerly-Catholic white ethnics, totally abandoned by their church. I say this as someone who dislikes Protestant Christianity in all its forms and the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements in particular. It doesn’t really matter what I dislike. In addition to providing its members with actual experiences of their God through the Spirit, the Charismatic church functions as an effective social support network for its members, while the local Catholic Church does little than I’m aware of besides siphon money from community and donate to the poor in far off places like Haiti. Meanwhile– and this will come as no surprise– at the exact same time that the Bishops in that area were dismantling the Charismatic movement within their own community, they also tore down the town’s main church, a beautiful old building full of statues and traditional art, and replaced it with a bland auditorium with a giant Buddy Christ in the center. While also implementing the lifeless Novus Ordo liturgy and massively de-emphasizing the sacramentals. Again, I don’t want to see sacramental Christianity die and Pentecostalism replace it, but that’s what’s happening in Western PA and many similar parts of the Catholic world. I once read an article about the same process in Amazonian Brazil, in which one of the Charismatic pastors explained that, unlike the Catholic Church, his congregation acknowledged the existence of the supernatural and gave its members a way of dealing with it.
Finally, regarding those sacramentals, you might be interested to know that they’ve been largely neutered in the Post Vatican II church. In the first case, they’re now hedged around with taboos. You’ll never find an article about them on a mainstream “Conservative” Catholic website that doesn’t talk, in terms nearing panic, about “abuses” and “superstitions” associated with them. In practice, “superstition” means “believing sacramentals actually do anything.” And in the second case, after the 1960s new rites of blessing were introduced, and– surprise surprise– these new blessings *don’t actually bless the objects in question.* Instead, they consist of prayers that God will bless a person who makes use of them. The difference is critical– in former times, for example, holy water was itself exorcised, blessed, and empowered to be a cause of spiritual and physical health wherever it was sprinkled. Now, the water itself is basically left alone, but God is asked for a special intervention on behalf of a person who might dip their fingers in it. Finally, with the Church at the highest levels having bought into the Covid Hysteria, many churches don’t even provide holy water anymore. I was at a beautiful old Catholic monastery in Canada a few days ago. All of the holy water fonts were empty… but there was a gigantic bottle of hand sanitizer at the entrance. One wonders if God had been asked to bless those who make use of it– provided they’re properly vaccinated, of course.
@Dr Coyote, I happen to have written a book on how I believe Quantum mechanics relates to a few traditionally occult concepts (linked on my handle for this comment). While my investigation focused mostly on time and the benefits of modeling quanta as four rather than three dimensional, what you’re referring to looks similar to a concept I termed ‘transition energy’. I’d give the definition as follows:
-the quantum Zeno effect states that if a system is constantly measured, it cannot change
-thus, for a transition from one state to another to occur, some amount of ‘privacy’ from the rest of the universe is required
-this privacy meets the formal definition of energy, hence the term transition energy
-At the scale humans operate at, the ‘privacy-observation’ spectrum is always partial and relative rather than absolute as it appears to us when working with systems much smaller than ourselves.
I go into references and the like elsewhere, but that’s the, erm, Occam’s razor version of the theory. Happy to expand if any of that sparks curiosity.
Mind, matter, spirit. The universe is Triune after all. Interesting.
@pygmycory
As time goes by, here, I absolutely love reading about your positive experiences living your Christianity in your community. I wish I had that.
I am convinced that one must start out as a child lucky enough to have a number of nurturing and kind Christians in their immediate circle over the first twenty years.
💨Northwind Grandma💨✝️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG, thank you for your response re the moon and its phases. I can’t say I understand. Am I to understand that while it is, nearly all agree, gravity which pulls the tides, some other phenomenon governs the effect the moon has on our temper and temperament? I don’t doubt the effect of full moons, because I have felt it myself. As for gardening, the explanation I most often see that the moon pulls at all water on earth, including that in soil. I would have supposed that gravitational pull to be more or less constant–low tides when the moon is passing around the far side of the earth.
My wife has spent her career as an environmental engineer running and managing sewage treatment plants and wastewater systems. She now manages a public wastewater district that is unique in the U.S. in that it does not encompass a municipality, but instead a single intact watershed. That watershed holds 650,000 people and the largest collection of semiconductor plants in the US. But it only discharges to a very small, slow moving river ( the Tualatin) that is considered as spawning stream by the EPA so regs are very strict.
As a result of growing up in Hawaii she was immersed in Hawaiian spirituality as a child and especially the Hawaiian concept of life force ” Mana”. She had always believed that there was something missing from the modern wastewater process , as it treated water as nothing but a chemical compound. Eventually she got the opportunity to put her ideas in to reality when a 600 acres site, filled with old settling ponds became available.
She worked with the wetland biologists on her staff to turn the site in to a natural treatment wetlands, which receives wastewater from the end of the normal mechanical treatment process and puts it through a series of natural ponds and swamps with various types of plants, animals, birds and bio organisms before entering the river. This has several benefits, such as lowering the water temperature, removing heavy metals that are hard to extract, but the one that is most important to my wife is that it adds ” life” to the water. She had always viewed even the most perfectly mechanically treated water as ” dead”, and thought that the river would never really be healthy unless this was corrected.
At the beginning, this idea of ” dead water” was an anathema, to the industry ( still is to some). But many are coming around to her way of thinking, especially younger people.
Joan #107
What is a “socon”? I have never seen that word before.
Thanks.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🙋🏼♀️❓
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Steve T’s #118 comment brought back a memory of Holy Spirit activity. I was at a large public event featuring a satellite broadcast of a message from a famous Pentecostal evangelist. After the event four men were asked to anoint and bless people. I was one of them. A fellow member of my church and myself handled one line of people. The two other men handled the other. Their line was a staid affair with people quietly receiving their anointing in turn like communicants at a Catholic Church getting their wafer. Those two men would glance over what was happening to us in shock. For around my friend and I we felt an electric atmosphere that had had fallen around us spontaneously and unexpectantly out of the blue. We would merely reach out, often not touching and people would go down and at times writhe. A fellow church member told us afterwards she could walk out of and re-enter the field of influence. As it says the Spirit blows where it will. This was a one time experience on that scale for me. Though I have had many encounters inwardly and outwardly and in group settings of the Holy Spirit.
@Dennis,
Avatar the Last Airbender is also very popular and Qi has a great deal to do with the magical ‘bending’ of elements by the characters.
Classic if-then statement:
If Weirdo, then Trump.
Classic if-then-else statement:
If Weirdo, then Trump, else____? (not Komoda* Harris)
💨Northwind Grandma💨🦎🥼
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
(*) Kamala Harris=Komodo [as in dragon] Harris=Komoda [feminized] Harris.
@Northwind Grandma,
my experiences with other Christians as a child were decidely mixed. I sort of got caught in the gears of the culture war between relatively socially conservative christians and gender/sex non-conforming non-christians, which didn’t always show me Christians at their best and led to a good deal of soul searching and personal heartache, even when those close to me on both sides were mostly more reasonable about their beliefs than many stereotypes would have one believe, and on other subjects were often much better.
I ended up being outspoken in my church youth group and suggesting that there was a lot of hypocristy going on in the church and that we should be paying a lot more attention to helping the poor and less to policing other people’s behavior, especially in the area of sex. Though the others in the group at least sometimes agreed with me on some of that…
My experience of God was much less mixed than my experience of other christians. My reading of the bible and listening to stories about Jesus showed me someone who I could trust absolutely, and who did not care about the things for which the cool kids were bullying me. Glasses? Not important! Bad at sports? Not important! You actually like learning? Nothing wrong with that! Find fashion confusing and stupid? Not important! Christian parents annoyed with you for undiagnosed asperger’s related lack of social skills when you were actually trying? God knew I was trying and was a lot more understanding! God was a refuge from all the stupid cruelties and painful things outside my control in my life. Still very much is.
>Myself, I think they just decided to start calling the ether “space-time” — light and gravity are now supposed to be waves in space-time, where previously they were waves in ether, and so on
It’s a bit more complicated than that but for similar reasons to why life force got associated with the wrong people, aether did too. And there goes the baby with the bathwater. Can’t quite separate the ideas from the people.
We don’t fully understand the vacuum. Look up “vacuum catastrophe” sometime. I’m guessing if there is a next breakthrough in physics, it will come from being able to adequately explain the vacuum.
Wow! I don’t know much about the role of turtles in cosmology but it seems like when it comes to history it’s class warfare all the way down.
This is certainly an unfortunate time to have a complex and confusing health condition – when the majority of information available points fingers at and denounces “quackery” even as the approved options are poisonous symptom-masks that don’t instigate or sustain actual healing. Having pretty much grown up not even conceiving of life force beyond some intuitively-seized rightness upon discovering Asian notions… it’s a challenge being an adult with somewhat-scientific leanings (I attempt to collect data and correlate causes and effects and successes and failures), trying to make sense of “the scientific literature” [and its lackeys who nocebo all the alternatives very loudly and almost-convincingly] AND trying to attune to my individual and the collective life force [as I lie upon my Eeman screen, for example]. I just end up approaching all the options as though they are all metaphors – and have stumbled into some sort of (pseudo)scientific/energetic theory (open to revision!) of what is going on — without knowing if it’ll lead in a healthful direction.
I suppose that’s neither here nor there – just a nod of recognition at the topic you’ve covered this week, and a sense of more’s the pity that politics have to decide so firmly what it is we’re “allowed” to be aware of as members of this society, thereby setting us all back with not only a lack of training, but the outright denial that any such training would be worthwhile. I’d say I’m thankful that much alternative information also exists, but I don’t even know if what I’ve found and been able to make use of is particularly efficacious either. There’s also the third option of shrugging and letting the Divine make its decision about an outcome (while doing only that which, in my deepest heart, I know is right and good for me to do).
Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know what pre-Romanized Europeans might’ve called the life force? Would any of those words (in whichever languages) have still-recognizable connections with words we use today?
“Before we go on, a question for those of my readers who have blogs. Are you suddenly getting much larger amounts of spam, or is it just me? It’s not a problem — my spam filters are getting nearly all of it, and I flag and then delete the one or two that get through when I moderate comments — but I’ve gone from ten or twenty a day to over a hundred yesterday and well on track for that today. Most of it, too, is not obviously commercial — a made-up first and last name (“Belenda Borblegorm” isn’t one, but it’s that kind of thing) is the whole attempted comment, and the website and email address are fake. If anyone knows what’s driving this, I’m all ears.”
– Huge uptick in spam on my podcast social media profiles lately – I think it’s AI driven, but it’s mostly phishing
JMG:
“the only evidence we have that matter exists at all is a set of phenomena in the consciousness of observers”
Yes, but the question is if the phenomena is accurate? I think it can be shown that it is.
Darwin struggled with this question, pointing out that, from an evolutionary standpoint, if minds evolved to be adaptive, that says nothing about whether they are accurate or reliable regarding the truth.
Adaptive and reliable are two different things. A belief could be adaptive and false. That is to say that the false belief produces desired outcomes, at least in the short term. That being said, while false beliefs can be adaptive, true beliefs tend to be more adaptive in the long term. Over the large expanse of evolutionary time, then, natural selection has tended to select for those minds that come up with true beliefs. So evolution has produced humans with minds that are generally if not perfectly tuned to form true beliefs about the world around them.
I say not perfectly formed because humans have instinctual and emotional drives that distract from rational thought. Additionally, perfect conclusions require perfect information and no one has that. But these exceptions prove the point more than they detract from it, I think.
Dennis Michael Sawyers #27: Through relatives, I have occasionally attended Traditional Latin Masses in Columbus Ohio the past 10 years (having read JMG’s comment from Dion Fortune and as an act to support my now deceased older brother, who was devoted to it), and it does have a majesty and mystery. But mostly if you attend the High Mass, which has glorious music; the Low Masses can get kind of dry and lecture-y. At one time, their church chanted the Kyrie Eleison from (was it the 13th or 14th century France) Eleanor of Brittany, which was hauntingly beautiful. Several major & a few smaller cities now have TLMs somewhere on their schedules, observed by one or the other of breakaway traditionalist Catholic groups (Institute of Christ the King or the Sedevacantists), and younger families are flocking to them, as well as younger priests learning to perform them. I was stunned early on to notice they defined as one of the “sins crying out to Heaven for redress” that of cheating workers on their wages.
As a ”white” amateur genealogist and family historian for forty-years, I have viewed hundreds of “blacks” (labeled so) in U.S. Federal censuses going back to 1850 in USA’s North and South. As for censuses in Jamaica, I have no knowledge if there were counterpart censuses in the 1800s, nor whether any such censuses would specify “white,” “black,” or “mixed.”
In the current flap, I noticed the following:
No-one in the media has mentioned that Komoda Harris is 99.99% probability of also being white (Irish and Scottish). Komoda Harris is black, Asian, AND white — so why is everyone leaving “white” out? I don’t get it.
Donald J. Harris, father
born 1938
Jamaica, West Indies
Komoda’s father Donald’s mother was a Finnegan.
Her Finnegan/Finegan line:
The surname Finnegan/Finegan is from Ireland. (As it happens, I have a Finegan line from County Galway’s neighboring County Roscommon.)
According to Ancestry dot com’s family trees (paywall), Komoda’s particular Finegans were from County Galway, Ireland: in particular, one Patrick Finegan born about 1843. One can say with 99.99% certainty that Patrick was 100% white.
Patrick married a Mary Graham Johnson Watson, born in 1838 Jamaica. I can’t say whether Mary was white, black or mixed, but her middle name Graham and her surname Watson seriously point to Scottish ancestors. It was likely Mary was either white or mixed.
All this is anecdotal and unproven. But it is out there on Ancestry dot com for the public to view (paywall). Similar specific information on Komoda Harris’ lines are available at no charge on familysearch dot org.
💨Northwind Grandma💨📜
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Dear JOAN,
i can testify as to the magical nature of The Abused. when i was in jail a few months ago, i went straight back into where i was as a kid very easily and would connect with the others locked up with me on that level. in real life as i dealt with a few outside afterwards, they tried to go back to “normie” world and i lost ’em in The Real.
but when we were in jail i could easily connect. there were some murderers in there that i didn’t deal with, but the harmless group of women i was trapped with, they each had that ability to see beyond and see truth and we don’t know how to play the game, the normie game, so we get popped.
they can sense us. we’re too open. too ALIVE. we don’t hide well, and if we do, it’s at our own peril even if we think we’re just surviving.
so yeah… write that book. magic enchantment life force spirit sensitivity artistry… all the same thing, same realm.
good luck with that. i’d love for you to write that book, too. this game is my …task? it’s my job to find a way to twist out of the traps and win. others say i’m doing fine but i’m not so sure. i feel thrashed trashed and like my head’s been bashed in over and over to a beat that goes on and on.
but i have FAITH. faith that some how there’s a better way to pitch that we’re not to be wasted but celebrated loved protected. more and more i think that’s utopian thinking but man… their dystopia is nonsensical. it sucks and no one’s having any fun. for the “winners” included.
erika
All I will say about my Christian upbringing at this point is that the Universalist tradition is a breath of fresh air.
Clay Dennis, “mana”, at least in the New Zealand Maori sense is another one of those words that doesn’t translate well to English. I interpret it as earned power, status, standing, or authority. “Adept”, in the sense that others figure out if you have mana or not, bestow it on you. Anyone running around claiming they have mana, probably don’t.
The Polynesian concept of life force you are referring to is “mauri”, where they relate, such as in your river example, is Te Mana O Te Wai, or returning the power to freshwater. I think that shows that Polynesian cultures, like most, realised everything had life force, it’s just that some of it could be depleted, and needed to be charged back up (that’s mana).
These concepts are law and lore in New Zealand, even those who don’t like them seem to put plenty of effort into opposing them.
@ PrayerGardens #99
Interesting. Thanks for that!
Blessed Lughnassad/Lammas/First Harvest for those who celebrate it. It’s a feast of bread and thanks for the bread, so have a fine loaf of whatever you like.
Steve T.—Really excellent comment, thank you very much. And I so agree with you. My take, as a practicing Catholic, is the Church is flailing around, unsure of what is going on, and has been like this since Vatican 2. I am very happy to see more and more people, especially younger ones, embrace the Latin Mass, sacramentals, etc. I make use of many sacramentals and really don’t care what “liberal “ Catholics think of them. And much as I like Pope Francis personally, I think he’s totally on the wrong track with some of his policies. Have you read any of Cardinal Sarah’s books? I think he’s very good and was forced into retirement by Francis. He’s very much a traditionalist. I think some of our priests know what needs to be done to save the Church, but most don’t know or even seem to care. I belonged for years to a “conservative “ parish that was full of the Spirit so I know what so many parishes are missing.
And Ennobled (please forgive me if I have gotten your name wrong), there’s a book called Catholic Sacramentals, by Ann Ball you might be interested in. I have no idea if it’s any good, I just went searching for a book for you and it popped up. It seems to be pretty easy to get a used copy. I personally wear a scapular and carry a rosary with me everywhere, you never know when you might have time to say one! I also wear holy medals of saints and a crucifix and a miraculous medal on a string around my neck. I gave up on nice looking chains, I was always breaking them. And I have many statues and pictures of blesseds and saints around my house and on my kitchen altar. All these sacramentals direct my gaze to God.
And Mr. Greer, I thought this was a fantastic article, truly one of your best, and I have been reading you for 15 years. Explained a lot of things to me that I have wondered about.
And to everyone that prays for people on Quin’s prayer list, my brother in law, Patrick, is still alive, but is down to skin and bones and is sleeping 22 hours a day. We are most appreciate of all prayers.
Blessings and peace to all here at this wonderful forum for “weird” ideas!!
Neckless Ones 😀
This echoes faintly of snarky writings by Gregory of Nyssa and others, regarding the heretic Severus and his followers, whom they referred to as acephalites: “Headless Ones”. It was a reference to their lack of a bishop, not to their lack of heads 😉 I think there is some clever Byzantine pun in there using a false cognate between “Severus” and the latin “Seperare” but I’m not scholarly enough to be sure.
I am so glad you talked about this topic and put it into nuanced historical context as only you can (or are willing) JMG.
“and it’s worth noting that the propagandists who wax rhapsodic about the benefits of science and technology are remarkably mum when it comes to mentioning the corresponding costs.” This needs to be turned into a song somehow, perhaps by me. One of the worst side effects of embracing the meaty aspect of Meatworld has been etheric starvation. My go-to term for the Holy Spirit, Xi, chi, prana, Mana, n|um, et al is etheric energy or just plain old energy. Electricity and the etheric plane appear to be part of the same thing as far as I can tell. Etheric starvation is when the etheric body becomes damaged, which leads to sickness and addictive behavior. Basically etheric starvation is horrible. Most of us, including me, have it.
The whole Covid claptrap of social distancing, e-learning, and masks was an attempt to cut people off from their etheric connections with each other and to make them easier to control.
We all die of something, however, in the meantime it is a very good idea to ameliorate the common condition of etheric starvation. The quickest remedy for etheric starvation, I have found, is a beam of sunlight on the spleen area. I intuited this remedy via Manly P. Hall’s Occult Anatomy of Man where he mentions the spleen as the main organ of etheric energy intake. Another remedy I tend to use is drinking lemon balm tea. Herbs in general help us to defend ourselves against etheric starvation, and that is why I recently wrote an article about them: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/124519.html Purslane is at its peak right now in northern Illinois, so I have made a lunch of fried purslane and rice (coat it in chickpea flour and fry it in oil) for the last few days. It has been very helpful. Purslane is nature’s multivitamin. Home cooking in general is restorative to the etheric body. Music is a great etheric recharger, especially quality live music. Alternative medicine, to my mind, treats etheric starvation, so it makes perfect sense that Big Pharma would be against its paying customers flocking to it. I welcome any other etheric improvement suggestions… every little bit helps!
@Clay Dennis, re: water treatment:
This is wonderful! I’ve read about projects like this in Germany, but did not think we had any in the US. I’m delighted to be wrong!
I haven’t read all the comments yet, so someone may have addressed this, but the calming, healing presence of a caring nurse, whether administering shots or just by their presence,as opposed to a timed drip is so obvious. I would say indisputable, but people will dispute anything. I think this holds true for a family member, friend, or even pet.
I recently had a hip replacement and it was hugely comforting to have my daughter there as I was wheeled off and when I woke up. The surgeon was very skilled, but throughout the pre and post op process the caring and humanity of everyone involved in the medical process made a huge difference. I felt that their care certainly strengthened my life force.
Stephen
(pondering whether this version of πνεύμα is or isn’t congruent with Orthdox use of either πνεύμα or νους…)
Hmm, a lot of people on the political left used to refer to themselves as weird, just as they used to be called “reds”. Today it’s the conservatives who have been colored red, and now weird. I wonder how many Austin, Texas progressives are scraping their “Keep Austin Weird” bumper stickers off of their electric SUVs.
Joy Marie
Bradley #79
Re. the quote you include in your comment “Ideas are nothing, financing is everything.”
I do think this is an interesting quote because neither the first part (ideas) nor the second part (financing) refer to actual practice.
In my own case, I have slowly, over the years, become a gardener making a significant contribution to the food we eat in our own kitchen, by spending time (not money), by paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, by developing relationships to the land, and its spirits and energies.
What I see around me are often people trapped in a spiral of:
1) panic at the rise in food prices
2) determination to start “growing our own food”
3) financialisation of this determination by making large financial investments in polytunnels, garden tools, soil additives, and etc.
4) failure to start actually spending any time at all in the garden
5) regretting the money wasted on gardening accoutrements not used
6) still thoroughly p-ed off at the rising prices and ongoing feeling of helplessness
If you are going to “spend”, spend the time first, and see what you can do, and how it works… THEN start spending. I figure I *may* be ready to invest in a polytunnel in a few years… or maybe, by then, I will have spent enough time in this actual garden, to realise I don’t need one. 🙂
JMG,
Since Illuminatus! has been brought up already, my comment feels less OT. At first I wasn’t quite sure what the Fnord bit was about – a lot of the book was puzzling on first read-through, TBH – but I totally get it now. Thanks for putting a finer point on that one. Of course, any book that tiles its chapters Kether through Malkuth is probably worth checking out…
I did not, that I remember, (then again I had just about everything beaten out of me by the time I graduated from HS), but my children both had memories of the “before-time” when they were very young and we never discouraged that. In fact we encouraged it whole-heartily. And gained strength in that conviction from your writings. I know everyone says this, but we have two really wonderful teenagers now, and I can’t help but think that was part of it.
The fnords remind me of the nargles in the “Bertie Scrubb” series, btw.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to re-read that book 4 or 5 times before I really get a solid grip on it. As an aside…I know you caught my diabolical mathematics at the end of the Open Post last week, because you approved the comment. [Fnord!] But that seems like a fair taste of what reading that book for the first time is like! 23? 17? 5? Am I missing something?? I’m sure there’s a lot more to glean from it.
Many thanks,
Fission Chips
(I took Grover out because I felt he was getting too close to me. Him and the whole BUGGR flash mob. Cheers.)
Hawk, music is potent stuff. Pythagoras, who basically kickstarted the Western occult traditions — vroom! — insisted that all his initiates had to study and practice it. He didn’t have them sign releases, either…
Steve T, oh, I know. Occam’s razor is one of the four or five logical fallacies most often deployed by pseudorationalists in defense of their materialist dogmas. As for Charismatic Christians, of course — and it doesn’t surprise me at all that they’re having to buck the frantic attempts by the hierarchy to shut them down. The wind of the Spirit bloweth where it listeth, no matter what religious bureaucrats think! With regard to sacramentals, finally, I think I need to find a good pre-Vatican II text on them. There’s no reason why the Universal Gnostic Church shouldn’t have a set of their own…
Karalan, yep. Funny how that works.
Mary, that’s correct. Gravity is a phenomenon on the material plane, and it affects physical matter. The life force is not material in nature, and so it is affected by forces and factors specific to its own plane, which is also the plane of our own vital or etheric bodies (and those of plants).
Clay, oh my. Thank you for this; that warms the heart of this aging and sometimes grumpy Druid.
BeardTree, excellent. Is it possible that you and your fellow church member did something to attune yourself to the Spirit?
Other Owen, “Vacuum Catastrophe” would make a great band name!
Claire58, not exactly, because there are other factors involved, too — but class warfare is always in there somewhere.
TemporaryReality, I don’t. Many modern Druids use the old Welsh word “nwyfre” for the life force, but I don’t have the linguistic background to guess what words would have been used in Old Brythonic, the proto-Germanic dialects, or what have you.
Isaac, thanks for this.
DT, all this amounts to saying is that one set of deductions from phenomena in consciousness seems to be consistent with another set of deductions from phenomena in consciousness. We still have no way of knowing if the “real world,” whatever that is, is anything like what we perceive it to be — all we know is that acting in certain ways in response to our perceptions seem to provide us with other perceptions that we like, such as the feeling of a full belly, or what have you. Kant showed more than two centuries ago that even such basic frames of experience as space, time, and causality are structures of our consciousness, not objective realities “out there.” So it’s all still a matter of consciousness.
Northwind, the mainstream media is frantically trying not to talk about that. The alternative media on the right is circulating copies of her birth certificate, which states that she is Caucasian and Indian.
Peter (if I may), please keep in mind that Clay’s wife is iirc native Hawai’ian, and that words such as mana may well have shifted in meaning across the thousands of miles separating one end of the Polynesian diaspora from the other!
Patricia M, thank you, and likewise!
Heather, thank you. I’m glad you liked it.
Methylethyl, funny.
Kimberly, I think it would make great raw material for a song. As for the rest, yes, exactly.
Stephen, thanks for this. It’s a real phenomenon.
Methylethyl, there I can’t help you. In late classical Greek πνεύμα meant the life force and νους meant consciousness, but that was a long time ago, and as I pointed out to Peter above, words change their meaning over time and space.
Grover, it’s a wild, wild ride! I finished it (for about the tenth time) night after last, and I’ll doubtless pick up more from my next read, too. Say hi to Mr. Chips, and tell him that Saint Toad will buy him a beer the next time he’s in Fernando Poo.
Since gravity is purely physical, what keeps the inhabitants of the ethereal plane anchored to the Earth as is hurtled through space?
I can see how this isn’t a problem on the astral and higher planes — in a dream or imagination the answer to “how far is that from here” is “how far do you want it to be?” — but on the ethereal plane I’m left scratching my head.
“the teachings I’ve read about that in Christian occult texts suggest that the Incarnation redefined the relationship between God and human beings, opening a connection that did not exist before, and it was through that connection that the Paraclete was able to act. It wasn’t a new thing in any overall sense, but in its ability to be manifest in human beings? Entirely new” a JMG quote from above
“Paraclete” is a Greek word used as a title of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John, translated ‘Comforter’ in older translations, ‘Helper’ in newer ones. JMG,I was impressed by your above succinct theological summary.
Jesus is introduced in each of the 4 Gospels as the one who will give or baptize in the Holy Spirit. A favorite phrase from the New Testament of mine – “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”
I respect and appreciate your acceptance of faiths and approaches on their own terms not performing nips, tucks, and amputations on the, to make them fit into a single all inclusive framework. I have learned over the years that just because something is real to me doesn’t mean it’s real to some one else and that though I am free to share it’s rude and not being a good loving neighbor to push on someone to see things my way.
To answer your question your question about whether my friend and I had specially attuned ourselves to the Spirit before the eruption. The answer is no, besides the initial coming to Jesus as Lord and Savior, way, truth, and life, baptism and the usual daily prayer, weekly communion and aiming to daily walk with God in our own small imperfect way. We were just there and were asked to perform a simple service. The understanding I have is that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit ongoing and He can manifest without a special prior attunement as a freely moving wind of surprise. . He also can graciously manifest when we consciously and deliberately seek and ask. The Holy Spirit in my understanding and experience is a person, not an impersonal force to be manipulated, though He does have the characteristics of wind, fire, water, and raw life. He has enlivened my body directly many times and is responsive.
@ JMG– This is pdf of a 1962 version of the Rituale Romanorum, which includes blessings of sacramentals: https://sensusfidelium.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Roman-Rite.pdf
At this point, the revisions had begun, but I don’t believe they’d progressed very far at this point.
As simple magic, they’re highly effective. They universally begin with an invocation, viz.
Adjutorium nostrum in nomine domini
qui fecit caelum et terram
This is immediately followed by–
Dominus vobiscum
Et cum spiritu tuo
… which serves to create a circuit of power between the operator and any assistants.
A suitable prayer follows, during which the object to be blessed is empowered by prayers which specify exactly what the purpose of the sacramental is. For example, priestly vestments are blessed so that they “may become hallowed and suitable for divine worship and the sacred mysteries. Let every bishop, priest, or deacon clothed in these sacred vestments (this sacred vestment) be strengthened and defended from all assault or temptation of wicked spirits; let them perform and celebrate your mysteries reverently and well; and let them always carry out their ministry in a devout and pleasing manner; through Christ our Lord. ”
The object in question is typically both blessed with the sign of the cross (enhanced, in my experience, by visualizing the cross as a brilliant white light through which current of power descends from heaven) and sprinkled with holy water.
It’s a very compact and effective mode of magic. I’ve used on its own (when I’m working within a Christian frame) and modified it for Druidic practice, following your example– “Hu the Mighty, Great Druid God, enlighten us through Thy initiation” works in place of “Our help is in the name of the Lord”; a pentagram to clear chaotic or unbalancing energies; an AWEN /|\ in place of a cross; holy water and incense.
The same formula could be used by anyone working in any tradition. I’ve also used variations based on texts from the Chaldaean Oracles (you know the ones…). The feel or “flavor” of the energy is different, but the effectiveness is the same.
It’s worth noting that, even within a completely orthodox Christian frame, the blessings for the sacramentals can be done by anybody, even if the local bishop might not like it.
@rajarshi, I do agree that the materialist consensus must have been maintained and reinforced over the 20th century, otherwise it would have disintegrated among all the revolutions. I do wonder at your affirmation that Dr. Urey had to leave the US after the Urey-Miller experiment – didn’t he live on as a highly acclaimed and productive emeritus?
Regarding Russia (and I claim no deep knowledge there), it seems that the tsarist regime was autocratic and often despotic, but not very efficient at suppressing dissent. From the literature I have read, it seems that an enormous variety of political, economical, philosophical and theological opinions arose and were quite freely propagated since the 19th century. Doctor Zhivago tells the story of how the 1917 revolutions initially opened up the border of the thinkable and sayable even further. From what JMG wrote above about cosmicism, that would have included occult thought, though I haven’t seen that yet (Master and Margarita does approach occultism in an oblique way, even under Stalin).
However, the party closed down dissent much more efficiently than the tsars had, especially under Stalin, and I suppose this iron-clad elitism and top-down rule included materialism.
I think Sagan’s urgency also had more to do with elitism than with fear of the USSR. Somebody wrote upstream that occultism and Christianity were both belief systems of the poor. That may very well be true in the USA, and to a lesser degree in Latin America, though it is not (in my opinion) the case in Europe. Ironically, all through the early Soviet period and even into Stalin’s rule, many people in support of the régime admired the USA as a beacon of progress.
@ Methylethyl– I’m still not sure if you believe me when I say this, but “nous” is used in your church in the same way that it was used by the pagan Neoplatonists, to describe a mode of consciousness higher than ordinary thinking. (And also to describe the level of existence on which that mode of consciousness operates.) It isn’t the same thing as the Life Force. My source for this claim is that I took in upwards of a dozen lectures on the subject from contemporary Orthodox thinkers (thank you ancientfaith.com) before I began studying Proclus and Plotinus, and was only able to understand the latter thanks to the Orthodox.
There’s an interesting history there, too, though, which is similar to the loss of the concept of the Life Force. “Nous” in Latin is “Intellectus.” But for some reason– JMG might know how this happened, but I don’t– at some point in our history, “Intellectus” and its English form,” intellect,” came to mean the thinking mind and its contents and to be identical with “reason.” In the thought of people like Plotinus, thinking is a function of the highest levels of the Soul, made possible by Nous but identical with Nous or with noetic activity. This both makes a lot of ancient philosophy impossible for modern English speakers to understand– “nous” in Plato is usually translated as “reason,” and so we tend to read texts like the Republic and assume that you leave the Cave just by thinking really hard about stuff! It also makes discussions between Orthodox and non-Orthodox difficult. I once had a long argument with a young Orthodox convert in which I tried to explain that “intellect” is the English word used to translate “nous,” while he kept insisting that the Orthodox Church knows all about the intellect but hold that the nous is something higher than the intellect.
The loss of the concept of nous is different from the loss of the life force, but similar in its destructive effect. The result is an overall degradation in our ability to think, and, even more importantly, to even talk about spiritual realities. The nous is, as your priests often say, “the eye of the soul.” But in contemporary discourse every form of mental experience other than reason per se is rolled into the word “irrational,” even when the experience should actually be termed “superrational” or “transrational.” At best we have the word “intuition,” but this is typically confused with “emotion” and still seen by many as the province of women, or maybe hippies and yoga instructors, but not thinking men like me.
@ Heather– Thanks for this comment. It is really heartening to see how many of the younger generation have totally rejected the pseudo-Church that emerged in the ’60s.
My own view is that the sacramental Christian tradition is one of the world’s great systems of magic– and since I was raised in the Catholic Church, that tradition belongs to me as much as it does to any priest, bishop or pope!
Two years ago I wrote a series of posts on my Dreamwidth blog which I called the “Christian Wheel of the Year,” which presents Catholic the traditions of seasonal celebration and sacramental practice as a magical system which can be worked with by anybody (including the entirely orthodox). It needs revision, and I’ve been meaning to clean it up and turn it into book form. But it occurs to me that you and others here might find it helpful. Dreamwidth doesn’t exactly make formatting easy, but the posts begin on the page which I will link to– at the bottom, and you have to scroll up to read on:
https://readoldthings.dreamwidth.org/?skip=160
JMG,
It really is just an upward spiral, isn’t it? I’ve always felt guilty about reading the same books over and over, (as if there’s some sort of an award to be won for reading the most unique titles. I’m about to RE-read “After Progress” btw), but I think I could probably pick just about any book on your to-re-read-list, study it for the rest of my life, and get everything I need to know. Maybe I should just turn Illuminatus! over and start again on Monday? 😉
@Northwind Grandma (#135) and JMG (#150):
Years and years before Kamala becam so prominent on the national scene, she gave an interview somewhere that I remember, in whicb she said that her mother had deliberately decided to raise her as a Black child rather than as an Indian or White one, since that would give her a more solid support community. (I was curious about her background since we both hailed from Berkeley.)
Ultimately, it has always seemed to me, one’s genetics and genealogy are far less important for one’s actual racial identity than one’s childhood upbringing and one’s physical appearance. So her mother’s choice was quite enough, in my view, to make Kamala grow up as a Black woman.
Two of our earliest and very best friends, once we moved to Rhode Island, were Horace and Naomi Craig, prominent figures in the Black community of Providence. (They kindly took us under their protective wings when we showed in in Providence as clueless Californian newlyweds.) Horace was a detective in the Providence Police, his father had been a Prince Hall Freemason; and Naomi was a (Black) Baptist minister. Each seemed Black in every way (appearance, dialect, culture) that mattered in Providence, and they were accepted as such by other Blacks that we knew. Yet Naomi’s father was an Irishman named Jennings, Horace’s mother was a 100% Narragansett Indian (born to the prominent Dove family of Rhode Island), and one of Horace’s father’s grandmothers had been a Lapp (Saami) who had immigrated here from Norway! These genetic or genealogical details hardly mattered for their racial identity.
Similarly, Barack Obama counts as Black in the same way as Kamala does, although his mother was a white woman, Ann Dunham, who was aever-so-many-generational descendant of Deacon John Dunham of old Plymouth Colony, who came there sometime in the 1620s.
Thanks JMG for filling in the details of a history that I didn’t know I needed to know about! I hadn’t considered the political dimensions of things like Occam’s Razor, or that all beliefs have a political dimension to be considered.
Thanks to William of Occam, Western Science likely does not have a way to study sentients who are smarter than us or operating in a completely different way from us; We are pretty good at studying rocks and minerals, OK at studying animals, and so-so results at studying other humans. I am not confident about what we can discover about entities for which our universe is only a subset of the realms they inhabit! Maybe the Chinese have done better…
For anyone who wants to do spiritual healing, try the Modern Order of Essenes described on ecosophia dreamwidth https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/essenes —
Particularly my fellow healthcare workers! You know you are in it to see sickness healed, and suffering relieved. People are already coming to you for treatment. Why not add blessings for your patients, and seek insights from Spirit Above to become more effective in your healing work? We don’t have to know the mechanisms of how the spiritual world works, and we may not be able to comprehend them. We may only need to seek relationships with spiritual beings who are willing to bless and heal, and find ways to block the ones who want to cause harm and mischief.
As an addemdum to my previous post, here’s a link to a Berkeleyside article on Harris and her young years in the Berkeley Black community:
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/08/01/rainbow-sign-berkeley-kamala-harris
@Chris Henningsen, thanks so much for this! Just pulled an e-copy of your book, will be digging into it over the weekend.
P.S. to JOAN:
i actually think the abused ARE abused BECAUSE OF OUR LIFE FORCE. it threatens others’ concepts of the game and their power as they’ve found their place in the system.
sometimes when you incite excite and arouse, it’s not considered a good thing but DANGEROUS to their stasis and sense of control. they’re fragile, rigid, and will kill to maintain their composure and concepts.
you have to be a little sadomasochistic to play and test such people, and that pathology is usually borne out of someone making training and teaching you to be or respond that way.
i don’t believe in subverting our so-called perversions that hurt belittle and flip ’em to discover and empower. empower because you are not a slave to the…what’s the word? SHTICK. you’ve taken a prediliction a HABIT and twisted it for good like the woman who said she shepherded her husbands OCD to get a medical degree.
EXACTLY! like THAT! why waste it on turning knobs on a stove fifty times? why not artistically channel it to a bigger goal?
i say this because some of us who’ve been abused end up with odd appetites and are bored by regular people and instead of hating each other in your oddness, there’s a way of loving and blowing it up big. so many of us abused find each other and try to make each other normals now.
i think we’re like the virgins people want to wipe their disease on to be clean. when first heard that about AIDS and virgins in Africa i thought, “yeah, that makes sense” because that’s how i saw us kids in trouble when i was young. we all were sweeter than the normies who preyed upon us. and even as a young girl i felt their desperation and self-disgust. i pitied them. and that’s why they never went far with me…. even if i’d wanted them to because my sense of love was as twisted as anyone’s. i figured as long as someone desired or was in awe of you, you’d be loved. how to do that and never run out of road?
ironically is to not NEED their twisted love! funny how that works.
erika
@ Heather, 141
Thank you for the recommendation.
And thanks to anyone else who replied. Work is pick up, so I’m resorting more to scanning the comments.
@Peter Wilson, and JMG
The Polynesian word Mauri is not used to represent the lifeforce in Hawaiian culture for a very simple reason ( maybe occums razor works occasionally). The Hawaiian language has no R or R sound in it. So if a native Hawaiian tried to pronounce this word it would sound like the Hawaiian island of Maui. Since Maui is named for the legendary Hawaiian god of the same name, there is a decent chance that this name was simply a bad translation from the word for life force further south in Polynesia.
As an aside, my wife is 4th generation japanese american whose great grandfather came from Japan in the late 1880’s to work on the sugar cane plantations of Maui. But growing up many of her friends were native Hawaiian, and the Hawaiian school system of the time did a very good job of teaching Hawaiian culture including its spirituality.
@MethylEthyl,
I bet the natural treatment wetlands in Germany don’t have a 5 acre formal Japanese healing garden at the headworks where the water is aerated by flowing down small waterfalls. Here is a link the website of the wetlands. https://fernhillnts.org
I read that Polynesians made the journey across the Pacific to Peru a long time ago by means of double-hulled canoe. Can you imagine? What except ‘life force’ would have impelled them to do that?
You might say the same about the beastly difficult trip across the Bering Straight and then down the west coast by prehistoric Siberians.
The Polynesians apparently brought back yams on the return journey and left chickens as evidenced by chicken bones in Peru dating back to before Columbus.
I find it wryly amusing how often people make the insistence that if a cause ain’t known the effect can’t happen, given just how many of the major scientific discoveries occurred because someone went looking for a cause for an odd effect. I’ve suspected for a while that this is part of what is killing science, although that particular death certificate is going to have a very long list of causes….
I recall from my high school chemistry classes that European alchemists and chemical scientists believed in a “Vital Force” up until the artificial preparation of urea in 1828 by the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler. They believed that organic substances (substances which are produced within the bodies of living things) can only be produced by this Vital Force, and not otherwise.
The preparation of urea from ammonium chloride and silver cyanate proved that inorganic compounds can react to produce organic compounds, and this broke the belief in Vital Force as a participant in the chemistry of life and living matter.
Although, this is from a high school chemistry prep book in India, so I do not know how accurate this narrative is. Does anyone else here know something about it?
Slithy, clearly there’s some pattern of forces more or less equivalent to gravity on that plane. Very possibly it’s the same force that causes the etheric tides.
BeardTree, thank you. I’ve long believed that the universe, strictly speaking, is too complex to be understood by beings as simple and finite as you and I, so there’s no justification for trying to cram different ideologies into a single pattern; every religion teaches as good an approximation of truth as it can, and the fact that those approximations contradict each other is simply a reflection of the impossibility of making sense of the infinite Divine in terms suitable for finite beings.
Steve T, thanks for this! Knowing the proper term, and having no fear of Latin, I was able to find several earlier editions as well, including the 1925 and 1873 versions. (Archive.org has those.)
Grover, I reread the same books tolerably often, though I throw new ones into the mix fairly often as well. I’m in the process, right now, of launching into a reread of all the original Sherlock Holmes stories, which have been faves of mine since I was eight!
Emmanuel, and that’s exactly it, of course — the point of Occam’s rusty razor is to keep people fixated on the material plane. There are other options, and a wider world.
Smith, I don’t think we’ll understand prehistory until we start thinking of the ocean as a highway rather than a barrier…
Taylor, and more stab wounds than Julius Caesar!
Rajarshi, it was more complex than that. Organic chemistry was very nearly the last stand of the life force in Western science, since for a very long time no organic compound could be synthesized; that was one of the core reasons why chemistry was treated for so long as a second-rate science — anything that left room for the life force got that treatment, while physics, astronomy, and other sciences that had chased it out were treated as first-rate sciences.
Quick update — just scored a downloadable copy of the 1615 edition of the Rituale Romanum. Now to see what I can find from the Middle Ages!
@JMG re: spam: nope. I have a DW, it receives very little traffic (and that suits me), and I think that prevents it being a target for spam.
@SteveT
Thanks for at least the attempt at a clarification! I’m still deep in the reading-everything-at-once process, and I’m rusty on what our catechist taught 15 or so years ago…
I remember that we differentiate between nous and “intellect” as it’s rendered in the West. I think that is… dianoia + logos? The intellectual capacity and the reasoning/speech capacity. Nous is different. Don’t quote me on it, but it seems to be perceptive, to a larger extent. Whereas our physical senses perceive light waves and sound waves and things, the nous is the part of you that is capable of observing your own thoughts, and a purified nous apprehends truth. And also directs will and stuff. And then somewhere in there, there’s thumos (anger? courage?), pnevma (spirit), and of course the physical body. But it gets confusing at times because different writers, often educated in the pagan/Greek tradition, sometimes use different words, or use them to mean different things. Where does psyche fit in? Depends on who you ask…
Perhaps in another couple years of painfully slow reading, I’ll have it nailed down 😉
After further thought – the event I described was decades ago – I may have had a brief time of prayer inwardly or quietly out loud with maybe a bit of tongues under my breath beforehand, possibly in conjunction with my friend, these are my usual practices – which could be called an attunement with the Spirit
“trying to cram different ideologies into a single pattern” Emerson said “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” JMG, you do realize that your refusal to embrace the Perennial Philosophy of Aldous Huxley makes you a heretic in certain circles? Yes, Let Freedom Ring! and let us all be good kind neighbors!
I have just learned something new. Mana it is.
JMG, a near contemporary of William of Ockham was Dante. Dante had been expelled from Florence in 1302 after being on the wrong side when the victorious Guelphssplit in two. Some years later (1307?), he began writing the Inferno, and he completed the Paradiso in 1321, the year of his death.
Another contemporary was the artist Giotto, whose cycle of frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel include depictions of the 7 sins, and the 7 virtues.
As you know, I own a wonderful lithograph based on Canto IX of the Purgatorio, the moment when the Angel at the gates of Purgatory inscribes seven Ps on the forehead of the Pilgrim. P is for Peccato, that is Sin in Italian.
This is the moment when Dante, the Pilgrim, goes from observer to participant in his travels through the afterlife. He must go through the seven levels of the Purgatory to cleanse himself in order to enter the Earthly Paradise, from where Beatrice will lead him to Paradise.
Under the influence of that lithograph, I’ve reread Dante. (Unlike Illuminatus!, each time I read the Commedia, the text is different, because I have 4 translations as well as the Italian). I am now preparing a service for my church on this moment, and the artwork that inspired me. Your writing this has made realize that sins are in way a corruption of the xi. Across seven centuries they continue to speak, and we try to understand what they said.
When I was in high school –mid 1960s–the group I hung out with proudly referred to ourselves as the Out Crowd–as opposed to the In Crowd of popular kids, jocks, surfers, cheerleaders and so forth. We were the band kids, drama club, future teachers club, library club. The kind who were reading Lord of the Rings before anyone else had heard of it and taught themselves Elvish. Still in contact with two other members. Learned years after high school that about half the Out Crowd were gay but no one was “out” back then.
Ockham seems to have revived a question that Plato dealt with in Euthyphro–is something good because the gods approve of it, or do the gods approve because it is good? Of course, it being a Socratic dialogue, no conclusion is reached, but it is clear that the question was one that Socrates felt important.
Robert Anton Wilson described an event that helped turn him from a straight arrow engineer to an explorer of the weird. By happenstance he actually witnessed Federal agents hauling off Reich’s papers and burning them. I forget which of his books describes this event, but he later wrote a play called _William Reich in Hell_.
Rita
@Clay Dennis #6,
That is wonderful news! I have been weird all my life–in Junior high all the popular boys would walk up to me and tell me I was weird. It’s a wonderful way of life, and I am quite proud of it. (The popular boys probably fared fine too.)
@JMG, wonderful essay this week, that I want to share with any Christians I know who are who holding tight against the materialists. I have plenty of Occam’s razor burn, as I imagine you were realizing as you wrote this, from people sticking up for one of the plutocrats’ most lucrative schemes for wielding power.
@ Aldarion # 154 Thank you for bringing up the claim I made about Dr. Urey. I rechecked it, and I was wrong. I must have confused him with someone else. Anyway, my biology teacher from high school said something about an American biochemist retiring to India after facing much criticism from Creationist, and I think I mapped it to the wrong person. Anyway, sorry about the prematurely checked assertion, and thank you for correcting it.
@ JMG # 168 Many people say that science is about materialism, but I have noticed that scientists have taken many metaphysical entities and formalized them into their working theory from time to time, including electric and magnetic fields, luminiferous ether (from Maxwell’s time to Einstein’), thermal fluid (which was an old theory of heat conduction before modern theories were worked out), and even probability waves. I think the actual reason why some metaphysical entities are considered scientific and others are not is that science is the domain of things which are analogous to deterministic motion. Ever since Newton, the methods of science have mostly included the same paradigm that works in mechanics: posting differential equations, identifying boundary conditions, and then solving them. The major revolutions in Einstein’s time were brought about by new updates to be theory of mechanics itself (in the form of relativity and quantization), because the entirety of science stands on mechanics.
That said, I find it funny that William of Ockham started nominalism, while another William, also from Britain, made perhaps the most memorable attack on that thesis: “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name is just as beautiful.”
I do see a kind of tactical nominalism in usage these days though. For instance, when the caustic ends of the political spectrum label things they don’t like as toxic (toxic masculinity) or associate things they don’t like with a gender-related attribute (feminine trait), they are weaponizing labels to affect perception, aren’t they?
Well John, I think “Baraka” meaning is “blessings” for a person in the Islamic world, but I don’t know more about this mystical idea. If the kommentariat knows more about it, I’d be happy…
@JMG regarding spam,
I’ve not been getting any spam in my Dreamwidth page, but I have done very little with that anyway and have had a limited audience. On my main e-mail account, I’m getting a tremendous and growing amount of spam. I am having to take special care for several minutes a day when opening the program so that it doesn’t automatically open up on a spam. I send the entire in box to the spam box, where I can sort through them and select the e-mails I want to read without accidentally opening a spam.
A few weeks ago, I sent a parcel by the Yamato Transport delivery service, and later that day opened a spam that purported to be from that company with the subject line saying there had been a problem with the delivery. Then I realized I’d never even given them my e-mail address. All I did was start reading the content for a few seconds and then deleted it. Since them I get about 20 similar ones a day plus all the others, totalling about a hundred. Most claim to be credit card companies or other financial-related, but recently I’m seeing health-related ones, so unless I’ve known the sender for years, I am no longer opening any health-related e-mails. I think they are finding more and more clever ways of reaching people. Also, they are more persistent than before. Late last year I suddenly received several thousand notifications from companies wanting confirmation for orders. I deleted all of them without replying. Fortunately, that is all that happened.
I think what it means is the economy is going to Helena Handbasket, and grifters everywhere are more desperate than ever.
JMG,
Oh, I like new stuff too (except maybe “The Social History of the Machine Gun” – just can’t really get into it), but I’ve read so many good books already that deserve closer study. Illuminatus! is certainly one of those.
Speaking of books that deserve closer study, my wife and I were just talking about what a useful concept Dion Fortune’s “thrust block” has been in our lives over the last few years. Case-in-point: earlier this year our teenage daughter developed a small lump on her ear and was convinced that she had to go see a “real” doctor about it. You know we’re herbalists, and have taken care of our own health needs for 20+ years now. Of course we didn’t see any point in taking her to a “real” doctor, and didn’t want to spend the ridiculous amount of money we knew they’d charge for the visit. But in true Fortune fashion we said “yeah, OK, let’s go see the doctor.” So we did, and the doctor said, “yep, looks like a small lump on your ear to me,” wrote her a scrip for antibiotics (which she promptly ripped up), and charged us $150. Expensive, but potent. Our daughter was disgusted by the whole affair, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to go back to a “real” doctor any time soon…
Looking forward to blowing the froth off a couple with Saint Toad in Fernando Poo!
I’ll see if I can score some Alamout Black for the occasion. 🙂
@JMG
Regarding your reply to fellow Ecosophian Rajarshi, I have a question – can we say that Justus Von Liebig had a complementary role to play in the “cancellation” of the life-force in organic chemistry, especially given his work regarding fertilizers and plant nutrition?
Also, since you mentioned organic chemistry, that brings me to a related question: do you agree with Rupert Sheldrake’s views on the dynamics of crystal formation? I remember reading his point that there is some sort of “memory effect” that is one of the factors governing crystal formation and growth – if Sheldrake is right (and there’s a good chance he actually is), is this another piece of evidence that supports the idea of the life-force?
Greetings all!
Fascinating essay! Thank you!
Are there any texts you could recommend if one were to learn to manipulate the life force?
Regards
There are many commenters above who speak about the healing value of being heard and respected, particularly during health-related treatment.
My memory from high school (long ago) includes being called “weird.” Recently I have come across mentions of the word “Basic” being used as an insult, particularly against young women. My best guess is that “basic” means “just like everyone else”. So, I’ve come to the conclusion that if someone wants to disparage or insult a young woman, they have both “Basic” and “Weird” available, and are now able to insult 100% of that part of the population without any sort of thought or imagination.
My experience with organized religion ended when it became clear that my 8 year old self was always car sick on the way home after Sunday School. (Snack was always Kool aid and Oreo cookies, so I think that might have been part of the problem?)
Too Long, Didn’t Read: respect and kind interaction is good for health. Processed food, not so much.
OMG. She came from Berzerkeley? Now it all starts making sense. Excuse me while I snicker quietly to all the people who consider that normal and not weird.
Although I did become fond of those sammiches at Cafe Intermezzo. I wonder if that place is still there or not. Aww, it burned down. Well, things have a way of catching on fire in that part of the world.
This is an off-topic post – JMG please remove it if you think it’s not appropriate. I wanted to post it last week but missed the cut-off date.
I have been trying to remember the name of a UK based blog that was once posted on Ecosophia in the comments which discussed topics from a fairly similar perspective to our esteemed host. I recall posts about the Strong Towns movement, the fecklessness of party politics in the UK, and lots of discussions around quantitative easing, the inflationary spiral, and the general disregard for the man in the street. Each post was tagged, and I remember one of the tags was “Economy”, which you could easily access via a top header.
If this rings a bell for anyone, please do post suggestions. I have been trying to remember the name of this blog for the past month. I should have bookmarked it in the first place to easily return to it, but I didn’t anticipate forgetting the name, which was quite catchy (but now I’ve forgotten it cleanly). Hopefully someone has a vague inkling of what it might be!
JMG,
Do you think some of the resistance to “spirit/life-force” comes from the fact that it can become an individually mastered practice?
Solo development is a bit frowned upon with the exception of approved self help that does nothing to help.
Hi John Michael,
Can’t say that I’ve observed more or less spam in recent days and weeks. However, you used the acronym to describe the Lurid Language Mode things which have been banned here. So perhaps they’ve taken umbrage? Or more likely, someone has set them onto you. I don’t believe they are smart, so someone will be behind this. May I suggest in future that you call the things something stupid, and then when that working fails, move to a different but equally stupid name? Or perhaps don’t state your policy so bluntly.
Speaking of the life force, in this instance you went into that Jedi cave with your intentions announced and tools shown to all – including those in the cave. Who’d you meet in there, none other than Darth Boring, and perhaps you are now locked in some odd confrontation, or at least a problem with high nuisance factor? That’s my best guess.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG: Thank you for this illuminating post; it has certainly given me a number of worthwhile things to reflect on. I’ll be very interested to learn more, if you decide to share the results, about what you turn up with the Rituale Romanorum and the sacramentals!
@Steve T: Thank you for both the notes about blessings and sacraments, and also for your comment to Methylethyl about ‘nous’, the term ‘intellectus’, and how ‘intellect’ came to be so tied in with ‘reason’. That is very interesting to me, because in learning how to get in touch with my own intuition I’ve had the faint or crude sense of some type of difference between the two modes, but I didn’t have a way to describe it (if that is indeed what I am starting to perceive).
I’ve found that, for years, I did discursive meditation by, as you put it, “thinking really hard about stuff”, and it wasn’t until I read, and started practicing, John Gilbert’s intuition exercises (as in his book Doors of Tarot but they also are located at that link, it appears), that some sense of the difference emerged.
I’ve found very useful his method for telling apart the different types of active minds that can be experienced while trying to listen to the intuition, and that gave me a clue into all this. Of course, this assumes that the term ‘intuition’ really points at this mode, as you’ve noted. I’ve also come across all the different ways that term is used. It’s fascinating to observe how words end up pointing at different things to different people and all the effects this has.
In any case, thank you for pointing all this out!
I remember one Catholic writer who, while not denying the supernatural, dismissed it all as “spiritual fireworks”, as in “Most people would rather be entertained with spiritual fireworks than get down to the hard work of salvation.” Which is what the salvationist religious establishments always want, right? “Don’t think about your current situation and how you might improve it. Keep your mind on the question of how you will fare in the afterlife judgement.”
@Northwind Grandma #124
Socon is an abbreviation of “Social Conservative”.
The ancient worldview, as is often found at least in part in works of C.S. Lewis, is that there is nothing that is not in some sense alive. Air? Alive. “Empty” space? Exceptionally alive (as the Voyager spacecraft are now discovering after leaving the heliopause, encountering vast quantities of cosmic rays). Rocks? Alive. Anything manufactured by men, even in an industrial process? Alive. The elements of a car, for example are more happy or less happy to be with one another, participating in the actions of the car, which has an effect on how “lucky” or functional the car is. Times? Moon phases, etc. All of them have their own individuality. Even in a materialist sense, there is absolutely no time that is identical to any other time in terms of what it “contains.” The idea that times have their own form of life totally escapes us (usually), but good astrologers are able to touch into that factor. The divine creator(s) of things, being the most alive entities(s) of all, cannot create anything without life. It’s a kind of raspberry jam effect: you can barely make and eat a peanut butter and jam sandwich without getting some on you somewhere. To quote the Marty Feldman character in “Young Frankenstein,” “It’s alive!” We may not these days routinely be able to access that immense quality of life-force, though there are techniques which if applied do enable this, but even the dullest of us experience and feel it all the same. The greatest crime of the “Radiance” which JMG explains here as the de-necking of our lives, is just that. Not the effects of it (pollution, genocides, etc.); it is instead the separation of a huge number of people from this immense vitality, their birthright. Thanks for this forum, and thanks to any who listen to my wee rant.
1615! Would you mind sharing a link? I would love to take a look at that.
JMG, as luck would have it there is a Christian clergyman who reads you. I happen to be protestant but have long recognized that our wholesale acceptance of the materialist agenda has been an utter disaster. Any chance you can recommend a title or 2 to help me resurrect 😉 the older magical traditions from either Orthodoxy or Catholicism. Many thanks!!
@methylethyl, bucks and others–
There is a typo in my comment to methylethyl above.
“In the thought of people like Plotinus, thinking is a function of the highest levels of the Soul, made possible by Nous but identical with Nous or with noetic activity”
The last part of this should read —
“but NOT IDENTICAL WITH Nous or noetic activity.”
A crucial distinction! Reason is indeed “dianoia” because it is made possible “through nous,” but it isn’t nous per se, but a product of soul (psyche) ‘s participation in nous. (At least as I understand it. These things can get complicated.)
Robert @ 160, thank you for sharing the link to a fascinating, to me, piece of our recent social history. It seems to me that American Black women can adopt as honorary sister anyone they choose for whatever reasons seem good to them. I fail to understand why anyone would want to devote time and energy to second guessing what does not concern them. One of the most unattractive and off putting habits of contemporary politics is the relentless and angry minding of other people’s business from folks of all sorts of persuasions who would be well advised to be attending to their own affairs.
I’m undergoing physical therapy for an ongoing and progressive muscular weakness, and just now realized how this building an especially this apartment is set up for it. The windows open, but they’d rather you not, because of mold etc (and pollen when it’s not this wet), and anyway back in the old apartment when I did, I could never get them closed back tightly, so it’s as sealed as a high-rise hotel room. One in which the windows all face north. The cure for this is getting out on campus a lot more, but when you feel too weak to walk very far, it’s a vicious circle. Will sign up for any live music on campus, and seek out more herbal teas. And ask my massage therapist to do some energy work on me.
As for the PT and our insanely fragmented regulations: The PT works only with the lower body; upper body work is for the Occupational Therapist to do. That’s insurance company rules now.
For what it’s worth.
Count me in with the weirdos and freaks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RFKJrForPresident/comments/1eie51i/freaks_for_rfk_jr/
Methylethyl, thanks for this. Another 48 spam comments this morning…
BeardTree, fair enough — thank you for this. The fact that they’re usual practices may well have helped make you a more suitable vessel on that occasion. As for the Perennial Philosophy, the only thing perennial about it is the frankly silly notion that the extraordinary richness of the world’s wisdom traditions can be crammed into any one pigeonhole. Heresy? Well, as an independent bishop, I’m by definitioin schismatic, and as a properly ordained Discordian clergyman as well — my noseprint has been mailed to the California State Office of Furniture and Bedding! — I’m a heretic, because all Discordians are heretics. Deal. 😉
Peter, I think it’s exactly the fact that Dante was a participant that makes him speak to us. William of Ockham wanted to be an observer all the time, passing judgment on objects.
Rita, yep. It’s a good play, too.
Patricia O, please do share it!
Rajarshi, science can’t do without metaphysical entities; it keeps trying to sweep that under the rug, but the rug’s gotten very, very lumpy of late! As for tactical nominalism, yes, and it works both ways. On the one hand, you can name something if you want to turn it into an object to vilify (or glorify); on the other, you can deny that something exists if its existence is inconvenient.
Patricia O, you’re probably right about the economy. Last I checked, stock markets are plunging and Intel is laying off 15,000 people.
Grover, nicely handled. One of the things I find most appealing about the ideas in The Cosmic Doctrine is that once you start treating them as metaphors, they have so many practical applications.
Viduraawakened, Liebig certainly played a role, though of course it was double-edged — he discovered some extremely useful things about the material-plane side of agriculture while he was helping our society turn its back on the life force. As for Sheldrake, I’d have to review what he says about it, but I tend to trust him — he has good experimental evidence for his claims. His morphogenetic fields are, as I interpret them, patterns in the life force that guide matter into forms.
Karim, whole bookshelves full of them, depending on what you want to do with it. I’ll have a book out on that subject — The Life Force Workbook — in the not too distant future.
Sylvia, thanks for this. It’s not 100% of that population, though. Too many young men are so far gone in near-fatal testosterone poisoning that they haven’t realized that the advertising industry, the porn industry, and the media are leading them around by the schlong, using an absurdly inflated ideal of female sexiness as the lure. Those few young women who can more or less fake that appearance are the ones who are neither basic nor weird, so as usual, you’ve got 90% of the young men chasing 5% of the young women and then whining like two-year-olds because they can’t get dates. Now of course nearly all these young men are themselves basic, weird, or both, but they haven’t figured out that they can have a much better time having fun dates with young women who are basic, weird, or both than they can if they spend all their time pining hopelessly after some vain and vapid beauty.
Kate X, oof. I remember it but I don’t remember the name.
GlassHammer, I think that’s a very, very large part of it. Another large part of it is that it can’t be turned into a marketable commodity.
Chris, oh, granted. I think it’s probably Darth Sipid, though, given the old naming conventions for Sith lords. This one isn’t accomplishing much, since my spam filter is good at learning.
Jbucks, I’ll be sure to let everyone know.
Joan, yeah, that about figures. “Can’t have you solving your problems, it’ll make you less dependent on the dysfunctional hierarchy that pays my salary!”
Clarke, Lewis was one of the last of the red-hot Christian Platonists, and he understood the ancient way of thinking as very few other modern people ever have. That’s why I included a hat-tip or two in his direction in my tentacle novels!
Steve, sure thing:
https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Vv9zfk9ddMQC/page/n1/mode/2up
If you do a search for “Rituale Romanum” there you’ll get other old editions too.
Rev. Steven, delighted to hear it. The first book I’d like to recommend to you is Experience of the Inner Worlds by Gareth Knight; he was a devout Anglican Christian, and wrote what is still the best intro I know of to the magical dimensions of Christianity, with a fine set of practical meditations. After that, why, fasten your seatbelt and head for —
https://thavmapub.com/products/
— the website of Agostino Taumaturgo aka Frater ADA, the most active figure these days in the Catholic occult scene. My Christian occultist friends tell me his books are first-rate. Beyond, that, why, one of the most spiritually awake people I’ve ever met got there by reading a chapter of the Bible and praying every day; your mileage may vary, but it certainly worked for her.
Patricia M, ouch. I hope things resolve.
@ Steven Dahlberg and anyone else who may be listening–
I’d also like to recommend the work of a few of my friends, who are practicing Christian occultists. The first is the one that JMG already shared, the work of Agostino Taumaturgo. His book “The Magic of Catholicism” (available at the website linked by JMG) is in many ways the last word in contemporary Christian occultism, and is very much geared toward orthodox, believing Catholics.
The second is the book “The Red Church” by Chris Bilardi: https://pendraigpublishing.com/the-red-church/ Bilardi learned the arts of magic and folk healing from traditional Pennsylvania German folk healers, and his book covers these in detail. He makes it clear from the get-go that the “magic” in question is by and for believing Christians.
I want to note that Bilardi and Agostino are both familiar with and sympathetic to at least the Lutheran wing of the Protestant churches.
Finally, another friend of ours (I don’t know has compiled a complete traditional Rituale Romanorum translated into formal, Elizabethan English rather than the pedestrian modern English of the version I shared with JMG above: https://www.lulu.com/shop/editors-of-saint-cyprian-press/the-roman-ritual-the-blessings-processions-litanies/paperback/product-149r9qgz.html?q=&page=1&pageSize=4
I can vouch for the fact that all three are serious occultists and serious Christians as well as simply being good men.
Finally and at the risk of excessive self-promotion, I’d also suggest that you might find the series of blog posts of mine that I recommended to Heather above helpful:
https://readoldthings.dreamwidth.org/?skip=160 (scroll down to the bottom of the page).
Part of what I tried to do in that series was to present the Christian traditions around the seasonal cycle, including the fasts as well as the feasts, as a straightforward magical system. The page I linked to covers the season of Advent through Epiphany, which begins the traditional liturgical year. I included material from throughout the European diaspora, and suggestions on how to modify traditional customs to meet the needs of modern Americans. For example, St Thomas’s Day, Dec. 21st, was a traditional “smoke day” during which livestock were blessed with incense, and it has many other customs associated with it as well: https://readoldthings.dreamwidth.org/57833.html
IMO the missing element in most Christian circles is an unawareness or even rejection of the varying alivenesses of the created order which after all is a creation of the Living God and would have that Livingness modeled and reflected in them. C.S. Lewis touches on this livingness in his book That Hideous Strength. This awareness was also present in the European Christian medieval and Renaissance mind. Because of my rural in nature upbringing, an innate sensitivity, and becoming enamored of Tolkien at age 12. ( Note the Lewis/Tolkien quote below). I retained this awareness after my conversion to Christianity in my nearly 20’s. For example I know that California Valley oaks when they attain a certain age acquire a most sweet gravitas.
I recently read Gareth Knight’s Experience of the Inner Worlds and found it contained many good insights but for me his methods and techniques seemed superfluous and unnecessary for this charismatic protestant to meet and know the Living Triune God and the inner aspects of creation. In this area I guess I am a minimalist in my set of physical, verbal and mental methods which is still larger than your standard evangelical Protestant’s and the “spiritually awake” person you mentioned. I find the sign of the cross a quiet blessing, have a splendid small icon of Jesus, burn frankincense based incense, and prostrate myself before the Lord, say the Our Father among other simplicities.
In a a letter to his life-long pen pal Arthur Greeves dated the 22nd of June, 1930, C.S. Lewis mentions Tolkien’s thoughts on the spiritual and generational effects of living directly off of the physically surrounding country.
“Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when the family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”
@The Other Owen (#185):
Yes, indeed it does help make sense of so much. Berzerkeley was (still is?) its own distinct cosmos, largely disconnected from the rest of the Bay Area, from the rest of California, from the rest of the USA, from the rest of the planet Earth, and in all likelihood from the rest of the known universe.
I take it you, too, are well acquainted with Berzerkeley! Hail, fellow Berkeleyan!
@Mary Bennet (@195):
You are very welcome, Mary! As for “the relentless and angry minding of other people’s business from folks of all sorts of persuasions,” I quite agree with you. Right on!
Apparently US politics has now become a branch of total war, where the destruction and humiliation of all one’s opponents is the whole aim of the exercise. (When I was young, politics was distinct from war. It was, in large part, the art of cooperating and compromising with one’s opponents (evil or not) to get something done of mutual benefit.
The very best way slowly to bring down any nation-state is to imbue its citizenry with the notion that one must never compromise with anyone or on anything that one considers “evil” or “unjust.” The quest for total virtue and total justice means the death of any working polity.
Kate X #186 – you may be thinking of Tim Watkins’ blog, The Consciousness of Sheep, found at https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/ which seems to match your description and mentions JMG’s writings occasionally.
Being back from my sojourn in the Kettle mountains I see I have to dive in the middle.
Rajarshi is correct about Urea putting a stake through the heart of vitalism. Making “organic” compounds from ordinary chemicals meant at least there were two ways to skin the cat. Further clarification came later with the discovery of chirality, left handed and righted chemicals. The first chiral compound identified was tartaric acid, You can read all about it in Wikipedia. Organic chemistry rapidly becomes complex because of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartaric_acid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)
Life uses only certain versions, left-handed proteins and right handed sugars being the best known. The wrong versions are either inert or possible even toxic. Most ordinary chemical reactions produce both (racemic mixtures) so an extra separation step is needed. Pasteur carefully grew large crystals of tartaric acid and then sorted them by hand.
So chemically speaking one could regard “life force” as an “enzymatic system” to produce the correct chemicals.
More broadly speaking, there is a similarity of life force with luminiferous ether. Since light is a wave it was assumed that there had to be a medium for the wave to propagate through. That medium was the luminiferous ether. A great deal of effort was expended searching for it to no effect. Finally the Michelson–Morley experiment disproved it. Later on they could argue that space-time itself was the luminiferous ether, but the properties they assumed the luminiferous ether must have were still wrong, so it was dropped as surely as phlogiston.
The similarity with life force is that neither the luminiferous ether nor life force can be measured. Since the ether can’t be measured the concept was dumped. Since the life force can’t be measured (or at least hasn’t been yet) and is no longer needed to explain organic chemistry, it was dumped.
So the mission is clear, you need a life-force meter. It would read zero on rocks or deceased people (or any other animal) and let’s say 10 on a young athlete. The meter should be lower on the elderly and the readings should drop steadily as a terminal cancer patient approaches death. Build that and the establishment will believe you. Bonus points if you can show the mechanism by which this force affects living cells.
Finding a new force other than the gravity, the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetism would be a huge upset of the apple cart. Fame and prizes await.
Just watch out for the trap Robert Pirsig fell into. He discovered that to prove his point he had to measure something that was by definition unmeasurable. The contradiction put him in a psychiatric hospital.
Back to chemistry for a second, admire strychnine. What a mess, but yet it can be built from scratch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine
>Another 48 spam comments this morning
Of all the things someone would find offensive, it’s a metaphysical discussion about life force? Of all the controversies in the world, it’s this one?
Well, I guess if someone can find air conditioners sexist, I guess a discussion about the existence of life force can be politically incorrect too.
@Steve (#192):
Also worth a look are the very thin booklets from the late 1400s and early 1500s containing an exorcism ritual for the use of people who were not ordained priests. Search on archive.org for the title “Coniuratio malignorum spirituum” and you’ll turn up a half dozen early editions.
I seem to remember seeing an English translation of that exoricsm ritual which was published a decade or two ago by one of the small publishers specializing in grimoires, as a small appendix to one of their grimoire editions. Can anyone give me a more precise reference?
For whatever it may be worth, before the reforms of the Council of Trent (mid-1500s) exorcisms were not the exclusive purview of priests, but could be done without much risk by almost anyone who could read the short Latin ritual. In the early Medieval Western church “exorcist” was one of the four “minor orders” to which any qualified layman could be ordained: porter, lector, exorcist and acolyte.
I am trying to wrap my head around the double meaning of spirit (pneuma). On the one hand, it was used as one of many names for the life force: as JMG wrote, “just a normal aspect of life.” On the other hand, the Holy Spirit (to pneuma hagion) is, in Christian experience, decidedly not a normal aspect of all human life, but makes itself known only to some humans, and only after having been invited. JMG bridged that gap by writing “that particular mode of the life force that embodies the Divine”, but it was not easy for me to understand why that particular aspect of normal human life should be specially capable of embodying God’s presence.
I have thought about it a bit, and here is what I have come up with. On the rare (for most of us) occasions that we make direct contact with the world of meaning, we inevitably also make contact with God, since God is the source of meaning. This seems to be the Platonic, patristic and orthodox meaning of “nous”, if I am not mistaken.
It is much more common to enter a state of prayer where God can touch and move our imagination and emotions and help us reach a decision. This is what is meant most of the time when we say that God spoke to us. This is a very important part of spiritual life, and I think the Holy Spirit is (for Christians) the one who does the moving and touching. Of course, it is also possible to confuse God’s guidance with one’s own passions and desires. In any case, this kind of contact can convince only the person who was praying that God was speaking, it cannot convince others.
The first divine manifestation that others can potentially perceive is when the Holy Spirit moves and changes the common human spirit, for example in healing a (mental or bodily) disease, or when it manifests in almost physical ways like BeardTree described, or moves human beings to act in ways they wouldn’t usually do. Since this can be a shared experience between several humans, the word “spiritus/pneuma” was extended from the normal human life force to define also an aspect of divinity.
Lastly, God can affect material, even “lifeless” objects directly, but chooses to do so much more rarely, for reasons I don’t presume to understand.
This is only a rough idea, and I welcome any corrections or clarifications.
Does anyone here know how the Syrian or Syriac Orthodox Church thinks of things such as the occult, magic, Rosicrucianism? I met a man recently and had a discussion with him about John Crowley, the author. He was also reading Robert Graves. But he was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, but I thought he might have some occult leanings. Since it was the first time I met him I didn’t bring it up, but we hit it off due to mutual love of Crowley and Graves. Just curious. The guy could have been a Rosicrucian for all I know!
BeardTree, an excellent point. So often, at least in the English-speaking world, any sense of the world as alive and conscious has so often been dismissed by Christians as paganism — a habit that has helped make a lot of pagans over the years.
Other Owen, I have no idea. I had 70 pieces of spam in my spam folder a couple of mornings ago. It’s interesting to watch, though. As the saying goes, when you’re taking flak, that shows that you’re over the target…
Robert M, thanks for the reminder! I’ve downloaded two, and in the process found a few old books on Catholic sacramentals.
Aldarion, I’ll leave the details to Christian theologians, but that sounds like a reasonable suggestion.
Justin, I don’t happen to know, but it’s an interesting question.
In defence of William of Ockham, it is worth remembering that his ideas did not come out of nowhere. Sure, he was a radical nominalist, but nominalism at its heart is a restatement of Aristotle – we are dealing with the ancient dichotomy between Plato’s vision of “universals are metaphysically real” and Aristotle’s “universals are simply labels.” The former is obviously close to the heart of the esoteric and the occult, the latter obviously less so.
In the case of Ockham, such ideas had already been gaining increasing strength since 1100, what with the reintroduction of Aristotle to Western Europe, and with it the commentary from Averroes. Basically, the scholastic Middle Ages of 1100-1500 was a hotbed of intellectual nominalism generally, and Ockham was just an edgy case. It’s an oddity of the Western World that its civilisational childhood was spent under the intellectual influence of a “deadened universe” model, and it took until the Renaissance for realism to be taken seriously again.
(Along those lines, Ockham did not invent Ockham’s Razor either. That’s also from Aristotle, specifically Posterior Analytics. Ockham’s Razor is really just a reminder to minimise the number of assumptions we use in coming to conclusions. Has it been often wrong in practice? Sure. Copernicus was forced to assume that the stars were really, really far away to explain the lack of observable stellar parallax. Copernicus happened to be right. But there is an underlying logic to the Razor. Relying on a chain of assumptions to get from A to B should make us aware that each link in the chain needs to be justified).
Ockham’s theology thus insisted that God could just as well have decided to make murder and adultery virtuous acts, and calling something “good” simply meant that God commanded humanity to do it.,
This just happens to be Ockham’s resolution to the old Euthyphro Dilemma. The alternative is that God has no control over what is Good – which itself has problems if you happen to be a believer in benevolent monotheism. Personally, I happen to agree with C.S. Lewis’ view of the Dilemma here – if God’s commandments were Good because they came from God, then we are dealing with mere tautology – but Ockham did not want to limit the ability of God to act.
The Roman Ritual translated into formal Elizabethan English sounds like something that could almost be High Church Anglican. Or as my dad called it, with a smile, when he was Canon of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral (Episcopalian) “Incense and nonsense, smells and bells.” He was also from Western Pennsylvania up around Pittsburgh, the Capital of Appalachia, and loved country humor – corny country humor at that – and stock car racing.
OT: Courtesy of Michael Walsh on the S.M. Stirlngfan list
“In other news, the board of Boing boing has selected a new CEO
An engineer.
Who will be based in Seattle.
Not an MBA and Not freaking Chicago.
The end times are upon us.
JMB,
Yes, “spirit” can’t be comodified unless it’s transformed into something like a charm, symbol, or idol.
But… we do have a mess of charms, symbols, and idols that we are clearly putting “spirit” into.
Maybe that’s the problem, we sent the “spirit” too widely and too distant from ourselves.
“In fact, there were three sides to the struggle, not two”
Dear JMG, that’s a really interesting point, because, the Pope that Louis and Occam were fighting against was John XXII. Of course, I’ve no need to tell you that, but if you lay out the steps of that guy’s career then a very interesting pattern emerges.
Aside from fighting Occam, John XXII was also famous for being the first Pope to order the inquisition to burn witches, a strange policy as, officially, the Catholic church doesn’t believe in witchcraft. But he proposed a new doctrine that magic was heresy as it interfered with God’s order, thus under the purview of the inquisition.
Which is even more interesting as he also was the first pope to condemn alchemy, and he excommunicated alchemists. He couldn’t find any valid theological argument to do so, so he went with … get this … because magic doesn’t exist, alchemists are wicked for deceiving the poor and ignorant. How’s about that for speaking out of both sides of your mouth at once!
But he has another claim to fame, that in his early pre-Papal career as a lawyer he was instrumental in organising the destruction of the Templars.
While Pope, he went on the war path against Meister Eckheart, who was the leading representative of ‘mystical’, occult Catholicism in that generation.
While he used to fill his spare time trying to gee on the English to crush the Irish and reinvade Scotland.
So an all-round bad-egg. Reading his list of targets, you might almost suspect that he (and the other Avignon Popes) knew exactly what he was (or they were) doing.
I met him in TN about two weeks ago and have his contact info. I will see what else may came of it, but it had a just so quality like I was making a loop of some kind. Next question for him in the letter I penned: Is he a fan of Manly Wade Wellman.
Anyway, delighted by all the esoteric action here. I noted in a past visit to Frater ADAs website that he is in Columbus, OH, and the Bishop this new acquaintance is based out of there at Saint Sophias.
One thing that just came to my mind regarding the spam-situation: Among several other news outlets, I read RT. In the beginning of the war in Eastern Europe, RT was difficult to reach due to frequent DDoS attacks. Then they had this DDoS-protection site up which would redirect you to the news site after a few seconds. I haven’t seen this page for more than a year, but a few days ago it started to show up again regularly.
And regarding the life force and randomness – maybe what we call “chance” is what happens if there are several possible outcomes in the absence of a guiding will (except for the “primal will” of the logos, maybe?). Maybe will can “tweak” chance outcomes (changing the distribution of the interference pattern of a double slit experiment, so to say) and depending on it’s strength and other factors in a big way (miracles come to my mind). I haven’t read The World We Used to Live In yet, but doesn’t Deloria give examples of how magical powers diminished over time? And mentions that there were even times, when magic directly affecting physical reality was observed? Is this related to the etheric tides you talked about further up in the comments?
And finally regarding Atkinson – You are right, of course, and I already learned a lot by disagreeing with him!
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Kate X
Not sure if it is the one you remember, but sounds like it could be; one that I follow a lot is consciousnessofsheep.co.uk. He has quoted JMG from time to time and is a very good read about British politics, economics, society, etc.
Stephen
>I take it you, too, are well acquainted with Berzerkeley
Not really but I’ve been there a few times. Still remember that punk wanting to talk to me and I pretended not to know any English. That has been a useful technique to employ in certain situations. Telegraph Avenue is definitely a place to see at least once, or at least it used to be. I have no idea what it’s like now these days.
I know many of the denizens of that place are in earnest but so much of what they say and believe is so over the top, I find it funny myself. But I’ll put it this way. If the titular head of this country comes from there, I don’t think I want to stick around to see what happens next.
@strda221
I don’t think you’re correct about Aristotle’s metaphysical views. Aristotle was a realist about forms, he just thought they were inseparable from their instances: the form of Cat is not Plato’s ideal cat but it Is something shared by all cats and which can be considered in abstraction from actual cats (because the form of Cat also inheres in our thoughts about cats).
This is made especially clear by the fact that he assigns a causal role to the forms: the abstract form of Cat is the formal cause of a particular thing being a cat. Moreover forms play a causal role in his theory of perception: we recognize a cat as a cat because the form of Cat inheres in our perceptions of a cat.
JMG and Robert, thank you both for the resources you shared!
Owen, air conditioning sexist? What is that all about? I don’t use them because I am unusually susceptible to throat infection, probably the lingering effect of tonsillectomy as a child in the 1950s, when that procedure was all the rage.
IDK about sexist, it can be annoying, to say the least, to have to pay utility bills for someone’s belief that their personal comfort is an inalienable right.
@JMG, @NickB
Thank you so much!! It was indeed Tim Watkin’s blog, the Consciousness of Sheep. Bookmarked this time for safety!
Kate X
Another site you might be interested in which deals with many of the same topics and has quoted JMG is thehonestsorcerer.medium.com, also a European site.
Stephen
Strda221, duly noted. So?
Patricia M, yep. If the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition ever pulls its head out of its nether regions and starts acting again as though it believes in a god, there are some very rich possibilities there.
GlassHammer, true enough!
Colin, I’m pretty sure he (and the other Avignon popes) knew exactly what they were doing.
Justin, now that’s a serious question! I may just have to visit Ohio one of these days — there seems to be quite a bit going on there.
Nachtgurke, yes, that’s exactly what Deloria said. The whole point of The World We Used To Live In is that in the past, Native American medicine people could do things that they can’t do any more. He lines up quite a bit of evidence for that thesis.
>Owen, air conditioning sexist? What is that all about?
I don’t know and don’t have the patience to follow the mental gymnastics you need to execute to come to that conclusion. It was what permanently turned me off from wokery back in 2014. That’s when I realized “These people are just nuts”.
Hi John Michael,
You learn something new each day. I’d not been aware of the naming convention for Sith Lords, but it makes a lot of sense. And yes, I agree with your observation. It appears so.
The ol’ brain must have been processing upon the matter because I woke up in the middle of the night. The idea popped into my head that if a group of miscreants so desired, those err, things, could be utilised to unleash a monster denial of servuce (sic) issue. Yes, it may well be that the interweb comes unstuck due to too much dog poop like text. Hmm.
I can comprehend the economics behind how such err, things, are made available free (or at very low cost) to the general public. But the questions to my mind: is whether it is the moral thing to do? and whether there is any wisdom in doing so? Dunno really. But clearly there is some pain there, with more to come, much more.
Cheers
Chris
Mr. Greer, when I read Barbara Tuchman’s ‘A Distant Mirror .. the Calamitous Fourteenth Century’, one could see how the Schmatic Popes, both French.. and Itailan, caused such awful mayhem amongst the assorted ‘faithful’ elites, choosing one, or another ‘allies’ in defending the religious cause of the day.. depending on one’s view of what’s ‘righteous’, and ‘moral’, which … from my interpretation, was a rather fickle undertaking: depending on one’s alliances.. and even then, one’s fate rested on quite a bit of circumstantial luck!
Me thinks that the 21st Century will rhyme with the past, but instead of a Holy Roman western religious schism, the results will rest on the Hi-Tech ‘Immortals’ currently running amok, vis the lowly Deplorabes .. or, the ‘Brutals’ .. as per my comment above.
I think that I just might identify as a ‘Jed’.. (now where did that rifle/bandioler go to ..??) I coulda swearn that I placed it in a good, secret, giant headiface ..!!
@Aldarion #207 I once printed out, utilizing Bible Gateway, every verse referring to the Spirit as Spirit of God, Spirit of the Lord or the Holy Spirit in the Bible as distinguished from the human spirit – a wild mysterious ride to read – some of which I have seen in the here and now. It seems apparent in the New Testament that the overt action of the Spirit was central to early church, Later on hierarchy, liturgical ritual, sacraments, scripture, creeds, doctrine, monasticism, sacred buildings and sites, material objects like relics, icons, statues, vestments became more central to what was happening, leavened by the Spirit. The understanding that Christianity has of the gift of the Spirit one is of Christianity’s peculiarities – an understanding that varies among the Christian subsections. And outside of Christianity the peculiarities and weirdnesses continue. Every faith, spiritual system has its unique components.
If you look at the modern map of Europe it looks to me that those national boundaries, much despised by globalist elites, look a whole lot like pre-Roman tribal territories.
A lot of Europe may be urbanized, where people think fashionable and modern thoughts, but a lot of Europe isn’t urbanized and a lot of non-urban people don’t think fashionable and modern thoughts – and I think that this is where those odious lines on the map are rooted (and much more).
A lot of the thinking that you find in the big cities would be dismissed by those retrograde hicks as pure nonsense, insane even. And I think that what you see in Europe, as with the urban-rural divide, and the political and cultural and religious imprint of the pre-modern world, you also find in the Americas.
Modernists, even with their towering self-regard and with their derision of anyone not thinking as they do, aren’t doing so good. They think they are but they’re not. They are not reproducing. This does not bode well for them.
Neither the women nor the men-folk are enthusiastic about leaving descendants. What they look like IOW, is an evolutionary dead-end, doomed to extinction.
They and their ways and their thinking will die off because they do not work. Natural selection has its own practices and we’re seeing them as we speak.
What does that leave? If people who live lives discordant with reality, occult or otherwise, disappear, it leaves the terrain open to others.
The greatly learned may scoff at this discussion of life force. They’ll say, it’s unscientific, follow the science. And i would say to them, fine, have a good laugh, you ain’t lookin’ so great.
I think another problem of the reformation is that it took the Germanic Celtic undercurrent out of western christianity, and it was actually around this time that the tales and beliefs of folklore came back into vogue. The early Catholic Church had embraced all this and was really expressing it through eastern symbolism, with Mary as the mother Goddess and queen of the forces of light, and the devil as the leader and representation of the evil forces. Then the Reformation destroys Mary (and turns on the feminine in general) while still embracing the devil battle, but after a while he falls away too.
The Lord of the Rings (Galadriel/Lady/Mary as light symbolism, Morgoth/Sauron Devil etc) is actually closer to the early Catholicism as practiced in northern and western Europe than many would be aware. Once the reformed church expelled it, it reemerged as ‘folklore’ and has been picked up by other movements like Paganism etc. If the church were to embrace it again with all the sacramental rites, well…
A few small comments with respect to William of Ockham and his razor, Aristotle, and the vanished third term.
I don’t think it’s correct to call the razor a fallacy, though it can be used fallaciously. It’s a tool, and a very useful one — but if a razor’s the only tool you have, as the old saying has it, everything looks like a neck. But it’s not a recipe for getting at The Truth — it’s a critical device for re-thinking a situation (like the epicycle situation in astronomy) that maybe could be accounted fir in some other way. But one still has to test the other possible accounts to see whether they actually make better sense of the phenomena.
A quick detour through “intellectual”. Like many technical terms, it has suffered a good deal from casual use. The intellect has to do with the realm of the intelligibles, the realm within which things become meaningful — not the realm of formal mentation, logical procedures, etc, but the realm of insight itself. Thomas Taylor had to wrestle with English to do his translations! But then the people who read his translations, and used his terminology, were used to an English that had not separated as much as ours has from those traditions.
Vitalism eventually became a “vitalism of the gaps” — accounting for whatever hadn’t been accounted for by the more mechanical inquiries. As with “God of the gaps” — God accounting only for what hasn’t otherwise been already accounted for — the enterprise was something of a category error, and it was just as well to end it and rethink the whole problem.
Ockham’s idea that “a thing is just because God wills it” (a Divine voluntarism that also exists in Islam, and not just with respect to ethics, but that’s another issue in the history of science) does in fact echo a Platonic question. Our Eliphas Levi resolved this binary more or less by saying that the two assertions were in fact the same assertion in what would now be called a nondual sort of way , thus producing a sort of Platonic koan.
The notion of “spiritual fireworks” is a bit like the notion of “spiritual materialism” — in either care, it’s a claim that focusing the surface cool stuff is like looking at the finger rather than at the moon.
Finally, and probably most important, the shifting away from “spiritus”, the intermediate substance, did have a lot to do with the return of an Aristotelian position. The Scholastics — and was it the Council of Trent? — completed the critical dismantling of the idea that a third term was necessary, or useful. But what they did not complete the rest of the job — to account for the phenomena that led people to want a third term in the first place. Part of the idea was that humans are essentially embodied entities, not essentially disembodied entities somehow accidentally associated with bodies.
But eliminating a theoretical method of accounting for certain phenomena does not eliminate the phenomena — and in fact right through the 19th century and after, the phenomena continued to be recognized, but without an ability to account for them. There is no reason why a Aristotelian/Thomistic esoteric philosophy, and practice, could not be developed. But there are only two kinds of people who might feel called to do so. One would be highly educated theologians who found themselves unable to avoid the issue. The other would be graduate students with perhaps too much free time, who wanted amuse themselves by seeing how far they could push it.
Otherwise, it’s a matter of, “I see how it works in practice, but how does it work in theory?”
(https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/30/practice/)
It is hard to know whether the material assembled here is more nourishing, more uplifting, to the intellect or the spirit. I was reading the posts late last night; this morning I have woken in a fizz of excitement just knowing that everything in the universe is alive.
I read Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk a couple of years ago, and my mind was blown. Of course, rocks are alive! Why did I ever think otherwise? They are just slow — to me.
Recently i attended a course at Schumacher College called Living Waters in which Peter Reason, the wonderful facilitator, invited us to sit beside a body of water — lake, river or sea — every week, and invoke its presence; treat it “as though” it were alive (which is the wrong way to put it) — rather, treat it as though we had lost our sense that we are separate or other from all that is. During that time, one of the tutors, a holistic scientist called Stefan Harding, spoke of how respectful he is when in the lab doing experiments, aware that each atom or particle is in some way a person. This is a ticklish matter for a scientist, yet I have a feeling that the idea that matter is imbued with spirit, still considered hippy dippy, is catching on. How is the idea that matter is separate from spirit, that we are separate from “Nature”, that our minds are separate from our bodies, working out? Endarkenment, surely.
Other interesting lecturers on the course were Freya Mathews, who spoke of the way that world communicates in poetry and metaphor; and Andreas Weber (The Biology of Wonder) who made me weep with his passionate speaking about the aliveness of all that is. Truly, we sleepwalk through this world! I am determined to do so no more.
It is all about relationship and connection, isn’t it? Wholeness = holiness …
Anyway, today is the beginning of a different way of engagement. I am already someone who walks down a city street speaking to the trees and seeing their personhood; today though I will make obeisance to the carpet, the parts of the car, the kettle. I see that each “thing” is a temporary assemblage of atoms that are intelligent. That describes me too; I am not so very different. True humility is utterly liberating, joyful and entirely expansive. All becomes one — or perhaps, as the Three Musketeers would say, “All for one and one for all!”
Thank you JMG for this fabulous forum of freedom and I only have one more thing to add and that thing is:
***HOORAY***!!!
PS I would like to share a poem, “Gone Thrishing”, I wrote during the course — I have no doubt that rivers, amongst everything else that exists, have always been teachers to those who present themselves as pupils …
Gone Thrishing
I
i’m going to visit the river today
but just as i’m getting my
hat scarf boots gloves coat
the heavens open &
it isn’t just splashing down
but lashing out so
i sit &
listen to the ringing
hoofbeats of the rainherd
on the roof &
glower at the lowering
sky lobbing tiny water-bombs
on the pane
& one boot on one not yet on
at last i get the message:
*NOT TODAY.
TODAY,
I’M VISITING YOU,
AS RAIN.*
II
how i love the approach
slipping & sliding down through
the woody bank ripening &
tangling with astonishing green
in early spring early morning sunshine
tiny whip of blackthorn lifting each holy face
oak basking its vast carved lattice flank
primroses flooding at its foot,
& points of celandine light,
outpaled by white anemones,
& dog-violets white
& dog-violets violet & there,
scudding by, slipping & sliding
along the path it made so it too
could wander the woods
& see the show
is the river, strong brown wildflow-er
III
on a pile of brash down by the rushing water
i lie & close my eyes
i would like to close my ‘i’s
but this is hard to do
there’s been much rain; the river is a muchness,
a suchness, a pulsing creature that’s
thrashing past but no that’s too wild it sounds so maybe
threshing past but no that’s too tame it sounds so maybe
THRISHING
*Well, that is very ecopoetic of you, especially as it rhymes with fishing*
IV
BUT
I don’t want to be beside the river
I don’t want to be in the river
I want the river and me to be in a space that holds us both
without one of us getting wet, or bored,
or the other of us being pressed repressed suppressed oppressed by words
& attempts to make meaning meaningful …
… shut eyes & open ears
create a dark limitless cavern through which
sweeps the river spreading out
my
narrow
one-track
mind
-stream
into a flood-plain which isn’t mine or anyone’s — expansive, dissolving —
and here indeed is space where river & i meet no inner no outer
& here’s what —
*Living, living worth the name, is unconditional.
How can you impose conditions on the world when the world is you?
Say yes, not maybe. Say yes, not yes but.
You can’t be intimate with the world or know yourself to be one with it
until you give your deepest assent to the everything of life —*
ARE WE SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE NOW?
— said the river, thrishing past
JMG #169 (and also Steve T)
I would be exceedingly grateful if a book on using sacramentals to bless and heal, with wide application for non-Catholics of every kind, were to emerge from your study.
I have been engaged in MOE style blessings of everyone and everything for a while, but the information elsewhere in this thread, suggesting that the procedure for blessing, say, water, or salt, or candles, etc, begins with a banishing (the word used was “exorcism”), was an entirely new one to me, and one which has definitely pricked up my ears.
I am absolutely looking into this for myself, and am already “drinking up” all the links to information on sacramentals that have already been posted. But a book that helps one “translate” (as it were) a Catholic rite to a Druid, pagan or other type of rite would be exceedingly welcome.
As someone else has said, this post, and this thread has filled me with new information that I did not even know that I needed. 🙂
Hello JMG,
Wilhelm Reich indeed had his books burned but NOT his research papers. These were given by the FBI to the Office of Naval Research in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, and were used by Freeman Cope in the mid-1970’s to construct a series of experiments on superconductivity. Five articles on the results obtained were published in the journal Physiological Chemistry & Physics between 1978 and 1979.
You can read about all this in detail in Robert Temple’s book “A New Science of Heaven”, which I have no doubt you will find very, very, very. very. very interesting.
Hi Everyone,
For those interested.
https://youtu.be/mWO68FayDRk?si=fNUhcNmJoBYMUIJX
Regards,
Helen in Oz
Chris, there was a discussion years ago on an early Dreamwidth post of mine, I think it was, about the secret Sith Lord name of the then head of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke. I think the one that was most popular was Darth Flation, though if I recall correctly Darth Solvency and Darth Eptitude also had their partisans.
Polecat, ah, but we’re late in the timeline now. I’m pretty sure that Zed has already figured out about the missing letters in Zardoz and has climbed aboard the flying head…
Smith, there’s that!
Willow, and that’s also an important point. Tolkien, as a ultratraditional Catholic and a linguist fluent in every one of the Germanic languages of Dark Age Europe — the guy could pray extempore in Gothic — will have known that. Do you think there’s much chance that any of the churches will take the hint?
LeGrand, yes, the razor can be used as a heuristic — “is there less involved here than there seems to be?” — but so is the equal and opposite approach, “what if there are factors you aren’t taking into consideration?” Any time you use one and not the other you have a very high likelihood of being wrong, and if you take one as a basic criterion — as of course the razor has been, especially in modern times — we land in exactly the situation you’ve sketched out in the second half of your comment, where there are phenomena that plenty of people experience, but that the approved thinking of our time insists cannot, do not, and must not exist.
Larkrise, delighted to hear this. That awareness of life in everything is one of the things that drew me to Druidry, and it’s good to see it catching on more generally. Thank you for the poem!
Scotlyn, Mercury’s about to go retrograde, so I plan on using that time to research sacramentals — I was able to find a lot of old books on the subject on Archive.org. We’ll see if there’s a publishable book there, or if it’s simply going to be a matter of producing a few detailed web pages and posting them on this site.
Logan, thanks for this. I’ll see if my local library has a copy.
Helen, thanks for this.
Not Catholic, but Mary is very congenial to work with, esp. in her guise as Star of the Sea… which as Willow pointed to… I see as a manifestation of Isis / Mother goddess. The connection to Isis can also be seen in the Black Madonna tradition.
Of course Osiris / Isis / Horus trinity maps well to God the Father / God the Mother / God the Child trinity.
Yeah, it wod have been interesting id some of the traditions of “celtic christianity” had survived better in tact.
Thanks fir researching sacramntals JMG!
@Dennis Michael Sawyers (#27) and replies by JMG (#38), Thymia (#134) and Heather (#141):
The power that the Latin Mass has is just one example, the example most familiar to Americans, of the world-wide phenomenon of Sacral Languages. These are languages that differ from one’s own vernacular; they serve to add power to one’s rituals and to enhance the awe that comes from any Numinous experience. Their creation and use seems to be part of human hard-wiring. Sacral languages are found all ov er the world, not just in literate cultures, but also in very many cultures that traditionally did not use writing at all.
There is a modest body of scholarly literature on Sacral Languages, unwritten ones as well as written ones. Unwritten Sacral Languages have mostly been treated by anthropologists in their own professional journals. Much of the scholarly work on written Sacral Languages has been concerned with their use by the three main Abrahamic religions, and especially the use of Latin by the Roman Catholic Church. (But I and others have published on the use of Church Slavonic as a Sacral Language by various Slavic Orthodox Churches.)
If one wants to look into the use and power of Sacral Languages, one good starting point is articles by Wade T. Wheelock: “The Problem of Ritual Language,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 50 (1982), 49-71, and “Sacred Language,” The Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd edition, 1987), 5301-5308. Also very insightful are the works by Christine Mohrmann, especially her popular. Liturgical Latin, its Origins and Character (1957); and by Walter J. Ong, “Latin Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite” (1959) and “Latin and the Social Fabric” (1960), reprinted in his Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (1971) and <The Barbarian Within (1962), respectively.
I will be putting PDFs of these articles up on archive.org later today.
There is also some connection between the use of Sacral Languages and the practice of glossolalia, on which there is a rich scholarly literature.
Weeping Willow #230
“If the church were to embrace it⭐️ again with all the sacramental rites, well… ”
(⭐️) I assume by ‘it,’ you mean ‘folklore.’ Not sure.
——-
Thanks for your comment‼️
(Speaking from the USA) In, at least, England, at least a decade ago, a wise man started an organization called “Forest Church” (the original Forest Church) at:
http://www.mysticchrist.co.uk/forest_church/
as it took off.
This organization has been around for, don’t quote me, at least fifteen years. I am thinkin’ more like twenty years. I SO wanted there to be one such ‘church’ near me in the USA (from the beginning), but there never was. Matter of fact, I could not find one anywhere the USA😢around 2010.
The founder, Bruce Stanley, has a book out called “Forest Church,” but the book keeps going ‘out of stock’ (because there is so much demand, the publisher can’t print enough copies each run. There have been several reprintings.)
So today, I wanted to re-acquaint myself with the original “Forest Church” website. In the past, for the longest time, there was ONLY ONE HIT. Today, to find them, I paged through six pages in my search engine. And you know what the first five pages were: forest churches picked up by Christian churches‼️Mainly in England, and mainly Church of England, but not all. It felt like zillions. I even spotted a “forest” Methodist church‼️I just about fell outa my chair. In England, and very possibly other parts of Britain. Woooo‼️
But, alas, when I searched for “forest church USA,” nothin’. Not a bloomin’ thing. Typical. Once again, Christianity in the USA is so behind the times. Nobody wants to go first. No-one wants to stick their neck out. No-one has courage. I would have loved to see a forest church in Madison, Wisconsin, but that is not happening,—not now. If there had been, I would have been there like a shot, handwaving, yelling, “Me, me, I am here. Where have you been all my life?” It is, however, inevitable that forest churches will crop up all over the USA. One may come to Madison, Wisconsin, but probably too late,—I’ll be dead (70-something).
By now, I am relatively sure that American ministers and pastors have heard of “forest churches,” but have dug in their heels saying, “We can’t possibly pollute OUR beliefs with, hmm, folklore, or natural things like trees, or trips to a field, God forbid,” as they watch their numbers decline. (Gee, I wonder why their congregations are declining. hint—hint—wink—wink😉.)
If, for example, a Lutheran church near me, went out on a limb and advertised they were including ‘forest church’ as what they do, I would be there in a shot.
Even as late as now, decades after England‘s innovation, “forest church” has the label “Not in the USA” (akin to “Not ‘Made’ in the USA”). American churches would rather die first. (which last I read, hundreds ARE indeed closing and forced to sell their buildings.)
💨Northwind Grandma💨🤩🌳⛪️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
>Neither the women nor the men-folk are enthusiastic about leaving descendants. What they look like IOW, is an evolutionary dead-end, doomed to extinction.
By 2100 the Screaming Bluehairs are long gone, forgotten, not even a legend to remember them by. The world was inherited by the Amish and the Muzzies, which are in the midst of a rebuild. In the 2200s they start to struggle for domination. I’m using Amish to denote all the back-to-the-land christian sects that rose up to fill the vacuum during the Collapse of the mid 21st.
Call it my brand of nominalism =D
JMG,
Apologies for the doubled reply (again). My new tablet seems to have some weird kink that sometimes messes up my cut and paste routine– ah, progress! I’ll try to double check about this issue before I hit post from now on.
Heather,
Thanks for the update on Patrick. May his passing come peacefully.
>we recognize a cat as a cat because the form of Cat inheres in our perceptions of a cat.
Meow.
With emphasis on the word “we” there. Makes me wonder, if it was just you alone in the woods, and nobody was around to tell you what a cat looked like, and you had never seen one before, would you still come up with the category of a cat? Or would you call it something else, that you can explain in terms of what you were already familiar with? Maybe it would be a cat at all, but say, a claw-squirrel? Maybe you’d go really really zen and just go meow meow meow?
I’ve noticed over the years that philosophers get really really tetchy when you start saying that maybe what you consider UNCHANGEABLE NOBLE TRUTHS(tm) are mere conventions of social agreement? For some reason that really start to drive them wild.
A poison to my life energy in me is paying attention to the ins and outs of the presidential campaign and the commentary on the apocalypse awaiting us if the wrong side triumphs. Though I tend on the conservative side, neither Trump or Harris really fit me. Robert Kennedy is somewhat better. IMO all sides need to grapple with and act on the stuff JMG has written about as the likely future. Or maybe we are in the wind up prior to the return of Jesus. I have sent up my prayers so now I am in the “wake me when it’s over” space and at that point will see how prayers are answered. Will discipline myself to avert my eyes from the clash in the meantime and keep my focus on the immediate real life and space where I actually live and move in, which at this time is a nice place. When appropriate I share The Retro Future, The Ecotechnic Future and The Long Descent. They have been well received by people.
Steve T wrote, “I was at a beautiful old Catholic monastery in Canada a few days ago. All of the holy water fonts were empty… but there was a gigantic bottle of hand sanitizer at the entrance.”
It was painfully obvious to anyone not caught up in the ecstatic trance of mass formation that the great priests and cardinals of Scientism™ were inflicting a strategic deathblow on any religious orders foolish enough to have imagined themselves able to safely cozy up to Scientism’s hypnotic allure.
The Catholic empire’s decision last century to finally throw in the towel on its poorly-conceived counter-reformation, in order to then completely overhaul itself based on Protestantism’s reformist zeal, was a stupendously ill-timed and cowardly self goal. They chose to put their faith in Man the Conqueror of Diddlysquat, with his fascinating Humanist ability to sterilize all divinity out of the cosmos. That they would succumb so quickly to worshiping the holy hand sanitizer, while letting the holy water run dry, was just another tiny, predictable step on that well-intended path to personal damnation.
JMG (#237) — yes, the razor as a heuristic is half of the story. Relying on it as The Way
is like using only flexors and not extensors. The same applies to the “deconstruction” of universals; there is a problem of course with mis-identified universals, but doing without them leads to real difficulties. CS Lewis remarked that the problem with seeing through everything is that it leaves nothing left to see. There is a lot that could be said about feedback loops and closing in on the target or setpoint, and even more that could be said about mistaking heuristics and (craft maxims) as absolute truths, but as Blake said it’s one of those situations where someone with adequate mechanical talents could spin out volume upon volume … and probably has.
Robert (#239): I find sacred languages, and “perfect” languages, very interesting. I’ll look forward to looking at those items. Thanks!
The way I tend to use occam’s razor is when dealing with very convoluted explanations that don’t pass the smell test for likelihood. If there’s a complicated explanation that requires several unlikely things to happen in order for it to be true, and a simple explanation that doesn’t require anything unlikely to have happened, I’ll go for the likelier explanation. Most of the time I’ll get the right answer this way, though sometimes unlikely things do indeed happen.
You do have to be careful to include all the data, when doing this You can’t just throw out data points that don’t fit your pet theory, and you do have the worry that the places you got your information may have done so without telling you and you might not have all the information you need to get any kind of correct answer on the subject.
@Beardtree
“most sweet gravitas”
A wonderfully apt description! Live Oaks are similar, IMO. Old and kindly.
Resource: Monastery Icons catalog. Icons, figurines, pocket icons in velvet pouches, medals, rosaries, crosses, holy water bottles. All sorts of saints and their specialties.The art is strong, clear, and Byzantine/classical. I bought several of them for my brother and his wife. MonasteryIcons.com or P.O. Box 87, Stevens Point WI, 54481-7103
JMG – will mail you the catalog unless you say otherwise.
Empirical science cannot address the life force because the life force only manifests via the subjective. It cannot, contrary to Silicconguy’s hopes and despite the many misleading analogies to material phenomena (force, energy, vibration, charge…), be objectively detected or measured. You might think because someone can (for instance) feel a person’s chi flow and therapeutically manipulate it from two inches away, that they can reliably sense whether a person is present at all from two inches away, blindfolded and without other sensory cues. Or you might think that because someone can easily feel the spiritus of a consecrated object in the setting where they usually encounter it, that they can distinguish consecrated from materially similar ordinary objects side by side better than guessing. But the consistent results of tests of such things strongly suggests that they can’t. If life energy operated like fluid mechanics or electromagnetism, the results of such tests should be as clear and obvious as a musician’s ability to distinguish between similar tones, not bogged down in arguments over statistical significance and mutual recriminations.
One can interpret this as a failure of science to confirm the obvious, or even a conspiracy to suppress the truth, but I see it as a finding that tells us something about the world. Eyes don’t emit sight-beams as some ancients thought they might; squaring the circle with compass and straightedge is impossible; there is no crystal dome over the sky; and life energy is inherently subjective.
Science is sometimes capable of investigating subjective phenomena.. Pain for instance, or conscious experience. But it’s not very good at it, which is why pain is “measured” in most clinical situations by pointing at a row of smiley-to-frowny faces, and in laboratories by when a rat flicks its tail. But subjective phenomena have to be acknowledged as such, or else you end up with category-error “tests” that make no more sense than trying to chemically isolate Gatsby from a ground-up copy of the Fitzgerald novel (and, failing, concluding Gatsby is an invalid topic of discussion or study).. If the life force is an aspect of intersubjective experience between the consciousnesses of, say, a healer and patient, of course a blindfolded healer will feel nothing from a silent uninvolved test subject.
Now, it could be argued that since conscious experience underlies all our perceptions, and/or that everything is conscious, no real distinctions can be made between subjective and objective anyhow. For what it’s worth, here’s why I don’t agree with that. Water might be a construct of our minds. Thirst might be an illusion of our perceptions. Water and even thirst might also be conscious beings. But the relationship between experiencing thirst and experiencing the drinking of water cannot be dismissed as illusory. Not without implying a degree of nihilism or solipsism that also denies the possibility of any further meaningful discussion. That relationship and a million others like it are what I consider inescapably real. What underlies the apparent inescapability (physical matter, a presently fixed idea in the mind of God, a line of code in the Simulator, the will of water and thirst expressing themselves, a mental block in my own unconscious mind, or what have you) is up for grabs but for most purposes irrelevant as long as the inescapable remains so.
•. *. .• * <—- some spittle flecks, as required for such a rant.
Hm. Is there any knowledge on whether anything that work on the etheric level is still more powerful when practiced in underground places like deep caves? If breath and attention are the guiding forces for the life force and with “tide” suggesting that what was once there is now somewhere else – maybe the earth has taken a nap?
Slithy Toves wrote, “Since gravity is purely physical, what keeps the inhabitants of the ethereal plane anchored to the Earth as is hurtled through space?”
Gravity is purely physical in the sense that it is a manifestation of the physical plane — or equally perhaps that the physical plane is a manifestation of it. However, that doesn’t in any way mean that gravity has no impact on the other planes and dimensions. Every plane affects every other plane, and every dimension expresses itself in each of the other dimensions as one of the various sub-dimensions that comprise it.
Gravity, as we think of it, exerts a pull on everything in the physical plane, right down to the photons that get drawn into black holes. Gravity, as we are not accustomed to think of it, also exerts a pull on all of the other planes. Just as time affects space and gravity, gravity also affects space and time. Similarly, gravity affects fate, causing some stories to turn into “an idea whose time has come”, as in a thought that has enough gravity to exert a pull altering the direction of fate. In that usage, gravity can equally be understood by its other meaning of import, weightiness, or profundity. On what plane is that meaning of gravity manifesting those more subtle gravitational influences upon ideas and narratives? How would gravity be able to affect outcomes in the imaginal astral plane or the contemplative mental plane?
I’m not at all sure whether gravity is in fact the force that “keeps the inhabitants of the ethereal plane anchored to the Earth as is hurtled through space”, since that could just as easily be vision or charge or any one of the other potent influences that bind the cosmos together. I’m also not sure whether inhabitants of the ethereal plane are actually anchored to the physical Earth, which we now like to imagine hurtling through space. “Imagine” because what we tend to experience is the rest of the galaxy hurtling through space around our own fixed centrality, and there may be more truth to that experience than Science’s gatekeepers would like to admit…
What if any ethereal plane inhabitants associated with each of us are neither spatially nor planetarily anchored to the physical plane inhabitants associated with us? What if each of our chakras are portals opening out onto and connecting all of the planes, forces, and dimensions? What if each of the planes, forces, and dimensions naturally correspond to our various chakras? What if your tether to the ethereal part of your larger Self occurs through your etheric chakra, without any spatial referents? How would those multidimensional portals, aligning in each of your constituent planes as some entity still distinctively you, manage to hold together the energetic pattern of your Self? Is it fated? Does gravity pull reality that way? Are you constantly re-envisioning your Self into existence? Are those portals charged with flows, fields, and polarities that maintain an alignment recognizable as you? Does divinity simply dream your distinctive chakral alignment into existence?
A similar set of queries could be applied to the tree of life, psychoanalysis’ subdivisions of the Self, or the zodiac. Imagining oneself to be an almost inconceivable fixed centrality, manifesting through all of the planes, forces, and dimensions, will reveal truths that remain elusively inaccessible to the rational materialist perspective. Of course, that perspective reveals its own brilliant truths, but those truths point in very different directions. The stellar metaphysical conception of gravity is one of the great gifts that modern rationalism has bestowed us with. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing our dawning age will be to attempt to reconcile the seemingly divergent insights of the visionaries and seekers from all the ages’ myriad traditions, so as to better connect with the underlying wisdom of the universe. Thank you, Slithy, for delving into those awaiting conundrums to begin the complex process of unpacking the many hidden blessings buried therein.
@ JMG–
If I might ask your indulgence a bit…
I’ve spent the last couple of days taking the series of blog posts I’ve shared a few times here and reworking them into book form. I now have a manuscript around 40,000 words in length. The book presents a simple but complete system of Christian magic based on sacramentals and re-enchanting the seasonal cycle. In theory there may be additional volumes, but this one is focused on the beginning of the Liturgical Year at Advent and Christmas– the one major holiday still celebrated, but also the one (I think you’ll agree) most in need of restoration to a higher form! It includes standard magical practices such as the use of the sign of the cross as a banishing ritual, magical applications of fasting and almsgiving, consecrating sacramentals, meditation and lectio divina, as well as detailed notes on traditional celebrations of the saints days and how to re-work them to fit a contemporary American home life.
I wanted to ask, if you don’t mind– Do you think that’s the sort of thing that one of the smaller occult presses would be interested in, or do you think it would be better to publish it on my own?
Sumerian persisted as a sacred language long after it was supplanted by various semitic and indo-European tongues in daily life. I think that is how Sumerian was able to be translated by archeologists; tablets were excavated which were textbooks to teach young priests the sacred incantations.
May have shared this beautiful quote before but pertinent to the subject,
“Great forests when they attain a certain age, take on an inhabited state. That is, there is a conscious and living presence in the forest. This does not occur in young forests and any forest that is extensively logged will lose this living presence. Humans have grown as a species in long relationship with this forest presence – a presence that possesses intelligence, awareness and consciousness – and we are immediately aware of it whenever we encounter it. The loss of the great forests thus deprives us of something deeply necessary to our humanity”
Stephen Harrod Buhner from Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers
And science is sort of catching up to this – a fun short video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kHZ0a_6TxY
Thanks Mr Greer for pointing out the scientists who have made sincere efforts to explore the phenomena related to life force. It does appear that there were enough observations to make it a worthwhile field of study, but the scientific community has largely decided not to pick up the gauntlet, either due to fear of ridicule, or because they did not believe interesting results would be forthcoming.
One problem might be that life force is, err, connected with life, and today’s scientists are a bit uncomfortable with that. Biology is now mostly a field dealing with read-outs, gels, solutions and sequences rather than with actual living organisms, and what are considered legitimate research questions is affected accordingly. It reminds me of what has happened with psychology: a once thriving field brimming with ideas has been transformed into a bunch of banal claims in order to render it more objective and scientific. To be sure, the pioneers from the first half of the 20th century did write a lot of claptrap as well, but they always tried to engage with the full complexity of human condition, and had something to show for it. The irony is that the supposedly improved modern iteration of psychology is notorious for the lack of replicability of its studies and has become a byword for pseudoscience. Luckily, the works of the original psychologists remain, and are still widely read and used despite the tedious attempted character assassinations that appear on schedule. Similarly, even though the scientific community does not quite know what to do with the concept of life force and prefers to ignore it or claim it has been debunked, the knowledge accumulated in various cultures during millenia is still there and continues to be disseminated.
Coming down from the rarefied heights of academia and moving on to personal knowledge, I have had experiences last year that I found puzzling, but which fit quite well within the framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Indeed, none of my Chinese friends found the experiences particularly remarkable. In science, if unexpected observations unexplainable by existing theory are made, this might eventually lead to develpment of a new paradigm capable of integrating the surprising findings. Similarly, my experiences that I have interpreted as manifestations of life force have encouraged me to question the reductionist materialistic view of universe, and to experiment with ideas and practices I used to be extermely sceptical about. So far I find the questioning and exploration immensely rewarding.
Justin, it’s occurred to me that a detailed discussion of sacramentals would be a useful addition to the Universal Gnostic Church material. We’ll see how it goes.
Robert, true enough. The only reason John Dee’s Enochian language is as popular as it is among mages is that it makes such a fine sacral language. Zodacaré, eca, od zodameranu! just has so much more thunder to it than “rise, then, and appear!”
Quin, duly noted. I’ll try to keep an eye out for unintended doubles.
BeardTree, oh, granted. My enthusiasm for Trump, such as it is, is very much a matter of pis aller, blended with a sense of something archetypal that’s seized him or his imagery and seems to be going somewhere with it. Over the longer term the American Empire is falling, no matter who ends up in charge of it, “and great will be the fall of it” — I hope to do something to pass useful things onto the post-American future.
LeGrand, I somehow managed to miss that Lewis quote. Thank you for it!
Pygmycory, and then it’s useful. Equally, though, I’d like to suggest that the opposite tool — maybe we should call it Scotus’s shaving mug, after Duns Scotus, the leading figure in the opposing Realist camp — also needs to be included. Scotus’s shaving mug is my term for the heuristic that suggests that there are always more factors than are included in any analysis. It’s worth using to whip up a froth of alternatives when a theory fails the smell test because it’s not convoluted enough.
Patricia M, I’d like to see it! Thank you.
Walt, what if actions involving the life force cause quantitatively measurable changes in the state of health of a living being? How does that fit your claim?
Nachtgurke, an intriguing question that can only be settled by experiment — and to my knowledge, the experiments haven’t been done.
Steve T, a 40,000-word book on that subject is almost certainly going to catch the interest of a small publisher. I would strongly encourage you to contact some of them and see if you can find one that’s up for it — and I’ll gladly contribute a blurb for marketing.
Soko, you’re most welcome.
Scotlyn #148
It depends on what the actual practice is. Large scale endeavors these days require money. Trumbull was referring to ideas for films. I recall an interview with Spielberg where he said he had wished he had majored in finance because he spent so much time talking with the finance people, and he wished he knew their language and what they were talking about.
You are investing time and effort into something that makes your life better. Today we had a salad of my wife’s tomatoes just picked from the garden. I doubt the best most expensive restaurant in town could have done better. I’m sure you are experiencing something similar.
JMG
Well I think the Latin American Catholic church has done exactly this, and the religion we see practiced in Mexico today is a throwback, but with the meso-American undercurrent rather than celto-Germanic. The key to early Catholicism is that it had a veritable pantheon of God’s and Goddesses (Mary, saints, archangels, or if you will Maiar, Valar etc) that was much more in line with the religious feeling of the people (and still probably is today) than the complete abstraction (or conversely, flat materialism) of the final reformed churches, including the counter reformed Catholic church.
Without it, Western Christianity lacks it’s Gothic vitality that is so apparent in the Cathedrals and people like St Bernard and St Francis. Its feels dead and frozen, whereas the Latin American feels very much alive.
JMG,
William Schryver has written somewhat similar thoughts about Trump and the ending of the American Empire in his latest Substack post – “Man of Destiny” or “What Can Be, Unburdened by What Has Been”.
@Patricia, re: Monastery Icons: Orthodox have been warned pretty strongly not to purchase from them.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/monasteryicons.aspx
Whether that bothers you or not is of course your call. Just putting it out there.
It would falsify my claim, provided (1) all ancillary physical effects were controlled for (e.g. I don’t doubt the efficacy of holy water against dehydration) and (2) the action involving the life force doesn’t evoke awareness of differential expectations of either the patient or any healers or intermediaries having direct contact with the patient. The latter is the reason for the double-blind study (lack of sufficient rigor in carrying this out is a valid criticism of medical studies, affecting their replicability), and might be particularly difficult to establish where a deity is directly involved in the process.
Willow, that makes sense.
John, thanks for this.
Methylethyl (if I may), Abbot George Burke and the groups that descend from him may very well be inappropriate for your tradition but they’re square on target for mine — Burke was an independent bishop, as I am, and in fact we share some lineage.
Walt, thank you. I appreciate your frankness.
“By 2100 the Screaming Bluehairs are long gone, forgotten, not even a legend to remember them by. The world was inherited by the Amish and the Muzzies, which are in the midst of a rebuild. ”
Don’t forget the LDS (Mormons). My daughter ran across an LDS friend from high-school and was shocked to find out #3 was on the way.
And as for “Humans have grown as a species in long relationship with this forest presence” I wonder how true that is? Early humans left the forest for the savanna. Although I like small woods and fence rows and such I’m happier out in the open country where you can see the sky. Do we romanticize forests because we don’t actually want to live there? Same with mountains, I like to. Is it them now and again, but living in them would be a pain the butt.
Robert Mathiesen, thank you for the info on sacred language. I have been trying to learn Latin kind of off and on, probably not trying hard enough, but I am very interested in the subject of sacred languages.
And Quin, I will definitely keep you updated on Patrick. My sister tells me he’s not in any pain, for that I am very grateful. And I can’t begin to tell you how appreciative I am for everyone’s prayers. Such a support!
Steve T, I am very interested in any book you write on Catholic sacramentals. I believe strongly in trying to live the liturgical year and am fascinated in the way it ties in with the natural cycle of the year. When my children were young, and now with my grandchildren, I try to bake and cook something appropriate for each saint’s day on the liturgical calendar. And I prefer the older style of calendar, the ones that show the Ember Days, Rogation Sunday, things like that. What an enormous mistake the Church made, getting rid of so much that was beautiful and conformed so wonderfully with the natural year. So many things were made “optional “. I don’t think Vatican 2 helped the Church at all, just the opposite!! And I read your blog posts, over on Dreamwidth, fascinating!! The information you presented there is exactly why I like to read about the Church in Medieval times, it was so alive and attuned to the life around it. So, please, get that book published! I want to read it!! Just because the modern Church is so sterile, doesn’t mean us lay people can’t go back to the old practices. And I enjoy reading your Latin, wish I knew it better.
And, finally, one of my grandsons, the one who lives with me, went to Catholic school from K-8 and he had some wonderful teachers. One of them would take them out for walks and she would point out flowers blooming because it was the feast day of so and so saint. And she told the class that the night sky at midnight on December 12 was the exact color of the mantle Our Lady of Guadelupe is wearing on St. Juan Diego’s tilma, tying in the natural world with the sacred. Of course we loved her.
About the surge in spam comments: I wouldn’t be surprised if the spammers are using ai for that.
I work in webserver maintenance and last month we noticed that servers that were normally just purring along nicely suddenly needed to work much harder. Investigation showed that there were a lot of ai bots frantically scraping the websites hosted on these servers.
Search engines have been doing that for years and are generally quite well behaved, but this was really out of control. We decided to block these bots and the servers are back to normal.
I asked a few clients and they indeed had a lot more spam in their comments and contact forms last month. It looks like it has become less since we blocked these bots, but we’ll have to wait a while to be sure, as spam often comes in waves.
bk.
@ Bradley – #258
Thank you, and you are quite right, of course.
Scale is among the reasons that societies and states become accustomed to exchanging “quality” for “quantity” – the first is [only] tangible, experiencable, the second is measurable and countable. In fact, they often only think they are becoming open to quantity as a way to evaluate what they intend to do, and forget to notice the way that quality begins to drain away from their endeavour. “Financialisation” as a process (to me) is just this – to give up quality and swap it for quantity, which will never be suitable as its proxy.
IMHO, the quality that is given up in the process of scaling and financialising a society, have a very great deal to do with the life force we are discussing.
Walt F # (if I may)
“It would falsify my claim, provided (1) all ancillary physical effects were controlled for (e.g. I don’t doubt the efficacy of holy water against dehydration) and (2) the action involving the life force doesn’t evoke awareness of differential expectations of either the patient or any healers or intermediaries having direct contact with the patient. The latter is the reason for the double-blind study (lack of sufficient rigor in carrying this out is a valid criticism of medical studies, affecting their replicability), and might be particularly difficult to establish where a deity is directly involved in the process.”
First, I wonder if you have ever noticed that every double-blind placebo-controlled study ever carried out or planned, has in fact soundly CONFIRMED the enormous strength that differential “expectations [or something]” within either patient or healer or both brings to bear upon the work of healing. The fact that when you are a company purveying a drug, and you want to draw attention to the drug’s capacity to “work” as advertised, you *must* exclude the known (but not easy to “control”) variables to the process contributed by patient and healer, is (to me) obvious scientific confirmation that both exist, and that both are powerful.
But, I think you also touch on the problem that science has with the life force (at least when it comes to health and healing). It is not that it is “subjective”. It is that it will not subject itself to “control”. And science cannot “see” a result if it cannot “control” the variables. This makes the scientific method essentially as blind as its carefully designed trials at “seeing” anything that happens in the real world, which is so chock full of unrepeatable and uncontrollable variables – in the form of agents busy about their own purposes.
Some of those agents are us, individuals, both as patients, and as healers, and as carers. And we too, cannot be subject to “control” if the processes of healing are to be set free to do their work as they will.
JMG– That’s more than I expected, and very kind of you! Thank you very much. A bit of searching has yielded half a dozen publishers which might be appropriate, though in truth I don’t know much about most of them (or about the process in general, really). I will keep you updated as things progress.
On the word “weird” as an insult – I think the Dems are getting this from West Coast rap. Earlier this year, the greatest rapper in this generation (in my opinion, and many others) Kendrick Lamar, took on the most popular/corporate rapper of the generation, Drake in one of the most exciting rap beefs of all time. In his most popular song, “Not Like Us”, the one that sinched his win, Lamar said about Drake’s close friend “Baka got a weird case, why is he around? Certified loverboy? Certified PDFile (different word)” which was one of the most catchy lines in the song. Baka has a case where he forced a woman into prostitution and beat her. Anyway, in a different rap song from the beef, Drake calls out West Coast rapper YG, saying that YG actually is a gangster, but Kendrick isn’t, and basically vying for YG to take his side. A week later YG drops a song called “Weird” where he basically disses Drake and calls him weird over and over. Here’s the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoyd4HLOQDc
Kamala, from the West Coast, and her crew started using the word as an insult after this, she’s also played Kendrick’s hit song “Not Like Us” a lot at her rallies. She’s trying to tap into the Black West Coast culture for authenticity.
The other thing about increases in spam – it’s also a pretty good indicator that times are getting bad as well. Every time the real economy goes down, there seem to be a group of people that have some free time on their hands and decide to use it by spamming the ever living daylights out of the internet.
Sigh, the internet worked a lot better when it was limited to scientists and engineers. You could say the internet is reaching a point where it doesn’t scale. Some people would say it reached that point a decade ago.
>Don’t forget the LDS (Mormons)
I use the term Amish a bit pejoratively. It has been generalized to cover all those semi-christian back-to-the-land, practical skills, deeply religious churchy people who survived the Collapse. It’s less time to say Amish than that. 🙂 If you wish to replace Amish with Mormon, that would be fine with me. It covers the same people as far as I’m concerned.
You say claw-squirrel, I say cat…
>Do we romanticize forests because we don’t actually want to live there?
I like trees. Not enough to hug them, but I do sense a calming effect from your typical forest. Although people who romanticize such things, should spend some time in that forest and then spend some time afterwards picking off the ticks you will pick up. Or you can spend some time beforehand soaking yourself in bug repellant. It’s 6 of one and half dozen of the other when you’re done.
Trees can also be quite the nuisance too, especially if they die on you and start rotting and then a storm comes and pushes one in through your roof. Or sometimes if the storm is big enough, the live tree will get pushed through anyway. Just rip it right out the ground, roots and all.
An herb I have had a relation ship with for nearly fifty years is Angelica archangelica, medieval common name – the Root of the Holy Spirit. I once grew some healthy plants and harvested some stalks. The plant is in the celery family and has rich fragrance like a blend of celery and frankincense. As I sliced the stalks the fragrance filled the air and suddenly for a few moments I felt the sensation I experience at times in group prayer, what I call the Holy of Holies presence. I said to myself so that’s why they call it the Root of the Holy Spirit! The fragrance had activated the receptors in me that respond in certain manifestations of the Spirit. As part of the current relationship I make a honey sweetened liqueur flavored with the seed and root, flavor my home made mead with it at times, and at times drink the tea or add it to my coffee. We live in such a potentially rich and beautiful world.
@Heather (#265) & LeGrand Cinq-Mars (@248):
Since you are both interested in sacred / sacral languages, I have just put up on archive.org a short essay of mine which you might enjoy. It was written half a century ago, but never formally published. ( I made only about 40 copies by hectograph for private circulation.) Its whimsical title is “Zombie” Languages: Their Study and Its Importance for Linguistic Theory. By “zombie languages” I meant languages that are neiher fully dead (since they are still widely used in a culture, generally as sacral languages) nor fully living (since they are not anyone’s native of vernacular language).
@JMG – catalog on your way. Make up your own mind about their artistic value.
@ Scotlyn et. al re: financialization, and quantification at the cost of quality, there’s an old old saying covering this:
“They know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
Walt, you might enjoy this.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
Scott Alexander has a long treatment of parapsychology as the control group for the scientific method. That is, parapsychologists are using the scientific method to study an effect that doesn’t exist, but which they believe exists, thus acting as a control group for the scientific method. Or, in the parlance of this week, neckless scientists studying the existence of necks in a neckless world.
It is a very thorough treatment of the subject with tons of references to real research. Scott goes through all of the confounding factors, shows that their research clears all of the hurdles necessary to demonstrate the existence of necks, to the same standards that elbow and toe researchers are held to, and concludes that there are no necks.
It’s a fascinating, well written, well researched, and unintentionally insightful essay by a neckless scientist who is objective and fair, but not open minded to the existence of necks.
@JMG: re: monastery icons: Of course! That seemed to be a thing that would be important to some, and not to others, particularly in this forum. I always prefer to have all the info and make my own decisions 😉
BeardTree. I have been trying for years to grow Angelica archangelica. What is your secret? No nursery near me offers plants. Seed would not sprout, not even one. This inquiring mind wants to know.
OT: The Washington Post has noticed the working homeless and the Catch-22 they’re in.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/28/homeless-lack-of-affordable-housing-economy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
BK, that would certainly make sense. As with most applications of that technology, it’s not very effective — my spam filter is shoveling it up without the least hesitation.
Steve T, oh, I didn’t offer that to be kind. I want to see this kind of thing become widespread, because the more people of every faith get to work banishing corrupt energies and evil spirits, and calling down blessings on themselves, their families, their communities, and their neighborhoods, the better off we’ll all be!
Isaac, interesting. Yeah, I could see that.
Other Owen, that also makes sense, with the economy in increasingly deep trouble.
BeardTree, I’m delighted to hear this. Angelica is also a very potent protective herb — evil spirits can’t tolerate its presence at all.
Patricia M, thank you.
Methylethyl, of course. I just thought that some of my readers might like to know the side of the story that your source didn’t reference.
Patricia M, good heavens. Is somebody using the orbital mind control lasers on the Post editorial staff or something? They’re supposed to be praising the Biden-Harris economy to the skies…
@ Mary Bennet #279
My growing Angelica experience was over 40 years ago. I was living as an apprentice in a beautiful organic garden in the California Bay Area learning biointensive horticulture based on the principles of Alan Chadwick a visionary English gardening master. Angelica seed is only viable for a short time after it ripens in the early fall and must be sown immediately. Here is a possible mail order nursery source for plants, though they are currently out of stock.
https://mountainvalleygrowers.com/search/?q=Angelica
Another Angelica archangelica memory from those days. I did what I now realize was a bit of intuitive natural magic. On the hillside overlooking the garden was a dilapidated wooden pyramid, smallish, just big enough to stand upright in it once you went through the door. I forget the supporting historical background details but we all at the garden felt it had an evil vibe. I was the only Christian, the rest had to varying degrees naturey new age beliefs. We decided it needed to be torn down. As a group we walked up,the hill. I was first and opened the pyramid door and tossed in a large Angelica archangelica stalk to drive away the bad whatever and it was demolished by the group.
JMG– Believe me, I understand where you’re coming from– that’s why I wrote the thing, after all! Still, I’m grateful for your willingness to help. You might also be interested to know that the original blog posts that form the core of the book came to me in a month-long blaze of inspiration immediately after being ordained to minor orders in the Liberal Catholic tradition. This stuff works…
Yes, besides “scientific” materialism banning the concept of a life force, it also banned the concept of “anti-life forces” or evil spirits as worthy of discussion. There is a usually invisible to the eye diverse ecosystem out there, also an ecosystem that is not detectable by lifeless scientific instruments but is detectable by living instruments like humans and other life forms.
Northwind Grandma @135..
Methinks that The Kamaloopy is actually a ‘They Live-ian’..
One only needs to don their internal Hoffmann Lenses to see how utterly fake, and alien-like the pretense is, of such outworldly creatures. They want to turn Your World into THEIR WORLD..
Don’t let them!
#271
Some would say twenty years ago, which marked a period where the transition from the original World Wide Web being the main thing, to the social media platforms.
Team10, what I think you’re saying is that people will not see something if they are determined to not see it. This is especially so if the consensus of their peers is that it does not exist, and if their own social standing and livelihood depend on publicly declaring that it does not exist. And so they will not see it and will insist with their last dying breath that there is nothing there.
The opposite also goes. Does the emperor have anything on? What do your own eyes tell you? For the longest time the msm, the heavy-hitters, all insisted vociferously that Biden was fully clothed. Was he?
There’s nobody as full of it as an ‘expert’. They think inside concrete boxes reinforced with iron bars and peer out through lens bent by power and money. This class of people is infested by self-dealing incompetents and so if they tell you that something is true and your own eyes say it ain’t so, then it ain’t. If they tell you that something isn’t so and you bloody well know that it is, then it is.
Have you seen a ghost? I have. It was my dad. Never mind the experts, I’ll believe my own lyin’ eyes.
Hi John Michael,
Hmm. For some reason, that cave we spoke of (where the force is strong), has been on my mind since reading your essay. I’m sure someone else in the comments may have mentioned the possibility, but you know that life force can be concentrated in a physical area? 🙂
Oh hey, my latest short video in the never ending ways to save money, is how to make: Toasted Muesli. Super easy, and better tasting than anything you can buy.
Given the economic headwinds blowing over western civilisation, it’s probably not a bad idea to start learning how to live more cheaply.
Cheers
Chris
“I’ll believe my own lyin’ eyes.”
As long as you remember your eyes do indeed lie. See any number of optical illusions and mirages.
Then there are the things your eyes don’t see at all like ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, and the radio waves at the other end of the spectrum. A large number of measuring gadgets are built to compensate for the limitations of our senses. Repeatable and accurate measurements are necessary in any technical field.
You can ruminate about Quality and the life force all you want, but neither will get you a functioning motorcycle. Quality one way may make a pretty motorcycle and Quality the other way may make a reliable motorcycle, and when you take the bike too fast into what turns out to be a decreasing radius curve you will likely worry about whether you have enough life force to get through it intact (don’t ask me how I know) but you’re not going to get the motorcycle to work using only your unaided senses.
Thinking about it, it’s probably better that we can’t measure the life force even if it exists. Once it’s measurable we’ll know what it is. Then someone will figure out how to move it around. That would expand into the preferred system of execution. A condemned criminal’s life force will be used to save a sick but worthy person. The demand for more criminals would soar. If you’ve read “The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton” or “The Patchwork Girl” both by Larry Niven this plot would be familiar. The concept was also in a couple episodes of Babylon 5.
And if the Life Force comes from the etheric (or any other Plane) then it would be a race to open a portal to there and we have a model of what happens then, as in oil. Humanity will suck it dry.
Fascinating!!
Thank you for tying this all together.
BeardTree, thank you for the explanation about Angelica. No wonder the seeds didn’t germinate. Thanks for the link as well, that looks to be an interesting site.
For whatever its worth, a number of years ago I heard lecture by a philosopher of science critiquing Occam’s razor. He said do not forget Leibniz’s tool box. The latter equally valid rule of thumb basically says never discard an explanatory mechanism that could prove useful if you do not have too. Personally I find this to be far more helpful. The razor is only a tie breaker. It two theories are totally equal then sure, go with the simpler one. For the other 99.99 percent of the time go with the theory that explains the most, which is usually the one with the most flexible set of cognitive tools, aka explanatory options.
I feel something big happened, something shifted. have no details
Ok, so, on a post like this, I should have plenty to say, and I do – oh, I do! Way too much, since it is my daily business to attend to and harmonise people’s qi.
Since I really do not know where to start, and could go on all day and bore the pants off yez, instead I may proffer a quote from Elizabeth Rochat de la Vallee’s very fine little book “A Study of Qi in Classical Texts”. (A fine History of Ideas style study of the *idea* of Qi and how it evolved in Chinese thought and practice).
First a wee dialogue on the relationship of the will and the qi, from Mencius:
– “The will (zhi) is commander of the qi, while the qi is that which fills the body. Where the will arrives, there the qi halts. Therefore it is said ‘take hold of your will, and do not abuse your qi.'”
– “Since you have already said that where the will arrives there the qi halts, what is the point of going on to say, ‘take hold of your will and do not abuse your qi?'”
– “The will when blocked, moves the qi. Oh the other hand the qi, when blocked also moves the will. Now stumbling and hurrying affect the qi, yet in fact palpitations are the result.”
Commentary on the above by de la Vallee:
“When the heart is in perfect balance and all the movements of qi are well regulated, then thinking is clear. This is the reason why Mencius goes on to discuss the relationship between the qi and the will or intent (zhi), the orientation of the mind. The relationship between them concerns the guidance given by the zhi to the qi.
“As we saw earlier, the qi is generally understood as an unlimited vital force, but not exactly as the guide or the ruler of life. Life is a spontaneous activity of the qi, but there is also something which makes this activity regular as well as spontaneous. It is this that we have to embody in ourselves as human beings, and which is called ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Way’.
The qi that I work with in the clinic, is movement and energy and force, but, because it follows and is affected by the will, it can flow in a balanced, well regulated way, and produce health, or it can become “perverse” – either by piling up, or rebelling (going the wrong way), or being blocked, or by weakening and failing to protect from imbalances in the environment. All of these unbalanced, unbalancing movements of qi produce discomfort and disease, and, in a way, it is the will within each person that is able to bring about harmonisation and guidance to bring the qi back into its proper coursing, by finding and following the pattern and guidance of Heaven.
(If the will so wills…) 😉
Anyway, I am enjoying the post, and the wide-ranging discussion, thank you.
Somebody, I don’t remember who, has written abour the lack of holy water in a church or monastery. Well, kommentariat and JMG:
When COVID-19 hysteria started, holy water disappeared in my neighbourhood Catholic church. It’s interesting that past year, holy water returned to my church instead of hygienic hydroalcoholic liquid. Better late than never, because another churches in my town have been going on retiring their holy water until today…
Steve T & JMG,
Here’s a few dots I’ve put together on the need for banishing rituals and sacred objects as a prerequisite for a human society to become and stay strong. Most school shooters seem to be demonically influenced in the usual way (hearing voices telling them to do x, y, and z). Many U.S. prisoners are afflicted too in the usual way, and there’s lots of complaints of hearing voices inside prisons that are handwaved away as mental illness, even when those voices can do things like read the mind of the psychologist interviewing them. Another point is that non-religious societies don’t seem to do very well in the long term, be it the atheist communist societies of the 20th century or the irreligious East Asian societies like Japan and South Korea and Taiwan which have declining populations and very high suicide rates.
Now, in America, people have easy access to guns and I think that’s why mass shootings are encouraged here, while in East Asia people are encouraged by the voices more to kill their family and then themselves. You come across a lot of these stories while reading the Japanese paper. I really think it’s because when you don’t have enough consistent banishing rituals going on in a society, when you don’t have enough sacred objects placed around a city, demonic forces cause enough internal strife (in different ways depending on the society) that the society goes down the drain.
So I think any discussion of the reintroduction of the life force, and ritual magic, to Western society and the importance of the sacred (be it sacral languages or charged objects) need to be accompanied by the discussion of this very real, pressing need.
>I feel something big happened, something shifted. have no details
Well, there are all sorts of things happening. Here’s one. In Northern Ireland, the Protestants and the Catholics have put aside their differences for the moment to join hands. Decades if not centuries of hatred and conflict has seemingly melted away almost overnight. However, they’re not singing Kumbaya. And there are reasons why they have united. I’ll let you discover those on your own.
@ Siliconguy # 204
Thank you for the bit about chirality and its role in life. I didn’t know that, and it was very enlightening. I do have an issue with the idea that Life Force would be up there with Gravitational Force, the (Strong and Weak) Nuclear Forces, and the Electromagnetic Force.
These “forces” simply refer to integer-spin fields. But not every use of the word “Force” implies an integer-spin field. For instance, when the military disperses a violent mob “by force”, they are almost certainly not producing integer-spin waves to interact with the violent mob and alter their momentum and kinetic energy hamiltonians.
A “force”, outside of the use of the word in Physics, refers to a cause the will either produce an effect unless impeded by another force, or to a cause which produces the effect of preventing the natural effect of a cause. For instance, if I push the door open I am applying a force on it, but if you push it from the other side to keep it in place then you are also applying a force to impede me. In mechanics, this takes on the special meaning of a push, pull or twist. And by delving deep into the works, we enter the realm of interaction fields and integer-spin particles.
A Life Force refers to a very specific set of causes which produce effects. These causes have something to do with human will, and may well be the means by which our will translates into the motion of particles in our central nervous system, if such is the mechanism of will and action. The closest I have for a “proof” of it is a peculiarity in human memory.
We remember experiencing qualia. If we couldn’t recall our experience (or imperience?) of qualia, we would never have been able to discuss qualia. So the fact that there is a discussion on qualia proves that we can recall the experience. Which means that in our memories, which are physical storage systems functioning on the basis of ion movements across capacitive membranes in neurons, our experience of qualia is stored as a state function of the ion configuration.
How does this work? I can remember that there is a cell-phone in my pocket, but this is easy to explain since my nerves will have very physical interaction (via the EM field) with the phone pressing against the skin of my fingers as I gripped it and put it in my pocket. My visual-motor gestalt would produce the needed signals to convince my memory system that I have indeed inserted my cell-phone in my pocket. These physical events produce chains of further cause-effect pairs down my nervous systems, ending in the formation of memory.
Now what kick-starts the chain of cause-effect that results in me remembering that I have, even moments ago, experienced the world as a milieu of qualia?
PS: I am sorry for the delay in my reply, I have been kept busy.
OT: Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour and slept well until sometime in the wee hours. After that, woke up several times, with uneasy dreams in between. When I finally woke at 7:45, the electricity was off, the wind was blowing strongly, and there was off and on rain.
2 hours later Administration sent out a text headed “Hurricane Debby.” The outage was just a fallen tree bringing down a power line, and confined to this corner of campus, but when the lights came back on, the time my clocks showed was about the time of the uneasy dreams. For what that’s worth.
And – what I’ve learned from this blog and the Occult Philosophy Workbook allowed me to consciously focus on the immediate here-and now and refuse to speculate further, or even care about anything beyond the here and now. It took effort, but it worked, and thanks for what I’ve learned here.
BTW – I hope nobody here was affected by the storm.
A hopeful trend. https://theconversation.com/understanding-underconsumption-core-how-a-new-trend-is-challenging-consumer-culture-235417?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Go, grandchildren! You rock!
Dear BreadTree, I have some wild Angelica’s growing in my yard. Are all Angelica species potent or does it have to be Archangelica?
Re: Holy Water. The local Catholic churches (one parish, three buildings) have what look like hand sanitizer despensers but they actually dispense Holy Water. It is applied by the people with the same enthusiasm and universality as hand sanitizer was by those who believed in it at the height of covidicy. (As far as hand sanitizer goes, I’m allergic. I’ll take my chances with germs until I reach soap and water rather than weeping hives. Holy Water, fortunately, has no such painful effect.)
Siliconguy, re # 289: all of what you say is true, yet what we have now is the real life version of Orwell’s 1984, where the essential command of our betters is for us to stoutly reject the evidence of our own eyes and ears. Reality, they insist, is what they say it is.
For my part, I trust my sensory apparatus and powers of reason. Not to sound grandiose, as nobody would mistake me for a big thinker or philosopher, but that basic trust is the basis for the science that you talk about in your comment, whether or not you’re using instruments to extend your senses.
Early on in life I started to notice an alarming tendency, for those in power to lie. And to lie without flinching.
I saw it in my employer, local pols, those higher up the food-chain. Then I noticed it in academia, in finance, and other places. They would say things that contradict, in ways big and small, what I saw with my own eyes, they would say things that offend basic logic and reason and what I knew to be true.
I figure they try to get you to live by small lies to get you accustomed to falsehood, and then they feed you bigger ones and they get you to accept those, and you smilingly do it, on pain of ostracism or loss of employment (which you learn about in due course).
By means of small steps of mis-statement and illogic, step by step, you’ll be convinced that the shirt on your back isn’t a shirt. Soon enough, to paraphrase Matthew, to demonstrate their own great intellectual power, they make a big show of straining at gnats, and you’ll find yourself swallowing camels. You’ll be convinced that shareholders own the company and that the foreign affairs blob is comprised of seasoned and competent professionals.
And so, should this life force be looked at rigorously by – cough – respectable science, or, for that matter, any one of the other myriad of phenomena currently relegated to the fringes?
As you say, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should. Maybe in the case of life force, maybe we should let that sleeping dog lie. But if they don’t take these ‘spooky’ things seriously, how much knowledge of the cosmos goes by the wayside?
These things are really difficult to investigate or we wouldn’t be talking about the occult, and because the universe in the normal course of its business follows certain rules. But sometimes it doesn’t. And so then there’s a glitch and you see a ghost.
Dennis Michael Sawyers, yeah. I think one of the few things keeping North American and European societies ticking over is the obsession with sportsball… which is certainly a celebration of the life force. Asians aren’t as much into that stuff, which is IMO, a plausible explanation for the even lower birth rates and higher suicide rates over there.
Someone on this blog (probably JMG) pointed out that the collapse of European society started around 1900, which is of course, when the Olympic Games were resurrected.
I’m late to the comments cycle to ask this, but it occurred to me that in the Kabbalah, the “neck chakra” area corresponds to two separate sephiroth rather than one (that one is typically associated with ‘speech’ or logos in the eastern systems I’m more familiar with). Would anyone with more familiarity with the Kabbalah care to comment how pre-occam westerners conceived of the subtle neck area?
>A hopeful trend.
I remember Simplification back in the 90s. The Herd moves in mindless cycles. It’s old, it’s new, forget it, rediscover it again. And again. Indicator that the real economy currently, is bad, no matter how loud they shout at you.
I hate to say (actually I don’t) “told them so” but when they started raising rates, it wouldn’t stop inflation but it would shut the real economy down. And now they have two problems. Well N+1 problems, where N > 1.
Although it says something when all it takes to obliterate the Japanese stock market was a teeny tiny 25bp increase. Potemkin economy.
Steve, delighted to hear it.
BeardTree, you’ll get no disagreement out of me on that.
Chris, of course the life force can be concentrated in a location. The ancients knew how to do it, too — there’s a reason why cattle still like to graze around standing stones:
Stephen, hmm! I’ll have to look that one up.
BeardTree, I also felt it yesterday.
Scotlyn, thanks for this.
Dennis, okay, that’s a reasonable point. I’ll take that into consideration.
Patricia M, you’re most welcome. I’m glad to hear that you’re fine.
Chris, interesting. In the Cabalistic system I was trained in, the throat center is alone, and corresponds to Daath, the intermediate not-quite-a-sephirah in the middle of the Abyss.
Other Owen (if I may), ah, but that 25bp increase collapsed the yen carry trade. Big financial institutions were borrowing yen in vast quantities at 0% interest and using the proceeds to fund investments. They were so heavily leveraged that raising it just that little was enough to make their investments worth less than nothing.
Steve T,
I hope you get your book published and I would definitely buy a copy. Could you post again your dreamwidth site?
Thanks and good luck with the book!
Ellen in ME
A very interesting read which challenged my preconceptions, since Occam’s Razor has always been one of my favored principles. Of course, I’ve always known there were exceptions — the Theory of Relativity is a good deal more complex than Newtonian Physics, yet the former is correct and expands on the latter. It’s not a hard & fast rule to be rigorously applied, simplicity doesn’t equal correctness, as you said. And that definitely applies to the Life Force, something that feels very natural, and other occult topics.
Yet I still can’t let it go, since Occam’s Razor slices away so much nonsense. Which is more likely, that a foreign intelligence agency hacked your computer and deleted your paper for school, or you just didn’t write it in a timely manner? Certainly, it’s within the capability of an intelligence agency to sabotage your coursework, but it’s far less probable than the alternative. Likewise, which is more likely: the Russians going out of their way to fabricate a laptop just to make the Bidens look dumb, or Hunter Biden leaving an incriminating laptop around because drug addicts are impulsive and foolish? And again, which is more likely, ancient aliens, or ancient cultures creating art with similar themes?
Granted, the whole “ancient aliens” thing might be a misinterpretation of the Fey folk, or other supernatural phenomena. But I still feel like there should be a way to rehabilitate Occam’s Razor, as a principle that doesn’t prove or disprove, but rather adds or subtracts weight, that is, makes things more or less likely to be true, with that caveat that the improbable can be proven true sometimes.
Other than that, I can’t disagree with the political dimensions of worldviews, or the illusion of popular participation in politics (which has become very threadbare as of late), or the arrogant, unfulfilling, incoherent nature of Materialism.
@Scotlyn #268, if controlling “extraneous” variables controls the phenomenon (as in, determines whether or not its effects are evident) then it’s reasonable to conclude that the phenomenon exists within the extraneous variables, and they’re not so extraneous. Like any conclusion based on inevitably imperfect and incomplete evidence (ie. every conclusion ever) it could be wrong in the specific case, but it’s reasonable. Awareness, expectations… these are aspects of consciousness which is why I posit that the life force either exists wholly within, or only interacts with, conscious experience. And as you point out, the very effects (placebo. etc.) being “controlled” for in such research are supporting evidence for this, and against the alternative conclusion that the life force does not exist at all.
@Team10tim #277, a very good essay from as you put it a neckless one, exploring the question from the “skeptic” viewpoint that can be summed up as “why won’t parapsychology go away?” I’ve read countless similar ones over the decades, but this one might hint at a change, the possibility of a growing insight that the wrong questions are being asked by “both sides.” I’m not interested any more in meta-analysis or advanced statistics intended to tease out subtle unreliable effects from statistical noise. The phenomena we’re discussing here should be obvious. If you can feel the energy emanating from a powerful talisman when it’s nearby, then you can feel it. If you can continue to be able to feel whether or not the talisman is nearby when you have no other sensory way of knowing (“controlled” conditions) then the way you feel it is probably pretty close to a conventional narrative of what it is and how you feel it. If you can’t, then you might benefit from a different understanding of what’s happening. Whether or not it’s sufficiently statistically significant if you can feel it 50.1% of the time out of 1000 trials under the controlled conditions is a boring argument I’m not interested in.
I am interested in some of those different understandings, especially when they’re not “these phenomena that everyone experiences don’t really happen.” Maybe the talisman resents being tested that way and acts as a trickster (but only, it seems, when the testing is sufficiently rigorous). Maybe when you control too may variables, you lose consensually of which go multiple parallel realities you’re experiencing (e.g. the talisman is present for you when you feel its presence, but the other observers observe otherwise). Or maybe, as a presently unpopular piece of shaving apparatus might suggest, being consciously aware of the presence of the talisman via your material senses is an essential part of feeling its emanations, contrary to the way other senses detecting other phenomena generally work.
@all, and JMG: To summarize, what I’m talking about is something like a definitional problem. To return to your central metaphor, what happens if the ones advocating for the presence of necks describe them as “flesh that connects the head to the torso, has ribs, and can solve acrostics?” Scientists look for tissue that appears to be neither unambiguously head nor unambiguously torso, but when they mark it out, they find no ribs and observe no solving of acrostics. Once in a while someone does find a rib, but controversy arises over whether their sample was just misidentified torso. Another lab does frequently observe acrostics being solved, but its head researcher is a former head researcher whose samples have often turned out to be contaminated with head, and other labs can’t replicate it. Is the resulting necklessness the fault of the scientists, or of the advocates responsible for the unnecessary misleading elements in the prevailing definition? I’d say, both.
Another Justin wrote: “Someone on this blog (probably JMG) pointed out that the collapse of European society started around 1900, which is of course, when the Olympic Games were resurrected.”
Usually I don’t like to be the fact checker or typo-pointer-outer (the latter particularly annoying) bu the first new Olympic games took place in 1896 in Athens, but your point still stands.
I kind of like the Olympics as far as spectacles go. I think they would do well to reintroduce the arts back into the Olympics as they were in ancient times, and as they were between 1912 and 1956 as detailed here:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/when-the-olympics-gave-medals-to
Seeing people at their peak potential does have the power to give other people inspiration of what they can do with their bodies, minds and imagination. Beyond that it is prone to the same failings as any other human activity and institution.
And why the don’t put skateboarding up front and center I still don’t understand! They are the gymnasts of the street after all!
I forgot to add, I in turn greatly appreciate this venue where respectful discussion of contentious topics makes frankness viable, and your long ongoing work to bring it into being.
Also,, in the above, “consensually of which go…” should be “consensuality of which of…” That might not make it any clearer, but at least it would be what I intended to write.
>collapsed the yen carry trade
People have been warning about that for years if not decades now. Like Fleckenstein said, it doesn’t matter until it does and then it’s the only thing that matters. I guess we’re somewhere past the point where it doesn’t matter but not yet to the point where it’s the only thing that matters.
At some point I will have to stop myself from spasming out into “I told you so”.
And it wasn’t just the Japanese that took advantage of that particular scheme, it was foreigners too. In other words, it’s all connected. And not in a good way.
How come the little guy never gets 0%? You have to had gone to the right schools and know the right people to get 0%.
@Patricia M: Underconsumption! They make it sound like a problem that people are trying to spend less than their whole paycheck!
“How come the little guy never gets 0%? You have to had gone to the right schools and know the right people to get 0%.”
The term you are looking for is accredited investor.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-become-accredited-investor.asp#:~:text=An%20accredited%20investor%20is%20one,many%20people%20are%20not%20allowed.
Are they locking out the little guy, or are they protecting the dabblers from the sharks? There are arguments on both sides.
The Liberals here in Canada have now adopted the use of weird as a pejorative to describe Pierre Polievre of the Conservatives.https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberals-borrow-weird-label-from-us-democracts-for-conservatives-1.7286180 Who reacted more or less by going, no, you’re weirder.
They both sound like children on a playground. Gah. Why couldn’t Polievre, have gone ‘So? What are you, a school bully?’
It felt like a huge heavy something that had been in the same place for a long time moved and we are now in a changed underlying reality. I was wondering if I was extrapolating some inner felt change in me to the world around. Maybe not if you sensed the same. I think it may begin to play out openly over the next year, starting a in a few months.
Hey JMG – another fine essay, on a topic that’s certainly open for debate. But one thought I have is the trend towards towards scientific materialism over the last 500 years correlates with the industrial revolution(s), which means global trade, which means more wealth for the average Joe – and allows for justification to gather this wealth while tossing off the chains of ethics/morals that religious based organizations usually bring to the table. I also believe the ruling class finds it easier to control people if they can communicate better with them. Put 10 people in a room and ask about their spiritual beliefs, and you’ll get 20 flavors to choose from. Ask them to describe a tall glass of cool water (on the material plane), and you’ll get 10 answers that sound pretty much the same.
As an agnostic, I agree that circular reasoning is a problem for materialists – but it’s also a problem for anyone who treads outside the material plane. In a court of law, the tall glass of water passes the reasonable doubt test – the life force, spirit, soul – not so much. The common thread among us is the 8 inch slab of flesh between the ears, where all our experience is processed. The brain exists on the material plane (IMHO), and for many of us (maybe even the majority) we do not have any experience interacting outside the material plane.
The Long Descent is going to stress many, and humans will naturally want to cope. But I’m unsure if some of us will be restricted to options/possibilities outside of the material plane, perhaps due to a lower evolved brain and not for a lack of desire.
>The term you are looking for is accredited investor
“However, the requirements of who can and who cannot be an accredited investor—and can take part in these opportunities—are determined by the SEC”
Which is another way of saying “go to the right schools and know the right people”. And it goes downhill from there. Reading that article further it really is “(know the right people) to the (know the right people power)”.
And also, nowhere in that article did it connect that with getting loans in yen at 0%.
@BeardTree – Yes, like the feelings yu get before and after a storm. (Here in Gainesville, we just had a big one, but not as big as it could have been.) The “progress & growth to infinity” folks will be wondering what’s hit them, of course.
Apropos of nothing, I was chatting with my speech therapist, age 65, and she has absolutely no use for those who scream insults at members of their opposing political party. and was bragging on her beloved 97-year-old mother, complete with pictures. Heartwarming, and like “Hey, folks, they’re PEOPLE!”
We could use a lot more of that right now; am remembering my son-in-law’s late mother and her plans to send the entire family to Canada in case the wrong party got a headlock on Our Democracy. And the friend in Klamath Falls who thinks if they do, Florida will become a hellhole under DeSantis’ unchecked dictatorship because the feds won’t stop him. (Like, Floridians won’t to can’t rise up and vote him out of office their own selves if they want to?) The word “hysterical” keeps coming to mind, sexist insult though it is. Can someone please explain to me the genuine terror I’m hearing behind all this?