In the last post in this sequence, two weeks ago, we watched Alberich steal the magic gold from the bottom of the Rhine. This reenacted in symbolic form the process by which our Western civilization, like every other civilization in recorded history, abandoned the traditional human relationship with nature as a community of persons and started treating it as a passive source of commodities instead. Alberich’s act thus sets the drama of modern history in motion.
This interpretation, as we saw two weeks ago, isn’t something that modern commenters invented. Wagner consciously drew up the scene in those terms. As a passionate believer in the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, not to mention up to his eyeballs in the nearly forgotten world of mid-nineteenth century German political and cultural radicalism, he plotted The Rhinegold in the confident expectation that the world of commodification and exploitation Alberich’s deed created was about to crumple before the heroic Siegfrieds of the German radical counterculture. He began writing the music while he was still trying to deal with the way the revolutionaries of 1848 and 1849 had been brushed aside by the forces of the existing order of society. It was only years later, when he was most of the way through the work of composing Siegfried, that he grasped just where the drama of his age was heading, and the revelation nearly broke him.
We’re far from that point as Alberich scrambles down from the waters of the Rhine into the subterranean realm of Nibelheim, the world of the Nibelung dwarfs. He’s got the magic gold, he’s forsworn love, and so of course his first action is to hammer the gold into a magic ring—the Nibelung’s Ring of the series title—which gives him power over Nibelheim and its inhabitants. Of course he abuses that power shamelessly; as we’ve seen, when Wagner talks about renouncing love, the word “love” includes every kind of human relationship that’s not mediated by money, so no human (or Nibelung) ties restrain Alberich from doing whatever he wants. The results are just as ugly in this case as they generally are.
(Once again, if you haven’t read the libretto, stop now and read scenes 2-4 of The Rhinegold, which you can download here. None of what follows will make much sense unless you know what’s going on.)
Wagner doesn’t follow him there right away, however. As the first scene of The Rhinegold gives way to the second, the camera of his imagination pans up, not down, leaving behind the world of nature for the world of the gods and giants. There’s Wotan, dreaming about the wonderful castle in the air he’s having the giants build for him, and there’s his wife Fricka, trying to wake him up by reminding him of the price he’s promised the giants: Freia, the goddess of love.
You caught the parallel between the two scenes already, right? Just like Alberich, Wotan’s renounced love in exchange for power. If anything, Wotan’s done it in a more extreme form. Remember that Wagner’s take on the gods was defined by Feuerbach, who interpreted deities as emblems of human ideals. Alberich renounced love (that is, personal relationship with other people and the natural world) in a purely practical sense, driven by his own desperation, but Wotan bargained away the ideal of love in order to pursue his dreams of omnipotence.
Ah, but Wotan doesn’t intend to follow through on his side of the bargain. That’s the thing to keep in mind about Wotan. For all his pretensions of divine glory, he’s basically a slimeball. Alberich, for all his nastiness—and you haven’t seen more than a tiny fraction of that yet—isn’t the villain of The Ring; Wotan is. Yet he’s not a cardboard-cutout villain, one of those dreary figures so common in modern fantasy fiction whose sole purpose for existence is to give the protagonists somebody to despise and destroy. He is The Ring’s villain but also its tragic hero, the character whose actions set the plot in motion and drive it step by step, despite all his best and worst intentions, to its apocalyptic end.
(He’s also Richard Wagner, by the way. The Seattle Opera production a few decades back that dressed Wotan as Wagner and the rest of the cast as opera singers and backstage personnel, and made the sets represent a German opera house of Wagner’s day, was engaged in the sort of postmodern posturing all too common in modern opera, granted, but this once, that usually silly habit actually had a point. Look at Wagner’s life and writings up to the point at which he started writing the music of The Ring, and the parallels are impossible to miss. Like Wotan, Wagner built a castle in the air, engaged in dubious activities to try to make it a reality, and had it all come crashing down in flames around him. Unlike Wotan’s story, though, Wagner’s didn’t end there.)
To grasp what Wagner intended to say—as distinct from the self-portrait that got into The Ring the way it usually slips into every writer’s major works—it’s here again crucial to remember Ludwig Feuerbach’s insistence that the gods are human ideals, symbolic representatives of the vision of human possibility central to each culture. Wotan, the king of the gods in Wagner’s version of Norse mythology, fills this role for modern Western civilization. He is its image, its ideal, its archetype, observed with a keen and unsympathetic eye. “Take a good look at him!” Wagner wrote of Wotan in a letter to a friend. “He resembles us to a hair; he is the sum of the intellect of the present.” To the extent that each of us participates in modern intellectual culture, dear reader, you are Wotan, and so am I.
Let’s watch him at his antics, then, and see how clear a mirror he holds up to ourselves and our society. Wotan’s renunciation of the organic order of things begins well before he cut a deal with the giants that he never intended to keep. His first act, long before the orchestra starts up, was breaking a long straight branch off the World-Ash-Tree—that’s one word in German, in case you were wondering—and using it as raw material for his magic spear, on which the contracts that undergird his power are carved in runic letters. As we’ll learn in the prologue to The Twilight of the Gods, the World-Ash-Tree never recovered from the wound. It sickened and died, and the magic spring over which it once grew ran dry.
Next came the deal with the giants, which as noted already he never intended to keep. His plan was simply to have Loge, the fire-god of reason and logic, find some wiggle room in the contract so that Wotan didn’t have to hand over Freia to the giants. Now, though, the giants have finished their work. Valhalla, the castle in the air Wotan planned, is finished—there it is on the backdrop of the scenery, with a rainbow bridge leading to it. Now the giants want their wages. Fricka, Wotan’s wife, upbraids him—she spends a lot of time doing that—for cutting such a bad bargain.
Freia, the goddess of love and eternal youth, comes running in a panic, because she doesn’t want to go with the giants. The two giants, the brothers Fafner and Fasolt, show up, demand that she be handed over, and remind Wotan that his power depends entirely on the contracts carved on his spear, including the one that binds him to pay for his castle. Two more gods, Donner and Froh, turn up to squabble with the giants. It’s quite the quarrel, and more than once threatens to break into open violence.
Finally Loge shows up. Wotan demands that he untangle the whole mess. Wagner knew how to write a trickster god; Loge teases, temporizes, evades and delays; he explains that he wandered all over the world, looking for something that would be more desirable than love. Everyone he met agreed that love is the best thing ever. Except, says Loge, there’s this Nibelung dwarf who renounced love to win the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, and now he’s made it into a magic ring and used it to become fantastically wealthy and powerful.
Alberich thinks this is better than love, Loge goes on, but of course you, Wotan, won’t see things that way—in fact, the Rhinemaidens asked me to tell you about this so you can get their gold back for them. He has a lot of the same sort to say about the gold. By the time Loge’s finished with his description, the giants and gods are drooling over the thought of getting Alberich’s wealth—well, except for Wotan, who is more ambitious than the rest of them. Power matters to him more than wealth, and so he wants the Ring and he wants it bad.
That is to say, every one of them makes the same choice Alberich did, with less motivation.
Loge then slyly points out that it would be easy enough to steal the gold from Alberich. That’s as much as the giants need to hear. They state their terms: if Wotan gets the gold from Alberich, they’ll accept that in payment in exchange for Freia—and they take her as hostage to force Wotan to keep his promise. Lacking her, the gods lose their strength and glory, and so Wotan and Loge go scrambling down to Nibelheim to get the gold. In the process, they see the brutal factory existence to which Alberich has consigned his fellow Nibelungs.
Loge tricks Alberich into showing his magic power by turning into various critters. Once he turns himself into a toad, Wotan grabs him, and the two gods go hurrying back up to their own realm with their captive. Wotan demands all his treasure as ransom for his release. Alberich grudgingly consents, and up come the Nibelungs carrying heaps of treasure. Then Wotan demands the Ring. That’s where we get to see the difference between Alberich and Wotan, and the comparison is not in Wotan’s favor. Alberich knows the price he’s paid for the Ring; he cuts through Wotan’s dishonest moralizing rhetoric in a furious outburst, accusing Wotan of wanting to take the gold all along but being too much of a coward to pay the price; and he warns Wotan that it’s one thing for a Nibelung to renounce love but a far more terrible thing for a god to do the same thing.
Wotan doesn’t care. He wrenches the Ring by force from Alberich’s hand and puts it on, then tells Loge to set Alberich free. Once freed, Alberich pronounces a terrible curse on the Ring: it will bring misery, dread, and death to anyone who wears it. Then he stumbles back down to Nibelheim, leaving Wotan to gloat over his magic ring.
Next the giants come back. They gather up all the gold—but then they want the Ring, too. It takes the combined efforts of all the gods, as well as a sudden appearance of Erda the earth goddess, to convince Wotan to hand it over. Of course Alberich’s curse takes effect immediately; Smeagol and Deagol—excuse me, Fafner and Fasolt—quarrel over the Ring at once. Fafner kills Fasolt right there in front of the gods and everyone, and he takes the treasure and the Ring and leaves the scene. Wotan, shaken by the sudden eruption of the curse, still manages to convince himself that he can regain the Ring and avoid the consequences. He and the other gods cross the rainbow bridge into their new castle. Loge, in an aside to the audience, shakes his head and comments that the gods are going straight to their doom. Meanwhile, far below, the Rhinemaidens mourn their lost gold. Theirs are the last voices heard before the opera ends.
It’s easy enough to translate all this out of the florid imagery of mythology into the Feuerbachian terms Wagner had in mind while he was writing it. We discussed two weeks ago how love, in Wagner’s symbolism, stands in for the whole range of personal relationships that unite human beings to one another, to their communities, and to nature: the foundation, as we’ve seen, of human social and ecological existence in the early stages of every civilization and the baseline to which the survivors return when every civilization falls. What Wagner wants to discuss in the language of mythological opera is how the Western world abandoned that foundation.
The fascinating thing, at least to me, is that he got the history right. Remember, here again, that Wotan and the gods represent the ideas and ideals of society, and in another sense the intellectual and celebrity classes. Wotan in particular is the Western intellectual mainstream, “the sum of the intellect of the present” in Wagner’s own phrase, and it’s a matter of straightforward historical fact that the foundations for the modern industrial world were laid centuries in advance by the thinkers of the Western world, who spent most of a millennium making the commodification of the world thinkable.
As Lynn White pointed out many years ago in a crucial essay, “The Origins Of Our Ecological Crisis,” that process began with the rise of Christianity. That’s not to say that Christianity did it all by itself—quite the contrary—but by denouncing the old gods and spirits of nature as evil and reimagining the world as an artifact rather than a natural growth, the Christian churches laid a foundation on which later materialists would build. The nominalists, whom I discussed in an earlier essay, took things a step further to reducing the mental realm to a collection of arbitrary labels; from there, with the resurgence of philosophy in the wake of Descartes, all the necessary ideological framework for the desecration and commodification of nature fell into place.
Alberich’s terrible deed, as I suggested, was driven by the hard political and ecological realities of European life during the Little Ice Age, but Wotan broke off his branch of the World-Ash-Tree long before. What’s more, ambitious god that he was, he’d already pawned the goddess (that is, the ideal) of love and beauty in order to get his castle in the air built to his satisfaction.
Wagner made that whole transaction as edgy as he did, I suspect, because it was a bargain he’d made himself. Every intellectual and every creative talent who seeks respectability and a comfortable place in society makes some version of that deal. The people who control power and wealth—the giants, in the myth; the aristocratic class, in Wagner’s day; the managerial class, in our time—are rarely intellectual or cultured themselves; their mental capacities, which range from the mediocre to the considerable, have to be applied to the challenging art of maintaining and increasing their own wealth and influence, leaving little time for anything else. To them, the labors of intellectuals and creative talents are useful tools in the struggle for power and prestige, and intellectuals and creative talents have to recognize this and craft their creations accordingly if they want to get the respectability and the resources so many of them crave.
There’s an alternative, of course, for some intellectuals and some creative talents. You may be able to write books and articles for fringe communities, and get by that way. You may be able to paint or draw, so long as you don’t mind selling your work for postcard prices, and you can probably play music at the local honky-tonk and make some money. You can’t compose grand opera that way, though. Wagner had to sell himself to the rich and powerful if he wanted to follow his artistic vision. Given his pride, that must have twisted in him like a knife.
But there’s a further dimension to the bargain with the giants. The intellectuals and creative talents of every society create visions of what that society could be. In our society, with its fixation on progress, those are visions of the future; in societies with different relationships to time, the visions focus on the glorified past or on an idealized form of the present instead. The visions that matter aren’t created in a coldly manipulative spirit; they’re heartfelt, and express collective longings, which is why they’re embraced so fervently by so many people. Cutting a bargain with the giants in order to build your personal vision, your palace in the air—that’s a tempting deal for any visionary. Many people fall for it, and most of them go far out of their way not to notice how much of the vision has to be bargained away in order to get some of it in place.
That’s woven into the history of every civilization, but it takes a distinctive form in each case. In ours, the first stirrings of industrialism tossed a wild card into the middle of play. All of a sudden the gods and giants had to deal with the rise of a new power, the first sketch of a capitalist class, which could cash in the explosive expansion of wealth made possible by deepwater shipping and the earliest forms of mass production for the more intoxicating coin of power. Obviously it was essential to existing holders of power to take that magic ring from its makers.
Just as in the opera, they did it partly by force, and partly by embracing the same renunciation of love that got the Ring for Alberich in the first place. That is to say, they used their control of European political systems to keep the industrialists in line, and embraced the commodification of nature in order to give themselves ample wealth to take a dominant position in the rising capitalist system. All across Europe, kings and aristocrats converted feudal relationships based on personal loyalties to financial relationships in which only money mattered.
Much of that conversion was done with impressive brutality. Most of my paternal ancestors came to the New World because of one example, the Highland clearances—the mass deportation of most of the population of the Scottish Highlands. People whose ancestors had lived on the same land for centuries beyond counting were driven off their land by their own clan chieftains, their houses burnt and all their traditional rights taken from them, so that the lairds could lease out the land for sheep raising to feed Lowland mills with wool.
If you want to know why so many people of Scottish Highland descent these days live practically everywhere in the world but Scotland, and why most of their ancestors dropped their language and culture like a hot rock as they fled all over the globe, now you know; those who have been betrayed by the clan leaders they were taught to trust, admire and support routinely do such things. Similar scenes were enacted in quite a few European countries, for that matter. The mass migrations of impoverished European farmers all over the world had causes that don’t always get into recent history books.
Notice, finally, Wotan’s response to all this. Despite everything that happened, despite Alberich’s curse and the warnings of Erda, he still wants the Ring, and the power and wealth that it provides. That’s true of most mainstream intellectuals. In Wagner’s time it was even more true than usual, since the role of the philosophes in launching the French Revolution convinced a great many intellectuals that they ought to do the same thing, plan out a wonderful new world, and then get other people to make it happen. That’s exactly what Wotan has in mind. He plans on getting somebody else to get the Ring for him. That strategy didn’t work out too well for the philosophes, all things considered, and it worked even less well for their heirs in 1848 and 1849. In the operas to come, we’ll see how it works out for Wotan.
Reading through the opera itself and your blog posts on it, it boggles me that Tolkien denied any similarity between Wagner’s opera cycle and his own Ring story even while he ripped off huge chunks of it wholesale. Do you think there was a deeper reason for this, or was Tolkien just being his often-curmudgeonly self?
One thing I noticed as I looked more deeply into history a few years ago is that mass migrations from country to city fairly frequently weren’t just caused by pull factors like more jobs in the cities and people going to seek their fortune. There were MANY clearances of various kinds, and in recent times mechanization of farming and reduced need for labor and inability of many small farms to compete with large, subsidized and very mechanized farms has had a very similar effect in the emptying out of the countryside worldwide.
People often/usually weren’t jumping of their own free will, or not their own will alone; they were being pushed.
Most history book really like to downplay the role of elites and governments in actively dispossessing their own citizens and forcing them off the land – at least, unless they’re talking about european-ancestry groups dispossessing indigenous groups. For the rest, you find bits and pieces that you have to put together yourself, and the picture that emerges is pretty disturbing. The people pushed off the land go to the city, where they become cheap labor that fuels the industrial revolution in that nation. Labor whose alternate choice was taken from them, and can now be exploited to horrific levels. Happens everywhere from Ireland to the USA to China to Bangladesh to Scotland.
People argue that the factories were obviously better than the farms because people chose the factories. But if you have no access to land or work in the country because it was actively stolen from you, this is not a valid argument.
Cities tend to be population sinks rather than population sources, and I suspect the huge and increasing proportion of the world’s population now living in cities is one of the more important reasons that birth rates are now dropping so fast.
I hope everyone here has a good day!
I must say that I am not content with the blame that is put on Christianity. Christian principles are the opposite of the desire to reave nature of it’s bounty. I bring up the instructions that God gave to Israel regarding the land and it’s preservation, how Israel was indicted for exhausting the land. Remember Paul as well, in chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans he says that creation is groaning because it is in bondage under our bad management and that God prepared hope of it’s release.
Remember Jesus talking about our anxieties in how we procure our food and clothing, that it is wrong to maddingly pursuit these at the cost of love, for it is Love itself, the Father’s love, that sustains us.
I see that you pointed out “the Christian churches”. A subtlety with which I agree, for love of others and love for creation is built in the definition of Christianity, but organizational Christianity is always tainted by human shortcomings, but never completely for the head of the Church is a pristine and incorruptible High Priest who always takes back His Church from the clutches of human failure never allowing it to be “conquered by the gates of Hades”.
Thus far I’m very much enjoying the saga!
A parenthesis…you said, “…by denouncing the old gods and spirits of nature as evil and reimagining the world as an artifact rather than a natural growth, the Christian churches laid a foundation on which later materialists would build.” I expected, and first saw, “by denouncing the old gods and spirits of nature as evil and reimagining the world as an artifact rather than a natural growth, the Christian churches laid a foundation on which materialists would later build.” Are you saying that Christians were/are at least proto-materialists (because they see the world as a made object)?
(This is off topic for today and not intended as a ‘comment’)
Dear Mr. Greer,
In light of the upcoming 5th Wednesday on the topic of Hitler, I wonder if you’ve read Blitzed by Norman Ohler? It is an examination of drug use in the Third Reich. I was shocked that I’d never heard the topic mentioned in history books but it does help make sense of some of the crazier notions that came out of Munich. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29429893-blitzed
It’s interesting that oxycodone and methamphetamine use/abuse was prevalent in Germany and much more recently in portions of the United States. Could there be some link between those particular drugs and the ideologies of both places?
Meth does initially induce a “Superman” type of feeling; pain, fatigue and doubt all fall away. Like most drug abuse, it tends to not end well for the users of course! But if you are trying to create an army of disposable super-soldiers, Pervitin pills make a certain kind of demented sense and of course, they didn’t really grasp all the downsides until it was too late. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/05/pervitin-wonder-drug-that-fueled-nazi.html
I look forward to your post on the man, the myth and the archetype,
Sincerely,
Ken
JMG,
This series is awesome. I didn’t expect it to cut QUITE so close to home… As a young musician about a decade ago, I made my own pseudo-faustian creative bargain with those in power and wealth… The consequences would have been obvious, if I had been paying attention.
Noodles
As far as I can understand, the only way to find harmony is by abandoning industrial civilization. I mean on a personal level, I wonder if there are places and groups of people who rehabilitate other people who spent a lot of time in modern civilization. I am interested in these places and groups of people.
Japan had the same immigration dynamic as Scotland in the 1800’s. As the Meji restoration took hold in the 1880’s all the old feudal relationships were abolished and many traditional Japanese farmers were turned off their land. That is when my wifes grandfather came to Japan.
The interesting thing is that if you read conventional history sources. they like to ignore this and give other reasons for large out-migration from Japan, Scotland and other places. For instance Wikipedia ( cough cough) says the cause of out migration in Japan was war with China and and an economic downturn. Which seems like stupid reasons.
Even today the narrative is maintained that feudalism is bad, and monetary industrial servitude is good. So it can’t possibly be that people would want to leave when feudalism ended and the great new era of working in a mill for pennies came.
Thank you for this enlightening work.
Ken : drugs were and are used for all the military in all the countries.
One bizarre history is the history of the soldier Aimo Allan Koivunen
While fleeing a Soviet ambush, Koivunen took a near-lethal overdose of methamphetamine. The drugs helped Koivunen cover hundreds of miles of ground – but they nearly killed him in the process.
Full history
https://allthatsinteresting.com/aimo-koivunen
So Wotan gets the Ring before he has to give it to the giants. Is this Wagner’s nod to the revolutionaries, who seized power from the capitalists for a moment before being forced to give it back to the aristocrats?
I guess one of the things you are saying here is that Wagner pursued the 20%
[See Greer’s Law: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/299920.html?thread=51613840#cmt51613840 ]
James, partly it was Tolkien being the grumpy old git that he became in his later years, but there was another factor. Tolkien was a rock-ribbed religious and political conservative, and he bristled at the way that people on the opposite end of the spectrum — especially Wagner and William Morris — had reworked the old Germanic legends to fit their beliefs. The Lord of the Rings is in large part a counterblast to Wagner’s operas and Morris’s fantasy novels, and includes quite a few elements that more or less parody both — for example, the chief villain in Morris’s greatest fantasy novel, The Well at the World’s End, is named Gandolf…
Pygmycory, yep. Our current elites love to talk about what their precessors did to the indigenous peoples of the rest of the world but they really, truly don’t like to talk about what the same predecessors did to the indigenous peoples of Europe.
Rafael, if you go back and reread my comments you’ll find that you’ve completely missed the point that I made.
Roldy, no, I neither said nor implied that. It’s rather dispiriting to watch the point I tried to make being ignored so that a familar polemic quarrel can be trotted out.
Ken, I have indeed. For what it’s worth, I think our current elite uses cocaine more often than meth.
Noodles, the only thing that saved me from making the same bargain was the slowness of my learning curve as a writer. If I’d broken into print in my 20s I’d probably have gotten sucked into the trap of writing for the big corporate publishers, and had my own voice and vision stifled.
Zarcayce, nope. That’s been tried over and over again, and it doesn’t work, because try as you like, you’ll take the mental world of industrial society with you. (It’s another case of “wherever you go, there you are.”) No, the only way out is through.
Clay, that’s another fine example. As the Meiji regime tightened its control over Japan, it adopted most of the bad habits of the European regimes it copied, and that was one of them.
Randal, you’re welcome.
Roldy, very likely that was part of it. I suspect it was also a nod to the Renaissance, however.
Justin, since he wanted to be an opera composer, he locked himself into that choice.
Sorry, no polemic implied – I just wanted to be clear that when you compared “Christian churches” to “later materialists” it was just inadvertent phrasing. Thanks.
@JMG, I’m actually not just talking about the past. I’m also talking about policies today in China, and the situation in Bangladesh (though that’s partly sea level rise/salt water intrusion mediated). Also in Africa, with corporate takeovers of tribal lands mediated by government. It hasn’t actually stopped.
It’s interesting that by giving up the Ring, Wotan gets Freia back, so has at least the option of renouncing power and returning to love. Alas, ’twas not to be.
Wotan reminds me of Faust, who probably didn’t give much thought to the price he’d have to pay when he signed the contract (or thought he could find a way to wiggle out of it).
Ha. I published a very similar essay today, except it was the trashy dime store version with horror movies, psyops, and Islamic terrorism. Your way of thinking feels more and more like a lifeboat now that all the abstractions are sinking into the abyss.
https://naakua.substack.com/p/second-religiosity-the-final-chapter
From the bible this is what you give up when you renounce love
“Love is patient,
love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast,
it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
and a depressingly accurate description of what Industrial Civilization is not.
The greeks had several different words for love
Eros: Romantic love
Philia: Deep friendship or brotherly love
Storge: Familial love
Agape: Divine love
Philautia: Love of the self
Ludus: Playful love
Pragma: Long-standing love
Did you need to renounce them all to get the ring?
My sense of what you just described? Alberich is the only character in that whole miserable story that actually wanted to work. And actually got something done. You can argue over whether it was foolish or not, meh. The sorry lot of them wanted to leech off someone else. Some gods.
Although that does make me wonder. Why would a god that has plenty of power to begin with, want more power?
And the World Tree – so that’s where Blizzard ripped that off from.
Re: Pygmycory (#2), JMG’s answer to that (#13)
This is a point I realized a few years ago when I read Simone Weil’s ‘L’enracinement’ (the English translation is called ‘The Need for Roots’). This is a strange book, a political manifesto she wrote during WWII, which, like so many other books of this genre, is very perceptive in its diagnoses and very unrealistic in its practical suggestions. The central claim is that one of the most basic human needs is having roots, that is, belonging – to a land, a culture, a community. Faustian civilization has been engaged, since its inception, in uprooting. During colonialism it uprooted countless cultures around the world. But this could only work because it had uprooted itself first, or rather its ruling classes had uprooted the peasant population.
Weil doesn’t speak about the enclosures in Britain but about similar processes in France. Before France could subdue and homogenize the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Maghreb and Vietnam, the rulers of the Île de France had to subdue and homogenize the Languedoc, Brittany and the Périgord.
Of course the usual polarization in politics makes this connection invisible. If Brexiteers and Indigenous Amazonians realize they are up against the same enemy, some interesting things might happen.
Dear JMG,
Following the answer to Zarcayce, would you be able to clarify “the only way out is through [the industrial civilization]” ? Does it mean enduring it ?
Kind regards
Zarcayce #7
> I am interested in these places and groups of people.
I would opine that such places and people would include:
(1) Existing farm communities.
(2) Farmers, farm families, and their extended families.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🐖🐑🧑🏽🌾🌱🚜
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I can understand why. He obviously had the talent and the will to see his project through, and it obviously has had a far reaching effect. Just ask smeagol!
Fantastic essay. Thank you for all tbe parts about the choices creatives and intellectuals make and face. A lot to chew on there.
Good essay JMG
As for “Even today the narrative is maintained that feudalism is bad, and monetary industrial servitude is good.”
Feudalism and Monarchy have a common problem (in both senses of the word.) What if your lord or sovereign is a bad ruler? What’s your recourse? Oh, there isn’t one except to try to escape. Voting the bums out might not work, but it’s safer to try that than armed revolution.
Even though Feudalism and Monarchy should encourage long term thinking since the grandkids will inherit all too often the grandkids turn out to be entitled snots only interested in hedonism. Then it all falls apart.
A great continuation of the series! I understand better now that the gods here represent both ideas and creators of ideas, not just any kind of middle class. Thanks also for your subtle appraisement of the role of Christianity in the desacralization of Nature: “that’s not to say that Christianity did it all by itself—quite the contrary”. A not too different take can be found in Charles Taylor’s A Secular World, which hasn’t stopped Taylor being a devout Christian.
When you write about the “earliest forms of mass production”, are you thinking also of tropical sugar and tobacco monocultures worked by indentured European servants and African and indigenous slaves? Graeber’s Debt cited a rather obscure French reference to the effect that the discipline and regulation applied to “free” workers in the factories of the Industrial Revolution was pioneered in the tropical plantations with unfree labor. I have never read that French reference, but the connection seems plausible. Another example of how unsavoury measures applied abroad finally come home to roost.
The example of the Scottish clearances is heartrending in part because it is well-documented, having taken place in a country with mass printing. Countless similar episodes of treason by former clan chiefs have probably taken place over the millennia, from the founding of dynastic Egypt (told very well by David Wengrow) to Hawai’i, though the disenfranchised were usually retained and not put to flight.
I think the elite attitude to uppers is along these lines:
Cocaine is a clean drug fit for the wealthy and well to do jet setters. If it worked for Freud and Doyle it can work for us!
Meth is a dirty drug fit only for trailer trash and ghetto fiends, or crazy scifi writers like Philip K. Dick. Don’t point the pink beam at us! Plus ut rots out your teeth and Daddy wont pay for another set of full implants.
I witnessed that Odin bargain when finishing my art undergrad, when I realized that the fine art world was actually just a way to make a meager living off of rich people’s money laundering and tax avoidance schemes, with no relationship to the product produced. I didn’t make the bargain, but then again I realized at the same time that I am not nearly talented enough to succeed in that industry anyway (at least without resorting to unethical tactics), so it wasn’t a real option anyway.
You skipped over Alberich’s plan to enslave the world and overthrow the gods with his wealth and his ring! I thought it was interesting how Alberich, with all his newfound power and freedom, has no better plan than revenge against creation for his misery.
Hi John Michael,
Well, yeah, treat any relationship like an object, and things are inevitably going to end badly. It’s not lost on me that the cursed bloke treated his debtors with disdain, much like Wotan would have approved of. The parallels are strong. Interestingly I tried that trick too as a very young bloke, and got thumped for my efforts and also coughed up the mad cash, and that was a good lesson to take relationships seriously.
I must say, it amuses greatly to see debts worldwide spiralling ever upwards into the dark realms of the non-relationships. The end point will of course be the same, a good solid thumping. The difference here is, I was a child, but then an argument could be made… 😉 As far as I can comprehend the situation, it’s the same, but on a huger scale, and I doubt that there is an intention to pay, so the thumping is foreordained.
Yup, the clearances. And so my lot turned up down here and repeated the act on the locals. Hmm. A curse, upon a curse, upon a curse. Not good. And the payments are building.
Dude, I saw how the winds were blowing, and chucked my lot in with nature. But even so, a dudes gotta walk in two worlds all at once.
Good to hear that the worst of the weather missed you. That mostly happens here as well. Some places are like that aren’t they?
Hi RandomActsofKarma,
Thanks so much for the explanation last week, and you’ve given me plenty to think about.
Cheers
Chris
Roldy, I was contrasting them with materialists before Christianity, of whom there was of course no shortage.
Pygmycory, that’s a valid point.
Roldy, the comparison with Faust is a valid one — the two figures have a very great deal in common.
KVD, thanks for this! Having grown up on trashy dime store fantasy stories, I still have a soft spot for that end of literature; I’ve bookmarked your essay.
Dobbs, it’s not necessary to be a Christian to recognize that there’s a lot of wisdom in the Bible. As for your question, as I mentioned, you have to renounce all human relationships and replace them with strictly economic relationships, so yes, it’s the lot.
Other Owen, how many intellectuals do you know? An aversion to hard work is not exactly rare in those circles…
Foxhands, what I mean is that there’s no way to run away from it, since you take its modes of consciousness with you. You have to deal with the industrial civilization in yourself, and you have to do it here and now, not in some imaginary refuge — keep in mind that the vast majority of people who dream of fleeing someplace to get away from industrial civilization will never actually do anything of the kind. That’s what I’m trying to teach people how to do.
Justin, you’re most welcome.
Siliconguy, what if all the choices your supposedly democratic system presents for your vote, in election after election, are sleazebags who are pushing the same policies? In a hereditary system you at least have the chance now and again at a good king.
Aldarion, the role of plantation slavery as a forerunner of factory labor hadn’t occurred to me, but it’s quite a plausible suggestion and deserves further exploration.
Justin, that’s the impression I’ve gotten, certainly.
John B, that’s a good point. Alberich’s like so many people raised in an oppressive background; the only alternative they can think of to being oppressed is doing the oppressing. It takes an unusual kind of insight to imagine something else.
Chris, yeah, I think a world-class thumping is on its way.
“If Brexiteers and Indigenous Amazonians realize they are up against the same enemy, some interesting things might happen.”
Robert, it is the purpose of the “diversity” scam to make sure they do not realize.
Not sure how on topic this is but it sort of fits with some of the comments, I think.
Christians say that we are made in God’s image. This is something I believe and it informs the way I treat other people.
However, perhaps what we really do is make God in our own image. So much more comfortable and easier to understand him.
Hi Archdruid John,
What are you thoughts on the real Wotan/Odin? How different is he from the opera treatment he gets from Wagner?
Just as as a PS: The French book David Graeber cites for the claim that capitalism started with, and has always continued to be built on, mostly unfree labor is Yann Moulier-Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat: Economie historique du salariat bridé. It’s funny because after reading Debt, I asked Graeber for a different, non-French source, and he couldn’t give me any. Nowadays, I would be able to read it in French, though the book doesn’t look easy to find or to read!
@Other Owen: The giants laboured quite hard to build Wotan’s castle, and they make a point of comparing their hard work with this sleep! I find that quite out of character for aristocrats.
I must say I have difficulties reconciling Wagner’s off-stage characterization of Wotan as “the sum of our intellect” with his on-stage performance. He doesn’t seem intellectual at all but depends entirely on Loge for suggestions and solutions. He reminds of nothing so much as of mediatic politicians like Macron, Pena Nieto or Justin Trudeau.
JillN, as I see it, we can’t understand the Divine — the finite cannot comprehend the infinite — and so we necessarily (re)make our gods in our own image.
Felix, as far as I can tell they have nothing in common but the name.
Aldarion, I read French fluently, so if I can find a copy I’ll have a look at it. As for “the sum of our intellect,” well, what does that say about Wagner’s opinion of the intelligence of the modern Western mind?
@JMG,
Once again, your Wagner essays are a real pleasure to read. I don’t think that anyone else I follow on the internet has even half as wide a range of interests as you do!
I wonder sometimes if Wagner’s story would have caught so many people’s imaginations if it had to stand on its own, apart from the music. Suppose he had just been a novelist, or a playwright – would anyone remember his eccentric take on Norse mythology? Yet with a musical talent like his I figure that any tale could go a long way….
I will admit to disliking the mostly-negative l light in which Wagner portrays Wotan and the other Gods. I always had the impression that in the original myths they were usually heroic figures, who created mankind and who fight hard to keep Loki and the giants at bay, even as they know that sooner or later they’ll perish in Ragnorok. They may not be all-knowing or all-powerful like the Christian God, but they’re more benevolent than Wagner gives them credit for. (Some Christians might argue that with epithets like “Glutter of Crows,” Wotan is also too violent to be compared to their God, but I don’t think this is fair. Jehovah is deep into the crow-glutting business too. See Jeremiah 16:3-4, Ezekiel 39:17-20, and especially Revelation 19:17-21. Or just look up the phrase “Supper of the Great God.”)
It seems to me that Tolkien had similar feelings, which might explain why he disliked the Ring operas and pretended not to be influenced by them. After all, in Tolkien’s cosmos, the Valar fight hard to bind the Loki-like figure of Melkor/Morgoth, and Gandalf looks a lot like Wotan as “the Wanderer,” and Manwë has ravens bringing him news from all over the world, and the high God over all of it is Eru, called “Iluvatar” by the Elves. (Iluvatar being Quenya for “All-Father,” a major title for Wotan which never shows up in Wagner’s works.)
But if Wagner, as a Feuerbachian, is just using the traditional gods of the Germanic race as a mirror for (what he sees as) that race’s most powerful and influential figures… perhaps also influenced by Greek mythology, which is made mostly of stories about powerful but short-sighted and selfish gods using vulnerable human beings as pawns in their games… then I figure it works. The character development through the four operas is solid, as is the tragic ending for Siegfriend and Brünhilde, and of course the music is wonderful.
Thank you for these explanations of the Ring Cycle, JMG. I honestly did not understand it or its appeal until now even though I studied music in college. For those who have not been following mainstream news, there is a famous entertainment producer named Sean Combs a.k.a. Diddy who was arrested and thrown in jail. We are now finding out he was into nasty stuff. He is an Epstein-like figure who spent most of his time obtaining compromising videos of celebrities and celeb-wannabes. He seems to me like a modern Alderich, enslaving and assaulting everyone and everything around him, obsessed with wealth and world domination. Combs was a significant domino. His fall is taking a large swath of cultural visions and ideals down with it, but in many ways, those visions and ideals were cursed to begin with. I’m planning to address him in my next weekly essay.
Thanks Archdruid John,
Great to know he is nothing like the opera version. What is the real Wotan/Odin like? Is he a deified Norse/Gothic hero from long ago? Or is he an arch type? I see that most of the gods represent some kind of order over chaos.
How do I get into contact with him? How responsive is he?
Thanks
Felix
From the last discussion on the Rhinegold I got totally swooped about Wotan being not an external idea, or an idea of part of our cultural ecosystem like justice/lawgiver and artist/beauty, social custom, love and relationships, logic and reason. But the idea of self and intelectual self. The identity.
So in the scene where every internal faculty of modern culture is begging the self to yield the craving for power, where the very Earth deigns to speak against it. Wotan yields in deed but not in mind.
What still puzzles me is who Edda is, “Goddess of the Earth”, but I suppose the answer this week is the same as two weeks ago; the answer will be forthcoming in the Valkyrie and the Twilight of the gods. 🙂
@Other Owen: @Aldarion: Seems to me that the work the giants are referring to is the same as described by John n this essay;
“the aristocratic class, in Wagner’s day; the managerial class, in our time—are rarely intellectual or cultured themselves; their mental capacities, which range from the mediocre to the considerable, have to be applied to the challenging art of maintaining and increasing their own wealth and influence”
If you ever met some of the managers/accountants/entrepreneurs, they work all the time. They are constantly on call. They do not have the time to dream about “the better world”, they have to keep their department in line, on schedule and on budget. Plus their superiors happy. They got no time to dream. 70 hour workweek is the norm.
@Mary (#30)
It truly is!
Hi John Michael,
Whilst reading through the comments a little thought popped into my head: Loge would make a good economist don’t you reckon?
Cheers
Chris
Yeah, if giants = nobility, then their hard (or rather, dangerous ?) work would be better shown by results of conquest… but then of course that wouldn’t fit with the rest of story – if Wagner was so prolific, he must have said something about this choice ?
@John B, well, Alberich *did* renounce all love !
(BTW, thanks @dobbs for reminding us of the yet very different conceptions that Ancient Greeks had of “love” – which lived in a society both very different than medieval Europe (politics, slavery), but also very similar (agricultural society).)
I’m afraid that one issue with this blogpost might be the use of “feudalism” as a valid concept. Historians seem to have never been particularly happy with it, and in fact obsoleted it half a century ago : “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe” AHR 79.4 (1974)
The creation of that concept seems to be the result of on one hand a myopic focus on Europe’s Middle Ages, and on another hand the main sources for a long time being the written texts : paid for by and therefore written almost exclusively for nobles (and especially the highest rank nobles) and the Church.
The others –
not sure if Third Estate would be too much of an anachronism to use here, since it was seemingly pushed so much by the bourgeois (=city-dwellers), which, as a reminder, did exist even in Medieval Europe, but were perhaps even more separated from peasants than in Wagner’s modern era (before the printing press and the start of alphabetization) –
the others are basically invisible in the written texts, and it’s the progress in archeology, especially over the last decades, that now allows us to have some idea about their lives.
Anyway, “feudalism” might be better understood as when circumstances make vassalage meet manorialism/serfdom.
Vassalage being the social system where there is basically no state capacity, so it’s all based on personal relationships between elites, which are a warrior class : the experience of war bringing them even closer together
(also remember that the poor medieval peasant made for a paltry fighter, and specifically, wasn’t a warrior – my guess is that it would be interesting to look at counter-examples, like with English longbowmen, where their hunting skills translated well to warfare).
Vassalage is indeed dead by the beginning of the modern era (mid-1400s), with rising state capacity, (resulting in absolute monarchy rather than vassalage), rising population, and the start of industrial revolution making even peasants (still commanded by nobles) into a much more dangerous force, first with crossbows, then muskets (both being much more expensive to produce, but requiring no lifelong training).
(Also, in Europe itself, it’s only by the middle of the Middle Ages that the system of hereditary land grants against the obligation of military service becomes the norm.)
Serfdom being the (legal) social system where the underclass is neither free, nor in complete slavery – which I guess does involve a kind of love – late modern Russian literature is probably a good place to get a sense for it (or lack of it), since it was only ended in practice by the end of the modern era with WW1 and the Russian Revolution (not that the next system was particularly free either).
BTW, Russia is a counter-example here, since serfdom only became the dominant social system there in the modern era.
Manorialism is an economic system, and a much more prevalent one – it basically seems to be the default for agricultural societies ? (Or is that mostly for plow-based societies ?)
In it, landholders (which are typically rich farmers themselves) exploit the labor of poorer farmers nearby, often taking advantage of the fact that only the rich farmers have any real capital (in the form of (better) tools and beasts of burden).
It was for instance basically the default in most of the Roman world.
(and seems to have suffered a somewhat (but not quite) similar fate in its center as with the Industrial Revolution, except that the energy slaves that replaced peasants in Rome’s neighborhood were literal slaves. They might have gotten a better fate too (at least materially) compared to modern peasants, since once they fled to Rome, the resulting instability resulted in free grain for them to prevent food riots)
Anyway, my point is that the worlds of peasants (farmer class) and of nobles (warrior class) were already very distinct in the Middle Ages (and themselves also very distinct of the few bourgeois free(ish) cities). For instance peasants did *not* pledge fealty to their lord, that was between nobles only.
Not to say that there might have been *some* kind of love / expectations between peasants and nobles… and I would expect that Christianity would actually have had a positive effect here (the Church itself, maybe not so much ?).
Those relatively small love / expectations that would have been ruined by the appeal of mercantile/industrial profit,
which before that pretty much required conquest of new lands,
(long distance trading having become too dangerous during the Middle Ages),
which was only an option for the warrior noble class, and where nobles would have had to face those who they would have considered their peers (and which typically were in practice), not easily walked over lessers.
(The rich non-noble manorial lord peasant, betraying its subjugated same-class peasants feels worse indeed. But, see Alberich’s resentment overpowering everything ?)
I wonder how much this “feodal mistake” comes from the early 20th century generation of historians being too far removed from the old world (completely dead and buried with WW1), and also ironically projecting their expectation of “all men are created free and equal” over the Medieval writings ?
Phew, this came out much longer than I expected, thanks for those that did end up reading it all.
>I must say, it amuses greatly to see debts worldwide spiralling ever upwards into the dark realms of the non-relationships
Amusing isn’t the feeling I get looking at it. Did you know those spiraling debts never could be paid off? That it was baked into the cake from the very beginning? That all the debts are technically bad? That they had to spiral? That they must spiral?
They’ve kept it all going by writing off part of the bad debts and finding ways to reset the ponzi scheme from that lower level. They’d probably be able to do that again, except they’re running into planetary resource limits.
“Foxhands, what I mean is that there’s no way to run away from it, since you take its modes of consciousness with you. You have to deal with the industrial civilization in yourself, and you have to do it here and now, not in some imaginary refuge — keep in mind that the vast majority of people who dream of fleeing someplace to get away from industrial civilization will never actually do anything of the kind. That’s what I’m trying to teach people how to do.”
Thanks JMG, I got the best epiphany from this response. I had come to the realization quite a long time ago that if I tried to move to the country and “go back to the land” that I would just be taking industrial civilization with me. I had not thought to apply that same realization to my intellectual life or my emotional life or even my spiritual life. Live and learn. Now to see if I can apply it to these other areas of my life.
@Aldarion, another French author, Braudel, had quite a different take on the origin of capitalism. He sees its origins in the market economy of the late middle ages in Europe. His work is available in English translation.
A minor bit of synchronicity:
There is this billionaire called Bryan Johnson who is documenting his journey to “not die”. Someone asked him on Twitter:
ahem
@bryan_johnson
would you turn yourself into the worm like in dune god emperor if it would ensure you live an additional 1000 years and become immortal but you had to be a massive worm who was incapable of love?
Yes
I found it amusing, he’s acting out Wotan’s bargain. I feel that the Dune series is like a different take on it though, Leto became a tyrant because he saw that it was the only way to bring humanity to the Golden Path and he went willingly to his death in the end to bring it about.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Rebecca’s new job position, the start date of which keeps being rescheduled, indeed be hers, and commence as soon as possible; may it fill her and her family’s needs, and may the situation be pleasant and free of strife.
May Divine help be granted to newlywed Merlin (TemporaryReality’s daughter), that she be guided to beneficial information and good decisions that lead to perfect health. May the lump in her breast resolve rapidly with no issues.
May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
born prematurely two months early, come home safe and sound.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Kevin, his sister Cynthia, and their elderly mother Dianne have a positive change in their fortunes which allows them to find affordable housing and a better life.
May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
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If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG,
First thank you! This series was thought provoking. Do you think The abandonment of a relationship with nature happens inevitably when there is a resource benefit to extraction at a pace faster than the land provides? If that excess extraction can lead to growth and then conquest of other lands, i can see how extraction can be a temporary “win” causing growth and collapse. To me i see human populations acting like algae blooms. Where resources or technology that allow for extraction cause a bloom and collapse. I am trying to imagine a culture that is both sustainable and stable to invasion. The only species that seem to achieve this consume all the resources like old growth trees, that maintain low soil nutrition, and cover the canopy.
Open to criticism of this train of thought!
Sandwiches, oh, it would have depended on whether he’d have had any other talent on the same scale as his talent for composition. Most operas as written make poor novels and worse poems, but a good novelist or poet could take the same basic ideas and do something amazing with them. As for Wagner’s Feuerbachian reworking of the gods, oh, agreed — and I know a lot of Heathens share Tolkien’s animosity toward Wagner for exactly that reason.
Kimberly, one of the reasons that Wagner’s operas still have plenty of fans is that we all know, or at least know of, exact equivalents of each of the characters. I wonder if we’ll ever find out why, after having been sheltered from prosecution for all these years, Combs/Alberich finally ended up in jail.
Felix, that’s not something I can help you with. You’ll have to go ask some Heathens about that — and, btw, it’s off topic for this comment thread, which is about Wagner’s fictional figures.
Marko, in Wagner’s Germany one of the major intellectual movements was Naturphilosophie, the forerunner of modern ecology, which tried to ground human understanding in the world of nature. I see Erda’s appearance here as a reference to that — the recognition, on the part of a great many German intellectuals, that the commodification of the world was not merely antihuman but in conflict with nature itself.
Chris, in a sense, yes. He was certainly good at telling the gods and giants what they wanted to hear, which is of course the basic requirement for success in economics; his problem is that he couldn’t lie to himself, much less convince himself that the gods hadn’t just doomed themselves.
Peak Singularity, as you see, the line breaks came through just fine. There’s a glitch in the software that makes it look in previews as though they’ve gone away. As for “feudalism,” yes, I know there’s been a lot of fussing about it in the last century or so. I prefer to let the middle ages speak for themselves here — as you may know, there’s plenty of literature from that time talking about the nature of the feudal relationship.
Kay, delighted to hear this. Once you see the current mess as something that exists all through yourself, and not just an outside presence you can flee, you can start to do something meaningful about it.
Alvin, that’s just sad. Really sad.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Alex, that’s a solid ecological analysis. As for your question, I don’t think human social evolution has reached that successional stage yet!
JMG,
i would agree that human social evolution is not sustainable…. if we look at one of our most sustainable examples i would look at Egypt. however i think they may have existed for so long because the opportunity for extraction was limited. If you think about their farm land, both soil nutrients and water were provided at a constant rate from the Nile annual floods. Excess nutrients were likely washed away and obviously excess water was as well. Because of this the CHANGE of resources was near 0. This is unlike farm lands with rain, as the nutrients taken from the soil are not replaced, so their is either an extraction of the top soil, or a human energy input to maintain it through composting. Since the human energy input is needed to maintain the resource base, a healthy top soil is now a resource that can be extracted from by other peoples who spend their energy taking that land rather than cultivating their own. It also doesnt help the math, that there is a temporary surplus of food when you dont rotate crops. I wonder if Rome insisted on conquered farm land being extracted from rather than cultivated, used the excess to fuel a conquest, and repeated for 1000 or so years of this “growth”
just some thoughts, im convinced that humans behave like algae when you “zoom up” a bit. i wonder if there is any biological system that is sustainable however i cant think of one that would choose not to grow consumption to meet availability of a resource.
@Alvin, This is such a perfect example of a modern version of the ring! the castle in the air is our myth of progress which primarily centers around Ray Kurzweil’s promise of immortality. And when asked he would literally give up Love and every other form of dignity to be an immortal worm.
“However, perhaps what we really do is make God in our own image.”
That would account for the vast gulf between the God of the Old Testament and the one Jesus and John the Baptist were going on about. That brings up the question of what caused people’s self image to change. Did the ravings of the priestly caste finally grow wearisome? Did the priests fail to deliver prosperity while the Romans did?
I just finished reading Michael Lewis’ ” Going Infinite”, about FTX and Sam Bankman Fried.
It is a kind of sideways Wagnerian story in real life. Sam Bankman Fried is a kind of Post-Wotan character who seems to have born without the ability to feel friendship, love or empathy. Almost as if one of Woton’s curses was to father a son bereft of any of those human characteristics.
As Lewis depicts him, Sam was not evil or greedy, just detached from normal human emotions. He then, early in his adult life gloms on to a strange philosophy called ” ethical altrutism” . In a nutshell E.A. says that a human can accomplish the greatest good for the world by making as much money as possible and then giving most of it away to good causes. A kind of “license from the gods”, to make money and spurn human relationships while feeling morally good about yourself.
This of course leads Sam down a path of massive temporary wealth amidst a wreckage of human lives and relationships.
It was not Lewis’s best work, but this post made me realize that it might make the feedstock for a better Opera.
Kimberly Steele, I have not been following the Diddy story. I made a note to myself to read your blog post, I hope you will be able to tell us something about who put him up to it all. Doesn’t excuse him of course, but I take the view that the hit person and whomever purchased the hit are equally guilty.
>Other Owen, how many intellectuals do you know? An aversion to hard work is not exactly rare in those circles
Yeah, Wagner wasn’t really talking about some mythological past, no more than Mike Judge was talking about the year 2505 when he made Idiocracy. For some reason nobody is trying to bury The Ring Cycle though. I guess it’s impenetrable enough on its own.
I guess in some ways Wagner’s operas were the Idiocracy of the 19th c, a scathing critique of the conditions of the time.
@Alvin #46: I hope we are not getting too off-topic here. I see a distinction between mercantile capitalism like the one the East India companies plied, and industrial capitalism. Mercantile dynasties and networks did indeed start to appear in a rather timid fashion from about the 12th century onwards and grew enormously in the 14th and 15th centuries. (Btw, I just re-read some passages where Graeber suggests that the romantic “knight errant” of medieval lays was actually based on the very real “merchant errants”!). However, the East India Companies and others like them did not employ large numbers of people to work in confined spaces. Even into the 19th centuries, a lot of production like spinning and weaving was done by each family in their own home – they received the wool and returned the finished product, but did not go to work in a factory. Since at least some of them owned their houses on their land, they could switch back and forth between agriculture/husbandry and this outsourced work.
What Moulier-Boutang is after (according to Graeber) is that the organization of the workforce into large groups of workers, working in shifts in big buildings under foremen, which we consider typical of industrial capitalism, actually had its origins in tropical plantations that confined and disciplined unfree laborers (indentured servants, slaves or contract workers from other countries like India or China). As far as I know, sugar plantations were pioneered in the 15th century on the Portuguese Açores, saw a huge expansion in the 16th century in the Caribbean and Brazil, and early in the 17th centuries were adopted by the English, too, for sugar in Jamaica and for tobacco in Virginia.
That would have been the training ground for the creation of the industrial working class in Britain itself beginning in the very late 18th century, but first the English and Scottish peasants had to be forced away from the land. They would never have accepted 19th century factory working conditions if they had had any alternative. And that’s where their betrayal by their former clan chiefs or manor lords comes in.
I haven’t yet read Moulier-Boutang myself so can’t judge the evidence. It’s a pity Darkest Yorkshire doesn’t comment here anymore, he would have a lot to contribute!
Are Wagner’s gods Vikings of the Mind? Our managerial class certainly seem to be.
“You have to deal with the industrial civilization in yourself, and you have to do it here and now.”
That is what I call a rousing call to action.
*tips hat*
@Felix Cheah #39 Re: Odin/Woden and the Germanic Gods
JMG, if this is going too much off-topic, feel free not to put through.
Felix, if you’d like to ask a Heathen about Odin/Woden/Wotan, feel free to reach out, either by email (jeff DOT powell DOT russell AT gmail DOT com or at jprussell.dreamwidth.org). The super short version: To get a feel for Him, the best starting source I can recommend was one of Wagner’s primary sources, Snorri Sturlusson’s Prose Edda, and many of today’s Heathens (myself included) have found Him very responsive. If you’d like to dig deeper on either, reach out as I said and I can likely give you far more than you want or need!
Cheers,
Jeff
May I interrupt momentarily to ask how rhe 5th-Wednesday topic voting is shaping up?
Alex, I’d like to suggest another way of looking at it. Civilizations, ecologically speaking, are the human equivalent of early successional stages — they spring up where there’s an abundant supply of nutrients, run through it, and then die out, to be replaced by more stable forms. Our stable forms are various kinds of dispersed tribal communities. It’s all very sustainable, so long as you look at it in terms of the ecological big picture; civilizations fill their niche, and other social forms fill theirs.
Clay, interesting. Thanks for this.
Other Owen, in a very real sense, yes!
Justin, if I were a Viking I’d wax wroth at that comparison. No, not Vikings of the mind — they’re at the other end of the historical arc. Think of them as decadent Roman aristocrats of the mind:
Scotlyn, oddly enough, I meant it simply as a statement of fact. But thank you!
Your Kittenship, Hitler conquered it. We’ll be hearing from him — or rather from his posthumous image and reputation — in a couple of weeks.
Gotcha. Cuing up soundtrack to Fellini’s Satyricon…
“most of their ancestors dropped their language and culture like a hot rock ”
That’s an intriguing comment. My Scottish ancestors who landed in Cape Breton didn’t drop their language or culture at all, quite the opposite, to this very day you can find centenarian Gaelic speakers out there in the wild. I always wondered why there wasn’t more of this elsewhere given the vastness of the Scottish diaspora.
Anyway the Clearances are interesting in that you grow up reading about it, because it’s part of your heritage, and you think, “Pshaw, how terrible, good thing nothing like that would EVER HAPPEN NOWADAYS, amirite?” And then you look at various pieces of “environmental” (in scare quotes) legislation, or the current stories coming out from North Carolina, or what have you, and you realize: plus ça change.
Another great essay. Your zeroing in on Alberich’s curse as the dramatic (and musical!) high point of the opera is, IMHO, spot on. (People can listen to it beginning an hour and forty one minutes into the Youtube mentioned two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFCFq6WWmGE — what the characters are singing is spelled out in clear subtitles.). Wagner had this uncanny ability to get into the minds of dark, twisted, cursed characters and use his incomparable greatness as a composer to enable us to feel exactly what they feel. Who else could do that? Well, Shakespeare, I suppose — and Verdi pulled it off in his most “Wagnerian” opera in his musical portrayal of Iago. But Wagner managed it over and over again – indeed the first piece of indisputably great music he ever wrote is “Die Friest Is Um” from the Flying Dutchman ; you feel the Dutchman’s rage and hopelessness (Wagner wrote that aria before he composed the rest of the opera; here is Bryn Terfel doing it in a bravura performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcu11tVDy_s ) As mentioned before, I have some quibbles about Rheingold, particularly the opening parts with the Rhinemaidens swimming around the gold (yawn!); Alberich’s theft of the gold just seems to lack the power it should have. The trick Wotan and Loge use to capture Alberich — having him boast about being a toad — hmm, are we supposed to be afraid of this guy? But everything from the time they drag him up to the heights until the end of the opera has such incredible musical/dramatic power.
I guess in your next installment you’ll start in on Die Walkure. Can’t wait!
Adding to what Clay Dennis was saying about Japan, having been successfully attacked from the outside and forced to deal all of a sudden with the modern world (which they’d received considerable news from via Nagasaki, and had doubtlessly formulated a strategy for if worst came to worst), they noted the duality in the West between “Human” and “Nature,” and that it was a powerful concept, allowing the West to objectify the latter and exploit it. So the took the old word “Jinen” 自然, meaning “nature” as in “that is the nature of things,” and assigned it a new pronunciation: “shizen,” meaning that part of it which is separate from humans, unspoiled, all the meanings the West associates with it. They went ahead with that to modernize themselves.
Shinto never really adopted that concept. My first mentor, a robust guy who would climb a mountain even with his heart failing him, told me it was humanity’s duty to get out there and clear paths through the forest. The human-enhanced traditional Japanese landscape (described under the term “satoyama”) has higher biodiversity than places that are just allowed to go wild. Our foraging activities and attempts to maintain order create important niches, and have done so throughout our species’ existence. He told me, “We are an important part of so-called Nature.”
It strikes me as a healthier and happier attitude overall.
Patricia,
I completely agree with that attitude. I lived in the Japanese countryside for 3 years and found myself wanting to protect that version of nature much more. By that version of nature, I mean the version of nature that has vending machines and trashcans in the middle of trails located in the middle of nowhere, staircases next to a series of waterfalls, and manmade lakes with running trails around them in the middle of forests next to the ocean. There were very few people where I lived, with a density of only 69 people per square mile, and I got to experience nature in a way that I didn’t realize was possible.
Justin, you could do much worse as a model.
Bofur, there’s always an exception that proves the rule and Cape Breton is the one in this case; I don’t know offhand of another area where Scots immigrants kept the language and culture that tenaciously. My family had already dropped its name before they fled Scotland — as you may know, having the last name MacGregor was a death penalty offense in Scotland for almost 200 years — and shed everything else as quickly as possible once they got to this side of the Atlantic. I wouldn’t even know that my paternal ancestors were Scots if it wasn’t for my great-aunt Alice, who was a major genealogy geek. (Autism runs in the family.)
Tag, The Flying Dutchman is a fave of mine; “Die Friest ist Um” is a glorious aria, but for me the part that is most electric is the opening of the Overture: it’s an act of pure elemental sorcery, conjuring up a storm at sea more perfectly than any other piece of music ever written. (That Overture, btw, was the inspiration for much of my novel A Voyage to Hyperborea.) Musically speaking, The Rhinegold is hampered by too much theory, but Wagner shakes himself out of it as he proceeds, and the whole of Scene 4 to me is fine work. I’ve been amused to note that humming Donner’s invocation of the storm is a way to chase any unwanted piece of music out of my head…
Patricia O, thanks for this. Your first mentor had the right idea — the one that all of us will have to get back to. Do you happen to know if there are good English-language resources on the concept of satoyama?
@Siliconguy #52 I am very familiar with the Bible and through selection of verses ( including some things Jesus said in the Gospels) I could preach a convincing message about the loving and merciful God of the Old Testament in contrast to the judgmental God of the New Testament. Mercy and wrath, love and judgment run intertwined throughout the Bible. God is portrayed as both Lion and Lamb, a danger and a safe haven.
About Scotland and its diaspora, people always talk about the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s but they forget that there was a potato famine which was occurring at the same time in the Scottish Highlands, which lead to a lot of Scottish refugees and immigrants to all around the world and the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands itself.
So, to obtain power, you need to relinquish love. I wonder if the opposite is true – you need to give up power to find love? I heard a saying that in a relationship you can either be right or be happy. Trying to overpower the object of your love may not be the best recipe for a happy, loving relationship.
Yes, back to the land away from the oppression of the capitalistic technological, artificial reality. But, hmm, we still need to go to town to get rolls of toilet paper – actually made possible by artful technology and more socks and clothes as ours wear out and …… and …… and. …. canning jars to store our vegetables,those jars would be marvels to most people through history – so clear, so exactly made and . . . . to get all sorts of other items we need. We are trapped in the belly of a beast.
Hi JMG and everyone,
Another great installment!
Regarding Tolkien, it now makes sense that he always said that his involvement in WW 1 was not the inspiration for his LOTR novels.
Apparently the ongoing march of industrialization was, so that ties in with Wagner.
I’ve been pacing my reading with this series, including a chapter of Schopenhauer here and there.
I’ve just finished my first Jack Vance novel, The Dragon Masters.
Intriguing characters!
For those whose may be interested, Radio War Nerd have unlocked an episode on him.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/repost-radio-war-113105845
As an FYI to US readers, that ‘dime store’ pulp fiction is pretty expensive down under, even for battered used copies.
For the price of one or two, maybe four from an Australian eBay seller, a US one will be offering roughly 10-20.
(For around $20 or $30)
But…
The postage will be anywhere between $65-$120
😬
Things are very expensive here.
I believe the median house price in Sydney is about $1.2 million? Or something like that. Just ridiculous
About the clueless elites and the bubble they inhabit, just picture in your mind the scene of a boss sitting in his office ranting at his subordinates, “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done!”
I think that goes a long way to explaining why they make the decisions they do.
Regards,
Helen in Oz
@JMG, #67,
There have been a number of papers written on satoyama landscapes in recent years from the perspective of ecological conservation and sustainable societies, and the Ministry of the Environment of Japan has promoted a “Satoyama Initiative” https://www.cbd.int/sustainable/doc/satoyama-initiative-brochure-en.pdf This makes it sound suspicious, as of course they inevitably want to introduce technology to enhance it, but the concept is sound.
I have included it in a paper I am about to release on the apparent possible impacts of 5G, which was recently introduced in our neighborhood. The satoyama environment has an ameliorative effect, unsurprisingly, which I am documenting, while encouraging limiting the deployment so as to maintain the mosaic mix of habitats to some degree.
It truly is one of modern political discourses greartest tragedies that those who suffered the most at the hands of our ruling paradigm are painted as the villains. The “modern white man”,the indigenous europeans as a whole having been reduced to beasts of burdens and in the end, meat for the trenches are painted as the “privileged”. The hypocrisy is of coures revolting, but even more so is the fact that this lie is pushed down our throats in order to squeeze the lemon dry. The mental health epidemic created by this perpetual unreality, with rampant drug abuse to deal is squarely on the shoulders of these parasites.
All for them to feel good about themselves for gazing at their castle in the sky, the “diverse, inclusive and egalitarian” star trek future, the dream that permits their continued exploitation.
“as you may know, having the last name MacGregor”
Heh, funny, because I do literally know MacGregors (not “Greers”) from Cape Breton. Anyway, thanks for all this, it’s very interesting, we’re big genealogy nerds in my family as well.
JMG, your discussion of the devil’s bargain, which Wotan engaged in has helped to clarify for me something which I have pondered for a while now: the whole modern art world, with artists seeking recognition by the rather more affluent parts of society: It seems to me that nowadays, in most cases, it boils down to an artist seeking und finding a relatively easy to execute gimmick with which he or she can produce acceptable art, present the art, sell it to wealthy purchasers, and as a whole, move in an art world that mirrors the emptiness and the lack of meaning so prevalent in modern society. This isn’t a new recognition, but it stands in stark contrast to the place art has in other kinds of society, to the degree that there are tribal languages who don’t have a word for art as such, because it is simply a meaningful and functional part of life.
A further thing, which occurred to me about modern art is, furthermore, that the artist, his or her personality and his name seems to be ever more important nowadays, whereas in premodern and in tribal societies, it is not such a big deal.
I love that you are using Rackham’s illustrations for these pieces. My father has all the Rhinegold books illustrated by Rackham and I read them over and over again as a child, loving the pictures. Your re-telling of the story is fascinating. Thanks as ever, JMG.
Bofur @ 63 Why do you think various pieces of environmental legislation are akin to clearances, ‘takings’ is what the modern right calls it? If you refer to things like wilderness designation, that kind of legislation does not clear the way for sheep or any other kind of commercial development. What we have sen all to often recently is the laws of eminent domain misused for the benefit of private profit.
What I think many do not realize is that both industrial development and industrial scale agriculture use massive amounts of water. That is why industry settles in parts of the world where there are large fresh water rivers and rain. In the US, there is a severe and getting worse scarcity of water west of the 100th parallel. Furthermore, every drop of water is already spoken for, to the fury of would be suburb developers.
Mixed use by the public, including commercial concerns like logging and ranching really is the best use of the Western public lands.
Wer here
As an Catholic I have to disagree that all Christians are insensitive to damaging the enviroment. Maybe because we live here in a rural village in Poland but we realize that destroying the fields will mean disaster to us in the wrong run. I would rather ask “enviromentalist” out there we want to drive in luxury EV vehicles completely not seeing the plight of people in distant countries where entire mountains were strip mined to the bottom in order to provide lithium for their ” enviromentally concious ways”. I belive that human beings are flawed and we are incpable of reaching any long solution (if you want to call this a bug in human evolution or the original sin it is up to you). Wotan and other gods are symbolic of the flaws in human nature . That dwarf who stole the gold was a scumbag but at least we was honest in his villany, while Wotan want’s to steal the rotten fruits of others villany it is repealing but so much like a lot of “influencers” and politicians nowadays.
And talking about the “Kurzweilians” out there never before in my life I had read anything so absurd and out of whack than this… If putting a living human brain in a jar was ever feasible in the first place I would likely ended up on the mercy of a Microsoft esqe holding and not in a “immortal robot body”
What is happening around the world right now proves that mankind cannot govern itself let alone trying to “spits” assume the role of the Lord in the universe…… (I want to use other worlds but JMG would ban me for this kind of language here)
Anonymous, and that came on top of the Clearances, and was followed by the general collapse of all the marginal regions of British agriculture due to British free trade policies. Scotland just couldn’t catch a break.
Ecosophian, good. Yes, that certainly seems to work.
BeardTree, exactly. Living solely on the work of your hands is extraordinarily difficult; you basically have to grow up doing it or you won’t have the galaxy of skills you need, and if you do manage it, the best you can do is something like the lifestyle of a medieval peasant. Anything more complex requires specialization of labor.
Helen, thank you. Delighted to hear that you’ve taken up reading Vance — a fine, fine writer.
Patricia O, thank you for this.
Quift, I don’t think it’s fair to say that non-elite Europeans suffered more than anybody else. It’s certainly true, however, that they suffered as much as anybody else — and it’s also true that their sufferings have been systematically erased by an elite class for its own sleazy benefit.
Bofur, some of na Griogalaich dropped the alias as soon as they got out of Britain. Others changed it back once the legal penalties were dropped in 1774. A vast number didn’t, though; if you go to a Clan Gregor website you’ll find a long list of aliases. Greer was only one of dozens of names that clan members used.
Booklover, yep. It’s one of the appalling things about modern life that so many of the arts have been turned into schemes for manufacturing collectibles for the clueless rich.
Caroline, glad you like it! I find Rackham’s Ring illustrations better than pretty much any others.
Wer, nowhere did I say that all Christians are insensitive to damaging the environment. I really recommend that you go back over my post and read what I actually wrote, instead of simply projecting your own polemic onto it! Sheesh…
Booklover, your description of the art market reminds me of a quilting class I walked out of once, despite having paid a fee. The teacher owner a quilt shop in the CA Central Valley and a quilt store in rich enclave Carmel. Teacher was all about doing things as fast as possible, fast and dirty, so she could have us all making quilts for her to sell. Plus we would have to pay her to quilt them. To my eye, the squiggle patterns turned out by the new quilting machines are truly ugly (my opinion only),
The challenge is to find that sweet spot where specialization of labor, industry, technology, social structure optimally meets human needs and keeps our living earth environment also in an optimal state, obviously we are not in that sweet spot.
JMG, I seriously hope you convert these essays to a book in the future. They’re great! Anyways, what I want to ask is this: why is Freya essential for the gods to keep their youth and power?
Aurelian’s post this week pairs quite well with this one.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/only-connect
I’d like to add that it seems to be modernity’s (I don’t know if that is the right word, capitalism, industrialism, whatever is pushing us forward to work hard for the sake of the economy rather than ourselves) main project is to break down people into atomized, socially isolated, lonely, replaceable units bereft of human connections that are based on something other than a financial transaction. Furthermore, those human connections are getting ever further removed, as paid human connections are being replaced by paid parasocial relationships these days.
I must admit, there is a synchronicity for me in reading your comments on the Nibelungenlied’s themes of “love” vs “power”, and the social implications of exchanging “relationship” for “economic efficiencies” arising in this series of posts, while also reading the series of posts that Mary Harrington is now “unpaywalling” on the work of Renaud Camus – and his “damned” research into the phenomenon of “replacementism.”
In the=is second post of three, she is examining his concept of “nocence” which, she says, attacks “relationship”…
A passage here – from this post: https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/camus-part-2-nomos-of-the-airport
“It’s much easier to treat animals as production units in a factory farm if you don’t give them names or notice their capacity to feel pain or fear. Similarly, it’s easier to treat humans as machines in the Taylorist sense if you discard specific relationships. Nocence, that is, attacks relationship. And when we recall that, as the late biosemiotician Wendy Wheeler noted, meaning as such inheres not in abstraction but in pattern and relationship, it becomes clear that what Camus calls “replacism” and Heidegger “enframing” maps closely to what futurist Yuval Noah Harari called the “deal” underlying all of modernity.
“In this deal, Harari argues, “humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power”. But where Harari seems relatively sanguine about this trade-off, it is far more radical and consequential than this would suggest – not to mention less consensual. For if “giving up meaning” sounds like a choice we might make, in reality this doesn’t usually look like the opt-in pleasure of frictionlessness and agency-at-a-price that we find synthesised within the carefully ringfenced high-security domain of the airport. For most, it’s a kind of expropriation, that falls most heavily on those least able to resist.”
Following Camus, she is locating the origin of this “replacementist” set of ideas in Taylorism – a managerialist philosophy of the early 20th century. But your posts are revealing that this specific anti-relationship, pro-extractionist set of ideas has a longer pedigree.
Another wonderful essay in this epic series. Thank you for this, JMG. I must admit, though, that Wotan seems to me to be less the creative artistic intellectual, and more the Catholic Church.
Freia, I suppose, represents the essential ethical principles of interpersonal conduct in pre-industrial Europe – the ideals of “Love that Neighbor”. Since Wotan seems to be her lord at the start of the story, Wotan must be the group that had enforced these rulings since time immemorial – in other words, the Church. Loge, on the other hand, seems to represent the intellectuals of the enlightenment to me. Donner, the son of Wotan who brings the hammer down on the Jotun, appears to be the inquisitorial powers of the Church which the aristocrats of Europe had feared and resented, while the spear of oaths is the intricate set of diplomatic, political, cultural, and religious ties by means of which the Church had acquired authority over those aristocrats. The aristocrats themselves, of course, must be the giants.
I could be wrong, but this is my personal opinion of the libretto.
@Helen #72 re: Jack Vance
(Again, JMG, if this is too off-topic, no worries if you don’t put it through – I strained for an obscure link to Wagner to sneak it in, but couldn’t manage).
Luckily, Vance has recently had his entire corpus re-published by Spatterlight Press, so you may be able to find his stuff more affordably.
If you’d like to explore more, his “Dying Earth” stories are very entertaining and vary wildly in mood – you might technically call them scif, or science fantasy, especially the first couple of stories, but they settle pretty comfortably into “basically fantasy” before too long. If you happen to be interested in D&D, they’re where Gygax and Arneson got the idea for “fire and forget” magic spells. His “Lyonesse” trilogy is pretty much straight high fantasy, but with his characteristic prose style and wryly cynical characters (some of whom have a heart of gold, some of whom very much do not). If you’d prefer more straightforward scifi, “The Demon Princes” (originally published as five novels, more recently as two collected volumes) are fine adventure/”mystery” novels (the protagonist is tracking down the notorious criminals who massacred his home village, but being an upstanding fellow, he has to be sure he gets the right man, and all of these criminals have taken certain precautions to avoid being too easy to identify), and Emphyrio is set in the same setting, but is a standalone story that touches on some interesting ideas about class, freedom, history, and agency in the face of large, systemic problems.
In short, I’ve yet to meet a Vance novel I didn’t like, but for my money, if you like fantasy, you’ll likely get your best bang-for-buck out of the “Lyonesse” books.
Cheers,
Jeff
BeardTree, we’re far, far from that sweet spot, and it’s possible that no society can maintain itself there for more than a short time. The book of Ecclesiastes has a few useful things to say about all things human…
Bruno, I have no idea whether I’ll be able to find a publisher for it, but I’m assembling the essays into a manuscript. As for your question, there are several ways to interpret that, so I’ll let you meditate on it. 😉
Dennis, it does indeed. Aurelien’s always worth reading; I don’t always agree with him, not by a long shot, but he always makes me think.
Scotlyn, fascinating. Taylorism is the practical application to human beings of attitudes that date back long before
Rajarshi, how does that fit with Wagner’s own comment that Wotan is “the sum of the intellect of the present”? The Catholic church couldn’t be described that way in the 1850s.
Hi Helen,
Music to my reading ears, what a fun journey you’re setting out upon. Apologies for the following unsolicited advice. However, Emphyrio is right up there with his best, and as Jeff noted, the story touches on many issues which would be familiar to readers here. The Demon Princes is my favourite series. Lyonesse suffers a bit early on because the character Suldrun was a cliche of major, major, proportions. On the other hand, if your mind can work past that point, the story picks up and the characters develop. The female character Madouc in the last book is an absolute ripper.
Yes, housing down under. That way lies madness… Dunno what your thoughts about it are, but I’m coming around to the concept that sooner or later if things keep going the way they are, the arrangements supporting this policy (which is supported by both parties and a large swath of the population) will no longer make any sense. We’ll see.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Whoa! There are elements of the Cassandra mythical story applied to Loge. Imagine if economists were paid only on the basis that their predictions and analysis turned out to be true. 😉 And of course, as you rightly noted, Loge dodged the curse of the sorcerer if he was unable to believe his cunning words.
Two inches of rain fell here yesterday, and it was already rather damp. I’d say we’ve reached the whole next level. It feels almost tropical outside despite the cooler temperatures. I dunno what to make of it all, but had a plan for some more ferns…
Cheers
Chris
@Raphael, @Wer Re: The Role of Christianity in Ecological Crisis
I can’t claim to speak for our gracious host, of course, but consider that before the rise of monotheism humans and gods were, while vastly different in knowledge and power, equal in a sense, both being parts of Nature. Pagan gods were (usually) believed to be born of the world, and while they did shape it, they weren’t it’s creators.
In Abrahamic faiths, however, God is the creator of Nature, and humans are his special creations, entrusted with the rest of the world to use (wisely) for our benefit. Thus, a hierarchy emerges: God > Humans > Nature. For a pious person, to abuse nature is to abuse God’s trust, of course, but what’s going to happen when such a faith, after becoming a nucleus around which a civilization has formed, starts to lose its power? In case of Faustian civilization, the intellectual elites had begun to think, thanks to Ludwing Feuerbach, that God is just a metaphor for an ideal of what humans can be. And they themselves are, of course, by virtue of being enlightened and by the logic of Progress, are the closest thing to this ideal that have ever existed, metaphorical gods and rightful rulers of Nature.
This is not to say that pagans never abused nature, there are enough examples of civilizations suffering collapse after using up all available resources within their reach. But ours is the first global civilization that we know of, and Christianity helped (not on purpose) to create an environment where “playing god” had become our elites idea of what they should be doing.
The idea that a lot of artists, and all influential ones, have by and large, sacrificed parts of their vision and comprised their souls in order to get by certainly gives the part of the Myth of Progress that says “In the future we will be able to make art without worrying about money” a far more tragic undertone than I had previously noticed….
Fascinating post and series as a whole, JMG. I was quite surprised that in the Ring Cycle, Wotan is a real scumbag (as well as a tragic hero), especially if Wagner was explicit about it – considering that the various nationalist societies in late 19th century and early 20th century Austria and Germany were big into Wotan, while generally being Wagner fans. Even more so, since (as I understand it) the notorious moustache man was a super-huge fan of Wagner while his Not-see movement was possessed by Wotan (or, at least, as Jung saw it). Pretty messed-up if you ask me!
To Jeff and Chris,
Yes, I have purchased used copies of the Lyoness trilogy, and the demon princes series, I think I have one of those in transit.
The War Nerd talks a bit about those ones.
He also mentions Gene Wolfe, have you read him?
I’m currently reading The Mabionigon Trilogy by Evangeline Watson which was recommended by ecosophians.
I usually have one or two books on the go at once.
Apologies for being of topic JMG, although you make like to know I just ordered The Hall of the Homeless Gods and The Book of Haatan this week, as well as the Dying Earth series.
😁
Regards
Helen in Oz
PS, both Prime Minister and Opp Leader were recently involved in multi million dollar property purchase and sale respectively.
They have every incentive to keep the bubble inflated.
Thinking about this further, it strikes me that the paradigm of “love” (being relationship between persons) admits of loving people, cooperating with people, fighting people, fearing people, ruling people, submitting to people, residing alongside people… but NEVER using people.
Which is to say, whether you are loving or fighting a person, or even ignoring them or passing them by, you are still acting fully within the framework of an “I/you” relationship WITH them.
Once you instrumentalise, or use, a person, once you “see” them as a resource, a store of value you can extract, or etc, you have downgraded them to a thing, and entered into an “I/it” framing. (And given the known actions of strawberry jam, it may not be long before the someone you have “thing-ified” is your own self).
@Mary Bennett, well, some of these iniatives certainly appear calculated to (eventually) “clear” people off the land, hence the similarity to “clearances”! But it was just an off-the-cuff comment.
An example might be initiatives surrounding wind farms. I heard an ad on YouTube just the other day about how “wind is the future and we need to invest in it.” No acknowledgement that (a) it isn’t the future and (b) these wind farms typically have the practical effect of putting subsidies into companies’ pockets while encouraging locals to vacate the land.
“Foxhands, what I mean is that there’s no way to run away from it, since you take its modes of consciousness with you.” Reminds me of the old saying, “you can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the tiger.”
With several centuries of industrialism in the West, in which our minds have been turned into Saruman’s “metal and wheels” it’s going to be quite a journey to the organic/relationship mind of Treebeard. But it must begin with de-industrializing the mind first (in The Two Towers the process was rather “kinetic” as I recall). I do what I can by spending my free time working with living things (organic gardening) or formerly living things (carpentry, almost exclusively with hand tools). Baby steps, I know.
While I am stuck in ‘LOTR mode’ I might as well state that on the subject of love and the bond of personal relationships across social divides, one of the most beautiful forms of love that I see in LOTR is that between Frodo and Samwise. Yes, it is unequal, but it is complementary in its own way. No doubt lots of ‘scholars’ have interpreted it in a homoerotic way; their loss. What I see is Tolkien’s mourning of an era in which servitude was not demeaning and loyalty was among the highest virtues. No doubt he saw the last vestiges of this world in his lifetime as machines, money and empowerment of the State finally finished off the landed aristocracy (as was well depicted in the TV series ‘Downton Abbey’).
Mary Bennet, your experience is a bit weird. It sounds like taylorism in art production. I myself didn’t have such experiences in the infrequent cases where I took a class in drawing or marbling. My impression of what I have seen in the art world where I live is rather that it is not so much about selling and buying, but rather of ego-stroking among a group opf people. The interesting thing is, that since the Corona pandemic, there are fewer art students and other people from outside visiting vernissages and the like. I could make this observation because I have a friend who occasionally helps out with the buffet at vernissages.
The ring is very similar to the Midas touch, which is a metaphor for financialization of life. King Midas couldn’t even enjoy the simple things like food, because he was turning everything into gold, that is, into money. That’s the power he wanted, but it turned out to be a curse. In some versions of the myth Midas dies of starvation unable to give up his power. But there is another version of the myth where Midas survives and gets rid of his gift by washing in river Pactolus, that is, by returning to Nature. I think there might be a lesson there for us.
Dear JMG and commenters:
Why is there a near universal lack of attention paid to the Highland Clearances, the Enclosure Acts, and similar actions in other European and related countries? I know that a lack of knowledge of history is standard (and appears to be celebrated in elite circles), but I think it’s more than just that.
A possibility is that if the elites talk about them, then the dispossession of “indigenous peoples “ gets another dimension; where it’s not just greedy white men stealing others land in far continents.
As an illustration of the magnitude of the Highland Clearances; I remember a book I read when I was 14 or so that mentioned a Highland valley where 100 fought at Waterloo, 50 in the Crimean War, and both men of military age served in WW 1.
The Scottish in my family were from the Clyde, so I would bet there were originally Highlanders among them trying to survive.
And finally, is there a requirement that if one is a billionaire, one must be insane?
Cugel
Enjoyed the new to me perspectives of Wagner & White.
Never heard you mention Jacques ellul before and I am curious about your perspective on his
Writngs on technique? Ray
Booklover, it was weird. I own quilts made by my grandmother by hand, no sewing machine, in which piecing and quilting were done to the level of perfection which was typical of her generation. I hated seeing the art of our foremothers denigrated and mocked by this woman. When I say ‘mocked’ I mean just that. There were disparaging references to “the T word”, templates, statements made in every lesson about how “we have other things to do” to excuse deliberate sloppiness. There is a big difference between right to one’s own opinion and demanding that everyone else must share that opinion.
Chris, I’m in favor of that approach to paying economists! As for rain, well, yes; correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the northern half or so of Queensland tropical? My guess is that you can expect that climate to slide down the coast all the way to your area and beyond.
Brent, thanks for this. Yes, exactly — and “helped (not on purpose) to create an environment” was exactly the point I was trying to make.
Taylor, yep. “In the future we will all go through the motions of making art, and turn out interchangeable lumps of schlock” is more like it.
Ron, that’s one of the things that fascinates me most about Wagner’s impact. The populist right in central Europe got sucked into Wagner’s invented myth and followed in in lockstep — or goose step! — straight to Gotterdammerung.
Scotlyn, exactly. That’s the dynamic I’m trying to trace out here. Thank you for putting it much more clearly than I did!
Ron, I tried to weave some of that same kind of relationship into my tentacle novels in the relationship, never at center stage, between Jenny Chaudronnier and the maid Henrietta Perrault. Admittedly, I was drawing as much from the relationship of Bayard and Ringo in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished as from anything by Tolkien.
Ecosophian, good! Yes, that works as a mythic metaphor, too. Notice that the Ring also must return to the Rhine.
Cugel, I don’t think it’s a requirement, I think it’s a consequence.
Ray, that’s off topic for this week’s post. Would you mind bringing it up again in next week’s open post?
@ Cugel (#101) wrote: “is there a requirement that if one is a billionaire, one must be insane?”
It’s more a consequence than a requirement, I think. One of the wisest things ever written (IMHO) was Lord Acton’s dictum,
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad me.”
Since wealth brings power in its wake, it’s only a small leap to “Rich men are almost always bad men.”
Like our host, I am fundamentally a Burkean conservative. However ….. I do think it would be an excellent idea to limit how wealthy and powerful anyone may become, no matter what. Limit it by prevention to the extent possible; by outright confiscation where prevention has failed; and by execution of the wealthy or powerful person in every remaining case where confiscation fails to achieve its limiting objective. Not a single exception allowed, no matter what the reason, no matter how benevolently a person does use his or her wealth.
Yeah, I do know it’s a pipe dream. But one can still dream …
” Christianity helped (not on purpose) to create an environment where “playing god” had become our elites idea of what they should be doing.”
Is Christianity responsible for this?
The kings of Babylon and Egypt saw themselves as incarnations of a god, “playing god” was something they saw as duty to their countrymen, and the people were of the same mind for that’s what their cosmology said. And when a king did something bad? Well he needs to be deposed and then replaced with another one that fits the “god incarnate” description.
Actually, in all eras, humans of all kind have played god. What is the murder of another person if not “playing god”? And murder is present in all of history in all economical and social classes.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Christianity is responsible or partly responsible for creating this environment.
Robert, there was an attempt at that, it was called communism and it does not work. Besides you’d need some really powerful people to enforce limits on being powerful.
@Helen #94 re: Vance and Wolfe
Well, given our host’s ongoing tolerance of this little tangent, I’ll just say glad to hear it and I hope you enjoy them! On The Demon Princes stories, I found each got off to a bit of a slow start (especially the first two), but then pick up considerably as they go, and I ended up enjoying them a lot.
I need to check to see if I have a pre-ordered copy of Hall of the Homeless Gods on the way, or if I was waiting to be able to order through bookshop.org. Book of Hataan was excellent, and if you enjoyed The Witch of Criswell, you ought to like it at least as much.
As for Gene Wolfe, I was late to the game here, but just read his “New Sun” books last year or the year before. They’re fantastic. Extremely deep, surprisingly spiritually insightful, and yet good, solid adventure throughout. As a heads up, Urth of the New Sun, though written as a “standalone” several years after he finished the original “Book of the New Sun” series is basically the fourth book of the trilogy, and I think makes the whole series more satisfying. Apparently the “Book of the Long Sun” series, set in the same world, also makes the rest richer and more worthwhile, but is not quite as essential as Urth of the New Sun. If you read the books and like them, the Lexicon Urthus is a wonderful supplement that reveals much of the symbolism and many of the allusions peppered throughout, but be careful, as it is chock full of spoilers, and this is a series that benefits from letting unfold as it proceeds.
I’ve not yet read any of his other books, but I have Soldier of the Mists and Wizard Knight sitting around waiting to be read, and I’ve heard great things about those and all his others.
I suppose if I want to try to steer this somewhere closer to on-topic, I might say that Wolfe’s books have a similar focus on the spirit of civilization and the cycles thereof to Wagner, though less directly focused on critiquing contemporary Western culture (though there’s plenty of critique embedded throughout).
Anyhow, once again, happy reading!
Jeff
@Katylina (#107):
The program of comnunism included a whiole lot more than merely a prohibition on great wealth. Among other of its stupid, foolish ideas was the hope of creating a “new human being,” free of everything that communism did not like. As it turned out, communism was just one more stupid human folly. As Immanuel Kant put it in 1784 (loose translation): “From such crooked wood as humanity is made of, no straight thing can ever be created by any carpenter” [Aus so krummem Holtze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz gerades gezimmert werden].
Nor would any superpowerful agency of enforcement be needed. You’re thinking in terms of government policies. Governmental solutions to human problems are somewhat overrated, I think. They pretend to be fairer and more objective than individual loose-cannon actors reacting to real problems, but that’s only a pretense. Corruption abounds everywhere in every government, always and forever: honest government, IMHO, is a theoretical impossibility: there never has been one, and never will be one.
Hi John Michael,
Yes, it’s been remarked upon elsewhere that incentives can drive behaviour – and having to talk sense just to get paid, might produce some astounding words of clarity. That lot then might have to work, just like the rest of us!
Very much so. It’s remarkably tropical way up on that far north eastern coastline. You’d hope the winter weather down here in the south discouraged the ferocious salt water crocodiles from eventually spreading this far down the coast, but haven’t fossils from that species been found way to the north and south of the planet?
Years ago, maybe even last century (most likely), I happened to visit the town of Kyogle which is in the northern rivers area of New South Wales, and just to the south of the Queensland state border. There’s probably plenty of places in the world that are wetter and greener, but on the day we visited, the heat and humidity, not to forget the overall green lushness of the area was off the charts. The day left a strong memory.
The climate is shifting for sure. My casual observation is that each year the autumn season appears to be getting shorter. I suspect that has something to do with thermal inertia, and also the warmer tropical air pushing southwards. The transition into winter is getting thus briefer. Interestingly during winter, it was cold (or what passes for such a description here), but some of the winter storms were almost tropical with very heavy rainfall. There were even a few thunderstorms, which rarely happen here in winter. Oh well. Your part of the world is probably enjoying a similar mild climate, from what we’ve discussed over the years?
Cheers
Chris
@Rafael
“The kings of Babylon and Egypt saw themselves as incarnations of a god, “playing god” was something they saw as duty to their countrymen, and the people were of the same mind for that’s what their cosmology said. ”
Playing a god (of running the state), maybe, but not the God Almighty. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t thing millenarism (and its materialistic variant, the myth of Progress) was nearly as common before Abrahamic religions with their belief that history has a definite end, became dominant.
“Actually, in all eras, humans of all kind have played god. What is the murder of another person if not “playing god”? ”
In a sense, yes. But what I meant by “playing god” is the idea of re-making the world in whatever utopian image is fashionable at the time. Radical reformers existed in every era, of course, but the logic of Progress demands bringing about change, because change is good in itself.
Hi Helen,
🙂 What a fun side topic you’ve begun! Well done. And I’ll be interested to hear of your opinions.
Ah, Gene Wolfe, his series: ‘Book of the New Sun’, which follows the trials and tribulations of a professional torturer was an excellent read. Rest assured the darker details of the protagonists trade is very much a minor incidental side note in the story which involves a much grander arc. A person has to be careful of the images they absorb into their brain, and the book series need not come with a trigger warning!
His next series, which I was rather looking forward to reading was: ‘The Book of the Long Sun’ (I’m sensing a theme), was sadly all rather dull because not much ever happened. This being a question of personal taste, your views of course may vary.
Ooo! I rather enjoyed The Mabinogion Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton, although our esteemed host may prefer the original texts.
The Dying Earth series, is simply just a fun read. The anti-hero Cugel, is great character, who always has a cunning plan, and hope he’s never involved in your business.
When the middle ground is abandoned… It’s poor optics any which way you look at it. I wouldn’t have made such a basic error, would you have if in those same circumstances?
Cheers
Chris
JMG – What is the significance of the magical token of power being a “ring”? Why a ring, and not a necklace, or a bracelet-charm? Is there something symbolically endless in its circularity? Is it the intimacy of a ring, which one wears continuously (unless working very close to powerful industrial machinery, such as a lathe)? Or is it the fact that it takes an extreme amount of force to take it from one who wears it? So, it can be willingly given away, or taken from a thoroughly defeated ringbearer, but not picked up in a 3rd-rate burglary? What prevents duplicate rings from being forged? Is the technology for gathering the material and forging a ring so far above what’s available to the common folk that there can only be powerful rings? Or would someone powerful enough to claim a fancy ring as symbolic of their power have sufficient access to violence to punish counterfeiters?
Robert, er, please be a little more careful in your suggestions. You came close to advocating illegal activity there, for which this blog could be held liable.
Chris, so far what’s been happening here in Rhode Island is warmer winters and increased rain but no significant increase in temperature in the summer. It’s quite odd, all things considered. In western Maryland, while I was there, the climate shifted in a very straightforward way — we started getting the weather we’d expect three states further south — but here it’s more nuanced. I haven’t heard anything yet about crocodiles in Narragannsett Bay, our big estuary here, but doubtless it’s just a matter of time.
Lathechuck, good question. To some extent Wagner may have just taken that detail out of the legends, where it appears, but that’s by no means certain. Let me throw that open to the commentariat: readers, why do you think it was a ring?
(I like the idea, btw, of a Ring of Very Little Power being picked up by a cheap burglar…)
Signet rings had a built-in power that exceeded their metal worth – the ability to sign a seal – and may have seemed magical in a way to pre-moderns because of this intangible property that adhered to them.
@JMG (#114):
Oops! You’re right, my bad. If you think it prudent to remove my last paragraph from the post, I won’t object in the slightest.
@JMG #89
> Rajarshi, how does that fit with Wagner’s own comment that Wotan is “the sum of the intellect of the present”? The Catholic church couldn’t be described that way in the 1850s.
I hadn’t thought about that! Since Wagner has personally articulated on the nature of Wotan, it is worth considering his words to be the final on the topic. But it does leave us with some questions though. For one, what role of human society is represented by the figure of Loge? Why is Wotan so dependent upon him, and why does Fricka consider him unreliable? Is he simply a McGuffin for letting the story move onward, or did Wagner assign him a Fauerbachian purpose?
Wotan certainly was not born at a moment close to the events of Albreich and the Rhinemaidens. He must have lived an nearly an aeon by that time. So I am assuming that Wotan does not represent simply the intellectual uberclass of the 1850’s. I suppose he represents the intellectual uberclass in general, the component represented by Jupiter in Mundane Astrology?
Hi JMG,
I have been mulling over the “renunciation of love” that everyone makes, watching the opera really brings it down, how everyone renounces love. When the process starts, can anyone not renounce love to be competitive, or are they simply swept aside?
Right now I am also mulling over the question how every major actor in our civilization, since as Shaw put it this opera could not have been written before the middle of the 19. century. The civilization built on Christianity, as Levi puts it, the religion of love, has completely abandoned love.
About limits on any one person’s/family’s wealth, in many pre-capitalist societies, there was a strong cultural pressure for the largest fortunes to be devoted to prestigious activities such as endowing monasteries, Islamic charities, or the like. Such cultural values were somewhat effective in preventing large fortunes from becoming permanent mega-fortunes. The treatment of the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation or Buddhist institutions in late Tang China are examples in which ultra-large fortunes were dispersed not by an even larger power but by a coalition of smaller fortunes unified by their desire to seize a piece of the larger fortune.
By the way, Soviet communism collapsed not when rival power centers and fortunes were repeatedly weeded (not all those lost in the purges were innocent) but when that process was allowed to lapse. This does not justify anything, just notes how it functioned.
It occurs to me re-reading what I just posted that there is a parallel between the post-Gregory Catholic Church (the papacy at its peak), Buddhism in Tang China, and Soviet Communism: In all three cases, strong religion/ideology held together the process of establishing a more elaborate, advanced economy and more intense, intrusive governance but after that process had reached the point in which such economy+governance could stand on its own (without being held together by the religion/ideology), smaller players within that system tore it down to their own advantage (Protestant Reformation, reining in of Buddhist institutions in late Tang China, transition to capitalism in the former Soviet republics and satrapies).
@katylina, the Athenian democracy was not communist at all. Citizens could and did vote to exile anybody they thought was too powerful: the famous ostracism. Exile meant also the temporary loss of citizen rights. Not that this is necessarily a good idea, but it can be done, and it can be done without any socialist ideology.
“Why do you think it was a ring?”
In early Germanic cultures, rings (including finger, arm, and neck rings) were treasure, symbolic of loyalty and fealty. “Ring-giver” was a frequent kenning in poetry for a king or chieftain worthy of respect, because he carried out his part of the fealty relationship by rewarding his accomplished warriors with rings. Such wearable wealth was easy to show off. (The metal would depend on circumstance, i.e. what was available in the treasury or captured loot, and on the degree of favor. Gold, silver, bronze…)
(In an earlier phase of my life a few of my friends from the gaming world were also members of the retinue of confidantes and technical advisors to a certain celebrity. At one point the celebrity gave them all large showy famously-expensive-brand watches, which they wore proudly and constantly. I remember thinking, the more things change…)
In that light a Ring of Power that magically exerts influence over others by being kept instead of given is a twist, so to speak. A perversion of the older social order, quite in line with the themes we’re discussing here. Imagine a watch so impressive that when the CEO wears it, it keeps the employees in line. Perhaps it incites envy, making every employee want it for their own while simultaneously casting the illusion that they can get it if they work hard enough. Oddly I’m not finding that difficult to imagine at all.
Of course, Alberich’s ring is explicitly a finger ring, and there are plenty of other comparably old traditions of magic (usually finger) rings. Aladdin had one, in addition to the more well-remembered lamp. So I probably shouldn’t read too much into that one particular connection.
Lathechuck and JMG,
I will take a stab at why it is a ring. I think it has more to do with where the ring is worn, on your hand. Alberich is a maker/smith and that requires the use of his hands and using them skillfully. Woton is not a maker and he can only steal the ring from Alberich or give it away to the giants. I think the ring is a mark of a powerful maker. Smiths were considered magical in the past and a ring might be the ultimate sign of their magical power expressed in their hands.
Others can wear a magic ring and perhaps wield it as the maker intended but most can not and the possession of a magic ring, especially unlawfully, seems to bring much misfortune. Since Alberich is the maker of the ring he can give it a mighty curse that will befall any who unlawfully possess the ring (not that it isn’t cursed already by Alberich’s renunciation of love). Woton thinks the ring will give him power, but since he possesses it unlawfully, it will only bring him misfortune as per Alberich’s curse. The giants don’t possess the ring any more lawfully then Woton and misfortune befalls them as well. Woton is not free of the curse even though he gave the ring away to the giants because he still wants it and is ready and willing to renounce love for it.
Rafael, I rather think that in ancient times the power and essence, for want of a better word, of a deity was invoked by ceremony to inhabit a prepared statue. This would be accompanied by promises of worship, sacrifice, etc. Temples often served as storage for treasures; when the city-state of Rhodes was being besieged by that fabulous villain, Demetrius Poliarcetes, the citizens had recourse to those stored up treasures as well as even stone from the temples themselves. They solemnly and humbly promised their deities full restitution and rebuilding even better than before if only the gods would grant them victory.
I think the ceremonies surrounding the installation of a new Pharoah or Ensil ( I think that was the word used in Sumaria) were likewise intended to, first, present to prince to the god as his or her deputy, and then to induce the god to grant a portion of its essence to the new ruler.
As for the antics of the rich of our time, do you truly believe that a culture which is in the main shallow and superficial–we can blame unregulated capitalism and its’ handmaiden the advertising industry for that– will not affect the wealthy any less than it does the rest of us?
Robert, do you realize how many of the Roman monuments still standing were built by private money? Roman elected officials were expected to spend freely while in office and for a time I think this practice did act as a curb on wealth. In our time, philanthropy has been perverted into the service of business and ideology. IDK about legalities, but I think your suggestion is far to dangerous to be entertained. Such individuals as you describe never can be controlled for long.
JMG #114
The most obvious symbolism is a wedding ring, commemorating a one-sided marriage to power.
Esoterically, a magic circle, with the purely Martian symbolism of one hand making it inherently unbalanced.
One of the kennings for the kings was ring-giver, however aparently back then it could mean also bracelet(which are frequently found in graves of germanic elites). There’s an entire article about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_in_early_Germanic_cultures
Hmm, I still find it perfectly reasonable to attribute the “commodification of the world” to the predictable way that human nature distorts itself, and more specific than distorted human nature, to the European mindset and cheap energy which allowed humans to distance themselves from nature and capture it. I don’t see how Christianity must be put into play, Europe could have been possessed by any other religious group and we would still be in this mess.
Ensil is a pretty word, a bit dreamy.
Robert M, thank you. I did a little quiet editing, leaving your very sensible comment about the likelihood of good government intact.
Rajarshi, all these are excellent questions. Let’s see how many of them are answered as we proceed.
Marko, that’s the bitter lesson of Fasolt’s fate. He doesn’t want to renounce love, and you see what happens to him.
Jessica, many tribal societies go out of their way to establish that principle. Among the native peoples in the Pacific Northwest, for example, social status was directly dependent on how generous you were. You and your family could attain power and influence only by giving wealth away. The famous potlatch feasts were one offshoot of that: a rich family would throw a feast, invite everyone in their tribe and the neighboring tribes, and literally give away everything they owned, knowing that if their rivals didn’t match them gift for gift, the rivals would be humiliated and lose all their influence over the community. It did a good job of keeping wealth in circulation.
This may be off topic, reverend sir, but the more I meditate and learn and study, the more I become convinced that what Jesus aimed to do was not found a religion but to end them. This would do etail with the phenomena of the “jesuii”, as it would mark the attempt to initiate each logoi into the Logos. “Christianity” is a religion, of course, but was meant to be a ferment and a yeast, and to stay oriented to the mission, not to lose itself in competing with civic religions, or becoming one, as it did, and stifling its gnostics in the name of “religare”. Ellul would say critics are quite right to blame Christendom for making itself too at home with power, with the inevitable results. Desacralizing Nature is just what you would expect from a civic religion that was based on esoteric roots of that sort, which it denied.
@ JMG # 128
I am quite excited by the prospect. I have been reading The Valkyrie a bit, and the more I read, the more fascinated I get by the way the story develops. The summaries I read earlier did not do justice to this work. I can’t wait to read your analysis of Wagner’s work as we go along.
Also, regarding why I think it was a ring: I supposed that this was a play on Anvari’s ring in the Norse legends, but that simply throws the question one recursive iteration back – why did Anvari have a ring?
At its heart, the ring is an artifact of jewellery. Jewellery carries magic in myths, since (1) ordinary people did not own them, so they were mysterious to the masses among whom folklore emerged; (2) they are small and easily concealed or carried, but also shiny and ostensible by design; and (3) they are long-lasting, and can remain undimmed down the centuries as heirlooms till their origins are forgotten or shrouded in mystery, so they have an aura of timeless mystery to them in more feudal and less prosperous times.
Magic jewellery features a lot in mythology, especially ones that grant invisibility to the wearer. There is the story of Utanka in the Mahabharata, where there are earrings that make the wearer invisible except to immaculate ones.
A necklace is bigger, hence harder to conceal. A belt, especially in the pre-industrial period, is clumsy to wear and required matching belt-compatible regalia. The same go for staves, sceptres, etc. Rings are easily carried, hard to remove, easily concealed, easily revealed, and mysterious, so that’s the thing about them I guess.
Mary Bennet, sloppiness and crudeness in the execution of art is something which has become more and more customary since the beginning of the 20th century in painting and sculpture, so it is a broad trend.
Robert Mathiesen, what you described about dealing with rich people is similar to what can happen in Russia when an oligarch there gets too uppioty for the taste of the Russian givernment.
Booklover, I agree and am painfully aware the “sloppiness and crudeness in the execution of art” has become customary, not to mention in everyday conversation as well. I was surprised to learn that it had become obligatory. I was and am used to people’s feelingses being hurt when any thought not previously introduced and promoted by mass media is expressed, but I had not expected a similar reaction to the mere attempt at care and attention in making.
JMG, Anonymous et al:
One should note that today it’s sheep farmers in rural England and Scotland who are subject to yet another form of highland clearances, with the carbon lobby pressuring politics to outlaw polluting animals in favour of giant afforestation schemes or rewilding (nature as object of sightseeing).
Combined with an effort to withhold subsidies to surreptitiously shrink this part of the budget, farmers are being divided into opportunists, shakers of fists and those seeking niches to somehow survive the bottleneck.
RE Why is it a ring? My guess is that it has to do with practicality and logistics of the story. Why not some other symbol of power? Other symbols of power are easy to remove. A crown, scepter, royal orb are all easily to knock from possession or stolen. A sword, shield or similar instrument are unwieldy and must constantly be held and are thus not practical. However, a ring is practical and unobtrusive in everyday life and is not easy to remove or lose.
In real life, otoh, symbols of power and position such as crowns, robes, cloaks, scepters, orbs, etc., do not necessarily contain power, they are just symbols of acknowledged power and position bestowed by those who are ruled. However, in the story, the ring is not just a symbol, it embodies the power imbued in it by Alberich. The ring contains the power itself. So, whoever possesses ring, actually controls its power. The ring is a container that is not easy to dispossess from the possessor.
In the Ring story, Alberich is manipulated by his betters appealing to his ego, showing off his power. They convince him to turn his self into a toad. Why not a horse or a lion or similar? No, a small harmless animal that loses vital contact with the ring of power and now he can be easily captured and held. This gullibility costs Alberich the ring and allows Wotan to steal it. Sorry Alberich, you are not smart enough, clever enough, devious enough, and, finally, ruthless enough to possess the ring of power. Just my two cents.
WILL1000
The Atlantic has upped the game for next week’s topic. Trump as Hitler isn’t working, so the author tacked on a couple more. She left out Mao and Pol Pot though. Maybe next week.
“Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini”
“The Atlantic magazine and its staff writer Anne Applebaum have faced widespread criticism after publishing an op-ed that compares former US President Donald Trump to infamous dictators like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini. The article, which claims Trump is borrowing rhetoric from some of the 20th century’s most notorious leaders, has been ridiculed online, particularly by pro-Trump commenters and political figures. Some have also drawn attention to Applebaum’s links to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout.”
To Chris and Jeff,
My head is swimming with all these books!
Maybe someone with the necessary skills could start a booklist?
With both recommendations, and ones that fell flat (in their opinion)
By the way, pardon my wonky spelling on the previous comment and saying Trilogy when I meant Tetralogy . I generally type on my phone, which now has a very cracked screen, but it still works so I’m not buying a replacement! (it’s an Officeworks cheapie, good enough for me).
I’ve forgotten who said it, regarding the music of this first section being a bit meh, but I have to say I love it. I love all those horns and I love the singing of the Rhine maidens.
When they sing together, it makes me think of the sun sparkling on the surface of a river, which is quite appropriate!
For those interested here is an article about The Instruments of the Ring:
https://www.lyricopera.org/lyric-lately/Instruments-of-the-RING/
As far as the actual ring, perhaps you could call what Alberich has performed to obtain the gold is almost an anti-wedding, so in a twisted way a ring makes sense?
Robert M, I always enjoy reading your comments and this one made me chuckle.
I can’t stand the obsession with making piles of cash and “maximising gains” and “seeking alpha” etc.
I really dislike the whole concept of the stock market, although I do keep an eye on it to some extent just to see how its tracking – generally far, far away from reality!
I suppose I’m not really comfortable with the concept of making money from money – who did the work to make that so?
Regards,
Helen in Oz
Why a ring?
It reminds me of Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail. Some say it symbolizes infinity, but I like the idea that it symbolizes the repeating cycles of nature. We will all pass away, but the cycles continue.
I think there’s an element here of, “It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have.” The Dwarf stole the Rhine Gold and could have done lots of things with it, but revealed his character by making it into a ring of oppression. This symbolizes what we have continually done in our civilization– Bypassing the safeguards of nature, and reaping destruction. We refine Uranium from its fairly radioactive ore and make it into intensely radioactive metal (Pure Uranium metal looks just like Gold, but more dense). Spent uranium goes into weapons. Lead sulfide ore (Galena) is safe to touch (but don’t breathe in the dust), and we refine it into lead.
A ring (or more properly, a torus) has mathematical properties that probably have magical significance– Or if they don’t, they should! You can’t make a 5-color map on a flat plane, but if you roll the flat plane into a tube and then join the ends of the tube to make a torus, suddenly you can easily make a 5-color map!
Some Magic Squares are known as Pan-Magic Squares or “Magic Carpet” Squares. Out of 880 types of 4X4 Magic Squares, only three have this property. If you tile your floor with them, you can draw a border around any group of 4X4 squares, and it too is a Pan-Magic Square. But these Magic Carpet Squares are actually Magic Toroids, ie., Magic Square Rings.
Another question would be, “Why didn’t the dwarf make the gold into an orb?” The orb is also an emblem of power– Kings hold them. Yet he made the gold into a ring…
Michaelz #133
“farmers are being divided into opportunists, shakers of fists and those seeking niches to somehow survive the bottleneck”
This is absolutely true in Ireland as well, and the process of emptying the countryside of people is moving apace. Although to the above 3 categories, one might add “farmers [and other rural dwellers] who have collapsed ahead of the rush, and are learning the necessary skillsets”.
Tolkien’s laments about industrialisation are somewhat mirrored by those of the late Poet Laureate John Betjeman. His poem ‘Slough’, first published in 1937 when industrialisation was well under way, sums up his sadness and intense detestation at what was happening to England’s Green and Pleasant Land. I’m reminded of Sam Gamgee’s horror about incomers ‘Tearing up the green country’.
Slough
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.
And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.
It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
If advertisers are exploiting our hidden desires, then secretly our desired relationship to nature is revealed by images of riding across the unspoiled wilderness ensconced in a brand-new truck or SUV. Nature is to be enjoyed like a lord surveying his dominions with no sharp thorns or biting insects or inclement weather. A reverse terrarium, with us in the glass.
It reminds me that years ago one of the Detroit Big Three commissioned a psychologist to determine people’s idea of the perfect car. It turned out to be a double bed that could go anywhere.
Re the reason for a ring: Maybe it’s a nod to the custom of kissing the ring of the powerful to show fealty. A ring any other place but the finger could make for some awkward situations.
Celadon, maybe so, but human beings are religious by nature — deprive them of religion and they’ll create a new one out of whatever materials are available. As the history of Marxism shows in fine detail…
Michaelz, yes, I’ve heard of that. The same horrors endlessly repeated, with different excuses each time.
Siliconguy, I’m disappointed in them; they didn’t include this gentleman in the list.
Poor Ming the Merciless. He doesn’t even make the cut of names to fling at Trump. Unfortunately for the Atlantic, it’s starting to look as though this might be the hard reality they get to deal with:
Bacon, thanks for this. That’s one fine savage poem.
Martin, true enough.
So finally we get some idea of why a ring – it has to do with Germanic folklore and tradition. I wonder what the equivalent would be in Murican folklore and tradition?
>The Atlantic has upped the game for next week’s topic. Trump as Hitler isn’t working, so the author tacked on a couple more.
I wonder if anyone has told her about Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate? No? Ok. Or Emmanuel Goldstein? Ok.
I know, I know, if you were to point these things out, she would just get even angrier and more vicious then she already is. But, isn’t that bringing her, to her logical conclusion? She’s going to get there anyway.
Why not nudge her along?
Bwa ha ha! JMG, The Trumpus Maximus picture is priceless! But what really makes it is the tiny Pepe the Frog, hanging onto Trumpus’ Toga!
Sorry, Other Owen (#143), Trump can’t have my 2 Minutes of Hate– I am keeping that all for myself– Emmanuel Goldstein
“So finally we get some idea of why a ring – it has to do with Germanic folklore and tradition. I wonder what the equivalent would be in Murican folklore and tradition?”
That’s a really good question. An axe is one thing that popped into my head, but I’m from the northern forests, Paul Bunyan country. The Kentucky Long Rifle is another mythic device from further south.
Given the size of the country and the length of time it took to fully settle it I’m not sure we would have just one.
Max von Sydow played Ming in the ’80s movie version.
“Recall an interview where he said that Ming was his favorite role over his career. The interviewer was shocked , wondering how a guy who’d had so many serious dramatic roles could pick a comic character as his favorite. Von Sydow explained that playing a villain whose only motivation was being evil just for fun of it was a great part to play.”
Hi John Michael,
It’s late in the week, but err, decisions have been made to put an end to things. North Korea is sending troops to Ukraine. It’s been my observation of history that a large standing military is fine and all, but ensuring that they’re battle trained just makes them all that more effective. And I suspect the goal in that case is to win and then hold the territory, unlike the unusual outcomes the west seeks these days.
Cheers
Chris
Wagner’s Ring Cycle is one of those things I always saw references too (eg kill the wabbit), but never delved into it. Now I have a proper guide to show me what I was missing, and this really is profound stuff!
As for the Highland Clearances, I remember reading about that in history books, and it always struck me as borderline genocidal; I was also struck by how this atrocity is routinely downplayed and whitewashed in sources. Check out this gem from the fake MMORPG encyclopedia, Wikipedia:
“The eviction of tenants went against dùthchas, the principle that clan members had an inalienable right to rent land in the clan territory. This was never recognised in Scottish law. It was gradually abandoned by clan chiefs as they began to think of themselves simply as commercial landlords, rather than as patriarchs of their people—a process that arguably started with the Statutes of Iona of 1609. The clan members continued to rely on dùthchas. This difference in viewpoints was an inevitable source of grievance.”
I mean, lol. I wonder if they would describe the Trail of Tears this way? After all, the two events are comparable (of course, they don’t). Just for fun, I’ll rewrite it:
“The eviction of Native American tenants went against the tribal principle that they had an inalienable right to their ancestral lands. This was not recognized in US law. This idea was gradually abandoned by the US as they began to see themselves as the rightful owners of the American continent rather than as co-habitants with Natives, a process that began with US independence and culminated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The natives continued to believe in their ancestral right to their land, and this difference in viewpoints was an inevitable source of grievance.”
Pretty sure this framing of the Trail of Tears would get you cancelled rather quickly. Also, the prose is rather turgid, parodying it was a bit more painful than I’d anticipated. Hope you don’t mind my wiki-bashing btw: there’s alot wrong with that place, and its culture of control freaks, activism, bureaucracy, and mediocrity, combined with pretentiousness, is something I never get tired of disliking.
I am loving this series! I’m learning so much 🙂