When I commented two weeks ago that we had strayed into a Wagnerian period of history, I wasn’t anticipating events like those of the Saturday just past. Nonetheless, here we are, with an apparent fluke of circumstance only an opera composer could get away with being acted out in broad daylight, sending the destiny of a nation skidding down unexpected paths. I’d already decided to continue this sequence of posts on Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring come Hell or high water, but the latest twist of events makes that seem even more appropriate.
With that in mind, let’s proceed.
Imagine for a moment that it’s 2124, and the United States of America is stumbling through the last stages of a protracted downfall. The narco-gangs along the southern border have long since morphed into private armies led by powerful warlords. During an outbreak of civil war in the US, one of them unites several less powerful bosses under his leadership and takes their combined forces straight through the crumbling border defenses, seizing most of California and declaring it the warlord’s private kingdom. What remains of the federal government, based in Cincinnati after sea level rise turned Washington DC back into salt marsh, has too little strength and too many other crises on its hands to stop him.
A few decades later, the same warlord sets out to enlarge his kingdom by marching east through Arizona and New Mexico to invade Texas, where a few remaining oil wells still produce the petroleum that what’s left of the United States desperately needs. In response, a tough, ruthless American general, the last effective commander the United States has left, assembles an army made up mostly of West African mercenaries and launches a massive counterattack.
Carnage follows. In a series of brutal battles, the warlord’s forces are overwhelmed, his short-lived kingdom crumples, and he himself dies in a hail of bullets. It’s one incident out of many in the violent twilight of a dying nation, and it only postpones the final implosion of the United States for a short time, but it happens to catch the attention of storytellers. Over the centuries to come, the story of the warlord who conquered California becomes the kernel at the heart of an entire cycle of legends. More than a thousand years later, those legends end up becoming the inspiration for one of the world’s great works of art.
Change a few of the details, set it centuries further back during the fall of a different empire, and that’s how the story at the heart of The Nibelung’s Ring was born. The warlord was named something like Gundacar. He was the king of a Germanic tribe, the Burgundians, who gave their name to what is now part of France before they were slaughtered nearly to the last man. In 406 the Burgundians crossed the Rhine into Roman territory and founded a kingdom there. Gundacar himself first appears in Roman records in 411 when he and another barbarian king sided with one faction in one of the bitter civil wars that ravaged the late Roman world. In 413, after the side of the civil war he supported lost, Gundacar and his people made a deal with the weakened winning side, which confirmed them in their control over a large share of Roman territory west of the Rhine.
In 435 Gundacar apparently decided this wasn’t enough, and invaded Roman territory again, closing in on strategic areas of northern Gaul. This time he was up against a more dangerous opponent: Flavius Aetius, the last capable commander the western Roman empire ever had. Aetius was born into the Roman aristocracy but spent his teen years as a hostage in barbarian country, first at the court of the Visigoth king Alaric I and then at the court of Uldin, King of the Huns, and his successor Charaton. He came through the experience tough, resourceful, and skilled, with close relationships among both barbarian nations and a canny knowledge of their ways. All through his career, taking advantage of the tangled loyalties of the age, he was able to recruit and lead armies from among the barbarians themselves.
That’s what he did when Gundacar launched his invasion of Gaul. Aetius quickly recruited an army of Huns and marched against him. In two hard-fought campaigns in 436 and 437 he crushed the Burgundians, leaving Gundacar and 20,000 Burgundian warriors dead. The survivors surrendered to Aetius and were settled in the region south of Lake Geneva, where they were quickly absorbed by the surrounding tribes. Aetius had many other battles to fight before the emperor he served finally had him assassinated—being loyal to the Roman Empire wasn’t a safe choice in those days. His triumph over Gundacar was one incident out of many in the violent twilight of the Roman Empire, and it only postponed the final collapse of the western empire for a few decades, but the fall of the Burgundian kingdom happened to catch the attention of storytellers, and a cycle of legends was born.
Gunther, as the warlord’s name eventually became, contributed more to the story than his bloody end. According to the chronicles, he was a Gibichung—that is, a son or grandson of an earlier Burgundian king named Gibich. He was also described as a Nibelung. Nobody nowadays is quite sure what that word meant in Gunther’s day, but it appears to come from the same root as the modern German word nebel, “fog, mist.” If so, it would mean “child of the mist.” The echo of some forgotten archaic mythology? Quite possibly, but we will likely never know. Keep those titles in mind, though. You will be hearing them again as we proceed.
Oral tradition is an odd thing. It can preserve scraps of lore from fantastic antiquity—aboriginal peoples on the northern coast of Australia and inhabitants of the western isles of Scotland have both been shown to preserve accurate information about the shapes of coastlines 10,000 years ago, when sea level was 300 feet lower—but it also jumbles things with wild abandon if that makes for a better story. Merlin, for example, was almost certainly a historical person, but he lived around two generations after the time of the historical King Arthur and had nothing to do with Arthur’s short-lived kingdom; the king he served was Gwenddolau, the last Pagan king in the Scottish lowlands. Once Artorius the Roman-British general morphed into the shining figure of King Arthur, though, his legend began to exert a magnetic attraction on every other British legend within reach. Merlin was only one once-separate figure of history or legend who was drawn into Arthur’s orbit; over time, the Arthurian legend came to embrace a vast number of formerly unrelated stories.
That was what happened to the tale of Gunther and the fall of the Burgundian kingdom, too. The Hunnish mercenaries who brought Gunther down guaranteed that once the storytellers got to work, Attila the Hun would be brought into the story. They had a great starting point for that part of the story, too. It so happens that after a long life of conquest and pillage, the old Hunnish king married a young, golden-haired barbarian woman whose name, according to the Roman chronicles, was Ildico. When dawn came after the wedding night he was dead. Inevitably, a rumor spread that she had killed him—conspiracy theory goes back a very long ways—and in due time this claim fused with the Huns’ involvement in the fall of Gunther to yield a legend claiming that Ildico was the sister of Gunther and had murdered Attila to avenge her brother’s death.
That story was probably in circulation by the end of the fifth century. The name Ildico dropped out of the stories, and Gunther’s supposed sister was given at least two names, Grimhild and Gutrune. He acquired a brother or cousin, Hagen, who had a bad reputation. He also acquired a treasure. Some authors have speculated that he may have had one all along, for barbarian kings in his time had access to ample plunder, and in the final crisis of the Roman world, the accumulated precious metal of centuries could quite readily fall into the hands of a successful freebooter. Gunther’s treasure, though, came to be a central theme in his story. Stories began to circulate claiming that Attila the Hun had killed Gunther to get at his treasure, but Gunther had concealed it so well that it was never found. A later generation of storytellers suggested that he had hidden it forever by flinging it into the Rhine.
Another century had to pass before Brunnhilde, the next element of the story, entered the picture. Her real name was Brunechildis, and she was a Goth—no, this doesn’t mean she wore black clothes and too much eyeliner. She was the daughter of the Visigothic king Athanagild, and was born around 543 in Toledo, the capital of the Visigoths after their conquest of Spain. Once she reached the age of marriage she was wedded to Sigebert I, king of Austrasia, one of the four kingdoms the Franks had carved out of the Roman province of Gaul. Her career was long, complicated, and violent; the short form is that her sister, who married the king of the neighboring kingdom of Neustria, was murdered by the Neustrian king at the urging of his mistress Fredegund. Brunechildis responded with a campaign of epic vengeance.
Over the next few decades, while carrying on her blood feud with Fredegund, surviving the murder of her husband and a great many other people, and returning the favor on a grand scale, Brunechildis ruled over Austrasia three times, each time in the name of a different underage prince, and was driven from the throne each time. She had quite an impressive number of her enemies assassinated—contemporary accounts have it that her body count included ten Frankish kings, as well as plenty of victims of lesser status. When she was finally defeated once and for all, depending on which chronicle you believe, the victors either had her torn apart by wild horses or had her dragged by a horse down a rocky mountain road until she died.
Her iron will, her tumultuous life, and her brutal death guaranteed that she would become a figure of legend, and inevitably her memory broke loose from its historical moorings and drifted back through the years until it merged with the legend of Gunther’s kingdom and its fall. In the process, the gritty realities of power politics in dark age Austrasia went by the boards, leaving only a few traces behind: her name, her extraordinary strength of will, her passion for revenge, and the fact that her death had something to do with a horse.
Then there was Siegfried. He goes back much, much further than the age of barbarian warlords that spawned Gunther and Brunnhilde, and he was probably never a historical person at all. Scattered across the myths and legends of the ancient Indo-European diaspora, all the way from India to Ireland, you can find scraps and traces of an ancient story about a shining hero-god who battles the greedy god of the underworld to free up a magical treasure linked to the fertility of the land. In the most ancient times, when the Indo-Europeans lived roughly where Ukraine is now, it was probably a straightforward seasonal myth, with the hero as the golden sun born in the darkness of midwinter, growing to manhood, and slaying the spirit of winter.
In India, where drought rather than cold was the barrier to fertility, that morphed into a battle between the warrior god Indra and the grim serpent Vritra, who held the waters prisoner. Vritra’s equivalent in Iranian myth is Verethragna, who had a similar role in pre-Zoroastrian days. In Slavic legend the same figure became the fertility god Veles, and in the oldest strata of Roman myth he appears as Veiovis, the subterranean Jove, lord of cattle and earthly wealth, against whom the lightning god Jupiter wages his seasonal warfare.
In the cold north, though, the winter spirit kept the dreadful serpentine form of Vritra, and the role of dragon slayer gradually found its way to the two supreme heroes of northern legend, Beowulf and Siegfried. Where the solar hero in other lands rose to glory and success after his triumph, the legends of the north took on a bleaker cast. There, the treasure became a terrible curse. Beowulf slays his dragon, helped by brave young Wiglaf, but dies of his wounds, and without his strong hand to protect his people, the dragon’s hoard draws so many raiders from far and wide that the mighty kingdom of the Geats is overwhelmed once and for all. As for Siegfried—well, we’ll get to that. For now, let’s just say that he dies a miserable death not all that long after his dragon-slaying deed, and the treasure he won is lost forever.
That may be simply a reflection of the realities of precious metal hoards in a violent age. Rich people make plenty of mistakes in the decline and fall of civilizations, but one of the most reliable is that they try to safeguard their wealth by turning it into precious metal and hiding it. This simply guarantees that every local warlord, every barbarian raiding party, and every band of local insurgents knows that there’s gold for the taking if you simply grab the rich and their families and start torturing them, starting with the children, to find out where the gold is. (No doubt our current crop of precious metal fanciers will also find this out the hard way in due time.) The idea of an accursed treasure is fairly easy to grasp in such times, as it teaches a solid practical lesson. Still, as we’ll see, that lesson took on new meanings as the centuries passed.
So Siegfried the dragon slayer slipped his moorings in the realm of seasonal mythology and drifted into legend, to find his way to Gunther the doomed monarch with his sister Gutrune, his dark and terrible brother Hagen, and his glorious treasure, echoing the golden treasure of summer harvest that the sun-hero had once set free. He seems to have gotten there about the same time as Brunnhilde, the gloriously awful avenger-queen, and the storytellers promptly decided that the two of them were made for each other.
By the year 1000, maybe, the resulting narrative had settled into its classic form. The original version was lost long ago, but two lengthy works based on it made it down to the present, the Nibelungenlied (“Song of the Nibelungs”) in Germany and the Volsungasaga (“Saga of the Volsungs”) in Iceland. The two versions aren’t identical by any means. The Nibelungenlied is a fine chivalric romance, the sort of thing that would fit right in next to the stories of King Arthur, while the Volsungasaga is a stark and savage tale of nearly unbroken slaughter.
They also tell significantly different stories, though certain basic themes are common to both. There is Siegfried the dragon-slaying hero, called Sigurd in Iceland, who was born to a widowed mother after the death of his father Siegmund. Siegfried is golden, strong, handsome, and fearless, and his body is invulnerable to wounds except for the inevitable unguarded spot on his back. There is the dragon he slays, and the vast golden treasure he takes from the dragon’s lair. There is Brunnhilde, called Brynhild in Iceland, who is a supernaturally strong warrior woman. There is Gunther, Gunnar in the Icelandic saga. There is Kriemhild, Gudrun in the saga, who is Gunther’s sister. There is Hagen or Hogni, waiting with his spear. Off in the distance, finally, there is Attila the Hun, called Etzel in the Nibelungenlied and Atli in the Volsungasaga.
The story at the heart of both versions is simple enough. Siegfried, fresh from his fight with the dragon, comes to Gunther’s court and falls in love with Gutrune, as Wagner will call the sister. Gunther wants to marry Brunnhilde, but she will only marry a hero and Gunther can’t measure up. Gunther agrees to let Siegfried marry Gutrune if Siegfried will help him win Brunnhilde. Siegfried is fine with this, uses a magic cap he got from the dragon’s hoard to make himself look like Gunther, and accomplishes the necessary feats. Brunnhilde marries Gunther, Siegfried marries Gutrune, and all seems well.
Brunnhilde and Gutrune take to quarreling, however, for all the world like Brunechildis and Fredegund. It comes out that Siegfried, not Gunther, conquered the warrior woman; Brunnhilde, seething with rage, conspires with Hagen, who takes Siegfried hunting and stabs him in the vulnerable place in his back with a spear, killing him. Brunnhilde kills herself and is burnt on the same pyre as Siegfried. Gunther and Hagen take Siegfried’s treasure. For her part, Gutrune marries Attila the Hun, and exploits him ruthlessly as an instrument to carry out her vengeance on her brother and Hagen, using the hope of the dragon’s treasure to get her way. Hagen, however, has guessed what is in store, and so dumps the golden treasure Siegfried won from the dragon into the Rhine, where it is lost forever. Then—well, basically, what happens then is that everyone dies.
Except for that last detail, we’re a long way from Gundacar the barbarian warlord and his short-lived Burgundian kingdom. It’s an interesting fact, though, that all the great epics to come out of dark age Europe end that way. The Arthurian legend, the most famous of them all, is the chronicle of a colossal failure, a golden kingdom that collapsed due to the personal inadequacies of the people who were supposed to uphold it. The French Song of Roland and the Welsh Y Gododdin are both accounts of bitter defeats brought about by the cocksure arrogance of the losing side’s leader—and in both cases he’s the hero of the piece. The great cycle of heroic deeds of the Shield-Danes, of which Beowulf is the only surviving fragment, similarly recounts the golden days of a great kingdom, and how it ended in blood and horror. The story that forgotten bards pieced together from the fates of Gunther and Brunnhilde and the ancient myth of Siegfried the sun-hero was cut from the same cloth.
Every dark age spawns epics, but not all of them end this way. Consider by way of contrast the Odyssey, one of the epics that came out of the terrible dark ages following the late Bronze Age collapse in the eastern Mediterranean, which ends with Odysseus’s triumphant return home. Yet a certain cold whisper of impending doom seems to have hovered around the European project from its very first stirrings in post-Roman times. When the Nibelungelied, the Volsungasaga, and the rest of old Germanic literature came out of centuries of obscurity to burst like a thunderbolt over the heads of nineteenth-century Europe, they brought that sense with them. In his first conception of The Ring, Richard Wagner tried to reshape that to predict the doom of those things about modern industrial society that he hated. As we’ll see, though, the legends had the last mordant laugh.
Trump seems to be morphing in to a genuine Wagnerian Character. The image of him raising his fist after the assassination attempt would certainly be at home on the cover of a paperback if it drawn in the appropriate style. The only thing left is the end of the story. Will he be vanquished by his foes, or will he come to power and vanquish them in the true Wagnerian style?
Hi JMG,
seeing that there are 5 Wednesdays this month, I’d like to cast an early vote for a post on Rupert Sheldrake and his hypothesis of morphogenetic fields. Thank you for all your good work!
greetings
Frank
Thank you Loremaster Greer, for a fine tale. It’s got me thirsty for a flagon of mead. Or iced tea anyway. Its a hot and humid day here in the future capital of Meriga.
Thanks for the bit about the gold too. I’ve contemplated gold & silver as part of prepping, but never taken any steps that way. Not that I have much to convert. It seems like tools and skills are better investments.
Dear JMG,
a great essay. The preliterate epics inevitably get mixed up and destroyed when some literate culture seeps in. Roman rule wasn’t enough. Giving Arminius a Roman education only touched the top. It took some centuries of (ruthless, e.g. selling the slavs to the Arab world) christianization. Christening a king after his warrior career helped the historians, they could safely leave out all the gory details, or blame them on the evil Saxons.
Styling Trump as today’s Gunther does not bode well, for both Trump and the Empire. Hopefully, some kind of “Fentanyl Wars” can restrict the bloodshed to Murica, and does not kill all of humanity.
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Clay, of course that’s the big question. I think, judging from the archetype that he’s come to embody, that he’ll succeed until his work is done — but what is the work in question? We’ll have to wait and see.
Frank, thank you, but we had that vote two weeks ago and the fifth Wednesday post is already settled.
Justin, it’s hot and humid here in the future offshore islands of Nuwinga, too. I find that good beer helps — and you know my advice concerning good beer and Attila the Hun…
MorePain, nah, Trump isn’t a Gunther type. He embodies a very different archetype. N.S. Lyons has a thoughtful essay on that —
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-world-spirit-on-a-golf-cart
Quin, thanks for this as always.
“Aetius had many other battles to fight before the emperor he served finally had him assassinated—being loyal to the Roman Empire wasn’t a safe choice in those days.”
Well, History is never fair…
“Then—well, basically, what happens then is that everyone dies.”
I love happy endings!
JMG, of course you are right. Trump is the underdog being ridiculed and fighting up hill all his life. That fits perfectly with Buonaparte. And moving along this historic parallel: if he survives the collapse he surely will be one of the consuls/in the triumvirat. The hatred now is only the next stage of grief.
Otoh, to return to your essay, the “Barbarian Invasions” are taking place right now. Interesting times we live in.
Wow! Just stunned at at the breadth and depth of this exposition. Of course I, like any serious Wagnerian, knew of the Nibelungenlied and the Volsunga Saga and how Wagner mixed and matched what he found in the two works to create the libretto (or the “poem” as he put it) of the Ring,. But I had no idea of this deep story — THANK YOU!
You no doubt know of Wagner’s comment that “the incomparable thing about myth is that it is always true, and its content, through utmost compression, is inexhaustible for all time.” I’m so eager with anticipation to see how you’re going to tease out the implications of this comment, which I gather you intend to do.
As the Japanese say, “gambatte!” (A cross between “stick at it!” and “go for it!”)
@JMG
As governments take a back seat and other gangs or states take their place, how do you think recluse communities like the Amish will fare? In one way they seem ahead of the game as their exclusion of technology prevented their evolution into the “dead end” of high complexity high energy use. In another sense they may be vulnerable as their land becomes a resource or “treasure” to plunder that they may struggle to defend if they are not willing to integrate, or fight, or adopt tech that may help them protect. The Amish seem to be decently robust as they dont rely on US aid and even serve in the military sometimes, all things that quell any jealousy from the public. However i wonder if in a time of collapse and salvage that the pacifism, and exclusivity, are traits that will be unaffordable luxuries. You sometimes mention the “offer the warlord a beer” as a way to trade skill for protection. To me that is a form of integrating as you then become a part of their project/culture.
Thanks this was a fun post!
Fascinating!
>what happens then is that everyone dies
As Mike said in SLC Punk, “We all die, Steve-O.”
>Brunnhilde, seething with rage, conspires with Hagen
You let the wrong woman past your lobby and she’ll burn it all to the ground. Especially the ones seething with rage. They will end up destroying everything around them.
>seizing most of California and declaring it the warlord’s private kingdom
I do go back and forth about California – will it fall to the Chinese? Will it fall to the Mexicans? Some days, I think it’ll be a province of China, and then other days, I think it’ll be a state of Mexico. It already feels like a foreign country. It’s nice they still speak English, but I wonder for how long that will last. I’m less than enthusiastic about becoming fluent in Spanish. Or Mandarin.
>N.S. Lyons has a thoughtful essay on that
>Donald Trump has always been something of a bafflingly lucky man
You know, it has been my opinion that he has never been playing 4D chess like the rest of the world seems to think, he has just been incredibly lucky. And like the old saying, better to be lucky than good.
I wonder if we’re not seeing the sum of some really massive karma that Trump has built up in previous lives? It looks like luck, but it isn’t.
A great post and an interesting discussion of how legends develop.
While I was a bit familiar with the music, I really got interested in Wagner back in the late 1980’s when I read David Gurr’s 1987 novel “The Ring Master” ( publisher Andre Deutche, London) which revolves around the lives of English twins, brother and sister, in the 1930’s and 40’s. I won’t give any spoilers but a memorable scene in the story is when their aunt pronounces their family Wagnerians and that someday, we will all be Wagnerians.
I didn’t know about N.S.Lyons. Thank you. Very interesting thoughts and writings.
And thank you for your estimate, how close the eye of the storm already is.
That was a great romp through the origins of the Nibelungen story! My father wrote his best historical novel about the historical Brunnhilde and the monk Columban, it’s a fine tale in itself, but of course tying her in with Siegfried, Gunther and the rest makes it even grander.
I think there is one great difference between the chivalric Nibelungenlied and the Nordic versions, at least in Germany it has been much made of: German Kriemhild plots to destroy her brothers out of vengeance for murdering her husband, and her second husband Etzel is just a tool in her hands. Nordic Gudrun tries to save her brothers against Atli’s murderous designs. This can be interpreted as the courtly ideal of love winning out against the older blood ties, but I suppose it is not such an important element for the myths you want to tell here.
I agree that the stories from the last European Dark Age are unrelentingly grim. Other epics are not very sunny, though, either. The Odyssey ends on a rather ambiguous note, since after massacring the suitors, Odysseus stante pede travels on to Scythia and leaves Penelope alone again. The Iliad ends rather badly for the supreme heroes, and the whole cycle about Troy ends badly for most participants on both sides. Gilgamesh ends in frustration. Shahnameh ends in unrelenting tragedy. The Mahabharata ends mostly in mutually assured destruction.
Chuaquin, oh, history is perfectly fair — just not to individuals. Rome fell because it had abandoned all the qualities that contributed to its rise. As for happy endings, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “Well, what did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?”
MorePain, I think Trump is on a different trajectory from Buonaparte’s — he’s got an archetypal destiny, but not the same one. But we’ll see. As for barbarian invasions, nah, this is just the warmup exercises for that. I recommend reading a good account of the barbarian invasion of Gaul in 406-407 if you want a sense of what’s on its way: that is to say, not a modest flow of refugees, but massed armies and the overthrow of governments. You’ll know the next round is well under way when the last president of France is hiding out in Canada and the Islamic Republic of al-Faransa has just been proclaimed in Paris.
Tag, thank you. I’m a serious history geek, and also a serious myth-and-legend geek, so watching the two of them come together like this is right up my alley. It was right up Wagner’s alley, too; expect to see some discussion of the essay “Die Wibelungen” as we proceed…
Alex, I expect them to fare very well. Once the population of North America begins to contract in earnest, land won’t be in short supply, but competent farmers who don’t need petroleum to bring in the harvest will be. Barbarian warlords need tax revenues like any other governing class, and they have the twin advantages of (a) being less expensive than vast civilized bureaucracies and (b) entirely willing to take their income in barter — dark age armies require a lot of feeding! Your smart warlords, and most of them are very smart indeed, will recognize the Amish as a resource and protect them, though they’ll probably require the young men to spend some time in the army before they return from “the world.” So I would expect to see the Amish gradually integrated into the societies of dark age North America, and the integration will go both ways — some Amish traits will become very widespread in the new societies that take shape.
Casey, thank you.
Other Owen, California has never really been part of America. It’s its own thing, and doubtless will revert to independence — quite possibly because nobody else on the continent is willing to put up with it any longer. As for Trump, I don’t think it’s luck. I think it’s destiny. It’s not that he’s playing 5d chess, either — he’s not the player, he’s one of the pieces on the board, in a long game of which he has not the least idea. My guess is that he’s the king, and he just dodged a checkmate.
RaymondR, hmm! I’ll look it up.
MorePain, you’re most welcome.
Aldarion, oh, there are lots of differences. In the Norse version, for example, Sigurd has a fling with Brynhild before he gets to Gunnar’s court, so she has even more reason to be livid with rage. But yes, Kriemhild/Gutrune has different motivations in the two stories.
Trump, a man of destiny and luck, especially if what is indicated in this writing is the case!
https://www.steynonline.com/14442/when-the-government-wants-you-dead
War with the archons? Ephesians 6:12? I think evil in high places may have surfaced in recent events, like a glimpse of a kraken. I think the two Kennedy assassinations were of this ilk. Will be at my men’s meeting tonight where we will be praying on all of this.
Hello,
Thanks you for another entertaining post!
Was the first of this series a top 10 among page views?
Thanks again,
Thomas
I’m currently reading The Odyssey, Hamlet’s Mill, and Children of Ash and Elm (culture and cosmology of Medieval Vikings). Your fascinating and timely exploration of the Nibelung legends fits nicely into my current imaginal space. Many thanks!
Merriam-Webster defines gotterdammerung
“ a collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder
The Other Owen wrote in Comment #13
>Brunnhilde, seething with rage, conspires with Hagen
You let the wrong woman past your lobby and she’ll burn it all to the ground. Especially the ones seething with rage. They will end up destroying everything around them.
George R.R. Martin used that trope a lot in his A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series, with characters like Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. Doubtless because it is a common mythological trope and one that has often been based on real-world historical events and personalities.
This was really fun (and interesting) to read, thank you!
Re: Trump, I may very well be off entirely in my own space, because when I say what I’m about to say, most people get angry with me (so double apologies in advance if this does so for anyone here; I neither love nor hate Trump but view him as a very interesting force and have done so for quite a while, and if a different perspective works better for you, I am all for you doing your thing in your way!). I see him as a Trickster, but with something maybe a bit different in the mix than people might be accustomed to expect — not quite Coyote but more Coywolf. What really sealed it for me was after his 2016 victory, when he first stepped into the Prez role and sent that maximum volume BLAAAAAT to everyone’s cell phones lol. I kept telling people, “guys…the thing you might be missing is, this is COMEDY GOLD” and just got a lot of snarls in return, heh.
I read the Lyons essay and agree, though Bonaparte, Caesar, and Alexander were great generals, and Tromp is another thing altogether. I also agree with your statement in King In Orange about The Changer, going from incident to incident, each time changing one thing, until the world is irrevocably changed. Then I scrolled down and spotted a review of Neil Howe’s new (2023) book, “The Fourth Turning Is Here.” (NO DUh!!!!) He dates the beginning of it at “the economic crisis of 2008,” which makes food sense, though there are also good arguments for 9/11. And of course, his brief summary of the anacyclosis as:
“Hard time create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.”
So…. what archetype *is* Trump riding to his destiny? I also noticed that his heir apparent, J.D. Vance, sprang out of nowhere with a platform straight out of Steve Bannon’s playbook. And there, if Trump is Caesar, is his Augustus, ready-made.
For what it’s worth, Tuesday’s WSJ had an article about the “Jacksonian streak” in American politics. Will try to get you a photocopy from the Village library’s copy.
Oh, yes. The dam has busted and we’re all in our rafts, riding the rapids, with steep canyon walls around us and occasional beaches of sand if you can swim to shore after being capsized. At least it’s not a tornado or a hurricane. (30-40 years ago I did go river-rafting in new Mexico, and it was exhilarating. )
If Trump is one of the pieces on the board, then who/what are moving them? Yes, I’ll meditate on this, but one answer has already come to mind as I type.
How well the Amish or any other group of agriculturalists fair with the warlords depends on how many generations the warlord has been off the farm. Consider a former presidential candidate,
“Speaking at the Oxford Union in 2016, Mr Bloomberg said: “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.
“It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, you add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”
If he’s the warlord the farmers are dead Pol Pot style. And then he’ll wonder why he’s starving. So you need a warlord who remembers where the food comes from before it’s wrapped in plastic.
As an aside have you really looked at how much food is shipped and packed in plastic?
JMG,
Which side will have the EV’s, 3D goggles and rainbow flags. The Warlord or the General?
In other words which side will be the good guys defending democracy and which side will be the bad autocrats?
I know your operatic taste is more Germanic than Italian, JMG, but Giuseppe Verdi’s early opera “Attila” is a fun blood-and-guts retelling of the Attila the Hun legend. Flavius Aetius shows up here, too.
You (and the commentariat) might enjoy this fantastic rendition of his aria “Dagli immortali vertici,” sung by the great Italian baritone Giorgio Zancanaro, in which the “last true Roman,” bemoans the state of his declining Empire. The cabaletta (starting around 3:55) never fails to put a pep in my step!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuNswVBBIOI
In Italy Aetius seems to be mythologized as a national hero, as evinced by the popularity of the given name Ezio.
@JMG (#18) wrote:
“California has never really been part of America. It’s its own thing, and doubtless will revert to independence.”
Spot on, JMG! Despite spending most of my life on the East Coast, I’m really a fifth-generation Californian by culture and ancestry, and I have always known that to be truth.
Before any English-speakers ever settled there, California’s (non-Aboriginal) languages on the Pacific coast were Spanish (since the early 1500s) and Russian (since the very early 1800s). Native speakers of English became a noticible part of the non-Indigenous population of California only in the wake of the Gold Rush of 1849, and they only became a majority of the population sometime after the opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, when it suddenly became much easier for women to travel there from the Eastern US and start families. It took even longer than that for California to begin to “feel” like a real part of the United States, maybe sometime in the 1890s.. Even today, that “feeling” remains fairly superficial, compared to the deep-rooted identity that one finds here in New England.
Also, this is a very different history than the history that Oregon and Washington had, and the boundary between the two regions is still a substantial boundary today.
I’m so thrilled to hear about Brunhilde’s archaic body count. It is so easy to fall into a YouTube rabbit hole,you watch one men’s topic and the algorithm serves up every complaint between the sexes of the young generations. On that field, body count is just another battleground to get clicks and clout. Here’s to Brunhilde!
You may not be aware, but there’s a particularly staunch Maori iwi (tribe), in New Zealand called Tuhoe. This tribe, lives in perhaps the most inaccessible and challenging part of the North Island, the Urewera, never signed the Treaty of Waitangi, was subject to constant pressure and harassment from other tribes, the Crown engaged (sometimes with those other tribes) in scorched earth tactics against them (approaching genocide, although people are loathe to use the phrase) during the New Zealand wars, (and then later). They were granted self-government and autonomy several times, although later governments reneged, before finally getting something akin to self-government in 2014. Most remain fluent in Te Reo Maori.
They describe themselves as the the offspring of Hine-pūkohu-rangi the Mist Maiden, and Te Maunga
the Mountain Man – the Children of the Mist. I’ve never thought it was a coincidence.
Hi, some questions:
– why are the europeans such doomers? The european dark age tales really are more grimdark then the ones of the bronze age collapse like the odissey or the cycles of Moses, Judges and David in the bible. Yes, Israel ends badly but is implied that it’ll get better.
– is the conservation of the Siegfried myth in indoeuropean cultures related with the preservation of the wolf mysteries that wrote about in the past? And if so is it also present in cultures that also had the wolf mysteries like the Turks?
Now to Trump the Lucky: God made his head turn to the right direction so that it would result in just a cool scar instead of a brain omelette. You can’t beat luck and you can’t control luck. It is his destiny to do what is required of him. Killing people like that is hard – you put a gun on his head, pull the trigger the gun jams (happened to a biker i onde knew – he was going to be executed. The gun jammed). You put a bomb in his office it blows everybody around him up but the table saves him. But you can’t direct nor control the luck/destiny, as Bannon found out. But i dont think he’ll be one of the ceasars, he’s too old. I dont know of any myth about heroes that got their way on their adventures by luck/destiny. Maybe the myths of Joshua and David.
The paragraphs were lost and there is no separation between questions =(
I’m looking forward to hearing the background story for Alberich. It has always seemed significant to me that he is the one character who doesn’t appear to have died by the end of the Ring cycle, though I don’t know what that signifies.
‘nebbia’ in Italian, fog or mist, where we get the word nebulous.
>he’s not the player, he’s one of the pieces on the board
If you compare Trump and Biden just as symbols and nothing more, it doesn’t look good for the energy patterns that Biden represents, does it? At least we’re not yet into comparing Trump and Harris. We may yet get the president this country deserves…
>competent farmers
I think you can probably stop right there. It’s a trade, like any other and it requires time and effort to master it. Which few have bothered to do so.
Justin @ #3:
Just as well you didn’t pursue the shiny stuff, I have it on good authority that it’s not edible.
Nice picture of Lagertha (for Brunnhilde) JMG!
I love the old myths with a passion, they always, well, sing to me .. .. always have . . .and very much appreciate your going into such depth to draw out how they have been charged and morphed throughout the ages by our ancestors.
I get so much out of your writings. I wish I had something as wonderful to share.
Ever since the event this Saturday, I’ve had a weird sense that Trump will turn out to be a major mythical figure for centuries to come, but as I read this post I had this very odd thought strike me of the possibility of future legends involving Trump and the Roosevelt Brothers (Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt). If the legacy of the 20th century turns out as reviled as it looks like it might at this point, maybe FDR is eventually reimagined as some sort of evil wizard who placed a curse over the nation shortly after murdering the rightful ruler, John Kennedy; and so a heroic team lead by the cowboy Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump end up going on some kind of wild adventure to free it. I would love to be able to see a text on American Mythology from 3024 to see just how this all gets reshaped and recreated, because I bet it will be even more wild than that.
Wer here
What did the proverb say about “leaving in interesting times”…
Let’s be honest I might be banned here for saying this but the liberals in the US just shot themselfs (they wanted to kill the “evil Orange Man”) the idiotic excuses made up for the fact why someone was allowed to camp on a roof for half an hour in view of ordinary people and in front of snipers, I am sorry what??? On the other half if they had succeded in killing Trump the US would go in my opinion to civil war very soon….
Media in Poland is in histeria after JD Vance (who is now called Putin’s best friend by some”journalistsin Poland”) said that Europe must defend itself and not relay on the US and claiming that he doesn’t care about Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile in Poland fun times ahead we have record level deaths and record low level childbirth rates. Ukrainian migrants are leaving in masse to Germany because something Tusk and Zelesky passed which mean none of them is safe in Poland anymore. They are claiming they want to enrich us culturaly by bringing migrants from Africa…
JMG I don’t know much about the end of Rome but did the Roman’s put giant signs telling barbarians welcome here taking from us by force everything you want.
And one more thing a certain French man apparently decided that giving power to people wearing Che Guevara shirts and having no children is the way to go (in his mind they are marginally better than Le Pen) I wonder how would these marxist wonders waving Palestinian flags will react when it’s Sharia law time in France?
And many things that are best without comment. National suicide on scale of Europe What a mess.
Other Owen (#14) —
Here’s a contribution to the mythos of the Greater Orange One (Florida, not the lesser Mandarin).
Perhaps he may accounted as one of those “armored and mailed, great sworded ones” involved in the breaking up of the stagnant conditions of a passing era. If karma (that is, incarnationary momentum) is an issue, he might even be some Pattonesque figure, incarnated over and over for some specific kind of task. Someone incarnated to be held in reserve unless and until needed, and thus generally a late bloomer, but otherwise some fairly ordinary magnate or social personage. Not, probably, a literary figure, but a character, with a way with words. Masked and cloaked, as it were, until he receives the unlikely cue to step up and act.
It would probably be fruitless to ask him about it! Perhaps among his papers there might be some traces that could eventually be discovered.. Not, very likely, a youthful call, but a late midlife transformation …
LeGrand
Mr. Greer,
I recently documented the battles as described in the 18 day war epic Mahabharata by transcribing the text descriptions of actions, movements and clashes in the order described with a chess metaphor to describe the characters and actions involved.
e.g. https://crackpot.substack.com/p/day-12
I was curious if you know of battles from epics or history in your study that are sufficiently described but have not already been documented using a similar technique. To my mind/read Homer’s descriptions fall into a category of observed by a poet that did not understand enough about military science of the time to get much.
Fwiw I love epics.. My head was swimming by the end of your summary! Will have to go back and diagram notes to follow the threads. Thank you for this!
Found this on Twitter. All kinds of people are talking about this, not just those of us in the Ecosophian ghetto.
https://x.com/rambovanhalen/status/1813420950312071188?s=46
Also: NS Lyons (whose essay has already been mentioned in these comments.
Also Paul Kingsnorth: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/all-the-world-is-myth
You wrote about Trump as the embodiment of the Native American archetype of the Changer some time ago. I had been thinking there was a possibility that that had run its course; after all, a great deal has changed since he came down the escalator in 2015.
And then he rose from an assassination attempt with the aura of some ancient hero from the Iliad, and suddenly I feel like the last nine years have all been prologue, and the Changer is only just now fully manifesting . . .
My preference on the Trump near death experience is that it was a massive display of incompetence by the Secret Service and law enforcement not a missed kill authored by secretive conspirators., but I may not have the peace of my preference being the case and we may never know the real story – which is the most likely scenario.
This also came up this week: https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/07/17/straight-from-god-john-rich-reveals-inspiration-for-new-hit-song-revelation-1473073/
What fascinates me about this is not the song itself, or the video, (it’s kinda catchy and good production quality, but the theology expressed is certainly not new or original), but 1) how it was written- in the Tucker interview John Rich says he wrote it, music and lyrics, in an hour, and doesn’t feel he contributed anything to it, but was really just a pathway for the message, and 2) it’s at the top of the charts with essentially no marketing. It seems there is an appetite for this kind of thing.
Also, on a different note, I pray that JMG is right and that the archetype being manifested in North America is the Changer, not Gotterdammerung.
BeardTree, I get the impression a lot of Christians are interpreting it in those terms. Whatever metaphysical force is behind it all, I doubt we’ve seen the last of it.
Thomas, not even close. It was in the lower end of the midrange.
Goldenhawk, thank you. You’ve just given me a little more hope for the future of Western civilization!
Robert P, well, yes. Where do you think we got that term?
Kate, good. Yes, he’s got the Changer vibe rather than the Trickster — I discussed that quite a while back here.
Patricia M, have they started using polite labels like “Jacksonian” now? Okay, it’s all over but the shouting…
SLClaire, the ancients had a convenient name for them. What that term “gods” means in reality, of course, is a complicated question.
Siliconguy, that kind of stupidity is self-correcting. As for plastic, sure, because at the moment it’s still cheap. As that changes, so will the packaging.
Clay, neither side. We’re seeing the end of that entire set of rhetoric. In the years ahead new badges of identity and new tribal orientations will emerge.
Revere, hmm! I’ll check it out as circumstances permit.
Robert M, oh, I know. I used to live in Ashland, Oregon, 14 miles north of the California border, and crossing it always felt like entering a different country. Oregon and Washington — well, they’re two countries, too, but the border’s in the wrong place: Oregon and Washington west of the Cascades are two halves of one whole, and Oregon and Washington east of the Cascades are provinces of western Idaho.
Jake, I doubt many people who were alive then felt the same way.
Peter, I wasn’t aware of that at all. Interestingly, the Scots highland clan from which my paternal line is descended, the MacGregors, were also called “children of the mist” for similar reasons — the whole clan was legally outlawed for more than two centuries, and those who (like my ancestors) didn’t flee to some other continent hid in the hills of the southwestern Highlands for the whole time, ambushing and being ambushed by other clans tolerably often.
Geronimo, (1) we’ll get to that. (2) That’s an interesting speculation, and worth further investigation. (3) I expect Trump to die in office, or not long after stepping down, and become the focus of a hero cult. It’s his heir, at this point almost certainly Vance, who will become Augustus. (As you see, the paragraph breaks came through just fine — sometimes the preview screen screws up.)
Tortoise, it’s a fascinating story indeed, and we’ll get to that.
Greg, not quite. We get “nebulous” from Latin “nebulosus,” and Italian got “nebbia” from a related word.
Other Owen, the president we deserve? Gods, I hope now — then we’ll really be in for it.
Laughingsong, I simply did a search for “viking queen” and took the best image I could find. That’s how most of my illustrations get chosen.
Taylor, that’s exactly the sort of thing that happens in the transformations of legend. I also imagine Teddy and FDR as brothers, one good and one evil, and Teddy riding hell for leather to the court of the God-Emperor Trump to warn him that the Redcoats are coming, so Trump can send his paladin Neil Armstrong riding a pillar of flame to the Moon to fulfill the martyred king JFK’s last command and bring the wrath of the frog god down on FDR’s legions of evil undead bureaucrats. It’ll be a heck of a story, and an even better opera.
Wer, actually, yes. The Romans made quite a big deal about inviting barbarians into their empire to make up for their own declining population. It didn’t work out very well, as you know.
Jstn, Homer knew enough about arms and armor to describe military equipment of the time that had been completely forgotten until archeologists dug them up — helmets made of boar tusks, for example. Keep in mind, though, that the battles of the Iliad were fought by a mob of pirates with great courage but no generalship, while the battle of Kurukshetra was fought in an urban, civilized, highly literate society in which generalship was a fine art. They won’t be the same kind of conflicts!
Roy, yep. I was wondering if his second term would be anticlimax; now it seems likely that the story is just about to begin for real.
BeardTree, at this point it almost doesn’t matter what actually happened. The credibility of the Secret Service and the entire Washington establishment took the bullet that was meant for Trump, and they’re not getting back up.
Roy, we live in a time of revelations. I wrote a novel that way a few years back, for what it’s worth.
For whatever it maybe prove to be worth, I had a sudden overwhelmingly strong premonition last Thursday that neither Trump nor Biden would be alive by Inaguration Day, and probably not even by Election Day.
I get these strong sudden premonitions from time to time, and usually they turn out to be misleading, so I thought little of this one. And then Saturday’s shooting happened …
So maybe this one premonition of mine is actually pointing to something fairly soon. Time will tell.
@JMG “Rich people make plenty of mistakes in the decline and fall of civilizations, but one of the most reliable is that they try to safeguard their wealth by turning it into precious metal and hiding it.”
This is why the first thing when things go really bad is the wealthy will fly to their New Zealand bunkers. Then a day later the New Zealanders who built said bunkers will take everything the rich folk have. Also good luck fighting against many Maori folk. They are a very tight community that will either be your best friends or your worst enemy depending on how you work with them.
Also “Once the population of North America begins to contract in earnest, land won’t be in short supply, but competent farmers who don’t need petroleum to bring in the harvest will be.”
This is something I have had to do many times. Talk folks in the US down off the ledge and say, ‘Yes, things are going to get very rough, but looking around the US in terms of natural resources is one of the best places to end up so long as many are ready to work for it.’. Hard times but great opportunity ahead.
Other Owen # 14..
What’s to say that future hoards of trumptonian tribes, who’ve coalesced on both the near sides of the Pacific Crest, don’t go all Western Young Empire 2.0′, and thereby defeat whomever stands in their midst…??
Just sayin..
Hi John Michael,
The barbarians were always going to win, then lose, then win, then lose, until the population exists within its means and has no way of subduing other folks to their will. It hardly surprises me that tales increase in darkness the further north a listener travels. The land informs the stories.
I heard an old timer sheep farmer once suggesting that it was wisdom to keep ten sheep, when you can feed ten sheep. The Europeans are doomed, for they trained the world to learn how to resist them on the battleground, then forgot the important lesson that they needed to always and forever be one step ahead in that regard. There is also a very large unpaid karmic debt there. If I lived there, I’d be edging further north west, or far west over the drink, kind of like what the Elves were up to. 😉
A few weeks ago I read a detailed account of the Battle of the Bulge, and that was an epic clash of total horror. One of the lessons I took away from the account was that you could see that resupplying the forces was a tactical advantage. Hungry armies, or those facing a lack of ammunition and working equipment, are rarely successful.
I’ve never understood the gold bug thing, but can respect that at present they seem to have doubled their paper wealth in the past five years. Dunno. I tend to put my efforts into the plants, skills and systems. As the alchemists say: “Ours is not the common gold!” I suspect they were right too! What’s your take on that?
Cheers
Chris
JMG or someone else,
Could you please explain what is meant by Jacksonian? I get that it refers to Andrew Jackson, but right now don’t have the time to learn more about what this term means
Thanks,
Jacques
JMG,
Thought you might like this little gem from the Babylon Bee – Republicans Concerned As RNC Opens With Incantation to Cthulhu
Breaking news: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/joe-biden-tests-positive-covid-19/index.html
The tale of Odysseus wasn’t exactly wine and roses. He may have made it home, after struggling in vain for years, but none of his many shipmates did, his final return culminated in the slaughter of all his wife’s suitors, and all of this was in the context of the Trojan war, where nearly all of the losing side and quite a few from the winning side, including Agamemnon himself in a sordid little drama after returning home, ended up perishing. But the wily one got to finish out his declining years settling for Penelope instead of Athena.
“The Romans made quite a big deal about inviting barbarians into their empire to make up for their own declining population. It didn’t work out very well, as you know.”
It worked pretty well until the 370s, because the Romans only allowed in-migration on their terms, which were rather harsh and restrictive. By the 370s the Goths were large and strong enough, and the Romans weak and venal enough, that the Romans couldn’t fully dictate terms, and when they continued to act as though they could, the battle of Adrianople highlighted the change in the balance of power. The Goths rampaged pretty freely for decades after that, largely within the imperial boundaries.
Robert M, so noted! I note that Biden has just been diagnosed with Covid. If the Democrats are desperate enough to get him out of the way so they have the chance to avoid a complete disaster for their party, it’s not impossible that somebody will prescribe a pillow over the face sometime in the next few days…
Michael, yep. I’ve been pointing out for years that the kleptocrats with their bunkers are making the same mistake as the elite classes of Roman Britain, who built rural villas with the same thing in mind. Archeologists keep finding the remains of those; they were generally burnt to the ground after being looted to the bare walls, and it’s anybody’s guess whether the looters and burners were barbarian raiders, local peasants, or the hired guards of the elites, who had nothing to lose once the rule of law collapsed by slitting their masters’ throats and making off with the movable wealth.
Chris, if I were in Europe I’d be getting out as soon as possible. As for the alchemists, it’s a heck of a good question what they were actually up to.
Jacques, Andrew Jackson was the guy who figured out that you could win the presidency by appealing to working class voters rather than just playing footsie with the elites. “Jacksonian” is a polite way of saying “populist,” or perhaps “rabble.”
John, yeah, I know they’re melting down because Trump was smart enough to have a Sikh do an opening prayer, to remind a hundred million voters or so that he’s not going to support the establishment of Protestant Christianity as a state religion. I was delighted, of course — even though it wasn’t a prayer to the Dreaming Lord.
Patricia M, yep. I wonder if he’ll be allowed to survive it.
Mandrake, granted, but he actually survived. In European heroic legends, that’s pretty rare! As for the Roman Empire’s immigration policies, oh, that sort of thing always works well, at first…
@John of Red Hook
I saw that. Interestingly, Joel Berry of their sister site Not The Bee had a really sober and self-aware analysis of the situation: https://notthebee.com/takes/yes-the-republican-party-has-moved-on-from-evangelicals-who-can-blame-it
What’s refreshing is that while Berry is understandably (as a conservative Christian) disappointed that the RNC had a Sikh prayer and a porn star as speaker as they nominate a serial philanderer, he doesn’t vilify them. Instead he writes:
While the milksops at Village Church and North Point Community Church were conducting white privilege training and shaming politically active Christians, people like Trump and Dhillon were kicking down doors to preserve liberty for our children.
Most major online figures on the Right seem to have come to a similar conclusion that Christian purity within the Republican party is a project for a later date.
Not only was the Orange Julius smart enough to have a Sikh do the opening prayer, but Vance’s wife Usha is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. It really is a sign of just how rapidly and profoundly things are changing in America.
Taylor and JMG,
One thing I hope makes it into the legends is the notion that Trump was protected by the spirit of Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister who was a friend of Trump and was himself assassinated a almost two years ago to the day of the attempt on Trump:
https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1812476080017592449/photo/1
https://x.com/CaudilloXIV/status/1812297639188402657
Regarding Odysseus, I seem to recall Tennyson wrote a great poem about how Odysseus felt later in life.
Regarding the fascination with gold, B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is excellent.
Very interesting piece!
Aetius obviously forgot that most essential principle of life…”Put not your faith in Princes…”
I suspect that, for all his charm, Trump will be tripped up in the same way…
I just happened to publish a TikTok/@whitewitchoftheprairie article on Brunhilde because of her relationship to the Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty myth. There is a weird Catalan poem called The Sun, Moon, and Talia that has the princess being put to sleep and woken up only after being impregnated and giving birth to twins by the prince. The sleeping beauty trend seems to come from Germanic myth and Brynhild/Brunhilde. Please correct me if I am wrong about the myth: instead of roses, Brunhilde sleeps on a mountain surrounded by a wall of flames that only Sigmund/Sigfried can get through, and of course he shapeshifts because he is pretending to be Gunnar/Gunther. Sigmund places a sword between them and they never consummate the relationship when it is him pretending to be Gunther. Then she loses her virginity to Gunther the non-hero and is angry because she loses her Amazon-esque powers as part of the price of losing her virginity, correct?
I did not know until today that Vance the nominated VEEP wrote Hillbilly Elegy.
Also, has anyone looked into the novel The Last President or 1900 by Ingersoll Lockwood, “where Americans are protesting a corrupt election process while the president’s hometown of New York City is fearing the collapse of the republic after the transition of presidential power.” Lockwood also wrote two children’s novels about a character named Barron Trump.
I had to write my own Substack piece on what is going on with the Trump assassination. https://kimberlysteele.substack.com/p/the-miss-heard-around-the-world
On TikTok and X, there has been speculation that we shifted timelines the weekend of the attempted assassination. Most agree the shift was to a more positive timeline. (Oddly, my part of Illinois had 12 tornados touch down in one storm that weekend.) The glitch in the Matrix being cited is the supposedly-recent deaths of Richard Simmons and Dr. Ruth. Some people remember both of them dying between 2002-2014 respectively. I seem to remember Dr. Ruth dying a while back. Simmons is more fuzzy but I seem to remember people making awful jokes about it at the time. Other people don’t remember them dying at all back then. I published a 3 part article on TikTok about the potential timeline shift today and I will be writing about that subject next week on Substack. Does anyone remember Dr. Ruth dying in 2002 and not 2024? Or Simmons around the year 2012?
As days continue to pass, i keep regarding what happened on saturday as more and more incredible. It’s the first time in my life that i had this feeling, it is indeed like having seen a myth happening in real life.
There is an intensity that goes beyond Trump as a man, and the considerations one may have of him, to the realm of Spirit. If something saved him, wheter it was destiny or divinity, then he is a bringer of spiritual influence unto the world. In this time of corruption and decay, having grown up watching only the fading of the last threads of Spiritual meaning innour societies, this event has filled me with wonder.
Maybe i sound a bit ridiculous, and i certainly never thought that someone like Trump could arise those feelings upon me.
It’s so great to see the world becoming alive in unexpected directions!
Re: jumbled history through mythology: In the Army I did HUMINT collection and spent a lot of time talking to Afghans. A good conversational inroad was always history. Afghans like talking about their history, and I enjoyed listening. Something I noticed, which you brought up here was that they often had stories which captured the vast span of Afghan history in a compacted tale (that often didn’t follow the actual historic timeline). But, for a largely illiterate society it was a good way for preserving cultural memory. It makes more sense now why they would do this since Afghanistan is a somewhat dark age society. Re: Trump and the recent events. I am very thankful for this blog and the many brilliant commenters here as it has played a big role in a much better understanding about what is really happening (as much as a human is capable of understanding) at this point in history. I feel kind of bad for my more rationalist friends and family since they seem bewildered by it all. Thank you all.
A very interesting piece, as always. I particularly liked your comment after about Paladin Armstrong riding a pillar of fire…
Those who want to find some of the original stories, they’re available for free on Project Gutenberg. The Volsunga contains a lot of the stories of Brunhild – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1152 – put together by William Morris, the online version of which I helped update by consulting my print copy some years ago. If you wish a print copy, I have made one which is available for the cost of printing, no profit to me or anyone but the printer and the mailman – https://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/volsunga/paperback/product-zmkvz7n.html – though you can find other copies on Lulu and elsewhere, usually more pricey.
I recommend printed works where you can manage them, since as JMG has noted, one of the characteristics of any dark age is the loss of literacy. What we have printed today may be the only copy found five centuries from now – but they won’t be recovering it from a hard drive in landfill.
As an aside, would the rarity of literacy contribute to the idea that written words themselves have magical power? Runes, kabbalah and so on? Do written words lose their power if everyone can read them?
Hi JMG,
I really liked how you started out setting the scene for an epic era of clashing kingdoms.
In the city of Worms in Germany, the capital of the Burgundians for a time, you can walk on a trail that takes you to all the places in the German legend. You can visit the statue of Hagen throwing the Nibelungen treasure into the Rhine and the cathedral.
Wagner also used Arthurian legends for his work such as Parsifal and Lohengrin. Arthurian romance really spread around Europe in the high Middle Ages with Chrétien de Troyes’ stories. Parsifal and Lohengrin were Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version.
Which selection of the opera should we listen to as we read this essay?
John Michael wrote, “so Trump can send his paladin Neil Armstrong riding a pillar of flame to the Moon to fulfill the martyred king JFK’s last command and bring the wrath of the frog god down on FDR’s legions of evil undead bureaucrats.”
I have to say, that is infinitely more epic than any of the ways that the usual pundits try to spin their incessant mythmaking. Have you ever considered trying to write up some epic myth of our age as it would eventually get handed down after thousands of years remove from the original events themselves? It would surely be entertaining to read, and quite possibly able to dislodge misplaced certainties from their cherished niches in the hodgepodge by which we try to make sense out of our times.
In your fiction, you have often touched on how future generations may reinterpret the wildly incoherent rationalist mythologies handed piecemeal down to them. Stars Reach’s lead character’s pondering of the incredible feats and ridiculous mindsets that must have gone into erecting skyscrapers or building bridges to span the mighty Mississsippi make powerfully subtle arguments for the reader to reconsider his own unquestioned presumptions.
Of course, I really just want to read more about Kek raining down his signature fainting spells on all the zombie bureaucrats who escaped from their netherworld swamp by bribing Charon to ferry them across the Potomac, as the once and future president, by simply turning his head, calls upon the mythic powers of the assembled pantheon of dead presidents to withdraw the mighty flag from the stone, unfurling its forgotten mojo and bringing the strong-armed paladin back safely from his perilous journey beyond the clouds to steal the magic moonstones and the goose that lays golden eggs. Hmmm… I guess Elvis and Mickey should probably make appearances too.
Re Trump. Since the only man who knows the truth has been shot by the Secret Service, we have to be content with conspiracy theories, of which there are a plenteous variety already. I’ll add two of my own:
A) The inner security perimeter was controlled by the SS, the outer by the local cops. Since it was impossible that a lone man with a rifle could be allowed within range of Trump, when such a man was seen it was assumed by the SS that he had been okayed by the locals, and assumed by the locals that he had been okayed by the SS.
B) They were all influenced by the Democratic message that America was better off without Trump so like loyal patriots they allowed the shooter to do his thing.
Re legends. JMG has compressed a huge amount of scholarship into a brief article. I’ll have to reread it couple of times. But in the proposed American legends, surely there will be a role for Biden? I’m thinking of a mad King Lear wandering the heath while Goneril (Hillary) and Regan (Nikki Haley) conspire to rule the kingdom.
This is a very interesting essay JMG– A lot of food for thought here. I would pay real money to be able to hear the heroic stories they will one day tell about Bidengamesh and Trumpkidu, the fast friends that defeated Kimbaba, but were tragically lost in the Ocean of Entropy…
#14 Other Owen, #25 Patricia Mathews–
I think JMG has hit the nail on the head–Donald Trump has become linked with an Archetype, but think Mr. Magoo playing the part of Napoleon, or Homer Simpson linked to the Changer Archetype. Kek, that Wry Frog-God of changes, is probably chuckling about all of this around a corner somewhere.
#51 Chris– Gold is mostly a false friend. It can be useful to keep the purchasing power of one’s savings, but only in circumstances where there is a stable government, lots of food and other resources for sale, and in which the government is manipulating the paper currency. They say you could have bought the Mercedes Benz Company in Weimar Germany for 50 ounces of gold–But then of course, you would be owning it through the Hitler regime a few years later.
#48 Robert Mathiesen–
I had that same premonition! Mine had both Trump and Biden dying of undeniably natural causes about 2 weeks before the elections, and seemed to be linked to the image of an empty pair of white leather slippers that belonged to Pope John Paul I — You may remember him as the politically-well-connected nice guy, and elderly candidate who died 33 days after being appointed Pope. At the time, there was talk that the College of Cardinals had bungled their selection when they picked JP1. It probably took some courage to step up to the plate as the next Pope after that, but JP2 seemed to do a pretty good job. If this were all being played out in China, I would say that neither Trump nor Biden have the Mandate of Heaven. Someone will get the Mandate of Heaven–Should be interesting to find out who…
Hi Everyone,
I’ve never listened to, or watched the entire Ring Cycle, apart from of course, Ride of the Valkyries.
But, I am now the proud owner of 2 use DVD sets, one the Bayreuth 1980 production; I have watched part one (as I do some cross stitch backstitching – I never sit down to watch anything unless I have a handcraft as well).
I also got the Met version and I managed to find a used set of the Solti recordings, which is still in transit to me.
I also got a used 1976 hard back of the first two parts, with the illustrations by Arthur Rackham, and in transit is the Saga of the Volsungs book.
Do I sound keen enough? hehe
I do remember that the Ring Cycle was staged here in Adelaide a couple of times
https://adelaideaz.com/articles/2014-ring-cycle-a-triumph-for-keeping-alive-city-s-19th-century-opera-spirit
With regards to the “Mythic Quality” of this moment in history, Walter Kirn certainly thinks so and is on fire in this podcast of Racket News with Matt Taibi, at day 3 of the RNC convention.
For those interested it’s a fun listen, I’ve just finished it , while working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U38iwvu9smE
Grab your popcorn!
Regards, Helen in Oz
This essay came at the right time, I have to admit, as I’ve been thinking about the unseen ramifications and synchronicities surrounding the attempt on Trump, and it does seem like this will be yet another legend with a grim conclusion, despite its protagonist being revered for his heroic deeds. Or perhaps it is his own perception of his deeds that begets his hubris – and if there is one word today that describes the Western civilization perfectly it’s “hubris”. I think the Russians, Iranians and Chinese have a few words to say about that. 😉
Nonetheless, the reason why I bring this up is that I keep thinking about the iconic photo of Trump with his fist raised and the US flag behind him, if for no other reason that the flag is actually depicted in reverse, upside down. I think this detail alone has some implications that may go over the heads of both democrats and republicans, but my interpretation is that reflects the last hurrah of a once mighty empire, and its last self-proclaimed hero is seemingly unaware that he is no longer living in its golden years, nor can such years ever return; so, my apologies to my friends in the United States, but no, America will never be made great again, and the detail of that photo might be a subtle reminder by forces beyond…
This makes it especially sad to see both the American left and right becoming seemingly enchanted (or perhaps cursed) by the events of last Saturday, projecting into Trump either the image of the savior or the devil incarnate. This left/right conflict is both sad and puzzling, as neither side has the notion to understand that they comprise two absolutes of the same political sphere. You know, I have been slowly reading the Doctrine of High Magic and have been meditating quite a bit about the first chapter, and this false dichotomy between left-wing and right-wing liberalism of what Levi says about the form being proportional to the Verb: how sheath’s length matches the sword, how the visible is a manifestation of the invisible. The people invested into the political sphere of the Western world seemingly don’t realize that they are not, in fact, opposite forces, but rather part of the same playing field, operating under the same foundations, but playing different roles. It’s telling that the right is considered “reactionary”: emphasis on the root “reaction”. That is the right’s role: to simply react as the designated bad guy to the left.
All this goes back to the image of the upside down US flag. It seems to me that the fall of the Western world will be especially harsh on the mental well-being of the political spectrum… At least the Russians had already resigned themselves to their fate by the time the USSR fell!
@ Chris at Farmglade “I heard an old timer sheep farmer once suggesting that it was wisdom to keep ten sheep, when you can feed ten sheep.”
Reminds me of a Hindu saying “Don’t make friends with an elephant trainer if you don’t have room for an elephant in your living room”.
Dear JMG,
I am inclined to think, that the future of Europe will be Muslim. They will preserve the basics of human society. ISIS only flourishes with an American base nearby, so I’m not afraid of Islamic terrorism.
One recurring thought about the Indo-European success is: taming the horse, and riding it (the technological angle) is barely half of the truth. My guess is, the real advantage was the ability to name the relatives. And even earlier: the vanishing of the Neanderthals has nothing to do with some ice age. They survived at least two. My take: contact with Homo Sapiens destroyed their societal structures.
JMG #18: Well, when I’ve written that I love happy endings, I was being indeed ironic!
I’m going to tell you a good joke I read in my country legacy media (always so subservient to “Democrat” US media lately): Trumps failed “execution” was ordered by…Iran.
How do they can lie so grossly?
@JMG and @Robert M #30
Regarding California being different: As a child in the early 1960s, I regularly watched Disney’s Zorro series on TV in the Midwest. Many years later, I got to thinking, where was that? When? I didn’t have a clue.
Even in the Disney version, California seemed a very different place than the rest of the U.S.
I have not watched TV here in France for a few years, but l remember grainy reruns of Zorro being a regular staple. What’s that about, anyone?
Footage of Biden stepping onto Air Force 1 with COVID recently appeared. Nobody, including the coofer-in-chief, was wearing a mask.
Hi John,
Fantastic post! I definitely need to geek out on Wagner opera!
In regards to your Augustus comment are you able to expand on that?
Regarding Europe’s future have you seen the news that Germany is cutting its plans to support Ukraine and the promised rearmament of it’s army.
For all the talk European armies remain feeble, struggle to recruit and keep soldiers and are generally in dire straits.
Exceptions are the Swiss, the Greeks and Turks, Finns and to a degree the French and Swedes.
Good morning everyone,
If this strays too far off topic I trust JMG will trashcan it, but with an eye toward the myth-in-the-making feel of current events:
There’s a video making the rounds of a group of kids in Uganda re-enacting the assassination attempt.
https://worldstar.com/videos/wshhW7BQo7mTwxh77274/ugandan-children-re-create-donald-trumps-assassination-attempt-on-tiktok
Do note that this can’t be taken to mean that Trump has captured the imagination of kids around the world. There seems to be a minor industry of people in Africa creating custom videos for online customers, i.e. pay the fee and tell them what you want and they’ll send you back a charming low-budget video shortly. Usually a happy birthday song and dance or something. They look like the turnaround time is about ten minutes. So probably this one was commissioned by someone in the US, I would guess at a higher than usual rate, and probably it was much more like work, or forced labor, than play for the kids.
Though to me that context makes it even spookier as a glimpse of the moment we’re in.
Jonathan.
As for the future of Europe, I have a few observations:
1) Google a map of Muslim baby names in France in 2022, you will see in the biggest cities a plurality of babies are born to Muslim parents. In parts of Paris it exceeds 50%.
Assuming that trend continues over the next 15 years or so, sometime around 2030 I expect around 50% of all new births to be Muslim in the biggest cities (Paris, Lyon and Marsailles).
So, when these children becoming adults, and specifically young men, will be on the 2040s.
Factor in illegal young men/boys, and the % of young men who are Muslim in the biggest cities including the capital of France(!) could exceed 50% by the late 2040s.
This is why my basecase remains a collapse of Europe in the 2040s. With the next decade being a economic depression and wars.
As for the Muslim armed invasions into Europe, again, climate change and water scarcity suggests the 2040s given large parts of the Middle East and North Africa become increasingly inhospitable to large scale human life next decade.
>who had nothing to lose once the rule of law collapsed by slitting their masters’ throats
I remember someone who was helping these high net worth people set up bunkers saying something like “It would be much more effective to guarantee a mercenary squad their children’s college education than to do what they’re doing”
I dunno. Some of the people who make it to that level do know how to lead and inspire people (*cough* Trump *cough*). I suspect those kind will make it. One of the things that impressed me early about The Orange One was he instinctively understood that it’s critical to take care of the guys actually pulling the triggers. I wince at how little most of the current status quo elite seem to care for the guys who actually have to go make the stuff they want to happen. Or how little common points of reference they have to them. They can’t even talk to them.
>Other Owen, the president we deserve? Gods, I hope now — then we’ll really be in for it
What is it they say about compromises? The outcome is that everyone’s unhappy with it? It sounds like Kamala would make the perfect compromise. Nobody likes her, nobody would be happy.
Quinn
I’d like to make a prayer request for Bridget, the mother of my son’s girlfriend, who is unconscious and under sedation in hospital after a fall from her horse. Whenever the doctors try to reduce the sedation apparently the pressure on her brain increases. Latest news today is that she is ‘beginning to respond’. This comes at a crucial time as the doctors have been started to talk about the possibility of ‘letting her go.’ I asked through my son if the family would like prayers and his girlfriend has said yes.
All prayers for Bridget to be blessed and healed and returned to full health would be most gratefully received.
Thank you in advance to all who feel to respond, for this community, for Qiun and for our host JMG.
Falling Tree Woman
John–
I understand that Geburah is just as holy a sephirah as Chesed and is required for the appropriate balance; also that the breakdown that occurs as a cycle moves from its manvantara phase into the subsequent pralaya is a necessary thing. My “greater self” understands all this; nonetheless, my “lesser self” is profoundly disturbed and wonders how an individual within a doomed civilization, as the European project has seemed to have been, can find a sense of meaning and purpose, particularly in the breakdown phase that becomes increasingly characterized by bloodshed and violence.
Odysseus survived because his requirements were modest, and Ithaca was a small, relatively poor kingdom; and his one desire was to get back to his wife and son. He had no desire to take part in any more wars of conquest or to be a big wheel in Mycenae. Also,he was a fox among some extremely stupid warriors. .
David Kaiser weighs in on this and rakes the Establishment pols over the coals: Complete with pivot-point dates.
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-fall-of-demoratic-establishment.html
“A few weeks ago I read a detailed account of the Battle of the Bulge, and that was an epic clash of total horror. One of the lessons I took away from the account was that you could see that resupplying the forces was a tactical advantage. Hungry armies, or those facing a lack of ammunition and working equipment, are rarely successful.”
On the other side of the world see also the battles over Guadalcanal. Starvation Island as it became known to the Japanese. The multiple naval battles over it were pretty well matched, the Japanese had a slight lead if anything. But they could not keep the supplies coming, so the land forces withered away.
New Guinea was just as bad, this is from one of Adachi’s last letters.
“During the past three years of operations more than 100,000 youthful and promising officers and men were lost and most of them died of malnutrition. When I think of this, I know not what apologies to make to His Majesty the Emperor and I feel that I myself am overwhelmed with shame . . . . I have demanded perseverance far exceeding the limit of man’s endurance of my officers and men, who were exhausted and emaciated as a result of successive campaigns and for want of supplies. However, my officers and men all followed my orders in silence without grumbling, and, when exhausted, they succumbed to death just like flowers falling in the winds. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hataz%C5%8D_Adachi
While being in a dark frame of mind, I had the same thought about a Covid induced pillow applied to a certain old man. Trump’s campaign surge would be neutralized, Kamala is suddenly the incumbent with a huge sympathy vote, the Party has time for a restructuring while the media is willfully ignoring them and distracting the public with the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral. Oh, Kamala is eligible for two full terms of her own.
If you were a power-mad member of the elite who needed to keep the graft going as long as possible, what’s not to like?
The Orange Man once again misunderstood by the media which apparently can’t distinguish the difference between can’t and won’t on the subject of the USA stopping a Chinese take over of Taiwan. Part of Trump’s offensiveness to the liberal elite is stating upsetting truths – which is part of being a Change Agent. https://asiatimes.com/2024/07/trump-didnt-say-he-wouldnt-defend-taiwan/
@Thomas R.P. #73 I agree it’s a last hurrah for the American Empire, Rome had periods of revival and reorganization in its decline. Trump and Vance and a reinvigorated Republican Party may effect one. The current prophetic word in the Christian circles I inhabit is an economic crisis followed by a spiritual and national revival for a season.
Ariel, yep. As a member of a minority religion, I’m all in favor of it!
Slithy, yes, that would make a great detail in the legends.
Pyrrhus, well, we’ll see. He seems to be on track to become emperor, which has certain advantages in that context.
Kimberly, yes, that’s correct. The virginity thing is very much part of the old Germanic legends, though Wagner didn’t use it — sexual love was too central to his revolutionary vision back when he was writing the libretto. More on this as we proceed! As for Lockwood, no, I wasn’t familiar with him. Hmm!
Guillem, no, you don’t sound ridiculous. Something very strange has been happening since Saturday. When I have more of a handle on it, I’ll post something over on Dreamwidth.
Croatoan, exactly! Oral tradition has its limits, and storytelling is among other things a very carefully honed technology for getting essential information past those limits.
Warburton, thank you for this. As for the power of the written word, yes — it’s quite common in societies in which literacy is rare for the written word to have magical power all by itself. Once literacy becomes widespread, that tends to fade.
Sean, hmm! Thank you for this; I’ve just put Worms on the list of places I want to visit someday. We’ll be talking about Parsifal and Wolfram von Eschenbach quite a bit in due time.
Claire58, I forgot that, didn’t I? The Vorspiel to Act I of The Valkyrie has the right feeling of crisis and impending doom.
Christophe, thank you. I’ve read a lot of traditional epids, and tried to copy the blithe disregard for historic fact that makes them such a delight to read! As for Elvis, nah, I already gave him his future apotheosis (of a sort) in Star’s Reach — and the sooner that wretched rodent gets fed to a terrier, the better.
Martin, nah, Biden’s too bland. Senile blustering just doesn’t have what it takes to make the leap into epic literature. Obama, on the other hand, already got turned into the hero of a cheap barbarian comic book series:
So he might have what it takes.
E. Goldstein, put it into your incarnation planner — get reborn to hear Biden/Trump legends, or something like that.
Helen, a fellow geek! Welcome! (Makes secret Wagner sign with hands) 😉
Thomas, I ain’t arguing. You’re aware, I trust, that flying the flag upside down is a maritime signal indicating that your ship is in trouble…
MorePain, simple demographics makes that inevitable. That’s one of the reasons why getting out seems sensible; it’s not terrorism that would concern me, it’s religious intolerance and Sharia law.
Chuaquin, well, they’re not going to come right out and admit that it was the self-proclaimed “good guys,” now are they?
Justin, well, of course! Masks are for hoi polloi.
Forecasting, J.D. Vance is a likely Augustus. He’s young, he’s ambitious, he’s got close connections with the rising economic class of tech entrepreneurs, and he’ll probably be president by 2028. As for Europe, well, yes. I gather that the German government has realized just how badly Ukraine is losing.
Jonathan, yeah, I noticed that. Have you seen the Japanese anime about the shooting? That was also out within a day or two.
Forecasting, exactly. Demographics is destiny.
Other Owen, Trump isn’t a member of the executive caste. His alignment is much closer to that of the rising tech oligarchy, and he depends on charisma rather than hierarchical position, so yes, he knows how to lead. The executive caste doesn’t — they know how to give orders, but not how to inspire loyalty. That’s why they’re doomed.
David BTL, people have been trying to work out an answer to that question since the beginning of recorded history. It’s not an easy one and there doesn’t seem to be a single answer that fits all, or even most. Me, I focus on trying to see to it that at least a few of the things that matter to me get through the time of chaos into the hands of the future; it may not work for everyone but it works for me.
Patricia M, what you’re saying is that “Be like Odysseus!” is good advice to us nowadays. Gotcha. 😉 Thanks for the Kaiser link.
BeardTree, especially when they don’t want to understand him — they just want to make him go away so the kleptocratic party can continue.
Yesterday when I went to the record store with my cousin, visiting from California, before going out for burgers and coneys, I found the book “Wagner Returns” in the used book section of the music shop. It is by one Dr. Robert Leichtman. It claims to be a conversation with Wagner “conducted mediumistically. ” Though I’m skeptical of that claim, for 50 cents I thought I’d snatch it up. I took it as a sign that your reactivation of the strong magical chains around and running through the Ring are already working. Wagner Returns.
JMG- You write “ Rich people make plenty of mistakes in the decline and fall of civilizations, but one of the most reliable is that they try to safeguard their wealth by turning it into precious metal and hiding it.” So how did warlords or rich people accumulate wealth during the fall of civilization?
JMG- I should have asked, how did the rich or wealthy safeguard or preserve their wealth, not accumulate wealth.
Falling Tree Woman, I just wanted to let you know that your prayer request was heard, I’m adding it to the list now, and prayers will go out shortly.
As Bridget’s situation sounds quite serious, I’d like to invite any and all Ecosophians to join in on blessing her and sending good mojo her way.
All this discussion has called to mind Terry Pratchett’s Theory of Narrative Causality, first stated a little too boldly in the opening pages of his Witches Abroad (1991):
Stories are important.
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.
Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived, and they have grown fat on the retelling . . . stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.
This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.
This is why history keeps repeating all the time.
So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.
It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.
Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.
Pratchett restates this important insight a little more circumspectly and academically in his Katherine Briggs Memorial Lecture of 1999 before the Folklore Society (London), published as “Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories,” Folklore 111 (2000), pp. 159-168. I have uploaded it to archive.org so anyone can read it gratis. It’s well worth reading in times such as we’re living in now.
And of course Sallustius got there first: [A myth] “did not happen at any one time, but always is so.” ….. “Since the myth is so intimately related to the universe we imitate the latter in its order, for in what way coukd we better order ourselves?”
THE ORANGE MAN HAS FALLEN
AND A GLODEN HERO HAS RISEN
lol I need to make that a T-shirt.
Weirdly enough i looked up Orange is supposed to sand for:
Positive, creative and warm but also insincerity, superficial, and exhibitionism. Orange is his color. LOL
@Moserian
Zorro the TV series took place in Spanish California. Its is implied that it takes place near the city of Los Angeles, or as it was known at the time as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula.
The TV series did a good job in telling a Hollywood version of the events of Spanish California within the context of a family friendly TV show. Interesting note – the decedents of the Californios are still around to this day and are distinct in there culture from the Latino majority
“No doubt our current crop of precious metal fanciers will also find this out the hard way in due time.”
as well as JPM #3 and friends:
There’s something to this (intentionally) provocative comment, but I would not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Having some precious metal on hand *is* a good idea – this isn’t hypothetical, gold and silver are money and have been for thousands of years, and there are numerous instances where people ended up living better than they might have, because they owned some.
But agree with me or not as you like; there are plenty of other forums having this discussion.
What I really wanted to say about it was: I’ve learned the importance of not looking like you have money.
When I was a kid, I had relatives that lived in what I call “country estate” – meaning, an area some distance outside town, but not too far; where they live in well-to-do “farmhouses” but in practice most people have PMC jobs or similar money; acreages, horses, vacations, etc.
At some point in my life, I developed the idea that you could achieve this lifestyle “on the cheap” by accumulating money and then moving to the middle of nowhere.
But it turns out this is a bad idea, in a collapsing society, because rest assured everyone else in the neighbourhood has you pegged as the local “rich guy”. Best not to stand out. Be seen working with your hands. And so forth.
Oh and if you’re going to own gold, never tell anyone.
Justin, mediums with musical talent get into that sort of thing sometime. I wonder if this one did a better job than most of them.
Joshua, most biographies of dark age warlords end with something along the lines of “and then he and all his warriors were slaughtered, and his kingdom was wiped off the map.” Wealth preservation is impossible in dark age conditions. That’s why economic recovery after the fall of a civilization doesn’t even start to happen until governments strong enough to enforce the rule of law are reestablished — a process that routinely takes several centuries.
Robert, Pratchett may have been exaggerating a little but he wasn’t wrong…
Dobbs, in Cabalistic terms he’s risen from the sphere of Hod, which is symbolically orange, to the sphere of Tophareth, which is symbolically golden. Hod is the sphere of the trickster, the wheeler-dealer, the communicator; Tiphareth is the sphere of the hero-king, the dying and resurrected one, the Lord of the Golden Age. I have no idea how well Trump will embody that — it’s an immense burden — but several people who’ve spoken to him since the assassination attempt have said that he sounds like a different person.
Bofur, the problem is that you can’t use your gold or silver without everyone knowing that you have some. The rest of your comment, though, is spot on — living as though you make a lot less money than you do is a very sensible move in troubled times.
Not unrelatedly, I recently learned about the infamous Black Act of 1723, worth knowing about:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Act_1723
“… was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. It was passed in 1723 in response to a series of raids against landowners by two groups of poachers, known as the Blacks from their habit of blacking their faces when they undertook the raids…
The legal rights of suspects and defendants under this Act were strictly limited. For example, suspects who did not surrender within 40 days could be summarily judged guilty and sentenced to execution, so that if they were apprehended at a later date they could be executed without delay. Villages were punished if they failed to find, prosecute and convict alleged criminals.
The Act originated in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble collapse and the ensuing economic downturn. The Blacks quickly demonstrated both “a calculated programme of action, and a conscious social resentment”, and their activities led to the introduction of the Black Act to Parliament on 26 April 1723. The Act came into force on 27 May and introduced the death penalty for over 350 criminal offences,including being found disguised in a forest and carrying a weapon.”
Well, then.
“I expect Trump to die in office, or not long after stepping down, and become the focus of a hero cult. “
I’m imagining devotees marking themselves with the tips of their right ears slit or sliced off…
Minor correction: Aëtius was assassinated by emperor Valentinian himself.
The 25-second Japanese anime retelling is… right in line with the archetypal spirit of the post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk8R0kg3DY
I have no idea what they’re saying, but at a glance it looks like *the Spirit of America* standing behind Trump reaches out and catches the bullet.
Anybody more conversant with Japanese anime culture want to take a swing at interpretation?
This is an incredibly detailed analysis of the generation of mythical lore in pre-Christian Europe. I am astounded by the sheer variety of sources from which characters were dragged in to the play. I recently discovered a disquisition on Daniel’s prophecies by Isaac Newton (the Physicist). He made a study of history with the intention of identifying the political entities corresponding to the entities in Daniel’s visions. He enumerated the events following the fall of Western Rome, and mentioned Gundaric there. Its an interesting synchronicity, because I came across the name in that book within a day of reading this article. I wonder what that means – that there is something important that I need to learn which dates from the period of the fall of Western Rome, perhaps?
I am a bit curious about whether Wotan in the Nibelung’s Ring is the same God as the Wotan mentioned in the eponymous work by C. G. Jung. The king tasking Jotun to build up his castle seems to be at a great remove from the vicious harbinger of war and death riding his chariot through the sky, trailed by a lamenting horde of ghosts in his wake.
For Roman Empire parallels with the American Empire, Trump and J.D. Vance are more like the Severan dynasty than Caesar and Augustus. Julius Caesar and Augustus were leaders of Rome when the Roman Empire was still expanding, while the Severan dynasty beginning with Septimus Severus ruled at the initial stages of the collapse of the Roman Empire, after the Year of the 5 Emperors. Since the American empire is collapsing right now, any future leaders of America will have more in common with the Severan dynasty than the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Bofur, European writers at that time liked to characterize the British governmental system as an aristocratic republic like Venice, in which the upper classes alone had political rights and the lower classes were little more than serfs. They weren’t far off.
Jonathan, it’s not impossible!
Michaelz, so noted.
Methylethyl, I’m not, but that’s what it looked like to me, too.
Rajarshi, propagandists for science have spent the last couple of centuries trying to hide the fact that Isaac Newton devoted more time to Bible prophecy than he did to physics, so I’m glad you were able to find that. I’m not sure what to make of the synchronicity. As for Wotan, no, Wagner’s Wotan is a fictional character — one of the great characters of European literature — but he shares only a name and some symbolic details with the far more terrible figure of German myth and legend.
Richard, history rhymes but it doesn’t repeat. We’ve still got a republic, more or less, and the rise of Caesarism is a feature of the collapse of a republic, irrespective of the presence or absence of an empire.
“…several people who’ve spoken to him since the assassination attempt have said that he sounds like a different person.” This is what interests me. His son said he tore up a divisive and polarizing speech he had planned for the first day of the convention and wanted to be more of a unifier going forward. It would be ironic if the attempt to kill him turned him into a statesman.
I’ll keep everyone posted on the contents of the book… but these “gems” should suffice to get a flavor of the spirit Robert R. Leichtman has allowed to come through. Judging from some of the questions Leichtman asks, “Wagner’s” spirit seems to share similar opinions as the medium. I guess this is another example of where the medium is the massage ; )
“The majority of rock and roll music is disruptive and has a negative influence on people. It is violent music which churns the emotions of those listening to it to the point where they begin to have a physical response and behave in violent ways.”
“I can appreciate some aspects of country and western because it deals with real people and real problems. But the music itself is unimaginative.”
“Disco music on the other hand, is rather artificial. It has no message or anything – just a rapid beat and crisp sound. It basically helps you short circuit your brain so you can be foolish for a couple of hours… Disco dancing is only a modern revival of primitive tribal dances designed to generate animal lust through the hypnotic rhythm of the drums – with flashing lights thrown in to enhance the effect”
–“Richard Wagner” in Wagner Returns
(I’ll still read it… there might be some actual real gems of worth… : )
“No duh! department: people actually speaking of the elephant in the room.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/15/us-economy-slowdown-economic-sentiment?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
From Business Insider, paywalled: “J.D. Vance has some ideas on how to get Americans to have more babies.”
Re: legends mixing periods with glorious abandon – when I read that bit in Star’s Reach where Trey conflates Odysseus with Dizzy Gillespie and maps the epic onto the map of Meriga as “Detroit MI to Ithaca NY, I liked Trey’s version a lot better than Plummer’s correction, because it made a much better story.
@KemV #98 – the same is true in Northern New Mexico. They speak an archaic dialect of Spanish and claim descent from the Conquistadores, and disparage the Mexican newcomers. New Mexico isn’t just a Southwestern state, it’s Hispanic through and through, despite the regional differences within the state.
And -JMG – another archetype is attached to Tipareth and features in mythology: the Sacrificial King whose blood revitalizes the land. Or saves the day, whether as a warrior king who gives his life in battle, or as a martyr in whose name the people go forth, or rally around at the end.
P.S. Wouldn’t land be the one true wealth, as opposed to buried treasure?
It’s always a learning experience when I check out your blog, JMG. I was expecting to just skip over these entries as I don’t care for opera, but I can see there are comparisons to be made and lessons to be learned with the current situation, so I will read on with interest!
An earlier reference was made to the Ingersoll Lockwood book called The Last President that many find predictive of the Trump era. It is available online, along with the Barron Trump books.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9462
JMG (answer to Warburton ):” …it’s quite common in societies in which literacy is rare for the written word to have magical power all by itself. Once literacy becomes widespread, that tends to fade.”
Many American schools have abandoned teaching cursive writing, so I suppose cursive will take on magical qualities?
The events of the past weekend have certainly lifted up Trump beyond both his supporters’ wildest dreams and his enemies most fearful nightmares. The far left are scrambling to deal with it, even coming up with conspiracy theories on par with those said to be produced by the far right. Joy Reid whines that they haven’t produced the bullet that de-tipped Trump’s ear, that it could have been “glass fragments…” .
https://www.foxnews.com/media/joy-reid-questions-trumps-injuries-suggests-could-have-been-glass-hit-former-president
Another weird thought that came to me as I watched the news reports. For some reason, Revelation 13:3, a verse believed by many to refer to the Antichrist, popped into my head; “One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast.” (NIV) ) A short commentary ends with “However this plays out in the real world, the entire world will marvel at the revival of the Roman Empire or at the head of the empire.”
https://www.bibleref.com/Revelation/13/Revelation-13-3.html
I could see the anti-Trumpers using this to frighten people, but I’ve heard they can’t meme. Plus those who are devoted Christians wouldn’t accept their interpretation. I want to note that I don’t interpret this verse that way, but just saw the possibility of it being used as such.
Interesting times!
Joy Marie
Hi John,
Vance sounds a bit like FDR, who was also a Ceasar type leader back in the 1930s.
If you are right, and I suspect you are, it looks highly likely that us Europeans will be on our own after President Vance gets elected in 2028/29.
If I was Putin I would wait for the Americans to exit NATO before moving in for the kill.
That nicely paves the way for what I suspect to be the era of wars across the periphery of Europe e.g. the Balkans and eastern Europe before the full disintegration of Europe unfolds in the 2040s and the rise of Islamic forces across western Europe, both internally and via external waves of armed invasions.
As I live near France it feels like history will repeat itself and, just as in the late 1930s, the ultra rich and the v perceptive quietly fled the island I’m based as the German threat became ever more dangerous.
I’ve always thought that the next big European war will unfold roughly 100 years after the last one, making the mid 2040s the key point.
But, I suspect the late 2030s will be the last good opportunity to leave Europe before the rush.
I’ve looked at Antigua as a plausible option via the golden visa option. It’s safe, English speaking, stable, nice climate, good connections with the UK and US, a decent economy and has plenty of British expats so should feel at home. St Kitts is also an option along with St Lucia. All have viable and affordable golden visa schemes for those with a bit of capital.
I like a lot Wagner and your series of articles about the Cycle of the Ring John, thanks!
I think most of metaphysical stories are, in fact tragedies; the myths of most cultures are formed around some kind of tragedies, were the conflict nature of being is exposed full of messages, many of then around the danger of fall into “hybris”; for people, tribes or kingdoms/societies.
The case of the modern myths in US, full of happy end and full time heroes and villains, is a poor boring simplification, and will not survive too much, and I think is consequence of the predestinationists roots of at least part of your culture/religion, and also a propaganda tool for the masses.
Brunechildis/Brunnhilde story reminds me the Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, her revenge against Agamemnon when he returned from Troy with Cassandra as his concubine.
After murdering Agamemnon Clytemnestra, drenched in blood, defiantly, went out of the Mycenae palace and talk to the curious and affraid people around her and said:
“To me this hour was dreamed of long ago;
A thing of ancient hate. ‘Twas very slow
In coming, but it came. And here I stand
Even where I struck, with all the deed I planned
Done! ‘Twas so wrought–what boots it to deny?–
The man could neither guard himself nor fly.
An endless web, as by some fisher strung,
A deadly plenteousness of robe, I flung
All round him, and struck twice; and with two cries
His limbs turned water and broke; and as he lies
I cast my third stroke in, a prayer well-sped
To Zeus of Hell, who guardeth safe his dead!
So there he gasped his life out as he lay;
And, gasping, the blood spouted … Like dark spray
That splashed, it came, a salt and deathly dew;
Sweet, sweet as God’s dear rain-drops ever blew
O’er a parched field, the day the buds are born! …
Which things being so, ye Councillors high-born,
Depart in joy, if joy ye will. For me,
I glory. Oh, if such a thing might be
As o’er the dead thank-offering to outpour,
On this dead it were just, aye, just and more,
Who filled the cup of the House with treacheries
Curse-fraught, and here hath drunk it to the lees!”
The characters of the tragedies os Aeschylus are gigantic, colossal, they are real archetypes, but few as Clytemnestra:
“So there he gasped his life out as he lay;
And, gasping, the blood spouted … Like dark spray
That splashed, it came, a salt and deathly dew;
Sweet, sweet as God’s dear rain-drops ever blew
O’er a parched field, the day the buds are born! ..”
And then, as Aristophanes thought, the rationalistic Euripides destroyed the deep unconscious strength of the Attic Tragedy, as also the (still) wagnerian Nietzsche wrote in his essay “The Origin of Tragedy” (1871).
Cheers
David
“the problem is that you can’t use your gold or silver without everyone knowing that you have some”
To be sure, under some scenarios. I just would rather have a little, than none. Anyway, enough.
“living as though you make a lot less money than you do is a very sensible move”
It’s literally (one of the) reasons I am not buying a new car. My neighbours know I am a PMCer in theory but I’m certain they consider me an eccentric, weird one. (Fair and flattering, I say!) I intentionally cultivate an understated image, not wishing to be known as that guy who was snobby during the Good Old Days.
“European writers at that time liked to characterize….”
I’m sure. What struck me about it was the notion that economic collapse following the South Sea bubble was bad enough to produce marauders roaming the woods.
Roldy, fascinating. That does sound like a Tiphareth sort of thing to do.
Justin, par for the course, then. Did “Wagner” compose any music for this guy? Channeled compositions from dead composers have earned a reputation for being complete dogs. As Swami Beyondananda liked to say, “Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they’re smart.”
Patricia M, good. It’s finally starting to sink in through the yard-thick skulls of the elite that we really are in trouble. I’m glad you liked that bit from Star’s Reach — when Trey came out with that I giggled. As for land, sure, if you can hold onto it…
Joy, delighted to hear it. Me, I’m glad to see cursive writing go the way of the diplodocus — as a left-hander with autism I could never do it at all, and it caused me endless misery in my school days.
Forecasting, you may not need to wait that long. Trump isn’t exactly eager to keep propping up NATO at American expense, you know, and if Europe has to start paying for its own defense, expect to see massive unrest as the social welfare system gets gutted to pay for guns.
DFC, the tale of the curse of the House of Atreus is one of the great grim tales of Greek legendry. Do you recall the scene in the same play where Cassandra sees the curse crouching on the roof of Agamemnon’s palace? It’s a brilliant piece of writing.
Bofur, there were marauders in the British woods pretty much continuously from the dissolution of the monasteries onwards. Every Enclosure Act that forced people off their land produced another crop of them. They had different names in different periods, but it wasn’t until well into the Victorian era when systematic rural policing finally got rid of the last of them.
Mr. Greer, re. that ‘Barack the Barbarian’ comic cover/issue.. well, all l can say, is that the body don’t jive with the head! Perhaps Big Mike… but Obama.. No Fraken Wayyyy!
And, for The Other Owen # 38.. ‘competent farming’ ?? Well, when the NEXT panic induced de’jour happens, say … BIRD FLU!- OMG!!!! … ‘competent farming’, as such, will be reduced to those of us ‘god’s gardeners – who STILL know how to grow something, if, on an illegal basis .. Anything! the old way .. without Hyper-Corpserate imputs!
But of course, as per the rather prescient Margaret Atwood.. who’s MaddAdam trilogy in my estimation, hold mucho cred.. the bestest that Corporate can buy(up).. will accellerate their utmost into forcing the plebes into CONSUMING the likes of ‘soydines’, ‘chickinobs’ .. and ‘secret burgers’ and wot-not.. to our still- barely beating middle-class heart’s content. THAT’$ assuming the Corps-se-Corps don’t getcha first!
Hello JMG
Does the astrology you’ve studied have anything to say about this assassination attempt?
SMJ
JMG, apologies for continually jumping in for prayer stuff, but: To any who pray for others in our community, three quite serious prayers have just been added to the Ecosophia prayer list– one of which, I’m very sorry to see, was urgent but a few days old, and I hope everything is fine there. Just to try to get some more eyes on them I am sharing them all here.
•May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget, who is unconscious and under continuous sedation after a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
•May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
•May young Azalea Troung of California, who recently had a life threatening reaction to the initial antibiotic applied for a finger bone infection, resolve her reaction without lasting issue; may the infection be completely cleared from her body; and may her family, including those physically separated from her, be strengthened against fear and dread.
Destiny – isn’t that “just” a fancy word for saying “karma (both individual and collective) piled up to such amounts that a stream of force seems to be guiding the actors like an invisible hand”? There have been questions popping up on recent Magic Mondays on what to do if somebody doesn’t have a destiny. I guess, if this is truly the case and what I said above is at least roughly correct, that this is a good opportunity to use the calm to work on creating one’s own destiny, for example by cultivating qualities that makes one available for the fateful events that are so often attributed to destiny at work?
But the part of “destiny” that frequently makes me scratching my head is the apparent unconsciousness of the actors affected by destiny. The Nibelungen Saga is a good example, of course. I remember reading an adaptation for children / young adults back when I was one. I was fascinated but on so many times I raised my eyebrows and said “why on earth did you just do that? It was so obvious that this step would be a bad idea…” The same applies to so many historical events, be it the NS-era and WWII, C-19 or maybe the current DT-era. People seem to be out of their minds and I if I had to make a guess I’d say that the karmic forces at work are of such an intensity that it goes beyond the capabilities of the affected individuals to perceive and steer anymore?
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
The article is very interesting background to the Nibelung cycle, and I am really glad to see that this series of posts is going to be what the professional-menagerial jargon calls a deep dive. Given that the historic events and characters inspiring the Nibelungenlied and the Volsungasaga to me appear to be somewhat marginal, I was wondering: did they have any specific significance that captured the imagination of the poets who then turned them into literal legends? Or is the process of selecting which historical fragments will serve as seeds for crystallisation into myth largely random?
Very much looking forward to the next installment!
Wee nitpick:
Flavius Aetius, the last capable commander the western Roman empire ever had
Majorian and Ricimer might have a word to say about that.
Patricia Matthews @ 110:
From Business Insider, paywalled: “J.D. Vance has some ideas on how to get Americans to have more babies.”
Would those ideas include making cost of living cheaper for young families? Rent controls? Price controls on necessary commodities? No more foreign ownership of American RE?
I think NATO should not be dissolved, only its’ purpose reoriented towards peaceful use of the warming Arctic. Even now, I think the NATO countries and Russia could enforce a peaceful use treaty, similar to what we now have vis a vis Antarctica. I suspect worries about Arctic access, not just fear of Russia, are what underly the recent decisions by Finland and Sweden to join.
JMG, oh, sure, but I thought the double meaning of “no masks” was kind of funny – whether or not Biden really has the coof, Biden exiting stage left from it is certainly funny!
Could one of the faults in those cultures featuring some form of Siegfried be that it’s only a good thing if Siegfried wins a limited victory? I’ve had an idea for a children’s book knocking around in my head for a decade or so – a child is killed by wolves in the first act. In the second act, the men of the village all engage in posturing and puffery, pretending to be the one who will slaughter the most wolves, burn their forest to the ground, and so on and so forth.
In the end, wisdom prevails, and although everybody is sad about Timmy’s passing, people are reminded that the price of admission to this mortal plane is submitting to self-regulation by other mortals, including wolves.
If I put all of your books on the same shelf, it would be full, but I have only read about 4/5. I’ve read ‘all’ the ADR and for years most of the comments. How? I was stealing the time do my art, and this worked for me..
This is really good stuff JMG, perhaps your best work.
Shouldn’t a channeled Wagner be speaking German and not fluent English? Did Wagner speak English at all? I suspect not. I’d take the channeled message seriously if it was translated from German that sounded like it was from the 19th c. Even if the source was fake, at least they were putting in some work or demonstrating something that required work to pull off.
I mean if some Russian were to channel me 100 years from now, I’d be speaking Murican English and nothing else.
Polecat, oh, granted, but I thought it was funny.
SMJ, the form of mundane astrology I do predicts general trends, not specific incidents. Most of what it predicts right now is that the US is in deep trouble and neither of the big parties really has a clue about how to cope with it.
Quin, no problem. These are urgent.
Nachtgurke, nah, destiny is the pull of the future, fate/karma is the burden of the past. Everyone has a destiny in the overall scale of things, but any given life may or may not have a specific purpose — sometimes our lives are just a matter of experiencing certain things and coping with them. As for people being out of their minds, yep — ultimately, human beings are not that smart, and when we get caught up in our own bad karma we routinely do stupid things like, oh, letting ourselves be injected with inadequately tested experimental drugs.
Soko, whether it’s random or not, who can say? Certainly it’s not the most important events that get that treatment, though.
Strda221, yes, I figured you’d pop in to champion some of the other candidates. 😉
Justin, well, there’s that. I keep on thinking of the line from the play The King in Yellow:
Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Cobo, glad you like it!
>Would those ideas include making cost of living cheaper for young families? Rent controls? Price controls on necessary commodities? No more foreign ownership of American RE?
Or even most important, stabilizing the economy so you can plan out at least 5 years? I was never able to plan more than 3 months ahead. And the idea of forming a family when I had no idea what the end of the year would look like seemed like suicide to me.
I think this country has become one of the most family hostile places on the planet anyway. They just don’t want you having kids here.
I got to wondering what the old stories might have sounded like in the old languages. So I found on youtube some clips of people speaking languages like Norse, old English, proto Celtic, ancient Latin, ancient Greek, some North American, ancient Semitic, Hittite, some ancient Asian languages. No idea if these are on or off the mark but I thought they were were interesting. Link is below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc22W3bos64&t=6s
Vance becoming Trump’s political heir makes sense. But what about Trump’s actual heir Barron? He’s 18 years old, 6’9″ has his mother’s looks and almost nothing is known about him.
By the way the wife and i predicted that Trump would pick Vance solely on the basis of how the names sound together – TrumpVance. It sounds like a portmanteau of Triumph and Advance.
methylethyl, JMG
The anime clip in question is a reference to the manga and animated series “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure”, which is known for its extravagant character designs, bombastic dialogue and unique battles, where characters fight using manifestations of their psyches called “Stands”. The dialogue in the clip is simply snippets from the animated version and doesn’t hold much significance.
What IS interesting though is the names of Stands: early on, they were named after major arcana in the Tarot combined with a color or metal. In one of the earlier stories, the protagonist’s Stand power is called “Star Platinum”, named after, well, the Star arcana, and the scene at the end of the clip is a reference to when he shows this power for the first time, by shooting himself with a gun and having the Stand catch it.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that the Star is quite representative of Trump in his current state, real or projected… 🤔
Wonderful eye-opening stuff, as it so often is, JMG. And good job, commentariat, for the insights and questions you bring to the fore. I hear B-flat minor chords ringing in the distance…
As for the deep mythological meaning of what’s going on in the present, there may be some wise one in a grove somewhere who has a clue, but if I were him I wouldn’t be saying anything. Anyhow, as far as I’m concerned, it’s too early to draw conclusions.
On the 15th, the day after the fateful day for #45, Mars was conjunct Uranus and Algol in Taurus. Algol represents the heads of rulers (not usually in a good way). Mars is the lesser malefic, and Uranus represents greater disruption. Assuming I can say things so briefly and have them mean anything. The symbolism seems very nearly perfect, but then I’m not a mundane astrologer and am barely a natal astrologer. Given the speed of the planets and fixed stars involved, the day before was fully good enough for the effects to take hold. Then there are the efforts (not just in the US) to take out leaders and install more compliant sorts. Mr. Orban being just one.
Grab ahold of the handcar folks, and hold on tight to your popcorn. You might get a moment to gulp down a handful now and again.
https://babylonbee.com/news/donald-the-orange-returns-triumphantly-as-donald-the-white
This captures perfectly what happened last Saturday.
Funny thing is, it was written four years ago…
Speaking of invisibility,
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/booze-bandits-steal-5-000-worth-of-alcohol-from-ephrata-store/article_36f1a6b6-456c-11ef-818a-8f799e3ddda0.html
No one saw them, but they didn’t fool the camera. It was a very effective Someone Else’s Problem field.
@methyleryl #104 the he anime clip is based on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, an avant garde anime which deliberately used a contrarian artstyle that makes characters look absurdly ugly and masculine but gives them feminine traits like lush long locks.
The monologue from Trump is a direct quote from a character named Funny Valentine, who plays the role of POTUS in the seventh season of the anime. It says something like “I have no ill-will or deception. Everything I say comes from the purest of intentions”. In the anime the character is an antagonist, and these words are lies.
Characters in Jojo frequently make brutal comebacks, and seemingly vulnerable characters turn out to be hiding overwhelming power in the form of brute physical strength, or rapid reflexes. The clip shows Trump, an aged man caught mid-speech, nonetheless operating with the swiftness of three men as he grabs the bullet with his own hand.
That’s as far as I can tell. This is a kind of shallow humour that cracks Gen-Z up, but I am frankly too old and too out-of-touch with anime culture at this point to get it.
Hello JMG,
I see Forecasting – who presumably lives in the Channel Islands – #112 is trying to estimate when particular things will strike in the Long Descent, at least in Europe. I had hoped that things here would hold out until after 2050 when I will either be gone or too old to care, but that looks too optimistic now. Whether it’s the 2040’s – as Forecasting and the blogger Aurelian seem to think – the 2030’s or in the next few years seems to me just too contingent on chance events, as the Trump shooting showed. Do you have any thoughts on what would have happened if a bullet had found its target? My thinking was maybe a 50% chance of a rapid slide to civil war with the economies of the most indebted countries, including Britain and several others in Europe, quickly upended. Some in the UK press have speculated and would have expected only 1960’s style moderate unrest.
One thing I would add, if Forecasting #112 does not mind, is a comment on fleeing to small islands. I spent a little time studying sustainabilty issues in these back in my academic career. Small islands in tropical and temperate zones under say, 1000 km2, generally lack resources to supply even their current populations with adequate basic foods, energy, freshwater and waste disposal services, even when they are independent countries such as Malta or several in the Caribbean. These are largely bought in from elsewhere using income from rich inhabitants or tourism revenue. Under crisis conditions, especially if the international monetary system broke down, supplying such places which could be perceived as hideouts of the wealthy, might not be a priority. In fact, getting away from them might be a better idea.
A lot of people getting ahead of themselves here. I think that the attempted Trump assassination is not really a game changer, it’s just another outrageous incident in his endless WWE lifestyle of outrageous incidents. It’s too far before November to be electorally decisive anyway, especially given the churn of the contemporary media cycle. I will therefore make the counter-intuitive prediction that the assassination attempt will be forgotten far more quickly than most people expect.
I also think that if Biden drops out then any substitute will have a very good chance of beating Trump, even Kamala Harris. Just one good debate performance from her will mean that the game is back on. I should emphasize that Trump still only holds a 2% lead over Biden nationally. Having such a narrow lead over what is basically a zombie does not signal electoral impregnability.
President Kamala is far more likely than a lot of people here expect. If this happens, then far from becoming legendary, Trump himself will be forgotten very quickly. He will become another William Jennings Bryan or Barry Goldwater.
That of course would probably mean that America goes down the pan, but that will be a blessing for the rest of humanity anyway.
Hey JMG and kommentariat, we’re living interesting times! A bit off topic, maybe not, but today Friday, a catastrophical failure (oh) in Microsoft systems has caused a lot of trouble in a lot of countries, my own country included. In Spain, there’s been some flight cancelations and much delays in airlines…Well, “they” can always to blame Iranians or Russkies for its own incompetence…
Thoughts about it?
https://www.majorcadailybulletin.com/holiday/airport/2024/07/19/125853/palma-airport-mallorca-global-system-failure-causes-chaos.html
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/07/19/how-the-global-microsoft-it-outage-is-impacting-businesses-worldwide
Hi John Michael,
Have to laugh, you’ve made that joke about ‘upgrades’ a few times over the years, and it’s a goodie. 🙂 Looks like there was one baddie upgrade this week.
Just in case you were worried, the effects were so bad here, that I hadn’t even noticed. As a general rule, other than the website I run, I don’t store data on the cloud and don’t connect any infrastructure to the information superhighway that everyone seems excited about. There’s a lot to go wrong there.
Hey, we made a video a few days ago showing how we use the coffee grounds in the orchards and gardens. We’ve been using the all of the coffee grounds from a busy café in Melbourne for fifteen years to improve the soil fertility. Thought you and the readers may be interested. Using coffee grounds in the garden and orchard ep 3
Cheers
Chris
I sincerely hope that, along with Neil Armstrong and the Frog God, Hulk Hogan features a place in the Trump pantheon after last night’s speech and ringing endorsement of Trump. He’d fit in perfectly as a Hercules type figure best known for slaying giants.
There’s a dimension to the assassination attempt that I’ve not yet seen anyone discussing.
For some time now, the antics of what are referred to online as “gun grabbers” have been a reliable source of amusement. By which, I refer to folks who believe (or act as though they believe) that firearms are to modern society what sexuality was to the Victorians. Not only do these voices constantly spout meretricious nonsense that betrays utter failure to understand even basic firearms mechanics; that lack of understanding is a point of virtue and pride. They will attack and ridicule anyone who talks in detail about firearm physics.
It’s a comedy goldmine.
(One of the recurring jokes is Schrödingers AR-15:
Uniquely capable of unparalleled destruction, but useless to take on or defend against the government.)
What I find interesting just now is the same gun grabbers spouting meretricious nonsense theories about trump’s bullet wound, the shooting being faked, etc, etc.
On a side note, there’s been much chatter about the shooter wearing a t-shirt from Demolition Ranch.
For those unfamiliar with the YouTube firearms community, Demo Ranch is one of the oldest and most popular guntuber channels, more than a decade old with over 11 million subscribers. The owner is also a veterinarian, and his channel is completely apolitical; Matt is known as a genuinely wholesome family man who doesn’t even use curse words in his videos.
Guns have been assigned all sorts of weird and contradictory otherworldly properties by people who proudly know nothing about them, and actively despise anyone who finds guns in any way valuable.
It makes me wonder about mythical weapons such as Gram, Balmung, Nothung, and Excalibur.
For good or ill, guns seem to exert a profound sort of gravity in the pipeline of Imagination-to-Culture-to-Politics in America that defies and ridicules any attempt at amputation by Progressive Victorians.
I’ve been watching this through-line closer and closer in the last several years and I still don’t know entirely what to make of it. But it’s equal parts amusing and interesting, and I think it’s indicative of something profound that transcends the material plane.
I am of course biased; I unabashedly like distinctly American things, and this is something distinctly American.
Would love to hear JMG’s thoughts, as well as anyone else on the commentariat…
Smith, thanks for this.
AV, don’t forget Trump’s older sons. He’s got quite a collection of potential heirs. That said, Barron’s definitely one to watch. I saw a meme shortly after the assassination attempt — a photo of Barron looking very serious and a little dazed, with the caption, “You do know that this is how Bruce Wayne became Batman, right? Just saying…”
Thomas, thanks for this. Very interesting!
Clarke, that’s certainly a plausible interpretation.
Roy, oddly enough, I was thinking about that…
Siliconguy, funny. Thank you for this.
Robert M, good question. I don’t have any speculations to offer at the moment, other than that it would have clinched the process of making the next major counterculture in the US a right-wing populist movement, with Trump as its JFK.
Logan, your prediction is noted. Now we’ll see who’s right, won’t we?
Chuaquin, yet another example of the increasing fragility of overcentralized modern systems. See below…
Chris, I didn’t notice either, until I saw the squawking about it on the news this morning. The moral to this story? Minimize your dependence on overcentralized modern systems.
Dennis, oh, he’s got to be one of the God-Emperor’s other paladins. I didn’t watch, of course, but I saw a great still this morning of him ripping his shirt open to reveal a Trump-Vance tee shirt. Campy? Sure, but it was a good crowd-pleasing move.
SilcoRaab, I drew a slightly different conclusion from the explosion of left wing conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt. There’s a useful maxim in occult philosophy that runs, “what you contemplate, you imitate.” If you spend all your time hating somebody or something, you’re contemplating it, and that guarantees that you’re going to imitate it. The privileged left is in the process of turning into an exact equivalent of everything it hates most about the populist right, complete with BlueAnon conspiracy theories. As for guns as the equivalent of Gram and Durendal, of course — in America they’ve always had that aura. Here’s our equivalent of Arthur brandishing Excalibur:
Logan Jones, I agree that a President Harris is more likely than many realize. I would also agree with you about non importance of the assassination attempt if the President had done what he should have done and demanded that the head of the Secret Service resign. Or simply fired her on the spot. Instead, he is seen as at the very least tolerating incompetence when it happens to be female. I don’t believe firing of the SS head would have hurt Biden with female voters because too many of us have been insulted and injured by simpering and sneering PMC incompetents. Remember how Gov. Palen was going to bring in women’s votes for the Republican ticket? What Palin represented to many of us was the vapid looker who gets promoted over the heads of hard working women everywhere.
Harris has been granted honorary Black American status which is more important than one might think. What that status means is activists all across the country, who are used to operating on their own dimes and don’t really need corporate sponsorship, uniting to get their people registered and to the voting booth. That may not be sufficient to elect Harris, but it may well mean a reelected President Trump will be facing a Democratic Congress in no mood to cooperate with him.
“if Europe has to start paying for its own defense, expect to see massive unrest as the social welfare system gets gutted to pay for guns.”
The end product is already impacting the impeller.
“Germany’s defense minister asked for an increase of $7.3 billion. He was given only $1.2 billion. German aid to Ukraine is cut in half.”
https://mishtalk.com/economics/germanys-defense-spending-will-start-an-immediate-clash-with-trump/
Too many promises with no way to pay for them is the theme of the times.
‘ “What you contemplate, you imitate.” If you spend all your time hating somebody or something, you’re contemplating it, and that guarantees that you’re going to imitate it.’
Makes me think of your post about magical combat, and Dion Fortune’s fine example during WW2.
It really is an exquisite trap, isn’t it? There are things that exist that are absolutely worthy of fighting against, in the material plane and elsewhere; but get too caught up in hating them, and you risk becoming them.
Which also makes me think of your Hate Is The New Sex post: “What you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.”
Incarnation as a human is a strange gig…
Hi JMG,
RE Trump and Tiphareth
I’ve been musing about this topic for awhile and figure now is the time to ask. Trump rising to Tiphareth was my first thought after the assasination. Do you think Trump has risen to the level of Tiphareth in a spiritual development sense? Or is it more of the sense that the Tiphareth archetype is expressing itself through him on a global scale, and his spiritual development is distinct from that? I’d like to make a case that he has indeed raised his consciousness to the level of Tiphareth in the sense of spiritual development. Even if Trump is kind of a blow hard in a lot of ways, surely he has an individuated, unique, and whole body of understanding. I suspect that all types of people can develop a mental body throughout all history, such as warriors, craftsman, and leaders – not just occultists, magicians, and mystics. Maybe I’m way wrong which is way I thought I should ask. Do you have any thoughts on this?
JMG, Methylethyl (#104), et al: FWIW, RE Anime of Trump – In one anime series I watched with my son (huge anime fan), Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures, all the main characters have a kind of guardian or alter ego with a special ability. This guardian is called a “stand” and is an extension of some sort of instinctive power particular to the character. Stand abilities include manipulation/use of fire, water, air, earth, time, space, increased strength, speed, agility, teleportation, transmutation, etc. The series focuses on the Joestar family and their friends and associates, and spans several generations starting in the 1880s. Fun story. The “Spirit of America” seen in the Trump anime would appear to be Trump’s stand.
Araki, the Japanese creator of the series, used western art and music as inspiration. Stands are usually named after a rock and roll band or artist, or perhaps one of their songs – i.e., Dire Straits, AC/DC, REO Speedwagon. This may be true for some of the characters as well. One series (6 anime series produced so far and apparently 9 written manga) used the standard tarot trump cards as a major feature. So for the Trump anime, his name already fits and for his stand, America, after the band of the same name, fits as well.
Will1000
Well John, overcentralized systems rhymes partially with Oligopoly and Monopoly; now the most accurate news say that the failure was the fault of the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike…In local TV news, a computer pundit has said something like this: “It’s not good for the Web and computers resilience that everybody is sharing the same antiviruses at a time, because when this companies fail, everything fails”. I think it’s an indirect reference to Oligopolistic prctices in the digital world, without signaling this or that company…
I have heard the ” But Kamala could win” line from several other desperate NYT’s reading dems lately. Funny it has been prefaced with all she has to do is win a debate, or come off as presidential a few times.
I call this the “IF” delusion, which seems to be common to the progressives. It works like this:
” If only the Ukrainians can win a big battle against the Russians they can turn the tide.”
” If only those deplorables can stop reading misinformation they will support Joe Biden and his crew.
” If only poor drug addicted mentally ill people can get free tiny sheds to live in they will instantly become productive citizens and crime will drop so low the police will no longer be needed.”
So the only Kamala needs to do to become president is to transmute herself in to William Jennings Bryan before the Democratic Convention. Whew! I thought it would be something difficult.
The treasure that turns out to be a curse is such an apt metaphor for so many things. Let sleeping dragons lie, perhaps? The doomer aspect of European culture seems quite prescient right now.
One of the most successful video game franchises of all time, The Legend of Zelda has a pretty standard mythical plot that is almost the same in every game. A sorcerer who is the embodiment of an ancient curse comes to take over the kingdom of Hyrule and end its golden age. This happened so many times as the franchise delivered sequel after sequel set in the far past or future that many fans- mostly American fans where the series is more popular – demanded they be ordered and set in a nice continuity and timeline. The Japanese creators seemed to give off the vibe in interviews that the events in the games were not to be taken literally, but mythically, and hinted that perhaps even they were all telling the same story from different times or perspectives.
This did not satisfy the audience, so they ultimately ended up shoehorning all the games into a timeline that had to use Branching paths from the nexus of the one game that was centered around time travel to create alternate timelines in a compromise that ended up pleasing almost no one. After this, their next game was deliberately set ages and ages into the future in a time of steep decline when all of the previous titles had been relegated to “the age of myth” and were not remembered in any historical sense by the post-apocalyptic culture that survived. While the series has always had a typical fantasy medieval setting, these latest titles brought on board high-tech computer-based technology in the world, robots, flying machines, etc.- but as relics of an age gone by that could not be replicated in the current day (the designers of the machines were inspired by Japan’s Jomon period between 14,000 and 300 BC in which a complex culture lived which left behind impressive pottery but about which little is known).
When the Ancient Machines are found, including killer robots, the King decides to fix them all up to protect his kingdom from the inevitable return of the demon king curse. Of course, when the demon king returns, he promptly takes over all of the ancient technology himself and uses it to destroy the kingdom. Thus, the buried treasure discovered turns out to once again not work in favor of the finder.
Lest all this seem completely irrelevant, the game with this plot (Breath of the Wild) is one of the best-selling games of all time and has captivated millions of kids- especially in America – who have now spent potentially hundreds of hours playing in a sandbox world where all technology similar to today’s is a thing of thousands of years past and decline and fall is simply how things are. I can’t help but hope this will help weaken the hold of the myth of progress on some of the youth.
Also, I couldn’t help but notice in this morning’s tech kerfuffle, that a global Microsoft outage bricking computers all over the world and leaving many airlines unable to take off, was due to a failure of Crowdstrike’s “Falcon Sensor” threat monitoring product. It immediately brought to mind the line from Yeats:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Is that a rough beast slouching I hear? Thanks for another fantastic essay, JMG.
For those speculating about the election, there is already a site for that and some say that betting odds are closer to reality than polls: https://www.electionbettingodds.com/
Just so you know, I was checking this site on Sunday morning, but before I had seen the news and was wondering why Trump shot up 18% from what I had last seen. After seeing the news, I understood.
thanks, all, for the explanation of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures references 🙂
Dear JMG,
You wrote :”the hired guards of the elites, who had nothing to lose once the rule of law collapsed by slitting their masters’ throats and making off with the movable wealth.”
In the Middle Ages, the warlords knew this, that’s why their guard units were mainly composed of their sons and sons-in-law, who were less likely to slit their throats than strangers. It didn’t completely eliminate the risk, but it reduced it a lot. Incidentally, early Middle-Age stories are full of instances of brother killing brother, nephew killing uncle, etc. But not sons killing their father.
Speaking of early medieval history… When I was a child, in 1960’s France, I thought that Charlemagne (French-sounding name) who ruled his empire from his city of Aix-la-Chapelle (also a French-sounding name) was French. Only more than a decade later did I learn that Charlemagne spoke a Germanic language (the French language didn’t even exist back then) and Aix-la-Chapelle is the French name of the German city of Aachen.
Two decades later, I asked my own children whether Charlemagne was French or German. French, they replied (that was in the 90’s). I guess that it hurt French pride too much to admit that France entered history rather modestly as the Western province of a German empire.
Incidentally the very fact that I, a Frenchman, don’t care about this may be a sign that the France I knew as a child has no future, therefore there is no reason to be chauvinistic anymore. I’ve known it since the 70’s. As you said, demography is destiny.
>What Palin represented to many of us was the vapid looker who gets promoted over the heads of hard working women everywhere.
I find that amusing. Palin and Harris being two sides of the same bimbo coin. And Kamala may not be the president anyone wants but she is the president this country deserves.
Another Barron Trump meme I saw depicted him as Paul Atreides from Denis Villenueve’s adaptation of Dune, with Barron drawing his crysknife across his forehead and saying “I will avenge you, father”
The Democratic Party establishment and the rest of the PMC has awoken a monster, largely through their own stupidity, greed and shortsightedness. I don’t think they have even begun to realize what they’ve set in motion and just how badly it’s going to rebound on them.
To what extent are religions affected by the energies and egregores of the areas where they are lived and institutionalized? Would, e.g., organized Islam in Europe be different from organized Islam in the Middle East, at least in the long run, because the energies and egregores of Europe are different and will have a major influence on it? Or, for that matter, heathenry in the US vs. in Europe?
Or, to put it more bluntly: To what extent does religious intolerance depend on the religion itself, on the culture of the people who practice it, and to what extent does it depend on the energies etc of the region where it is practiced?
Milkyway
In Stephen Kings Dark Tower series, the six shooter guns of Roland Deschain, are made from the melted down sword Excalibur.
I love this image of Roland, the gun, and the rose:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roland_Deschain_by_Michael_Whelan.png#mw-jump-to-license
Kings third book in the series had me reading Robert Brownings Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, based on a dream from Browning, and Eliots Wasteland in sixth grade. The books and their resonant chain linked associations loom large. Making it a fantasy-horror-sf western certainly helped.
“…the hired guards of the elites, who had nothing to lose once the rule of law collapsed by slitting their masters’ throats and making off with the movable wealth.”
Why settle for just the moveable wealth? I know of no reason why they couldn’t occupy their former masters’ mansions and palaces as well, so long as they are reasonably defensible. It’s what I would do in their position. The former owners could wind up as compost in their own rose gardens. That’s history for you.
Siliconguy, thanks for this. Yeah, it’s going to get messy.
SilcoRaab, excellent. Yes, exactly — but it’s quite simple, ultimately: you have to learn to fight for things, not against things.
Luke, I have no idea about Trump’s personal spiritual condition, since I don’t know the man, and I’m not even going to try to guess. What I’ve been trying to say is that he’s become a focus for certain archetypes, and those have just undergone a significant shift.
Will1000, okay, that makes a little more sense of the video. Thank you.
Chuaquin, I hope it encourages more people to ditch Microsoft programs (the main vector for the problem) in favor of something less dependent on centralized systems.
Clay, the polls I’ve seen suggests that she’s performing worse than Biden in a matchup against Trump, and that’s before the GOP starts hammering on her vulnerabilities.
Tyrellzo, thank you for this! I have zero exposure to computer game culture — I’ve literally never played one — and so wasn’t aware of this at all. I’m intrigued about your comments re: “Breath of the Wild,” because that same pattern is hardwired into an astonishingly large amount of classic fantasy fiction. From Tolkien’s trilogy and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories to Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné cycle and beyond, most of the great classic works of fantasy are set in worlds in decline, full of ruins nobody understands and magical or technological artifacts nobody can duplicate. I wrote about that a while ago —
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2012/01/blood-of-earth-or-pulp-nonfiction.html
— but I’m probably going to have to revisit it again, as we get deeper into the present age of decline.
Clark, thanks for this.
Horzabky, in the Middle Ages successful kings and barons also knew that you can only get loyalty from your vassals if you give your loyalty to them in return. As for Karlus, King of the Franks, well, yes…
Ariel, if the Democrats suffer an epic defeat this fall and Trump has a successful second term, I think it’s possible that they may squeak by. Otherwise, well, we’ll see.
Milkyway, there’s a significant effect, but that’s not going to provide Europe with any benefits, since violent religious intolerance is as deeply rooted in European soil as it is in the Middle East.
Justin, I really should get around to reading those one of these days. I read the first volume not long after it came out, but none of the others.
Kevin, it depends very much on whether, in the view of the guards, they have a reasonable chance of avoiding the same fate once the next band of freebooters comes along. Those mansions and palaces are rarely as defensible as their former inmates think.
Apologies if another commenter already noted this: but it’s worth mentioning, while tying together the various strands, that Aetius is himself most famous for facing down Attila at the epic battle of Chalons/the Catalaunian Fields (with the help of the Visigoths — he knew how to work his barbarian alliances), once again earning the empire a temporary reprieve. And, of course, the jealousy of the emperor.
Hi John Michael,
Absolutely! At this stage of history, nothing is guaranteed, but the strategy you mentioned is a workable one.
Dunno about your weather, but this winter has been extraordinary when it comes to cloud cover. I’m thinking that there is actually more moisture in the atmosphere – it sure is wet outside. The off grid solar power system is struggling with the lack of strong winter sunlight. Shifting from electricity to firewood for cooking would resolve most of those winter sunlight difficulties for us here. Hmm.
I’ve been reading that the mains grid is feeling this effect as well, and please excuse the pun, but they’re burning through the dwindling natural gas supplies which are being used in the peak gas generators. I’m told by a reliable source that some of those units have been running flat out for five weeks now, and I doubt the gas generators were constructed with that possibility in mind. All this stuff has operational limits, and some of those involve how long the machines can be run for. The fancy name for that is ‘duty cycle’.
Oh well. It is what it is. My best guess is that the Europeans will soon have to pay more for their adventure in Ukrain (sic). That is one expensive adventure, hope they can afford it? My crystal ball suggests a currency crisis is impending.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Err, a little idea popped into my head based on one of your conversations. Fighting for something, as distinct from fighting against something, is exactly akin to the producer versus consumer mindset. It’s so close it is uncanny.
The lesson I’ve learned here is that I have to apply continual physical effort and will on the farm in order to stay the course. Eventually I’ll fail, but so what? The Arthurian tales recount a similar cycle, and that’s kind of hard wired into our culture.
Cheers
Chris
From USA Today, courtesy of the Gainesville Sun: The shooting is “….not likely to have a great impact on either the outcome of the election or the US Economy,” Zaryab Iqbal, professor of political science at Penn State, considers it evident “in the fact that both the Nasdaq and the Dow continued to rise Monday…”
“That tells you that people recognize that this is not an event on the political or economic well-being of the nation,” she said. And also, “researchers say…(the same) and that it didn’t involve an incumbent head of state.”
For what that’s worth – worth, probably, the acuity of “the researchers” and professor Iqbal.
@JMG – one of my favorite lines in Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Paladin of Souls” is when the central character, a 40-ish dowager queen on pilgrimage to escape her keepers, looks at her young guardsmen and thinks “Loyalty must go both ways, or it becomes betrayal in the egg.”
@The Other Owen (#83) wrote:
“I remember someone who was helping these high net worth people set up bunkers saying something like “It would be much more effective to guarantee a mercenary squad their children’s college education than to do what they’re doing””
Were you thinking of Douglas Rushkoff and his essays “Survival of the Richest” (2018) and “The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods” (2020)? They’re highly relevant to the delusions of the elite that they can escape the coming collapse in their New Zealand bunkers, and make the same point about their mercenary guards.
They are both still available at:
onezero.medium.com
I remember your “blood of the earth or pulp nonfiction” essay well and have a hard time believing it’s been 12 years since you wrote it! Time flies and flattens events. It reminded me at the time of a line in don quixote, paraphrasing, that he was sent “to these iron times, to revive the age of gold”. Given all the the exhortations of various pop-psychologists, or western style buddhists or garden variety wellness hucksters to “be here now”… I wonder about the relative utility of placing a golden age in the past or in the future. Granted, it depends what era of growth and decline you are alive in, but at any moment some things are growing and some are declining.
Growth, decline… on what axis? The charts themselves look like sun salute up to the sky or pointing down to the earth. Everyone is wealthy (on average), whoops no one wants to procreate in this society (on average). The whole thing feels like guitar made out of toilet paper tubes and rubber bands being stretched to their limit before their release plays first notes of tragedy.
Obviously there’s no harm in being present and being here now, unless you are using it to excuse the sins of the past and bury your head in sand to avoid the consequences. It’s also weird that I don’t recall hearing “do here now”. Being is inherent – and important to be sure. But “be here now – and do here now” seems better balanced – to me anyway. What if there was a golden age in the past – and a golden age in the future – and a golden age right now, if you can take it? But everyone can’t go, sadly.
The Legend of Zelda series was the intro to myth and more for me and many others, believe it or not. The symbol of the series’ mythology, a sacred object left by the gods is the Triforce. It is three triangles arranged like the Tetractys, missing the bottom row, and always seemed unbalanced to me. The three parts of the triforce represent Wisdom, Courage, and Power. They are sacred objects created by the Goddesses that only mortals can use, but their ability to use them is based on their own personal qualities. The Hero (courage) The princess (wisdom) and The bad guy (power) are embodiments of their respected triforce pieces and do an endless epic dance time after time.
Fourfold symbolism always made more sense to me personally. There’s no triforce piece of shutting the heck up after all. Also, don’t courage plus wisdom= Power? Or is it knowing and the daring without the will even entering the picture? That would make sense in a way since playing a videogame could be seen as giving up your own will to engage with the world in favor of doing it on the terms of the game developers will. Regardless, the symbol of the triforce is something I have seen tatooed on quite a few folks… and when I first saw the tetractys I couldn’t help but feel like I had unlocked a new level… outside of the game itself.
Sorry if I’m rambling, and cheers to these interesting times we live in!
@ Chuaquin & JMG “I hope it encourages more people to ditch Microsoft programs (the main vector for the problem) in favor of something less dependent on centralized systems.”
Is now the time for the linux penguin to rise? 😛 Or something adjacent. At least with that thing, if something goes wrong you can just rip out the offending part and go with something else.
As for this whole computer system failing stuff, there is a Japanese saying “A thousand years of good will can be ruined in a single hour”. Maybe for all the good will computer technology has gained for many over decades, this will be the hour(s) that really makes folks stand back and question it a bit.
This essay seems quite prescient as I believe the doom of the modern world and its replacement with a reenchanted world are one step closer as of last week. I’m not sure what happened, but synchronicities seem faster and more frequent, I find myself having to watch my thoughts more than usual so they don’t manifest, and I suspect that we are going to get more bang for our buck from magical practices. I saw someone in your Dreamwidth post suggest a timeline (world line?) shift and that doesn’t feel off.
I also do not think it’s coincidental that right after millions of people all over the world witness a miracle on TV that was predicted by one of those evangelical prophets on Youtube of all things (down to which ear the bullet whizzes by) that a single tech update brought down much of the world’s air traffic and banking systems. I work in data and AI, and I can tell you it’s a miracle that something of this magnitude hasn’t happened yet given how haphazard most systems are tied together, how often code is pushed, and how basic engineering principles are often eschewed in favor of “move fast and break things.”
For a very long time now, I have believed that faith in technology is one of the main things that has kept it working as well as it has, particularly in the ML and AI space where no one really knows how things work. The standard approach data scientists (that’s what I am) use is to throw a ton of data (think 100s to 10000s of columns in an excel spreadsheet) into an algorithm to predict output data in a single column, and out pops code (rules) that predict something. Even the explainable algorithms are essentially black boxes, as saying that column 791 out of 2090 contributed 0.3% to the answer doesn’t mean anything to a human being. And this technology is what we’re relying on to make major decisions (who gets an interview, who gets out of jail, who gets paroled, what financial trades are being made, etc.).
I believe the complexity is being held together by faith, and I also believe that a lot of people’s magical power is tied up propping up the technology that makes modern life possible.
I think what we’re seeing here is something like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods where the New American Gods (TV, Internet, Media, AI, etc.) are losing power and the older Gods are getting some of their mojo back. It’s strange.
This is only vaguely related to the post (as in it its a historic spin on semi modern music) but funny as hell and Im hoping the readership and host will enjoy this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drDs-Y5DNH8
Cheers
KiwiGaz
Milky Way- 156 your question reminded me of a study I learned about in a linguistics class years ago. The interviewed people about how they felt about various errors made by people learning their language. French speakers were far more critical of errors than Spanish speakers, which maybe we could have predicted. French-speakers have a reputation of being critical. As we discussed the article, and dug deeper into the study, we saw that the group of Spanish-speakers were from Mexico, and tended to be very forgiving of errors of all types. The French speakers were from France. I wonder if the results would have been more similar if the Spanish speakers had been from Spain, or if the French speakers had been from Africa or the Caribbean. My fellow students and I discussed experiences as language learners in Spain and Mexico and various other locations (it was a group of future spanish teachers- the only French speaker in the cohort was a graduate of the cordon bleu, and initially had moved to France to learn to cook.)
All this to say that intolerance in language whether used by tourists or immigrants, may be tied up in the land.
JMG- thank you so much for this series. I’m not an opera fan, but it is always interesting to read your take on things I wouldn’t have thought of, and to see what the rest of the community thinks as well.
Camnon, if I hadn’t been trying to keep my post within a manageable length I would have mentioned that — not least because Tolkien based his account of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields on chronichlers’ descriptions of the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields.
Chris, here the summer weather is ordinarily hot and humid — southern New England is semitropical in July and August, thanks to the Gulf Stream. As for Europe, the sky is black there with birds coming home to roost. Your comment about production vs. consumption — thank you for this. That’s spot on.
Patricia M, that guy misses the point so completely, he should consider a career as an economist.
Tyrellzo, I like the distinction between “be here now” and “do here now”! I think everyone could embrace the golden age right here and now — they won’t, of course, but in an abstract sense, they could.
Michael, or at least question the idea of getting the latest new thing. My internet computer, still trudging earnestly away on Windows 7, had no trouble at all…
Dennis, it hadn’t occurred to me before that the end of the age of reason would also be the Gotterdammerung of the gods of reason, but of course that does follow! Strange times indeed.
Gary, thank you for this.
A saying I heard – To err is human but to really mess things up you need a computer”
Also in the 1930’s the Empire State Building, Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were designed and built quickly and efficiently without a single computer and no AI. Ditto for WW2. Computers and AI are not essential for the organization of an educated industrial society with good communication, transportation and electrical systems. That all was built before computers, AI came on the scene. Another saying I have at age 71. “I have reached the age where I have seen the future and I am not impressed”
Hi JMG,
Lifelong Democrat here. Past tense.
A lot of people here have mentioned Tramp, so I shall add my two cents.
I had been glued to the Republican National Convention 2024 (RNC) from Sunday to Thursday, with some backlog today (Friday). During those days, live and on UTub, I thoughtfully and mindfully watched and listened to, I would say, two-thirds of the speakers. I gave particular attention to the “plain old people” category of speaker. Most speeches seemed to be capped at about five minutes, making the overall experience rather pleasant—not boring in the least.
‼️I had an open mind, and learned an awful lot‼️
Then today, I started reading about Democrats’ reactions to the convention. I read a piece saying that Democrats are totally befuddled as to what Americans want and need. Well, all Democrats need to do is go to the Republican National Convention 2024 speakers’ roster list:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2024/rnc-speakers-list/
and watch/listen to the hundred or so speakers (at roughly 5 minutes each). 100 x 5 = 500 minutes. It wouldn’t take very long. Roughly, ten hours. Ten hours, and they would learn what Americans want and need—this week, this month, this year.
If I were an unkind person, I would say that if a Democrat is unwilling to watch those one-hundred-odd speeches on UTub, that person is an idiot. But I am not an unkind person so I won’t call such a person an idiot. I will assume that Democrats are not idiots.
A Democrat, who is willing to spend somewhat longer than ten hours (roughly), would learn an awful lot, not being an idiot, just as I watched and listened and learned an awful lot not being an idiot. That Democrat would have THE BEGINNING of discovering what are the rank-and-file American’s wants and needs—at this time—right now—this second.
I particularly listened to the everyday people on that list.
It was THE ORDINARY PERSONS there who convinced me that I will be clandestinely voting for Tramp come November. I don’t think I will even tell my husband that I will be voting for Tramp—he is totally close-minded about the matter. He borders on being violent in his stance towards Tramp. I will do my one vote, leaving everyone else “be,” keeping mum (lest I be drawn-and-quartered). Over the next three months, I plan to perfect my Mona Lisa smile, observe my “Democrat” cohorts’ panic and confusion (which has already started), and, now and then, give them a reassuring nod and soothing word (that they won’t die if Tramp gets re-elected), never revealing my one-true-vote. I feel like such a sneak, and am liking it.
I am finished voting Democrat—never again. Democrats have wrecked the last four years.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸🗳️🧐
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Actually the Remake of ‘We Didnt Start the fire’ actually is more related to the discussion than I thought…when I saw it this was intuitively the first audience I thought might appreciate it and it does tie in a whole lot of historical figures and events very nicely, linked in some ways to the comparisons you are making….but it brings a very pleasant light warmheartedness to the subject!!!!
KiwiGaz
@Dennis #168: “I work in data and AI, and I can tell you it’s a miracle that something of this magnitude hasn’t happened yet given how haphazard most systems are tied together, how often code is pushed, and how basic engineering principles are often eschewed in favor of ‘move fast and break things.'”
I spent 33 years in IT (retired now), and my experience was similar. I worked on Y2K remediation, and, yes, that was a serious problem which (thankfully!) everyone took seriously in time to avert chaos.
I am reminded of a joke that made the rounds early in my career: “If architects built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilisation!”
@ Tyrelizo #166
If I may, thank you for the phrase “do here now”…
I have certain little prescriptive “talks” that come out in the clinic every now and again, when the conversation seems to call for it, and one of them is the way in which our *power* can only reside in the here and now, because of the simple reality that our body can only exist in the here and now. This means that while our minds, imaginations and emotions can freely roam about in the past (as memory) and in the future (as fantasy or vision), our body cannot reside anywhere but NOW. Likewise our minds, imaginations and emotions can freely roam about anywhere on earth, in the universe, or in any other imaginable universe or world, but our body cannot reside anywhere but HERE.
If we are to unite our will (something that I have discovered is as critical to the health of the body, as it is to the freedom of the mind, as perennially discussed on these blogs), then our mental focus, our imaginative vision, and our etheric desire have to come together into one force that can move our material body into action, and in that way ENact real changes in the world.
This is is where we each have powers (which may be small in the greater scheme of things, but it are very real), whereas 100% of the time we allow ourselves to dwell in regretting or second guessing ourselves in the past or fantasising and wishing for ourselves in the future, is time spent entirely powerlessly. All of those OTHERWHERES and OTHERWHENS are places and times where we are, by definition, entirely cut off from the prime enactor of our will which is our physical body.
So, I think I may now shorten this whole little “sermon” to DO HERE NOW. It is easy to remember. I like it! Thank you! 🙂
Re: Bad updates
Open source isn’t immune to this problem and there have been cases where bad actors managed to cause some chaos.
https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor?lang=en
But when it is caught, it tends to be swiftly dealt with. I guarantee you, if this update had happened to linux, the response to fix it would’ve been measured in hours, not days.
I wonder. I wonder if if we’re not seeing a bookend to 1963. What if JFK lived? I think we’re about to find out.
Katsmama #170
Just a data point, but in relation to my own poorly remembered, coupla years in high school level French, I have never even attempted to use it during the couple of times that I have travelled through France. OTOH, we got on rather well during a weeklong visit in Tunisia, many years back, with my same utterly pidgin-level French (French and Arabic being the main languages spoken there), as the Tunisians were so glad to see you make any communication effort at all.
Faces would light up even more after we learned to pronounce a couple of Arabic words (eg “shukran” or something like that for “thank you”), but even a little bit of ham-fisted French, together with lots of nods, gestures and laughter, would get whole, long, and delightful conversations flowing!
Which is to say, yes, forgiveness of errors when foreigners are trying to speak to you in your language does not necessarily vary with the language so much as with the culture and openness of the speakers.
Tyrellzo says:
#166 July 19, 2024 at 8:51 pm
Given all the exhortations of various pop-psychologists, or western style buddhists or garden variety wellness hucksters to “be here now”…
Part of the effort to eliminate magic and spiritual depth in all their forms seems to me to be assuming everywhere the simple linear understanding of time. Perhaps in the Assiah realm (mostly Malkuth) it is as simple as they physicists like to imagine. But anyone who has experienced any depth of meditation (as I have, completely without intending it) can tell you from personal experience that time, whatever it is, is not what it appears to be–nor is it a simple phenomenon. Considering the other three realms of kabbalah, or if you will, the other nine sephiroth experientially, time is very complex. Yes, the simplifiers would have you “be here now” but they have no idea what “now” encompasses.
In Greek philosophy, if I remember correctly, there are for them three kinds of time: linear, cyclical and myth-infused or mythological time. That’s just in regular Greek understanding, not that of the more abstruse Neoplatonists, etc. And in mythology, time is an actor on the stage along with the deities and other forces.
I’ve been kicking this around for years and just wanted to get it out there. I’ll be fascinated to learn what, if anything, our host has to say on the topic.
@ Dennis #168
Re data science
As a fellow analyst, I concur that data science is little more than brute force computational analysis, with little forethought and no elegance of mathematics. It is sad to see the discipline hyped in the credentialing sphere as it is. But I’m in the last leg of my career (5-10 years left) and can afford the luxury of such observations. We need to develop slide rule skills again ,if anything!
JMG, et al.
Re the present situation
Personally, I think it’s a given at this point that Biden bows out of the 2024 race. The question in my mind is whether or not the powers of the Democratic party further “suggest” that he resign the presidency in order to allow Kamala to run as an incumbent…
I’m buying a large amount of popcorn to get me through the coming months!
Jonathan @ 102..
Perhaps such devotees of the uhh now newly enhanced ‘cult’ of the Temple of Orange can show their metal by more benign means of adherence, by attaching a somewhat bloodied linen square (let from one’s own body of course..), to their respective right ears .. as a symbol of faith! kinda like the flagellants of the past .. but without all that needless pain. ‘;]
You are an incredible historian and storyteller, Great Blue Heron and Loremaster Greer!
If I don’t have a reputation around here as a precious metals bug, I probably should. With one caveat. Our plan has always been to set aside extra cash in a more durable form, one that we aren’t so likely to spend, watch it keep pace with inevitable and accelerating inflation, and use it in hard times. Worked like a charm during the ’08 recession. After I lost my job, our house, and our car, with a newborn baby girl…silver kept us all fed and warm, a few ounces at a time.
This time, as soon as the balance we owe on our house and the value of our “hoard” cross paths, done. House gets paid off. (Of course I’ll just keep doing the same thing after that. I love having a sack full of old silver coins!) This stuff comes in handy at regular intervals, especially in a declining empire. You just can’t let it own you. And you obviously can’t let it get too big…
Thanks for a great story!
Mr. Greer, I did find that comic mag cover funny too.. quite hilariously so! .. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it published and distributed by a left-leaning hedge-fund owner($) or some such??
Katsmama #170:
I’m Spanish-speaker from Spain, and I think I’ve been always quite patient and understanding when I’ve met foreigners trying to speak Spanish fluently. Well, I hope my mistakes in English or French would be forgiven, so equeally I tend to forgive non-native Spanish speakers for their mistakes (Amen!).
However, I can’t represent every Spaniard of course. In my country, you can meet a lot of people who only speaks Spanish or they aren’t very fluent in other languages; but I think as a whole that Spanish people isn’t very critic with non-native speakers. I would like to believe it! My country is a global power in tourism…
I can’t say native French-speakers are so critic like you say. Well, I’ve been in Southern France several times (visiting relatives), and I didn’t found any hard critic for my deficient French, but well, it’s a personal opinion and experience. I’ve never been in Paris, by the way. In France there’s a lot of variety of people.
I invite anothers native Spanish or French speakers to say something about this topic.
@ Northwind Grandma #174
Re once being a Democrat
I understand completely. You sound like me back in 2016.
BeardTree, that’s cleaner than the version I heard. 😉
Northwind, I get the impression a significant number of people are going through this same process right now.
Other Owen, I noticed at some point in the 1990s that history seemed to be moving backwards, as though it had stopped sometime a few years previously and the film was being rewound: a lot of old habits had suddenly become new again, and so on. It was a casual thought, though it recurred to me now and then thereafter. At this point — well, we had our 1960s urban riots courtesy of Antifa and BLM, we had our neo-hippies courtesy of woke, and now we’ve had our equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. Are beatniks and a decade of prosperous conformism next?
David BTL, quite a bit of the Democrat leadership is desperately trying to shove Biden out, but the people that run him are showing zero interest in getting off the gravy train a minute before they have to; I get the impression that Jill Biden et al. still think they have a chance of winning the election and getting another four years of graft. In that case, we may be about to witness an open war within the Democratic party. Go long on popcorn futures!
Grover, duly noted! As long as the rule of law stays more or less intact, precious metals are a smart idea — it’s just that once the rule of law collapses they can turn into a death sentence. Me, I’ll stick with useful skills.
Polecat, nope — it was produced by an indy comics company. There were five issues, as far as I know. The whole thing was apparently inspired by a news report that Obama’s a Conan the Barbarian fan.
“A thousand years of good will can be ruined in a single hour”.
I learned it as “One aw-shale will cancel out a thousand atta-boys.”
As for the faith in complexity being the only thing keeping things running, it very well might be. It’s quite like all the cells in your body doing their individual things and yet you remain alive.
As for Bardcore, it’s interesting, but also a reaction to the overproduced music currently popular. And the pun implicit in Hildegard von Blingin’ is cute as well.
If you are not allergic to banjos then Mean Mary keeps it simple too. Even if you don’t care for banjo Death and the Maiden is a good ballad with just guitar.
>Are beatniks and a decade of prosperous conformism next?
It’s what comes after that, that should give you cause for concern. A short nuclear war followed by a grindy conventional war. None of this would surprise me at all.
I dunno. I think back to what people would’ve thought about the early 20th c and it must’ve been a weird and unpleasant time to be alive. Much like the early 21st. Except we’re running out of oil this time around. At least the mass propaganda doesn’t seem to be as effective as it was back then.
I certainly hope some low level but well connected insider within the Biden Team and Dem leadership has the foresight to chronicle what is going on for posterity. It will make for a wonderful epic tale of maneuvering and backstabbing as the party swirls the drain.
I see it as a novel and/or movie on the level of the “Big Short”, or the Enron saga ” The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Perhaps it might even be made in to a movie in the style of the German Classic ” Downfall” Chronicling the last days of the Nazi Regime in Hitlers Bunker as the Red Army drew near.
>but the people that run him are showing zero interest in getting off the gravy train a minute before they have to
It is interesting to finally see who is pulling the levers in the little booth behind the curtain that they don’t want us paying attention to. They pretty much have nowhere to hide anymore and the people who would be running cover for them no longer have any motivation to keep them hidden.
I wanna shine a light / On the things you do
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=K57dVZ4oHtQ
@JMG:
“there’s a significant effect, but that’s not going to provide Europe with any benefits, since violent religious intolerance is as deeply rooted in European soil as it is in the Middle East.”
I fully agree about the historical perspective, but to me it seems as if such currents can shift over time: Atm, the energies for religious intolerance seem to be at a low, at least in my part of Europe (some other forms of intolerance yep, but not religious).
Hm. Could it be that such tendencies can wax and wane over time? And if so, would it be an up and down, like the tides? Or a tendency just being dormant and waiting for its next cue? Or can such tendencies really come, seemingly out of nowhere, and then fully fade away again?
I guess there is no easy answer (unless you have one?), and we’ll have to wait and see anyway. Prediction would be so much easier if it wouldn’t concern the future, huh? 😉
@Katsmama #150:
Thanks for that. Good food for thought!
For what it’s worth, in Germany, the French have the reputation of expecting people to use French (as if it wouldn’t even occur to them somebody could not), i.e. not appreciating the effort, but taking it for granted, but then not slowing down one iota to accommodate non-native speakers – and French can be spoken awfully fast. 😉
Milkyway
#144 I suspect European governments are starting to realise how much getting to anything close to a war footing versus a major power actually costs and some of that isn’t even just money, creating or regaining capabilities that they haven’t had for decades is going to take much time and effort.
As such maybe they’ll realise that Ukraine is after all a war of choice for them (with the exception of Ukraine itself) and the best option is to fold and negotiate.
With the conflict in the Middle East taking top spot as the current crisis du jour, people can’t be expected to have more than one thing that is the Current Thing in their news cycle, so best have an armistice and put it off stage while peace negotiations drag out.
JMG #188
Oh, I would certainly believe that his handlers wouldn’t be wanting him to resign, but yes the open warfare option is certainly there. With Harris having a vested interest, my guess is that it becomes: resign with some remaining dignity or else we deploy the 25th Amendment…
In any event, popcorn for everyone!
People seem to be reasonably keen to fight for something but not so interested to work for the same something. After the drama of the fight surely the calm of the work has to take place.
JMG,
So have you shifted your projections to a faster collapse scenario than you’ve traditionally held? There is plenty of madness to go around, admittedly, simmering on the back, front, and middle burners! I feel like the U.S. is holding its collective breath, waiting to see what happens next. But I’ve always basically bought your idea that even radical change on the civilization scale takes a lot longer than we think. Your “young French lady on her wedding day” spiel had a real impact on my thinking.
We also go out of our way to NOT look wealthy, which is easy, because we aren’t! The 4 of us live downtown and share a 15 y.o. Camry, when we need to drive at all. Our house is modest and always in a variety of states of dis/repair. It’s obvious from the street that we grow a lot of our own food. Laundry hanging out to dry in the sun. You get the idea.
Of course I agree that appropriate skills training- ultimately making yourself useful to the future coming our way – is more important. Which is why I’ve been picking up plumbing, electrical, and supply chain management experience over the last 4 years, in a job that is WAY outside my comfort zone as a biologist. One of those things I asked for and then received in an unusual way actually. “Gee, I wish I were more mechanically-inclined.” Oh really?
Dear JMG,
I have no idea is the following is too political or not.
I think the phrase “drain the swamp” is more appropriate than ever. Tramp did some draining years ago, but we need more draining, a lot more.
Today, a headline stated that Komoda Harris has hit the campaign trail. Huh? What the f__k? What vice president of the USA does that, at such a dire time as this? It feels like the Democratic National Convention (DNC) shoved her arse out the door, and said, “We sacrifice you, Komoda Harris.”
Komoda Harris is NOT home where she belongs, which means taking care of business regarding an increasingly incapacitated Joe Bitten. Joe Bitten becomes more INcapable by the hour, and Komoda is galavanting around the country drumming up support, for herself alone. How about protecting the USA from a senile whacked-out sock-puppet that is Joe Bitten?
Komoda Harris, as vice president, is definitely not minding the store. Who *IS* minding the store? It is EMINENTLY obvious that “the swamp of so-called Democrats” is minding the store. My guess is that Jill Bitten is at the lead, along with mysterious others the public has not been allowed to be privy to. We have not heard a whisper from Jill Bitten over days, weeks, or months, ON how she puts Joe’s welfare first by withdrawing him permanently from circulation. Someone has duct-taped Jill Bitten’s mouth shut.
Yeah, we, the public, need to continue draining the swamp. In 2016, I (I would venture “we”) had no idea how deep the swamp was. Nor how huge the swamp has grown since then. One fell swoop, in early November. In the meantime, I Mona-Lisa smile😬🙂🤭.
Yeah, August, September, and October may well turn into “The Three Months of Popcorn.”
(Man, that much popcorn sure cleans out one’s digestive tract. I had three incredibly-delicious cobs of early sweet corn the other day, and it cleared me right out. Intestinal debris, all gone. Better than any enema.💩)
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸🗳️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Northwind Grandma – you took the words right out of my mouth. It’s a shock to realize it. Thanks much!
I have a friend who will be 70 this October and who works for the Democratic Party in a largely red area, who told me Florida was going to be a hellhole because “DeSantis will be able to do anything he wants to us.”
And on my primary ballot, a candidate for Senate sent me the only campaign literature I received this time. It amounted to pointing to the Republican incumbent and screaming “Devil! Devil!” Huh? Florida has party-closed primaries, so Scott wasn’t even on the my ballot. Now, my chances of voting for him are about equal to those of my throwing myself in a volcano and tossing him the One Ring That is, as likely as the sun rising in the west and and the Moon broadcasting Ride of the Valkyries. And she’s apparently the front-runner.
@JMG re: time running backwards – actually, it’s just repeating itself from a period I caught the tail end of in childhood. BTW, since somebody uplist referred to “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” I bought the book. Beil Howe is an incredible windbag, with tons of data I already knew, though the very early parallels were intriguing. And his vision of the post-Crisis future is straight out of the Myth of Progress liturgy. That said, he’s a very good morphologist, and called the shape of the current time on the nose. More details later – I have laundry in the washer, having started it very late. Late as in the length of time it takes me to read a book.
In the Nibelungenlied which I am reading Gunnar is King of Burgundy, his sister is Kreimhild, a beautiful princess who is enjoying her privileged life and in no hurry to marry. The hero who comes from the Rhine country for her is named Sifrid. Sifrid is the bright hero, best of the best, and Kreimhild consents to marry him. Brunhild is indeed a Queen in Iceland who, like the Greek Atalanta, requires her suitors to engage in an athletic contest. Sifrid here has a magic cloak which makes him invisible–J.K. Rowling borrowed that device–which he uses to make Gunnar appear to be a hero. Sifrid also has some sort of treasure, in addition to the cloak, given him by a so far offstage dwarf, Alberich. We all know where that theme went in the hands of Wagner and others. I would be interested to learn more of the legends about dwarves.
JMG, I don’t recall, have you ever published anything which explains what is an archetype. I recall reading something by Jung in which he said archetypes were complexes of instinctive behavior. The term ‘instinct’ itself seems to be a catchall used to describe whatever parts of animal behavior humans don’t understand.
Other Owen, I could se it. A couple of nuclear weapons could go off in the Middle East, resulting in a long and grinding conventional war, at the end of which the US is economically depressed and internationally isolated for more than a decade; then another economic boomtime cuts in, another war in which we are peripherally involved, and a long era of economic and political instability, ending in a civil war around 2123 — yeah, that would be entirely plausible.
Clay, oh my. I certainly hope so!
Other Owen, that’s one of the fascinating things about the latest turn of events. The party that yells the loudest about democracy is having a very hard time doing anything democratic…
Milkyway, Europe’s religious violence has always waxed and waned. Think of the way the relatively tolerant Renaissance was followed by the Reformation and the wars of religion, culminating in the Thirty Years War; then after the Peace of Westphalia the religious violence gradually toned down, reaching its nadir in the mid-19th century. An upswing driven in large part by Muslim Europeans would be entirely in character.
Mawkernewek, the problem as I see it is that the Ukraine war isn’t entirely a war of choice. Europe can only sustain its current standard of living given privileged access to a lot of very cheap natural resources, and the global South is becoming increasingly resistant to handing resources over at low prices. That’s why the dream of breaking up Russia and stripping the weak successor states of their resources has been the holy grail for the European elite for decades now. If they lose in Ukraine, that hope goes by the boards, and Europe’s decline into third world economic status will follow.
David BTL, one way or another, it’s great for popcorn, and it’s also good news for the GOP, which can sit back and let the Dems duke it out.
JillN, oh, granted.
Grover, nope. The collapse of the rule of law, especially in peripheral areas, is quite a common feature of the middle stages of decline, especially when there’s a risk of civil war, domestic insurgency, or a prolonged period of government paralysis — and any or all of those seem quite likely to me as things continue. That said, camouflage certainly helps, so do practical skills, and so do good relations with the neighbors!
Northwind, I’m definitely sitting back and watching this with great interest. Que Mala, as the Spanish-speaking people I know call her, knows that if her poll numbers go up above Biden’s she has a shot at shoving him out of the way and taking the Dem nomination — so we have the spectacle of two competing Dem candidates for president running against each other long after primary season is over, while the GOP is united and hitting the campaign trail hard. It’ll be one for the record books.
Patricia M, I’ll look forward to it.
Mary, I’ll consider doing something about archetypes as we proceed.
Pursuant to the historical aims you have enjoined for us all, I offer John Glubb in The Fate of Empires, 1978.
He describes these stages:
Age of Pioneers [what he describes as ‘outburst’ or “Boost Phase”.
Age of Conquests [though neglecting the suffering of those displaced above and below ground].
Age of Commerce [through the periods in England of railways and in the U.S. of railways and oil and the accompanying fortunes for a few; revisited by Thatcher in the U.K. with tragic results now!].
Age of Affluence [for increasing numbers of people, while the tax rate for the rich was 70 to 92%!].
Age of Intellect [not really sure this is what happened past the 1970’s – just my opinion though].
Age of Decadence.
The slippery slope to the “crash” [however long it takes!], is characterized by greed, corruption, irreconcilable internal political rifts, moral decay, frivolity [evident for those who watch TV], materialism [even masked as ‘spirituality]. Sounds too familiar!!
From the reports of the Trump rally in Grand Rapids going on right now, and the lines of people waiting to get in, it appears that Mr. T. won’t need to exaggerate or lie about the size of the crowd this time! I’m yet another former Democrat. I do like the Russell Kirk style of conservative. (Maybe the next time Hillsdale College asks me to contribute, I might actually consider it.) Kirk, another Michigander, was accused of antisemitism for remarking that the capitol of the USA was in Washington and not in Tel Aviv. It doesn’t take much to get accused of antisemitism. But the neocons in either party must be avoided at all costs. My apologies for being off-topic here.
Hi JMG and readers,
Regarding the weakness of the IT system, I might want to suggest using Manjaro OS, a Linux variant as an alternative to Microsoft Windows :
https://manjaro.org/
It is stable and snappy, even on old hardware. The installation is easy for users who are familiar with computers. Otherwise, you can always find someone nearby to help you. A request for help almost always puts a delightful smile on a Linux fan. My family has used it for more than ten years and saved ourselves a lot of headaches and money.
However, it would soon be simpler to return to a good quality typewrites. I recommend a medium size models such as Remington Quiet-riter, Olivetti Studio or Olympia SM, etc..A typewriter does also the job of a printer 😉 which is one of the most troublesome and expensive piece of IT hardware.
Wish everyone good luck in this volatile time,
Sincerely,
Mr. Greer, as opposed to, say,*Gonad the Contrarian?
*Who knows .. Maybe a new issue will be penned, this time including waterboards as part of the storyline. ‘;]
Ok, I’ll stop now .. before my arms elongate and my knuckles start to drag ground.
Clarke aka Gwydion #181: re time, if you can formulate that into a 5th wednesday topic I would gladly vote for it next time voting comes around.
An astrologer friend of mine noted last week that ; “On Monday, July 15, 2024, Mars exactly conjoinef Uranus at 26 Taurus 19 in zodiacal longitude….The Mars/Uranus conjunction has aroused speculation for one thing due to the fact that it closely aspects President Biden’s natal Sun… the enormity of his deeds ever penetrated the dry shell of his soul, the old boy might simply keel over dead in front of the cameras.”
As good a political death as one could get certainly. The narrow road for Biden has crumbled away.
Trump, I guess, has traversed the necessary initiations to impress his story in the mist from which myth pulls thread.
We got through about an hour and ten minutes of The Ring last night. Just past Loki’s entrance and presentation regarding the existence of the rhinegold to the gods. The complexity of the opera, and the development of characters was enough that i will hold for awhile before watching again.
Chuaquin 186 et al
I have found that France is not a particularly forgiving country linguistically speaking, more so in the south. Nor for that matter were the US, UK or Australia. All the Spanish speaking countries have been much more forgiving of my less than perfect Spanish. In both Japan and Greece people were delighted that I spoke any of their language at all. French was always very handy as a second language and I have had quite profound conversations in it in SE Asia and Southern Europe. Granted much of this was a long time ago and things can change.
Earlier this year, where I live in Mexico, I watched a young Mexican woman and young American man conducting a romance via the translation apps on their phones, neither speaking any of the other language. I guess love finds a way.
Stephen
@Bruce Turtin re: “The slippery slope to the “crash” [however long it takes!], is characterized by greed, corruption, irreconcilable internal political rifts, moral decay, frivolity [evident for those who watch TV], materialism [even masked as ‘spirituality]. Sounds too familiar!!”
Sounds a lot like the 1450s in England.
@ Northwind Grandma #198
Thank you for that last post. I haven’t laughed like that for a long time. It’s sad, I agree, but I think we’re at that stage where all one can do is sit back and watch the train wreck unfold.
I’m probably over-generalizing but people-on-the-move seem to be a common element in civilizational collapse throughout history. I’ve read about the Shardana (maybe from Sardinia?) and the Shekelesh (maybe from Sicily?) in the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age collapse. And then there’s the Hunnic-Slavic-Iranic-Turkic-Teutonic migrations that upended the Roman world.
It seems to me also that the smallest kernels of stories can grow into something a whole lot bigger. I would put the story of Moses and the Exodus into that category, and I would guess that what started as a collapsed Canaanite society, which got that way with the help of drought and the ministrations of the Sea Peoples, later took shape as Israelite with the heaping helping of myths and legends, one of which was this stuff about Mount Sinai and then the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and his compadres, which, according to one view that I read, never happened.
Then there’s ancient Italy. According to one account, Latin and Greek went their separate ways about 3,000 years ago which puts the linguistic split just after the Bronze Age collapse. It looks to me like the Italic tribes and their varied dialects came out of Greek speaking migrants on the run from the Aegean and its troubles.
Which brings up the present day which is rhyming with previous stanzas in historical accounts. No doubt young Islamic men are gleeful that Allah gave them Germany and I wouldn’t doubt that a lot of fellas of their ilk are saying the same in France and the UK. So, I wonder, will we see stories centuries from now about a Mesopotamian Moses leading his followers north to the promised land?
>From the reports of the Trump rally in Grand Rapids going on right now, and the lines of people waiting to get in
I wonder, is CNN bothering to livestream that one or did they get the memo to stand down? Is he still going on about that snake? I haven’t watched him in a while now.
Back to the Nibblin’, at what point exactly did the fascination with magic rings enter the picture? Was that Wagner’s innovation to the narrative or does it have a history that goes further back? Nowhere in any of this do elves and orcs appear either. That overlay was all Tolkien’s doing?
Bruce, his cyclical theory is certainly worth taking into account.
Foxhands, I have a very nice Olivetti portable as a backup, so I’m set.
Polecat, no doubt!
Ian, that same conjunction was also conjunct Algol, the most malefic fixed star in the heavens. Did your friend mention what aspect it made to Biden’s natal sun?
Smith, sure. Whe societies crumble, people get the heck out of Dodge. No doubt two millennia from now there will be all kinds of colorful stories about the fall of Europe…
Other Owen, elves and orcs are Tolkien’s inventions, based partly on Victorian fairy tales and partly on a few scraps of Norse elf-lore. As for magic rings, we’ll get to that.
Foxhands,
Typewriters are all good and well, but publishing these days relies so much on electronic typesetting – the old typesetting skills are quite rare these days, though kept up by a few artisan presses creating fine editions.
When the time comes that computers are priced out of most printing firms’ reach, there will be a lot of relearning of old techniques to be done – especially if laser printing goes the same way, as that will really impact print on demand and shift some of the power back to the publishers who have the money to invest in the older technology.
The best i can do is relay that, “Situated at 27Scorpio34, Biden’s Sun received the influence from the opposite point in Taurus, less one degree.”
🦎I forgot to define my terminology. Sorry. Bad writer‼️
Komoda Harris (“with an A”) refers to Kamala Harris as a female Komodo Dragon. Komodo dragon is her totem animal. This last year, I have learned instinctively whenever I encounter the human version of a komodo dragon,—she sticks out as one. She leads with her lizard brain. There is nothing “thoughtful” about her.
Watch some videos of komodo dragons on UTub, and there she is.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🦎
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
> will we see stories centuries from now about a Mesopotamian Moses leading his followers north to the promised land? — Smith #211
Yul Brynner as Ramesses the Great: “So let it be written, so let it be done.”
The Qur’an has many references to gardens and states that gardens are used as an earthly analogue for the life in paradise which is promised to believers:
“Allah has promised to the believing men and the believing women gardens, beneath which rivers flow, to abide in them, and goodly dwellings in gardens of perpetual abode; and best of all is Allah’s goodly pleasure; that is the grand achievement.” – Qur’an 9.72
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_garden
European Diplomatic Academy: Opening remarks by High Representative Josep Borrel:
“Here, Bruges is a good example of the European garden. Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together. And here, Bruges is maybe a good representation of beautiful things, intellectual life, wellbeing. The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. ”
— https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/european-diplomatic-academy-opening-remarks-high-representative-josep-borrell-inauguration-pilot_en
It’s almost like the takeover of Europe was foreordained and is being facilitated by the EU leadership.
More later. But for what it’s worth, Trump is a Boomer, with all their “What I think is Absolutely Right ” (no pun intended) arrogance. So is Netanyahu, likewise. Biden has all the earmarks of someone born and raised to be good and helpful and Not Rock The Boat, a personality I understand from the inside. Meaning any younger politician could eat him for breakfast as an appetizer. And Vance is a Millennial – that’s another time-honored pairing, though Vance has class issues the way a porcupine has quills. And Neil Howe is so shallow he can seriously take the “wicked Richard III murdered his nephews” as if it were a fact. But for the Big Picture, he’s great – though, also, a card-carrying member of the Professoriat.
JMG peasant
“Project 25,” in Wiki, sounds good ta me. I mean, what’s not to like?Just sayin’.
Heh, yes, please God(s), come forth with the 25th Amendment.
Vice Pezident Komoda Harris has decamped to parts unknown, “a hunched-over Golem fundraising😳,” having abandoned her all-important-and-non-negotiable VP duties of childminding/babysitting Pezident Bitten, nudging his hand away as it creeps towards The Red Button.
Golem begging for money. She can’t find The Ring, so she makes-do with money-money-money.🤑She doesn’t realize that Tramp’s unofficial anthem is “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
💨Northwind Grandma💨🎵🤑
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
KAN #215
In the past, instead of letterpress (?) printing (big; floor), JMG suggested mimeograph machines (small; desktop). (Oh, the smell, the smell.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph
I wonder when mimeograph machines will come back on the market.
💨Northwind Grandma💨👃
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I am no fan of the current Vice President, but I do wonder how someone discovers what is another person’s totemic animal. Especially in the context of managed and scripted TV appearances. I see the VP as a somewhat pathetic figure, someone who foolishly accepted the promotion beyond her level of competence. She could have applied herself and become an effective senator and eventually a respected national figure, rather like the late Margaret Chase Smith.
Joe Biden has been in national public office since the 1970s. His working class roots are for real, however much betrayed since young manhood. I take his reputation for gaffes to mean that, while he has become another servant of oligarchy, he simply will not, is constitutionally not able to take seriously the obligation of secrecy. Given his presence at the heart of DC decision making for the last 50 years or so, I can’t help wondering if, like the late Feinstein, some around him are hoping he will die before writing his memoirs. Should he be pushed out of the Presidential race, or out of office altogether, he will have no reason left not to reveal what he knows.
Hi JMG
The new military techonology seems to be favoring the war bands against the organized state armies, with the advent of drones and high caliber sniper rifles, the armored columns, as the poweful chariots of the Hittites and Egyptians, are easy prey of the cheap drones armed with armor piercing grenades with less than 1000 the costs of a modern MBT.
Some examples of this trend, now in full swing with the experience of the war in Ukraine:
https://www.unmannedairspace.info/counter-uas-systems-and-policies/mexican-army-records-more-than-260-drone-attacks-by-drug-cartels-this-year/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vwyx/mexican-cartel-50-cal
The mexican drug cartels are now armed to the teeth with these weapons, and I suspect in the future they will cause many headaches to the US military when the Northern emperor try to stop the flow of people and drugs from Mexico in the Southern Limes.
In other examples I think the IDF would suffer a catastrophic defeat if they will dare to invade Lebanon, and in almost the same place the Sea People detroyed the proud chariot armies of the Hittites more than 3.000 years ago; so History rhymes.
Times are changing fast. History is moving quicker.
Cheers
David
Chris at Fernglade said:
“It hardly surprises me that tales increase in darkness the further north a listener travels. The land informs the stories.”
That’s an interesting perception from an Aussie!
Cheers.
In this two part (English language) interview Professor Karaganov makes some predictions about the future of the West (which almost exactly match those of JMG).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLHyHVmF3-o
In the first few minutes of the second half he talks quite optimistically about the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqlMe-WKQb4
JMG,
We might not yet be finished with retracing the 1960s. With Biden no longer running for POTUS, that means the Democratic convention in Chicago has increased in importance in a year of turmoil. Wasn’t 1968 a tumultuous year in which a disorganized Democratic party had a convention in Chicago?
DJSpo
https://apnews.com/live/biden-trump-election-campaign-updates?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Biden has withdrawn from the nomination at the request of his handlers and has endorsed Harris. The DNC will meet in Chicago in mid-August to nominate their candidate. He will, however, serve out his entire term as President. [Father Time and/or the Grim Reaper permitting.]
“Wasn’t 1968 a tumultuous year in which a disorganized Democratic party had a convention in Chicago?”
Yes it was.
It’s almost like the takeover of Europe was foreordained and is being facilitated by the EU leadership : Martin Back @218
It does look that way. So, a question: Have the EU elite lost their minds? Is this a collective suicide pact? I mean it both literally and figuratively. ‘Literally’ because I haven’t noted a high degree of squeamishness among the rather excitable youngsters of the Middle East. No shortage of tough guys in that lot I would say.
Or are the EU elite so convinced of their collective invulnerability? Do they think that these dusky-hued peoples are no threat to EU establishment power, that the newcomers don’t have the intellectual reach, the ambition, that no credible leaders could possibly ever exist that can overturn the present-day dispensation?
Maybe the big thinkers ought to revisit some of their assumptions. Maybe they ought to consider the fact that the Islamic world had Europe back on its heels for most of the last 1,400 years.
I know, the Crusades, also known as ‘push-back’. But then Muslim armies were banging on the gates of Vienna in the late 1600s if I have my history right.
First rule is don’t tempt the gods. And a very unwise thing it is to underestimate civilizational rivals.
I didn’t see it myself but I heard that the Republican convention featured somebody singing that awesome aria by Puccini ‘nessun dorma’.
Nothing to it, right? But there was a scene in that movie Sum of All Fears called the pay-back scene where guys got whacked to the sound of that very same aria, you know, car bombings and the like. Nasty stuff.
And so the speculation by commenters on the web, given the history of lawfaring prosecutorial persecution against Trump and his hombres, and right on the heels of Trump literally dodging a bullet, was playing this very same glorious tune at the convention a not-so-subtle signal that retribution is coming?
Oh my • !!GOD • EMPEROR • ORANGE!! … Now they’ve done it! The Babalon Bee has, apparently ..read my mind.. “Trump selling $250.00 gloden ear bandages” (sorry, no linky). Now.. I ask you, my humble ecosophians .. which has the moarrrr bigly cred?? the ‘gold account’ simulacrum holders (hedge-funders, tech-bros, siloed trustfund fart-$niffers .. imbeciles?? … or the plain vanilla Wallyworld bloodied-linen fractional-reserve linen Lillyputians?
What say you?
p.s. … my knuckles appear to be above ground, still!
Patricia Matthew’s @ 227,
As many a Roman Emperor have proclaimed: “Let the Games .. BEGIN!”
Who, within the confines of the D.C. thunderdrome, cast the mortal blow? ‘Two Cons enter – One Con leave, laughing.
JMG,
I wonder if the Gotterdammerung of the gods of reason will herald a return of the type of magic that let people affect physical objects directly. I remember you mentioned a Native American author who held that such feats were possible in the past.
Hi JMG
Interesting to know that many dark age epics (not all of them) have an unhappy ending. I wonder if they simply chronicled the hard and bitter times, or were supposed to be a warning to keep people out of mischief.
I was trying to find parallels with the dark age epics in Indian literature. Most of the major ones like Ramayana, Mahabharata have some pretty dark chapters of wars, turmoil and hardship. But their endings show that the “Good” side wins. There are some extensions and offshoots to these Epics that end on a less cheery note, but they are not very popular.
I am not sure if this was because India did not experience a dark age long enough to birth a dark age epic, or that the dark ages were not really that hard, or that (as Spengler pointed out) Indian civilization is less historical so they weren’t interested in a dark age epic.
Another reason I am thinking is that the real dark age was between the 13th and 19th centuries CE — not enough time has passed for the dark tales to solidify into an Epic. I could see events like the heroic acts of Shivaji against the Mughals, the Indian mutiny of 1857, Gandhi’s war of non-violence etc being part of such an epic.
Mary Bennet #222
> I am no fan of the current Vice President, but I do wonder how someone discovers what is another person’s totemic animal
Let me explain.
In my case, whenever I see Kamala “Komoda” Harris, no kidding, superimposed visually in 50% opacity*, is a komodo dragon. It is intuition. I can’t not see the komodo-dragon in her. Whenever I see Harris on TV, computer, or wherever, I must look away, sometimes needing to leave the room. Her slobber gets on me:
https://youtu.be/V3H2uZUDHlg?si=Mnay5iq1hNJXT5tU
The visual comes with a particular apex-lizard vibe.
As far as I know, people figure out their own totem animal.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🦎🤮
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
’*’ referencing my Photoshop experience.
Wer here
Well JMG is it just me or we we transported into a bad dark comedy of sorts?
I sincerely douted the truthfullness of MSM ever since the COVID trash started coming from it but they just reached new lows recently. The Polish MSM is largely owned by a German conglomerate of news agents and it shows a freightening glimps into their minds right now. Let me say this they were never truthful (this join the EU and your economy will be a second Japan which Lech Wałęsa infamously said and parroted by our German “friends” was one thing) but recently they’ve degraded far behind this. From screaming that “Putin has cancer and 3 weeks to live” to “Sanctions will collapse Russian economy next week” to “Ukraine will be accepted to NATO next Sunday” to “Study shows people who go to church have a higher probabilyty being right wing extremists” (did they copy that from that vegetable spoon site?”) Now they are in depression phase screaming “that democracy and freedom are under threat by ascendant Trump, LePen and Vance.”
In many of your posts you said about Jung and the shadow but this is just getting ridiculous I mean who to these people get up at morning afraid and hysterical all the time? Is it just an act? I cannot belive that you can be such an actor to lie all the time or maybe they ended up beliving the nonsense they themselfs had benn screaming about?
Stay safe everyone It is getting crazier here by the day.
Hi JMG,
That’s great you own an Olivetti which probably had one of the most charming models.
Hi KAN,
Thanks for your comment regarding the use of typewriter. Publishing may transit back differently because of constraints you mentioned above. I’m thinking of older but sturdier computers run on Linux for this purpose.
The future of writing & publishing would not be like the past. Indeed, it would be a mix between digital and mechanical technologies:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/11/why-the-office-needs-a-typewriter-revolution/
Kind regards,
Since the cycles of religious tolerance and intolerance in Europe were mentioned, I woul like to add that this seems specific to the Abrahamic religions. The pagan religion of Antiquity and the polytheist, pre-Islamic religions of the Near East seems not to have such cycles of tolerance and intolerance, rather, their adherers didn’t bother much what religions other people had.
As an aside, in Naked Capitalism there is a good article about the current political situation of Germany: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/the-us-vassal-state-of-germany-unravels.html
Yeah. They just handed Trump the election on a silver platter. And, let’s be honest, Biden is a decent man who tried very hard to be a good President within the limitations of his party’s world view, but it was like sending a welterweight into the ring with Mike Tyson.
An aria from a grand opera at a convention to crown the King of Populism? OTH, I think any guys on the street knows Ride of the Valkryries when they hear it and what it means. (Massive helicopters coming in for the kill.)
Okay – a new anthem for our times, courtesy of Cole Porter – and look how it ended in his day.
“The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today
And black’s white today
And day’s night today
And that gent today
You gave a cent today
Once had several chateaux
When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clothes
Anything goes”
Stephen Pearson # 208:
Thank you for yout opinion about the various languages speakers “sensitivities”…Personally I’ve met always South French speakers in my trips to my neighbour country in the North. Maybe if I went up to Paris, I’d find some upset faces at me poor and broken French…That could be, or maybe Ive had much luck around.
Some years ago, I met in a RENFE train when I was with my bike, a young French man biker from Lille. Poor guy barely spoke a few words in Spanish, and the conductor treated him with a bit of scorn and passive-aggressive bias. I offered my help with my broken English/French vocabulary, then he thanked me for my help. International solidarity between cyclists!
I wonder what would happened to me if I were in the same situation on a SNCF train near Lille doing cycle touring.
“Earlier this year, where I live in Mexico, I watched a young Mexican woman and young American man conducting a romance via the translation apps on their phones, neither speaking any of the other language. I guess love finds a way.”
What a good story: I agree that love always find a way, ha ha!
Well, Biden is out of the POTUS game, so here in Spain the press praise Ka-Mala Harris: Of course, she’s a woman, because she has a vagina, not a penis; she’s not white; and she’s younger than Trump. No more qualities? It’s a little sad C.V., don’t you think it?
Journalism in my country has become the U.S. “Democrat” press local branch; and I’m afraid this phenomena is happening in other European countries. Even “moderate” Right Spanish press makes look like Trump as the Anti-Christ and Ka-Mala like the Western Savior…
In other news, the International Court of Justice has issued a ruling or opinion, I am not sure which, accusing Israel of maintaining an apartheid state. ICJ has no enforcement powers. Here is a brief article from non-leftist, business friendly Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2024/07/21/top-un-court-says-israels-occupation-of-palestinian-territories-is-illegal/
That ruling or opinion was issued July 19. Moon of Alabama thinks the Biden letter bowing out of the Presidential campaign was issued on his behalf, the President being semi comatose at the time. Quien sabe?, we will likely never know. Timing does suggest to me that the letter was issued Now in order to distract public attention from the ICJ opinion or ruling. Bibi Netanyahoo has once again invited himself to address our Congress on July 24, that would be Wednesday; no doubt he will be meeting with the VP to deliver his instructions to her.
1968. Take a look at the election map of that year. It was interesting. The Democrat riots were the least of it.
https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election
Wer #236:
Oops! I thought Spanish MSM lied a lot, but I ‘ve read your comment and I see your Polish MSM are even worse than my local propaganda (previously known as “free press”).
Stay safe everyone…you too, Wer.
As a side read during this series, I am re-reading Oman’s “The Dark Ages”.
So I like what you are doing.
My only request is to have a musical selection from the work as a “starter” for the particular post.
For some odd reason I listened to “(Theme music: “Vorspiel” from Das Rheingold)” Before I got to reading. Made for a nice focus.
But, keep going regardless, I have a feeling I am going to enjoy the ride.
And to think that Germany was top dog in the EU for so long.
The kids know where it’s at:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/21/recession-pop-explained-how-music-collides-with-economic-trends.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Thanks Mr. Greer! Yes I agree on Homer – he describes compelling soldier to soldier action. (which I won’t quote directly here cause its violent) hmm maybe just meant to share some projects are complete for me. 🙂
may I share a juicy iliad quote as I softly exit this week’s forum 🙂 “There Hera fell in with Sleep, twin brother of Death, clung to his hand and urged him, called his name: “Sleep, master of all gods and all mortal men, if you ever listened to me in the old days, do what I ask you now -and you shall have my everlasting thanks. Put Zeus to sleep for me! Seal his shining eyes.” The Iliad”
best regards!
Wer wrote, “Now they are in depression phase screaming ‘that democracy and freedom are under threat by ascendant Trump, LePen and Vance.’”
Oh, no, they’re nowhere near depression phase yet. Those poor obedient stooges only just managed to grow up enough to realize that all their deranged tantruming is not going to magically keep them in power. With that long-awaited breakthrough in maturity finally arriving, they’ve now moved fully into bargaining phase. Admittedly, some of them have been trying to bargain with the fates for a while now, but most were still imagining that, should they spit enough venomous rage onto their Shadow-projections, they would automatically win by default.
Given what extraordinarily slow learners/maturers they have proven themselves to be, I expect they will now go on trying to bargain their way back into favor long after their fall from power has become painfully obvious to everyone else (as I think it already has for most of us here.) Only then, begrudgingly, will they finally be able to succumb to depression. As long as they’re screaming, they’re still able to generate way too much energy, ambition, and delusion to have settled fully into depression phase. Their silence, punctuated by the occasional “Poor me,” will be the sign that they have at last entered the well-earned depression phase of their grief.
The good news is that they are already at the halfway point of their grieving process, no matter how loudly or resentfully they may go on snarling their bargains out to an utterly indifferent universe. May all of them eventually achieve the peace of acceptance. I wouldn’t place any bets on it though!
@Patricia Mathews #239 and everyone else here
> Yeah. They just handed Trump the election on a silver platter.
Is it really so cut and dried? I recall last time round that Biden looked completely unelectable. Presumably there still a bunch of “never Trumpers” still out there.
Also, about 6 months later I was having a catch up call with an old US friend, lifelong Dem. I asked how someone who so obviously was deep in cognitive decline could be President to be told that it was the people around him that would make it work. His mental state was apparently quite obvious and accepted then. If I knew and my old friend knew, why is it suddenly news to the rest of the US?
@Chris “Fighting for something, as distinct from fighting against something, is exactly akin to the producer versus consumer mindset. It’s so close it is uncanny.”
I don’t know why it took so long to link those but that sounds spot on! That is also a great elevator pitch to folks as why they should try and be more independent of the system.
In a way, these legends help remind us that all things are mortal, even great civilizations rise and fall. Most importantly, there is nothing we can do to stop the falling. We have only our legacy, which often seems to succomb to material desires. That’s quite a common theme ….
Thanks for this timely series!
Prizm
@Kate K, as predatory trickster spirits go, Tiger is quite a trickster in his native continent and building a presence in America. If Trump has a close relationship with Tiger, it would at least explain why people are so fixated on his at-times-orange skin tone 😀
Booklover #238,
Thanks for your comment. I‘ve been wondering along the same lines (i.e. how much of the religious intolerance in Europe was due to (organised) Christianity, and how much was due to the land, the people, the times, or other circumstances?
I‘m not sure if the pre-Christian records in e.g. middle Europe (i.e. not Greece or Rome) are clear enough on this to say that the pagan/pre-Christian societies here were inherently more tolerant. (Maybe you or anybody else is aware of relevant sources, though?) I.e. I‘m not sure on this, and I‘m not even sure it can ever be resolved. An interesting line of thought, though!
What I‘m not seeing (yet??) here in Germany is a resurgence of the old pagan/Germanic deities/religion. But then my personal circle is rather small and definitely not representative for the country as a whole, so I might be mistaken there. If we‘d see them gaining ground again, that would indicate a potentially different (and interesting) development.
Maybe other readers from Europe (not just central, but also East, North, …) have made their own observations with regards to the older gods?
Milkyway
“And to think that Germany was top dog in the EU for so long.”
That thousand year reich thing just isn’t working out for them. At least the Fourth did far less damage than the Second or Third.
Now back to my pickles. Oh, if Rafael is around, besides preserving yeast strains, add mothers of vinegar to the list. I burn through the stuff by the gallon this time of the year.
>The kids know where it’s at
One of the things I’ve observed over the years, when bear markets take hold, something about that energy wants to make people get down and boogie. The crappier the times the more people want to dance. Can’t tell you why. Or even if it’s causative. It’s just correlated. If you see one, you’ll see the other.
So. We may see an era of disco like no other before it or after. I know rock and roll is dead, nobody wants make power chords while wearing a mankini anymore, that’s for sure. I mean, you still hear it on the golden oldies stations, but that’s about it.
It’s either disco or country music. Make your choice. Or don’t and head for the hills.
>If I knew and my old friend knew, why is it suddenly news to the rest of the US?
A guy named Samson was rapping about Biden’s mental state back in 2021 (Today, Junior!). Why get so upset over something that you should’ve known about for the past 3 years at least? Why does he suddenly need to go? Could it be his usefulness has run out and useless people are gotten rid of?
Hi JMG,
Harking back to your previous posts, I am looking for the Cliffs Notes, Reader’s Digest, dummies, idiot version, vernacular English, of The Ring of Nibelung. Being a numbskull, I need the condensed version giving the overall story of the four sections. If there is such a publication, I can’t find it. Please provide particulars, author, publisher, or links, so I can locate where to purchase it.
Thanks.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🥹🤪🤯😳😵💫
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
About Kamala Harris – A phrase kept coming to mind, from the street insults of decades ago, before they turned really violent and nasty : “You’re jokin’, token.” Everybody knew what the other person was being accused of. Of course, the current culture of the Left has raised tokenism to a high and sacred art form..
(Hint. If you really want to be sure to level the playing field, do what orchestras started doing and put the performers behind a curtain and where they could only judge them only on how well they played their instruments. Variations of the process in other fields of endeavor, I leave to your imaginations.)
The Other Owen @ 257, I think I know why, well I have a theory which I thinks fits such facts as we have. You really have to pay attention to timing. I will save exposition for open post week. I have a few dates and such to look up in the meantime.
It’s late in the cycle but with permission I’d like to post an update following my prayer request a few days ago re Bridget the mother of my son’s girlfriend who was unconscious after a nasty fall from her horse. She is coming round, has had her breathing tube removed, has waved at family members, mouthed her husband’s name and indicated she knows she has two daughters. It’s a big turn around from where things were and such a huge relief to all who know and love her. I give heartfelt thanks to anyone who offered prayers, I shall continue to pray for her onward healing and recovery. We are in Devon, England btw
Falling Tree Woman
Milkyway, I don’t know of any sources about how the ancient Germanic people saw their own religions and the religions of others. I don’t see any specific religious trends in Germany, either. Obviously, there are Christians and Muslims there, and some Druids.
There is talk about remilitarizing Europe, but I doubt it will accomplish much, because for that, one needs more things than money alone (i. e. resources and suitable perople, which Europe doesn’t have anymore.)
A short question for JMG and the kommentariat, before this post be closed. What do you think about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?