As we saw two weeks ago, the action of The Nibelung’s Ring is rising toward crisis in this third opera of the cycle. Siegfried, the child born of the incestuous relationship between Wotan’s human children Siegmund and Sieglinde, has grown to young manhood in the deep forest under the dubious care of Mime the Nibelung. He’s strong, vital, passionate, utterly fearless, and just as utterly clueless: a perfect weapon, which is the role that Mime has intended for him all along.
Elsewhere in that same forest, after all, is the cave where Fafner has holed up with the treasure of the Nibelungs. Back in The Rhinegold, as my readers will recall, Fafner was a giant, but he used a magic cap to transform himself into a terrible dragon, the better to guard his ill-gotten gains. There he sits on his hoard, and in there among all the other treasures is an inconspicuous golden ring: the ring Alberich forged from the gold he stole from the Rhinemaidens, all those hours of singing and orchestral music ago.
That ring is the goal of Mime’s plotting. Like most of the other characters in the operas, Mime craves the ring, and he’s so caught up in that desire that he can’t be bothered to worry about the terrible curse Alberich placed on the treasure he desires. He’s not alone in that. One of the bitter ironies in this opera is that every single character we meet, except for a forest bird who shows up in Act 2, is doomed because of the ring’s curse. With one exception (aside from the forest bird), each of them desires it, or will desire it, and that all by itself is enough to bring its curse to bear on them. The one exception? That’s Siegfried, for whom the ring is just a pretty trinket—and he, too, is doomed because he owns it for a time. To have the ring or to desire it are equally lethal.
So that’s the narrative situation as the third opera begins, and Mime struggles with the one task he hasn’t been able to accomplish: the forging of a sword that Siegfried can use to slay the dragon and win the treasure. In the world of politics, economics, and philosophy that Wagner wove into the story he borrowed from Germanic mythology, all this has a far edgier meaning, but let’s stay with the narrative for the moment.
Mime’s an odd character. He’s portrayed in The Rhinegold as a master smith, capable of fashioning a powerful magical artifact for his brother Alberich, but his efforts to make a sword strong enough for Siegfried fail repeatedly—the strong boy simply snaps the blades in half. He has the broken halves of Nothung, “Needful,” the sword that Siegmund drew from the ash tree, but he doesn’t have the skill to reforge it. So he remains stuck in a loop of failure, like so many of us, repeatedly trying something that won’t work because he doesn’t know how to do the one thing that will work.
He’s not the only one who is circling in a holding pattern, hoping that some outside force will make it possible for him to get the thing he can’t get by his own efforts. Alberich, Mime’s older and bolder brother, is also lying in wait in the same forest. He knows he can’t kill Fafner and take the treasure himself, but he can’t turn away from the ring for which he renounced love. His condition is as common now as it was in Wagner’s time: he committed himself wholly to a failed project and can’t let go of it and get on with life. So there he lurks in the forest, watching the dragon’s cave in a frenzy of hatred, envy, and frustrated desire.
Then there’s Wotan. Yes, the king of the gods and supreme sleazeball of the Wagnerian cosmos is still roaming the world. Once his plans flopped in The Valkyrie, he apparently gave up all hope of seizing the ring himself, but he remains passionately interested in the outcome of the schemes he set in motion, and in his grandson Siegfried. In the second scene of the present opera he confronts Mime, and gets the dwarf to play a riddle game with him—the scene is drawn straight from the Eddas, but Wagner has put it to his own uses. Tolkien did the same thing, of course, replacing Mime with Gollum and Wotan, in a stroke of satiric genius, with the utterly un-Wotanish figure of Bilbo Baggins; it’s entirely possible, in fact, that Tolkien had an irritable eye on this scene of Wagner’s when he wrote the chapter “Riddles in the Dark” in The Hobbit.
Wagner cleverly uses the riddle contest to remind the audience of the cosmological frame of the story—the realms of gods, giants, and Nibelung dwarfs—and to summarize the story so far. He also uses it to showcase Mime’s self-defeating selfishness: accosted by the god of wisdom, Mime can only think of how to get him to go away, instead of trying to extract from him the secret of how Nothung can be reforged. Wotan mocks him for this, asking him that very question as his last riddle and then pointing out that Mime could have learned what he needed to know if he’d bothered to ask. He leaves Mime with a lesson the little Nibelung can’t grasp: only one who is without fear, he says, can reforge the broken sword.
That fearless smith, of course, turns out to be Siegfried. Returning to Mime’s smithy to claim his father’s sword, he finds that Mime has not repaired it, and sets out to do the thing himself. Now of course in the real world, bladesmithing is among the most challenging forms of metalwork, and a half-trained teenager who decides to ignore the advice of his elders and do the thing the way he thinks it ought to be done will fail miserably. Since we’re in the realm of symbolic fairy tale, though, Siegfried succeeds where Mime fails, reforges the sword, and demonstrates its strength in the classic way by chopping Mime’s anvil in half.
Off he goes with his shiny new sword in search of the dragon. The logic of fairy tales being what it is, of course he finds the dragon and slays him in the approved style; of course his hand is splashed by the dragon’s burning blood; of course he puts his hand in his mouth to quell the burn, and suddenly finds himself able to understand the language of birds. All this is classic folktale stuff, and so is the sequel. A helpful forest bird promptly tells him about the ring and the magic cap of shapeshifting, and so our hero goes trotting into the cave and comes out with the two items that matter.
Alberich and Mime have watched the whole thing from a safe distance, and are horrified to see Siegfried come out of the cave with the ring and the cap. Alberich retreats, fuming; we see him only once more in the entire cycle of operas, and there he’s not much more than a bad dream. Mime isn’t so easily put off. He goes at once to Siegfried, plays the doting daddy, and offers him a poisoned drink. Unfortunately for Mime, the same drop of dragon’s blood that gave Siegfried the power to understand the language of birds also gave him the power to understand the intentions of Nibelungs. The scene where Siegfried and the audience hear what Mime is thinking, while Mime himself can’t understand why his words don’t have their desired effect, is well crafted, and it ends as Siegfried kills Mime with his sword.
So there Siegfried is, all alone in the midst of the forest, with the one person he’s ever known lying dead at his feet. That’s when the helpful forest bird speaks again, telling Siegfried about a hill surrounded by flame not far away. Pass through the flame, the bird says, and you can find and awaken your destined bride, Brunnhilde. Of course Siegfried takes the hint and heads for the hill, the flame—and the confrontation that Wagner most dreaded.
This is where we need to step back to the Feuerbachian political and economic interpretation of the narrative we’ve been following. Lacking that, it makes no sense that Wagner stopped writing at this point, stuffed the incomplete score of Siegfried in a drawer for several years, fought his way through several bitter rounds of clinical depression, and repeatedly contemplated suicide. Without considering the deeper level of meaning in the story, it makes no sense that Wagner would have had to write two unrelated operas on opposing themes before he could nerve himself up to tackle the opening bars of Act 3 of Siegfried. What, just because Siegfried and his grandfather Wotan were about to meet and quarrel? Is that so huge an issue?
Yes, in fact, it is.
The meeting and the quarrel had no place in Wagner’s first complete outline of the drama, The Nibelung-Myth. In that version, Siegfried goes trotting straight from the dragon’s lair to the hill where Brunnhilde sleeps, without any intervening scene. In that version, too, the entire story ends with a vision in which the spirits of Brunnhilde and Siegfried mount up to Valhalla, in much the same way that the gods did at the conclusion of The Rhinegold. Wotan’s in his heaven, one might say, and all’s right with the world: the ring has gone back to the Rhine but Siegfried’s death and Brunnhilde’s self-sacrifice have atoned for Wotan’s sins, and Wotan’s castle in the clouds shines unharmed and glorious as the curtain goes down.
Translate that into the symbolic language Wagner was using and the issues are impossible to miss. The gods, again, are the ideals of society and the intellectual and creative classes that live and die by them; the giants, in their brute strength and practical cunning, are the ruling classes of society; the Nibelungs are the working classes; the ring, finally, is the social process of commodification that flattens out all values into those that can be denominated in money. These are the pieces on the chessboard of society.
All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the goal of radicals in the intellectual and creative classes was to come up with some way to break the power of commodification, and with it the power of the ruling classes, without relinquishing their own status or their own hopes and dreams about the future—in which, of course, the preservation of their own status was a crucial factor. That’s the meaning of that final scene in The Nibelungen-Myth. Though Siegfried the brave revolutionary dies a miserable death, his heroism leads to the downfall of the existing order of society and the collapse of the system of commodification, while he himself is enshrined in the pantheon of heroes whose deeds are celebrated and exploited by the inmates of Valhalla.
You can find that idea rehashed in countless works of radical political theory all through those two centuries, and celebrated in just as many works of more or less utopian fiction from the same period. It was very much on display in the radical scene in Seattle when I was a teenager, as the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Freedom Socialist Party, and the other factions of that scene went through motions more than a century past their pull date, in the passionate conviction that someday soon the revolution they longed for would usher in the utopian future of their dreams. I never had the heart to point out to any of them just how similar their faith was to that of the fundamentalist Christians they abhorred, for whom the Second Coming of Christ fulfilled the same role: inevitable and imminent in theory, endlessly postponed in practice.
That was where Wagner’s genius came close to costing him his sanity and his life. His experiences in the failed revolutions of 1848-1849 were one factor that forced him to see past these fond fantasies and gauge the way the future was actually headed. An even more potent factor, however, was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we discussed in an earlier post in this sequence.
The ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, which guided Wagner through the opening stages of his work on The Ring, were founded squarely on Hegel’s insistence that history had a direction that could be known in advance—a direction that was fundamentally optimistic. When Martin Luther King Jr. famously insisted that “the arc of history bends toward justice,” he was channeling Hegel, and giving voice to a sense of entitlement deeply rooted in Western culture. History must go where we want it to go: that, phrased in bluntest terms, is the conviction that Hegel borrowed from the popular Christianity of his time and reworked for a secular audience.
It was not the least of Schopenhauer’s achievements that he shredded that comfortable belief system. He didn’t do it explicitly; he didn’t have to. Follow Schopenhauer’s logic through the elegant prose of The World as Will and Representation and it simply becomes impossible to believe any longer that the arc of history bends toward anything at all. Schopenhauer himself was not a Christian in any sense that mattered—his sacred books were the Upanishads, which he read each night in their first European translation—and so it was left to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard a generation later to take the same insights and restate them in the language of Protestant Christian faith: to see the Second Coming not as the completion of any sort of historical process but as a breach in history, a dissolution of time in eternity.
How this works out in theological terms didn’t concern Wagner, who was no more a Christian than Schopenhauer was. What left him staring in horror into the night was its implications in politics and economics. It occurred to him that if revolutionary movements emerged from within the working classes, as the intellectuals of his time hoped, those movements could not escape the realization that the intellectuals themselves were part and parcel of the system they hoped to overthrow, and had to be overthrown as well. The inevitability of conflict between working class radicals and their self-proclaimed allies among privileged intellectuals: that was the nightmare that haunted him, and sent him fleeing from The Ring, because it meant the end, once and for all, of all those hopes of salvation through revolution that had motivated him for years.
Being Wagner, there was one and only one way he could work through the conflict, and that was by writing operas. The works that resulted are two of the greatest operas in the entire repertory: The Mastersinger of Nuremberg and Tristan and Isolde. They were written in that order, one right after another, and yet they’re astonishingly different, as different as any two operas Wagner ever wrote. The Mastersinger is a glorious paean to life, love, and historical continuity, told in the classic language of grand opera; at its culmination, the young rebel poet accepts the traditions of the Mastersingers and is absorbed into the existing intellectual and cultural system.
Tristan and Isolde is an entirely different creation. In a very real sense, it is the final masterpiece of classical Western music. I don’t mean this in a chronological sense—there were some great works of classical music written after Tristan, though not many—but in a conceptual sense. In Tristan, Wagner pushed the creative language of classical music as far as it could go, stopping just short of collapsing into incoherence. It’s some measure of his achievement that the first orchestra hired to play the music ended up quitting en masse, insisting that the score was unplayable. It isn’t—there are plenty of recordings to prove them wrong; I have one on my stereo right now, a fine LP of Toscanini conducting the Prelude and Liebestod scene—but it can’t be played without drawing a line under four hundred years of classical music.
It took a challenge on that scale for Wagner to settle his doubts, go ahead, and write Siegfried the way it had to be written. He returned to the score with his creative powers at their zenith—the prelude to Act 3 of Siegfried is a work of harrowing musical force—and let Siegfried and Wotan do what they had to do. The inevitable quarrel happens, and Wotan’s spear shatters against the reforged steel of Nothung: Wotan’s power is undone once and for all by the results of his own scheming. He stumbles blindly down the hillside with the shattered halves of the spear in his hands. We do not see him again.
Siegfried knows only that he’s vanquished the foe that killed his father, and brushed aside the last obstacle between him and Brunnhilde. Fearless as he is, the fire around the hill is no obstacle at all, and he reaches the rock where she sleeps. There follows a scene that English-speaking audiences inevitably find hilarious. Siegfried, in his utter innocence – recall that he has never seen a woman before – thinks at first that he has found a male friend to relieve his loneliness. Then he takes off her breastplate and gasps, “Das ist kein Mann!”—“It’s not a man!” Since the average Wagnerian soprano is built on a heroic scale, and her gender is impossible to miss even from the back row of the second balcony, the reaction of the audience can be imagined.
In terms of the narrative, there are complexities in all this that few productions of the opera bring out. Recall that Brunnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt; she is older than he is, and considerably more experienced in the ways of the world. By contrast, Siegfried is a cute, ignorant teenager. The complexities of her emotional reaction are well expressed in the libretto and the music alike.
In terms of the deeper meaning, in turn, there’s an equal complexity here. In Feuerbachian language, Brunnhilde is the ideal of liberty, and the fit between that ideal and working class radicalism is by no means perfect. Furthermore, as we’ll see, whatever passionate pledges of love and loyalty the Siegfrieds of history make to their beloved Brunnhilde-ideal may not last long once other interests come into play. We’ll discuss that when we begin our exploration of the last, longest, and most terrible opera of the Ring cycle, The Twilight of the Gods.
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January has five Wednesdays in it, and by longstanding tradition, that means readers get to nominate and vote on a topic for the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want to read about? Inquiring bloggers want to know.
Fifth Wednesday: Jung and occultism. I have a number of questions about Jung I would love to hash out on the discussion board.
“It was very much on display in the radical scene in Seattle when I was a teenager, as the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Freedom Socialist Party, and the other factions of that scene went through motions more than a century past their pull date, in the passionate conviction that someday soon the revolution they longed for would usher in the utopian future of their dreams. I never had the heart to point out to any of them just how similar their faith was to that of the fundamentalist Christians they abhorred”
This radical scene you’re remembering when you were a teenager, reminds me the hilarious factions of Jewish Radicals in the movie “Life of Brian”. OK, John, I know of course you don’t like and don’t watch videos, although I’ll link a fun scene of that movie for the kommentariat who watch videos…A classic of mocking the partisanship and sectarianism both in politics and religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4
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Oh, my vote for a topic for the 5th Wedenesday post is for meditation(s). I’m very interesting in this form os self-knowledgement and spirituality.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, John.
I work extensively with non-profit organizations as an advisor and support. I would be very interested, for the fith Wednesday, to have you share what you understand about the economics and functions of the fraternal orders that were once more a feature of community life. In short, how they functioned practically and the roles they played in the community–roles which have now in many cases been taken over by the state. In the past you have alluded to the idea that these organizations might resurge as our world decentralizes. I would love to understand how you think that might happen and what these organizations might look like in the near future. I’m curious to hear any practical ideas about how community organizations can relocalize necessary supports as the centre slowly slides into dysfunction.
Happy new year! Excellent as always sir. I still get a chuckle knowing that I have learned more about the history of western music from a druid on the Internet than ten years studying in a university.
Brief question concerning the astrological significance of the line up of planets around the twenty fifth. A good time to start a new endeavor or should we take cover to avoid the wrath of newly awakened elder gods? Thanks and blessings upon you and yours.
So speaking from Wagner’s Perspektive this all is happening in the future. Sooner or later the working class will break the binds that give the intellectuals their power. And being naive and brash they will squander their gifts.
I have been thinking of late along the lines of why we develop good qualities only in hardship? Applied onto this example, why would Wotan try and use his children as Chantel and dupes? Why not train them, give them the means to live, prosper and establish themselves. Then gain the prise openly.
In feuerbachian an therms; why does the intelligentsia not train their own numbers to seize the power? An order of intellectual warriors, honor and learning in hand then build that up until the ruling class is overwhelmed.
For the fifth Wednesday I would like to vote for western/European Islam envy.
Happy New Year! For The fifth Wednesday – My vote is for Islam envy please.
5th Wednesday – a vote for the power and importance of ritual, I have had TSW with the one I worked up after looking at the Sphere of Protection in your writings. Thank you.
I’ve got everyone’s votes tabulated; thank you.
Chuaquin, I saw it in a movie theater when it first came out, for whatever that’s worth.
Loki, so noted. You might have a look at this post of mine on that subject —
https://www.ecosophia.net/knock-and-give-the-password/
— and let me know if it covers the territory.
James, lineups of the planets have no particular significance in astrology, though you wouldn’t know that from listening to the latest internet-babble. If you see tentacled horrors rising from the nearest body of water, act accordingly; otherwise, just carry on.
Marko, you’d think that would be the logical approach, right? Intellectuals talk about that sort of thing from time to time, but somehow they’re never at the head of the line volunteering for the discipline and training. It’s always somebody else who’s supposed to do it. Seriously, I’ve seen dozens of essays insisting that “we” can save the earth if only people committed to the environment become an order of warrior monks or what have you. The one thing I’ve never seen is the writer of some such essay saying, “And therefore I’m going to commit to becoming the first of those warrior monks; here are the ecologically damaging habits I’m giving up for the rest of my life, and here are the austerities, disciplines, and training exercises I’ve started, effective today.” It’s always someone else who’s supposed to play Siegfried.
I can also see ritual performance is a form of meditation – trying to piggyback on Chuaquin’s vote for meditation(s). You know get two votes for the price of one! 😉
Fifth Wednesday vote: the extent to which Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam
My vote for 5th Wednesday topic is the deafening silence around the upcoming 250th birthday of the USA next year.
In case I have not mentioned it, I am finding this series a LOT more fascinating than I expected. I may need to check out some other version than the Looney Tunes one from way back.
Before discussing the content of the opera, I would just like to remark on the language (having read the libretto of Siegfried just now). I criticized Wagner’s alliteration schemes, rhythm and excessive archaisms in The Rhinegold. He has much improved here: consistent rhythms, consistent alliterations and fewer archaisms or dialectal forms.
@5 Marko
I’m not sure whether that will actually happen. Maybe, in an age of decline, the Giants will pull their funding for Wotan’s sky castle, and it will come crashing down and become rubble. Both the Nibelungs and the giants are losing faith in the intelligentsia, and long ago stopped caring about most of the cultural heritage of Europe (at least in my country the USA). So why continue supporting most experts, celebrities, and creatives?
Please count me as a vote for Jung!
I am curious about how Islam shaped the development of early Protestantism. Does it have anything to do with how strict monotheism seems to give rise to cults of personality? For example Calvinism, Lutheranism, etcetera.
For the fifth Wednesday I propose Jung’s archetypes and how Hitler is the Wotan archetype.
For fifth Wednesday, I am voting with Marko and Devonlad. I think the topic of Western/European Islam envy is highly relevant right now. We are seeing a similar envious emulation in some factions here in the USA today, misogyny and ugly beards (I don’t mean you, JMG, yours is a patriarch’s beard).
It has always seemed to me that the proper role of intellectuals in society is to tell the truth, and, of course, like Socrates, be prepared to take the consequences of doing so. Just as the proper virtue of a statesman or woman is justice, and that of a craftsperson, high competence, so must truthfulness be the chief quality of philosophers worthy of the name. That is why they are so often abrasive and disliked, their very quality of mind and thought can be harmed by the comforting white lies and evasions which help more socially adaptive types navigate through life.
Hi again. Thanks for reminding me of that post–that’s the exact one that got me thinking…how many members does a lodge need to make that promise of mutual aid sustainable? How were the organizations governed? Were they legally incorporated? Did they maintain bank accounts? Were the promises written contracts, or…? How iften did they meet? What is the structure of meetings and the order of business? You suggest that the rituals and “secrecy” served as a protection mechanism, yet this also would seem to limit membership. Would this be necessary today? Is modern technology a potential accelerator for these organizations, or is it part of their seeming decline? Would it be practical to build a new organization in 2025 out of whole cloth addressing today’s issues and concerns?
Just a few of many questions. You mention it is hard to find histories that account for these organizations. Perhaps if you know of some books that give a tolerably accurate treatment that would also suffice.
I’m grateful for any thoughts you may have.
Happy new year to everyone!
I am by no means an expert, but from what I’ve read on the topic, reforging a broken steel sword is more or less an impossible task. So Siegfried, in a heroic fool fashion, succeeds at something no one else dared to try because he doesn’t know he is supposed to fail. This might be a jab at the skilled worker and petite bourgeois, which are among the most conservative of classes. Just like Fafner, hoarding the rhinegold and doing nothing with it might be a jab at the aristocracy, as perceived by the intellectuals. In an alternate universe where Wotan ends up with the ring he might try to use it to remake humanity in his vision, and end up with an abomination instead (but then, arguably, this is what Wälsung are).
As for the fifth Wednesday topic, I would like to vote for Carl Jung (and psychology in general, but this is probably asking too much; I can’t help but notice that a lot of modern popular psychology is just garbled and recycled New Thought material) and occultism.
I remember sometime back, there were some shenanigans that ended in Diana L. Paxson being expelled from her own organization (IIRC, it had to do with her connection to Marion Zimmer Bradley way back when); you made a comment about entryism, and how it’s a danger to any organization. For the 5th Wednesday, I’d like to read your thought about it, and most importantly, how groups can protect themselves from being undermined this way.
Again, all votes have been tabulated. Thank you!
BeardTree, nope. One vote per person!
KM Gunn, glad to hear it. The Looney Tunes version is even funnier when you know the real operas!
Aldarion, being Wagner, it never occurred to him that he had to work up to doing good alliterative verse. He did finally manage it, at least.
Mary, you’d think so, right? But telling the truth is a good way to end up drinking hemlock, and lots of intellectuals find that an unwelcome prospect.
Loki, if your nominee doesn’t win, we can discuss all this during the open post, which goes up on January 22. Right now it’s time to talk about Wagner’s operas.
Brent, I’ve wondered if Wagner talked to somebody who had metalworking experience, because Siegfried’s approach sounds like a least-worst option — you lose all the advantages of the different layers of steel in a real blade, but at least it’s an intact piece of steel.
Vote for 5th Wednesday–Jung and Occultism.
Thanks,
Pierre
Hello JMG, I am also voting for week 5 on the increasing Muslim immigrants in the West, the antipathy towards them and how it will affect the revival of Christianity in the Second Religionisty.
Aldarion: I’m intrigued by your mention of archaisms – are you able to give some examples?
Regarding the idea of conflict between “intellectuals” and the “working class”, what do you think of this quote from 1965?:
https://contemporarythinkers.org/buckley/
Second on Carl Jung. I’m muddling through Psyche & Symbol, and I’d welcome some help making sense of especially where it relates to The Dolmen Arch.
Also, second on the role of fraternal bodies in the near future. Membership seems on an upturn here in the Rust Belt, and I’ve been wondering when their former roles might make a comeback.
And – regarding your observation that somebody else is supposed to play Seigfried: Is there a name for the cartoonish splutter caused by someone who wants somebody else to play Seigfried realizing another person is putting some effort towards just that?
Rhydlyd
Maybe you can help me with vocabulary here: what do they call it where history has a direction, that you’re on the wrong side of history. It’s not eschatology, it’s not dispensationalism, and from the root concepts, it’s very hard to Google and find.
Yeah, we should use this word a lot, since all Progressiveism, Modern world, and Socialism is based on it. The UniParty, headed to the UniFuture.
By the way, I disagree: history and reality probably has a direction, “Up”, but it moves so glacially we won’t discover it, and has a thousand cycles, not that go nowhere, but spiral up like a double helix. …These concepts are yes, approved in magic. So history is both linear and cyclical, but it’s a whole LOT more cyclical than otherwise. Call it the 80/20 rule? The 800/2 rule?
Why don’t they train the lessers openly and fairly? Same as always, illusion of power. If you train all to be better men, you renounce power. This, like the Tao, works slowly and invisibly, “Nothing happens”, Wu Wei. The West feels if they train you, give you any power, the people will do what they themselves would do: fight it, cheat it, take it, steal it. They can’t see that not all men are like themselves and it is their constant undoing.
America, such as our concept was, proves that. They altered men from the middle ages to be their own men, their own fortunes, their own government and kings of their own castle. Nothing happened but they got rich and invention and prosperity boomed worldwide. Then from the very riches thus created, they tried to fight it, cheat it, take it, steal it, undo it.
You don’t actually NEED hardship and badness to become strong. We just HAPPEN to do it that way. Sports in a way can illustrate this: you don’t actually conquer Pittsburgh and leave them (more of) a ruin. No one is harmed and they play again next week, and there are many such examples. If that weren’t true, it would be a tragedy for the greater universe! Imagine we use hardship and war to become ultimate power in the universe…but then the only thing we can functional, or can think of to do by the laws of (Spiritual) physics with that power is create yet more war and hardship. Surely in the larger sense, reality is not created that way.
So let’s all give that up now, where we can.
And you’re all wrong! Horribly wrong! The rise of fogs worldwide is clearly a sign that Cthulu and the Elder gods are coming! Coming I say!
I would love to see you flesh out the argument that non sacrament based protestantism was molded by Turkish influences. How did Islam make modern Christianity?
My vote for 5th Wednesday topic is the why no one is talking about the upcoming 250th birthday of the U.S. in 2026.
It’s weird, especially when you see it as a chance to make piles of money as so many corporations did for 1976. There were bicentennial everything for sale!
Maybe with Trump in office, this will change.
I vote for an update on the cosmic eclipse event, whatever that was and however it may be described.
For fifth Wednesday this month, I too vote for a piece on Jung and the occult. If possible, I would love you to include your thoughts on how the occult influences psychology today as a result of Jung’s relationship with the occult.
Enjoying this Wagner series very much, John! Your plan to scare off readers is not working on me.
Developing on Mary’s remark (#17) and your response (#21): Is this unwillingness on the intellectuals’ / Wotan’s part to simply tell the truth and refrain from power games just a consequence of human nature, or is there something specific in the Faustian soul or world-view or whatever that makes it more likely?
My fifth Wednesday vote goes to Jung and occultism.
Hi JMG,
Happy new year to you. Wish you good health and continue to delight us with fascinating writings.
Wagner seemed uninterested in showing any virtues in the Nibelungs, does it imply that he didn’t hold a high regard toward the working class ?
Regarding the 5th Wednesday, I’d like to vote for The West’s Islam envy.
Kind regards,
I think I’ll vote for the connection between Islam and the foundations of Protestantism.
I vote for Jung, archetypes and the occult
Again, I’ve tabulated everyone’s votes. Thank you.
David R, I’m not especially fond of this habit you’ve developed of throwing bare links at me and asking me to respond. That’s low-effort on your part and high-effort on mine, and I have a lot of other comments to field, you know. If you want to have a conversation, that’s one thing, but I’m not going to respond to bare links, and if you keep doing it without contributing to the discussion I may start deleting your comments.
Rhydlyd, I’ve seen quite a few younger Freemasons here in Rhode Island, too, so here’s hoping. As for the intellectuals grumbling about Siegfrieds, why, that’s a step Wagner didn’t get to — the point when the radicals become faux-radicals because it’s really sunk in that any actual change in society will deprive them of their status and privileges. We’re deep into that now.
ArdaTawa, the usual term is “historicism,” which is unfortunate because it has several other meanings. Karl Popper’s writings, especially The Poverty of Historicism, are worth reading in this context. As for direction, you’re right, we disagree: to my mind, “up” is simply a phase, and will be balanced out in due time by “down.” With regard to Chtulhu, here’s hoping — mysterious fogs and sudden huge waves on Pacific coasts are certainly promising…
Peter, by that I assume you mean the Dion Fortune-based theory that things have been so weird in recent decades because one or more solar systems on higher planes are interfering with ours?
Robert K, I think it’s specifically Faustian. Intellectuals in classical times, for example, made quite a point of living up to their ideals in everyday existence.
Foxhands, yeah, that’s how I’d read Wagner’s attitude toward the Nibelungs. It’s a common bad habit among privileged intellectuals.
Hi John Michael,
Thus the inherent fear of peak oil in that it runs to it’s own trajectory. What do mean there are limits? It is a fear, don’t you reckon?
The stars will remain as distant to our species as they ever were. They are not for us. Did Wotan gamble it all on a single throw of the dice, and lose?
Cheers
Chris
Hi John,
If I remember, you defined magic as changing consciousness in accordance with will. So with this definition in mind, I see commodification as a form of magic. If money were only a improvement over barter, allowing perishable avocados to be traded for a hammer, then it would be an ingeniously clever servant but not a magical one. Money gets its power from a prior act of magic, where the order of be-do-have is reversed into have-do-be, which to me is the essence of commodification. So if the magic (in this case, applied psychology) convinces you that if you buy product X you’ll have desirable quality Y and–this is crucial–others have been convinced you’ll in fact have Y–then money becomes the magic means of (supposedly) acquiring Y.
Now it’s true that a person could afford X by having made a genuine contribution to society in a manner unrelated to X; e.g., the person who, after years of research and effort, discovers the proverbial cure for baldness celebrates by buying a Bentley. But this is an instance of Be-Do-Have. The problem is when, increasingly, money can be acquired by means unrelated to first being and then doing.
Commodification is crucially enabled by another form of black magic, that of making the productive classes blind to their own value. This was hilariously satirized in the Wizard of Oz. For example, the scarecrow–who was always smart–doesn’t believe he is until he gets a degree from the faux wizard (and who then proceeds to mangle the Pythagorean Theorem, which perfectly illustrates how formal, credential-based schooling can be as likely to mis-educate as not.)
A real rebel intellectual or artist is one who tries to break the evil magic spell gripping the producers–the sort of spell that lionizes Wall St. chicanery and puts its sorcerer’s apprentices into McMansions, while discounting all the skilled tradespeople that built the mansions. Now that the soi-disant elite institutions are breaking down, it should be easier to break its spells.
The nightmare of the elites are self-educated intellectuals (of whom more than a few visit this site) who are also productive and who have no desire to lord it over anyone. They just want to return to a society based on the good, the true and the beautiful.
The Buckley quote ;
““I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
Is directly related to this, “An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing.”
That one has a long history, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/25/more/
There is a real risk of forgetting how things interact as you dial in on ever more precise measurements or constructs. See also unintended consequences. So the experts at Harvard or anywhere else live in their world of pure abstraction where their actions are contained, or other words, they apply a partial differential equation Assuming Everything Else Is Constant. But it isn’t. It’s the butterfly effect though usually the changes damp out before a full fledged hurricane develops.
And the specialists never consider that a mud-dauber wasp built a nest exactly in the right spot to prevent the starting switch on the irrigation pump from resetting. I took that thing apart three times before I found the mud ball and got the reed switch back in the right spot.
I’m voting for Jung and occultism for the 5th Wednesday post.
I vote for Jung and the archetypes.
Dear JMG:
My vote is for the deafening silence on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the USA. I remember the 200th; there was a big buildup then. Although I note there is an uptick in mention of it by historians and those interested in our history.
And as an aside; I also had visions of the Life of Brian in your description of the radical scene in Seattle. Good heavens, if you wrote a movie like that now, certain people would go nuts (“But I want to have babies. Don’t be ridiculous! You don’t have a womb! Where would you put them, in a box??!). The screams of rage!!
Cugel
Re Islam’s influence on the rise of Protestantism:
I remain skeptical. Protestantism arose in the northern part of Germany, which (along with Scandinavia) was quite far removed from regions of Europe strongly influenced by Islam. Rather, the similarities between Protestantism and Islam can be explained by the influence, independently in each case, of Rabbinic Judaism. (I specify Rabbinic Judaism because there are also several ancient forms of non-Rabbinic Judaism, which differ strikingly from Judaism’s Rabbinic form.)
Fifth Wednesday:
The state of the astral—is it actually unusually grimy right now, why, what are the effects, and what can be done about it?
Thanks!
@Loki #3 and #18
http://bowlingalone.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478.Bowling_Alone
If you are interested in the decline of American civic organizations (I assume you are talking about things like The Moose Lodge, Woodmen of the World, the Fraternal Order of Eagles or ethnic mutual aid societies, the book “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam is a must read. It’s an excellent and accessible book, and it was written 25 years ago, so this issue was already ongoing by the 1990s even before the internet and social media had an impact. Highly recommended for not just you but anyone noticing the collapse of the social fabric.
Happy New Year!! I hope all of you have a Happy New Year!
Again, everyone’s votes have been tabulated. Thank you.
Chris, it’s partly fear and partly rage driven by our culture’s wildly inflated sense of entitlement. Whaddya mean, we can’t have the stars? We want them, dammit!!!
Greg, excellent! Yes, exactly, point for point — and I’m now feeling better about the future of humanity than I have since the day I heard two twelve-year-olds talking about how lousy Taylor Swift is as a musician.
Siliconguy, I don’t often agree with Buckley, but he hit that one out of the park.
Cugel, maybe we should recommend to the incoming administration that all woke bureaucrats should be strapped down and made to watch all of Monty Python. It might actually help…
Robert M, so noted.
Watchflinger, another good book in the subject is David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, which documents the immense economic impact of fraternal societies as a source of mutual help and security in hard times.
Jose, likewise.
I’m voting for Jung and occultism too.
Annette
Hi Annette2…I’m also from Canada and almost your age. My family emigrated to US in 1963, when I was 7.
JMG, sorry yes, I mean the theory discussed on your Dreamwidth account that yes, our solar system has been eclipsed or affected in some other form by another solar system, on a higher plane that we can’t see. Whatever the event was, it was particularly bad from 2019 to 2022 and affected all of us to some extent. It is the backdrop to the covid madness I think, how a relatively ordinary virus caused such a major panic. Whatever influence that was present has now faded I think, with normal service from the central sun resuming.
I’d like to cast my 5th Friday vote for the very odd phenomenon of The Poptart Bowl. This year, there were three mascots dressed as poptarts, and the winning team got to choose which mascot would be ritualistically “sacrificed” by being lowered into a giant toaster, and then devoured in effigy by the winning team.
It was very surreal, and cannot help bring to mind the sacrifices before games in Ancient Greece and Rome, or the way certain losing Aztec teams would be sacrificed.
My vote is for Jung.
I went to my favourite second-hand bookstore a few weeks ago and got “The Old Regime and the French Revolution” by Alexis de Tocqueville and “Nordic Gods and Heroes” by Padraic Colum. I’m currently reading de Tocqueville’s book and there’s so much that he wrote that fits in with our current society. Maybe I’ll post some of it later.
I glanced at the Nordic Gods book. Other than Wotan being the Norse Odin, I didn’t notice any difference. But I haven’t read it yet.
Once again, I’ve tabulated all the votes.
Peter W, thank you. If there’s interest, I can certainly write about that.
Emily, I wasn’t able to find anything about that in a quick search. I’ve added your vote to the list, but if it starts getting traction, I’ll want you to point me to some sources.
Annette2, Padraic Colum! Good heavens, I haven’t heard that name in donkey’s years. He wrote quite a few books on mythology and legend for older kids; I enjoyed them a great deal.
JMG,
A quick search on the Brave search engine yields the following articles about the PopTarts Bowl:
https://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/news/pop-tarts-bowl-edible-mascot-toaster-trophy-cfb-bowl-game/24c6246ae7dc7296802ecddb
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/43185454/pop-tarts-bowl-ideas-toaster-trophy-college-football
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2024/12/28/pop-tarts-mascot-iowa-state-miami/77294150007/
Also Wikipedia has an entire article about the event, which has this sentence in the third paragraph of the History section:
“The mascot, named “Strawberry”, is a large anthropomorphic Pop-Tart that was deemed the “first-ever edible mascot”;[9] it was lowered into a giant toaster and presented for players to eat after the game, having been replaced by an edible replica.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-Tarts_Bowl
Perhaps it says more about the deterioration of Google and its search engine that you weren’t able to find any information about the Poptarts Bowl.
While the young fool who completes the impossible task is of course a folk-tale motif, the libretto also makes a point of explaining that only somebody who didn’t know what fear was could reforge the sword. The contrast is with Mime, not with Wotan, but I wonder if this isn’t also Wagner’s comment on the question Marko raised.
I don’t want to jump ahead in the opera cycle, but in the real world, working-class leaders did not shatter radical intellectuals’ power. What did happen was that they took over, at least for a while and in some countries. Yes, Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotski, they were all intellectuals from middle and even higher class families. And yes, for the last 50 or 60 years, the left parties have again been almost exclusively the domain of university graduates. But the social democratic generation that took over power in the decades before and after WW1 consisted to a considerable degree of actual workers: men like Friedrich Ebert, the first president of Germany, a saddle maker, or Keir Hardie, the first Labour leader, a coal miner without schooling. I could also cite, much later, Lula in Brazil. What they all had in common was pragmatic goals – no use for revolution.
Here’s a clip of the ending ceremony of the Poptart Bowl. The first two minutes or so are just your standard Sportsball “yay for winning team” and can be skipped.
https://youtu.be/V_Oa3u3OVsU?si=MomG5JayV4laYDUN
They also did a segment earlier in the game where they “resurrected” the poptart which was eaten in 2023. Complete with gruesome half-eaten mascot suit.
https://www.si.com/college-football/pop-tarts-bowl-resurrected-strawberry-frosted-mascot
JMG, I hope you can excuse this comment being off-topic (tangential perhaps?): Last night, I attended a new-year’s eve contra dance. It was the first dance I’ve attended since the presidential election.
What was interesting was that the caller addressed the dancers as “ladies” and “gents” instead of with the circumlocution “robins” and “larks”. This is new, and I felt like I was at least smelling fresh air again. And out of 400 attendees, there was only one man wearing a dress.
I’ve gotten so tired of normal people being marginalized and even vilified, while fringe people (to use no stronger word) get normalized, deferred to and celebrated. Dare I hope this a straw in the wind heralding a return to sanity?
–Lunar Apprentice
A question about politics.
Since The Ring Cycle isn’t particularly kind to and of the classes, how did it get it produced? If the political meaning in his operas was readily accessible at the time, then why did the powers that be fund it, or even allow it? Especially since Wagner was a wanted man in some places for his previous involvement in failed revolutions.
Were the political meanings only accessible to some or did he have wealthy patrons that approved of such things?
Re: the 5th Wednesday topic:
I recently read your book, A Magical Education. On page 192, you remark that “there used to be American magical traditions involving hardcore physical exercise.” I don’t know if it merits a full post, but I, for one, would be interested to hear more about this topic. Magic and physical exercise are two of my hobbies, and I wouldn’t mind combining them.
Very much enjoying these essays, but not much to add to this one, as with earlier ones.
I would like to throw in my vote for Jung and occultism, though.
Happy New Year to all here!
Jeff
This has been a fascinating series, and astounding how well the human psyche and nature were understood way back when. That definitely helps give a nod to the idea that we aren’t currently progressing, and that there has been a lot of lost understanding from times past.
Specifically, the idea of hope stands out. It causes Mime and Alberich to stick in a holding pattern. Perhaps similar to our current intellectual and management classes, hoping beyond hope that things will work out. In this way, hope is a poison. Hegel’s philosophy allowed this poison to infect many, thinking that things will inevitably bend. Curiously, is this a product of Western thought? Greek mythology has it’s Pandora’s Box.
Which brings me to the point that hope isn’t always a poison. It is often a source of light. Hope for right gave the Founding Fathers of the USA conviction to stand up for their beliefs and start movements which eventually bore the founding of this country. All movements begin with some sort of idealism, which is a sort of hope, isn’t it?
The key is realizing hope is similar to a seed. It can be planted, watered, grown, and eventually bear fruit, which will need to be harvested, otherwise it risks decay. This is the problem with civilizations, isn’t it? They get stuck in that holding pattern and never recognized the responsibility to harvesting when ripe, resulting in things decaying. Does the Twilight of the Gods lead us to this recognition?
@JMG #47
Thanks for the book recommendation. On a light note, there is a pretty active fraternal organization in the Western states called E Clampus Vitus. It’s a kind of tongue in cheek historical society that will put up memorial plaques that commemorate things like the death of a mule in a mine. They tend to have funny titles for their chapters and officers and seems like most chapters have their headquarters in roadside bars.
Oh, and I haven’t voted yet, so I’m going to back the third party and say “Poptart Bowl!”
My vote: the limits of Spengler’s model as it applies to “transitional” states, i.e. those that aren’t from the heartland of the cultural complex (Japan, Korea, Vietnam w.r.t to China, or even the US w.r.t to Faustian culture.
@KAN: From the Rheingold libretto, just a few examples of either archaisms or words only in dialectal use in Wagner’s time: Friedel; “wildes Geschwister” in the singular; neidlich; schleck; witzig meaning intelligent; talpen; nugrell; and many others. The last two I had never heard.
For Fifth Wednesday, I vote for Jung.
Happy New Year!
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 Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed with a successful surgery under a steady hand when she goes into the operating room in mid January, and with well-being and a speedy recovery.
May Bill Rice (Will1000) in southern California, who suffered a painful back injury, be blessed and healed, and may he quickly recover full health and movement.
May David/Trubrujah’s 5 year old nephew Jayce, who is back home after chemotherapy for his leukemia, be healed quickly and fully, and may he, and mother Amanda, and their family find be aided with physical, mental, and emotional strength while they deal with this new life altering situation.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Daedalus/ARS receive guidance and finish his kundalini awakening, and overcome the neurological and qi and blood circulation problems that have kept him largely immobilised for several years; may the path toward achieving his life’s work be cleared of obstacles.
May baby Gigi, continue to gain weight and strength, and continue to heal from a possible medication overdose which her mother Elena received during pregnancy, and may Elena be blessed and healed from the continuing random tremors which ensued; may Gigi’s big brother Francis continue to be in excellent health and be blessed.
May Jennifer, whose pregnancy has entered its third trimester, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
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.
Happy New Year JMG! I finally got around to reading That Hideous Strength and I’ll be finishing it tonight. What an amazing, deep, dystopian book. It’s interesting how there are some thematic parallels between it and the current Wagner discussion.
To Jennifer — I just tragically deleted my own comment to you by mistake before hitting “send”. Anyway, I’ll try to remember what I was getting at; please forgive all the links I am about to post in longhand. The collective astral is a hot red mess. It is my opinion that it has never been worse in human history. This is because we are in a demonic age that was actually feared by more spiritually aware people such as the Mayans and Nostradamus. The only reasonable way to clean up the astral is to start extremely locally with yourself. One way you can do this is by playing the Glad Game https://kimberlysteele.substack.com/p/the-glad-game and acknowleging the negative while ratioing it with the positive. Another thing you can do is a daily Sphere of Protection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsD3LkfgFVs and daily discursive meditation as suggested earlier upthread. I myself have a few essays on the astral plane here: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/astral+plane And if all else fails, try cleaning your toilet every day. https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/clean+toilet+challenge
I hope this helps.
Another great essay – thank you! As you note, Wagner quit working on Siegfried midway through Act 2 (he did go back and finish the Act up before turning to Tristan – small correction: Tristan precedes Meistersinger) and the usual explanation lies with the increasing disenchantment/disillusionment with the Feuerbachian premises that formed the basis of the entire Ring “poem” (as Wagner liked to call his libretti).
But there were other factors at work as well. One was his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck and concomitant sheer force of erotic love he was experiencing, a force that simply demanded a response. Another (and they are related) was the way in which the musical language Wagner had developed in composing the Valkyrie (I say related because the intimacy between Wagner and Mathilde was at its peak while he was composing it – she shared all his thoughts, both musical and extra-musical.) Wagner writes of being tortured by musical ideas that he could not cram into Siegfried; ideas that would finally take shape when he let Siegfried go and turned to Tristan. ( I couldn’t agree more with your characterization of Tristan as the “final masterpiece of Western classical music.” Leonard Bernstein who had a very ambivalent relationship to Wagner – said he “hated him on bended knee” – wrote that Tristan is “the central work of all music history; the hub of the wheel.”)
But there is also the fact that Wotan had usurped Siegfried’s place as the central character of the cycle (it bears remembering that the Ring started out as “Siegfried’s Death”) and that the narrative arc of Wotan had come to a fitting dramatic end of a sort with the Valkyrie as he finally acknowledges to himself what he had been up to and “lets go” in a manner of speaking (has anyone ever composed music as moving as those passages commonly known as “Wotan’s Farewell”?).
Now Wagner has to start all over again with a “clueless…dolt” to use your inimitable characterizations of Siegfried and he just simply couldn’t get into it – as his own correspondence acknowledges.
I recently read Ernest Newman’s century old 4 volume biography of Wagner and if Newman is to be believed (no reason why he shouldn’t be), not only did Wagner seriously consider never going back to Siegfried (both the opera and the young dolt), he probably would not have if “Mad” Ludwig of Bavaria hadn’t insisted on it. Ludwig was the one person Wagner could not ignore – he had literally rescued Wagner from what could likely have been debtor’s prison and funded him during the years he was working on Meistersinger (Tristan had been finished before Ludwig found him).
So what he was going to do? Wagner being Wagner, the music of the first two acts of Siegfried is never boring and often exciting/compelling but it never touches the soul the way almost every measure of the Valkyrie does. Part of the problem lies in what you write about – Wagner’s loss of faith in the very Feuerbachian ideals that had sparked the Ring in the first place – and part rests in the character of Siegfried himself. He’s just not very interesting and the task of fashioning not one but two operas around a clueless young dolt would have daunted almost anyone.
Once Wagner had resolved to go ahead, though, he composed, as you noted, one of the greatest scenes in the Ring – or indeed in all opera – the opening of Act 3 from the astounding prelude (see what I can do with these shopworn musical motives!) through to Brunnhilde’s awakening. But the “problem of Siegfried” (the uninteresting/unsympathetic central character) would not go away and would continue to plague the cycle from the forced joy of the concluding love duet of Siegfried through much of Gotterdammerung.
One can’t help but wonder what Wagner could or would have done had Ludwig not insisted that he finish the Ring cycle (not to mention wasted all that time and energy on launching Bayreuth). I suppose one can make the case – maybe you’ll do it! – that Wagner could not have written Parsifal had he not first completed the Ring, in which case all faults in the Ring are forgiven.
I really look forward to the remainder of your essays on the Ring.
(Topic I would love to see discussed although I doubt it will collect many votes: why it is that opera conductors today scrupulously honor the composer’s wishes while opera directors think they have some sort of license to ignore every dramatic intention of the composer and the librettist and impose their own notions, even ones that directly contradict and undermine the composer’s/librettist’s vision. 150 years ago, it was the reverse: conductors freely rescored music they were performing – Wagner did this with Beethoven – while the action on stage generally conformed closely to what the composer and librettist had intended.)
I vote for Islam envy. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing.
Greetings all
For fifth Wednesday this month, I vote for a piece on Jung and the occult. Thank you
JMG wrote: We’ll discuss that when we begin our exploration of the last, longest, and most terrible opera of the Ring cycle, The Twilight of the Gods.
A naive question: from our perspective, once the Gods have gone, does it mean human societies goes back to a non – industrial and non-modern state and can thus begin to create ecotechnic civilisations? Or what happens after the twilight of the gods, from our perspective?
Dear Archdruid, a very happy Gregorian New Year to you, and to the entire community
Another erudite and stimulating essay. I have come to expect no less from you, but this series has nevertheless left me overjoyed. Between Wagner’s genius and you analysis, the anatomy of The Revolution has been laid bare before us. A lot of things I have witnessed, especially since the turbulence of the pandemic revealed the political intentions of so many vested interests, are finally making sense to me.
Regarding the fifth week of this month, I do have a request. It is possible that you have already written at length about the topic, and it is possible that this topic is the entirety of Magic and the Astral Light and a single blog will not be able to hold it, but let me articulate it to the best of my ability.
I have found that sometimes I am able to find confidence to take on tasks with patience and fortitude, and when I do, I am able to stick to the tasks and finish them, over multiple attempts if necessary, even when the tasks are difficult. When this happens, invariably, my eventual success confirms my initial confidence. At other times I lack confidence in my own abilities, so I give up quickly after a few tries. In such situations, conversely, my final failure reassures me that any confidence I might have had at the onset of the engagement would have been misplaced.
I spent my childhood and early youth believing that this is because I am good at certain things and bad at others. Then I realized that this has more to do with the state of my mind, and that my presentiment acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Facing this predicament, I spent much of my later youth trying to brute-force my consciousness into getting in the confident state. After much difficulty, and having learnt a little Magical theory, I have come to realize that this is a matter of will and consciousness. Hence, Magical theory may have the best explanation of what is going on and what one can do about it.
Based on extremely amateur divination, I have come to conclude that this might have something to do with the nineteenth card in the tarot, The Sun. I cannot be sure (and I am really, really amateur). Either way, I shall be grateful – and others may benefit – if you could share some insights into the working of these states of consciousness that are the result of self-fulfilling presentiments regarding our own capabilities.
I would like to nominate for the fifth Wednesday the collapse of France’s military and economic influence in West Africa and what it means for the future of France and West Africa.
Hey JMG
On the subject of the 5th Wednesday vote, it is a hard choice between the “Islam-envy of Protestant Europe that you have been mentioning recently, and the feminisation of modern society.
While the former is interesting in a historical sense, the latter seems more relevant and important to how we live and so I somewhat reluctantly vote for it.
Hi John Michael,
The precious! The precious! We wants it, for ever… 😉 Far out.
As a youth, I remember watching the film Damien – Omen II. It was a late 70’s horror film where allegedly Damien is the Antichrist. To be honest, as I was watching the film, horrific scenes aside like the frozen lake scene, it all seemed rather petty and trivial. Wotan’s cloud castle seems a bit like that to me. So this dude is meant to be the all powerful, and he’s hankering for a cloud castle. Is that the best desire he’s got?
Oh hey, I’ve got an off topic question: Which classic to read: Wuthering Heights or Dracula? I need some assistance here with my summer reading!
Cheers
Chris
When I was younger, I thought that opera was only fat people dressed in cheesy costumes, shouting for amusement of rich people. Then, I started to see hoy wrong I was, and I’ve been listening opera in my spare time. So, thank you John for this posts about Wagner tetralogy…
>But telling the truth is a good way to end up drinking hemlock
I think the trick these days is to label yourself as a “comedian” when you’re telling the truth. That way if someone gets mad at you, you can then fall back to “You can’t take a joke?” or “I’m a comedian, you’re not supposed to take me seriously”.
They may still make you drink the hemlock but if they do, it looks really really bad for them. Or you’ve made them come to the terrible self-realization that they have no sense of humor. Is that worth dying for? I don’t know.
>I heard two twelve-year-olds talking about how lousy Taylor Swift is as a musician
Eh, I remember when 12 year olds were talking about how lousy Madonna was as a musician too, at the supposed height of her popularity. The difference these days is those 12 year olds are all networked together (as Elon has discovered) and the Radio which shoved all that dreck into your ears, was god back then but is mostly dead now.
>just how similar their faith was to that of the fundamentalist Christians they abhorred
I can smell fundamentalism, having had much exposure to it as a child. Those screaming bluehairs REEK of it.
I’ve been waiting for the Depends Bowl to show up somewhere (suggested by the late David Foster Wallace), but otherwise I’ll add my vote to Emily’s and go for the Pop-Tart Bowl. Strange indeed!
@emily and @jmg
Found this for the pop tart bowl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-Tarts_Bowl
too many bowls….. 🙁 My son just played halftime at the “pinstripe bowl”. Which was created in 2009 and is played in Yankee stadium. Not a packed house….and I heard from another band parent the tickets were cheap.
Jerry
A question about the sword. If I remember aright, Mime has been trying to repair Nothung by soldering/brazing the pieces back together. Siegfried, however, just files the old sword down to powder and forges a new sword from that. Is there a significance here? This is the sword, after all, that Wotan stuck into Hunding’s ash tree as part of his original scheme, and its ultimate use to shatter Wotan’s spear is an ironic rounding off.
Tr: The sword. Diana Paxson, in her novelization of the saga, had it that the sword was not the iron of the period, but iron “from a stone that fell from the sky.” You couldn’t work it like the iron the blacksmith dwarf was used to using. Neither could a half-trained teenager. But she suggested that an old wandering veteran with only one eye dropped by the forge for shelter and had a few pointers for the kid,his foster father being absent. Not at all like Wagner’s Wotan, that! But I’m wondering how many special magic sword in mythology were forged from meteoric iron?
She and Steve Stirling both, in American (or post-American) settings, have The Old One appearing as Coyote also. And I can easily see that!
PS @KAN: “nugrell” seems to be a misprinting in the online libretto I was reading for nu (grell). The other words are indeed archaic or dialectal, e.g. Grimm’s Wörterbuch says “Friedel” has not been used since the 15th century. I know it from Walther von der Vogelweide…
I am enjoying this series very much. Thanks. It seems that it is framed in the language of revolution with working class and intellectual revolutionaries exploring the limits of their common cause in overthrowing the entrenched interests that are benefiting from existing systems. The practical reality is that the forces represented by Siegfried are the main options with the raw power to overturn existing systems. And those forces are always shaped and guided by ideas from actors better characterized as intellectuals or leaders than ‘working class’.
(In some ways you can understand the obsession with education among the intelligencia as a progress myth that allows them to envision a Siegfried that is more like them. But the gap between the complexity of our world and the descriptive capabilities of our best ideas is larger than most realize. This pushes creative types to create ‘rings’ that magically simplify things to focus the action. But practical types continue to imagine they will create a working class that rationally solves societies problems, ignoring the fact (or maybe to help distract themselves from noticing the fact) that they don’t have much by way of rational solutions to society’s problems. )
The core simplification is made by assuming that ‘revolution’ is the path forward. This seems to be rooted in a kind of eschatological vision of progress with utopia just 2 hours of heroic actions away. Wagner extended us to 15 hours and after his emotional breakdown ends with more like dystopia. I actually suspect that the best futures available to humanity involve suppressing the fantasy of revolution. If it is possible to keep enough of humanity out of mental illness without revolution fantasies, we could get about the hard slow work of persistently improving broken systems towards ones that work a little better using trial and error. And at the same time preserving systems that are mostly working. But we seem intent on revolution to tear down all systems, working or not, and replace them wholesale with fantasies that are sure to fail since most of them have been tried already and the broad shape of their outcomes are known.
Took a look at a sample of the book from Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. What a shame the Fraternal Organizations are so diminished. I have seen the remnants of the past over the years in buildings – Eagle and Masonic lodges, the Elks and the Moose,. Odd fellows, Grange Halls, Veteran organizations. The past is a different country as they say. What a loss, representing degeneration and loss of “biodiversity” connections, humanity, and vitality in the social ecosystem. I often say – “I have reached the age where I have seen the future and I am not impressed”.
Getting burning blood on your hand from the dragon you just slain, and promptly putting it into one’s mouth, seems, counterintuitive.. yet somehow completely appropriate for the human(oid) experience. Haha
It is so much easier to see the faults of others than recognizing our stupid and obvious compulsions. Very rarely to the culminate with the ability to understand bird song..
Popping in to read the latest essay, and, while I’m here, vote for an essay on the 250th Anniversary.
One of the reasons I’m so interested in the topic is because someone I know has emphatically announced that she will not be celebrating the 250th. Why, you ask? Because Trump was re-elected, that’s why! And “there is nothing worth celebrating about a country that would elect Donald Trump twice.”
Even with that craziness aside, I remember what a huge deal 1976 was, and the comparison is stark. I imagine the answer to why it’s so different touches on a number of social and cultural factors.
(And maybe if we don’t win the vote this time, you’d consider the topic for a July 2025 post, one year out from 7/4/2026?)
Perhaps Siegfrieda amazement at discovering a woman is a reflection of Wagners ineptitude with women?
He’s not really sure what one is or what one does.
I’m going to assume he was not a lady killer. Judging from contemporary Female marvel characters and superheroes, women are bad ass and super sexy.
As before, everyone’s votes have been tabulated — thank you.
Anonymous, thanks for this.
Aldarion, of course! We’re talking about Wagner’s hopes, fears, and predictions, and those don’t necessarily have anything to do with what actually happened in history.
Emily, thanks for this, but I’ll pass on the videos.
Apprentice, I’d never encountered “robins” and “larks” — what an absurd excuse for communication. I’m glad to hear that some whisper of sanity seems to be slipping back in.
Team10tim, the political meanings were accessible, but only if you knew what to look for. Then as now, the intelligentsia used a coded language (see “robins” and “larks” just above) that was fairly opaque to those who didn’t read the right things. It’s worth noting, though, that Wagner’s years of exile only ended once Ludwig II of Bavaria, a very eccentric monarch who followed his own strange path and ignored the conventional wisdom of his day, took the composer under his wing. Ludwig’s patronage allowed Wagner to return to respectability — a theme we’ll be discussing later on.
Prizm, good. Very good. I discussed this same theme more than a decade ago in The Archdruid Report:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2011/12/hope-in-cold-season.html
WatchFlinger, when I lived in southern Oregon I knew some people who belonged to E Clampus Vitus. What I’d heard from them is that it nearly became extinct in the late 20th century, but a few earnest new recruits who loved the organization’s combination of history, practical jokes, and hard drinking succeeded in reviving it.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Kimberly, delighted to hear it — it really does seem prescient these days.
Tag, of course there were other factors. A complete book on Wagner’s motivations and ideas wouldn’t be a book, it would be a multivolume series large enough to fill a couple of feet of shelf — the guy was an omnivorous reader with a powerful mind. Since I’m focusing on a single theme here — the same social and political issues Shaw explored in The Perfect Wagnerite, but with a more philosophical slant and a good clear sense of Shaw’s own colossal failure — the other volumes will have to be written by someone else. I’m not at all sure, for what it’s worth, that he could have written Parsifal without first writing Gotterdammerung — so much of what went into the former was, in effect, commentary on the Ring cycle — but we’ll get to that.
As for the insufferable habits of opera directors, you’ll get no argument from me. I endured the Seattle Opera’s 2003 Parsifal, which had a stellar cast but suffered brutally under François Rochaix’s directing and Robert Israel’s utterly execrable designs. I would have had a better experience if I’d just put on a blindfold and listened to the music. That was one of the things that fed into the discussion of opera in my novel The Nyogtha Variations — one conversation among the characters centered on a (fictional, so far) production of the Ring by the New York Met, in which all the characters were dressed up as marshmallow bunnies and ducklings. Wotan was a marshmallow rabbit with one ear bitten off.
Karim, Wagner doesn’t deal with that. What he does deal with — well, we’ll get to that.
Rajarshi, so noted! That does involve much of the philosophy and practice of magic, but if it gets the votes, I’ll see what I can do with it.
Chris, that’s one of the astonishing things about intellectuals. For all their self-preening grandiosity, what they actually want in practice is usually pretty petty. As for which book to read, that’s a hard call — two Gothic classics! I enjoyed Dracula more, but your mileage may vary.
Chuaquin, you’re most welcome. Delighted to hear it!
Other Owen, you also have to have a sense of timing to pass for a comedian. Me, I’ve chosen instead to stay way out on the fringes, where nobody thinks they have to take me seriously. I got the idea from the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tsu, and so far, it seems to be working.
Jerry, thanks for this.
Roldy, I’m sure there is, but I haven’t been able to decode it yet.
Patricia M, it’s a plausible claim; meteoric iron, because it has a lot of nickel in it and some other more exotic elements as well, is very hard and tough. Ironically, one of my very early, very bad fantasy novels also centered on a legendary blade of meteoric iron, the Star-Wrought Sword…
Ganv, I don’t disagree with that at all. Edmund Burke, whose political ideas remain the foundation of mine, argued that incremental improvement was a far more effective strategy for productive social change than the self-defeating fantasy of revolution. I don’t think that ever occurred to Wagner, though.
BeardTree, exactly. It was an amazingly rich system — and its remnants are going under right now because too few people are interested enough to contribute one evening a month and a modest annual dues payment. Many years ago I put a lot of work into trying to change that, and got nowhere. One of those things…
Travis, true! Very true. It would be amusing to have a parodic fantasy in which heroes who did that immediately collapsed and died. I imagine skeletons scattered around a dragon’s den, dead dragons and dead heroes alike, with the next dragon hatching from an egg about the time the next hero is born…
El, I’ll certainly keep that option in mind.
Travis, Wagner apparently had no problem getting laid, if that’s what you mean.
Watchflinger —
About fraternal organizations, another very interesting example is the revived Noble Order of Muscovites, which is an offshoot of the Imperial Order of Muscovites. Its special feature is that it is an interfraternal organization: it admit both men and women who are already initiates of a fraternal organization. (See https://fezmuseum.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/the-imperial-order-of-muscovites-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-fraternity.pdf for a brief history odfthe IOM, and the same site https://fezmuseum.com/odd-fellows-social-groups-2/ for brief accounts of various similar groups — along with pictures of their fezzes.)
As an interfraternal organization, it provides a meeting place for members of disparate groups who otherwise would have no common fraternal meeting ground (for example, Knights of Columbus and Scottish Rite Masons). Although its ostensible purpose is to be a charitable “fun” group, this feature means that it can allow for a more serious kind of fellowship.
Pedantic note: “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” translates to “The Mastersingers of Nurnburg” (i.e. plural).
JMG,
Are you familiar with the performance of the Ring Cycle put on in your old stomping grounds of Seattle back in 2013? The reason I ask is that I noticed , after going down a rabbit hole exploring the 1962 worlds fair leading me to Seattle Opera, that they have a CD set available for purchase of the entire thing.
They claim that they will be doing it again sometime in the unspecified future, but large amounts of funds must be raised first.
Lunar Apprentice @ 56, I am noticing what looks to me like declining usage of BCE and CE as effete snobbish replacements for BC and AD. I think I said before on an open post at this forum that I wish historians and archeologists worldwide would get together and designate a year 0 as arbitrary beginning of human settled life. Maybe one of the neolithic complexes which are even now being excavated in Turkey could yield a plausible date.
Chris @ 73, IMO, Dracula. In my idiosyncratic opinion, the only one of the Bronte Belles worthy of respect is Anne, who died young, alas. The other two are like Walter Scott, things you read in adolescence and don’t take up again. Both are well-written escapism; the theme of WH is women wailing for their demon lovers.
If 19th century novels interest you, have you considered Balzac? or Stendhal?
Haha.. yeah maybe I was projecting
JMG, about the “modest annual dues”, that only, only works if everyone pays the same. Which in the present climate of opinion–what about student/senior/low income discount?–combined with increasing costs of living, not going to happen. I suspect that “amazingly rich system” was a characteristic of a particular time and place which likely won’t be replicated now. I suspect that what we will see is informal associations of people united by common interests, under the official radar, or possibly connected to churches.
J.K. Rowling is now talking about the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal and coverup on Twitter:
https://xcancel.com/jk_rowling/status/1874609315690258777
I don’t think the United Kingdom and its government and institutions are going to last for much longer. This is usually the stuff that will end up causing a violent revolution in countries once normie citizens find out about it.
For the 5th Wednesday essay, I’d like to vote for Jung and the occult.
Dear JMG,
A suggestion for a 5th Wednesday essay: sorcery in the new court of Trump. I’ve read your original book on the matter and hoped for an update! I was surprised/not surprised to learn today that Musk has renamed himself Kekius Maximus (on Twitter at least), and changed his profile picture to Pepe the Frog.
Yours kindly,
Boy
For the 5th Wednesday topic, I vote for the excellent questions that Loki raised about mutual aid societies.
Once again, everyone’s votes have been tabulated. Thank you!
Roldy, so noted — thanks for catching the typo.
Clay, it’s a mixed bag. I’m far from satisfied with Greer Grimsley’s performances as Wotan — I don’t think he’s strong enough for the role — but Stephen Milling’s a fine singer, Jane Eaglen is a brilliant soprano even though she can’t act her way out of a wet paper bag, and I remain delighted with all of Richard Paul Fink’s villain portrayals, especially his fine Alberich. No doubt they’ll have to raise more funds — I don’t think the last cycles sold anything like as many tickets as they hoped.
Mary, in every lodge organization I’ve belonged to — and there have been quite a few — dues are strictly equal; the one exception is that very elderly members who have little money are sometimes given free memberships by vote of the lodge as a reward for many decades of service. Thus, yes, I think it’s quite possible that it could happen.
Anonymous, well, she’s more than held her own against the transgender lobby and its government enablers, so it doesn’t surprise me that she’s aiming for a bigger target.
Boy, I saw that. I wonder if he has any notion what he’s invoking on himself…
Joyous and Peaceful New Year to one and all,
Fifth Wednesday: Jung and occultism. Please.
@Roldy Re:Nothung
The surface reading, of course, is that Mime clings to the pieces of the past, while Siegfried dares to go and see “what could be, unburdened by what has been”. The sword is also something a hero lives and dies by, and something that cuts other things in two, producing right and left (or wrong), and in this way can be likened to the sense of justice. Siegmund’s sword is planted by Wotan to guide him to become a hero, and is shattered by Wotan’s spear, a symbol of law and tradition, which can be interpreted as Siegmund being reminded of his breaking of the taboos and faltering, leading to his death. Siegfried, on the other hand, is not satisfied with a hand-me-down sense of justice, especially from a cowardly dwarf, and forges his own by reducing the old Nothung to dust (going to back to the mythical natural state of man, being an archetypal wild child he is), and produces something that can expose Wotan’s hypocrisy, thus shattering god’s spear.
If Jane Eaglen couldn’t act, I have never seen her, that is a distinction she shared with Joan Sutherland.
Aldarion, thanks for that. What I’ve noticed in spending a lot of time with mid-19th and early 20th century German literature is that many supposedly ‘archaic’ words were still getting a lot of use in that literature and that German dictionaries, both Grimm and especially Duden, are nowhere near as comprehensive as the OED, and their definition of archaic is sometimes a bit suspect. Even with the wonders of Google Books and Archive.Org I still encounter odd words that only seem to be found in the one book which I happen to be translating, or archaic meanings for words which now have a quite different meaning (WWII seems to have marked a break with many words). Geschwister as singular is definitely something I have seen in 19th century fiction.
Hi John Michael,
It is weird isn’t it? At it’s core, just for one example, all Sauron and Saruman really, really, wanted was to be petty Kings, and then what? Even Morgoth was no better, and the cynic may suggest that despite the best efforts of the Elves at marketing, who’s to say that they weren’t in the same game? Hmm. I always had this vague notion that having achieved their sole desire, they’d make the most awful of administrators. Active subjugation of ones plebs, would be a tiring experience. Positive monomaniacs, all of them. The universe in which we inhabit, certainly does not follow that most human desire, after all, look at how humans treat the environment of which we are all a part of, and nature all unconcerned and stuff, provides enough rope…
Hey, if I had that sort of power, I’d set hard limits – and be universally hated. After all, wasn’t that what your ex President Carter hinting at?
Thanks for your thoughts, and I’ll go Dracula. 🙂 I have it on good authority from a number of sources that it’s a ripping good yarn. Years ago I read Frankenstein, and just wanted to put the good doctor out of his misery – although many people love that book, it just didn’t talk to me.
And err, skystones with their high nickel content would produce an intriguing stainless steel alloy. Hmm. Read a most excellent book about that a while ago. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Hi Mary,
Thanks for your thoughts, and yes, Dracula it is!
Actually I was quite fond of Charolette’s book, Jane Eyre. So much grittier than the Jane Austin books. Although I must say that the running off randomly, almost dying in a ditch and being found by distant family scene is a probably a step too far in terms of plot plausibility. Still, makes a strong statement as to the fictional characters personality type – of which I know deep down all too well. 😉
Cheers and hope your summer / winter reading provide you with joy!
Chris
I vote for Islam’s influence on the rise of Protestantism please!
JMG, thank you for this Wagner series, I would never have guessed it would end up being so fascinating.
If I may opine on Marko’s (#5) question about why intellectuals don’t try to lead the rebellions themselves (with apologies in advance for the length)… I come from a working class background on my mother’s side, where labor organizing was a Very Big Deal, and a line of academics on my father’s side. I myself am a former academic, now back in the working class (but hoping to enter the creative class since I’m useless elsewhere).
That’s all to say that I, and those close to me, have straddled that particular class divide and seen a bit of the radical rhetorics on both sides. So with that context, my view on why intellectuals don’t lead the rebellions is because, well, they’re intellectuals. That road attracts people who tend to observe and to be contemplative, often in very abstract terms, who often don’t fit in well (or at all) with the majority. They often envy those they see as making a more direct and tangible contribution to society, but are self-aware enough to recognize that they are good at thinking, not at fighting, farming, building, making money, leading others, and other things society values. At the same time they envy those who don’t have to worry about doing any of those things they aren’t good at and generally dislike doing (i.e., elites). (Of course I’m generalizing here, but it’s a general question after all.)
So a convenient codependency develops between elites and intellectuals (and often creatives as well) in complex societies: The elites want to monopolize the output of both the intellectuals and the artists. They want philosophers around to give them moral authority, experts to advise and inform them, and all the pretty things. Meanwhile intellectuals and creatives are generally able to do their best work when freed (by elite patronage) from the need to toil all day in the fields or the mines – something which they often aren’t really that great at anyway, and which is often a special misery since it keeps them from using what gifts they have. When working smoothly, this arrangement can allow some great discoveries and artistic creations (just not any that are threatening to the elites) and is living-the-dream for the lucky few intellectuals/creatives who find a comfy spot; and for the elites, monopolizing intellectual and creative output means they get all the benefits and at the same time mitigate any potential threats. It’s a Faustian bargain in both the metaphorical and Spenglerian senses.
But the intellectuals tend to support radical/working class causes because they aren’t stupid, they see the edifice is corrupt and unfair, and some are of working class backgrounds themselves. When you’re in an ivory tower you can get a really clear view of what’s happening on the ground. But having no skin in the game, they start to overestimate the value of their output; they start to think the elites actually NEED them (when in fact they are, at best, pets or tools), and they lose sight of the fact that they are integral to propping up the system they’re critiquing. Some of them even imagine they can become elites themselves. To be fair, some do realize their complicity/entrapment. A few even know they are hoping someone else will tear down an edifice they philosophically despise but materially enjoy, just to free them from an untenable moral position they can’t bear to quit.
Inertia usually wins the day. True desperation can overcome inertia, but the working classes feel that first, and much more acutely than the intellectuals. To me it seems natural and inevitable that revolutions begin there – at least in systems such as we find ourselves in. The wheel turns and what goes down must come up, and vice versa, as JMG said.
(For those who watch TV, Thomas Cromwell as depicted in Wolf Hall (BBC/PBS/Amazon) is an excellent illustration of the position of intellectuals more generally, now as then. But then, in the long durée, we’re not very far from the 1500s.)
Another vote for Islam envy or influence of Islam on Protestantism. I wonder if this can be extended to include the protestantization of other faiths when they come to America. Reform Judaism, for example. I note from websites that some Buddhist churches have adopted the convention of a sanctuary with pews in which a weekly service of sermon, prayers, music, etc. is presented. Am currently reading the Bhagavad Gita and am stuck by the way it reduces the huge pantheon of Hindu gods to Krishna and the necessary rites to chanting–seems very similar to “just believe in Jesus”.
On the feminization of culture I would comment that IMO this is not the same as womanizing culture. Feminine qualities are those imposed on women by a male dominated culture, not the natural virtues of the female. Both sexes have virtues and vices. Male instinct to protect can become domination; female instinct to nurture can become control, and so forth.
Rita
For the fifth Wednesday I vote for Jung and occultism. I’m currently reading a collection of Jung’s writings (Psychology and the East) so that would dovetail nicely 🙂
For the 5th Wednesday, I would like to have a discussion about what the economy will look like after the Age of Growth has ended. It seems like our economy has been based on growth since … forever, and without growth the current system falls apart. Well, with fossil fuels and other resources beginning to run short, and now with a population decline visible on the horizon, what’s next?
Are there examples of previous systems that functioned during a time of stasis or decline in recorded history? Maybe I won’t live to see it, but then again, when growth is in the rearview mirror, it seems like the current system could go Tango Uniform pretty quickly. What replaces it?
My vote is for anything about the 16th century, including the roots of the Reformation and the influence (conscious and subconscious) of the Ottoman empire. Just like Robert M. remarked above, I think it bears investigation why the parts of Europe which had not been Romanized, and which were not the closest to the Ottoman power, were more likely to end up with a Protestant state church.
Like you, JMG, I’ve contemplated carrying blindfolds to opera productions. An item on my bucket list is to hear Parsifal in Bayreuth; Wagner wrote the opera with the acoustics of the Festspielhaus in mind — I’ve been told that no recording does (or can) do justice to what one hears there. But the execrable productions of recent years make one hesitate. Solution? Carry blindfolds! Some years ago, a critic evaluated all the various Ring cycle productions around the world that year (there were 5 or 6 as I recall) and concluded that Barenboim’s concert cycle at the V&A in London was the best – in part because the the audience was not subjected to some pretentious “regieoper” director shoving his vision into their collective faces.
Hello JMG and the commentariat. I had a question about herbal remedies the other day and the end of the year has been so hasty I didn’t even notice I posted on Wednesday the new post day!! Anyway, I think ilona replied that there would be a post of the Frugal blog about it. Thanks for the heads up. Can’t wait!
Also this is a very thorough and interesting deep dive into the Wagnerian epic and its relation to historical social concepts. This is like a semester of rings, orcs, and other goodness. Well done.
All votes have again been tabulated — thank you.
Mary, well, I never saw Joan Sutherland. Eaglen really is a brilliant soprano, the best I’ve heard live, but she just stands there like a post; Brunnhilde needs to be able to move.
Chris, that’s one of the things that makes Tolkien’s portrayal of evil ring false to me — and let’s not even talk about the endless dreary parade of faux-Saurons since his time. They don’t have any reason to do what they do, other than to fill an otherwise gaping void in the plot. Look at actual tyrants and they generally have complex, thought-through, and richly personal agendas, usually on the grand scale — but our fiction, like our propaganda, can’t deal with that.
Alexandra, thanks for this. As I jumped straight from the bottom end of the middle class (my parents were schoolteachers) straight into the career track of a fringe intellectual, doing the kind of work nobody in the elite classes would be caught dead patronizing, there’s a lot I don’t claim to know about the attitudes of those intellectuals who cash in their skills for elite patronage.
Rita, that’s a good point about the feminization of culture, and one I’ll keep in mind if that theme wins the vote now or later.
Tag, I’d love to take in some Wagner at Bayreuth, but yeah, blindfolds are probably a good idea. To quote another of my characters, too many people don’t realize that there’s room for only one gargantuan ego in any Wagner production, and Wagner owns that role.
Maurice, you can always post something yourself on the Frugal Friday post when it goes up on my Dreamwidth account tomorrow — questions are welcome there.
A vote please for Slink’s topic of what a post-growth economy could look like.
JMG, have you ever been offered elite patronage in any recognizable form?
@Greg Simay
Your distinction of be-do-have as the natural order and have-do-be as the order under commodification is really striking to me, and also I think holds a lost key to the proper use of New Thought techniques. A great deal of the older New Thought literature stresses that it’s about changing yourself, and then the possessions or circumstances you want will naturally follow. (And to be fair: this is also present in a lot of modern “manifestation” books, but is often underemphasized.)
And if you get this order backwards because you’re looking for something for nothing… well what happens when you reverse a magical formula? At best you get nothing, but you also might get the opposite of what you want, or the formula becomes corrupt and you get some short-term benefits but at a high cost down the road. (Consider what happens if you flip the Tree of Life: you get the Tree of Death, ruled by the unbalanced energies of the Qlippoth.)
Hmm…
I ran across this Thomas Sowell quote about the intellectuals vs reality that goes well with several comments above,
“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”
As to nickel-iron meteorites making interesting steel, it would not be stainless steel. The stainless property is from the chromium. The most common stainless steel, 304, is 18% chromium and 8% nickel, but the 400 series has 18% chromium and less than 1% nickel. The “silverware” in the drawer is likely 18-0 stainless as nickel is somewhat toxic and some people are sensitive to it. The 440C stainless used in knives is 18% chromium, no nickel, but 1% carbon so it will hold an edge.
What nickel does do to iron is make it tough and cold resistant. It won’t shatter under impacts or thermal shocks. It would make a good core for a sword, but you would have to laminate a hard layer on the cutting edges. ‘Tough’ does not mean ‘holds an edge’.
JMG,
Thank you, thank you for maintaining this forum and all your forums, and for your many writings. You have been an invaluable anchor for me and have provided me with insights, wisdom, entertainment, laughter, and more.
Thank you, also, to all the commenters, readers, and JMG supporters here and at the Dreamwidth site. You all amaze me with your insights, questions, and knowledge.
This is all an oasis of sanity in today’s desert of insanity.
Blessings to you all if you please.
Also, my Fifth Wednesday vote is for Jung, archetypes, occultism, etc.
With immense gratitude,
WILL1000
JMG, is there any chance that opera productions will return to being respectful of tradition after the civil religion of Progress collapses?
Hi Alexandra,
Your comment brought to mind the classic quote from Frederick Bastiat: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” And the “they” who do the creating are largely the intellectuals and the creatives.
JMG had earlier on this thread mentioned his admiration for Burke, who believed that incremental change is far more likely than revolution to do any good. This suggests a strategy whereby intellectuals/creatives can reclaim their digniity by convincing some members of the elite to embrace incremental change that noticeably improves the lot of the people while preserving their status, with the losers being the members of the elite that are unable or unwilling to change. The problem today is that we’re on a burning bridge, and the Ship Incremental probably sailed sometime in the last century. We might be closer to the dynamic that prevailed in dire days of 1933, when FDR was facing the genuine prospect of a general revolt. I forget the origin of the quote, but the deal presented to FDR was, “You can have your reform your revenge [note: against the bankers, etc. whose shenanigans had been recently revealed in Congressional hearings] but not both.” FDR chose reform and had a brain trust to help him. (How successful the reforms were is a separate debate.) Trump may be facing a similar choice, and if he opts for reform rather than revenge, it better be real and substantial reform.
Hi John,
I remember you asked me to bring up Hall and The Secret Teachings of All Ages when a fifth Wednesday came up.
Thanks,
Kevin.
Regarding this week’s article, JMG, intellectuals and the enlightened often -especially in the age of Reason- think of themselves as newly emerged prophets and everyone should trust them and follow their path, and those who do not comply are marginalized as ‘heretics’ and considered crazy, as you say in your book After the Industrial Age: Don’t forget that if you attack people’s beliefs too much, they may respond to you… That’s exactly what I feel right now, and I find it unbearable that intellectuals usually imagine themselves with Matthew 4:16, apart from that I would recommend Dracula.
Thanks for this series, so interesting and thought provoking.
Count me in for a discussion of mutual aid societies.
For the 5th Wednesday I propose because I think there is due a peak oil update and the fracking and coming downward slope and the update on peak oil and how fracking just got us 20 years, just to make things worse on the long term!
Thanks,
@Slink, What is interesting that US hasn’t meaningfully grown since 2019 although oil has made world records in terms of production, if these things happen on record oil production imagine the view on the coming downward slope.
Dear JMG and Commentariat:
In light of one of the proposed Fifth Wednesday topics up for vote; I just saw this announcement:
Murphy Administration Readies For America’s 250th Anniversary With Battle of Princeton Re-Enactment on January 5 and Installation of Enhanced Interpretive Displays (the announcement can be found at NJDEP@public.govdelivery.com ). The NJDEP is the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection; the Murphy Administration is that of the Governor of NJ (a Democrat).
JMG, when I asked you last week for your thoughts on the silence around the upcoming 250th birthday of the USA, you noted: “during the last weeks of the campaign, Trump talked about how he planned on having a yearlong celebration of the sestercentennial, kicking off this coming July 4 and ending on July 4, 2026. It makes perfect sense to me that the previous regime would want nothing to do with that — the last thing they wanted was to remind Americans that they have rights and once took up arms against a tyrannical government to defend them!”
Definitely agree, but it strikes me that there may be a change in the wind coming, given who the announcement is coming from.
Cugel
In reply to Boy about Elon Musk you said: “I saw that. I wonder if he has any notion what he’s invoking on himself…”
Could you say more about this please?
I’m not sure what the “Islam envy” is, referred to by other commentators – is that historical? Seems to be a lot of it about in college campuses at the the moment, with the embrace of Hamas as “freedom fighters against colonial oppression” in certain “progressive” activist circles.
Feels like a major scandal brewing in the UK involving the culture clash between Islam and the West – “grooming gangs” of Pakistani-heritage men targeting vulnerable underage British girls. Or more accurately, rape and torture gangs as it now turns out. As well as a culture clash, it’s also a case of the ruling and intelligentsia classes disdaining and throwing the working classes under the bus in a really horrific way – and they’re really feeling it now. Something relevant to this series of posts.
(Basically the police, social workers, politicians and media have been hushing things up and blaming the victims, for the last 40-50 years – for the sake of not stirring up racial tensions. Thus making those racial tensions much worse once the full scale of this actually breaks. The rumblings of this are mainly on social media at the moment, not the mainstream media so much. But I predict things will explode).
This is not really a vote for what to write about, just a heads-up that this issue could be one to watch.
One more vote for Islam envy, please.
Hi JMG, thank you for another fascinating post on the ring series. Beyond Looney Tunes, the only other cultural touch point I had to the opera was Apocalypse Now. Are you familiar with the use? As a kid, when I first saw it, well, pun intended, it blew me away. Curious to what you think.
My vote for the 5th Wednesday is our republic’s 250th anniversary, if possible, with connections to DJT’s return to office and the noted historical marker that 250 years means for empires and or nations in general. A lot for one post I know, but I’ve got faith in you!
My vote is for the importance of the Binary in our thinking. I recently noticed that the Greeks embraced the Binary with their two forms of theater: tragedy and comedy. It is sad that Greek thought has been reduced to being merely a precursor to Enlightenment thinking. I stayed away from Greek philosophy for years because I was taught that they were all extreme rationalists.
@Teresa, regarding the 250th anniversary. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now and have asked several people on their opinion. Most are convinced that our managerial state/technocracy doesn’t want us to know our roots. My hope is that Trump will re-ignite a passion for our roots by promoting this event. I visited Concord, Mass a while ago and they are all set to celebrate the events of 1775.
I think that the reason Gen X voted for Trump is that we were in our tweens and younger during the Bicentennial and those memories still resonate with us. I can recite the Preamble to the Constitution by remembering the song from the Saturday Morning cartoon, Constitutional Rock. It’s on YouTube if anyone wants to go down memory lane.
https://schoolhouserock.fandom.com/wiki/The_Preamble?file=The_Preamble_of_The_Constitution_Schoolhouse_Rock
It seems like the method for remaking the Nothung sword is kind of Alchemical.
Break something down into fundamental parts, purify and build back up.
File down the sword, melt it and then reforge it.
Hrmmm… i wonder if that was a necessary step ?
purify the weapon of the ill intent of its first maker (selfish Wodan) in order for it to be able to slay the dragon?
Once again, all votes have been tabulated; thank you.
Mary, yes, in a modest way. Back when I was Grand Archdruid of AODA I was approached on several occasions by wealthy people who wanted to know, basically, what kind of spiritual entertainment I could provide for them and their friends — weekend workshops, inspiring talks, etc. I calmly explained that Druidry didn’t work that way and I’d be happy to help them out if they wanted to commit to half an hour of spiritual practice daily, which chased them away very fast. I also had a brief period, during the height of the peak oil era, when I was invited to talk at some fairly prestigious venues; the couple of talks I gave were very clearly not to the taste of the attendees — not surprisingly, as I’d crafted them with that in mind — and so I got dropped from the invite list in that circuit. Last year, along the same lines, I fielded an invite to a high-end conference on the spiritual dimensions of climate change in an elite venue in Wyoming; I turned it down, since it was basically a circle-jerk with talking heads flying in from all over the planet to babble about how everyone else had to use less carbon. I hope it sinks in this time, as it’s kind of boring to have to keep on politely telling them to get lost, but hope springs infernal and all that.
Siliconguy, I’m coming to the conclusion that Sowell is one of the clearest and most incisive thinkers of our time.
Will1000, you’re welcome and thank you! I have the best commentariat on the internet; I’m convinced that that’s most of what makes this blog what it is.
Patrick, I certainly hope so! I tried to plant that seed in a couple of my books, not least The Nyogtha Variations, but we’ll just have to see.
Yigit, presumably this means that you think a stake through the heart of the current intelligentsia is preferable to treating them as prophets? 😉
Cugel, well, that’s promising! We’ll have to see what happens.
Bacon, as I noted in a sequence of posts here a few years ago —
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-one-aristocracy-and-its-discontents/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-two-in-the-shadow-of-the-cathedral/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-three-triumph-of-the-frog-god/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-four-what-moves-in-the-darkness/
— Pepe the Frog became the focus through which something very strange flowed into manifestation during the 2016 election campaign. The intensity of what habitués of “the chans” call Meme War I faded quite a bit after that, but I’m far from sure it’s safe for Musk to take on the notional identity of a god; that act may draw him in directions I seriously doubt he’s ever contemplated.
Sydaway, I suggested a while back that the rise of Protestantism in 16th century Europe could be seen as an outburst of Islam envy, inspired by the prestige of the Ottoman Empire (then far larger, richer, and more civilized than any European nation). That’s what people are asking about.
Jeff B’KLYN, yes, I saw it on HBO when I was a kid. I like the original story, The Heart of Darkness, rather better — despite the absence of Wagnerian soundtrack.
Dobbs, hmm! Yes, a good case could be made for that, and it embarrasses me that I didn’t think of it.
JMG sir I totally agree with what you said 😉
Sydaway @ 128, here is an example of the effect of what I call Islam envy on our Christian Nationalist faction: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/theobros-jd-vance-christian-nationalism/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
While the long article does not explicitly mention Islam, I am of the opinion that some of the plans being laid by this faction are being taken up because the “christian”, I use the term advisedly, planners saw what armed Islamic militias were able to get away with, not excluding kidnappings of young women and mass sexual assaults.
Voters might not be members of these particular churches; they might not like all of the ideology being promoted, especially if they are partnered and enjoying the benefits of a double income, but they do see that this bunch might be able to stand up against the oligarchical forces that are making our lives miserable.
Sydaway #128
I’ve been following this for a while and also wondering if the issue will now explode. Those in power have been trying to keep a lid on the rape gangs for decade but, since Musk got involved, matters seem to be approaching critical mass and could be about to go boom. I hope they do because it needs to happen, all of this filth needs to come out in the open for everyone to see who presided over the cover-ups. The victims, thousands of young girls, need to be finally acknowledged and helped.
JMG, thank you for the links!
Please tally my 5th Wednesday vote for European Protestant/Islam topic.
I have found your analysis of Spengler’s theories regarding pseudomorphosis compelling and plausible. In particular, I wonder about how much of the rise of Iran has to do with Magian culture, and how much has to do with an older Persian culture evolution. Or something…it gets confusing trying to peek into and make sense of these long slow convection currents of culture.
Excellent post JMG. If it isn’t straying too far off topic, I’m curious why all these great intellectuals haven’t been able to design institutions that counterbalance the obvious and ever-present human flaws? Wotan represents the intellect of the age, so is the point that it’s impossible to prevent jealousy, greed, etc from creeping in no matter how smart you are, or think you are?
I’ve been enjoying the comments here too. Siliconguy, that quote from Sowell is right on.
For the fifth Wednesday, my vote is for Jung and occultism.
I would like to place a vote for update on peak oil related idea posted upthread
The following is a sharing and a thank you concerning the power of ritual. No need to post, unless you think it appropriate. Recently I decided to apply your triad of ritual, meditation, and divination, the foundation of magical practice. I ordered a number of your magic practice books. Couldn’t apply them hook line and sinker as I am a charismatic Christian with Druidic nature tendencies. So I devised a circular ritual, inspired by the Druidic Sphere of Protection expressing and applying my own peculiarities. The physical element is an application of standing postural integration along with elements of tai chi and qigong, along with prayer, tongues at times, silent worship, raising my hands, the name of Jesus the sign of the cross, the Our Father, the Gloria Patri at the end. All in a precise set pattern of actions. The deliberate conscious settled physical embodiment in good standing posture applying gentle qigong movements (Gathering Heaven and the Open-Close from Sun tai chi) at the center of the circle and at the points of the compass is an essential foundation for a whole being response to and knowing of God, anchoring myself in the life and energy of the creation in His presence. I begin in the middle of the circle I am about to trace, then step forward and then move clockwise back to where I started the circle then step back into the center to end with the Gloria Patri. Followed by a chapter of New Testament, discursive meditation on chosen verse from the chapter. And the divination part at the end is seeking and knowing the Spirit’s voice. The whole thing is an application of the will and it has steadied and grounded me. and negative spiritual influences have diminished. A TSW experience with positive effects on my being and life. Again thank you!
I also vote for more information on the subject of entryism and protections against it. I live at a family nude ranch that is now overrun with “Chrisitian” nudists – the problem being that public nudity is forbidden by God and the other 9 or so mentions in the bible that support that prohibition. What I’ve is the entry of first wave of Christians I call the ABC Christians, the sweetness and light crowd: love of God, love of Jesus, lovelovelove. But coming down the road, on the horizon, are the DE&F Christians (Or, maybe they’re already here posing as ABC.) These are the old testament control freaks who have nothing to bring to table except an an obsession to control the table. They’re here to make you tow the line (whatever that line is) or run you off. Then eventually come the XYZ Christians who know with a certainty that women and children are chattel property of the husband, father, grandfather and holy leader to do with as they see fit.
A hypocrite can best be defined as a person who is without conscience. What they are doing is unconscionable: say, teach, preach, publicly proclaim their belief, then turn around and do whatever in violation and betrayal of that belief. A person without conscience is also the definition of a sociopath. A person without conscience is also the definition of a psychopath.
My concern here is for the children. If we are to remain a family nude ranch and one of the safest places for women and children, what can be done to deal with the creeping sepsis of the “christian” nudists who think they’re better than you and should be running the show? A destabilizing member here was recently looking for proxy votes to dump the family thing and turn the ranch into a christian swinger whorehouse.
Any suggestions you have on combatting entryism will be most helpful.
Because of this series, I almost won bar trivia last night. “Wagner” was the correct response, and I was so sure of my answer that I “doubled down” to get extra points. Thanks JMG!
samurai 47, counterbalancing human flaws is what the U.S. Constitution was intended to do. With the possible exception of Madison, the men at the Constitutional Convention were not intellectuals, they were men of affairs who had had good educations. They had a clear understanding of what they did not want, European style monarchy and (remnant) feudalism. They also had clear historical memories of the religious wars of the 17thC and wanted no repeat of those on North American soil.
Notice that it was bookish Madison who, as president, allowed himself to be persuaded into the ill-advised invasion of Canada.
R Caldera, Christian nudists??? Now I truly have heard everything. I would suggest that what the so-called persons of faith are really after is your land and buildings. So, first priority would be to get title, inheritance and so on nailed down tightly. If you don’t outright own yet, get that mortgage paid and keep receipts. Do not delay in registering your purchase and, hey why not, make a party of it with video evidence of the registration. Furthermore, you want local people on your side. Donate as means allow to community organizations, police benevolent fund first, and attend their gatherings. There are lawyers who specialize in writing up bylaws for non profit organizations, private clubs, and the like, and it might be worth your while to consult one or two of those. I gather this ranch is an income stream for you? How do your long time members feel? Would they be open to participating in a private club with limited membership. How are the peace and love crowd about clean up? Might there be any or any possibility of an environmental assessment of your property which might just happen to recommend an upper limit to guest numbers?
@Mary Bennett 135: I read the article in Mother Jones that you linked. It reminded me of half a century ago, back around 1970, when I subscribed to Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” magazine; she had a feature called “From the Horror File.” I realized that I wasn’t quite 100% on board with her ideas when her alleged “horrors” didn’t seem all that horrible to me. So, likewise, this piece in Mother Jones didn’t seem all that horrible to me; not as the Mother Jones editors probably intended it.
I apologize if this is getting too off topic.
“I’m curious why all these great intellectuals haven’t been able to design institutions that counterbalance the obvious and ever-present human flaws? ”
The US Constitution did a pretty good job for a long time, but government inevitably attracts the power mad. Add to that politicians spreading “free” public money to buy votes and here we are.
The separation of powers was one of the good ideas. Only Congress can raise taxes and appropriate money. The President and executive branch carries out what Congress says to do, and the Court can overrule either side if they go too far off the rails.
On the other hand the general welfare clause gave the government too much prerogative since you can argue everything affects the general welfare. If the Executive branch, which owns the enforcement arm of the government, chooses to ignore the Supreme Court then there isn’t much the Court can do about it. Congress can’t balance a budget to save their lives. So there are multiple problems with the system.
@R. Caldera
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but this is one of the strangest comments I have seen, on here or any other website, in my life. At no point in reading it was I able to anticipate what you’d say next. It’s rare for this kind of thing to come along and I always love it when it happens, so thank you.
As to your situation: I hate to hear that this is happening and I sincerely hope things work out well for you. My main suggestion would be to discuss the matter with those you know you can trust, and start a process to require some affirmation or obligation that the group you are trying to keep out cannot bring themselves to abide by. As JMG as pointed out, this is why many of the old lodge fraternities (Masons, etc.) require the Pledge of Allegiance as part of their opening ceremony: they were keen to keep out communist entryists, and for whatever reason, communists bristle at saying the Pledge even disingenuously.
To keep out fundamentalist Christian entryists, you might consider requiring an affirmation of the right of people of all creeds to practice their faith in peace according to their own conscience. (This is just an example; I’m not sure if it would work or be appropriate to the venue.)
Keep in mind this sort of thing only works for entryists, who still have some conscience left. You could also be dealing with narcissists and sociopaths (like that guy featured on Unsolved Mysteries who moved into a nudist resort, scammed the members, and then did some other very bad things), in which case you’re probably just going to have to be extra vigilant and be willing to throw them out when they start making trouble.
Hi John Michael,
The lack of a good motivation for Sauron other than seizing the status of petty king makes little narrative sense for a semi-deity. The reader isn’t even really clear about whether Sauron is seeking revenge upon the remains of Númenor, wiping it off the map, or plundering the riches – the reader just doesn’t know. And what did all the armies from the south want from that final battle? The example set by the land of Mordor is hardly an environment where large armies or populations could be fed. Here (Sauron speaks), look at what I’ve done to the land and rejoice oh ye folks from distant lands, come fight for this dread outcome. 🙂
By the way, started reading Dracula. Quite intriguing, and simpler times when proper icons, provided proper protection. Thanks for those commenters who shared their opinions.
Still getting through the collected works of the author, Jack Vance. The most recent book was Maske: Thaery written in 1976. I’d read it before in the pulp version, but the collected works has the restored text as intended by the author – the result of a huge effort from fans, many years ago. Anywhoo, the bad guy in the story, Ramus Ymph, has a hankering for a space yacht so that he can go travelling through the galaxy at his leisure. The world he lives on is very bucolic, but stifling with no off planet travel allowed. He’s a wealthy and powerful dude already, but will stop at nothing to achieve his space yacht desires, including destroying the local cultures, over running the planet with tourism, and putting long established trades out of work. (hang on a second, that sounds eerily familiar to neoliberalism!) As a character, you know what motivates him, although he’s rarely seen in the narrative, and basically his ability to place self interest above all other considerations, clearly falls into evil category, although he is deliberately not portrayed that way, and there are power blocs that support him.
Bizarrely though, Tolkien’s body of work is far better known. Wonder what that means? Surely it doesn’t mean nothing?
Cheers
Chris
Hi Siliconguy,
Many thanks for the correction in relation to the addition of the mineral Chromium. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Once again, everyone’s votes have been tabulated.
Samurai_47, because being an intellectual doesn’t fit you for constructing things in the real world. Intellectuals are people who are good at doing things with abstract concepts, and there’s always a mismatch (often a vast one) between abstract concepts and the realities they try to express. That’s why you want a constitution designed by politicians, businesspeople, and soldiers, like the US constitution — it has some hope of actually working. Intellectuals — and I include myself cheerfully in this — should focus on inventing and promoting ideas, and leave the implementation to those who have experience getting things done in the real world.
BeardTree, thank you for this — I’m delighted to hear it, and it’s something I think other people will also want to know about.
R. Caldera, members who are concerned about this need to be aware of what they’re up against — in all probability, an organized push to take the ranch away from its current owners. If you’ve still got a majority, put in whatever regulations you need in order to keep the ownership secure and slow down the infiltration of entryists. I don’t have a lot of experience with dealing with such things in groups controlled by their members, though — if anyone else has advice, I’d welcome it.
RW, glad to hear it!
Chris, I’ll have to read that Vance book — it’s not one I’ve gotten to yet. Of course Tolkien is much better known — it’s so much easier for the privileged to insist that their enemies are Sauron than it is for them to reflect on the possibility that they might be Ramus Ymph.
Dear JMG,
You responded in relation to Musk: “I wonder if he has any notion what he’s invoking on himself…”.
Since you responded I saw the extraordinary image of a Tesla cyber truck in flames in front of the Trump Hotel. Of course, I recalled your suggestion of invocation.
Kindly,
Boy
R Caldera —
Does “family nude ranch” mean just “family-friendly nude ranch”? Or dies it include “family owned and operated” as well?
I think the previous suggestions would be workable. Making sure the governing and ownership structure has enough inertia to slow down or block attempts at radical shifts in the project would be one of the key points. If there’s no operating charter and set of bylaws, then implementing something of the sort would be a good step. If there’s resistance to institutionalizing what has previously been run on fellow-feeling and high collaborative morale, then preliminary work pointing out the precariousness of such a situation might be necessary — or at least helpful..
For better or for worse, there’s nothing particularly unusual about sectarian Christian nudists,, or even something like “Christian whorehouse” communes — for the former, there the Adamite movements; and for the latter, there are such things as the Oneida Community, or a certain phase of the Moravian Pietists (the “time of sifting”), and of course various fully antinomian movements. Sometimes (as in the “flirty fishing” of the Children of God), it was not only a matter of internal libertinism, but a libertine directed outward, beyond the community itself . I suppose, perhaps in Nevada, one could even imagine an organized Christian brothel of one sort or another.
However, one if the core problems with the intersection of libertinism and a family-friendly setting that includes children, is the tendency to cross certain boundaries in a way that could, quite literally, bring the whole place down in flames, as it did with the Branch Davidian community in Waco. (I should add that transgressive libertinism is not particularly unique to Christian, or even religious, settings. It’s a common enough feature of many would-be revolutionary scenes, religious or not. Especially for the upper echelons.)
This is another reason why establishing and maintaining good relationships with the wider community in the area (as mentioned in other suggestions) might be useful. If things look like they’re really running off the rails, some external pressure on the side of “our nudists” might be helpful.
1) My vote is for Jung. I want the Allah/Islam envy idea to ferment a few more months, and Jung has been waiting a while now.
2) I always thought Wagner left Siegfried in the flames after Wotan stepped up to him expecting worship, respect and awe…and received enough disrespect to finally destroy whatever hope he had in the world. That Siegfried acted on his own (and NOT how Wagner wanted him to) was enough of a shock that it took Wagner a long time and two other operas to get back to Siegfried.
(That would explain why there’s much more life from Siegfried’s meeting with Brunnhilde to the end than in the rest of Das Ringen. Everything up to the meeting with Wotan feels scripted and slow, after that the story does what it needs to do and in proper time – like Wagner was writing the story, not telling it.)
@Caldera
My inclination to drive away religious fanatics is to find out what silly foods or rituals are forbidden to them and then incorporate those into the entrance requirements to join.
Most christians have hangups regarding booze? Start there.
In my kingdom, you’d be required to film yourself once a year eating a bacon cheeseburger and then washing it down with a 6% beer. Wouldn’t get rid of all the crazies but would cut down on them considerably.
Annette @ 48
There are a lot of Canadians wandering around Ecosophia, I’m one of many. As for your comment about being about my age, I was in my third year university when you were 7, but I guess when you get past a certain age, “being about” can cover a lot of years.
BeardTree, I do Tai Chi (Yang) and Qigong and I’m going to add the Gathering Heaven and Sun Open/Close to my practice. Thank you for this.
Near the end of the Lindsay Anderson film “O Lucky Man”, starring Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, Mick is walking past a former girlfriend living on the streets. Someone has spray painted “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals” on the wall behind him.
The film is about Mick’s abandonment of his principals to succeed in modern Britain, only to be scapegoated by the elite. The action is driven by the Alan Price soundtrack.
https://live.staticflickr.com/3575/3345506875_1a02a0ab49.jpg
Jerry D #79
January 2, 2025 at 9:53 am
…too many bowls…
Perhaps the time has now come to declare a “war on bowls”?
One caution: It may be that slamming two ubiquitous hackneyed cliches of this power into one another will create a massive ironic singularity that sucks all existence over its event horizon into a universe where all reality will behave exactly as portrayed in MSM 24/7/365 *
Nasty
Light the blue touch paper: Stand well clear.
You’ve been warned!
*Some say this has already happened
Phutatorius, I linked to the Mother Jones article, thank you for doing me the compliment of reading it, because I see the people, organizations and ideas described a pretty clear examples of what I call, for shorthand, Islam envy. I never said I agree with every point expressed, nor do I endorse the writer’s point of view. Myself, I would like to see the ideal of chastity outside of marriage become a social norm like it once was. What I do strongly object to is forced marriages. The other objection I have to the views the writer quoted is the notion, I have seen it expressed elsewhere by self described Christian nationalists, that we no longer need the Constitution. There is neither justice nor prosperity in a polity where the meanest and toughest get to rule.
I have not heard or read that Libya–and I think Mme. Clinton should be prosecuted for her actions and policies during her tenure at the State Department–is prospering under the rule of competing Islamic warlords.
@ Siliconguy #117, V Tombergs in his art of the good has a comment to the effect that naivete is an impardonable sin in a legislator. Under that rubric most of the 20th century was a bust
I will second the recommendation of Thomas Sowell’s works. His _Conquests and Cultures _ gives a different point of view on the effects of being part of an empire. His book on Marxism is a very clear explanation of the philosophy.
On the rape gangs in England–apparently the current Prime Minister was head of the Crown Prosecution Service during much of the time that these gangs were being ignored (or even aided) by police and social service so he may be put severely on the defensive. I’m seeing a lot of anger on social media as information gets out. It may take a while to break because the current libel laws make it risky to accuse or criticize on social media. A woman recently spent some days in jail for insulting a convicted rapist!!
I’ve once again noted down the votes. Thank you all.
Boy, there’s that! I get the impression we’re in for even weirder times to come.
Donald, and that’s also a factor in the Ring. It’s a very rich, complex story.
Peter, funny! I think it was James Billington’s history of revolutionary ideology, Fire in the Minds of Men, that first argued that if religion is the opiate of the people, revolution is the amphetamine of the intelligentsia. Me, I’d suggest cocaine instead, but the principle’s the same…