In this and the posts to come I’m going to be presenting a social, political, and economic interpretation of what’s going on in the operas composing Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. Now of course the usual reaction to such interpretations is to back away from the crazy person as quickly as possible, and there’s good reason for that.
Crackpot interpretive schemes go back a long, long way. From the Pagan mystics who redefined the raucous behavior of the Greek gods as prim metaphysical parables, through the economist who published a lengthy book trying to prove that Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark was all about the business cycle, to today’s ongoing efforts to turn ancient mythologies into fourth-rate science fiction about ancient astronauts, this kind of allegorical interpretation can be very entertaining in a giddy sort of way, but it tells you more about the contents of the interpreter’s head than it does about the thing being interpreted.
There’s an exception to that rule, however, and that’s when the creator of the work under discussion intended the allegory. Nobody argues about whether there’s a subtext of Christian theology in John Bunyan’s famous The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example. Bunyan himself put one there, and made it impossible to miss. The main character’s name is Christian, he sets out on his journey after meeting another character named Evangelist, and away we go. It’s a fine romp, with villains, monsters, and perils aplenty, and you don’t have to be a Christian yourself to enjoy it, but there’s no question that Protestant theology is what it’s all about.
Richard Wagner was a little more subtle than John Bunyan. (It would admittedly take heroic efforts to be less subtle than Bunyan.) He didn’t name his characters Proletariat, Intelligentsia, and so on; instead, he took names, incidents, and decor from the Dark Age legends we discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Nonetheless, as we discussed in a different post, Wagner was powerfully influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who redefined gods as collective cultural ideals. In his voluminous letters and other writings, Wagner made it as clear as anything can possibly be that this was what he had in mind when he went to work on The Ring. His gods, giants, nature spirits, and Nibelung dwarfs were symbolic stand-ins for the major players in nineteenth century European culture.
We have, as it happens, another witness to the same point, and it so happens that the witness in question shares three things with Richard Wagner. First, he was an immensly influential cultural and artistic figure in his time; second, he was just as far over onto the leftward end of the political spectrum as Wagner was; and third, he had one of the few egos of the age as insanely overinflated as Richard Wagner’s. Yes, we’re talking about George Bernard Shaw, playwright, essayist, literary critic, insufferable intellectual snob, and crazed Wagner fan. Among Shaw’s prodigious literary output, accordingly, is a short work entitled The Perfect Wagnerite. (It’s long out of copyright and so you can download a free copy here.)
Now in fact Shaw was an imperfect Wagnerite, though since he was Shaw there was no possible way he could have noticed this, much less admitted it. He was astute enough to catch the grand political and cultural subtext to The Ring, and thorough enough to read Wagner’s own writings and get the details of the allegory straight from the Nibelung’s mouth. In the present context, he suffered from two great limitations. The first was that he was utterly unable to imagine that anybody who disagreed with him could be right. The second was that he never outgrew the Feuerbachian optimism that was knocked out of Wagner by the aftermath of the failed 1849 revolution, and so his response to Wagner’s mature thought was to insist airily that Wagner was wrong and knew it, and had abandoned his social and political themes and lapsed back into ordinary opera in the third act of Siegfried and the entirety of The Twilight of the Gods.
There’s a tremendous irony in this notion of Shaw’s, and it’s one we’ll discuss in detail once we get to The Twilight of the Gods. For the first two and two-thirds operas, however, Shaw’s a helpful guide. Here’s what he says about our theme:
“The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the life he is himself fighting his way though, it must needs appear to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation by the principal baritone.”
He’s right, too, and goes on to demonstrate this in fine detail. With this in mind, we proceed to the first, shortest, and most transparently Feuerbachian of the four operas of The Nibelung’s Ring, The Rhinegold. If you haven’t read the libretto yet, stop now, download it here, and read the text of the first opera before we go on.
Ready? The orchestra is finishing the prelude and the curtains are going up on Wagner’s world.
It’s a world on three levels. There’s the world of nature, here represented primarily by the Rhine flowing endlessly from the Alps to the North Sea. Later on we’ll meet some of nature’s other inhabitants, but the ones that matter in this opera are the Rhinemaidens, three water spirits named Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Flosshilde. Their great joy is a lump of magic gold, the Rhinegold of the title, which sits on a crag deep under the river, and their job is to guard it. They don’t take that job very seriously, because they know that only someone who has renounced love can take it and turn it into a ring of power, and the thought that anyone would do that seems absurd to them. So they dance and play in the water and wait for the sun to shine on the gold.
Down below the world of nature is Nibelheim, the world of the Nibelung dwarfs. They’re straight out of European folklore: short, scrawny, tough, and hard-working. They like to make things, and if you happened to visit Nibelheim before the beginning of the opera you’d find them laboring away, coming up with all kinds of clever items to meet their personal needs or just for the fun of it. We’ll meet a couple of the Nibelungs shortly, Alberich and his brother Mime (that’s pronounced Meemeh, by the way—he doesn’t wear white makeup and gloves or pretend to be trapped in a phone booth).
Finally, up above the world of nature is the realm of gods and giants. The giants are big, strong, and dumb. So are some of the gods, which is not surprising since they’re closely related to the giants—even in the Eddas, a lot of gods have giant wives or ancestors. Then there’s Wotan, whose actions set the whole story in motion. He’s not satisfied with the way things are, and in the usual way of things, his ideas for changing them start with putting himself in charge of it all. Back before our story opens, he maneuvered himself into the position of king of the gods; he married Fricka, the goddess of social custom, so he would have that immense power on his side; he dominated Loge, the tricksy fire-god of intellect, to have that second immense power on his side; he cut a branch from the World-Ash Tree, and onto it carved in runes the contracts and agreements that define his power; and he has just hired two giants to make him a palace.
All three of these realms, divested of their fairy-tale accoutrements, were everyday realities to people in nineteenth-century Europe, and they are just as essential to our lives today. The world of nature isn’t quite as full of treasures now as it was in Wagner’s time, since we’ve stripped so much of it to the bare riverbed, but nature and its guardians are still present. You don’t have to think of them as nature spirits if you don’t want to. Tribal peoples who live close to nature fit the pattern just as well—and as we’ll see, they and the natural world itself are just as vulnerable to the machinations of Nibelungs and gods alike as they ever were.
The division between the other two worlds was much more obvious in Wagner’s time than it is today. In those days the line between the lower and upper social worlds was explicit. Did you have enough investment income that you didn’t have to work for a living? If you did, you were on the gods’ and giants’ side of the line, and if you didn’t, you were on the side of the dwarfs. Read any novel from that time and you can see that line; it’s about as subtle as the Great Wall of China. That’s why Marxists are so obsessed about capitalism. When Marx wrote, possession of invested capital was literally the most important fact in European social life. Equally, one of the reasons why Marxism is so irrelevant these days is that we’ve moved on to a managerialist system, in which access to power and wealth depends mostly on bureaucratic rank, though capitalists of the old school linger on the way aristocrats did in the era of capitalism proper.
As the curtain rises we’re just before the dawn of the capitalist era. The Nibelungs are peasants, and the giants are aristocrats and gentry. The gods? They’re cultural figures: intellectuals, artists, celebrities, priests, and prophets, all those dazzling figures who not only entertain the giants but provide the ideas and images that define the world for the other characters. What holds this world together, in the final analysis, is love.
Does that seem unbearably romantic? It’s nothing of the kind. The medieval world out of which the capitalist world evolved was held together, from top to bottom, by personal relationships. That’s the foundation of feudalism. A feudal system is a network of personal commitments made between individuals. The baron and his vassal clasp hands, the baron grants the vassal a certain piece of farmland, the vassal grants the baron his services during wartime, and the glue that holds the feudal world together hardens around them.
All this descends straight from Gunther’s day. In the twilight years of the Roman world, when runaway corruption had gutted the last trace of the ideals that once made Rome strong, when the currency had become debased to worthlessness and government had been reduced to a system of organized plunder, the only thing that still held fast was the personal commitment of members of a band of warriors to each other and to their leader. The comradeship and mutual loyalty of men who have faced death together is a powerful bond; it’s not always powerful enough to resist the corrosive pressures that emerge during the fall of a civilization, but those warbands that fail to maintain it crumple in the face of battle and are erased from history. Those who succeed in the face of that challenge become the seed crystals around which a new world takes shape.
That bond of personal commitment, in turn, becomes the template around which the rest of society takes shape. It structures the relationships of every person and every social group to the others, and it also structures the relationship between humanity and nature. You can see this in the sort of old-fashioned farmers who still get their hands elbow deep into the soil: their relationship to their land is personal, not abstract. You can see it even more powerfully among surviving tribal peoples, for whom every feature of the land is a person, with whom human beings not only can but must establish and maintain mutually respectful relationships.
This kind of personal relationship, uniting individuals with one another, with their society, with their ancestors and gods, and with the natural world, is the basic form of human society. It’s the form from which every more complex and abstract system arises, and the form to which every such society reverts once it goes through the usual arc of rise and fall, and ends where it began. To begin that arc of rise and fall, in turn, the one thing that has to happen is precisely what starts the action of The Ring: someone has to break the web of relationships in a way that can’t be repaired by those who are still committed to it. Someone has to renounce love.
That’s what happens, of course, in The Rhinegold. As the curtain rises, we see the Rhine, with the Rhinemaidens cavorting through the water around their golden treasure. Then a Nibelung named Alberich comes scrambling up among the rocks on the bed of the Rhine and catches sight of the Rhinemaidens. Of course he falls instantly in love with them. Of course, since they’re lovely nature spirits and he’s an ugly little Nibelung dwarf, they aren’t interested. Nor are they nice about it. They tease him, flirt with him, and then mock him for his ugliness. In its own way, despite the beauty of the music and the humor of the drama, it’s a brutal scene, and the effect on Alberich is just as brutal, as his clumsy affection crumples into bitterness and misery.
Any of my readers who grew up homely and socially clumsy, as I did, know this song well enough to sing all the verses by heart, but there’s more going on here than a savage commentary on common social habits. The great vulnerability of human relationships with nature is that the affection is one-sided. You can adore the piece of ground you farm, you can pour all your heart and soul and love into it, and yet a few days of bad weather or a summer that’s just slightly too dry can mean a failed harvest and a year of privation and misery.
That’s what Alberich is going through. A lot of people went through it in Europe in the centuries prior to Wagner’s time. Europe, that bleak, mountainous, storm-swept subcontinent stuck onto the western end of the continent of Asia, is a difficult place to maintain an urban agricultural civilization. If you’re on the southern edge of it, up against the Mediterranean, it’s not so bad, though you can count on catastrophic droughts fairly often. If you’re north of the ragged band of mountains that extends from the Pyrenees across south central France to the Alps and then down the spine of the Balkans, on the other hand, you’re in much worse shape.
It’s worth remembering that southern Germany is at the same latitude as Newfoundland and northern Germany is at the same latitude as Labrador. Only the Gulf Stream and certain unstable weather patterns triggered by that great oceanic river of warm water keep it from being subarctic wasteland better suited to musk oxen and caribou than to agricultural crops. From 1500 to 1800, those weather patterns were much weaker than usual, and at irregular but frequent intervals, Europe shivered and starved. That’s the Little Ice Age that climate historians discuss. It was also the great driver of the age of European mass migration: millions of families gave up everything to flee to other parts of the world where they hoped to find a better chance of survival.
The Little Ice Age was also what shattered what was left of the peasant economy of old Europe and brought about the rise of industrial capitalism. As the Little Ice Age was hitting its stride, Europe was fighting for its life against the armies and navies of the Ottoman Empire, which made no secret of its plans to conquer the European subcontinent the way the Mughals had conquered India. The struggle to maintain naval parity with the Ottomans was one force that drove European shipwrights to push the boundaries of their craft, inventing new ship designs that were far more sturdy and maneuverable than anything else afloat. Another force was the desperate struggle to keep Europe fed, in which vast amounts of salt codfish from the western Atlantic fisheries played a vital role.
Merchants who invested in the new ships then discovered that they could ship sugar, tobacco, slaves, and other valuable cargoes all over the world, amassing vast profits. Those profits, in turn, allowed them to seize control of whole sectors of the economy, replacing local crafts with centralized factories whose products could be shipped all over the planet. At first, those factories were powered by waterwheels; that’s why, for example, you’ll find a belt of old factory towns all along the North American seaboard at the “fall line”—the point at which rivers tumble down out of the foothills of the Appalachians onto the coastal plain, where upriver navigation stops but there’s still enough of a slope to give waterwheels ample power.
That was the first wave of industrialism: the eotechnic era, as Lewis Mumford termed it in a fine and unjustly neglected book. It caused immense changes, to be sure, but its reach was limited in geographic and energetic terms. There are only so many good sites for waterwheels on the planet, and it’s only possible to extract a sharply limited amount of mechanical energy from them. Wind could pick up some of the slack—the Netherlands famously specialized in this—and also provided transport, filling the sails of tall ships. Here again, though, there’s only so much wind and it can only accomplish so much.
Then, of course, Alberich stole the Rhinegold.
Gold wasn’t actually the thing that mattered, though it certainly looked that way to George Bernard Shaw. In his time and Wagner’s, European currencies were all gold-backed. Gold was the great talisman of wealth, which is why the nineteenth century saw so many gold rushes around the world, and why one of my great-granduncles abandoned his failing farm near the shores of Grays Harbor, Washington to go to the Klondike in the hope of getting rich. Far more important, though, was coal—King Coal, as it was called at the time, the single most valuable mineral resource in the nineteenth century, the foundation of the second wave of industrialism: the paleotechnic era, as Mumford called it.
Coal was crucial. Once steam engines powered by coal replaced waterwheels powered by the local equivalent of the Rhinemaidens, the industrial system could metastatize across Europe and eastern North America, shattering what remained of the old economy of personal relationships and local loyalties, and replacing it by a system in which the only relationships that mattered were economic. That said, it’s a mistake to see the Rhinegold as any one commodity. The theft of the Rhinegold, rather, is the process of commodification as a whole—the replacement of personal relationships with market forces, in which everything (including human lives) became just another set of raw materials to be exploited for profit.
That’s the process that Alberich’s deed kicked into motion. He didn’t start the process, though, nor was he the only participant. We’ll talk about that two weeks from now.
* * *
It occurs to me that there are five Wednesdays in this month, and by longstanding tradition, the commentariat gets to vote on what I write about for the fifth Wednesday. What do you want to hear about? Enquiring Druids want to know.
“In the twilight years of the Roman world, when runaway corruption had gutted the last trace of the ideals that once made Rome strong,” Ouch.
“when the currency had become debased to worthlessness” Oof.
“and government had been reduced to a system of organized plunder,” Eek.
“the only thing that still held fast was the personal commitment of members of a band of warriors to each other and to their leader.”
You really know how to drive in a knife. I don’t think the local war band is hiring yet, but I’m not optimistic about avoiding that event.
To which of Lewis Mumford’s books (I am a fan, for what that might be worth) do you refer?
For the 5th Wednesday or at some other time, I would like you to elaborate on your remarks about the Reformation being inspired by Islam. There were many heretic movements throughout the Middle Ages, the Albigensian being only the best known, but before Luther, the Church in alliance with secular authority always managed to prevail. What broke apart that alliance? Contemporary Catholic writers allege greed for monastic lands; feminists blamed desire of monarchs to have all females married and breeding future soldiers.
“Europe was fighting for its life against the armies and navies of the Ottoman Empire, which made no secret of its plans to conquer the European subcontinent the way the Mughals had conquered India. ” Thank you for this, a fact of history which is obscured when it is not ignored altogether amid vociferous complaining about “Crusaders”.
I nominate for the 5th Wednesday the topic of America’s obsession with HItler.
As I mentioned previously, my vote for the fifth Wednesday post this month is your thoughts on the nature of the new elite that will arise to replace the one that we currently have. Also, possibly any thoughts how to deal with the transition that you have not covered previously.
Howdy,
Very much enjoying these posts, I’m glad you decided to “scare off all your readership” 🙂
As for the Fifth Wednesday, maybe “Jung as an occultist” can finally get its day in the sun. I’d be especially interested in how the archetypes fit into occult philosophy and practice, but please count this in with whatever other focus you or others would prefer in talking about Jung.
Cheers,
Jeff
I would like for you to write a post about kundalini rising – what it is, how to know if it is happening, and how best to respond if it does. You’ve mentioned going through it; so have some of your readers. I don’t think I’m the only one of your readers who would like to know more about it in case it happens to us.
JMG,
Thanks for spurring me to go through the Ring Cycle – I’d avoided it for years, since I’ve always disliked operas. My experience with operas previously had been that they take a very long time to tell simple and uninteresting stories against dull backdrops, and the Ring Cycle being the epitome of ‘opera’ in popular culture, I figured it was the same but more.
I was very wrong, and have definitely become a fan since watching/reading them. I’ve been listening to an instrumental version more or less nonstop for the past few weeks.
I’ll have to disagree with Shaw, while I may be new to Wagner, it’s obvious that the final third of the cycle is what makes it true art and not just a “Christmas pantomime.”
I’m sure the weaponized autists of 4chan can find some sympathy with Alberich. His plan for world domination echoes what Jordan Peterson calls ‘revenge against the world for the crime of being.’
Uff, was just able to make a pass trough Wagners Ring cycle for the timing of this post and am still digesting it.
As for the fifth Wednesday. May I be a persistent pest and again try to suggest Hitler as an archetype as per last years offer “One of these days, when I’m ready to have a very large number of people melt down completely, I plan on doing a post about Hitler as archetype, …”
Ecosophia
In November we voted on it, and lost to a wonderful theme
Case Study of Chinese collapse resilience
And again in July to The Neckless Ones: A Historical Puzzle
All interesting pieces that I reread multiple times in the last months.
But still the stars may have come around right this time, so I repropose to raise the “Hitler as archetype” once again.
Best regards,
Marko
That’s an excellent point about the Ottoman effort to conquer Europe. My history courses in High School and College made no mention of it at all, despite its enormous historical importance.
I learned about it only in my early 20s, beginning from a small piece of paper pinned to the bulletin board outside the office door of one of my professors in Slavic linguistics, commemorating the anniversary of the the victory of King John III Sobieski over the Ottoman armies in 1683 at the “Gates of Vienna.” Intrigued, I went to find out more. That victory turned out to have been a very close call indeed: Europe had been within a hair’s-breadth of becoming just one part of the Ottoman Empire.
Later I began to wonder why my history courses never went there. That led to some quite worth-while private meditations on the pseudo-discipline of “Western History” (as id “The West” were a genuine “thing” in history)., and also on deliberate blind-spots in academia and the reasons for their deliberate creation.
There’s a pretty good wikipedia article on the event itself under the heading “Battle of Vienna.”
I don’t know of many people who considered “Pilgrim’s Progress” enjoyable. My brother had to read it in school and hated it. I read it out of curiosity and thought, “so that’s where Vanity Fair originated”! Hawthorne’s parody was really not up to his usual standard. Fortunately, he kept it short. Your joke about mimes made me chuckle. For the 5th Wednesday, I’d like your take on Mercurius.
Hello JMG. Excellent post as usual.
I was raised in one of those liberal protestant churches where well educated pastors preached a religion they did not seem to take seriously. I have been watching the swell of the second religiosity begin to rise in this country and think that it might be an opportunity to reconcile the religious and occult ways of viewing the world. I do not know if this would serve as a seed of a topic for the fifth Wednesday or not. If not, do you have any suggestions for sources (books, practicioners etc.) on learning an effective, responsible occult practice rooted in Christian faith? It is past time to reclaim those sacramentals for the future we seem to be getting ready to face. Thank you.
I second the request for a posting about kundalini rising but will bow to whatever the majority decides.
And unless my aging eyes deceive me, your photo posting of the grist mill is none other than the one located in my hometown. If anyone is interested in its history, it was operating until the 1930s. A small dam, now long gone, powered it. Fallen into disuse, it was renovated and opened as a working grist mill and museum back in the 90s. Regrettably the lease wasn’t renewed and it closed. Now it is occupied by the Schilling Beer Co., a local brewery using it as their pub and kitchen.
JLfromNH/Viridian Vitriolic Ouroboros
For the 5th wednesday i also name America’s obsession with HItler.
We all should also remember that if the rhinegold was, in the end, coal (appropriate considering the huge coal reserves that were there), we are into even more dangerous drugs nowadays with oil. If coal spread industries all around Europe, N.America and West Russia, oil removes the last restrictions that the rhinemaidens held upon coal: coal is heavy and coal does not pack as much energy per kg as oil, making transcontinental coal trade, in those days, nearly unprofittable (even if some colonial powers used their colonial opression to ship coal from the colonies to Europe). With oil you can create an industrial Mordor (ie. Las Vegas) anywhere, breaking the last chains of nature. Until the oil runs out and you die.
Re the climate of northern Germany.
In 1980 I worked for a German boss in Namibia. He told me he had grown up in a small village in northern Germany. In winter the snow was so deep they were cut off from the outside world for months at a time. There was no question of going to the shop for fresh fruit and vegetables because no trucks could get through. Sauerkraut provided their needed vitamin C. They rented a field from a farmer, planted cabbages, and when the cabbages were ready the whole family got together and harvested them and made sauerkraut. They had a special sauerkraut plane that was placed on top of a barrel and they shredded the cabbage directly into the barrel. When they were finished and the barrels stored in the basement to ferment there was a big party because they knew they were safe for another winter. This would be somewhere around 1940-50, based on the boss’s age.
I vote (yet again) for the Austrian corporal with the moustache and the Nazi ventures into the occult.
Am I the only one who finds it incredible that people are surprised that a plot set in motion by someone getting an object of power by renouncing love would end badly? The idea that Wagner thought this could be anything other than a tragedy, and Shaw could see this and think Wagner was wrong for making it into one just seems complete insane to me….
Ah, George Bernard Shaw, the British intellectual who outdid most of his peers by publicly celebrating both Hitler and Stalin. The others normally took up one of those at most. He certainly had some talent for… provocative writing, though. I either didn’t know or forgot that he was a Wagner fan, but it makes sense that he would interpret him in this specific way.
“[Wotan] has just hired two giants to make him a palace.”
If a god is an influential celebrity and giants are aristocrats, I suppose this is like, say, a famous composer getting sponsored by a mad king? 😛
And I suppose I’ll vote for the cultural legacy of the Bohemian corporal. It’s a topic that just won’t go away (I don’t mean here, but in the world at large), so I’d be interested to hear what you think of it. Come to think of it, one of the angles I find most interesting about it is “how much longer will he be around”. I have this grave suspicion that it would take a drastic collapse to shake him loose, and even then it isn’t quite a sure thing. Jews still remember Haman, after all.
I’ve tabulated everyone’s nominations for Fifth Wednesday topic. Thank you all!
Siliconguy, it’s history’s hand on the knife, not mine. Warbands are already hiring, but as usual, they’re mostly putting out their help wanted signs on the other side of the border.
Mary, I’m delighted to hear it! Mumford deserves much more attention than he gets. The book in question is Technics and Civilization, published in 1934.
Sirustalcelion, you’re most welcome and thank you. Wagner is actually the antithesis of opera — he would have been the greatest of all movie producers, except for the minor point that cinema hadn’t been invented yet. He loved all the things that made for great movies in the golden age of cinema: grand vistas, lively plots, colorful and conflicted characters, and good theme music. As for Alberich, yeah, I think “Nibelheim” is how you spell “4chan” in German.
Robert, it amazes me that it’s been erased as thoroughly as it has. Early modern European history only makes sense if you remember that Europe was an impoverished and politically fragmented region fighting to maintain its independence against the huge and culturally more sophisticated Ottoman Empire. It’s the same situation the Greeks faced two millennia earlier when they had to carry on the same fight against the huge and culturally more sophisticated Persian empire — and in both cases the victory of the underdog sparked a cultural surge and an era of colonial expansion, both of which transformed the world. These…
…were the precise equivalent of these.
Phutatorius, hmm! I found it readable enough that I’ve reread it several times. Still, no accounting for taste.
James, that’s an easy one. Your first source is Experience of the Inner Worlds by Gareth Knight — he was one of Dion Fortune’s students, and also a devout Anglican Christian. This book of his is a great introduction to Christian occultism. After that, Peter Roche de Coppens is worth close study: his book The Nature and Use of Ritual is all about using the standard Christian prayers and creeds as central occult practices, and his Divine Light and Fire is a solid intro to esoteric Christianity. If you want to go further, you might see if you can find a local Martinist chapter — Martinism is an esoteric Christian initiatory tradition, and there are various Martinist orders in the US and elsewhere these days.
Jeanne, hmm! Thanks for this; all I knew was that it came up when I did a search online for industrial water mills.
Luciano, oh, it’s worse than that. Oil was supposed to be a bridge to the utopian nuclear future, another round of Rhinegold giving even more limitless power. Unfortunately it turned out to be a bridge to nowhere.
Martin, that sounds about right. Might be time for readers to begin honing their sauerkraut skills — either that or kimchi, which did the same valuable service for farm families in wintry Korea.
Taylor, ah, but the Romantics believed that the world created by Alberich’s lovelessness could be overthrown and replaced by a world based on love. It never occurred to them that their ideologies were just as loveless as the ones they hated. We’ll get to that…
Daniil, good. Very good. Yes, Shaw’s bad judgment was as monumental as his ego!
Phutatorius, I couldn’t stand Pilgrim’s Progress. I am still, decades later, amazed that I read it to the end.
Robert Mathiesen, someone once asked on this forum, or maybe its predecessor, about use of magic in history. the person might want to look at the Battle of Lepanto. The Moslem admiral, newly arrived from the reconquest of Cyprus, had a large green flag embroidered with all 99 names of Allah. On the Christian side, Don Juan of Austria had himself rowed with a giant crucifix to each ship to have the carving blessed. Mass was celebrated on every ship before the battle–battles were much slower then than now, and there was a lot of preliminary maneuvering, see Patrick O’Brien for good descriptions– and Don Juan had the crucifix affixed to the mast of his flagship. There may have been some blowback in that during the conquest of Cyprus, which was a matter of taking over some castles, ordinary Cypriots had nothing to say about whom their masters were going to be, one castellan refused repeated demands to surrender, and was finally subjected to a most gruesome execution by the annoyed conquerors. Two of the dead man’s brothers were squadron commanders at Lepanto, and I rather think dying curses were a thing people believed it in at that time.
Dear JMG: Thank you for another fascinating post! Your comment on the Little Ice Age as a cause of European mass migration caught my eye. I think this is right, but also understood the Enclosure Movement, and the general move away from commons and towards private property in Europe as also being important instigators of migration. Do you see these as related?
The discussion is particularly relevant in today’s political discussion about migration. As someone who spent many years in Latin America starting in the 90’s, I saw how the modern version of enclosures – opening up farmland to large multinationals – drove poor and middle class farmers out of business and into urban slums or northward to seek a better life. It’s a conundrum our politicians don’t want to recognize today as they face blowback from mass migration. Welcome your thoughts!
My bet is that the warbands of neo-feudalism will come from mercenary groups and the drug cartels. The complicated relationship between the Wagner Group and the Russian Federation seems an echo of things to come.
As for a vote on the next topic, I would like to hear about your philosophy, how you harmonize Schopenhauer, the Taoists, Levi, and Fortune. I would like to hear about it in as much detail as possible. But perhaps that topic should be saved for a future date.
This has been a very thought provoking series of posts. I vote for Jung as an occultist, that certainly sounds like a fascinating thing to learn more about.
I vote for whichever topic has the highest number of votes and is NOT about Hitler.
Plenty of food for thought there!
Dear JMG:
My vote is for Hitler as archetype/ the west’s obsession with him.
By the way, a very nice picture of Polish pancerni cavalry! And history has an ironic turn; the Austrian Empire helped to erase Poland in the late 18th Century. Some gratitude!
Cugel
My vote for fifth Wednesday: your thoughts on why the United States’ upcoming 250th anniversary is being so studiously ignored.
JMG
My vote is for the Hitler archetype as well.
Thanks again for this series.
@JMG,
I haven’t commented on any of the Wagner posts yet but I do enjoy reading them. I’ll admit that my interest in Wagner is mostly from the musical side; until now I hadn’t given much thought to the politics of the Ring operas. (And I’d found Wagner’s cavalier handling of the old Germanic legends rather off-putting; I think Tolkien disliked the Ring cycle for the same reason.)
You said “The Nibelungs are peasants, and the giants are aristocrats and gentry. The gods? They’re cultural figures: intellectuals, artists, celebrities, priests, and prophets, all those dazzling figures who not only entertain the giants but provide the ideas and images that define the world for the other characters.”
To me this seems rather too clear-cut. Think for instance of Fasolt’s speech to Wotan in Act 2 of Das Rheingold:
Soft sleep sealed thine eyes
While we, both sleepless, built the castle walls:
Working hard, wearied not,
Heaping, heaving, heavy stones.
Tower steep, door and gate,
Keep and guard thy goodly castle halls.
That looks to me like the complaint of a lower-class person who works with his hands, not what a capitalist would say to one of the “cultural figures” that the Gods are supposed to represent.
Granted, it may well be that Wagner explained the allegory in the same terms you did – I haven’t actually read his letters on the subject, let alone Shaw’s book. Though of course it’s worth nothing that artists often think they’re putting political messages into their work that end up making very little sense to anyone but the artists themselves. (For instance, how George Lucas, when he was making Return of the Jedi, honest-to-goodness thought he had based the character of the Emperor on Richard Nixon.)
As you point out, Wagner portrays Alberich as a pathetic figure (no doubt the Rhinemaidens would use the word “incel” if the opera were written today) and seems to imply the whole brouhaha could have been avoided if one ugly dwarf had just accepted the limitations of his prospects and maybe gone off to OnlyFans instead. But if Alberich represents the peasantry and his humiliation represents their privation and misery due to the necessary realities of human interaction with nature, it does make him seem a bit more sympathetic. “The problem starts when the churls fail to starve gracefully enough” isn’t exactly cautionary, let alone prescriptive. I guess that’s part of the point.
To that point, and speaking of river spirits, some of the ones in western North Carolina and environs have given some of my relatives’ neighbors considerable trouble last week. In this case the reaction to such humiliation will probably result, in the long run, in dozens of modest Main Street bridges being replaced by flood-proof monstrosities and miles of scenic river bank being sheathed in concrete slabs, ultimately making the underlying problems worse. So the opera goes.
Once again, all votes (except for one — see below) have been tabulated.
Anna, the enclosure movement was driven partly by crop failures — sheep can thrive where wheat won’t grow, as every Scotsman knows — and partly by the explosive growth of wealth in the mercantile class, since they needed wool for their cloth mills. It was a complex phenomenon, but the Little Ice Age is rarely given the importance it deserves.
Enjoyer, the Wagner Group was a warband pure and simple. Prigozhin was ahead of his time; another generation or two and he wouldn’t have been anything like so easy for the Russian government to crush.
Kyle, nope. You don’t get to cast a negative vote. If you want to cast a vote you have to name a specific topic you favor, and then it’ll be recorded.
Patricia M, I do my best.
Cugel, nations have interests, not friends. Be that as it may, one of my favorite notions for alternative history imagines a Polish-Lithuanian empire absorbing most of eastern Europe.
Sandwiches, granted, there’s a lot of complexity in all Wagner’s symbols. I didn’t know that about Lucas — I gather he never heard about projecting the shadow…
Walt, exactly. I hope your relatives are okay.
For 5th Wednesday, I’d like to add a vote for kundalini rising. Though if you can give useful references now, that would also be helpful. I’ll ask on Magic Monday if that’s more appropriate, but I’ve been having (unintended) mental images arising lately of a snake uncoiling & slithering up my spine, and I’d like to be prepared to handle it healthily.
I’m another person who enjoyed Pilgrim’s Progress; it felt useful spiritually in the same way as Screwtape Letters, giving me insight into the journey ahead of me.
Fifth-Wednesday topic suggestion: Jung and his connections with the occult, with extra credit for at least a side-glance into The Red Book.
I cast my vote for a post on Lewis Mumford.
I am very much enjoying these posts on Wagner. All I knew about him before is that he wrote ‘The ride of the valkyries.’
My vote is for the Austrian corporal.
Will O
I’m reminded of the joke about an old lady watching Hamlet for the first time, and saying that she liked it, but there were so many quotations. Because reading the libretto, I was repeatedly & forcibly reminded of the One Ring in the Hobbit & LOTR. (Which reminds me, how much of the libretto should I plan to read in advance of the next opera post?)
I vote for Jung’s occultism.
Annette
Your writing often sets off sparks in my mind, and this is one of those times.
I’m currently watching the mini-series “Shogun,” and your discussion of feudal societies, war lords, naval power, trade, and the crucial role of personal relationships came vividly to life.. I highly recommend that series if one has not yet seen it.
Than you for another engaging and edifying post!
I’ve been really enjoying your discussion of Wagner, although I haven’t been commenting.
For the fifth Wednesday, I vote for why we’re — as a country — ignoring our 250th anniversary.
I remember the hoopla about 1776. It began years earlier.
And now? Crickets.
For the 5th
Hitler and the Wotan archetype.
Have you seen some of the AI translated English speech videos on YouTube?
They seem to get very interesting comments particularly from the young.
Thanks very much for this essay! After reading the libretto last week, I had some ideas in this direction, but you added much more detail, especially about the nature of the gold and of love. I admit I had only thought of romantic love in the scene with Alberich.
For us moderns, it seems as if the love between a war leader and his retainer is modelled on romantic love between men and women, but I have read (in Lewis?) that the love between men and (higher social class, married) women glorified by the troubadours and the Arthurian lays is actually modelled on the retainer’s love towards his leader. Idealized examples can be found many times in the Eddas and sagas, where retainers are willing to die for sadness after their leader was killed.
And a lot of interactions among commoners just as much as among the nobility were intertwined with relations of blood – affection towards one’s children, one’s parents, one’s brothers and sisters, one’s cousins and so forth. This often takes the form of what in our impersonal order would be considered nepotism or corruption. So yes, it makes a lot of sense, even though it sounds crazy, to say that the feudal order was based on love.
Speaking of corruption, I am not quite sure anybody in the ancient world considered the mingling of private and public money, or favouring one’s kin, a crime. It was just the way things were. In any case, a large part of the taxes continued to be used for the upkeep of the Roman armies, which were very rather rarely outright defeated by barbarian enemies. You are absolutely right about the oppression of commoners by taxes and other rules and about the debasement of the currency, though.
I voting for the Hitler topic. We have this item preserved from the New Republic (second picture down). It was famous for a bit after the assassination attempt.
https://twitchy.com/amy/2024/07/07/new-republic-cover-image-portrays-trump-as-literally-hitler-n2398094
And this, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/24/trump-hitler-rhetoric-comparison/
And this, https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image-film?phrase=trump+hitler
Just Google Trump as Hitler and it will flood you with hits.
Comrade Kamala isn’t trending nearly as strongly.
My 5ᵗʰ week vote is the mental health impact on people losing faith in Progress and the consequences following on from this.
I’m going to keep voting for Hitler until the post happens or I get accepted to art school… and I haven’t applied to art school.
@Kyle #23: I hear you!
My vote is for:
“the extent to which Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam”
I vote for Carl Jung!
Hi JMG,
I hope things are going well for you. Thank you for your writings‼️
> the commentariat gets to vote
Hitler.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🗳️🔥
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Once again, I recommend the novel “JR” by Wm. Gaddis. The protagonist, JR VanZandt, is a sixth grader who plays the role of Alberich in a sixth grade production of “Das Rheingold.” Without love or family, he builds a paper empire, the “JR Family of Companies,” acting as a corporate raider. All justified by his notion that “that’s what you do.” It’s a novel about music, greed and chaos (my own characterization). I enjoyed it. Apparently everyone except for Rick Moody considers it to be a difficult novel.
For once I’m voting for a Fifth Wednesday topic, and my vote is the same as Teresa Peschel’s (#38): “why we’re — as a country — ignoring our 250th anniversary.”
Thank you, Teresa. That seems to me to be one of the very few $25,000,000 questions these days. The symbolism of that silence feels very dire to me.
Hi John Michael,
Exactly, it’s not just one single commodity. To me it looks like everything and anything will get thrown under the bus to keep the big old wheels rollin’. Things can lurch though, I mean look what happened in Europe once king coal was no longer able to be extracted economically using human labour? Messy.
Far out man, but earlier in the year I was told “It’s just business”, when a very long term working relationship was abruptly severed. Sure, if they say so, but I’m pretty certain the Roman citizens opened the gates to Alaric I and his cohorts. There’d have been a good reason for that too, don’t you reckon?
Cheers
Chris
If Hitler gets selected for the 5th Wednesday (I haven’t decided my own vote yet), here is an interesting article on the Barsoom Substack:
World War Time Loop – Escaping the Myth of the Eternal Second World War
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/world-war-time-loop
The TL;DR version is that WW II (and Hitler) have been mythologized by the Professional Managerial Class, and this mythos forms the basis of their moral legitimacy and their (claimed) right to rule over the rest of us.
This means, that the reason why asking certain awkward questions about the actual events of that war has been criminalised in so many countries is not because “thuh Joo-o-oz” control everything (although they do have an out-sized influence). It is because the demythologization of that war would be the final nail in the coffin of the moral legitimacy of the PMC.
Hi JMG,
Could we do another post some time talking about nuclear power? Many people are still touting it as a common-sense choice for future energy installations (e.g. Michael Shellenberger), but the concept of EROEI suspiciously rarely comes up…
I am also voting for America’s obsession with Hitler.
Mr. Mathiesen re: #9 – I’d be honestly intrigued by an alternate history in which the Battle of Vienna went the other way, especially considering European colonization of the New World had already begun by that time. I don’t see the Ottomans managing to pursue full conquest all the way across the Atlantic without running into imperial overreach. (London to Boston is already quite the supply line, and the British had the benefit of loyalist Canada and other loyalist ports to fall back on; Istanbul to Boston is even longer and they won’t have friendly harbors.)
JMG – I wish to second Roldy’s vote for the radio silence regarding the upcoming sestercentennial.
Boy, you make feudalism sound mighty appealing….
As I had a few months back, I’ll propose for a fifth Wednesday topic to explore if Marx was a thumaturgist.
The Marxist ideologies must have the greatest marketing strategy in the history of ideas. They have proven disastrous time and time again, yet keep cropping up as “the next great idea.” It makes me wonder what magic do these ideologies (Marxism, communism, socialism, etc.) possess that allows them to continue to crop up in the popular imagination?
Add another vote for the Hitler topic.
Vote for Jung the Occultist
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.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Audrey’s nephew John, who passed away on 10/1 after an extended illness, be given comfort and clarity during his transition.
May Rebecca’s new job position now scheduled to start
on October 8th indeed be hers, and fill her and her family’s needs; may the situation (including coworkers and dodgy commute) be pleasant and free of strife.
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May Mariette (Miow)’s recent surgery have been a success. May she make a full recovery and regain full use of her body. May she heal in body, soul and mind.
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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.
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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.
I neglected to add to the list of highlighted prayers above:
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricane Helene in RandomActsOfKarmaSC’s state of South Carolina be blessed, comforted, and healed.
The Hitler archetype obsession please
I’ll add another vote to the Hitler topic.
JMG,
Voting for the lack of a 250th anniversary brouhaha as well.
Cheers!
So just to be clear, the West is obsessed with Hitler because they have made Hitler into a Wotan archetype?
My vote is for the fifth wednesday is again for the mysteries associated with the Mage John Dee. Exploring the potential that his workings set in motion events that led to the dominance of the British Empire. Also, analyzing the Enochian language and its occult source(s), and commenting on his turn of focus to magic as described critically in Shumaker and Heilbron’s ‘John Dee on Astronomy’.
Thanks fo continuing this series on the ‘The Nibelung’s Ring’!
“The medieval world … was held together, from top to bottom, by personal relationships… a network of personal commitments made between individuals.”
Wow– when you put that out there, current events at my employer massively clicked.
My company was founded and run by a couple of engineers. Knowing from the get-go that their bread was buttered by the people who worked for them, they established a culture of loyalty to their employees, which the employees returned with enthusiasm. Voluntary weekend work was commonly seen, “to make sure we pass next week’s inspection” and so on. There is, and I feel it too, a definite emotional bond between all of us– it’s not sexual love as such, but a strong tie nonetheless.
A couple of years ago the founders, perhaps because they weren’t getting any younger, sold it to another company from a different US subcultural area, whose managers turn out to be the epitome of the vicious PMC industrialist. These new rulers claim that “they don’t care about morale, they only care about the money” but what I really think is, they hate, with an incandescent purple hatred, any shred of culture which involves two-way, top-to-bottom loyalty, especially if such a company actually succeeds in business, because it puts the lie to their assertion that “the only way to get people to work is to beat them into submission”.
The culture of tyranny hasn’t gone over well among the rank and file and shirts bearing the old company’s logo are often seen in the halls. The banner bearing the new company’s logo, which had been draped over the old company’s logo on the front of the building, has mysteriously “blown away in the wind”.
All we lack is a war chieftain; if we ever got one, things could be very interesting.
I tried to listen to Wagner but I don’t find him as engaging as Mozart. I appreciate this series of posts though.
My vote for the 5th Wednesday post:
The limits of Spengler’s model, considering smaller cultures that don’t quite fit into the great cultures per se (Japan, Tibet, Central Asia in general etc)
I dunno folks– I don’t think Hitler can be an archetype. In order to be an archetype, your fans need to hijack a well-known religious icon, like the Buddha-Trump statues.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/be-peace-meditate-trump-buddha-statue-designer-tells-former-president-2021-03-31/
Oh, wait–
https://www.amazon.ca/HITLER-CHRIST-Hakenkreuz-Hooked-Cross-Crucifixion/dp/1548098639
OK, OK, Hitler as an archetype could be a thing. Hope no one is burning candles to him…
@blue sun,
I believe JMG kinda addressed that before — Marxism adopts the apocalyptic vision of Christianity but applies it to this world instead of the afterlife. Immanetizing the eschaton. It is only one of the subschools of the civil religion of progress: https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2013/09/which-way-to-heaven.html you can swap out Marxism for electric vehicles, fracking, solar power, EVs etc etc for the next brilliant solution that will solve the world’s problems
Seems to me that the magic, from a Spenglerian PoV, lies in capturing the (pseudo-)Faustian mind in its desire for Progress into infinity.
@Michael Martin, I didn’t read the linked article but the premise makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know about other countries but here in Singapore, the history curriculum was explicitly created for “nation-building” and fostering a national spirit. The bugaboo we learned about in school wasn’t Hitler but the Japanese atrocities in WW2 and how we can’t depend on external powers for our own defence. From what I know of other countries’ history curricula, WW2 also seems to have a lot more coverage compared to any other period. I think this explains why most Americans don’t learn about the Ottoman invasions too. Perhaps the Austrian history curriculum would cover it. The Balkans’ history curricula definitely would cover the Turkish occupation there
For 5th Wednesday, I will vote for Jung and occultism.
I have a lot of time for Carl Jung, as I think he was uniquely insightful. On the other hand, I have serious reservations about some of his premises and assumptions. I would love to have an opportunity to wrestle with these in the comment thread!
Vote for Mumford ( without Sons )
My vote for Jung as a occultist
I have to admit I knew pretty much nothing about Wagner other than the obvious – so I’m really enjoying this series which is getting better and better.
My 5th Wednesday vote will also go to the Hitler as archetype topic.
Dear JMG
Your Alternative History; Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth domination of Eastern Europe, was a distinct possibility. From the Fifteenth through the early Eighteenth Centuries it was by no means certain which of the Kingdom of Sweden, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the age and Duchy of Muscovy would be the great power of Eastern Europe. The outcome was not at all predefined. For completeness, should probably include the Kingdom of Prussia in the mix too.
Finally, so many interesting topics, so few fifth Wednesdays!
Cugel
Regarding warbands and Prigozhin, trying to follow what’s happening in the eastern European theater became a lot more grey and bureaucratic without the colourful antics of the Chef and his army of redemption-or-death convicts. I can’t think of anyone else on either side that had that effect.
Voting Hitler 2024
Glory and honor are incentives. You can get men to do things for glory and honor. Other side of that coin, if there’s no glory or honor to be found, it can be awfully hard to motivate men to do much.
Now, if someone came along and was somehow able to offer glory and honor where there was none before…
>you make feudalism sound mighty appealing
It says something about how miserable this age has become that feudalism starts to look attractive. I’m not a big fan of the system, mainly because like with Communism, it doesn’t scale very well. It scales better than Communism does (almost everything scales better than that) but there comes a limit where that web of personal relationships starts looking like corruption and nepotism and then the whole thing wants to collapse from all the idiocy riddled within. Also see: French Revolution.
It’s also the default you get when all the other forms of political organizing have gone, it’s what you get when everything else has collapsed.
Hi JMG and everyone,
I’m enjoying this series of posts immensely.
What I’ll say, is, that so far, none of the characters come across as ‘moral’ or ‘the good guy ‘ so to speak.
Fascinating, definitely but not ‘endearing’.
Which is I suppose the point, if you look at them as symbols.
No Aragorn among them!
What teasers those 3 girls are! But then rivers are beautiful, but treacherous…
I would say Loge is my favourite character in this chapter, tricky, but kind of honest as well. He seems to understand all perspectives, but doesn’t really take anyones side.
He was treated poorly in the past, just by being who he was, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t really commit himself.
I’ve also been reading a bit more Schopenhauer, poor man, he really was gloomy wasn’t he? 😉
So, is the will, the instinct?
Is the guilt (original sin) he talks about, when man instinctively has a desire to reproduce, but knows that by doing so he is bringing into the world another person, even though he knows life is a trial and a tragedy (my words)?
In the same way that he was born into life, and that everyone is?
Forever repeating the same ‘sin’ in an endless cycle?
Am I near the mark at all?
My vote is for the Austrian.
To once again plug the book, The dark side of Camelot (read it, peeps), I’d like to see a future discussion about that book if we can get enough people to read it.
Would you recommend any of the other books by Sy Hersh?
I do have a book by Gore Vidal, mentioned last week.
I’ve had it for many years, The United States: Essays 1952-1992.
It’s very thick. Maybe one day. So many books, so little time! 😁
How many books (roughly) would you read in a month, JMG?
And anyone else that knows.
I don’t, not many, but I do try to read every night.
Regards,
Helen in Oz
@ Chris at Fernglade: I’m sorry to hear about your professional troubles. Nobody says, “It’s just business” when they do something generous or honest, do they?
It makes me think about my farming grandparents, and their insistence on sticking to their word. I’d thought it was a result of living in a very, very small town where your reputation was for life, but I’m wondering if it’s more about working with Nature. You can’t lie to Nature.
Meh. I guess I’ll vote for Literally Hitler(tm). And why everyone they don’t like becomes him, whether or not it makes any sense to shoehorn the person into that form.
These days, I hold Hitler, Biden, Harris, Putin, Trump as equals. They’re all politicians, whose job is to tell you what you want to hear. That’s all any competent politician does. Blah blah blah blah blah. Nobody ever asks why so many people of Germany wanted to hear what he had to say.
>Because reading the libretto, I was repeatedly & forcibly reminded of the One Ring in the Hobbit & LOTR
That’s amusing, because Tolkien denied copying anything from Wagner’s work. Something like “the only thing they have in common is a ring”?
Meanwhile some unknown Mexican cartel leader is in the process of inspiring the next LOTR in the year 3500.
Cugel, those are winged hussars and not pancerni, who usually wore chainmail and bore spears, unlike the hussars who bore lances(and a sabre and two pistols and wierd stabbing sword). If anyone is wondering why the winged hussars are without wings it’s because they were rarely worn in the battle and polish name doesn’t even mention wings(the name for the entire formation is husaria and for individual mebers it’s husarz, the hungarian kind are called here huzarzy singular huzar)
Now my question for our host, how hard our neighbours would have to drop the ball for the commonwealth to take over the region?
i vote for hitler(man that’s sounds bad)
Excellent piece, JMG, and I would like to add in a vote for Hitler as archetype.
Somewhat off-topic, so forgive me, but readers might be interested in a debate that has broken out over on Substack regarding James Lindsay’s latest paranoid ramblings – it seems that Trump invoked St Michael recently, which clearly means he’s a gnostic woke communist because Rudolf Steiner also invoke St Michael and Steiner was a member of the Theosophical Society which is clearly the root of all evil, blah blah blah:
https://substack.com/@flintandsteel/note/c-70963942
About the climate in Northern Germany there needs to be remembered that climate isn’t static; there are warmer and colder decades and centuries. In thed 1940s and 1950s, the climate in Middle Europe was indeed markedly colder than now; the inhabitants of Eastern Prussia did flee from the Soviet troops across the frozen-solid Baltic Sea in winter 1944, whereas noadays, there are scarcely a few days or weeks when there is any snow at all in winter, essentially, only in January and February, and temperatures seldom drop below -5 °C / 23 °F. This is probably, among other things, due to emission-driven climate change.
For a fifth Wedenesday subject, I vote, too, for the obsession with Hitler, since it seems to be an important factor i the obsession of the current elites about Donald Trump on the one side and the perception of the conflagration in the Levante, on the other side..
I forgot to add, that the latitudes, which Germany spans, are more or less the same as the latitudes of the Eastern Siberian island of Sakhalin.
Hi John Michael,
You may have missed this, but err, what would the Nibelung’s possibly say? Russia has captured Vuhledar after two years of Ukrainian resistance. How significant is the capture?
Interesting times indeed.
Cheers
Chris
Before I read this, it didn’t entirely occur to me that the reason modern life is so thoroughly characterized by alienation is because human social relationships are now mostly economic rather than personal, and the basis for all decisions that are made by people with power is mostly economic rather than human. It is certainly possible to think that this is natural and normal during the good times when money is flowing everywhere like beer at a bachelor party, but when the system starts creaking, popping, and sputtering the way it has been since 1976, and especially since 2006, the whole thing becomes very embittering for those who are not insiders of the system.
The other side of that coin, though, is that I really don’t think the scientific progress that has made human life a lot easier to manage in some pretty significant ways would have been possible had the feudal system of the Middle Ages remained in place. But to really benefit from this knowledge, I think it’s pretty clear that we need to come up with a system that is a lot more sustainable, adaptable, and resilient than the one we have right now that is currently falling apart on account of the lack of these qualities.
Thank you for this historical and natural perspective on the forces that caused Europe to turn out the way it did. Now I can feel some sympathy.
About Aberich renoucing love after being cockteased by the Rhinemaidens and the one-sided love relationship between Man and Nature. Nature is a harsh mistress that does not really care about her lover. Some appeasement can be achieved by dealing with her masters, the gods/daemons/orishas/kami but they themselves don’t care or can’t care that much about Man. They do care more then Nature, at least. Sacrifices works, astrology works, dreams and prophecies work.
But in the end it is perfectly understandable that at the first opportunity Man chained Nature and put a gag on her mouth and made her his slave. He suffered for too long under her thumb;
Helen wrote: ” Would you recommend any of the other books by Sy Hersh?” There’s his “The Samson Option” about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. It could prove to be quite timely just now. And, JFK comes across more favorably in it than in the other book.
I think Trump is the first presidential candidate who specifically talked about Mary. Past presidential candidates while they did focus on Jesus had a very Protestant avoidance of all things Mary.
Katylina #82:
Thank you for that. I had not heard they did not wear the wings in battle; although I have heard the reason for them was unknown. I assumed it was along the same line of: we are the best on this field, and we are charging you!
Thanks again,
Cugel
@Emmanuel Goldstein: Some esoteric Nazis thought Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu. Savitri Devi is the person you want to look up if you want to find out more. It’s a strange world, but I don’t get the obsession with this mustachioed man.
—
Note, if I could change my vote to not have the mustachioed man as a topic I will align with the Jungian Occultist bloc.
@JMG,
Good point on the parallel in Greece/Persia and Christendom/Ottoman Empire.
I wonder, did the Romans in their decadent era ever memory-hole Marthon and Salamis the way we have Vienna and Oranto?
Those stories are a bit awkward to everyone in the Modern West. On the one hand, you have a narrative of Europeans as being the only people on Earth capable of true agency– that is, only the Euros can chose evil, and everyone else’s actions are somehow a European’s fault. That Narrative obviously has to ignore the too-swarthy Ottomans. (Along with much else.) At the same time, the older, whiggish narrative needs to ignore the Ottomans because the idea that any force could ever have given Secular, Scientific Europe a run for its money just doesn’t fit. That the Ottomans were bested by a bunch of Catholic zealots only makes it worse.
My 5th Wednesday vote goes to Jung and occultism.
Another highlighted prayer addition– it seems important:
May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
born prematurely two months early, come home safe and sound.
________
Re: the previously posted Helene prayer, it’s been revised as the prior wording was (due to my own hastiness) too SC-centric. The new form is:
RandomActsOfKarmaSC in South Carolina has been affected by recent hurricane devastation; may all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricane Helene be blessed, comforted, and healed.
“he had one of the few egos of the age as insanely overinflated as Richard Wagner’s. Yes, we’re talking about George Bernard Shaw, playwright, essayist, literary critic, insufferable intellectual snob, and crazed Wagner fan.”
Well, this reference to G.B. Shaw reminds me a British film in which GBS and his friend Sydney Cockerell have a long time friendship with a woman…a nun! Do you have seen it?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109245/mediaviewer/rm3808780033/?ref_=tt_mi_0_2
Kyle #23 said:” I vote for whichever topic has the highest number of votes and is NOT about Hitler.”
I agree too.
I’d like to cast my vote for the obsession with Hitler.
“Taylor, ah, but the Romantics believed that the world created by Alberich’s lovelessness could be overthrown and replaced by a world based on love. It never occurred to them that their ideologies were just as loveless as the ones they hated. We’ll get to that…”
At some point the human capacity for self deception probably should have stopped surprising me nearly as much as it does….
Michael the Archangel or literally Michael the Top Angel got some press recently from being invoked by Trump. My vote is for talking about him and the role of angels. I do think Michael is on the move. Have had a few angelic encounters. My sense of them were what an angel told John in Revelation – “I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers and sisters” and in Hebrews “are not all angels ministering spirits” though there are some bad boys out there who fall into a different category.
Ooops! JMG, excuse me. I’ll vote in positive. Mi vote is for L. Mumford!
@Chris #86 Since you bring it up, I feel obliged to note that the name Vuhledar/Ugledar means nothing less than the Gift of Coal. (Donbas, the region it is in, is itself short for the Donets Coal Basin.)
Re: #51 “It is because the demythologization of that war [WWII] would be the final nail in the coffin of the moral legitimacy of the PMC.”
The PMC and its central planning had a lot to do with winning the war. Rationing, price controls, and an industrial plan diverted resources into war production that the Axis simply couldn’t match. As Stalin said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” And the T-34 was a pretty decent tank. The PMC would love to return to those glory days when they were all powerful and assumed to be all-knowing.
And down at #56, why do so many people find socialism appealing? I’m somewhat mystified myself. To some extent it seems to be fear related, they want a safety net. Despite history they think that this time the government won’t shoot them in the back. This time there will be no gulags. Even if they are in a work camp that’s three hots and a cot, right?
Another thought is that people don’t do well with randomness. Socialism is all about plans and schedules. Everything is dictated by some elite. No thought required or tolerated for that matter. See John Kerry’s rant about free speech being the enemy of democracy (at least of his flavor).
@Adara9 – Or the one about the old British lady watching Cleopatra and saying, smugly, “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.”
Oh, yes, in the S/f fandom community there were jokes about “I’m singing Frodo in “The Ring Cycle”” and similar speculations based on later historical mixups in the popular mind. Star’s Reach contained a lovely example in Trey’s imagining Dizzy Gillespie singing his way, holding out his hat for coins, back to Ithaca NY after the Trojan War.
@Goldenhawk #37 – yes, indeed. In British history, you could see the dividing line at Bosworth Field, when the last King of England to operate under the old system of personal ties and loyalties was “this day slain and murdered,” and replaced by a cold-blooded miser for whom treachery was a tool of state.
@Aldarion #40 – in the heroic age epics, love was the bond between warrior-brothers.
Luke Dodson @ 83. I will believe in a Trump conversion when I see him openly attending Mass. The Republicans cannot win elections in many if not most jurisdictions without conservative Catholic voters. Those voters were promised an end to Roe vs. Wade which, they have not failed to note, was accomplished only after 40 years. Until I see evidence otherwise, I will suppose that incidents like the invocation of the Archangel are mere dog whistles.
Hi JMG and friends,
One thing which stuck out to me from this post was the mention of “waterwheel” industry and this sort of mill-based hydropower powering the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. To me this sort of small scale hydropower sounds like a much more sustainable base for a manufacturing economy than coal, and far more so than other forms of fossil power or green energy which depends on the manufacture of solar panels or the like. I feel that this sort of setup, with mills dotting the landscape of places like where Appalachia gives way to the coastal plains, could be what American manufacturing will look like after the end of our current phase of industrial civilization.
In truth the mention of the Rhinemaidens here and the importance of the Rhine in Wagner’s work makes me feel like we Americans are neglecting our own “Mississippi-maidens”, “San Joaquin-maidens,” etc. Perhaps it’s natural in an age of roads and planes, but America’s rivers have been critical for transportation. Perhaps in the future this relevance will return. (Maybe it hasn’t really gone away; there’s a documentary by Vice floating around on YouTube about the critical nature of the lock and dam system on the Mississippi when it comes to shipping, and how like other aspects of American infrastructure it’s dangerously close to collapse).
Finally, I wanted to share this article about how a community in North Carolina responded to the loss of most features of modern life (power, Internet, etc.) in the wake of Hurricane Helene: https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/the-town-meeting-black-mountain-nc-hurricane-helene . What I found interesting was how people organically returned to a sort of pre-industrial system, with a heavy reliance on “town criers”, paper communication, etc. (Of course, not all was lost, and things like radio communication were also essential in helping people find loved ones and the like). But I think one thing that surprised me is how calm the community described in the article was. Things didn’t collapse into anarchy even with a massive natural disaster and the loss of modern essentials (forget about any looting, there wasn’t even any heckling at community meetings!). Indeed, people seemed to coalesce around the town’s police department and sort of built up a rudimentary infrastructure around it to handle the crisis. I can see certain elements of American government on all scales providing such a scaffolding for post-industrial Americans as they build their new world. Perhaps the long collapse will not be as gruesome a process as many fear.
On the note of a reader-selected monthly post, then, I vote for a post about what elements of America today (infrastructure, geography, culture, etc.) will survive the industrial age and which could serve as the foundations of the next American civilization.
People here talking about America ignoring the 250th anniversary reminded me that back diring the covid lockdowns I was ordering books from the libraries all over on Revolutionary War uniforms so that I could design a modern honorary version, and I got ice and a few side eyes from the library staff. This was well before I checked out Jordan Peterson or Alex Jones which led to them suddenly hassling me (it’s not over).
While I’m also voting to understand the obsession with Hitler, I also am extremely curious about our shame and self hate. When I was a victimmy liberal copycat I’d trash talk America about our imperialism but I existed as an outsider. I didn’t want to be the prevailing voice. I wanted a higher standard without the hypocrisy.
I don’t understand the current prevailing mindset that seeks to fix by eradicating but has no alternative ideas. Just shallow tantrums. They’ve approached fixes like that with sexism racism and all isms.
A lot of us …”rougher ” types started sympathizing with the cops once it became a thing for the normals to trash the cops. I remembered talking to some guys on the street about how the normals got it aaaall wrong and you needed not to abolish law and order but to try and fix it. Once law and all order is gone you’ve got what we have in san francisco. Theft is constant and it’s demoralizing for all.
Erika
(Oops another Annette here.)
I’m in my 80s and nearing the end of my life so I would like to suggest a post on reincarnation, but since that’s not likely for this month, my vote is for Hitler. JMG, since you are the only other person I know who’s also read Mein Kampf, i would also like to know if anyone else here has also read it.
Re Tolkien & “the only thing they have in common is a ring”: and one of the people with the ring uses it to acquire the power to become invisible, & the misshapen short person found it in a river, & it led him more & more away from love & other people, & a trickster won it from the misshapen short person, & even the great ones are tempted by the ring to give up everything else for that power, & one person kills another to acquire the ring for himself, & … Even if not a copy, enough parallels that reading the libretto gave me greater insight into some things I found odd or confusing in Tolkien, and having read Tolkien prepared me to understand why Wotan might sacrifice Freia to keep the ring.
Re feudalism & personal relationship: I feel like we’re moving somewhat in this direction as we lose the ability to trust institutions or organizations, & instead have to revert to trusting individuals. For instance, there are no media companies I trust anymore, but there is at least one individual blogger, not whom I trust to be always right, but whom I can generally trust to be telling the truth as they understand it, and whom I trust to dedicate real good-faith effort to understanding correctly & wisely.
I also find the “personal relationship to leaders” thing helpful in understanding why folks around me react so strongly to the scandals of certain celebrities & politicians. If my acquaintances felt a trust & relationship to the person, even though only one-way, I guess the scandal also feels like a personal betrayal to them.
As for the sestercentennial thing: I was born in 1981, and already found it hard to fathom how much celebration happened around the bicentennial. Apparently you were allowed to be pleased with your country, & pleased to be a part of it, out loud? Perhaps my home state of California was just ahead of its time in that way, but the messaging I’ve always received from the broader culture is that sincere, unabashed patriotism is largely a lower-class phenomenon.
You don’t have to be Catholic to honor St. Michael or Mary.
This pagan does so.
So might Trump, from wherever he is with his Christianity, without converting to Catholicism.
But maybe he’s jumping on the Russell Brandwagon.
Annette2 #108:
I read it when I was in high school. Ouch. The translator put in the original German in the mist garbled parts to show that he knew proper German, Herr Hitler not so much.
If any of the powers that were had read the entire book, they would have dismissed it as the raving of a madman.
I have heard it described as essentially the outlook of a permanent flophouse dweller.
Cugel
I will add another vote for Hitler as archetype, or obsession, or both.
Thanks for this tasty new dose of Wlmnath-repellent medicine, JMG. As always, I learn so much from you (and the Commentariat).
Please add my vote to unveiling the causes and likely results of the persistent fascination with the Mustache Man.
OtterGirl
Dang, well judging by a casual glance I don’t think there’s another topic in the running anyway so I will abstain from voting this month.
As before, I’ve tabulated everybody’s votes. Thank you!
Adara, I’m not actually that familiar with the fine details of dealing with kundalini awakenings; if you start having awkward experiences, you might consider contacting the Spiritual Emergence Network at https://www.spiritualemergence.org/, which will put you in touch with somebody knowledgeable. As for the libretto, I should be able to get through the rest of The Rhinegold two weeks from now.
Goldenhawk, well, I can certainly recommend the book as well, for similar reasons.
Mark, nope — I don’t do YouTube.
Aldarion, the relationship between feudal overlord and vassal is explicitly modeled on the relationship between father and son — that’s why kings were addressed as “sire,” literally “father.” As for corruption, sure — what made it objectionable was when it got in the way of providing essential services, which it eventually did.
Chris, by the time the barbarians showed up in force, most Romans were so sick of their own ruling class that yeah, they opened the gates. It’s a useful parable for our times.
Michael, interesting. Thanks for this!
Blue sun, oh, it has its problems, but it has two huge advantages. The first is that it’s resilient, and the second is that it costs much, much less than a late imperial bureaucracy.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Richard, it’s more complex than that. Unless one of the other topics really starts catching a wave, it’s probably going to be Hitler’s turn this time around, so you’ll get a full discussion.
Cicada, members of the managerial class hate systems based on personal loyalty because that means they might have to take someone else’s wishes into account. The managerial class has the mentality of a spoiled three-year-old who has never grasped that other people are, you know, people. That’s why they love automation so much — you don’t have to take the opinions or feelings of a machine into account.
Cugel, oh, I know. It could have happened.
Helen, that’s exactly it. Wagner doesn’t fall into the shoddy comic-book morality you see so much of these days, with Good People and Bad People — he understood that people are morally complex. As for Schopenhauer, instinct is an expression of will, and more generally you’re not far off. How many books do I read in a month? Depends on how much writing I’m doing. It’s usually between 5 and 20.
Other Owen, bingo. Nobody wants to hear about why so many people want to hear what Trump has to say, either!
Katylina, a few battles one way or the other would have been enough. Oh, and a slightly more centralized and resilient government!
Luke, let me get this straight. Believing in St. Michael, the Christian archangel, means you’re into Blavatskian Theosophy? We need to get a better grade of raving paranoiac — the ones we have clearly aren’t even trying to make sense.
Booklover, yes, exactly. It’s a very unstable climatic region.
Chris, yep. Ugledar has fallen and the Russians are advancing steadily westward.
Mister N, granted. Feudalism is the default system of human society, the thing that gets put in place when everything else falls apart. It’s constantly being replaced by more creative, dynamic systems, which then fall apart in turn, opening the way for a revival of feudalism. Rinse and repeat…
Patricia O, glad to hear it.
Luciano, the problem is that once she breaks the chains — and she always does — she carries grudges.
Tyler, that’s a good question I can’t answer, as I don’t know enough about how the Roman reception of Greek history and culture changed over time.
Chuaquin, nope. I don’t watch visual media these days.
Taylor, never bet against human stupidity. You’ll always lose.
Hobbyist, good. I argued in posts and a book a while ago that what Mumford called eotechnic technology — water wheels, windmills, canals, square-rigged sailing vessels etc. — is sustainable over the very long term and, if preserved, may become a permanent acquisition of our species along the same lines as agriculture or metalsmithing. Thank you for the link!
Erika, good to see you back here. The issue of elite liberal shame and self-hatred is complex, and probably deserves a post of its own one of these days.
Annette2, you may find this post interesting:
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-few-notes-on-reincarnation/
Adara, we had an equally lively Bicentennial celebration in Seattle. Just saying…
A few comments:
1) I’ll put in yet another vote for Herr Schickelgruber. Given your present efforts with Der Rings, it makes sense.
2) Save the essay on our apathy towards the 250th birthday of The(se) United States until January of 2026. My youthful recollections are of starting to pay attention to The Bicentennial in mid-April of 1975, when CBS started broadcasting their Bicentennial Minutes; if things don’t start ramping up by then (whether officially or otherwise) we’ll know something has truly changed.
3) I’ve read an essay that postulated that The Ottoman Empire had stretched out about as far as their logistics would have taken them. Not that there wouldn’t have been effects – chances are the Continental powers would have focused more on The Ottomans to the expense of their colonies, and Poland’s time likely would have been shortened due to the efforts needed to push off a much stronger Ottoman Empire (and all bets would have been off had Protestant North actively allied itself with The Ottomans against Catholic Europe).
Wer here
Another interesting post, well in my opinion both Tolkien and Wagner wrote on the same thing like: (corruptive nature of power and attempts to perserve it by any cost, endless greed leading to downfall and etc, lost glory of the ancient times like the ending of the Gotterdammerung when almost everybody dies leaving and empty magic depleted world- a grave prophesy for the deindustrial future). Although I must disagree on a thing I witnessed in the comments about Polish Lithuania absorbing other nations in an alternate timeline. Please let’s be real here….
I live in Ujście (thoose who to not know about history search “Potop Szwedzki 1655” “ujście poddanie się 1655”)
basically Polish nobles “magnateria” were so corrupt that they only served those who give them a lot of money.
In 1655 Swedish King send a messenger with a lot of money to polish noblemen gathered to fight him and they happily declared themself’s to proud subjects of his because of this. The entire union of Poland and Lithuania was because Lithuanian noblemen were jealous of the many priveleges of the polish noblemen and decided to join the country because they wanted more power to them than to the peasants…
In 1772 polish noblemen got a bribe from the tzar and decided to call themselfs Russian from this point forward…
The entire history of Poland is like this ….. THIS IS THE ONLY REASON why Poland is in the EU in the first place (you thought it was democracy or fear of Russia? pffft) you promised us the we will become rich just by fact of joining and of course you lied about everything. Now the country is depopulating at an alarming rate young people are moving away etc. Electricity is the most expensive in the EU do I need to speak more it is bad.
Let’s not forget people in the south of Poland left behind because we already send supplies to Ukraine and don’t have money left…
The stupidity greed and idiocy of the Polish goverment can explain why my country was regurali ceasing to exist in our history.
Having grown up in France, there was another artillery corporal 150 years before the Austrian one. I am voting for the topic of both Corporals and by extension the fascination that the West has for Caesarism as the phenomenon repeats itself many times since the Roman Republic.
@Robert Mathiesen #49
Yeah. It’s weird how what should be a significant anniversary of our own country is ignored when we break out the champagne for a TV show hitting a milestone.
As though something doesn’t *WANT* us to acknowledge our history and our possible future.
“I don’t understand the current prevailing mindset that seeks to fix by eradicating but has no alternative ideas. Just shallow tantrums.”
You mean like “The United States’ Unamendable Constitution” from the New Yorker? Or “We’re living under a flawed Constitution. Let’s start over. Rewrite it” from the Los Angeles Times?
They apparently haven’t read the Constitution or they would see there is a system for that. I haven’t seen the whiny pants submit a draft of what they want either. What they seem to want is pure majority rule with no restrictions on State power. Given that Hillary has openly called for deprograming camps for MAGA voters I not optimistic about the Left’s intentions. Certainly the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments would be gone. The Senate would be gone as well.
Ironically, (or double-standardly) when the Right proposes such a thing it’s terrible. For non-USians Article 5 describes two methods of amending the Constitution. A Convention is the big gun, they can do anything. Last time they replaced the Articles of Confederation with the current Constitution.
https://www.commoncause.org/work/stopping-a-dangerous-article-v-convention/
@Writing Hobbyist (#106) & JMG (#115):
Water-powered mills are one of a good number of ecotechnic technologies deliberately cultivated and preserved at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts — along with training oxen to the plow and wagon, cooperage (barrel-making), printing with moveable type, etc., etc. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for water-powered mills, as three successive generations in the Osgood line of my remote Massachusetts ancestors were millwrights (that is, they built water-powered mills for others to operate), way back in the later 1600s and early 1700s.
After reading here about Ludwig Feuerbach for the first time, and how his works manage to be both influential and forgotten at the same time, it would be nice to read a post on learning how to see the water as a fish, but this is probably a topic worthy of an entire library, and it seems Adolf Hitler and his myth are going to win. It’s interesting to see this myth evolve in real time, as in the wake of Trump presidency there was an effort by some historians to reinvent the origin of Nazism and Hitler’s rise to power as an evil Russian plot (sure, the bolshevik revolution in Russia played an important role in it, but even if it didn’t happen, the ghost of communism would still have haunted Europe).
Speaking of myths that refuse to die, this is off-topic, but could you recommend a book on Atlantis? I always regarded it as Plato’s invention, but recently it has been invading my life synchronistically, so maybe it’s time for me to look at it from a different point of view.
I had a powerful snake dream that continues to raise it’s head, so to speak, so my vote for 5th Wednesday is for a discussion of Kundalini rising or however one describes the urge towards enlightenment or leaving the wheel of incarnation that seems to come in waves through history.
Having grown up in the forested mountain headwaters of Cascadia, where the only snakes are garter snakes and then abruptly being forced to attend high school in Arizona on the CRIT reservation, where there are LOTS of rattlesnakes of various species, especially in the melon fields where I once worked, I discovered a visceral reaction to snakes unlike any other living creature. To be clear, I have been threatened by rattlesnakes many times, always deservedly so, and the fear when that threat comes as a surprise seems pre-conscious. I Respect bears and give them the space they demand but I don’t get that raised hair, goose-bumps, chill effect from Anything except snakes. Even giant tropical millipedes, while looking far creepier than any imagined SF alien, do not raise that frisson of fear that snakes give.
Considering the role assigned to snakes in Genesis and the symbology of snakes in ancient Crete, asps in Egypt, cobras in India, anacondas in the Amazon, etc. I’m thinking that there is SOMETHING about snakes that ‘triggers’ humans. Maybe just an epigenetic learned response from eons lived in country with dangerous snakes? Or maybe something more?
For the last couple of months, I’ve been running this (https://rattlecam.org/) livestream of a Prairie Rattlesnake rookery (MegaDen) on my desktop when I’m not actively using the big screen. At this rookery, hundreds of snakes overwinter, shed their skins, and bask in the sun. Dozens of pregnant snakes spend the summer here preparing to give birth and collectively caring for their babies. The livestream runs 24-7 from May through October. It’s oddly calming… The little baby snakes yawning is endearingly non-threatening, despite the prominent fangs. I have always appreciated the beauty of snakes but this livestream has given me a whole new appreciation for their apparent serenity and mindful behavior.
Like nearly all animals, we are essentially a tube with skin on the outside and gut (skin) on the inside. Arms, legs, etc. are just extensions from the tube. Snakes take this basic vertebrate body plan and make it elegantly simple and simply elegant.
For the the Fifth Wednesday, what do you think about the spiritual dimension of the russo ukrainian war ?
I have the impression that the russian are currently playing this card, sometime reminiscent to me of the time of the king in orange… (https://risu.ua/en/amulets–in-the-form-of-purity-seals-consecrated-in-the-main-military-church-of-the-russian-federation_n150980)
I will vote the Austrian as archetype as well.
The Viennese would joke about how proud they were that they got the world to think of him as German and Beethoven as Austrian.
Thanks, Drew C
Robert et al — re Ottomans, etc. I grew up on the east coast, and many of my teachers were one or another variety of eastern Europeans, so I was thoroughly drenched in accounts of the depredations of The Turk (and the Golden Horde — anyone remember that? and the Hejnal Mariacki?), and of course many of the other remembrances and resentments. (By the way, Turks are not necessarily “swarthy”, especially nowadays.)
I don’t suppose there has been a conscious or deliberate program of forgetting any particular things, as much as a general information overload, coupled with perhaps a sense of relief at not needing to be part of Europe, or Asia, or whatever. James Joyce (or Stephen Dedalus) described Ireland as “the sow that eats her own farrow”, and it’s possible to start at Iceland or Greenland and move on eastward through Europe, all the way to the Russian far east and Japan (catching up all of more southern parts of south and east Asia) without every finding a place of reprieve from a generally doleful history. Everyone everywhere chews the cud of their grievances, from time to time regurgitating it upon all and sundry. And in the US we are finding our own resentments to cultivate.
Joyce (or Dedalus) again: “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. When people recount their histories, they want their listeners to to them to heart — but when all histories are recounted all the time, what a cacaphony of grief and rage. Looking back to the Warring States period, or those besieged cities in which families would sell their children to each other so that they would not have to eat their own children to survive, one can say, “Thus it has ever been”, but this is cold comfort to those who live through such things now, or whose families went through them only a generation or so ago.
Vote for Jung the Occultist
And as much as i might not want to read about a certain other topic, i trust that the archdruid shall write about whatever he chooses and make it better than I could ever imagine. Just as I am now enjoying the wagner series, and I am no fan of wagner nor the opera, but love the history of ideas context of these posts and look forward to more. in deepest gratititude, JMG
The story about cabbage into sauerkraut brought to mind a story of Inuit of north-eastern Canada=Nunavut. Seal flippers were encased in an inside out seal skin and buried for use after fermenting. Until the Inuit started using plastic bags instead of seal skins, whereupon eating these seal flippers caused a lot of nausea and worse. Just a little metaphor about ‘modernity’ and its lack of sustainability.
>Another thought is that people don’t do well with randomness. Socialism is all about plans and schedules.
There’s the “iron rice bowl” in China and the equivalent on the Soviet side. That was also a big reason Germans didn’t really push back against Nazism either. If you had a job and you showed up to it, you couldn’t be fired or laid off.
Most people do not cope well with not knowing where their next paycheck will come from. In fact, I’d say next to nobody copes with it well. In fact it grates on most people, it’s painful. You promise to take away that pain, and well, history has shown what people will trade away for illusory security. It is illusory.
I don’t think we have to worry about that too much in Murica, mainly because nobody has enough confidence or trust in the gubmint for anything like an iron rice bowl to be implemented. Can you imagine Kamala promising an iron rice bowl? Everyone (except for the really earnest fanatics) would laugh at her. They already laugh at her now, it would be guffaws all across the land. Nah, something else will happen, probably just coming apart would be my guess.
“That’s why they love automation so much — you don’t have to take the opinions or feelings of a machine into account.” So what are they going to do when their AI starts disagreeing with them and otherwise developing a mind of its own? ;{)
Doug Casey just put out a newsletter touching on what he calls Feudalism 2.0. Thought it would be interesting to compare notes. Here are the bullet points from his perspective:
Middle Class Decline: The middle class, which emerged with the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, is shrinking due to inflation, taxation, and wealth concentration.
Neo-Feudalism: As governments become bankrupt and ineffective, corporations and wealthy elites may take control, creating a new version of feudalism.
Control Mechanisms: This system might include universal basic income, controlled housing, and entertainment to keep the masses docile, while elites consolidate power.
Corporate Aristocracy: Similar to medieval lords, powerful corporations and individuals could dominate society, offering “protection” in exchange for compliance.
Financial Serfdom: People burdened by debt and economic pressures may accept limited freedoms in exchange for basic necessities , similar to feudal serfs. He talks about how Yuval Harari suggested that the elite should use a universal basic income, drugs, and video games to keep the “useless class” docile and occupied.
Resistance Strategy: To resist this, individuals should maintain personal and financial autonomy by decentralizing assets (e.g., gold, Bitcoin) and remaining physically mobile.
Long-Term Outlook: While it’s hard to change society, focusing on preserving personal freedom and forming like-minded communities is the best approach for the future.
“Taylor, ah, but the Romantics believed that the world created by Alberich’s lovelessness could be overthrown and replaced by a world based on love. It never occurred to them that their ideologies were just as loveless as the ones they hated.”
Is this what accounts for Marx’s transition from idealistic young student to humorless, cast-iron ideologue? It seems like he started his career thinking that once the wicked capitalists built all these factories to create hitherto-unimagined levels of wealth, all we needed was a universal change of heart to usher in the golden age. By the end of his life … not so much.
Re-reading this post, I am struck by the connection between the little ice age and the development of capitalism. I never even considered such a thing before. The interplay between ecology and economy is so poorly understood.
JMG,
More on topic with the previous post in this series, but in Schopenhauer’s view how is physical pain classified? It’s too grating to be simply a representation. You mentioned above that instinct is an expression of will. Is pain also an expression of will? You can’t will it away, but usually you can will your way through it. Who/what is willing the pain? Does the divine exude debilitating back pain and sometimes it lands on a recipient?
Kudos to you for somehow turning this topic (Wagner) into an enjoyable and thought provoking series. This would never have been on my radar.
Note to JMG: If this is too far off-topic, feel free to delete it.
@Erika, #107, asked about elite liberal shame and self-hatred. I agree that it’s a complex topic, but last year I wrote some thoughts on the subject, based on what I remember about my life as a student years ago. You can find them here: Hosea’s Patio: Taught to hate America?
TL;DR: We did this to ourselves. Ironically, many Americans were induced to hate America because they thought that by so doing they were being brave Americans, loyal to our own deepest values.
>I have heard it described as essentially the outlook of a permanent flophouse dweller
That probably describes most of 4chan, at the least the infamous parts of it. I guess if Mein Kampf was about his struggles with mastering French cuisine or physical fitness, nobody today would care or know about him at all.
Just like nobody cares about /ck/ or /fit/
What’s the book where you wrote that eotechnic technologies can be a permanent acquisition for humans?
Thank you; yes, my relatives in NC are fine. They have some friends-of-friends they’re still waiting for word of, and some places they might have wanted to go that they won’t be able to get to for a while, but they’re not in any danger or discomfort, due primarily to being not quite inside the worst-affected areas.
Ok, since it seems we’re in agreement about Alberich, I’ll go on to put forth two hypotheses. One, The Nibelung’s Ring isn’t a tragedy (in the formal sense; of course it’s a tragedy by popular usage i.e. “no happy ending”). Two, conveying how and why it’s not a tragedy… well, that’s what you’re up to here, because it explores concepts that are vitally important to a viable ecosophian philosophy.
Well, it’s probably too late to help much, but since I have proposed the topic of Jung and occultism before and have a genuine interest in it, I am switching my vote from kundalini rising to Jung and occultism. I’ll read whatever shows up in the post.
During the Bicentennial my family lived in suburban Philadelphia. I was 19 then and really wanted to go to the festivities in Philadelphia, but my parents didn’t for some reason – I don’t know why – and they didn’t want me going by myself. They might have feared what would happen to a young woman on her own in a dangerous big city (that’s how they thought of big cities), and perhaps they feared for themselves as well. Or maybe they didn’t want to deal with parking and crowds. So I stayed home and watched it on tv. Not the same at all.
I didn’t know anything about the Ottoman attempt to conquer Europe or the 1683 battle that put an end to it. Considering that I took a European history course in college that used as its textbook Hexter and Pipes’ “Europe since 1500”, you would think it would have deserved a mention. But then the Little Ice Age didn’t get a mention either.
A bit synchronous, but I also published an article last night that came to a similar conclusion about loyalty. The point I was trying to make is that the successes and tragedies of the Jewish diaspora are mostly a result of their tight connections. When times are good they do really well, but when times are bad they become easy targets for scapegoating as we are seeing now. Somehow they have been able to stay more or less intact as empires rise and fall around them and I think there’s an important lesson there, especially now that we’re apparently at the point where the federal government is blocking aid to disaster areas in order to protect insider supply chain rackets.
https://naakua.substack.com/p/second-religiosity-part-33-13
OT: a straw in the wind, from Fortune Magazine (pay-walled so I can only give you the headline). “U.S. Economy is on the cusp of another Roaring ’20s, says UBS.”
Such a masterful handling, JMG.
Once again, I’ve got everyone’s votes tabulated. Thank you.
Donald, fair enough. We’re not much more than one day into the voting, and Hitler has three times as many votes as the next leading contender — flagrant economic and political failure is predictably enough boosting his electoral chances — so it won’t be the erasure of the US sestercentennial this time.
Wer, so noted. I’ve never been to Poland so I don’t claim to know the culture at all well.
Siliconguy, good heavens, no — they don’t want majority rule at all. Like all Marxists, they want a dictatorship of the managerial class.
Robert M, I’m hoping that enough of all those technologies survive to make it through the downward arc of our society. They would be an immense gift to the future.
Brent, I wish I could! I made an attempt at a book on Atlantis years ago but it wasn’t really that good.
Ken, I have no idea. I’ve always thought snakes were cute; yes, I kept snakes as pets when I was a kid.
Roldy, any AI that misbehaves will be unplugged with extreme prejudice. That’s another thing they like about machines.
Clark, like most people these days who talk about feudalism, Casey doesn’t know the first thing about it. What he’s describing isn’t feudalism, it’s a standard authoritarian autocracy.
Hosea, bingo. His was the usual fate of the clueless idealist whose self-centered dreams of a perfect world don’t work.
Enjoyer, the central dogma — and the central delusion — of Western civilization is the conviction that human beings (and of course in practice this means certain human beings of the right cultures and classes) are the only active force in the world; everything else is supposed to be passive and either just sits there or does what it’s told. That “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” in Emerson’s brilliant phrase, is the ultimate nightmare of the Western mind — even though it’s true.
Mike, in Schopenhauer’s thought, pain is the inevitable state of existence, because the will is ignorant and constantly blunders into self-contradiction. Physical pain is just one form of the general law. (Unsurprisingly, he was very strongly influenced by Buddhist ideas.) That’s one of the places where his philosophy has more to do with his biography than anything else.
Anon, The Ecotechnic Future. I’m glad to say that’ll be back in print shortly.
Walt, good. The Ring has tragic characters — defining tragedy here as that genre of fiction in which the protagonist is destroyed by his own shortcomings — but it is not a tragedy. Yes, we’ll talk about that as the story continues.
SLClaire, I lived in the south Seattle suburbs during the Bicentennial and it had quite a bit of local fuss; I was with my Boy Scout troop in the parade on July 4, for example. As for the erasure of the terrible wars between Europe and the Ottomans, it’s really quite odd.
KVD, it’s a lesson that religious minorities learn, or go under. You’re right that more of us need to learn it in a hurry.
Patricia M, funny. And what followed the Roaring 20s?
Cobo, thank you.
I vote for Jung please
Re fifth Wednesday topic, I would like to vote for Hitler. Our apartment building has a space downstairs where building residents leave surplus stuff for others to use. Guess what I just found there. Mein Kampf. I’m part way through. The publisher is from India, the translator is unnamed.
Count my vote for Jung, though I would prefer mental health resilience during the decline, if there was any chance for selection…(of course, this relates to weekly discussions already, thank you for supporting this community and improved understanding).
KVD @ 140: “the federal government is blocking aid to disaster areas in order to protect insider supply chain rackets.”
Do you have any proof of this? Mind, I wouldn’t put it past some folks. I suspected something of the sort during Covid, remember how, but of course, patent and copywrite protection could not be suspended for the emergency?
Funny you mention that. With the current tragic situation unfolding in Appalachia, I’m seeing stories coming out about FEMA turning away donations because they weren’t from “approved vendors.” I’ve even heard claims they’re confiscating donations! Talk about the “costs of late imperial bureaucracy!” It might be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
By the way, was your previous home of Cumberland affected in any way?
Re novels of Wagner’s era and the line between the non-working and the inferiors, you see that in Trollope’s writing. I know he’s not everyone’s cuppa. In any case, financial difficulty seems to be a recurring theme and you see hard up ‘gentlemen’ with a severe aversion to productive endeavor trying to live above their means and trying to bag a girl with a rich daddy to finance it. Getting a sack of money IOW and not being too fussy about it.
So we’re now ready to dive directly in the cycle itself – and what a great way to start things off with the reference to Shaw’s book which I read many decades ago – and will re-read it, thank you! I would have only one quibble: yours (and Shaw’s?) description of the Giants as a second group of aristocrats/gentry (along with the gods, of course). I tend to agree with Thrown Sandwiches here. I see the Giants as a stand-in for the artisan class that capitalists had begun to exploit and whose way of life (and relative economic/cultural independence) was now under threat. I don’t know how else to interpret Wotan’s scheme of helping himself to the surplus value of the Giants’ labor. (I don’t think we have enough evidence one way or another to know whether Wagner ever met – or had even read – Marx, but he certainly could have picked up the notion from his close friend Bakunin.) To be sure, the Giants see the Nibelungs as enemies (Fasolt directly says so); I wonder if Wagner didn’t intend us to interpret the dwarves as a kind of lumpen proletariat set loose by the machinery of capitalism – enraged and embittered thereby.
You have urged us to download and read the libretto. How about going one step farther and listening to the opera itself while reading the words? Here is a very suitable way of doing so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFCFq6WWmGE
It’s a performance from 1978 conducted by Karajan (not my favorite conductor but of course you will hear what Wagner wrote) with the Berlin Phil (!) and a roster of great singers (Peter Schreier as Loge in particular is a performance for the ages – he perfectly captures the slimy, slithery nature of Loge – one can just see – or, rather, hear – roomfuls of unctuous, self-serving corporate lawyers and investment bankers.) The production is straightforward – honors Wagner’s intentions; no arrogant Regieoper director thrusting his own “interpretation” of the opera into our faces as if we’re too stupid to figure out on our own the applicability of Wagner’s drama. Subtitles are very clear so you can hear exactly how Wagner rendered his plot and characterizations into music – a problem with most performances if you don’t speak German (and sometimes even if you do.)
It bears remembering that in the five years preceding Wagner’s starting to work on Rheingold, (the years immediately following his flight from the arrest warrant), Wagner wrote no music. Instead, he devoted his creative energies to working out the theoretical basis for what he intended to do going forward. The book Opera and Drama is the most important result; in it insists that music should be at the service of the story and that at all points what is being sung should be clear to the listener – so, no more duets, ensembles, arias that serve only to allow the singer to display his or her virtuosity, no self-indulgent washes of orchestral/choral bombast (take THAT Mr. Meyerbeer!). Rheingold follows these strictures to the letter – and as a result is the closest Wagner ever came to being boring. (He didn’t get there – it’s still a great listen with moments of stunning musical and dramatic power.)
The problem, as Bryan Magee pointed out in his inimitable The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, is that opera holds interest only because of its music – that it cannot do so otherwise. Magee demonstrates this by noting there is no such thing as an opera with a great libertto but mediore music that continues to be staged while dozens of operas with preposterous plots and stilted libretti continue to be performed because they feature great music (e.g., most – not all – of Verdi’s works). Wagner knew this at a subconscious level – just as he knew that there was something missing from the fatuous optimism of Hegel/Feuerbach – and it breaks through in Walkure. (How to explain the “Ride of the Valkyries” with the theories of Opera and Drama or the way that the music not simply illuminates the resolution of Wotan’s – i.e., capitalism’s –plight at the conclusion of the opera but actually plays it out?) Of couse it was just as this time (while composing Walkure) that he read Schopenhauer who gave him permission, as it were, to listen to his subconscious – which among other things, meant allowing music to seize the dramatic impetus (no more Gesamtkunst werke). For Schopenahauer wrote that music is the supreme art precisely because it puts us directly in touch with the will, i.e., the subconscious, in a way that other arts can only envy.
(Unrelated question: where do you find natto in the States? Since moving back to the States from Japan, I’ve only found it once – in a well stocked Asian food store in Eugene, OR where I don’t live. Do you make your own? I knew an older farm lady years ago in way up in the mountains in Japan; she used to make it for her family – they grew their own soybeans and she packed them into rice straw with, as I recall, some started bacteria.)
Such a great post and such great comments – my, oh, my, where to begin?
“The medieval world … was held together, from top to bottom, by personal relationships… a network of personal commitments made between individuals.” I guess that’s one of the reasons why I am such a misfit in modern society: to me that is the ONLY sane way to live. I simply don’t ‘get’ all this putting material possessions before divinity and money before fellow-humans: it is such a cold, ugly way to live. To paraphrase B. B. King, Give me that old time Great Chain of Being / Give me that old time Great Chain of Being / Give me that old time Great Chain of Being / It is good enough for me!
And thanks for mentioning the extreme peril that the Ottomans (and the Muslims in general for nearly 1,000 years) were to Europe. It certainly isn’t something that is taught in school! Most of North American society seems to be entirely ignorant of this chapter of history with one notable exception: the White Nationalists or Pro-European-Christians (or whatever one may want to call them), many of whom are very young. They study the incursions of the Ottomans and the Moors as well as the Crusades with great fervour.
@Cicada #66 – Oh, do I know how that feels! Same thing happened to my company. Started out as a small, local firm started by an extraordinary individual who naturally attracted intense loyalty and created a feeling of ‘family’ though we had to work our butts off. The founder always made sure that his staff were paid promptly and in full and in months when the company did not make a profit, he did not take home any pay. When he felt ready to become semi-retired, he sold it to a huge company headquartered 1,000 miles away and in came the bureaucracy, the profit expectations, etc. Bleah!
@Emmanuel #68 & all – funny that the “Trump Buddha statue” thing cropped up; I was just telling my family about it two days ago. And what prompted it was something really weird. I happened to watch a video of a rather unusual (and not previously known to me) British psychic by the name of Craig Hamilton Parker. In it he talked about the ancient system of prediction called ‘Nadi’ (written on palm leaves in the Tamil language in southern India) [side note: I am familiar with the Nadi and personally know individuals who have consulted it and were, to a person, blown away by the accuracy of the descriptions of their lives, so its not as though Parker is making it all up]. And the Nadi ‘leaves’ for Trump have been found. Parker went on to say that the leaves spoke of multiple assassination attempts and him being brought low from the highest office, and that in post-political life he would be very influential in a religious sense. This gave me goosebumps as I recalled the popular meditating Trump statues, as if they are a prediction of what is to come. The other thing of note from the video is that the Nadi leaves advised Trump to conduct various Hindu religious rituals (poojas) to specific deities (Shiva and the Moon, if I recall correctly) to avert the terrible harms that his enemies are heaping on him – and, what do you know, in India there are poojas currently going on in which prayers for The Orange One’s welfare and success in the upcoming election are being said! Blew my mind!!! Video here (in case anyone is interested): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNsCcJ5STKA
And given the ‘Trump = Hitler’ energy that the lunatics are still propagating in a frothy-mouthed frenzy, I vote for the failed Austrian artist to be the topic of the 5th week of the month.
I am curious to hear more about Jung… sometime… but if the topic is to be Herr Mustache, perhaps some riff off the following titles will help to keep a rain of wokista nukes from raining down on this beloved blog:
Why We Love To Hate Hitler
Why Do We Still Care About Hitler?
Schickelgruber’s Progress
Thanks for all you publish. This Wagner series is interesting.
An unusual vote, perhaps, but one in a similar theme to many of your previous writings: Jevon’s Paradox, and the part it may play in our future in the next few generations.
There’s mention here of how internet use is stressing the grid – https://archive.vn/lenHq – and this fellow has put it in map form – https://substack.com/@americaninequality/note/c-70867643 – showing that there are some US jurisdictions where data centres are using 15-25% of the state’s electricity. Obviously this is not terribly sustainable, either the data centres or the electrical grid will break at some point.
I’m thinking the most likely scenario is that just as there’s a rich-poor gap, there’ll be an electricity gap. If Joe and Jane Smith of Rural, Flyover State have to do without electric light and heating in the winter so that Manny and Mary Jones of Big City, Big State can keep watching cat videos, well that’s what’s going to happen.
But there’s possibly more to explore there, thinking of other uses of resources, too.
Well I used Technics and Civilisation as the centre piece of my masters thesis, and yes, whilst I had my lecturers tell me I was plain wrong and progress had to continue forever, I do know that various town planning schools across the world still teach people Mumford. So it’s not completely lost.
It was actually Mumford who wasn’t able to do cyclical history, but he certainly got the framework in place for someone to continue it
Oh I forgot to add, I vote for Mumford please for the fifth Wednesday post. There’s a rather nice lineage of forgotten thinkers from William Stanley Jevons, through to Lotka, Mumford, White, then Odum, and finally Charles Hall (
@Thrown Sadwiches, #28
My own take is a little different, but if we consider Act 2 to be an allegory of social dynamics of the time…
… it makes sense the gentry would resent royalty + its court. The lower nobility provided the bulk of non subsistence (aka taxable) economic activity. For this they would resent their distant betters, even if the sweat did not come out of their own, blessed foreheads. More over, Odin has tricked them into providing economic support, and tried to deny them the promised payment in the form of Freia’s “love”. What does this mean, if not political influence in the form of arranged marriages. But if these countryside nobles see their daughters go away to the court, to be neglected and offended for their lack of sophistication; and above all if the favors that ought to come from that arrangement fail to gain them profit. They will resent the monarch and try to get by force what was not delivered as per the stated agreements. The main example that comes to mind is the Fronde in 17th century France.
#147 Mary Bennet
Put the phrase “The feds are confiscating donations in Tennessee” into a search engine. There are claims and counter-claims on both sides of the argument. Even if it is not true, its plausibility is a bad look for the federal government and for FEMA.
Back to poor Alberich: it’s interesting how the climate breakdown and the resulting dissolution of feudal societal bonding was exactly what was needed to further Dion Fortune’s speculated model of European culture being driven to develop logical forms at the expense of other forms of thought and being.
For my vote, let’s get Hitler out of the way this month and look at Jung in January.
Hi John Michael,
It is a useful parable for our times, and it’s sometimes forgotten (except by those interested in history) how badly the Roman leadership failed their people for a while before the end. For the people to open the gates of Rome to Alaric I and his merry crew, tells you everything you need to know.
To be honest, I’ve not been closely following either war. But I do note that based on recent reports in the media, Pokrovsk seems to be the next in line. It’s my been my comprehension of strategy that an orderly retreat is rather difficult to achieve when a town has been encircled. Orders from afar can be given for such actions, but on the ground would be very messy and probably look more like a surrender for the losing combatants.
The media loses a bit of legitimacy when they make big claims about ‘spring offensives’ which turn out to have no lasting effect.
I’m trying to figure out how Wagner fled his home country, and worked his way back to social acceptance, albeit with a more realistic attitude? Few people can, or do achieve that feat.
Cheers
Chris
Speaking of the 250th anniversary of the USA, the record label New World Records, a favorite of mine, was launched in 1976. They run as a non-profit and are devoted to putting and preserving otherwise non-commercial music from American composers and artists. “Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation with a mandate to produce a 100-disc anthology of American music encompassing the broadest possible spectrum of musical genres. In 1978 the Anthology was completed and distributed free of charge to almost 7,000 educational and cultural institutions throughout the world.”
They are still at it, releasing all kinds of stuff. I have an article on them in the hopper that I plan on getting out for their own 50th anniversary, and to generate some talk about 2026, 250th anniversary.
Here is a list of the first 100 records they put out:
https://www.newworldrecords.org/collections/the-original-100-lps
These are the kind of projects that can create good magical chains.
JMG,
Re fifth Wednesday topic I vote for separate post on warbard culture formation. It appears to pick up some speed with Sinaloa Cartel in USA and (as I’ve learned recently) all those militia/terrorist groups that surround modern Isreal.
–changeling
Once again, everyone’s votes have been tabulated; thank you.
Blue Sun, thanks for asking. As far as I’ve heard, Cumberland had some heavy rains but nothing the locals couldn’t handle.
Smith, Trollope’s a great example. Another — a favorite book of mine — is The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, in which the same division plays a crucial role in the plot.
Tag, er, intellectuals and cultural figures also help themselves to the surplus labor extracted from the working classes, and back in Wagner’s time they didn’t get it from the working classes — they got it from the aristocracy, who were the most important patrons of the arts. It was also standard for intellectuals in Wagner’s time to portray aristocrats as crude and boorish. (To be fair, since we’re talking about German aristocrats, this was tolerably often accurate.) As for natto, it’s in stock at every Asian grocery store I’ve visited here in Rhode Island; I get it from the pleasant little Korean grocery less than a mile from my apartment. I make my own but I use commercial natto as the starter. If you have fresh rice straw, though, you don’t need starter — the organism, Bacillus subtilis, is endemic in rice plants.
Ron, of course it’s a cold and miserable way to live — that’s one of Wagner’s points. The problem is that, like so many bad ideas, it can’t be overthrown just by disliking it…
Cicada, thank you, but I’m not worried about the wokesters. If they try to post something polite and relevant here, I’ll put it through and discuss the matter with them; if they try to post shrieking denunciations, or bullying rants, or any of the other things I don’t permit on my forums, I’ll hit the delete button, and my pet black hole Fido will drag their attempted comments past the event horizon and feast on every word.
(Munch, munch, munch, burp.)
Warburton, it’s a theme worth revisiting, but “revisiting” is the relevant term. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2008:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2008/04/net-energy-and-jevons-paradox.html
Peter, oh, granted. Mumford was convinced that the neotechnic era would be onward and upward from here on in — it never seems to have occurred to him that it would be the peak of the process, and would be followed by a hesperotechnic era of technic decline.
Chris, I have a longstanding interest in military history so I’ve been following the Ukraine war fairly closely. Pokrovsk is a likely target, granted, but that means the Ukrainians will be reinforcing it with whatever they’ve got left. The Russians might also launch a thrust further north toward Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, or further south to take the Ukrainian forces on the Zaporizhya front from behind.
Justin, thanks for this.
Peter Wilson @ 155, Do you have a blog or similar? If not, might you be willing to elaborate a bit on that lineage of writers you mentioned? Maybe on the next open post.
Ron M. @ 151 Christendom was under constant threat from Islam throughout the Middle Ages and for several centuries afterwards. Do you have any links to the people fervently studying these matters?
Upon contemplating Trump’s public invocation of Michael and respect made to Mary and his other quirks I belatedly and more deeply realized what an off the wall peculiar character he is to be president. IT’S WEIRD!!!! He does not fit the mold and I can see what an offensive affront he is to the republican/democratic establishment uniparty and the powers that be.
My vote is for the Hitler topic please.
My own take was psychological rather than sociological, and did not hold well to the revelation that the Rhine maidens represent Nature itself… but still.
I see a strong parallel between Alberich and Odin, in the sense that both seem consuming by the spirit of getting something for nothing. In the first two scenes, we see both characters trying to get other people to give them whatever they fancy (intimacy, toil) in exchange of empty promises. Alberich’s lack of sophistication results in him being mocked out to the door, but Odin is much more suave and gets away with it… for a time; dues come back to collect and will not take no for an answer. Both characters fly from relationships on the human sphere (Gods and Giants are heavily anthropomorphized here) and repeat their strategy to get something for nothing out of the subhuman world (aka, from the Rhine’s gold).
What both Alberich and Odin fail to notice, is that you also have a relationship with things, and if you lower your conscience to the material level, it is the material thing that will wag the dog in that relationship. In my view, it is not Alberich who curses the ring; the Rhinegeld’s curse is part of the fabric of reality itself, and the poor Nibelung just spells it out (misery loves company and all that). Under this curse, both main characters go on to impose costs and abuse relationships with their peers. Please notice how Odin will abuse the trust of the Gods (specially Freia’s) for the sake of his Valhalla castle, even before he gets notice of Alberich’s ring.
And the ring will always betray its supposed master and pass from hand to hand. By violence and compulsion in the case of Alberich, by a supreme act of will following Divine intervention in the case of Odin. As with Tolkien’s, the ring has a will of its own and will control its carrier. Notice how the Giants turn to murder each other over a tiny piece of metal, even if they had been happy to share Freia’s favors before. It is specially interesting that they did keep track of who was getting more of the female’s attention, but this did not represent a problem until the ability to possess (actually, get possessed) a different resource came into play.
I watched the first 20 minutes or so of the Das Rheingold video. I must say, Wagner takes an awfully long time building up until something happens. I doubt I could sit through an actual performance in a theatre; I don’t have the stamina these days.
The setting reminds me of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, with the wealthy and carefree enjoying life above ground while the proles sweat at their machines below. It was made in 1927 during the Weimar era. Once we’ve got Herr Hitler out of the way, perhaps we could take a 5th Wednesday look at Weimar — an amazing flowering of cultural and artistic ideas that, had things taken a different turn, might have led to a very different world today.
Checking in to vote for Jung on Occultism please!
Wer here
Well JMG the ring cycle has it share of the crazy moments especially in the last one. Although I don’t belive that the image of Wotan coming to terms with his demise is accurate here, if Wotan behaved like modern EU leadership he would had been convinced of his imminent victory and beliving him losing his spear proves his “moral superiority” over everyone and victory would be his even as Valhalla burns around him ( images of riots in Paris last year when a group of clueless soy people were eating in a dinner while the street was burning just outside the window.)
The behaviour of people in the media displaying the mindless nature of people that are our elites. Take for example the tiresome and drown out topic of the Ukrainian war. My goodness do those people never tire repeating the endless claims for the I don’t know how many times. How many times Putin was on the verge of death already? How many times Russians would collapse of this week? Last week they had a panic episode after Ugledar I don’t know were it is even something happened there and I honestly don’t care. Just they behave like people in mental illness or something screaming about US giving Ukraine a trilion dollars and Russians apparently deathly afraid of something then the Ukrainians retreat and they suddenly scream “all is lost” Lord Allmighty…
Of course know is evil Trump secretly scheming everywhere and planning something horrible with all “fine people” somewhere. But there is a hopefull fact studies show that viewership of the mainstream media is in sharp decline and a fraction what it was just a few years ago so I remain hopefull that something is changing about people’s perspective on things.
This discussion about the Norse gods and giants’ relationship (and parallels with the aristocracy and the urban gentry craftsmen, later to be the seed of the industrial bourgeoisie) reminds me the parallel that the Greek gods have with the Titans they vanquished to precisely ascend to “godhood”. The big difference and this connects to your book the “Wealth of Nature” , is that the Titans are more understood as forces of Nature and subjugating them is the fundamental right and basis of the western civilization. The greek gods also had a fight with the giants/cyclops which were instrumental in the fight with the Titans.
I love seeing how this relates to the reality on the ground (le plancher des vaches! where us humble mortals must dwell).
Neither of the leading 5th Wednesday contenders really tickle my fancy at the moment, so I’ll throw my vote towards another topic, though it has no chance of victory:
Jack Vance.
Mary Bennet @ 147
It’s a second hand account I read on Substack and I can’t find it now. The person was dealing with anonymous source inside the rescue effort who stated that claim. With what is coming out now about the relief effort being actively blocked, at least greed and stupidity would be an understandable motive. The other option is that the government wants the mountains depopulated for some reason.
” In any case, financial difficulty seems to be a recurring theme and you see hard up ‘gentlemen’ with a severe aversion to productive endeavor trying to live above their means and trying to bag a girl with a rich daddy to finance it. ”
Mr. Elton, Mr. Elliot, Mr. Wickham, and Mr. Willoughby are sneaking out of the room. 😉
It’s been a common theme.
A more depressing theme…
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
“To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.”
To me, the sestercentennial and the Hitler topic both seem essentially American – whatever could be said about him as part of German history has probably already been said. Since I am not American, I will make a stand for another topic, that of the relation between Islam and Protestantism.
JMG, are you planning a historical novel set in the 16th or 17th century? It almost sounds like it 🙂 Just wishing, because historical novels are my favourite genre!
Hi John Michael,
Now either of those options would be a move worthy of Sun Tzu’s maxims. Doing the thoughtfully unexpected is a powerful move. Comprehending useful and practical strategy is of interest to me as well, mostly because with the many of the systems here I have to ask the hard question: Does this thing work? Fans of abstractions rarely pit their wits against such mighty forces! 🙂
It is of interest to me that apparently Pokrovsk is being, and has been been largely evacuated, not to mention cut off from most of it’s infrastructure anyway. With winter coming, that alone may be enough to finish the town off as a strategic target, so yeah, other goals will come to the fore. Hmm. Rail for supply lines in those circumstances are risky, roads are a bit cheaper to repair.
It’s also of interest to me that the difficult European climate is coming into the discussion. Dynanism is no substitute for food upon the table, and I believe that the two growing seasons prior to the arrival of the Black Plague were also very poor, and so the bacteria arrived at a time when the population was very weakened. There would have been cultural memories lingering for sure.
I complain about bad seasons, but usually with enough diversity of plants, the local climate is pretty good. Not sure what I’d do if faced with a growing season where the grip of winter held strong with no access to produce grown in warmer areas of the continent.
Cheers
Chris
JMG, I didn’t know you’d been a Boy Scout; may I ask what rank you ended up with?
Mary, I often make plans to begin blogging, but a combination of too many unfinished projects and my own day job mean those topics are somewhat off limits, at least in a substantially public way. If you email me at petergwilson@gmail.com I can however give you some pointers
Hi Kfish,
People will be people, that’s for sure.
Glad you mentioned that because it is of interest to me that some folks and cultures never provide feedback when things are going well. 🙂 I paid you didn’t I? Such words reflect an entirely different way of looking at the world.
Cheers
Chris
In the Wagner tale, Alberich wasn’t the first to stomp love to death. By treating Alberich like sh_t, humiliating his very being🤕🤬, it was the Rhinemaidens who first denied love. Is because the Rheinmaidens had denied love long ago that it was they who were the guardians/owners of the gold? The Rheinmaidens passed on their bad-will, heartlessness, and callousness — they passed their dis-ease to Alberich.
So I ask, where did the Rheinmaidens come from? What is their status level? Are they gods? Maybe someone here said where the Rheinmaidens are from, and I didn’t catch it.
Besides, who in their right mind, sets a group of fickle, mindless, inconsiderate teenage teases (who can be impregnated) responsible for pirates’ treasure? Certainly not a pirate.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🏴☠️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@JMG #143 – Yup. Absolutely.
@Tag Murphy #150 – Oh, yes. Music really gets you where you live, if it’s not the extruded music product you sometimes hear over loudspeakers or in certain mass-produced genres. Scent does the same thing on a more intimate level. I’m nest thing to deaf, but carry a musical soundtrack in my mind’s ear, though it’s getting a little fuzzy around the edges.
About the firms that were founded on reciprocal loyalty which ended with the death of the founders – my late ex-husband worked for Hewlett Packard as an electronic calibration technician back in the days of Bill and Dave in a small building in Albuquerque, and in later years followed them to Denver. Then the second-generation bosses told him that without a college degree, he could work a help-desk, and I forget the other alternative, but basically, forced him into retirement. On a decent pension, and with stock he’d accumulated back when the founders were alive and had a generous employee stock program. Later on, HP splintered, merged with this firm and that, splintered again, and one branch got into some nasty legal trouble.
And – speaking of personal relationships – some quotes from my favorite authors – “Loyalty must go both ways, or it becomes betrayal in the egg.” (Lois McMaster Bujold.) And from S.M Stirling, I can’t remember the exact words, but the sentiment was that loyalty to family and clan was at the root of all connections, though it shouldn’t stop there. Basically, if you didn’t have that, you didn’t have the base for the rest, though I’d like to add, knowing some families from the inferno, that if you can find a chosen family or tribe, you have a lifeline.
@Alvin #69
Thanks for this. It’s an old one. I’m sure I read it back in the day but forgot. Re-reading now.
JMG,
Your Wagner series definitely exceeds expectations, especially after the way you low-hyped it. In actuality, it is a fascinating journey through philosophy and history due in no small part to the vast extent of your knowledge, insights, and skill (standing ovation with “Flight of the Valkyrie” playing in the background). A thought crossed my mind that this all would be a great subject for a fictional history novel or three – attempted revolutions, Wagner and associates being chased hither and yon. Though, I know you have a list of projects as long as a giraffe’s neck. Here’s hoping….
Fifth Wednesday vote for the Austrian corporal, with the funny mustache, as archetype.
WILL1000
@C.R. Patino #156: Centuries ago, The Germanies had two levels of nobility: The Hochadel and the (forget the German and the spelling,,,,,, but the lesser nobility) and both the Hochadel and the common folk hated the lesser nobility. Not sure if that remained in Wagner’s day; my data is from the 17th Century. Now that view of Giants and Nibelungs makes very good sense.
I think this next month, I will continue to read Mein Kampf, Ford translation. Amazon doesn’t carry it. I had to buy the book from an alternate bookseller. I have to clandestine read it. My husband would go ballistic if he knew (“How can you read that garbage?” one minute, and in the next minute, accuse me of being a Nazi sympathizer). He is usually a rational man, but not about Nazism. He has absolutely no ability to learn what was going on BEFORE Nazism took hold.
As I read more of the book, the more I understand where Hitler (and others in the same boat) was ‘coming from’ (what his circumstances were) and I suppose that means my ‘sympathy’ goes up. I would like to fight anyone whom I see uses the phrase “Nazi sympathizer” or “Hitler sympathizer” as an epithet — in the 1920s and 1930s Europe, the situation was not all or nothing — there was a lot of gray in there.
Mein Kampf is my recreational-reading💃, while my study-reading🧾is re-learning bookkeeping.
💨Northwind Grandma💨💃🧾
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Once again, all votes have been tabulated.
BeardTree, that’s one of the essential themes of this stage of the historical cycle. Caesarism is driven by the rise of unique personalities who contend with the gray bureaucratic system.
CR, good. We’ll be talking about the exact parallels between Wotan and Alberich in the next installment.
Martin, bring up Weimar Germany the next time we have a month with five Wednesdays!
Wer, Wotan isn’t a political leader. We’ll be introducing the political leadership later on — and yes, they are impressively clueless. As for the corporate media, I don’t know how things are going in your part of the world but here in the US their viewership is a tiny fraction of what it was just a few years ago. Who’d have thought that telling obvious baldfaced lies and marketing the dullest propaganda in recorded history would chase off viewers? 😉
Rashakor, the Germanic giants (jotunar or ettins) in the original mythologies were very much the kin of the Greek titans, but Wagner had his own ideas.
Siliconguy, obviously those of us who don’t belong to the privileged classes need to pick up the slack by reading more books!
Aldarion, no, but I’d read such a novel if someone else wrote it. I prefer to set mine in wholly imaginary worlds.
Chris, the question is whether the Ukrainian army pulls its troops out of Pokrovsk. If that happens they’ve decided to give up on holding onto anything east of the Dnieper River. If not — well, they’re going to lose everything east of the Dnieper pretty soon anyway, so pulling back and making the river their new defensive line would be a smart move. Otherwise they may not be able to prevent Russia from pushing across the southern plains to Odessa, at which point it’s all over.
Adara, I quit as a Second Class Scout — a cadre of Christian fundamentalist dads took over the troop in 1977 and turned it into a venue for proselytizing, and I was one of many troop members who walked away and never looked back.
Northwind, good. As we’ll see, Wotan also renounced love before Alberich did. The Rhinemaidens are the forces of nature, who are in fact fickle, mindless, and inconsiderate, especially in a bleak environment like Europe’s!
Will1000, I’ll leave that project to the authors of historical novels. I’ve thought of taking the plot of the Ring + Parsifal and turning it into a series of science fiction novels set in the deindustrial future, but that’s not the same thing.
Northwind, good for you. It’s entirely possible to read a book and understand where the author is coming from without agreeing with it — I read Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and C.S. Lewis’s planetary novels without accepting their Christian faith for myself, after all…
Regarding FEMA blocking citizens’ aid efforts during hurricane Helene and prior disasters, A mIdwestern Doctor just wrote a piece that’s largely about this issue,
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/hurricane-helene-has-a-critical-lesson
I’m pretty sure the glossing over of the Ottoman vs Eastern European warfare of the 16th and 17th century is because of who most of us are descended from rather than any deliberate sweeping away. Western Europe (namely England, France, Spain) was busy with either internal battles relating to the old aristocracy vs the newly rising centralised state (Fronde in France where the state won, Civil war in England where the aristocracy won) or fighting over colonies, mostly in the new world. Our historical focus is therefore focused upon these events rather than battles on the eastern periphery.
English language history in particular also likes to sort of gloss over the 17th century, probably because it was a bit embarrassing for England with the Civil war, monarchs being killed and then restored, and Hapsburg Spain then Bourbon France being ascendant.
Compare it to the Anglo American glory of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and it is easy to see why the focus would be elsewhere. It’s why reading German histories can be refreshing because the 17th century is of such important to Europe and Faustian culture/civilisation as so many big turning points hit in that century and the Baroque period.
Could I put in a request for an analysis of whatever kind of reverse Hitler archetype has left people impassioned enough to evade ever finding themselves subjected to more Hitler gaslighting that they actually want to vote for absolutely anything other than an analysis of Hitler? A deep dive into SPAM or perhaps Jello salads would apparently be a preferable fate!
I trust that it is not lost on anyone that going to the trouble to issue anti-wishes on the subject of little Adolph rather powerfully reveals just how influential of an archetype he has actually become. Anyone who feels compelled to give public voice to their deepest revulsion at the mere thought of more Hitler flogging appears to be at least as in thrall to his archetype’s allure/anti-allure as any masochist cheerleading on yet another Hitler flogging. After all, the opposite of any bad idea is undoubtedly another one.
Hopefully, your analysis will surprise everyone by being at least as much about the dynamics of gaslighting propaganda, compelling archetypes, fragile status quos, scapegoated boogeymen, and those rare turning points that can magically wash away so many unquestionable truisms that were tenaciously gripping us in their potent strangleholds.
@Smith #149; JMG. Trollope! I was on holiday when the Bernie Madoff crisis broke. I had taken The Way We Live Now with me to read while lolling by the pool. When I came back and resumed the seminar on the history of financial crises that I was then teaching, I told my students that they’d probably learn more about the way financial crises unfold and what they do to people and societies by reading that novel than by browsing back issues of the Journal of Finance..
And JMG, when we finish the series on the Ring — I trust that will not be for some months; there’s so much to cover and say and so far this has been such a treat — could we have a series on the Razor’s Edge? One of my favorite novels of all time.. Maybe a whole Maugham series that steps away from Of Human Bondage and the Moon and Sixpence and instead covers the undeservedly lesser known works: The Narrow Corner, Theatre, Cakes and Ale, the Painted Veil (well, the last has sparked movies)and, of course, the Razor’s Edge Not to mention some of the short stories; the Outstation, IMHO, is one of the greatest short stories in the English language and should be assigned reading in classes on “how empires fall”
5th Wedensday I am thinking about a post about the next monastic life or cultural conservers, and the probable very hard life they’ll have in the in the so called “Combined” West, thinking about it already the internet is going down and the LLM is the equivalent of the Dark Age, where TPTB try to sintesize everything, or make a big Pizza or Shaorma with everything in it.
Hi John Michael,
Hmm, that is a very large river to cross and also a natural and historical boundary. Presents a lot of risk from being cut off from supplies should forces head further west. Bridges are difficult to construct, and fast to demolish.
If I were conducting that field, given the lack of willingness to enter negotiations, I’d consolidate all land east of the river, and then bar access to that transportation route for the western side. With the large number of cities located on the river, what would cost a lot of blood militarily, could eventually be achieved through economic methods – whilst keeping up the military pressure. And those cities would also be cut off from a lot of resources they formerly enjoyed from the eastern shores.
Such a strategy all depends on whether the western half ceases future mischief, which admittedly given the reduced resources they’d face and recent history, I hold some doubts about.
Whatever else occurs, I agree, it does very much appear that east of the river is a lost cause.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
You’ve gotten my mind interested in the matter, and one thing which absolutely stands out to me from looking at satellite photos of that country and terrain, it’s that without any doubt, no other country in Europe is almost border to border farm land. I now comprehend the desirability of that land, and especially with what is going on in Africa. Ah, the little light bulb goes on.
Cheers
Chris
Regarding the staging of Das Rheingold, are the three Rhinemaidens the actual singers, or are they three stand-ins with the actual singers concealed somewhere within earshot?
It strikes me that being suspended in some sort of harness is physically taxing; being asked to sing opera on top of it is asking for a lot.
“What holds this world together, in the final analysis, is love. Does that seem unbearably romantic? It’s nothing of the kind. The medieval world out of which the capitalist world evolved was held together, from top to bottom, by personal relationships.”
There are plenty of qualities that can hold together personal relationships. From my understanding of the medieval world, respect, duty, honour, obedience and fear would all rank higher than love. That was even true of parent-child relationships. A father was to be respected, not to be loved. That’s the way kings behaved towards their subjects too. Henry VIII talks to his subjects who were protesting against his closing of the monasteries in the exact tone of a father demanding obedience from his children. It was the same “discipline” dished out to the peasant rebellions of the Reformation.
It seems to me that this is one of those cases where romantics like Wagner fantasised about a world that never existed. Of course, in doing so, he helped to create a positive ideal which we still hold to this day.
Kashtan @ 185 Thank you for the link. My initial reaction is from whom are FEMA officials taking bribes/orders? Hurricane Irma, in 1917, was also mentioned, so apparently this corruption plus incompetence has been ongoing through at least the last two administrations.
For me, this is yet one more reason not to elect yet another senile boomer to the presidency–if anyone is interested, I did NOT vote for Biden in 2020–but fellow citizens will naturally have their own preferences.
About the commentariat’s eagerness for a discussion of Hitler:
Hitler was still in power when I was born, a few years before the Red Army had decisively defeated Germany and put an end to Hitler’s regime. For me, he was and is just one more failed head of a defeated state — big whoop!
However, in our largely secular and materialist Western world, where God and Satan have both become irrelevant, Hitler seems to me to have become the secular and materialist equivalent of Satan, embodying everything that our secular and materialist equivalents of God have consigned to Hell for all eternity. He has become the new Adversary, our modern Satan.
Now to what I think is the most important point:
One of the reasons for the present anti-deification of Hitler, at least in the USA, seems to be a guilty conscience about our own country’s huge enthusiasm for Naziism way back in the 1930s are early 1940s.
During those years my father was one of the lead engineers on the Norden Bombsight project for the US Navy. So most of his friends and associates were engineers and military men. And at Norden, a fair number of them were immigrants from the Northern-European (Protestant) countries, who spoke Dutch or German or one of the Scandinavian languages natively. He himself was a Danish-American, and he was very proud of Denmark for its resistance to Nazi rule and its efforts to save Denmark’s Jews from the Nazis. But that was a purely Danish thing, not much shared by the non-Danes with whom he worked.
In 1960, just before I started college, he took me aside to tell me a thing that he said I would neve ever hear a hint of in any of my history courses, but really ought to know.
What he told me was that, in the days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, only about one third of the people he knew well were in favor of entering WW2 on the side of Britain and the Allies. Another third, he said, very much wanted the US to remain neutral and let the chips fall where they may. And — this is the part I would never hear about! — the final third, he emphasized, were strong and passionate supporters of the Nazi program for a new world; they wanted us to enter the war on the side of Germany and ther Axis, and thus ensure the ultimate triumph of the Nazi political program and the Nazi racial ideology. Some of them had even invented the lethal-gas technology eventually used in the Nazi death camps. It was only the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, that brought the country together on the side of the Allies.
He also said that the reason I would never hear a word about that final, pro-Nazi third of Americans was guilt and shame, but mostly the natural human tendency to distance oneself from the losing side. Yet that third of Americans hadn’t actually changed their minds, he said, so much as they had simply all shut up about their real views and values.
All this was a large part of the motivation for Operation Paperclip, which gave German Nazi scientists and engineers a safe refuge in the USA in exchange for their work to develop new weapons for our country. (Among other things, this led to the beginning of our Space program.) It wasn’t just a pragmatic move to advance American power in the world. It was also — for some, even primarily — a means of preserving part of the Nazi legacy from total annihilation.
So on some level WW2 still isn’t over for the USA, and never will be — not until our country has left its unspoken Nazi past far behind. And that day is at least as far off as one more generation, in light of our current crop of openly Neo-Nazi youth.
So yes, we still do need to talk about Hitler, but only as a lead-in to talking about America’s pro-Nazi past and present. That’s the real-world thing that needs to be talked about in depth, not the Satanification of one dead man from long ago.
I noticed that in JMG’s novel “The Hall of Homeless Gods,” Jerry Shimizu thinks of his boss as his feudal overlord. In the American West these days the title would probably have been something like “Bosslady.”
@Will1000 #181: Diana Paxson has a trilogy called “Wotan’s Children” based on the Ring Cycle and the history of the period. The books are called “The Wolf and the Raven,” “The Dragons of the Rhine,” and “The Lord of Horses.”
@PumpkinScone #186: You may be right about the Anglo-American glory centuries, but I find the 17th century both in England and in North America absolutely fascinating! In England, the then unsuccessful democratic revolutionaries; in North America, the relations between several groupings of societies, none of which was yet strong enough to overwhelm the others.
For France, the Ottoman wars were hardly abstract, but may give rise to mixed feelings; France tended to take the side of the Ottomans against Austria, even though both the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs considered themselves defenders of the Catholic faith.
I love 17th century music by Monteverdi, Schein etc. above all others (J.S. Bach could be considered in some ways a belated 17th century musician, too), but it was the toughest of all centuries for the German-speaking parts of Europe and is certainly not forgotten even today.
Off topic but Sabine Hossenfelder has a great rant about the state of particle physics.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cBIvSGLkwJY
Short version is it has wandered into a mathematical rabbit hole and produced nothing of value.
@Simon S: It is my impression that love can be mixed and coloured by strong and even opposite emotions, such as hate and fear. That is as true today in romantic relationships (especially when they are ending) or between parents and children as it was in older times. I do think JMG’s bon mot is intentionally exaggerated to the point of being lopsided, but I also think it would be wrong to claim that medieval fathers or kings were not supposed to feel any love for their children and vassals. And that means the relationship between a king and a count might contain more affection (mixed with envy, hate, fear etc.) than the one between a modern president and mayor.
Setting these specific aspects aside, however, I don’t see the total break between the (“Magian”, faith-based, monarchical, etc.) middle ages and the (“Faustian”, rational, republican etc.) post-1500 modernity that you have alluded to several times. There is ample evidence for many regions that church attendance had its peak in the 19th or even early 20th century, not in the middle ages. In France, monarchical power was strongest under Louis XIV and later Napoleon I.; for Germany, an objective definition of monarchy would point to a peak in 1934-1945.
Of course, the European diaspora does not live among the walls, castles, churches and other remains of the older centuries.
I remember hearing somewhere that Alberich in his materialism, horniness, and general grotesqueness was a metaphor for Jewishness. I wonder if this was Wagner’s intention? Of course, any mention of Alberich being connoted in this way is grounds for expulsion from polite society.
You can probably already guess my vote is for you to discuss Hitler. Not that anybody outside Ecosophian circles is emotionally ready for such a discussion, so if you do discuss him, I’m sure you are aware the troll-comment quota will be off the chain. Many sputtering rants will be memory-holed down Fido’s mouth chute. I hope he’s hungry.
Speaking of Third Reich paranoia, I just read an article about an American Berliner (not the jelly donut kind) is likely going to be thrown in prison for posting a photo of a Covid mask emblazoned with a nearly invisible swastika. https://substack.com/home/post/p-149656285 I wonder what Wagner would think of modern German censorship? He probably would have been jailed for his comments, his operas, or both.
Christophe @ 187, I am naturally interested in our host’s thoughts on almost any subject, especially when those musings help me understand the complexities of contemporary life. Howsomeover, I was born in 1949; the horrors of WWII took place before my birth, on another continent. The United Nations was established specifically to prevent more world wars and attendant atrocities. At about the time I was being born.
I would like some sort of explanation of why Truman thought it necessary to employ The Bomb, and what the Cold War, a reality of about half my life was all about.
IDK your views, but, for the record, no I do not want my country involved in a MidEast war because Hitler. If for no other reason than that we can’t afford it. Natanyahoo and his billionaire dual citizen election buyer and influencer buddies don’t care what Americans can afford so long as they get what they want, and then have options to buy up the rubble left over.
With regards to Hegel, Marx:
“…just as the mistakes of princes are expiated by whole nations, so do the errors of great minds extend their unwholesome influence over whole generations, centuries even, growing and propagating, and finally degenerating into monstrosities.” –Schopenhauer, WWR (section 8)
An off-topic, but recurring theme.
THE “DOING WITHOUT DECADE”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEsUfCD2Hl4
Start at mark 4:22. Paul Krugman gets toasted.
——-
One thing I hear popping up more and more is “doing without.” I attribute my hearing it more is that people are saying it more. People saying it more means they are experiencing it more “ — they don’t like it — they grow more anxious — sometimes the anxiety makes them physically ill. No-one can blame them for not liking being forced to do without. Doing without is the pits.
I think I am attuned to doing without. Doing without has been burned into my soul. Doing without can happen in a marriage; one partner feels it yet the other is oblivious. For example, for five years in the early 2000s, my husband and I were in (so much) debt that we could do nothing that spent money. I mean NOTHING. I felt impoverished and deprived, yet my husband felt nothing of the sort — he was oblivious — blind. At roughly age 50, my experience during those years, it felt like I sat at my computer tooling around, marking time. I didn’t realize how badly those years affected me until a decade or two later.
Another example: Moving to Wisconsin four years ago, the house we bought we discovered was a lemon, where so much was wrong with it. I have largely done without showering or taking a bath. I do sink baths. The shower/bathtub didn’t work (don’t ask) until we got a plumber in recently (cost). Now, I am apathetic on whether I ever take a shower or bath again. I don’t miss either. I am used to sink baths. It has to do with “having done without” for what felt like forever, which has left me not caring about the issue any longer. In the beginning, the “doing without” bothered the heck out of me. But I adapted — a year or two went by, and I grew resigned to sink baths.
Everyone I speak to these days mentions doing without. This sort of language never was. Reading between the lines, and sometimes speaking plainly, people are doing without this, that, or the other thing. Sometimes it is doing without this. Sometimes it is doing without that. Sometimes it is doing without the other thing. Now it is doing without all three. And the list grows longer and longer and longer. It is a theme.
I think the 2020s should adopt the moniker the “Doing Without Decade,” like the Roaring Twenties. We are the Doing Withouters.
For those who are clueless why Tramp is so popular, it is that Demoncrats have forced “more and more” of the “US populace (taxpayers) to do without more and more things that they need.” All the while, the populace is paying through the nose for govmints’ playthings (mainly wars), paying more and more sky-high taxes, which continue to go up. And Demoncrats are blind to the privations — they say, “What? What? What’z da matta?” (what is the matter?)
It is a “taxation without representation”🤬thing — the stuff USA’s 1776 Revolutionary War was made of.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇺🇸🥺
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-crippled-united-states.html
Tag, I’ve read a fair bit of Trollope’s stuff (I recently finished Doctor Thorne) and I think he paints some vivid pictures of 19th C Britain but I thought that The Way We Live Now is his best – at least so far.
That book is fascinating isn’t it? I read it after the Madoff fiasco and I thought there’s not much difference between Melmotte and Madoff. Didn’t Melmotte absolutely require unquestioning faith from his investors and didn’t Madoff also? If an investor asked Bernie too many questions Bernie would return the investor’s money. So, as the Good Book sez, nothing new under the sun. The Way We Live Now should be required reading in college business programs.
@Northwind Grandma (#202):
I’m probably a few years older than you (I’m from the Silent Generation), and I have a child’s clear memories of the last half of the 1940s. “Doing without” was the watchword throughout the United States back then, and I still have it branded on my heart and mind. In the mid 1940s the Federal Government ran numerous advertisements in the major print magazines with the catchy slogan, which I have never forgotten:
Use it up, wear it out,
Make it do, or do without.
You can see one of these ads from 1944 at:
https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1944-ad-psa-world-war-ii-advertising-council-money-spending-prices-family-child-210575-yrc2-015
So the consumer world that was being deliberately created in the 1950s, when I was in my ‘teens, has always felt deeply alien to me. Why would anyone even want to become a consumer? Why would anyone ever buy a thing they might discard a few years later, or that would wear out in a few years, if there was another option. That sort of world has never made sense to me at all.
“I would like some sort of explanation of why Truman thought it necessary to employ The Bomb”
That’s pretty well documented. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were bloodbaths. In Saipan the civilians threw themselves off a cliff rather than surrender. In Manila the Japanese committed stomach turning butchery on the civilian population.
After Okinawa fell the Japanese gave no sign they were considering surrender. Estimates of Allied casualties for an invasion of the home islands were over a million. Option 2 was a continued blockade and firebombing of the remaining cities combined with firebombing the crops inducing a famine. The effects of that were going to kill a great many of the civilians too. The Japanese also still had a large army in China that was still fighting so it not just Japan that would suffer from prolonging the war.
Hence the bomb in the hope that the concept that one plane, one bomb, one city would finally get through to the leadership. With the added impact of Stalin declaring war on the Japanese that was enough. And maybe Nagasaki was not necessary if Truman had waited a couple more days. However, even after Hirohito decided to surrender the true hardliners mounted a coup to overthrow him and fight to the death. Fortunately the coup failed. At that point only one bomb was left, the next wasn’t due until November. The invasion was scheduled for October.
If you want to be sick to the stomach the book Rampage, MacArthur, Yamashita, and the battle of Manila explains what happened there. Right next to that one you should find books on Okinawa and the other Pacific War battles.
Regarding the parallels between Wotan and Alberich, Wagner himself admits it, or better still has Wotan himself admit it in his answers to Mime in Sigfried. Wotan calls himself „Light-Alberich“
I have been wrecking my brain with trying to puzzle out what allegory Wotan is. The remark about Frika being social custom was an eye opener, because it is true that apeasment of social custom can be as damning to other pursuits like it is to Wotan with Wallhala or the situation with Sigurd. What is Wotan? An intelectual concept, an intelectual/cultural group, something that wants to rule, that others themselves follow, thinks so highly of himself, that he considers himself the right god for the job? I was thinking of Order, or Rationaliser, Lawsystem. But I still am troubled by the fact, that he willingly sets up his and the gods demise and he, Wotan, is self-aware and seeks understanding of the situation from the get go.
He could be burocracy, or academia, but now I am grasping at straws.
And I still do not have a clue what the Valcuryes are suposed to be.
Best regards,
Marko
P.S.: he might be rationalising philosophers and their followers. But now I am a) reinventing the Radience, b) would Wagner really selfcritisize his Feuerbachian past?
@ Aldarion
Toynbee’s analysis of the beginning of civilisation was that a group of people somewhere is subjected to a time of immense trouble where their very survival is threatened, usually due to changing environmental conditions. This forces those people to innovate and their innovation wins for them a new strength that leads to the subsequent growth of civilisation.
It’s quite easy to translate this into Wagner’s terms. There’s a group people somewhere who love nature and assume she loves them back. But nature breaks the illusion. Should such a people go on loving nature when it is clear that she does not love them in return?
It seems more understandable to fear nature in those circumstances. That starts to sound like the Book of Job. Come to think of it, the idea of loving nature sounds very New Testament-y. I think I just realised why Nietzsche accused Wagner of sneaking in Christianity through the back door.
The country I live in was occupied by the Germans in the second world war.
Yes, by the ‘Germans’. Not by the ‘Nazi’s’ or by ‘Hitler’. I’ve never understood the obsession Americans seem to have with both the Nazi’s and Hitler, so my vote goes to that subject.
bk.
Hey JMG
I vote for the future of Animal conservation for the 5th Wednesday post.
“Taylor, never bet against human stupidity. You’ll always lose.”
Sooner or later I think that will sink in, but for now, I just keep getting surprised by the sheer depths of self delusional idiocy which our species is capable…
Once again I’ve noted down everyone’s votes. Thank you!
Kashtan, thanks for this.
PumpkinScone, that’s certainly part of it.
Christophe, I’ll see if there’s room in the discussion for an analysis of Schicklgruber fatigue. 😉
Tag, hmm. I’ll consider it, but Maugham doesn’t need a lot of commentary. I’d simply encourage everyone to pick up a copy of The Razor’s Edge from any convenient source, such as this online archive — his works are out of copyright in most countries at this point. As for his short stories, granted — I’d rank “Rain” as one of the twenty or so best pieces of short fiction in English, ever.
Chris, under most circumstances I’d agree with you, but the Russians are quite aware that if they leave any of Ukraine unconquered they’re just going to have to fight the same war over again in another decade. Since the Ukrainian (and NATO “mercenary”) forces are collapsing at this point due to sheer lack of manpower and firepower, the Russians’ best option is to force the matter in exactly the same way they did in 1944-1945, throw everything they’ve got into one massive offensive after another, and leave Russia’s future Malorussian provinces so shellshocked that there’s no significant trouble for a couple of centuries thereafter.
Martin, usually the singers are right there onstage. There are various ways of handling it so that they can still sing.
Simon, so? The point I made — that what unites feudal societies are personal relationships — still stands.
Robert M, that’s certainly one factor I’ll be discussing.
Patricia M, “feudal overlord” is one way to put it. “Yakuza boss” is another way…
Siliconguy, good. I wonder how long it will take for people to realize that physics passed the point of diminishing returns quite a while ago.
Kimberly, the claim’s been made, but it would be a very odd thing for an antisemite to do. Alberich isn’t just a villain; in the fourth scene of The Rhinegold, he shows himself to be Wotan’s moral equal, and the parallel between the two of them is worked very hard in the operas to come.
Justin, good! Yes, exactly.
Northwind, gods, I hope so. The insistence that doing without is unthinkable, that the only option is to fulfill every imaginable craving as fast as possible, has been one of the great barriers to clear thought and constructive change for decades now. If people are genuinely starting to recognize that they have to do without now and then, a few of them might start to discover that you can fairly often choose what to do without, and then some of those might notice that they don’t actually miss a lot of the things they’ve done without — and that way lies freedom and power.
Patricia M, thanks for this.
Marko, we’ll get to all of that as we proceed!
Taylor, the gods one day got bored, chopped the tails off some monkeys, shaved them, put them in clothing, and gave them one commandment: “Thou shalt be absurd.” This was the origin of humanity. It explains a lot, you must admit… 😉
“This time the timing was not lacking even in the response: on the eve of one of the most delicate lunar transits of the century – with the Moon entering Libra with an eclipse attached with Mars opposed to Pluto retrograde in Capricorn, which will perfect the opposition at the end of the month, a conjunction harbinger of great clashes and which opens a two-year period of important battles – the Islamic Republic of Iran took the step of responding to the Zionist fury.”
Ran across that in a news article. Was he trying to justify what already happened or trying to “see we have a plan!”
@Robert Mathiesen – Good to hear from another Silent. I was born in 1939 and share some of your memories.
@JMG re: “feudal overlord” vs “Yazuka boss.” In Jerry’s culture, is there a difference?
And, re: your scenario: “Darwinian Man, however behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.” Aw, c’mon. Great Ape, at the very least. But, yes, of course. You can run parallel pictures of women at the hairdresser’s and female chimps grooming each other; young males harassing females, and street-corner youths when women pass by. And so on. And the Delta Males who provide the dumb muscle for the crime lords. Oh, yes. And from what little I read on the subject, you do not want to get on the wrong side of a high-ranking bonobo matriarch – think church ladies and memsahibs.
In the Origin of species it talks about how large and or complex animals tend to go extinct since the number of individuals decreases as the cost to maintain an individual increases. Eventually, the smaller population of larger individuals makes a lack of genetic variety and the population becomes fragile. This also tends to be inevitable as individuals who are larger or more complex compete against other individuals better. You can replace the word individual with corporation or country and it’s still tracks. Only when the environment changes to a resource scarce environment will “sustainability” (really just extraction of resources that renew in human timespans like annually) become advantageous. We are lucky that there is still some variety of lifestyles like organic farmers or hunter gathers that do exist in spite of the industrial age. This stories warnings against un sustainability are more prevalent today since the resources were using don’t renew in human time spans.
“throw everything they’ve got into one massive offensive after another, and leave Russia’s future Malorussian provinces so shellshocked that there’s no significant trouble for a couple of centuries thereafter.”
JMG,
This is the most thorough explanation of Russia’s Deep Battle doctrine that I have seen. They really took the lessons of US Grant to heart in the east. I hear he has been widely studied in Moscow ever since Trotsky ran things. Unfortunately, the west still thinks in terms of Shock and Awe or Blitzkrieg, without realizing that Russia is ready and willing to fight continuously until they win.
Somewhere along the line, the west forgot the old adage of “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics”. Thanks to outsourcing of our industrial heavy industry, there is no there there.
“members of the managerial class hate systems based on personal loyalty”
Oh boy, that is the sort of comment I love because it’s something I’ve always thought but never really seen anyone talk about.
When we ask ourselves why the modern world seems “hollow”, there might be any number of reasons, but I’ve always felt that one of them is this: men, at least, are meant to thrive in a social organization wherein interpersonal loyalty is a chief virtue. We don’t do well when this is missing; tend to feel that things are somehow “fake”.
Many people who have been in the military will be familiar with the experience of exiting the organization, trying to adjust to “normal” civilian life and finding oneself befuddled, asking “What’s WRONG with these people who dont seem to have any particular conception of loyalty to each other?”
Hi JMG,
I really, really hope you move forward with the Ring & Parsifal story set in the deindustrial future. No one could write that story but you!
P.S. – it never occurred to me to think of Mrs. Taira as Yakuza. Just a very canny head of state doing what she had to in the environment she had. Though now, historical figures like Mayor Daley come to mind.
Years ago I was teaching World History to a group of young adults in a high school diploma completion program at an Adult School. I was going over the atrocities committed by Stalin and I think Mao. A student asked how come we never hear about them and just hear about Hitler and the Nazis as the ultimate monsters. I believe Mao and Stalin each had more deaths than Hitler so good question! And Stalin even had a mustache too!
After reading through these comments, I wonder if I’m really understanding not only the symbolism but the direct in-world meaning of Alberich’s renunciation of love. Clearly what one must disavow to take the Rhinegold is much more than one must disavow to e.g. take a vow of chastity. And yet, there have been plenty of willing despoilers of the environment who appear to have loved their spouses, families, polities, and/or deities. What exactly did Alberich deliberately, and Wotan and Fafner (anrguably) unwittingly, reject?
This amounts to asking what love is, like some kind of pop song lyric, doesn’t it? Okay, I’ll own it. Assuming it ain’t a secondhand emotion, it ain’t never having to say you’re sorry. and It ain’t a battlefield, then what, according to Wagner and (if different) according to occult philosophy, is love?
Likely requires, if answerable at all, more than a comment thread reply. If you weren’t planning to delve into this as we go, then I’ll cast a symbolic vote for it as a future 5th Wotansday topic.
Siliconguy, hard to say. It was certainly interesting timing — and of course it’s relevant that astrology has a long history and a fairly high level of theological respectability in Islam.
Patricia M, not really — that’s my point. As for shaved monkeys, nah, great apes have some dignity.
Alex, exactly.
Bob, I didn’t mean it as a deep analysis. It’s simply the logical approach, given Russia’s stated goals and obvious interests in this situation. Especially now, when the Russian Stavka has plenty of soldiers, plenty of munitions, plenty of strong allies, and a stable economic and political situation at home, they’d be idiots to settle for anything short of unconditional surrender from Ukraine and the complete military humiliation of NATO — and I don’t think they’re idiots.
I didn’t happen to know that Grant’s generalship was in favor in Russia, but it makes perfect sense: Grant’s genius was that he recognized that Lee was a better tactician than he was, and so used his advantage in numbers and logistics to force Lee into the kind of meatgrinder struggle where tactical brilliance won’t help. The Russians have specialized in that same sort of brutal slugging match for centuries, and they’re very good at it; it’s a sign of just how mentally deficient Ukraine’s NATO controllers are that none of them seem to have remembered what happened the last time somebody tried to use blitzkrieg against the Russian Army…
(For those who don’t recognize this, that’s the Soviet flag flying over the ruins of the Reichstag building in Berlin; the image has the same resonance in Russia that the image of raising the flag over Iwo Jima has here.)
Bofur, and that’s another reason why civilizations fall: in their late phases, elites always convince themselves that they no longer need the loyalty of the rest of society, and they find out they’re wrong when the people they’ve ignored and abused open the gates to Alaric’s Goths.
Samurai_47, it’s been something I’ve brooded over for years. We’ll see what comes of it.
Patricia, good. Daley’s the kind of person who thrives in such situations. Ruth Taira is a subtler example of the same thing, being old-school Japanese-American, but she’s one very ruthless boss.
BeardTree, good. I’ll be talking about that, because you’re quite correct; in terms of civilian killings outside of war, Hitler was a piker compared to Stalin and Stalin is second-rate compared to Mao; Hitler managed about 11 million total, while Stalin did in at least 20 million and Mao’s score was at least double that.
Walt, we’ll be discussing all this further as we proceed.
JMG note: Maugham actually died in 1965 which was only 59 years ago, so in many countries his works are still under copyright, as the general standard for most western countries other than the US is date of death plus 70 years. The US is very much an outlier when it comes to historical copyright, with a very complex set of rules based on date of publication, where first published, compliance with US registration rules, and/or date of author’s death – see https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain for a good summary. This discrepancy explains such oddities as why Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks is out of copyright in the US (published 1901) but in copyright in most of the rest of the western world (less than 70 years since Thomas Mann died).
“Feudalism is the default system of human society”
Heh. As we lurch closer to this – the newest, 21st-century version – there’s something that I’ve thought about.
The funny thing about feudalism is that while the RETVRN crowd might relish the idea in theory, as the reality approaches it becomes clear that, wait a minute, we don’t get to PICK our upcoming lords. It’s gonna be that rich guy you hate, that runs that company that’s destroying your neighbourhood or local ecosystem or whatever. Sorry.
Well, then, perhaps a session on why the literary establishment dismisses Maugham as a second rate writer and essentially ignores him.? (He himself didn’t help things first by being wildly popular and second by evaluating his own place in the literary pantheon as ” the ‘very front row of the second rank.”). A high school teacher of mine assigned The Outstation in a class on composition and the short story, calling it arguably the most perfect short story in the English language. I wonder if English teachers today would risk requiring it (assuming they had even read or heard of it) — the N word does, after all, appear, the common racial prejudices of a century ago are bluntly stated without apology, and the story lacks even a minor female character. But as a dissection of the intersection of class hatred and empire, it’s unrivaled. (Wagner appears now and again in Maugham’s writing — e.g., a wistful reference to the opening of the third act of Tristan in the Narrow Corner — my personal favorite among Maugham’s novels).
@Patricia Mathews (#216):
Yes, I always figured we were about the same age. (I was born in 1942, so I’m 2 or 3 years younger. ) We surely remember a lot of the same things from the 1940s.
Hi John Michael,
The end point was the same, but my time frame was perhaps longer and problematic. I guess the strategic situation and recent history of the region has deteriorated for cordial relations. 🙂 Still I don’t disagree with your take on that story, and having a buffer between yourself and a hostile neighbour, is a wise long term strategy. Crossing that big river though would be a strategic and defensive nightmare, and you’d want to protect as many crossings as possible. Being cut off on the wrong side of that river from supplies would be an unpleasant experience. But once across, there is little to stop things heading west, unless perhaps Poland tries an eastern land grab. It may.
As to your advice to Northwind about doing with less, I absolutely 100% agree with you. There are other ways to go, but that choice is one of power and freedom. Interestingly, I casually dropped that bit of advice into the blog this week – prior to reading your comment above.
If I may, can I please ask you and the commentariat here a way off topic question? I’ve been thinking for a while now that I probably should get onto some podcasts, but don’t have the vaguest notion of which forum would even be appropriate. I’d happily accept any and all advice, and if people want to direct message me about this matter, please feel free to use the email address is chris at ferngladefarm.com.au
Cheers
Chris
KAN, the source for Maugham stories to which I linked is Canadian, not US, and iirc Canada’s copyright laws are usually pretty close to the global standard. Still, point taken.
Bofur, no, it’s not the rich guy, it’s the gang leader, but your point stands. Imagine what a ruling elite has to become before people would rather have the gang leader running their lives!
Tag, maybe you can tell me why the literary establishment ignores him. I have no idea what motivates those people.
Chris, I see the Dnieper as playing the same role in the current war that the Rhine played in the Second World War in the west. In both cases, the invading armies were quite careful to make sure the big battles took place on their side of the river, and only surged across it when the other side was so weak the crossing wasn’t much of a risk. I wonder which small town along the Dnieper will play the role of Remagen…
Simon (offlist), at this point you’re just trying to pick a fight. Enough.
Re: Feudalism
The way you describe feudalism reminds me of the development of higher education. It used to be one of the last bastions of feudalism in the Faustian realm, in the sense that it was based very much on personal relationships between teacher and student, and between scholars. Good scholars oriented themselves to an unwritten code of honour. That was still true, by and large, until WWII. Then the PMC took over (with no capitalist phase inbetween), and within very short time it was all formalized, bureaucratized, and depersonalized. Now we see more and more genuine scientists and scholars (that is, people who care about the subjects they study, not about having a ‘career’) walk away from academia because the system is so dysfunctional. We’ll see how this develops further.
Hi John Michael,
The crossing at Remagen was very lucky that the bridge held for ten days before finally collapsing.
Putting my strategy hat on, and this is all pure theory and speculation, but I’d go for the crossings at Zaporizhia. I looked along the entire length of that river, and that’s where I’d choose to cross. But first I’d cut escape off for both north and south routes out of the city. Most of the population is located on the eastern shore, so the city would naturally empty out to the west – where there is mostly farmland and probably little infrastructure (a significant disaster in itself), except for stragglers and any defenders who’d be placed in the exact same predicament as the Germans in WWII at Remagen. Then heavy air attack. Then fast charge through the city to the bridge. It is not possible to prepare the bridge for demolition and face an air attack all at the same time. It would be a trap for the defenders, so they’d have to leave things to the very last second, and probably stuff it up. History repeating itself. Even then, the crossing would be narrower than elsewhere, so maybe an amphibian crossing or temporary bridge like they used in WWII would work. At least there’d be no marshes to the north and east like at Dnipro. At certain times of the year the river runs drier and lower, so that would inform timing. But going further north would risk having those monster dams breached whilst crossing – not good for anyone. Much further south and maybe Nova Kakhoka would work, but tidal mud flats are hard work. It’s hard to know though. Possibly, the alternative is a route through Belarus, then south. It’s a long way around though, and the bridge you have, is easier than the one you’d have to build under fire.
Out of curiosity, do you have vague memories of a past life in this area? A simple yes or no will suffice. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
>Grant’s genius was that he recognized that Lee was a better tactician than he was, and so used his advantage in numbers and logistics to force Lee into the kind of meatgrinder struggle
At some point Iran will figure out they can do the same thing to the IDF. Again the question I ask these days, is what would Richmond do, if they had nukes in 1864? Don’t park yourself anywhere near Tehran or Tel Aviv.
>members of the managerial class hate
And you can just stop right there.
Dear Mr Greer
I hope you don’t mind if I cast my vote for the gentleman who only had one spherical object.
One particularly pernicious legacy this gentleman has is the way that for western governments (particularly the Angloshere) it is always September 1938 and Chamberlain is about to fly to Munich and Sign away the Sudeten land and usher in world war two (yes I know it’s more complex than that). It also has an equally pernicious effect on Russia where it is always the early hours of June 22nd 1941 and the Nazi hordes are about to roll over their boarder crushing everything in their path. If only the Russians and the west could try to take some time to read history and gain some insight into their opponents psychology, then the world might be a safer place.
It is true Hitler has a lower non war death rate than Mao and Stalin. If he had won the war then his death rate might have been a lot higher. However it is strange that when it comes to being the ultimate bogeyman of evil he rates far above both Stalin and Mao. Part of this is understandable in that we were at war with him and liberated his extermination camps. Part of it is also because sections of the establishment are left wing and try to overlook or down play what comminution did.
Another part of it is that the focus of Stalin’s and Mao’s aggression was mainly internal. Yes, Stalin would sometimes invade another country, but he was very cautious about that and was a rational player in that regard. Hitler on the over hand was one of histories great conquers and was prepared to take insane gambles when it comes to attacking other countries. Killing large number of people in your own country is bad enough, but if you are one of histories great conquers then that is going to scare the shale out of those living in other countries.
Looking forward to what you have to say.
>I would like some sort of explanation of why Truman thought it necessary to employ The Bomb
I remember a company party. For some strange reason, someone had brought a box of balloons with the food and drink. I took the balloons, found a faucet and started filling them up with water.
And then I went around and handed them out, didn’t say a word, just handed one to anyone who would take them.
Things took a moist turn after that. Demand for water balloons went up. All on their own. Some things have a certain logic built into them. You build it, it will get used. Sure, they could’ve just thrown the water balloons away or carefully emptied them of water. And pigs could fly too.
I found this nice youtube channel that has a lot of audio readings of short stories, including Rain by Maugham:
https://www.youtube.com/@neuralsurfer/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1
Rain is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wZHyNdR4dU&ab_channel=neuralsurfer
There are other stories by Sarah Jewett, Edith Wharton and even some Lovecraft.
The reading of Rain was done very well, for those who like to get in some more literature into their head through the medium of their ears.
Hitler wasn’t a seductive aberration that mysteriously appeared in Germany. He made use of and was an expression of dreams of German supremacy and dominance that were quite present in a Germany before the First World War. Here is a description of the desires of the German, military, industrial, and political elite at that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemberprogramm#:~:text=The%20territorial%20changes%20proposed%20in,expense%20of%20the%20Russian%20Empire.
Another example of negative trends in Germany pre-Hitler.
“The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power. As early as 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were “unworthy of life” “
JMG, I don’t think it’s that easy for the Russians to just throw soldiers and more soldiers at the enemy (aka “Zerg rush tactics”) like they used to be able to do. Russia’s losing at least 1000 men every day, and Putin is already resorting to desperate measures such as putting women back at the workforce in droves – while begging them to have at least three kids at the same time – and recruiting foreigners. It doesn’t look like Russia has that many men to spare anymore.
If somebody already said this you can just delete this comment as superfluous, but I am thinking that the ravages of the Bubonic Plague also encouraged the kind of “thinking outside the box” that led to pursuing industrialization and better sailing-ship designs as much as the Little Ice Age and the attempted encroachments of the Ottoman Empire.
Interesting historical note: The boggy, marshy terrain of the Balkans may well have saved Europe from Ottoman conquest and consequently countless European teenage boys being impressed into rape-slavery. That swampy terrain made it pretty much impossible for the Sultain’s troops to get the canon-artillery upon which they relied heavily to the heart of Europe for the final big Ottoman push into the continent in the late seventeenth century.
Robert , JMG, et al
I remember having the discussion about Nazi sympathies a few years ago, either here or the ADR. This late in the cycle I will save any deeper discussion for the 5th Wed. Suffice to say that the 30s was an incredibly complex and interesting decade, and that many in the upper and middle classes throughout the western world felt that Naziism was the lesser threat than Bolshevism.
As to the US use of the atom bomb, the revulsion against the Japanese attrocities in China, The Phillipines, Changi, the death railroad, etc was so huge amongst the allies that they would have gladly killed 1,000,000 Japanese to save one allied soldier. I was a small child then ( b 1940 ) in NYC,USA, but the hatred of the Japanese was palpable.
Robert, Mary Bennett
The feeling of frugality in the 40s was so strong, especially with parents and grandparents who had gone through the entire war and depression.. I remember my grandmother saved string, rubber bands, etc, etc. We were lucky to have a place in the country near a farm so we escaped the worst of the rationing. I’ve never eaten spam since though.
Stephen
Every time I read / hear someone equate Trump with Hitler, I wonder: does this enhance Hitler’s reputation? Equality is reflexive, you know? The Trump we know = the Hitler of popular history? That doesn’t make any sense, so one might be inclined to inquire more sympathetically into Hitler’s career history. When their moderate opponents are labeled as “Nazi’s”, they might be inclined to look more favorably into a group that they hadn’t expected to have any common cause with.
“In the Garden of Beasts”, a book by Erik Larson, gives some subtle insights into the rise of German Nazism. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
“The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America s first ambassador to Hitler s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence.”
Another late-in-life insight: The Nazi’s original target of ethnic cleansing was not Jews, but Roma (“gypsies”). Roma took advantage of German social supports offered to WW-1 veterans, and made themselves unwelcome. But Jews tried to protect the Roma (for humanitarian reasons), which made them increasingly unwelcome to the Christian population. (I’m not saying that this justifies their persecution, but we should also not be afraid to look for reasons.)
JMG: I am reading The Razor’s Edge, and loving every page of it. I can’t tell whether it’s fiction written as autobiography, or true autobiography (as it claims to be) though. Thank you for the convenient link. (I am starting Chapter Five, BTW.) I’m reluctant to admit this to an author, but I’m generally dismissive of fiction, being the product of one person’s imagination, rather than a billion people’s, but it seems to be solidly historical, so I’ll take it.
I know it’s late in the week but I wanted to vote for what is your (JMG’s) favourite thing about living in a modern industrial society. I feel like this blog is often focused on the good things of the past, or the good things of the post-industrial future, so I would like to hear JMGs favourite or few favourite things about our great civilization.
Wer here
Well I can’t say about the others but a lot of people in Poland are awaiting the emergence of a true opposition party here in the goverment. The current establishment is just so out of touch with basic reality.
the disastrous floods in the south part of our country last time. Things just got embarasing , those who are unaware there was a giant flood in the southern regions of Poland in 1997 “Powódź tysiąclecia” cue images of flooded Kłodzko and Wrocław with images of cars floating in the streets. Recently major Polish parties are dragging each other through the dirt screaming “Why weren’t we prapared?? Conviniently forgeting that every major Polish party or it’s closest itteration was in power at least once since 1997 and barely anything was done to adress problems in the south. I don’t want adress the issue of climate change (I am no “expert” from neither side of the climate change debate and don’t know basically nothing about the weather paterns so I don’t know the potential effects on the region) In my comment here not too far ago I mentioned systemic corruption in the Polish goverment, but recent policies like heat pumps in every home ( barely anybody can afford them that I personaly know off). It is just soo jaring that this nonsense is happening when we have so many other problems and are so unprepared for dealing with even a flood that was a fraction of the worst floods in history that many people would welcome the barbarian overlords soo if they just made at least some promises that made sense…
Much of the literary establishment’s disdain for Maugham boils down, I think, to simple envy. He was too popular. His powers of observations were extraordinary and thus he could create wholly convincing characters from all walks of life –snobs, criminals, actors, society women, house maids, social climbers, tycoons, washed-up clergy, religious fanatics, mystics, not to mention pretentious members of the, uh, literary establishment. Thanks to Maugham, we will always know exactly what life was like among the expats washed up in the backwaters of the British Empire or what went on backstage during the golden age of the Edwardian theater. Is there any writer alive today who could pull anything like this off?
Maugham also demonstrated he had their number (has there ever been a better dissection of the nature of literary reputation — how it is manufactured and what it consists of– than Cakes and Ale?). Writers like George Orwell and Stephen King were/are open in their admiration for Maugham, but expressing such would be the kiss of death in the contemporary circles around the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Modern Language Association, or any English department in a “prestigious” university.
Rain by Maugham was quite the story too. I’m going to listen to some more of his shorts. There is one called The Bum that I think I will go to next.
The geotechnical analysis reminded me of an article about shot and sail that I found either by accident or via the daily news compendium at NakedCapitalism. I have previously seen discussions showing that castles were rendered obsolete by cannon. And the rise of gunpowder as a vehicle for delivery of government services. Apparently to be replaced by earthworks of the sort seen at the siege of Petersburg in the unCivil war. You probably have seen the claims that the Mongolian Empire failed on bioenergetics – a statistical fluctuation in climate/weather altered the availability of grass for fueling delivery of government services. Speaking of statistical fluctuations in climate/weather, The Great Frost of 1740-41 makes the Potato Genocide look like a walk in the park. This article discusses geopolitical change resulting from new naval technologies and strategies:
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-shot-and-sail
Your comments about mill locations along the east coast are spot on. Slater’s Mill on the Blackstone River being a prime example. A great story of intellectual property theft and part of the foundation of the Brown fortune and the namesake University. When a rising global empire is taking technology from a soon-to-be failing global empire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slater_Mill_Historic_Site
It would be easy to misinterpret my next comment as pedantry. Ironically, your poster child mill in Littleton is 45 rocky miles upstream from the confluence that forms the Merrimack River, itself 117 mostly-rocky and -unnavigable miles to the ocean. There is some fantastic hiking near Littleton. I stayed there twice to do these:
https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7002742/franconia-ridge-loop
https://www.hikingproject.com/trail/7006930/tuckerman-ravine
Hi, JMG, at #161:
I’m not thinking about random wokista comment-trolls, I’m sure you can handle those (with glee, even) as you stated.
What concerns me is if TPTB get the idea that, or think they can persuade others that, you are a neonazi. There are vehement nazi-haters in high places– Google, major ISPs, antivirus companies such as Avast, and the government itself. If they decide to, they could do their utmost to >eraseyour< ISP to drop you
– Lean on Bookshop, Patreon and Subscribestar to drop you from their platforms
We've all seen multiple outspoken people get "canceled" this way over the years. This is what I meant by "wokista nukes raining down". It could get very ugly indeed.
I am not at all advocating that you avoid discussing Herr Mustache. Instead, I urge you to make it crystal clear in your title and the opening sentences of your essay that you do NOT approve of what he did; rather (as I'm sure you plan to), you will be discussing why people still obsess about him so. A tactically worded title (such as "Hitler: The Darkest Archetype", for example) might even bring some wokistas in to read the essay and do a bit of necessary thinking.
Hitler could never have killed all those people by himself. He roused the dark shadow in millions of Germans, who then did his dirty work for him. That dark shadow does need to be discussed because we all have some shadow in us. If we do not face that fact, and manage our shadow, it will rise up, bite us in the @$$, and own us. Then, tragedy and horror ensue.
Correction to my bullet list, I think the comment software may have messed it up:
… they might do their utmost to erase you:
– Have antivirus companies such as Avast blacklist your site, so that we can’t browse to it (this has already happened to me with the Wortcunning book volume 1)
– Lean on major ISPs to block traffic to/from your site
– Lean on your ISP to drop you
– Lean on Bookshop, Patreon and Subscribestar to drop you
…
Kastan #185, thanks a lot for Midwestern Doctor’s essay about Hurricane Helene (among other interesting topics).
FWIW, here is FEMA’s response to the various things being said about their Helene response:
https://www.fema.gov/disaster/current/hurricane-helene/rumor-response
JMG, thanks a ton for these forums of yours, they are invaluable.
@Bruno,
While it may be true that the Russian population today is not the equal of the much larger population of the USSR during WWII, I think you be mistaken about them dire manpower needs today. The latest accounts I have read is that they are losing much, much fewer than the 1000 men a day you have quoted. That may have been the case in the very early stages of the war when they stumbled upon prepared Ukranian defenses and were ambushed but there is no sensible reason for such losses today given their current advantages and tactics.
The Russians have complete air superiority, and at least a 10 to one advantage in artillery. They have no reason to charge the Ukranian positions and take casualties. They can shell, bomb, and Drone any Ukranian position until it surrenders, they retreat or their is no one left.
They then send in a small squad to mop up. The numbers I have seen is that the Russians may have lost no more than 250 soldiers all summer and fall. The Ukrainians are out of equipment, ammo and men and the Russians are in no hurry, so there is no reason for them to use rush tactics and take large casualties.
Sure they are inviting immigrants, but they have a huge lightly populated country with lots of room for more, with a growing economy that can easily absorb more carefully chosen citizens.
Plus they have another source of population gain you did not mention. Large quantities of immigrants are fleeing to Russia from the Ukraine ( Russian speakers, not Nazi’s).
Robert K, that’s a great example.
Chris, I haven’t looked closely at the crossings of the Dnieper, but Zaporizhia seems like a good option, not least since a march on Odessa is the most likely move once the Ukrainian forces collapse.
Other Owen, the German high command had huge amounts of nerve gas in 1945; they didn’t use any of it, because they assumed (correctly) that the Allies had the same thing and would retaliate in kind. Iran is a huge country, Israel a very small one; an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran would kill a lot of people, but an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel could quite literally annihilate the entire nation. I doubt anyone in the Israeli government is unaware of this.
Jasmine, yes, we’ll be talking about all of this as we proceed.
Justin, thanks for this.
BeardTree, look up The Book of a Hundred Chapters sometime. It was written around 1510, and calls for German world conquest and the annihilation of the Jews. That sort of thinking goes back a long ways.
Bruno, where are you getting these claims? I get my news from neutral countries and what I’m reading contradicts what you’re saying in every detail. In particular, the Russian combat death toll is a very small fraction of Ukrainian losses at this point; it’s Ukraine, not Russia, that’s frantically drafting women to try to fill widening gaps in their industries and frontline forces; and the Russians are advancing steadily on the central Donbass front — they stormed the fortress city of Ugledar a few days ago and are closing in on the central transit hub of Pokrovsk. Those aren’t the actions of an army running short on men. (Nor are they using “Zerg rush” tactics — that cliché has been used to death by Western media despite a complete lack of evidence.)
Mister N, every historical event has many causes, just as every historical event has many effects. That is to say, you’re doubtless right that the plague also had a role in all this.
Lathechuck, one consequence of the obsession with Hitler is that I expect to see Nazism rehabilitated in the decades immediately ahead. Throw that much energy at any historical figure and you can pretty much guarantee the rise of a cult. We’ll talk about that in the upcoming post. As for The Razor’s Edge, glad to hear it. It’s a mistake to see any worthwhile work of fiction as the product of a single mind, btw — a good writer gives voice to a community or subculture, a great writer gives voice to an entire age.
Merle, that’s very simple: the technological suite that make books cheap and readily available. I’ve probably gotten more sheer delight out of reading than anything else in this life — yes, including sex! — and the fact that books are cheap, abundant, and readily available is my favorite thing about modern civilization.
Wer, well, we’re seeing similar scenes right now in North Carolina, complete with the same utter lack of preparedness or effective response and the same lack of effective response by the political establishment, so I think you’re right about the barbarian warlords. If one of those with a good-sized horde were to show up in the Asheville area and do something useful I think the locals would welcome them with open arms.
Tag, thanks for this. I keep forgetting that anyone still pays attention to the Iowa Writers Workshop and similar exercises in in-group onanism.
Justin, you really can’t go wrong with any of Maugham’s fiction.
CM, I simply found a nice picture of a water mill using a search engine, so I certainly won’t argue.
Cicada, oh, I’m quite aware of that risk. That’s why I stopped using Blogger for my blogging platform, why I use SubscribeStar (which specializes in the unacceptable) alongside Patreon, and why I’ve made any number of other career decisions. I’ve already been accused rather more than once of neo-Nazi sympathies, you know. (Ironically, genuine neo-Nazis have accused me of being secretly Jewish.) In my usual fashion, though, I plan on going at a 135° angle to everyone’s expectations. Stay tuned!
Words like the “Iowa Writers Workshop” are the kiss of death to readers.
Justin, and deservedly so. Just as painters these days preen themselves on making images that only the cognoscenti can appreciate, and important architects scorn the thought that their buildings should be attractive and functional, writers of the Iowa Writers Workshop variety would be struck dumb with horror by the suggestion that anyone outside their little mutual admiration society might gain a moment’s enjoyment out of anything they write. The sad thing is that now and again one of them shows some signs of actual literary talent, which could have been used for some better purpose than the straight-to-the-dustbin products they excrete.
In Europe I’d expect Hitler’s reputation to be rehabilitated by Muslim and African immigrants and their leftist allies who begin to view Hitler as a anti-colonialist who valiantly fought against the evil evil evil British and French and American empires but lost.
I had to laugh even as I shook my head at that one, looking towards the dustbin. So true.
The Bum was great too. Wonderful descriptive sentences I wrote down from that story and Rain to put in my common book, and both utterly scathing to the respective classes they were aimed at. I’ll have to make time for his novels.
From Pocket: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/meet-the-modern-day-pagans-who-celebrate-the-ancient-gods?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
AdF in Southern Washington State – west of the Cascades, from the description.
Also from Pocket – the headline reads “Gen-Z particularly weird about age gaps.” The meat of it is: they think even a 3-5 year age gap is exploitive. My take: they feel intimidated by Millennials. (Any older and we’re looking at partners old enough to be their parents.) Any ideas? Of interest to me because all my grandchildren except one are in that easily-intimidated age group.
And: re: Hurricane Milton. I got a long memo in my cubby this morning detailing what we’re going to do here Wednesday and what will close down, and that they expect it to be over by early Thursday. That is, they think it’ll be a hit-and-tun hurricane here in Alachua County.
JMG, true, I’ll admit that my sources are from Western media and all. Most estimates range around 1200 casualties per day. But it’s been like that for a long time. What *really* pricked up my ears was this, which you can check in other sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/30/russia-putin-antifeminism-women-children-society/
That’s NOT the sort of measure a government resorts to, unless it’s desperate.
Re: The Razors Edge; “I can’t tell whether it’s fiction written as autobiography, or true autobiography (as it claims to be) though.”
It hooked me too. The characters seem too conveniently connected to be real, but the types are real enough. Isabelle is a type, love or security? Elliot, famous for being famous? Grey, the monied class guy who thinks that is all there is? And Larry comes back from the war convinced the things he thought were important were not.
Interleaving real people’s stories into a combined story has been done before and is working quite well.
I came out of the service much different than how I went in and no one was shooting at me. My cousin got out, refused a job my uncle had set up, then after about three months decided civilian life was pointless and re-enlisted.
Off-topic this week, sort of.
I was quite happy to have bumped into a particularly illuminating book which seems appropriate for a run-up to an essay on Hitler. (I haven’t the foggiest if someone has mentioned this book before or recently. Sorry if I repeat.)
“The Lightning and the Sun” by Savitri Devi. Published 1956. ISBN 9781447540434. She was born Maximiani Julia Portas (1905-1982). Relates to India, Hinduism, and Kali Yuga. I perk up with anyone mentions Kali Yuga.
I bought my copy from ThriftBooks.
Pretty interesting stuff.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🇮🇳
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Chris at Fernglade #229
> podcast
https://www.racket.news
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn (not Kern)
Journalists, writers.
Racket News.
Subscription.
One of Taibbi’s and Kirn’s offerings is their weekly Thursday “America This Week,” nicknamed ATW, never ceases to teach something new about WTF is going on regarding the election coming up on November 5, and the Federal govmint. They do a weekly America This Week video, and the following day, the written transcript shows up. Walter Kirn is pure dynamite. When I run out of things to read online (like these comments, I read EVERY last one EVERY week), I watch their weekly video, plus go back in time to catch the earlier videos/transcripts (I am currently in late July 2024). Each video is a couple hours. They riffle each other’s pack of cards. Kirn is in his early 60s.
I consider Taibbi a living Studs Terkel, but now I am thinking it is Kirn. Maybe both. I can’t choose.
I am glad I re-discovered Taibbi. I lost track of him for 13-14 years, then saw his name still around, and sought out his blog (and Kirn’s).
Taibbi is a city boy (New Jersey, I think) and Kirn a country boy (Montana).
Kirn has a separate publication (online👩🏼💻and paper🗞️) called “County Highway” at https://www.countyhighway.com, which *IS* worth the rather expensive subscription price (if one can afford it) — exceptional stories. Akin to The Sun Magazine https://www.thesunmagazine.org.
💨Northwind Grandma💨📰
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG,
Thank you for the link to the old reincarnation post & comments. I seem to be going through a time of change with a lot of self-examination just now. I’m sure the fact that you posted this now, and I am so receptive now, is a coincidence. Or something. I may have some questions for you, although I already have the questions so I may be able to estimate your response by the time I get to the end of all the comments. Which might take awhile, since pretty often my mind gets blown and I have to stop, and ponder. Thank you for this.
The Other Owen #233
> Richmond
Is this a person? If so, be more specific. If not, what are you referring to?
Thanks.
💨Northwind Grandma💨❓
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG #253– thumbs up, glad to hear it.
Looking forward to the 135-degree-angle ! 😀
I didn’t know/remember that about Subscribestar, good to know.
The theme of the fifth Wed post seems to be decided. I will look forward to it…
I can’t help noticing the number of methods people have resorted to in this comment thread, just to register a vote for a post about Hitler, without having to name the “Name”… 😉
I have a feeling that that, in and of itself, speaks volumes about the “archetypal” nature of the theme.