Siegfried’s betrayal of his ideals and his love for Brunnhilde, the central theme of our discussion three weeks ago, is also the hinge upon which the entire story of The Ring turns toward its end. Our blond and brawny hero was doomed the moment he took the Ring from Fafner’s hoard, Alberich’s curse guarantees that, but it was not yet certain how the curse would destroy him. Once Siegfried put his fearlessness and his magic cap in the service of Gunther’s sleazy plan, that was settled, and the rest of the story proceeds with terrible inevitability from that point on.
Of course, outside the world of the story, that outcome was determined before Richard Wagner was born. The Twilight of the Gods depends more than the cycle’s other operas on the raw material Wagner inherited from medieval legends. It’s hardwired into the tale that Siegfried would fall in love with Gutrune, that he would pay her bride-price by using the magic cap to obtain Brunnhilde for Gunther under false pretenses, that Brunnhilde would discover the ruse and repay one betrayal with another by letting Hagen know about Siegfried’s only vulnerable spot, that Hagen will follow through by thrusting a spear through Siegfried’s back when the hero expected no danger, and that the consequences of that treacherous deed would include the deaths of Brunnhilde, Gunther, and Hagen, and the fall of the Gibichung kingdom.
All those details of the plot came to Wagner down through the centuries, all the way from whichever forgotten storyteller in the Dark Ages first wove together the story of fall of Gundacar the Gibichung, the last king of the Burgundians, with the tale of the vengeful Frankish queen Brunechildis and the archaic myth of the sun-hero who slew the dragon of winter and freed the golden sun. It’s what Wagner did with those elements, and how he used them as a basis for talking about the political, economic, and philosophical themes that structure the entire story of The Ring, that shows Wagner’s genius.
I don’t simply mean that last word only in an artistic sense, though of course Wagner was a brilliant creator. He wrote at a time when the literary genre of allegory hadn’t quite become moribund yet, and it was still just possible to express profound thought in the form of symbolic narrative. Here as in so many other ways, he stood at the hinge of ages, when one era was ending and another about to begin; it’s no surprise that so many people nowadays have trouble grasping the idea that a great work of art can also deal with the gritty realities of politics and economics. Friedrich Nietzsche, by turns Wagner’s best friend and bitterest enemy, attempted the same thing with philosophy a few decades later in the mythic narrative of Thus Spake Zarathustra, but by then it was already too late. Next to nobody understood what Nietzsche was saying, and his own plunge into insanity and death followed not long thereafter.
Wagner avoided that fate, barely. Schopenhauer’s philosophy gave him a way to make sense of the tragic conclusion of his story, and thus also of the equally tragic conclusion he foresaw for the entire historical arc of European society. On a more pragmatic level, the ample financial support he received from King Ludwig II of Bavaria spared him a great deal of stress, and the emotional support he received from his second wife Cosima—not to mention her patient and competent management of his affairs, in several senses of that word—took care of much of the rest. Where Nietzche ended his life as a burnt-out psychotic in a mental ward, Wagner ended his as the Western world’s most adored living composer, living in luxury and basking in the applause of legions of crazed fans in every country of Europe and the European diaspora. How many of those fans understood what he was trying to say is a good question, and one that haunted him in his last years, if Cosima’s recollections are anything to go by.
We can try to make sense of the implications of his ideas by paying attention to some of the core themes of The Twilight of the Gods, and relating them to the subtext we’ve been following all through this series of posts.
Let’s start with one detail that often gets missed: the way that some of the most important symbols and dramatic actions in the earlier operas in the cycle get reprised in this one. The most striking of these, appropriately enough, center on the Ring itself. Just as Wotan takes the Ring by force from Alberich, setting the entire tragedy of the later operas in motion, the old god’s grandson Siegfried takes the Ring from Brunnhilde by force, setting his own personal tragedy in motion. Just as Wotan, motivated by greed, refuses to give the Ring back to the Rhinemaidens when he has the chance, his grandson, motivated by pride, refuses to give the Ring back to the Rhinemaidens when he has the chance—and doom clamps down hard on both characters once that final chance has slipped away.
Notice also how Wotan in the aftermath of The Rhinegold redirects his affections from Fricka to Erda, furthermore, and thus guarantees that Fricka will turn on him with icy fury in The Valkyrie and destroy his plan to regain the ring. In much the same way, Siegfried in the first act of The Twilight of the Gods redirects his affections from Brunnhilde to Gutrune, and thus guarantees that Brunnhilde will turn on him with equally icy fury, and even more devastating effect, in the second act. In all these ways and others, Siegfried shows himself to be Wotan’s rightful heir, as selfish and self-defeating as the king of the gods himself.
Siegfried isn’t the only character to reprise an earlier role in the present opera, of course. Just as Sieglinde was kidnapped and forced into marriage with Hunding in the backstory of The Valkyrie, Brunnhilde is kidnapped and forced into marriage with Gunther in The Twilight of the Gods. It’s a bitterly edged irony that Sieglinde’s own son is the one who does the kidnapping in this latter case, just as it was Sieglinde’s own father Wotan who arranged for the kidnapping in the earlier case. Yet there’s an important difference here, as in the other parallels just mentioned. Wotan knew exactly what he was doing when he treated his mortal children as pawns in his plot to recapture the Ring. Siegfried, by contrast, has no clue what’s going on. He stumbles blindly along a track laid down before he was born by the events of the first two operas. It’s for this reason that Brunnhilde can rise above her own bitterness and forgive him in the tremendous final scene of the opera, just before she sacrifices herself and her world to the consuming flames.
In a very real sense, then, the action of The Twilight of the Gods recapitulates the action of the whole cycle of operas. What was enacted then in a world of gods, giants, and magic dwarfs is reenacted in the human world. The great difference between this last opera and the three that come before it, after all, is that now the world of gods and mythic beings has receded almost beyond the range of vision. The Norns appear in the first part of the Prelude, but the cord of destiny snaps in their hands and they vanish from the scene; one of the Valkyries puts in an appearance, pleading with Brunnhilde to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens, but without effect; Alberich comes to his son Hagen in the depths of the night, but as an insubstantial presence, almost a ghost; and Wotan and his castle in the clouds hover like a phantom in the distance, visible only in the final scene when the flames take them.
There’s an ancient vision of history underlying all this, and it’s one that Wagner—like every other person who received a middle or upper class education in nineteenth-century Europe—learned about in childhood. The Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro, whom other scholars of his time considered the most learned of all Rome’s antiquarians, divided history into three ages: the age of gods, which is chronicled only in myth; the age of heroes, which is chronicled in legend; and the age of men, which is chronicled in history. That’s the scheme that structures the temporal vision of The Ring. The Rhinegold is set in the age of gods, and human beings play no role in it at all. The Valkyrie and Siegfried are set in the age of heroes, and in it human beings mingle with gods, dragons, and other legendary beings. The Twilight of the Gods is set in the age of men, when the gods are fading shadows that perish in the final scene.
It’s an indication of the importance of that scheme that JRR Tolkien, whose Ring trilogy so often provides an edgy counterpoint to Wagner’s tetralogy, also used a variant of Varro’s system. No, these aren’t the three ages of Middle-earth. If you happen to read The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s account of the myths and legends of the elves, you’ll find that there were ages before the beginning of the notional First Age. For example, Morgoth was bound for three ages of the world in the prison of Mandos after his defeat at the siege of Utumno.
These three ages were the Noontide of Valinor, Tolkien tells us, and correspond to the age of gods in Varro’s system. There followed the three ages of Middle-earth, during which Elves and Men contended with Morgoth and his servant Sauron; these correspond to Varro’s age of heroes. Finally, Tolkien speaks of the Fourth Age, which he and Varro both term the age of men. The idea that the world would last for seven ages was a staple of medieval Christian legend, and Tolkien blended it with Varro’s scheme with his usual panache. But then Tolkien was a Christian, of course, and Wagner was not—a point which will become even more edged when we reach Wagner’s final opera Parsifal.
The same system of three ages also has a distinctive meaning in the light of Wagner’s great metaphor, shaped as it was by Feuerbach’s interpretation of myth and legend. To Wagner, who didn’t believe in the real existence of gods, myth was necessarily what Feuerbach said it was, a way of talking about the highest ideals and basic understandings of a particular human society. That was why The Rhinegold, set in the age of gods, laid out what Wagner identified as the fundamental problem of European society: the commodification of nature (very much including human nature), the process by which all values were reduced to monetary value and thus controlled by those who had money.
The age of heroes is transitional, representing the way this fundamental problem worked out in history. At this stage of the metaphor, gods and humans, ideal principles and actual historical phenomena, mingle and interbreed with very mixed results. In The Valkyrie and Siegfried, Wotan—in the earlier opera, the ideal principle of rule by an intellectual elite, the grand and disastrously misguided dream of Pythagoras, Plato, and their myriad followers down through the ages—became the intelligentsia as a historical class, the people who embraced the ideal principle and tried to make it real in the world of history.
We watched them place all their hopes on the idea of liberty, and manipulate that idea in the hope that they could use it to seize power. We also saw them lose control of it, as the ideal was taken from them by the revolutionary Siegfrieds of radical movements in Europe and around the world, who overthrew the authotiry of the intellectuals as their first act, replacing it with the rule of raw force in the normal revolutionary manner. Opera being opera, and myth being myth, that took place one time only. In history, of course, it repeats over and over again. So far, at least, each new generation of would-be Wotans has to learn the same lesson the hard way.
That’s the basic theme of The Twilight of the Gods. Having taken the concept of liberty far more literally than the intelligentsia intended, each generation of revolutionary Siegfrieds liberate themselves from the ideologies and belief systems that were intended to make them hand over power to the intelligentsia, and proceed to bargain with the old elite classes for whatever Gutrune-shaped goodies they think they can get. The Gunthers and Hagens of each generation, in turn, are generally more than ready to cut a deal with the Siegfrieds, partly because most of them were Siegfrieds in an earlier decade before they sold out, and partly because Hagen’s spear is always handy if the Siegfrieds step out of line. Those of my readers who have watched the history of the last half century or so know this song well enough to sing it in the shower.
It would be easy enough to portray this as a straightforward repeating cycle. There’s a broader pattern at work in it, however, and it’s one that many people are beginning to notice around them at this phase of our own historical process. Each repetition of the cycle, after all, whittles away at the legitimacy of the system and also of the ideals that it supposedly embodies. Each generation of revolutionaries, as it abandons the rhetoric of liberty in order to secure its own privilege, makes it harder for anyone to take seriously the claims of the new leadership regarding liberty—or anything else, for that matter.
It’s hard to tell, either from the operas or from Wagner’s letters and essays, whether he expected the loss of faith in the Valhalla of Western ideals to be gradual, or whether he foresaw a collapse as sudden as the one that happens in the last scene of The Twilight of the Gods. It’s clear, though, that he recognized that an ideal betrayed often enough loses any power to move people to action. Thus it’s not just the kingdom of the Gibichungs that goes up in flames, it’s Valhalla itself, and also Brunnhilde, the ideal of liberty, who kindles the fire in which she herself will perish.
That, in turn, is when the Rhine comes rushing in to finish the process.
All through the cycle of operas, from the opening chord of The Rhinegold, the waters of the Rhine have symbolized nature. In that first opera, nature had a wholly passive role to play: the Rhinemaidens’ guardianship of the magic gold didn’t give Alberich the least trouble once he decided to take it. When Erda the earth goddess put in her appearance toward the end of The Rhinegold, all she could do was offer good advice, and she was receptive enough to Wotan’s response that nine Valkyries promptly resulted. In the next two plays, the role of nature was nearly as passive: in The Valkyrie, the ash tree growing in the middle of Hunding’s hall didn’t offer the least resistance when Siegmund extracted the sword from it, and while the forest bird in Siegfried had a slightly more active part to play, her role was simply to give the clueless hero some idea of what was going on.
Yet that passivity comes to a decisive end in The Twilight of the Gods. The Rhimemaidens fail to convince Siegfried to hand over the Ring, true, but they make the attempt; they have much more success explaining to Brunnhilde everything she doesn’t know about the situation; and when flames rise from Siegfried’s funeral pyre and Brunnhilde flings herself into the fire to join him in death, the waters of the Rhine come sweeping in to take the Ring from Siegfried’s ashes and return it to where it belongs. When Hagen tries to intervene and get the Ring for himself, the Rhinemaidens show that they’ve learned from their experiences. They don’t tease and taunt him as they did his father; they drag him under the waters and hold him there until he drowns.
So the story ends. In terms of Wagner’s great metaphor, what has happened? Simply this: in the final crisis of society, the system of commodification itself breaks down. Money, that complex system of tokens that the elites of industrial society use to control and exploit the exchange of goods and services, turns out to be too brittle a thing to survive the final crisis of the society that created it. As the system burns down, all the tokens of notional wealth—including, by the way, gold, the keystone of the financial system in Wagner’s time—lose their ability to exert power on people and extract real, nonfinancial wealth from them. Those glittering objects, once rings of genuine power, become nothing more than pretty toys for Rhinemaidens to play with.
That, at least, was Wagner’s vision. One of the fascinating things about it is that history appears to agree with him. It’s one of curious details of economic history that as the Roman empire fell and the Dark Ages closed in, money dropped almost entirely out of use in economies across the Western world. In 300 AD, nearly every imaginable transaction in what was then the western half of a huge empire involved the exchange of gold, silver, or copper coins; five hundred years later, the great majority of people in the same region could easily go through their entire lives without ever handling a coin. Market economies went away almost completely, and were replaced by customary systems of exchange in which a man might pay rent on a piece of land by handing over a tenth of the grain he grew on it each year, plus two piglets suitable for roasting each Christmas. Commodification collapsed, giving way to the same patterns of personal relationship that the young Wagner and his fellow romantic revolutionaries had glorified so enthusiastically.
Yet The Twilight of the Gods has very little else in common with the fond fantasies of redemption through revolution that Feuerbach and the left-Hegelians had put into circulation. Just to start with, Wotan and Valhalla are gone; the intelligentsia and its castle in the clouds are among the casualties of the process. The Gibichung kingdom is right next to them on the obituary page, and so are death notices for nearly all the characters. (Not, however, Gutrune. Keep her in mind; we won’t see her again, but she’s a bridge to the final stage of our discussion.) To get out from under the curse of commodification, Wagner seems to be saying, the only option is to burn everything down to the ground
It’s a bleak prospect. Wagner being Wagner, he couldn’t leave it at that. He had only one more opera to write after The Twilight of the Gods, and he considered it his most important work—so important, in fact, that while he lived it could only be performed at his own specially constructed opera house at Bayreuth. This was Parsifal, the opera in which he tried to come to a final synthesis and resolution of the themes he’d introduced in The Nibelung’s Ring. In order to make sense of that, we’re going to have to take another deep dive into the world of myth and legend…and when we do, starting two weeks from now, we’ll find that Wagner has gotten there before us and is waiting to show us around.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Karen who is in the hospital with RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) quickly recover and be restored to full health.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who has been in the hospital since 1/20 with almost complete liver failure and 20% kidney function, have found the strength to survive and thrive when he recently came off of his respirator, and may he be blessed with robust healing that allows him to regenerate his failing organs to the fullest extent that the universe allows; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Jennifer, who is now 36+ weeks into pregnancy with the baby still in breech position, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Matt, who is currently struggling with MS related fatigue, be blessed and healed such that he returns to full energy; and may he be enlightened as to the best way to manage his own situation to best bring about this healing.
May NPM/Nick’s 12-year-old Greyhound Vera, who passed away on 1/20, be blessed and comforted, and granted rest and a peaceful transition to the next life. (1/23)
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May MethylEthyl, who recently fractured a rib coughing, heal without complications, and have sufficient help for the move that she and hers are making at the end of the month.
May Sub’s Wife’s major surgery last week have gone smoothly and successfully, and may she recover with ease back to full health.
May David/Trubrujah’s 5 year old nephew Jayce, who is back home after chemotherapy for his leukemia, be healed quickly and fully, and may he, and mother Amanda, and their family find be aided with physical, mental, and emotional strength while they deal with this new life altering situation. (good news update!)
May Mindwinds’s dad Clem, who in the midst of a struggle back to normal after a head injury has been told he shows signs of congestive heart failure, be blessed, healed, and encouraged.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. He is not doing well, and consents to any kind of distance healing offered. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe] (1/7)
May Christian’s cervical spine surgery on 1/14 have been successful, and may he heal completely and with speed; and may the bad feelings and headaches plaguing him be lifted.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Bill Rice (Will1000) in southern California, who suffered a painful back injury, be blessed and healed, and may he quickly recover full health and movement.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Daedalus/ARS receive guidance and finish his kundalini awakening, and overcome the neurological and qi and blood circulation problems that have kept him largely immobilised for several years; may the path toward achieving his life’s work be cleared of obstacles.
May baby Gigi, continue to gain weight and strength, and continue to heal from a possible medication overdose which her mother Elena received during pregnancy, and may Elena be blessed and healed from the continuing random tremors which ensued; may Gigi’s big brother Francis continue to be in excellent health and be blessed.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
” an ideal betrayed often enough loses any power to move people to action”.
Yeah. Hit the nail on the head. We’re seeing a lot of that in real life in a lot of areas of late, and it’s a large part of why things are getting so unstable and generally interesting-timesy.
You should publish this series as a book
It is really fascinating in the lenses of our current environment in Globalized Western culture. Great read once again this serious really has me enthralled. Thank you.
The Ring Cycle so far reminds me of one of the meanings that I read from the Second Branch of the Mabinogion, right down to nature’s taking back what is her own at the end. Does that make sense to you? And if it does, does the Third Branch correspond in some sense to Parsifal?
interesting topic, I haven’t read Wagner, and I think that with your summaries I think that it is enough, the conclusion of “Twilight of the Gods”, I don’t know how Wagner came to that conclusion, but Giambattista Vico came to the same thing around the 18th century, although talking about Vico is complicated. I speak Spanish (Vico was Italian), believe me, reading Vico in a Latin language, despite being similar languages, it hurts anyone to read Vico.
Do you have any plans to do an analysis, similar to Wagner’s, of Nietzsche? It would be interesting although very long, but it would be nice to read something about Nietzsche from other perspectives, an author so forgotten today.
In other news, have you seen the recent declaration of the United States government (I’m from Latin America) to control and turn Gaza into a tourist resort (Gazysium? because of Elisyum the movie)? My reaction was to laugh 🤣 at first because, far from the pompous statements, in my opinion, this has been one of the great defeats for Israel, this is simply accepting the fact that they are incapable of administering their territory, Gaza is Israel’s as far as I understand, they leave the administration of Gaza to an external nation and the reconstruction is the responsibility of the UN, easy, without complications.
I took the time to reread this opera just before this post came up.
It’s a wonderful post, and I look forward to Persifal.
Best regards,
Marko
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Pygmycory, it’s one of the things that ideologists never understand, and just as routinely end up suffering some versions of Hagen’s fate as a result. We may see a lot of that in the near future.
Charles, I’m assembling it into a manuscript as I write it. I’ll have to see if anybody wants to publish it, though.
Kyle, you’re welcome and thank you!
SLClaire, in a certain sense, yes — the connections between the Mabinogi of Manawyddan ap Llyr and the Grail legends generally are worth noting. (The Waste Land motif is common to both, for example.) More broadly, though, the Grail legend in its full form corresponds to the four Branches in general; I may discuss that in a book someday.
Zarcayce, I’ve read Vico in English (there are several good translations) and checked the text against the Latin original; he’s hard to read unless you can get into the end-of-the-Renaissance headspace he inhabited, but he makes a lot of sense once you’re there. I hadn’t considered a series on Nietzsche, though I’ve written about him already. Here are two examples:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2013/03/the-sound-of-gravediggers.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2013/05/the-rock-by-lake-silvaplana.html
With regard to the Gaza thing, keep in mind that this was an off-the-cuff comment by Donald Trump, who’s made a career of dropping bombs like that. Few of them ever go anywhere, because their goal is to destabilize the situation and keep his opponents off balance. We’ll see if there’s any attempt to follow through on it.
Marko, thanks for this.
JMG, it is a pity you don’t do video. I think you would enjoy Castle in the Sky. The artists of Studio Ghibli have created some of the most beautiful images of our day.
Thank you for the remark about Plato, Pythagoras, et al. There are those now who would like to reinvent Plato as some kind of enemy of oligarchy and defender of democracy. They did not read the same Plato I did.
So I gather the options for the USA in the coming months, years, and decades are:
1. The people back Spenglerian Ceasarism. The Ceasars use appeals to religion (probably divine right of kings) and tradition to maintain power instead of ideology. The people by-and-large lose interest in politics and ideology.
2. Social and cultural disingration from disillusionment. Selfish desires are the only things that seem real after ideology collapses, and society can no longer function. This seems to me to be what Wagner is describing.
3. Abandon Faustian excesses and fall back on different ideologies or rules of thumb that work better at this period of history. Seems like the approach favored by the commentariat is a Fortress America the Trump administration might bring about, plus recognition of resource limits and the need for America to live within its means.
I thought history could be neatly folded into the Aeon of Isis, Aeon of Osiris, and Aeon of Horus… or the time of matriarchy, patriarchy, and now youth-y-archy. Malarkey.
Also, Tolkien was really a Hegelian in disguise. What is the return of the Elves to Valinor but the ultimate unfolding of the “long now” into the ultimate paradise free from the worldly cares of middle earth? Aka communist utopia for elves.
Or maybe Wagner should have got in touch with Hari Seldon to mitigate the twilight of the intelligentsia?
Just kidding / late afternoon brain amusements to keep me from lashing out at the closest PMC representative / glad a coworker had their last day, hopefully they don’t hire a repeat / didn’t get enough sleep.
Once again, the Ring Cycle makes for some interesting comparisons to real life, and the fate of civilizations…An example… Season 1 of the Landman, Billy Bob Thornton, whose job is managing drilling and producing oil and gas in the Permian basin, has an interesting conversation with a drug Kingpin who has just rescued him from the violence of a lower level thug…The genial Kingpin says that we have to cooperate so we don’t interfere with each other, which is also used for smuggling…Billy Bob kind of agrees, but says neither of our businesses has much of a future, so you should diversify…Kingpin agrees, and says, your business still has some future left, so I want to get into it….For a cable series, the mutual acknowledgement that we will be in a totally different world not too far down the road, is startling….
“Thus it’s not just the kingdom of the Gibichungs that goes up in flames, it’s Valhalla itself, and also Brunnhilde, the ideal of liberty, who kindles the fire in which she herself will perish.”
This magnificent sentence sent chills up my spine.
Cataclysmic fire (comets, volcanoes) and flood cycles are clearly part of collective human memory, since the motifs recur in multiple myths and legends. There is even evidence of such events recorded in ancient architecture, according to some serious researchers.
Thank you for this series; I’m looking forward to the Parsifal installment.
Why is it that for Wagner true love is illegitimate or forbidden? Siegmund and Sieglinde are siblings, Brunnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt. Further afield are Tristan and Isolde (she’s promised to King Mark), Lohengrin and Elsa (he’s sworn to never give his name) and even Walther and Eva (who’s promised to the winner of the singing competition). For that matter, none of Wotan’s children are by his wife! Is this just a Romantic thing or does it play into the allegory?
Thank you again, JMG, so very interesting to me (and many others here) for this history of ideas through opera.
Double thank you for your essay on Jung from last week as well.
Look forward to the weeks ahead,
I second Zarcayce’s hope for more posts on Nietzsche–especially his relationship with Wagner, but also more of your interpretation of Also sprach Zarathustra.
Hi John Michael,
The unfolding events in the saga are hardly surprising. At any point in time, the protagonists could simply all walk away from their desire for power and control. Then they could all go off and do something more useful with the time and resources left to them. But do they do that?
The funny thing about power, is that Wotan – just for an example – doesn’t seem to comprehend that his own grubby stature limits the possibilities available to him, even if he got the cursed ring. He’d not be able to rise beyond his own self. In fact, it reflects very poorly upon his character that he even seeks power whilst being unable to wield it.
The protagonists are all themselves part of nature, though they realise it not, until nature sweeps them all away. Then they know.
I’m hardly surprised that in the early 70’s there are the earnest Limits to Growth studies. And in these more enlightened days, we have the WEFters. The world is probably a very baffling place for those folks.
Cheers
Chris
I’ve been waiting for the moment to ask about the role of Tolkien in the subversion of the ring myth. My great uncle who bombed Germany with the US Army Air Corps mentioned that the code phrase was always: “It’s not over till the fat lady sings.” I learned that this was a reference to Brunnhilde’s aria and immolation at the end of Twilight of the Gods. The strategic bombing mission had an objective to make the mythical end of Midgard come true by fulfilling the myth and burning Germany to the ground.
This is where Tolkien comes in, although I don’t think Dion Fortune actually mentions his work during the war at Oxford as part of the Magical Defence of Britain, it is said that he was tasked with taking the ring myth in a different direction than the German High Command would have wished. I’m told the idea was to toss the ring into the Crack of Doom rather than let it be returned to the Rhine. What do you make of this strategic self-fulfillment of prophecy and the British hijack of the ring myth to write an ending to the war?
Mary, I have a complicated relationship with Pythagoras and Plato. They really were the founders of the Western mind, the people who kickstarted the intellectual tradition that shapes my own thought from top to bottom; they were also wrong, catastrophically so, about the foundations of human thought and also about its proper political expressions. I try to reflect that in my discussions of them. It’s crucial to realize that they were the forefathers of that whole deluded notion that intellectuals ought to tell everyone else what to do — democracy was exactly what they opposed the most.
Patrick, yes, and we’ll get all three of those; the second has been pretty common up to this point and will doubtless continue to be widespread, the first is coming into vogue right now, and the third is further off but already stirring.
Edward Etc., amusements or not, Hari Seldon is a fine example of why the twilight of the intellectuals can’t be mitigated. There’s something profoundly tragic and relevant in that scene where his projected image is rabbiting on about what should have happened next, when the rise of the Mule has thrown his entire scheme of future history into an interplanetary dustbin. As for those Aeons, Crowley never did grasp that the Aeons aren’t sequential periods of time; as any Gnostic could have told him, they’re eternal spiritual powers who are all present and active at every moment of time. Sure, he proclaimed the word of one Aeon, but so does every other soul, since each of us is aligned with one or another Aeon and constantly proclaims it in all our thoughts, words, and actions.
Pyrrhus, fascinating. Things really are in motion!
Goldenhawk, thank you. Yeah, there’s good reason that destruction through fire and flood are so well represented in the world’s mythologies.
Roldy, it was a Romantic thing. Remember that marriage in Wagner’s time was a tangled mess of cultural expectations that guaranteed misery for most of its inmates; remember also that the segregation of the sexes at that time meant that almost always, the first person anybody ever had the hots for was a close relative. (Paging Dr. Freud…)
H4nksh4w, you’re most welcome and thank you.
Ambrose, oog. I’ll consider it — I’ve got a copy in my library, of course — but it would be a serious slog.
Chris, ding! We have a winner. Stay tuned…
Malleus M, er, you do know that Tolkien’s trilogy was unknown to anybody but his closest friends until shortly before the publication of the first volume in 1954, don’t you? Yes, the business about the fat lady’s vocal talents was about Brunnhilde, but it’s a reference to the fact that The Twilight of the Gods is a very, very long opera, and people who weren’t crazed Wagner fans had to be reminded that until the soprano who played Brunnhilde belted out that final piece, they still had more to sit through!
“It is said,” by the way, is shorthand in the occult community for “crap I made up;” there’s no evidence at all that Tolkien was involved in any magical working, much less that he (a devout and very conservative Catholic) had anything to do with Dion Fortune’s magical defense of Britain; his idea of what to do for his country involved spending a lot of time on his knees praying the rosary. You’re right that he deliberately had his Ring thrown into the fire as a smack at Wagner, whose work he hated — Wagner was way over on the left, Tolkien way over on the right — but the Nazi government banned performances of The Twilight of the Gods during the war, because the last thing they wanted was to see that enacted in real time — as of course it was.
Say, did you ever notice the similaries between Delville’s Parsifal and Hawkwind’s Space Ritual album cover? (The uninitiated and Wagner-saturated might give the track, “Orgone Accumulator” a little ear time.) My sources tell me that the Symbolists were much taken by Parsifal for some strange and interesting reasons, so I’m looking forward to your remarks on this cycle’s bonus reel.
@Edward, the elves never fell like men did. They didn’t suffer from original sin. Therefore, Valinor isn’t utopia for them, it’s just how things are supposed to be, just like it would be for men, if they weren’t fallen.
Is it significant that Alberich doesn’t appear to die at the end, either?
Tolkien did put a deliberate twist in it for his ring, like Wagner, no one could throw it in, unlike Wagner, being Christian, his off-scene god had engineered the right characters to be in the Sammath Naur at just the right time, and Eru Iluvatar intervened to trip Gollum over the edge. Wagner wouldn’t have ever been able to write that, not having any all powerful god, and also, not being so prone to happy endings.
I do wonder if the challenges with Wagner are that he was decidedly non Piscean in his thought, and the Piscean age hadn’t ended. In a way he foreshadowed the change of the ages, although I don’t know anything about Parsifal, other than it invented the leitmotif, to be able to say if he mapped out a way forward for the individual.
JMG,
I know you’ve written some about Oswald Spengler and his theories; do you know whether Spengler was in any way an occultist?
Rhydlyd, no, I didn’t — that’s Delville enlivened with about 500 mikes’ worth of blotter paper, but you’re right that the resemblance is there. It irritates me that the local used-record venues haven’t yet brought me any Hawkwind!
Tortoise, very likely, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Quite possibly it’s an acknowledgment that the possibility of commodification is always there.
Peter, nah, there are leitmotifs already in The Flying Dutchman, and buckets of them in The Ring. As for the solution Wagner proposed, we’ll get to that!
Kabuki, no, he wasn’t — quite the contrary, he was a hardcore rationalist.
Another fantastic instalment JMG, Wagner really was a genius wasn’t he?
It must have been very traumatic for him to actually write this final part, I imagine his personality, plus his obvious love for his art, kept him from a Nietzschean end.
I finished Dune, as well as Dune Messiah. I think I remember you weren’t a fan of, was it the books after the first three?
I can see some parallel themes. None of the characters, although Paul was somewhat “heroic”, are in any way, “good guys”. Paul, unlike Siegfried was aware of his trajectory and hated it, although he didn’t feel that he had any choice but to go through with his apparent destiny.
I suppose walking off into the desert was his into the Rhine moment!
I wonder if the Tolkien mythos leaves some of us a bit annoyed, because it doesn’t actually parallel how life works. We might like it to go that way, but its a bit of a con job really.
Wagner’s tale, although it makes you uncomfortable, is closer to reality. Better to face facts.
A bit off topic, but I also, have been feeling somewhat uncomfortable of late, due to uncomfortable facts.
Once again we are going through another hot, dry, miserable summer. I think Western and South Australia are the equivalent of California, Arizona, Nevada, etc.
This, in Celcius was our last 4 day’s daily high and low?? temps and today’s is the last figure:
40.5 °C / 21.5 °C 41.2 °C / 23.8 °C 35.0 °C / 24.6 °C 30.9 °C / 17.2 °C 32.9 °C / 16.2 °C
It’s been like this pretty much since December last year.
We’ve got more heat to look forward too as well, with mostly mid to high 30’s and another 39 and a 40 next week .
Our rainfall, meagre at the best of times, has over the past year been mostly insignificant, the largest monthly total was 83.8 m, the next best 51.2 mm. Most monthly totals really equate to basically nothing, because they are generally made up of a few mm here and there. Anything under 10 mm really equates to nothing.
As a gardener, I’m feeling pretty flat, and wonder if it’s actually worth growing annuals over summer at all. I just requires too much watering.
Our measly water storage of of 192,496 is at 40.4% – 77,744 ML.
We have no major rivers or lakes, we do have the end of the Murray , but that is always over extracted:
In 1981, the Murray Mouth filled with sand and closed for the first time in recorded history.
Since then, the Murray Mouth has required regular dredging.
In recent years, the Murray Mouth has required almost continuous dredging.
The response by the dimwits that make up our “Leaders” is to simply let more and more people in.
Perfectly good solid brick houses, with a garden with trees etc are constantly demolished, and in the space 3 houses from street to back fence are erected. Usually with a dark grey steel roof, to match the road! So any meagre drops of water no longer find their way onto the land, but are caught in the gutters and go down the drain.
I could go on about may other things, but I ‘ll spare you.
I will say, that although you believe Europe is facing a Gotterdamerung, I actually think Australia is in the worst position of all the West. You have no idea how stupid, and bought and paid for, our politicians are.
And if spud head Dutton gets in as Prime Minister in the upcoming election, our participation in a potential War with China is practically guaranteed. We rely almost totally on imports and a blockade by China would be almost a certainty. Then they will probably expect our total surrender.
It may sound over the top (I don’t think so) and I certainly hope it doesn’t come to this.
Happy days!
Kind regards,
Helen in Oz
@JMG,
Thank you for another fun Wagner essay. The Age of Gods -> Age of Heroes -> Age of Men business seems extremely pervasive… not only does Tolkien copy it in his work (including that staple of mythology, ancient heroes with extremely long lifespans that get longer the further back you go) but it seems to me you can find elements of it in pretty-much any mythology you look at.
Why is the Christian God up to the challenge of flooding the whole earth in Noah’s day; by Moses’ time a millennium or two later he’s not doing anything quite so big but can still drown Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea while 600,000 Israelites watch; a thousand years after that you see Judas Macabbeus winning battles against long odds and giving God the credit, but he never (for instance) kills three thousand men with the jawbone of an ass. Jesus’ healing and resurrection are supposed to be the big miracles that the whole story is building up to, but at most a few hundred people witness them and get converted… very different from Moses with his 600,000! And then of course on the longevity front, biblical figures like Methuselah (who lived to be 969) are featherweights when compared with the earliest Sumerian and Chinese culture heroes, who topped out somewhere above forty thousand years.
On the one hand, thinking hard about this makes one really reconsider the worldview in which orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. make any sense. On the other hand, I do wonder – as an occultist and a Druid, do you think there’s any truth behind this extremely common theme of the “elder days” or an intensely magical deep past full of Gods and heroes, who gradually yield the stage to less and less magical varieties of men? And is there actually something real behind the extreme ancient longevity motif that shows up so reluably in so many different cultures?
@Kabuki
In Volume II of The Decline of the West, Spengler dismissed occult & Eastern religious practice from the Western intelligentsia of his time as “toying with myths no one really believes” and filling the role fantasy fiction does today.
However, I don’t think materialism is a satisfying explanation for the existence and development of High Cultures. Do currents of energy flow out of regions of the Earth like mantle plumes (probably ascending to the mental plane of meaning by the time they reach the surface) and humans respond to living within one by developing High Cultures?
“The idea of Liberty dies in flames” is indeed a powerful ending, and one that resonates with my recent thoughts.
I read many people who look forward to the end of what they call the American empire or some variation thereof. Many of those people are Westerners with political ideas that may be outside of the current Western mainstream but are still derived from the post-Enlightenment European political tradition. A large subset of that subset appears to expect “the end of empire” to result in the triumph of those ideas: something like a worldwide shift towards egalitarianism and democracy. I can see why this vision might appeal, but the likelier thing is that as Western civilisation loses ground, which seems like a largely unavoidable process, so do the ideas it promotes and is associated with. Also, if/when total collapse comes, it won’t be a triumph of liberty. It never has been – the kingdoms set up on Roman ruins weren’t exactly egalitarian utopias – though it may have some other upsides.
The cycle of sellouts you describe, by the way, can be seen in its purest form in countries that haven’t had a drastic (as opposed to gradual and partial) changeover of elites since the 18th century. Here in Russia, it can also be observed but in a more complicated form. The Bolsheviks, for example, never sold out; the original generation died trying to make their dream come true over the corpses of their “captive audience” and each other. But many other idealistic revolutionaries and free thinkers sold out to them. The remarkable late-Rusisan Imperial striving for liberty produced a fire that almost totally destroyed the intellectual milieu from which it rose, and the ideas of an emancipatory revolution or working-class politics have been tarnished by it for a large part of the population to this day. In the 90s, something similar though less bloody happened again, and again a new generation of freedom-loving intellectuals, the so-called Masters of Culture, flocked to support the new rulers (themselves either unscrupulous careerists or unbending liberal fanatics, not sellouts in most cases) and demand harsh measures against everyone they hate. The effect has been to discredit the ideas of liberty, democracy and human rights, and those who hold to them, for what is probably a majority of the population. It’s easier to like those things when they aren’t being brandished as weapons against you. The censorship our liberals complain about (very reasonably, I might add!) has been another product of their campaigns against nationalists and communists.
For my own part, I like to distinguish between Liberty as an abstract ideal and specific freedoms. The latter are very often useful and good, sometimes downright necessary and very much worth protecting and expanding. The former seems dubious at best, at least when it is portrayed as the only important thing, an end in itself, without any consideration of how this ideal interfaces with reality. For one thing, its adherents often seem to commit to it in disastrously counterproductive ways or else (maybe that should be “and subsequently”?) abandon it entirely, with grave consequences for the actual freedoms bound up with them. For while I like to make the distinction between Liberty and freedoms, and think the former concept requires a more critical approach, I fear what usually happens when people turn against it is that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.
Thank you for these posts! Just what I need to hear now in the middle of all craziness going on. I just received a heads-up from Berlin Staatsoper for 2 rounds of the Ring in the autumn, September-October. I am a bit tempted, although staying in Berlin that long (a week) is daunting – my love-hate relationship to that city can handle 3 days nicely, 5 days and I start to crumble. Like a lot of old, old european cities, the history with all its layers of terror and glory somehow seeps through into me, and mental digesting is hard. But thanks to that, Wagner in Berlin packs a special punch for me. It is not really cheap, though. The cheapest tickets have severely limited view of the scene.
Chris@Fernglade points out an obvious thing: all characters could have quit their grasping anytime, and changed the course of events. I do not know if burning it all up and starting anew will make much difference, when the grasping with violent means is still the go-to strategy. It even smacks of a narcissistic strategy of running away when the just desserts of your actions come knocking at the door. Dying is an escape from a self-manufactured catastrophe. Also: only getting punished after using the grasping strategy succesfully (more or less) a long time is not a good strategy of education. Some buddhist teaching story says that it is useless to beat up the pig when it is already in the cabbage field. Restraint is not an easy virtue for humans, and definitely important to be reminded of that as often as possible. But does it help when the takings are rich and getting richer every day? What would the current president of Ukraine say?
https://www.staatsoper-berlin.de/de/spielplan/ring/
Zarcayce, ” Gaza is Israel’s as far as I understand” – no it’s not. It’s Palestinian land, Israel’s occupation of Palestinians lands has been ruled as illegal under international law, and if you yourself were threatened with ethic cleansing I don’t think you’d find it so hilarious. Especially after everything the Palestinians have gone through. I get it that this is just what Trump does, spouting random stuff to keep everyone on edge and distract from his actual plans (assuming there are any), but I don’t think it’s funny anymore and I think the world is getting fed up with these games and threats.
Wonderful set of essays. Has made me rethink a few thoughts I had about the work – especially the part of Waltrude going on Brunnhilde.
One thing bugs me, though – what was sacrificial about Brunnhilde’s final act? Had she done what she did and the Gods bowed down to the Rhimemaidens, then maybe I could see the act as a sacrifice, but I’ve only seen it as a necessary act of destruction complete with a recognition that, with nothing to live for, it would be better to die with your former compatriots.
Note that this issue didn’t start with you – for some reason “Brunnhilde’s self-sacrifice” seems to be the party line. I’ve even seen it in The Met’s “Opera For Children” books.
“Hari Seldon is a fine example of why the twilight of the intellectuals can’t be mitigated. There’s something profoundly tragic and relevant in that scene where his projected image is rabbiting on about what should have happened next, when the rise of the Mule has thrown his entire scheme of future history into an interplanetary dustbin. ”
Very true. I should revisit the Foundation books. It’s been awhile since I read them, and only once.
The Mule and his random rise and his ability to turn enemies into allies, and otherwise dash the hopes of Seldon and the Foundation do seem very apropos just now. Some things really are unpredictable no matter how good your math. Overlooked by the intellectuals, and then derided, his power continually solidifying…
https://theartofmichaelwhelan.substack.com/p/the-mule
This image of the Mule by SF artist Michael Whelan shows just how much of a trickster and change element he is:
https://theartofmichaelwhelan.substack.com/p/the-mule
As for Crowley, no argument there.
What do you make of the change in Brunnhilde’s leitmotif post-Siegfried? It’s as if Liberty goes from being something wild and even ferocious to something domesticated and even submissive, and it takes betrayal to bring back the old fire.
Is rumor correct that Parsival is “Part-the-veil” in old lingo?
@31 Gaia Baracetti
Yes. If people here subscribed to certain accounts on X, they’d see the graphic videos of starving children being murdered, and wouldn’t find Trump’s comments about Gaza (or anything he or Biden administration did about Israel) so funny anymore. I only rarely watch them to preserve my mental health.
Our fate is in motion
You can thank your lord
Rhine Maidens are coming
for their golden hoard
The end is arriving
abandon your sword
Rhine Maidens are coming
for their golden hoard
Revelation is here
you will not be bored
Rhine Maidens are coming
for their golden hoard
Helen, I like the original novel Dune; even the best of the sequels are third-rate in comparison, and I haven’t read any of them in years. Tolkien — well, keep in mind that he was a devout Christian and felt he had to make his novels theologically correct, complete with the happy ending. As far as your local weather, ouch. It wouldn’t surprise me if Australia has a really ghastly fate — it’s a very marginal environment for human habitation, and I’ve read accounts by a good many people who’ve been there and sensed something deep in the land that is actively hostile to human beings…and hungry. Then, of course, there’s China; quite a few SF writers back in the day assumed as a matter of course that Australia would eventually be conquered by the Chinese, and I’m far from sure they were wrong.
Sandwiches, the idea that magic and miracles were more powerful in the past is very widespread, and there may be something to it; Native American philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. wrote a book entitled The World We Used To Live In presenting evidence that medicine people could do things in the fairly recent past that they can’t do any more. I’m open to the possibility that people lived longer, too, but there are a couple of confounding factors.
First, there’s some reason to think that in very ancient times, people counted time by the Moon rather than the seasonal cycle, and old traditions and records listing ages in moons were later read by people who counted age by suns, with resulting confusion. Methuselah’s age of 969 makes good sense if it was 969 moons, which is a little short of 81 years! Second, it was once standard practice for certain people to be buried alive in mounds and there become guardian spirits of their tribe or village, stepping out of the cycle of reincarnation for a while; eventually the mound was opened, the remains taken out and exposed on a hilltop to free the spirit, and a new guardian took the old one’s place. It would surprise me if any of them were left there for more than 3000 years (40,000 moons), but it’s possible.
Daniil, I know. I like to remind people that when the British Empire went down, there were three contenders to replace it — the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States. Would people really have been happier if one of the other two took power instead? In the same way, if China replaces the US as global hegemon, things will doubtless improve for a while — a new hegemon is generally better behaved than an old and decadent one — but in a century or two the burden of empire will drag China down the same path, or they’ll step back as they did in the 1400s and some other nation will take the same role, as Spain did back then.
Liberty is a high ideal, and like most high ideals it’s lethal when it isn’t adequately balanced by countervailing ideals. For a great many people, the liberty they want is the liberty to persecute the people they don’t like, and advance the interests of their region or culture or class at the expense of everyone else. Humans being human, that’s the way it too often works out. Thus I think one of the things Wagner was saying with the plot of this opera is that liberty pursued as an end in itself cancels itself out, and perishes in the flames it kindles.
Kristiina, I envy you that! I grant that European cities can be psychically rough, but if I had the option I’d probably put up with Berlin for a week. As for your point, granted — and that’s something Wagner will try to address when we go on to what, for all practical purposes, is the fifth Ring opera.
Donald, it depends on your definition of sacrifice, of course. As we’ll see, the sacrifice of one’s own liberty to a higher aim is one of the themes of the last phase of Wagner’s thought.
Edward Etc., to my mind Michael Whelan is the best of SF cover artists; in a less moronic society his paintings would adorn cathedrals and national capitols, rather than cheaply printed paperbacks. That image of the Mule is a case in point, catching not only the Mule’s trickster nature but also his personal tragedy. It’s brilliant.
Roldy, that’s important to the plot. Part of the punishment that Wotan inflicts on Brunnhilde is that she will become an ordinary mortal woman once somebody takes her as a bride. It takes betrayal and tragedy to force her to rise for a moment to her former stature, and then die.
dZanni, no, it’s “pierce the valley” — perce-vale in the older spelling. One French version calls him Perlesvaus, per les vaux (“through the valleys”) in modern French.
Dobbs, that’s not half bad. Thank you.
@29 Daniil Adamov
I’m also thinking we Americans should replace “universal human rights” with “rights for Americans.” Countries working with that conception of rights can adopt what specific freedoms work well in their societies, rather than trying to adopt whatever currently fashionable “one size fits all” Unalienable* Universal Human Rights.
*The claim that rights that are perpetually being tweaked amd often under attack are “unalienable” is one of the most dishonest ever.
“Part of the punishment that Wotan inflicts on Brunnhilde is that she will become an ordinary mortal woman once somebody takes her as a bride. It takes betrayal and tragedy to force her to rise for a moment to her former stature, and then die.”
As an allegory of the ideal of liberty, that seems to imply she exists in two modes: Liberty Leading the People on the Barricades and Liberty Being Invoked Incessantly in Parliament. At first she was the former, then she was tricked into settling down with the political elites to become the latter, but (Wagner predicted) when this all comes crashing down she will go back to being the former… for one final performance.
@JMG
One of the major planks of post-imperial US foreign policy must be to retain independence from China, even if it makes us a pariah in the “international community.”
Well, you’ve done it again, JMG. This is about the best short summary of what is at issue in The Twilight of the Gods – what the opera is ABOUT – that I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many summaries and longer disquisitions.)
I might plea for just a bit more focus on Hagen. Perhaps the most overwhelming experience I ever had in an opera house occurred back in 1991 (?) when I attended a performance of Twilight at the Met. The great Finnish bass Matti Salminen sang Hagen and when he roused the Gibichungs I thought he was going to blow the roof off the Met. I had never encountered in all of art such a bone-shaking, terrifying rendition of pure evil.
Hagen is rousing the male group. Male group dynamics – for good or for evil – were an increasing pre-occupation of Wagner’s. Male groups are there at key points in Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Tristan. They disappear from the Ring (instead we get a female group in Valkyrie and what a group it is) until Hagen awakens the latent power of the male group in Act 2 of Twilight. Wagner had, in the Mastersingers, subtly and sublimely depicted the male group, led by honorable men and constrained by history, culture, tradition and the demands of a fully realized adult sexuality, as the central pillar of a civilized order, In Twilight, he shows us the reverse – the male group responding to nothing but the lure of power.
One does well to remember how close Hagen came to taking the Ring for himself. Wagner gives us a glimpse – more than glimpse – of the sort of world that would have ensued. Was Wagner warning us of the totalitarian horrors that awaited Europe? I think he was and alas, in this as in so much else, he was an extraordinary prophet.
In Parsifal, of course, the male group – corrupted and diseased – takes center stage. I eagerly await your insights!
I second the idea of turning this discussion into a book. I’d want a physical copy of it. Maybe one of the self-publication companies ?
I repeat myself, but man, great series! Thanks
“intensely magical deep past full of Gods and heroes, who gradually yield the stage to less and less magical varieties of men?”
Larry Niven wrote a series of stories on that theme. The main character was the Warlock. The premiss was that magic was powered by a non-renewable substance called Mana. As the mana supply dropped what was achievable by magic also dropped.
The stories I remember right off are “Not long before the end”, “What good is a glass dagger”, and “When the magic goes away.”
The decline of wonder is a common theme. In Game of Thrones you have Valerian Steel which no one knows how to make anymore. All they can do is recycle what they have.
The knowledge of how to build Orthanc is lost in the Lord of the Rings as well as many other things. In the real world lost wax casting had to be rediscovered, and although metallurgists think they know how Damascus steel was made, modern ethics frown on case hardening the sword by running the white hot blade through an Ethiopian slave.
Although I haven’t had much to say on Jung or the Ring Cycle, I have really enjoyed the articles.
It seems to me that one of the most concrete lessons the Ring Cycle has for us mortals in the current time is the way it ended with the collapse of the system of commodification that was at the center of the Opera’s narrative.
We of course, live in an empire that represents the ultimate in commodification and financialization of all things, from people to nature. As this empire crumbles, Wagner reminds us that we must look towards other arrangements beyond the financial economy. Attempting to soften the ride down the slope of collapse by holding gold, cash or stock portfolios will be futile as the world reverts to a system of exchange, barter, duty and obligation.
Speaking of the failure of materialism, many old materialists have recently been complaining about the current decline of the scientific community, and these phenomena have reached a point where they can no longer ignore them.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/02/06/two-eyed-seeing-the-advantageous-of-combining-a-modern-scientific-with-an-indigenous-perspective-touted-in-nature/
According to the complaint of why evolution is true, we can see the process of scientific decline from an example
1. The papers themselves started to get longer and longer, but the progress made was getting closer and closer to zero.The 1953 paper in Nature by Watson and Crick positing a structure for DNA is about one page long, while the Wilkins et al. and Franklin and Gosling papers in the same issue are about two pages each. Altogether, these five pages resulted in three Nobel Prizes.Sadly, such concision has fallen. This new paper in Nature (below) is 10.25 pages long, more than twice as long as the entire set of three DNA papers. And yet it provides nothing even close to the earlier scientific advances.
2. The papers themselves are becoming more and more ideological, rather than producing objective knowledge related to reality (in fact, the objectivity of knowledge is being devalued). the paper calls “Western” neuroscientists “settler colonialists,” which immediately tells you where this paper is coming from.
3. Taking spirituality or sacred things (as long as they are not Christian) seriously as part of theory is beginning to be encouraged in the scientific community.For example:We build upon the foundational framework of Two-Eyed Seeing to explore approaches to sharing sacred knowledge…
Despite this, the old materialists still believe that if they can eliminate the poison of left-wing ideology on science, they will be able to return to the era when three Nobel Prizes could be won for a five-page paper.
But perhaps “left postmodernism” is actually the result rather than the cause of the scientific community’s inability to produce more effective objective knowledge, a method that scientists are forced to adopt to avoid unemployment. It is as if physics abandoned positivism because further experiments were no longer possible.
Gaia Barcetti @ 31 & Zarcayce @ 6: Greenlanders, Canadians and Panamanians can now rest easy. All remaining American treasure is to be spilled in the sands of Gaza so that Our President can have his Win–Peace in the Middle East!!, his supporters can be bribed with shares of Mediterranean beachfront condos, and his good buddy Benny will, he fondly imagines, activate the same networks of influence that arranged a Peace Prize for Eli Weisel. Nothing against the latter, BTW, of whose mellifluous writing I happen to be a fan. Please note the timing of the Natanyahoo visit. Talk of Panama, etc., brought him running hotfoot to DC to get his hand in the till first.
Jimmy Carter did it the right way and did it better. Not one drop of American blood was spilled to bring about the Camp David Accords. Best president of my lifetime.
I think that when Patrick Henry and others were speaking, orating in Henry’s case, about liberty, what they meant was no foreign domination of the then colonies, and no feudalism imposed on American workingmen. In our time, that fine old word has been perverted to mean I should get to do and have whatever I want, with advertising induced desires redefined as needs.
Chinese civilization is extremely resource intensive, despite the celebrated frugality of Chinese people. I question whether a warming and drying Australia could support it. A future military occupation could happen. I am inclined to think Chinese eyes are firmly fixed on the warming Arctic.
Patrick, yes. I’ve seen those mutilated children here in my home town in Italy, about a year ago, the few “lucky” ones that were able to come here to get treatment. They were trying to play on their wheelchairs, because they had no legs, while the local children ran around on the grass like children are supposed to do. And this was but the tiniest fraction of what’s happened to Palestinian children, due almost exclusively to American bombs.
For all the talk about how the American empire is doomed, and the American elites are clueless, there sure seems to be a lot of acceptance among certain people for crimes committed by their chosen candidate, either one of them, they are the same in this respect.
JMG,
Would you be so kind as to provide a quick summary of the characters and what they represent in Wagner’s view? Something like:
Wotan = elite intelligentsia of the time
Brunhilde = liberty
Siegfried = idealistic rebellion
Rhinemaidens = wealth of nature/natural commons
Hagen = ?
The way you’ve described all this in a really digestible for such a far off subject, but keeping track of the representations can be difficult. Fascinating essays. Thank you.
@Mary Bennett #47: I remember reading a quote from an ordinary man on the side of the American Revolution explaining “‘They’ (the British) wouldn’t let us govern ourselves.” To him, the issue was, do we govern ourselves? Or do others govern us?
Hi John Michael,
Thanks! 🙂
Hmm. I’m of the opinion that it is the role of the Elder to remind us lesser folks, that there are limits.
Man, the land down here is harsh. It’s an old land too and has known much. It’s my belief that it is best down here to work with the land, and whilst you can tweak the outcomes, the larger narrative is fixed. Already a number of large cities rely on desalination for drinking water (I rely upon rainwater alone), and it seems totally weird to me that the electricity system powering those monster machines would be kicked around like a political and ideological football – whilst adding more people into the mix. That story will not work out.
Cheers
Chris
Recently I watched the Shogun series which started on Hulu last year. While dots on screen are not the best way to transfer ideas, I found a lot of the ideas in the series to be strikingly similar to what has been transmitted in this discussion of the Nibelung, from the Lords and Regents being an aristocracy trying to keep and salvage their ideals from the past, to the women being both a force to manipulate and ultimately explode the current system. That is to say, these ideas are found in many cultures, and find themselves in many periods of time across the world.
Reflecting on the story of Shogun, and the story of the Nibelung, many of the ideas reflected here in Ecosophia and the Archdruid Report presented themselves. One especially, about limits rears itself to me. It seems that in the climactic reaches of a civilization, the old stories, the myths are ignored. One of the things taught in those myths are limits. Eventually we will reach those limits. Because they are ignored, we fail to see our own end nearing. It’s a tragedy in a way that it continues, but one lesson from Shogun was to consider flowers and their beauty, and how they could not be flowers without this process of living and dying. I’m certain there is a similar allegory in the Nibelung, perhaps I have missed it. Or perhaps this is where Parsifal comes in..
@46
The sciences are adopting left-postmodernist terminology because the current ruling class is woke and scientists want money. The vast majority of the population in America, never mind Europe, doesn’t give a fig about Native American beliefs (but doesn’t want to be branded “racist”– especially the PMC).
Of course, if Western art, science, technology, and general prosperity had continued advancing, critical theory wouldn’t be popular.
“Jimmy Carter did it the right way and did it better. Not one drop of American blood was spilled to bring about the Camp David Accords.”
And yet the Camp David Accords solved nothing or Gaza wouldn’t be a problem today.
Bill Clinton gave it the old college try as well. He talked, wheedled, bribed, and coerced both sides. And yet he also failed. The hate is too strong.
Re: Gaia 31 and Patrick re: zarcayce
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathancook/p/the-gaza-war-was-a-lie-as-is-the
Like Patrick I only watch a little bit because I feel I shouldn’t turn away but I don’t know what I can do and I’m not great at just taking in horror and tradgedy for which I have no remedy and sitting with it. Maybe I should watch more opera to practice. Or just keep my nose on the grindstone where I feel like I can be of service.
It’s the first Tyler Childers song I learned when he was coming up in our home country. https://youtu.be/_QzcrflqDCg?si=-HaXYVxKLw2p709q
Daniil, exactly. That’s what he’s saying, and I don’t think he’s mistaken.
Patrick, why do you think the Trumpistas are cozying up to India so enthusiastically? If you don’t want to be aligned with one rising hegemon, aligning with another is a good plan.
Tag, I wish I’d heard that! I’ll give some thought to Hagen and see if I can add something to the book version.
Thibault, duly noted! I think one way or another something will happen.
Siliconguy, Niven’s stories about mana depletion are fine work, and perhaps the most Seventies of all fantasy fiction. 😉
Clay, yep. What’s more, “collapse now and avoid the rush” applies here as well.
林龜儒 , good. Very good. It’s beginning to sink in — just beginning, but the first signs are there — that the law of diminishing returns applies to scientific research too.
Gaia (if I may), no one’s hands are bloodless; they never are. Europeans can afford to preen themselves on their moral superiority only because they’ve been a wholly owned subsidiary of the American empire since 1945 — and even there, a lot of Russian children in the Donbass have had limbs blown off because the EU has so enthusiastically funded and supplied the proxy war in Ukraine. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now that the US is backing out of its imperial role in Europe and your nation gets to function as an independent power on the world stage.
Mike, it’s not quite so simple as that, because each character represents (a) a philosophical principle, (b) a social class, and (c) an actual character shaped by the demands of the drama. I’ll see what I can do, though.
Chris, no, that story won’t end well.
Prizm, do you happen to know how well the miniseries tracked Clavell’s novel? I’m familiar with that — I read it many years ago — and it’s modeled on a period of Japanese history I know tolerably well, with Tokugawa Ieyasu playing the role assigned to Toranaga in the book. As for those flowers, keep them in mind. Flowers will play two very important roles in the opera to come.
Prizm, you might perhaps enjoy Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, his (very) fictionalized account of the famous samurai.
Siliconguy, what the Camp David Accords did was stop Egypt and Israel from fighting each other. No successful treaty solves every problem.
JMG,
I unfortunately don’t know how well the 2024 miniseries followed Clavell’s work. It is something I intend to remedy though as my interest has been peaked. According to some comments I read from others who had read his work, they’ve all said it remains relatively true to his novel, and cited the same connection to history and attempts to parallel it with Will Adams being portrayed by Blackthorn and Ieyasu portrayed by Toranaga.
Flowers are things of beauty. I’m looking forward to hear more about them in the next installments of this NIbelung series.
When reading about the Gods, Heroes, and Men, I am reminded of the worlds of the Kabbalah and how the same event has correlates across the four worlds. The fact that wagner’s ideas have value along philosophical/economic lines in addition to their raw artistic values also reminds me of that intuition. The higher ideals of Wagner drain all the way down from the lofty heights of art to the gritty realities of the material world.
Not sure if I’m making any sense, but that was what I put together when reading this.
I have now finally read the libretto. Wagner’s additions to the story, like Waltraute’s visit to Brunhild, and Alberich’s meeting with Hagen, are the most interesting parts!
Götterdämmerung seems to have been enacted several times during the Third Reich, though perhaps not very often – I haven’t found exact numbers. The prohibition seems to have lasted only from 1943 onwards.
Without your commentary, I would have been at a total loss why (almost) everybody dies at the end. Why does Siegfried’s betrayal of one woman for another (under the influence!) lead to the destruction of everything? As a prophecy of the end of Western civilization it makes uncanny sense. This interpretation is also completely outside the field of vision of any major political movement today – liberals, conservatives, nationalists, populists, mainstream greens, even fascists, socialists, communists etc.
Gunther and Gutrun, the Gibichungs, make a very sorry figure compared to Wagner’s initial vision of world history directed by the Wibelungs. Gunther as a Beowulf-style Germanic warlord-king in his hall would also have been unrecognizable to Gundacar, the historic leader of Burgundian auxiliary troops, who took over and resided in the still intact buildings of Roman Borbetomagus, nowadays known as Worms. While he might have been known to his troops as “king”, he was also part of the intrigues between various factions of the still very much existing and even, sometimes, overpowering Western Roman Empire of the 440s and 450s. I have recently read a slightly fictionalized account of the life of St. Genofefa of Paris, who lived in exactly these decades and had to deal with similar enemies, but from a very different perspective than Gundacar’s would have been.
It is really surprising what a huge imaginary and artistic tree grew from such rather modest roots!
Have you ever taken on “Tristan and Isolde”? I understand Wagner wrote it in a pause while working on the Ring cycle. He was reading Schopenhauer and the opera shows it. It has some of his most profound music. The opening of the third act is life changing but under appreciated, I think. Liebestodt of course and overture and prelude to act one are the pinnacle.
@JMG said, “Sandwiches, the idea that magic and miracles were more powerful in the past is very widespread, and there may be something to it….”
I might have to look into Vine Deloria’s work, then. Being from a Christian background I am mostly familiar with the Christian tradition of faith healings, visions, miraculous experiences involving saints and their relics, etc. – but even there you’ve got a clear cycle of rising and falling enchantment, with the irreligious late Greek and Roman world giving way to the Early Middle Ages with miracle stories all over the place, which gives way to the Reformation and Enlightenment and all that.
I am wondering if the Age of Gods -> Age of Heroes -> Age of Men scheme is the product of (1) a cycle of enchantment and religious experiences (be they Pagan, Christian, or whatever) becoming more and less common on timescales of several centuries, overlaid on top of (2) a tendency for tales to grow in the telling, with the tales set furthest in the past growing the tallest. I suppose that as a polytheist and a Druid, you don’t actually believe that the God of Israel flooded the whole Earth in the 3rd millennium BC, or that he sent the Ten Plagues to convinced everyone in Egypt that he was real and their gods weren’t… so the really big miracles still don’t fit into the cycle that Vine Deloria is describing.
As for the extreme lifespans being a matter of mixing up lunar and solar cycles – I’ve heard that before and find it very hard to believe. The month-year substitution would give Methuselah a reasonable lifespan of 78 years, but it would also mean that he was born when his father, Enoch, was a five-year-old boy. Also, biblical longevity fades from the world gradually (just like the deep magic in so many other traditions) – before the flood, almost everyone lives into their 900s; in the ten generations after Noah, the lifespans decline from Shem’s 600 years to Abraham’s 175; after Abraham you see Isaac, Jacob, and Levi living to be 180, 147, and 137, respectively, and by the time that Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt his own lifespan of 120 years is a small miracle. You can’t get that simply by forgetting that earlier generations told time by the moon; the priests who put together the biblical narrative were clearly aware that they were telling a story in which something strange and supernatural was gradually fading out of the world.
One other question – your mention of people from the very dawn of history burying themselves in hills to withdraw from the cycle of reincarnation and become guardian spirits makes me wonder what the sources for that belief system are. Until now I was not aware of any recorded theories about reincarnation from before the first millennium BC when they appeared in both the Upanishads in India and in the teachings Pythagoras in Europe. But if you can point me to a well-documented belief in reincarnation in late Neolithic or bronze age times I would be quite excited to learn more about it.
Just a connection I noted; in the 1981 movie Excalibur, during the scene where Perceval is sent to return Excalibur to the lady of the lake, the music used is the Siegfried funeral march. As my wife pointed out when I remarked on this; “So the enchanted object is returned to the water in that story also.” It seems to me that the makers of Excalibur might have understood a thing or two about Wagner.
So I stayed up and finished Revolt of the Elites and it closes with the Rhine reclaiming the ring!!! Last paragraph: “those wonderful machines that science has enabled us to construct have not eliminated drudgery, as Oscar Wilde and other false prophets so confidently predicted, but they have made it possible to imagine ourselves as masters of our fate. In an age that fancies itself as disillusioned , this is the one illusion– the illusion of mastery — that remains as tenacious as ever. But now that we are beginning to grasp the limits of our control over the natural world, it is an illusion–to invoke Freud once again– the future of which is very much in doubt, an illusion more problematical, certainly,than the future of religion.
JMG, I can assure you there’s a lot of guilt in Europe too about a lot of wars, but the one in Gaza specifically is mostly an American war, with unfortunately the complicity of many other countries, including European ones, against the will of the majority of their population. But the bombs are American and Israel has the strongest hold on the American government, including your current president, who was supposed to be a man of peace but keeps threatening countries with war and supplying weapons for this one.
As for Ukraine, of course it’s Russia that has invaded Ukraine, which is defending itself with Western help, and that’s why children are being blown up and it baffles me that anyone would think otherwise (try talking to a few Ukrainians from any part of the country) but I suspect there’s no point in discussing this here, as you’ve made it very clear how you see it, and this is your blog, not mine.
Siliconguy (#54) wrote:
“And yet the Camp David Accords solved nothing or Gaza wouldn’t be a problem today.”
Remember, please, there are predicaments as well as problems. Problems can be solved with luck and skill. Predicaments never can be solved, no matter how skillful and lucky humanity is or ever becomes, no matter how many centuries pass.
Gaza is not a problem. It is a predicament.
There are many, many other major predicaments out there, too. None of them will ever be solved so long as living people are involved in them. Human life, like every form of life, always creates new predicaments. No predicament can ever be solved.
Hi John,
Great post. First time the Wagner opera series starts to make sense to me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinbatcho/p/the-death-throes-of-globalism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1dcn5
Talking about the end of an epoch do you agree with this post analysis?
Hi John Michael,
I’d have to suggest that with where the ring cycle narrative is going, Wagner perhaps finally had a more clear vision of his own revolutionary activities as a younger bloke. Maybe, he even realised he’d been living someone else’s ideal / vision in those days. An unflattering perspective to see oneself as a flunky, but it happens. 🙂 Anyway, it’s hard to say from this distance of time, if in writing the conclusion he was angry, vengeful, or simply wanted to tell a more likely outcome of events for those with eyes and ears to know. And maybe, just maybe, seed an idea in fertile ground.
Years ago I stopped reading new sci-fi, and maybe you’d appreciate my own revelations in regard to that genre. There was a dull sameness to the stories: rich, enhanced humans, clean, technology solving all problems, AI, yada, yada. Boring. But nary a decent story telling moment of a more likely future. It was as if the authors were reading from the same story book and attempting to will a future that won’t ever come to fruition. Where are the Kirth Gersen’s of that fictional universe surviving by sheer wits and skills alone against uncaring scheming and entrenched powerful enemies?
Wagner himself perhaps faced that same moment, and then in a fit of creative energy sought to tear the veil.
It’s an impressive achievement.
Cheers
Chris
“Eru Iluvatar intervened to trip Gollum over the edge.”
This is certainly the version that Tolkien translated from the Westron of the Red Book and used in the Lord of the Rings. However, the Fairbarn family, into which Sam’s eldest daughter Elanor married and who were custodians of the Red Book for generations, had a different version that they passed on only orally. It turns out that even Eru Iluvatar needs help at times from his humblest servants.
This version held that after Samwise had finished his last term as mayor and with his wife Rosie having passed away, he came to visit Elanor on his way to the Gray Havens. During that visit, he acknowledged to her what she and a few of his lifelong companions had figured out. That Gollum did not fall into the Crack of Doom with the ring on his own. Nor was he the one who bit off Frodo’s finger.
What actually happened was that when Gollum hit Sam from behind with a rock as they entered the cave, he only caught a glancing blow and Sam, enraged by yet one more deed of perfidy at that crucial moment, swung out with Sting and delivered a mortal blow to Gollum. When Frodo lay claim to the Ring and put it on, Sam rushed over frantically, managed to get his hands on Frodo, but could not wrestle the Ring from him. When Frodo’s hand struck Sam, Sam in a moment of panic and despair, did something he would feel guilty for the rest of his life. He bit off Frodo’s finger, took it and the ring and threw them into the fire, then threw Gollum in after them.
Frodo had been so possessed by the ring in those moments that his memory of what happened was confused and he accepted the story that Sam told him. At least at first.
After their rescue by the eagles, Sam confessed the true story to Gandalf, who praised him lavishly for the deed. “You did what you had to, Master Samwise. Even though it was contrary to your nature. Leave the tale as it has been told. It is a good one. Surely, you don’t think that all the tales from the previous ages were completely accurate.”
{In the canon, Sam did visit his daughter Elanor late in his life. The rest is not canonical. I made it up.}
Prizm, glad to hear it. It’s a good solid novel.
Enjoyer, it’s relevant!
Aldarion, that’s exactly the problem, of course. Nobody realizes that their pursuit of their own advantage can, and well may, bring the whole system crashing down. That’s one of the downsides of blind belief in the myth of progress.
Kevin, no, this is only my second venture into opera criticism — my first was Chapter 2 in my novel The Nyogtha Variations, and more broadly that novel as a whole, which has as one of its main plot engines the writing and first performance of a chamber opera based on that famous French Decadent play The King in Yellow. I haven’t listened to Tristan und Isolde often enough to work out a commentary on it — these discussions of the Ring cycle are the result of watching the whole cycle twice and listening to it probably a hundred times on CD and (now) record as well.
Sandwiches, no, I don’t believe that the entire world was flooded in the third millennium BC, nor that the earth’s rotation actually stopped so that Joshua’s armies could finish slaughtering whoever it was they were slaughtering that day. Of course tales grow in the telling, and those are good examples — there were certainly robust floods in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, and no doubt Joshua’s soldiers finished slaughtering their enemies, looked up from the carnage, and said, “Good heavens, is it still that early in the day?” But I think the possibility has to be considered that there may have been something else at work. As for well-documented beliefs in reincarnation, we have no documentation at all from the Neolithic and precious little from the early Bronze Age about any subject at all, as you’re doubtless well aware, so that’s a very convenient thing for you to demand.
Shadow Rider, hmm! I haven’t watched the movie, so didn’t know that. John Williams’ theme music for the original Star Wars movie, which I did see, borrows extensively from Wagner — the music at the end, where everyone’s getting medals, is heavily, er, “influenced” by the Walsung theme in the Ring.
AliceEm, yes indeed! Here come the Rhinemaidens, and they mean business.
Gaia, funny. Now look up how many Russian-speaking Ukrainian children were killed and maimed by Ukrainian missiles and shells from 2014 to 2022, when there wasn’t a Russian invasion, when the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass protested Ukrainian government efforts to erase their language and culture. The Ukrainian government responded by sending in the troops and, when those were repelled, by spending eight years bombarding civilian targets. It must be very comforting to look at that situation from a “we’re the good people, they’re the bad people” standpoint, but in the real world, once again, nobody’s hands are clean.
Forecasting, can I ask you to repost that during the upcoming Open Post? We’re getting far off topic at this point, and I don’t have time to read that piece and respond to it intelligently right now.
Chris, I know what you mean about science fiction. With the recent revelations about US government money being poured into the mass media to control narratives and push worldviews, I’m starting to wonder how much of that was also true of the publishing industry — whether the reason science fiction and fantasy both became insanely boring repetitions of a narrow set of clichés was that the big corporate publishers et al. were being paid to do so…
Jessica, I like that. Revisionist versions of Tolkien are, I think, badly needed.
JMG In your answer to Mary’s question (#19) you had this among other things to say about Plato and Pythagoras “they were also wrong, catastrophically so, about the foundations of human thought and also about its proper political expressions.” How were they wrong about the foundations of human thought? I understand Plato’s dislike of democracy but I do not see the error about the foundations of thought.
I have to say this series on the Ring cycle is amazing. I did not know anything about Wagner before this and very little about Opera. Almost all I knew about Opera before came from Bugs Bunny and the movie Amadeus. My Dad still sometimes calls classical music Bugs Bunny music. Now I am so interested that I got tickets to the Barber of Seville this spring in Minneapolis. However the real amazing thing about the series is seeing things in our civilization that I never knew were there but now that I see them. They are everywhere and explain so much. My folks are more or less old hippies who never really sold out. I never understood how or why that movement went the way it did. Now I have an idea. Thanks
@Jessica, nice plausible retelling of the LOTR. In my interpretation of the Canon the LOTR hinges on Bilbo’s act of mercy in The Hobbit where he chooses to have mercy on Gollum and not kill him.
JMG,
“Part of the punishment that Wotan inflicts on Brunnhilde is that she will become an ordinary mortal woman once somebody takes her as a bride. ”
This makes me think of how women today want to remain princesses instead of becoming queens. They have no desire to have children and loose their youthful bodies to labor and breast feeding. They prefer their independence and refuse to take on traditional responsibilities. Even after marriage, they prefer to farm out the responsibilities of motherhood.
JMG: “Nobody realizes that their pursuit of their own advantage can, and well may, bring the whole system crashing down.” I admire but cannot share your idealism here. I think many if not quite all who are in pursuit of their own advantage to the exclusion of both sense and ethics do know at some level of consciousness what are the likely consequences. I think they simply don’t care. Me, myself and I is what matters and, hey, I should be able to get mine just like the Astors, Vanderbilts, Kennedys, Bushes, Trumps got theirs.
You will recall the ending of The Great Gatsby. I don’t have the exact quote at hand, but it went something like (paraphrase), They were careless people, Daisy and (her husband) Buchanan. I believe that just that quality, carelessness, is the American national vice, rather than greed or sociopath lust for domination.
I can take your points about the Ring Cycle, but I am not so far able to see them as being more than superficially applicable to our own American predicament. Prior to WWII, I believe our intellectual classes mostly behaved themselves, devoting themselves to study–I happen to think that 19th and early 20thC American scholarship was much better than anyone now realizes–and teaching the men of affairs who, it was assumed, would someday ascend to leadership. It was the generations who came into prominence post WWII, very much including the Middle European diaspora, who maneuvered themselves into high position and influence. I read somewhere that Jack Kennedy thought Harvard intellectuals were a dime a dozen.
Here is the Fitzgerald quote:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Ever since I first read that, I have regarded the sentiment as the best description I have seen of our national predicament.
@31 Gaia Baracetti, Patricio: I’m sorry if I offended you with my comment, I don’t mean to offend anyone and if anyone else was offended, I’m very sorry. I always defended the people of Gaza and they have my full support, the massacre in Gaza is unforgivable and seeing the massacre in Gaza is not exactly to my liking, twitter is still censored (as far as I know), I kept up to date on the Gaza war via telegram where there is literally no censorship and that’s why I stopped keeping up to date on the war in Gaza, because those images were so disgusting and repugnant that I simply stopped because I couldn’t stand it.
I don’t know how other people take Mr. Trump’s comments, but taking the statement of “turning Gaza into a tourist center” seriously is nonsense in itself, the idea is so silly and out of place that I don’t know how many took it seriously (moonofalabama.org took it seriously), I could only laugh at how hilarious and silly the idea was, maybe I shouldn’t have done it (sorry), but in this tragicomedy we live in, what can we do? Maybe be more serious.
@47 Maria Bennett, that’s a good theory, probably Mr. President wants his own peace agreements for the Palestinian issue and tries to be the hero of this whole tragedy, how he’s going to do such a thing, I don’t know. But it would be logical for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, simply because it is very worn out and because the presence of Turkey is beginning to worry it quite a bit, and not to mention Iran, it would be better to leave the Gaza Strip to someone else (and for the occupier to negotiate with Hamas and the Alqasam brigades).
Regarding Panama and Greenland, Marco Rubio came to my country on tour, I am from Guatemala. Marco Rubio came with the whip to pay the president of the country to which I belong. He came to impose order 😅, but the irony is that the current president of Guatemala is the son of former president Juan José Arevalo, who was overthrown in 1954(the period from 1944 to 1954 is called the golden age of Guatemala because it tried to implement a social democracy and was mutilated by the USA) by the CIA because of the problem of a banana producer (the company is called Chiquitita, today it is Brazilian property), at least they didn’t overthrow his son this time, they just hit him with a whip, ordered him to accept immigrants, and gave him the promise that they would build a port (or rebuild a port) and a railroad(make Guatemala great again? maybe that should be president Arevalo’s slogan 😅).
JMG, a question (and leaving aside the controversial topic of Gaza), in which part of the Ring Cycle is the American Empire? At least entering “Twilight of the Gods”, but I don’t hear the opera or the music, terrible service!
@JMG,
I’m agreed with you about tales growing in the telling – the Atlantis story, which a lot of researchers think started out with the memory of an eruption of Santorini that triggered a tsunami and wrecked the Minoan civilization on Crete, may well be another good example. Only a few of the people who told that tale between then and Plato’s time would have had to embellish it for Atlantis to eventually end up as an island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, “larger than Libya and Asia together,” whose downfall had occurred 9000 years ago rather than c. 1600 BC.
About the mound burials: you said in an earlier reply that “it was once standard practice for certain people to be buried alive in mounds and there become guardian spirits of their tribe or village, stepping out of the cycle of reincarnation for a while; eventually the mound was opened, the remains taken out and exposed on a hilltop to free the spirit, and a new guardian took the old one’s place.”
I’m aware of archeological evidence that neolithic and bronze-age people in Egypt, China, and other places practiced these sorts of burials – what I want to know is your source for the idea that they believed they were “stepping out of the cycle of reincarnation for a while” to become guardian spirits. Since you made this assertion, not me, I don’t think it’s fair for you to criticize me for demanding impossible evidence. (And for what it’s worth, we do have documented afterlife beliefs from the bronze age in the form of things like the Pyramid Texts and the Epic of Gilgamesh.)
@Roldy, JMG, re “Why is it that for Wagner true love is illegitimate or forbidden? Siegmund and Sieglinde are siblings, Brunnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt. Further afield are Tristan and Isolde…”
Personally, I didn’t so much notice the illegitimate/forbidden angle of so many of Wagner’s love stories – I think that every storyteller is drawn to such relationships because the more obstacles the lovers have, the more of a story there is. And if even someone as conservative as Tolkien could make Beren and Luthien central to his epic, then it’s not just a matter of rebelling against social mores on marriage.
What stuck out to me the most about Wagner is that, in his stories, love is always fulfilled in a brief burst of passion… and then the lovers die. He isn’t interested in making them live together as husband and wife and actually spend years hard at work raising children or ruling a kingdom together or anything like that. Whether it’s Senta and the Dutchman (Senta drowns while swimming to his ship they day after they meet, thus proving her fidelity so they can both go to heaven) or Lohengrin and Elsa, or Tristan and Isolde, or Siegmund and Sieglinde with their one night together (just getting Siegfried born at all is a huge challenge for an author with Wagner’s lack of interest in domestic life), or Siegfried and Brunhilde… Wagner was obsessed with “redemption through love,” but for him love seems to be a burst of passion ending in oblivion, not something you do for years and years on end.
My guess is that this is a reflection of Wagner’s own chaotic love life, since over and over he would have passionate affairs with different women; they never lasted long, but it must have been neat to fantasize about dying together in a burst of passion and redeeming the world… rather than just admitting that he would soon lose interest and move on to the next woman! (Tolkien, whose “love life” consisted of strict chastity in his youth followed by a lifetime of intense devotion to one woman, took the opposite course with his heroes, what with most of Tolkien’s lovers – Thingol and Melian, Beren and Luthien, Galadriel and Celeborn, Aragorn and Arwen – ruling a kingdom together for decades, centuries, or even millennia! Though of course being a big fan of the Norse sagas he had to throw in one tragic story of brother-sister incest in the tale of Turin Turambar and Nienor.)
@JMG
In This Hideous Strength, “Numinorian” magic functioned through wizards working with not-quite-yet fallen spirits in matter that were not aligned with demons nor angels, and that that magic became less easy and more dangerous as matter became more material and the spirits fell further.
Take away the moral middle ground yielding to black-and-white morality, and make matter becoming more material a measure of the gods to prevent abuse of magic by humans as they become more capable of turning it towards really bad ends.
I read Flatland while in high school, and in its social satire first half it said:
Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception, absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the Circles. But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that, in proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence, knowledge, and all virtue, in that same proportion their acute angle…shall increase also and approximate to the compartively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle…[A]s they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage, so do they wane in the power of penetration itself.
(Note: the “gentle-square” narrator is intended to be perceived as unreliable, inheriting the prejudices of his society.)
I also like Jessica’s version of the destruction of the Ring. And not just because it fits with my understanding that Samwise is the greatest hero of middle earth.
But to tie it back to Wagner and the Ring Cycle it would be Samwise’s love for Frodo that destroys the ring.
(take that Alberich, wisdom chooses love over power.)
hrmmmm ……..
Power, Love , Wisdom
I wonder if that would mean that when push comes to shove
the Occultist sides with the Mystic over the Mage?
Will O, I’m glad you’ve found this sequence useful! As for Plato and Pythagoras, they both believed that human concepts are closer to reality than human sensory experiences — that we can, in effect, think our way to the truth. That was the belief at the core of what some historians call the Axial Age, the point at which human societies (or at least those known to history) invented philosophy, logic, abstract mathematics, and other purely conceptual ways of thinking about the world. It was an enormously productive idea in terms of the amount of cultural creativity it set in motion, and also — less pleasantly — in the amount of violence and mass murder it inspired. It was also wrong. What we’ve learned from two and a half millennia of abstract reasoning is that abstract concepts have more in common with art than with reality; they can be useful, and they can certainly be beautiful, but they’re never actually true.
Clark, it’s an attitude that goes back a very long way. In Wagner’s time, it was mostly found among the upper classes; now it’s pretty widespread.
Mary, so noted. If you don’t find my metaphors (or Wagner’s) useful, why, then, you don’t.
Zarcayce, we’re well along in The Twilight of the Gods at this point. I’d keep an eye out for Rhinemaidens, in fact.
Sandwiches, I’m far from sure I buy the Santorini theory, not least because there were catastrophic global floods around 9600 BC — the specific date Plato gives for the end of Atlantis — driven by the end of the Younger Dryas cold period and the dramatic global warming that followed it. The land area swallowed up by rising seas just in the northern Atlantic basin, outside the Pillars of Hercules, is something not far from the size of Libya and Asia Minor combined, it turns out. As for the business with mounds, that’s from occult teachings, of course; the sources I know of are heavily influenced by clairvoyant experiences, which you may believe or not as you choose. With regard to Wagner, oh, granted — though here as usual, The Mastersingers is the exception.
Patrick, yeah, that was Lewis’s argument. He had to find some way to include the occult material while still clinging to his Christian dislike of occultism!
Dobbs, in Tolkien’s universe, surely.
John you said
“As for Plato and Pythagoras, they both believed that human concepts are closer to reality than human sensory experiences — that we can, in effect, think our way to the truth. That was the belief at the core of what some historians call the Axial Age, the point at which human societies (or at least those known to history) invented philosophy, logic, abstract mathematics, and other purely conceptual ways of thinking about the world. ”
The really hilarious thing about that is Hard Core Scientific Materialists think that because you can get some bits of carefully structured of matter to behave in ways that are consistent with mathematics that it is proof that the world is made of matter rather than made of ideas.
(If I may), Zarcayce @ 76, do have a look at Indian Punchline: https://www.indianpunchline.com/trump-turn-is-bad-news-for-west-asia/ and the sequel, for probably the best explanation around about what’s up with Gaza. The only thing left out is the not yet published deal to get the USA to invade Iran.
Dobbs, rationalist materialism is quite literally a contradiction in terms. If matter is the only reality, then by definition human thought is nothing more than the set of hardwired neurological reactions evolved by one life form on an out-of-the-way planet out toward the fringes of an ordinary galaxy, and any relationship it has to the actual nature of existence is purely coincidental. If, by contrast, human ideas — and in particular the beliefs about nature held by just one civilization at just one period of time — are in fact the truth about the world, then some factor other than the purely material must be involved.
Gaia (offlist), it must be very comforting to see the world in such easy black-and-white terms. Nonetheless this whole discussion has gone straying very far from the subject of this post — and this is hardly the first time you’ve done this, of course. If you have anything to say about Wagner, I’ll be happy to put it through, but any more attempts to drag the conversation back to corporate media talking points will be deleted out of hand.
Hi John Michael,
I guess it’s one strategy to get all the talking heads, parroting from the same story book.
The curious part of my mind wonders what that lot will do to keep the lights on and food upon the table now the flow of cash has been halted? I faced similar circumstances during the recession of the early 1990’s. When people use the word ‘woke’ as in the act of being awakened, but in the past tense, well now they might get to find out what it means, in the present and future tense, as in ‘waked’. Has a nice ring to it, does it not? 😉
By the way, you mentioned out loud in the comments above, the ‘dirty little secret’, which was alarmingly encountered by me whilst reading William Catton Jr’s fine book: Overshoot (which you recommended, thanks!) Yes, people by and large do say that such and such an act does not matter, when it does.
There was a heatwave earlier in the week. Outdoors in the shade was 100’F with warm overnight temperatures. Inside the house (despite serious insulation) got to 82’F which was quite uncomfortable. Thinking of the previous paragraph, a lot of destruction is done in the name of comfort. And by the way, this story also relates very much to the media. Once on that easy ride, the control gets taken out of a persons reach. Oh well.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG, @Dobbs
Are you suggesting that matter appears to obey the laws of physics humans came up with in controlled experiments largely because physicists are willing them to, and matter follows those laws only approximately when scientists aren’t testing it?
@Helen in Oz
This is just a usual summer in the drier parts of Aus, and irrigating is part and parcel for our climate, growing food isn’t possible without it. This summer hasn’t even come close to the worst parts of the millennium drought where we would have whole weeks over 40. I have some citrus here further upstream on the Murray where it’s even drier and haven’t irrigated them once yet because they are on a nice sandy rise with their roots way down.
Don’t despair, our whole national character was built on laconic fatalism, it’s time we took it back. Boundless optimism is something the Americans brought here with their Empire and it doesn’t suit us. Just look at the history of crippling drought and devastating flood, it’s the way things are. Too many Australians have been wrapped in a 20th century urban bubble powered by fossil fuel comforts, and need to think about our ancestors who thrived in these conditions without any creature comforts.
At least we can’t freeze to death in winter.
At 11h20 Paris time 8 feb 2025 dreamwidth was completely down.
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Guru Meditation:
XID: 40239152
Varnish cache server
@83 Mary Beneet: Yes, I have read indianpunchline.com in its entries, but I do not agree, I am more in tune with the article linked by @67 forecasting intelligence
Let me explain, if JMG and other authors are right, the current ruling elites of the empire, reached an agreement that says that they must distance the USA from its foreign commitments to prevent the country from burning (one thing is to try and another to achieve it, but that is a separate issue), and seeing the state of the US army, and if these elites are correctly informed, it is a great madness to invade Iran, it would literally be suicide.
Unless Trump and the MAGA boys are some kind of clueless Siegfried, but too clueless, and if they are, but in the realities about peak oil, unless they even ignore the state of the army, then there will be conflict with Iran.
I will explain myself better.
And this is where Wagner comes in, as JMG commented, if you look at the Rhine Maidens, what they ask for is that the Rhine treasure (the ring) be returned, one of the scenes where they do this is when they talk to Siegfried, if we pass this behavior to current politics, the Rhine Maidens are telling the MAGA boys (and their entire political movement) that the MAGA project through the commodification that reigns currently is not possible, because there is no easily accessible oil (fracking is too expensive) for such a task. What is the MAGA boys’ response: “Drill Baby Drill”, basically says that he will not return the ring, and keeps it. I wonder who will be the one to stab the MAGA boys in the back.
And seeing how things are, if the MAGA Boys really are a kind of Siegfried, and Trump is a kind of Siegfried, after all Trump believes himself to be a hero who can save the United States (sometimes I think he really believes it), Hagen already tried to kill Siegfried (attempted assassination of Trump), the MAGA movement has already sold out to the establishment (Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.).
We are almost in the final acts, Valhalla will soon burn. If I can approximate when Brunnhilde will sacrifice herself, it would be in the next decade, in the mid or early 1930s.
That is not a pretty vision, but returning to today’s events, Trump’s policy can be summed up as a “carrot and stick” policy: first he hits with the stick and then negotiates with the carrot in his hand as a gift. This could be seen with the threat of tariffs on Mexico and Canada (although poor Colombia fared badly, no one deserves to be treated like that).The typical Siegfried 😴
That was the reason why Marco Rubio managed to negotiate with Central America (tariffs on Guatemala, here in Guatemala many would have gone into panic mode, the USA is one of the main commercial partners) after hitting Mexico and others with the stick, the Central American countries preferred to negotiate before they launched more threats, I exaggerated when I said that Marco Rubio came with a whip to see the president, and I do not like to be a liar, but he did come to demand the entry of non-Guatemalan immigrants to the country (that will cause some problems in the future) and that Guatemala would become the third safe country (Arevalo does not want to accept that publicly). In exchange for that, the USA promised investments in land, railway and port infrastructure (if it will be fulfilled, I have no idea). That is why I hope for some negotiated solution with Iran.
Dangerous moments will be experienced with the Siegfried that the Americans chose as a political movement (and president), and when he falls, I would prefer to be somewhat far from the domains of the American empire, but that is not going to be possible 🥲.
Question, for the United States, what is the ideal that Brunnhilde represents? Democracy, freedom or prosperity? Personally I think it’s prosperity, “go west and make the pie bigger so we all get a slice” referring to the old west of the 19th century, which led to the gold rush.
Wow, that’s amazing, if Wagner hadn’t had an unpleasant personality and had dedicated himself to politics or something similar, he would have been a great political scientist or a great psychologist, he would have been a Machiavelli 2.0, but I suppose that being an opera writer brought him fame (and selling himself to the upper classes), on the other hand, as a political scientist he would have brought him enemies everywhere. The analysis of the behavior of industrial societies is very good and refined, add the music and actors and you will get very good operas, I think they are worth seeing, the good thing is that they are on youtube.
Still, I prefer Nietzsche, Nietzsche attacks the problem directly, of the German priests of the 19th century I like Nietzsche the most.
Chris, that is the big question now, isn’t it? I seriously doubt that Trump’s administration is finished digging up corruption, either — I see from various newsfeeds that a judge dismissed the attempt to keep the Doge boys out of the Department of Labor, which means that a whale of a lot of graft connected to the big labor unions is about to become public knowledge. There are going to be a lot of well-fed swamp creatures out of work. The wake for woke may turn out to be quite the spectacle.
Patrick, no, not at all. The scientific method is a very clever way to try to work around the hard limits of human intelligence, to generate abstract models that more or less imitate what nature does. It’s not flawless, though, and the biggest of its flaws is that it’s possible to come up with an infinite number of hypotheses to account for any set of data. Thus “laws of physics” are never more than models, and arbitrary models at that; all that scientists can say, when they’re being strictly honest, is “as far as we’ve observed, nature seems to act more or less the way this model does.”
Moserian, I know. It’s apparently a system-wide outage, and it’s gone on for at least five hours now. I haven’t been able to find out anything about it online; it would really suck if Dreamwidth was being funded by USAID…
JMG I have no problems accessing ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, it loads fine, time 9:40 gtm -6, there was a typo at the end of my previous comment, @89 Zarcayce, what I wanted to say is that of the German writers the one I like the most is Nietzsche
Wagner: I’ve long been vaguely aware of this epic opera, not least thanks to Bugs Bunny, but this finally makes the story and its meanings accessible. Now I see how it earned its towering place in culture, not only through excellent storytelling and distillation of mythology, but also by its insights into the modern mess we’re in.
Foundation trilogy: Keep in mind, Hari Seldon’s predictions were on point for the most part, and the text makes it clear that the civil war between the traders and mayors certainly would’ve happened, were it not for the Mule’s interference sending the timeline skidding off in another direction. The books do a pretty good job of selling psycho-history — even I thought it was an intriguing possibility, until the Archdruid corrected me, saying that even an advanced society, working with huge numbers, cannot possibly quantify human affairs to that extent, since Nature refuses to be tamed. I had to concede that, although it’s still a fine yarn, especially since the Mule asserts the counter-point that not all variables can be accounted for. I also approve of its themes of planting seeds and nudging history in the right direction, even if the ideas its built on, rationalism & managerialism, have turned rotten since the books were published.
As an aside, Onum & Ducem Barr are two different characters a generation or so apart, because there are time-skips between the various story-arcs. Also, the population of Trantor was estimated very differently at various points in the trilogy, with the latter estimate being more realistic iirc. Just wanted to point these out, since I’ve seen other commentators get mixed up on these points.
Dune: It really is a magnificent work of science fiction, but I’m rather surprised by the Archdruid talking down on the sequels. Don’t get me wrong, the first book is the best and most accessible in many ways, a classic space opera woven with deeper concepts. However, it’s the sequels that really expand on Frank Herbert’s vision, with Messiah deconstructing the whole hero/savior archetype, and God Emperor fleshing out his most substantial themes. Heretics and Chapterhouse veer off in a strange direction, although they’re worth reading if you’ve made it that far — I think he was working towards a satisfying conclusion, and book 7 would’ve tied up the threads nicely, had he lived to finish it. As it is, we’re stuck with the fanfic garbage of Brian & Kevin, which stand as a testament to why IP’s should be protected from hacks cashing in by prostituting serious works. If I ever get my hands on the Dune 7 Outline & Notes, I still have a working USB floppy drive, and will absolutely release them to the world.
Lord of the Rings: It had to be Gollum who did the deed, because first, there was a scene in which the hobbits had the chance to finish him off, but refused to do so, and it was this act of clemency that helped ensure their success. There’s also a line explaining how even a fallen creature like Gollum may have a role to play in the grand scheme of things, and that Eru Illuvatar can and will use unlikely tools to carry out his will. This is related to one of the main theses of LotR, that a seemingly insignificant person has the potential to play a greater role in world events, given a certain amount of persistence and luck. The other, of course, is the conflict between tyranny and freedom/self-determination.
As another aside, I think it’s an intentional irony on Tolkien’s part that the Rhinemaiden’s Ring is taken from and returned to water, while the Ring of Power is made and unmade in fire.
“it would really suck if Dreamwidth was being funded by USAID…”
Now that is funny! Not to exult in anyone’s misfortune, of course (or at least not too much).
This post is one of the best in the series imho, very powerful and apropos. Thanks.
“when the Rhine comes rushing in to finish the process.” I remind friends, family and acquaintenances occasionally that Earth has been around for quite some time, that she has experienced cycles of events and life we can barely even imagine, that she will most likely continue until Sol itself dies. Humanity… probably not.
“Jimmy Carter did it the right way and did it better. Not one drop of American blood was spilled to bring about the Camp David Accords. Best president of my lifetime.”
I agree Carter was the most morally upright, least corrupt president of modern times. However, his presidency reminds me of the Star Trek episode where a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into an evil Kirk and a good Kirk. Carter is the good Kirk, who becomes completely ineffective.
The picture of the hippies could have been me about 60 or so years ago. Ah, the halcyon days of youth. Sex, drugs. and rock n roll. It was fun while it lasted. But then reality showed up and gave me a bitch slap with a cold dead fish and I grew up. I still have my ideals, but they stay in my head, guiding my thoughts, emotions, and actions. They wouldn’t survive outside when they came up against the uncouth, uncultured, and uncivilized thing called human.
Following up on Zarcayce’s comment above, I view Trump as part Wotan, part Hagen, and part the clueless dolt Siegfried. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has ordered all American alcohol off the shelves. Where the American products were there are now signs advising of the Canadian products to replace them. Six other provinces have also done this. Travel agencies here are reporting that people are cancelling their American winter reservations. A new website has popped up listing Canadian products, so far mostly food, cleaning products, etc. and encouraging people to buy Canadian. None of this is going to affect the US economy very much, although it will have some on individual entities.
I don’t know what other countries are doing, but Trudeau recently had a phone conversation with Mexican President Sheinbaum, so Mexico may be planning something also.
Trump has stated that if the BRICS countries tried to set up their own currency (as in the Euro), he would place a 100% tariff on them. But that’s not what they are doing. What they are doing is encouraging trade in their own currencies, bypassing the US dollar. Saudia Arabia has refused Trump’s request to pump more oil at a time when the US fracked wells are in steep decline. If the African Union countries listen to American economist Michael Hudson and, as a group, defaulted on their loans from the IMF and World Bank, what would be the effect on the US dollar? Trump seems to think that he can bully the rest of the world around. But, like a clueless dolt, he doesn’t seem to realize that the rest of the world my have other ideas.
And then, there’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about–the US federal debt of $36T (and growing).
I’ve long suspected that there would come a tipping point when all of this comes to a head. Now I’m convinced that Trump is swiftly bringing about an economic Gotterdammerung.
>all that scientists can say, when they’re being strictly honest, is “as far as we’ve observed, nature seems to act more or less the way this model does.”
Although there are differences between models. A good model points to things in the real world to go look for. A bad one just points back to itself while being depressingly accurate. I think it was Feynman who pointed out the Aztecs (or was it the Babylonians) had this lovely mathematical model of eclipses but it didn’t tell them anything about what was happening under the hood. Useless but highly accurate. Or the model points in so many different directions that to chase them all down would take the rest of the age of the universe. I think string theory has something like 10^500 different directions it points in? That’s LLM-tier territory.
I suppose cynically, a good model allows you to apply for more funding grants so you can continue your lifestyle. I suppose it depends on how you define “good”. I think with Murican glasnost and perestroika, the age of generous government grants is over though.
For example of the power of a good model, to make metal burn as bright as the sun, you needed to find a needle in the haystack and the only hope you would’ve had to find that needle was to use the models that were telling you where to go look. There’s no way anyone would’ve stumbled across U235 without it or to know to purify it.
It’s not just dreamwidth: a lot of other internet services are being disrupted, ranging from some of the Canadian government’s services to the Playstation Network. I wonder if this might mean that some key piece of internet infrastructure was being quietly subsidized by USAID. If so, the shutdown of USAID might dramatically accelerate the decline of the Internet as it suddenly has to be able to turn a profit.
Hidden subsidies to the Internet could also explain why so much of the net has managed to remain free to access, despite the lack of a clear business model now that adblockers have become normal. If this is the case, I would expect to see a lot of disruption in the weeks and months ahead, and a lot of currently free services hidden behind a paywall in very short order….
>I believe that just that quality, carelessness, is the American national vice, rather than greed or sociopath lust for domination
In other news, a military helicopter that was flying too high crashed into a jetliner killing everyone involved, over 80 people. ATC did try to warn them that they were heading into the airliner but they assured ATC they had it in sight. Reading between the lines, ATC didn’t feel like it could push back on them. They “requested” visual separation and got it every single time. And then proceeded to visually unify with said jetliner.
>They have no desire to have children
Shrug, the future belongs to those who will and are. The world of 2100 will look completely different than today.
Zarcayce, I was able to get on for a while this morning, but at this point it’s down again and a couple of checks with websites such as https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ shows that the servers seem to be down. We’ll have to see what happens. I have a backup plan in case this becomes an ongong problem.
Xcalibur, glad to hear you’re finding the series useful! As for the Foundation trilogy, Dune et al., I certainly don’t claim that my opinions are the only valid ones, but they remain my opinions.
Karalan, given the extraordinary spread of USAID money directly and indirectly into censorship and propaganda ventures, very little would surprise me at this point. I’m going to be watching the publishing industry very closely over the next four years, in particular.
Annette2, I’m delighted to hear that Canadians are doing this — it’s almost as though Canada is a real country or something. 😉 Seriously, the more that each nation disconnects itself from global trade, the better — and if Trump’s bull in the china shop routine furthers that, all the better.
Other Owen, sure. The model you have in mind is Babylonian, by the way, and the reason it couldn’t be used to make theoretical predictions about the nature of the solar system is that plane geometry wasn’t available to them — the Babylonians did it entirely using arithmetic, which they were very good at. Once the Greeks combined Babylonian arithmetic with Egyptian plane geometry, the fusion of the two produced the Ptolemaic model…which proceeded to mislead the world for almost two thousand years. A model can be fruitful without being true!
Anonymoose, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. Dreamwidth offered a very good service for almost no money; I’d wondered for years if they were getting money from some other source. As I mentioned to Zarcayce, I’ve got a backup plan, and will activate it if this continues.
JMG,
Today I’ve no problem getting onto Dreamwidth, although I haven’t been trying it constantly. What I have noticed in the last couple of weeks is that at times webpages didn’t fully load on the first try. Often the pictures or other imbedded items won’t load without a refresh or two. Trying to get into a “secure” account site can be especially trying. It’s something I haven’t seen until now.
I chalk it up to the expected decline of the internet.
Hi John Michael,
Yes, they do seem to be kicking the hive rather hard. Probably could stand a good kicking.
It is the big question in town, isn’t it? Yup.
You know, it occurs to me that the difficulty of living within ones means, is that you have to live within your means. Not very appealing sounding is it? 🙂 My best guess at this stage as to the outcome of all this kicking of the hive business, is that individuals acting in their own self interest, took things too far. Now they’ll get to discover that their own check book does not extend anywhere near as far as that of the money printers to which they no longer have access to.
Not sure if you’re interested in Aussie politics, but yesterday two by-elections were held. Prahran (pronounced Pah-ran) which is a swish inner suburb (once formerly very working class where my lovely grandmother used to reside) switched from the left leaning Greens to the centre right Liberals. And even more interesting, the middle to outer suburb of Werribee (pronounced Were-O-Bee) which was as safe a seat for the centre left Australian Labour Party as you’d ever find, had a strong swing against it, described in the media as ‘an almighty whack’, again shifting to the centre right.
Liberal Party surges in Werribee and Prahran by-elections mount pressure on Allan Labor government
As a disclosure, I used to be a rusted on supporter of the centre left Labour party, and I now cannot find it within me to forgive them for their pursuit of ideology over common sense policy. And a few years ago, they took things way too far down here. For me as a citizen to have to display papers and identification to the military and police and explain my presence, showed me their true colours. Now I know what they want and how they see the world, because I experienced it first hand. Some things, you can’t un-know.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Oh, almost forgot to mention it but…
Your Dreamwidth service issues (and it is still down here) is the very reason I remain independent and just simply pay. Sure, it’s not as fast, cheap or convenient, but you once told me that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
To be honest, I’m looking at Substack and wondering… (I don’t use the service)
Cheers
Chris
JMG,
Also, the effects I’ve mentioned I remember as starting before USAID encountered the DOGE asteroid.
“If matter is the only reality, then by definition human thought is nothing more than the set of hardwired neurological reactions evolved by one life form on an out-of-the-way planet out toward the fringes of an ordinary galaxy, and any relationship it has to the actual nature of existence is purely coincidental.”
Not a materialist (what does that even mean?), but I am puzzled by this line of reasoning. You seem to assume that human thought must have some special relationship to “the actual nature of existence” (i.e., cannot be such a marginal phenomenon in cosmic perspective), and that this actual nature must transcend the domain suggested by material evolution and neurology. Cannot matter have “spiritual” dignity? (For a Druid to say no would be odd!) The heliocentric theory aroused similar objections, that it makes us unimportant–but I do not claim my mother to be the center of the universe, and yet love her. I understand the appeal of a Platonic-type dualism, but also its limitations.
I just now got into Frugal Friday, so Dreamwidth may be back up and running.
Other Owen and JMG,
One of the more intriguing ideas in 20th century philosophy, stemming from Wittgenstein, is the idea that the only truly mind-independent facts are those of causality: that there are causal forces which operate more-or-less independently of my will, but the objects and events I actually experience — in other words, the impressions of those forces upon my consciousness — are in a sense inseparable from my experience of them. As Hilary Putnam put it, “The mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”
And if that’s true, then because our mental models about the world, such as physics, are not models of the causal forces per se (which are by their very nature beyond our ability to experience directly) but about their interactions with our joint mind-world experiences, the models cannot represent the world as it is in itself, nor can they fail to represent it — because there is no such thing as “the world as it is in itself.”
This is, of course, a very Kantian and Schopenhauerian idea but I think it needed clarifying since Schopenhauer’s philosophy is usually approached as a novelty and Kant’s distinction of noumena from ding an sich is often taken in a very dualistic way: as if the experience of a thing is mere illusion and the thing-in-itself is what we would experience from a kind of “God’s-eye-view.”
The 20th century correction was to point out that the idea of a “God’s-eye-view” was neither necessary nor fully coherent in the way it was conceived. (My own hunch is that there is an Ultimate Point of View but it’s more like the union of all possible individual points of view rather than a One True View.)
John, well, it’s back up at the moment. If it keeps on being problematic, though, I’ll activate my backup plan.
Chris, thanks for the heads up! I try to keep an eye on politics more or less globally, so I appreciate this. As for Dreamwidth, there’s good reason this blog is hosted on a paid server; my backup plan for a post-Dreamwidth situation involves something of the same sort.
John, so noted and thank you for this.
Ambrose, I’m trying to figure out how you got from what I said to what you said, and not managing it. All I’ve said is that the human mind is either a product of matter alone, or it isn’t. If it’s a product of matter and nothing else, then its ways of processing the world (which we call “reason”) are purely the result of evolution and blind chance, and offer no insight into the inner nature of things; therefore rationalist materialism is false. If it isn’t a product of matter alone, then the universe cannot be reduced to matter and nothing else; therefore rationalist materialism is false. As for matter having some sort of “spiritual dignity” on its own account, I see you don’t know much about Druidry; according to the teachings of the Druid Revival, certainly, “matter” is simply our way of perceiving the densest part of the world of spirit. Blake phrased it crisply as usual: “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”
Patricia M, thanks for this. Yes, I was also able to get on.
Slithy, thanks for this. Yes, that makes a great deal of sense — I wonder if the discussion of “co-creation” in some esoteric writings was inspired by that. Can you recommend a good source on that argument?
I haven’t had any trouble getting into dreamwidth in the past few days. I have had a bit more trouble getting onto a fanfiction site I frequent; AO3.
I’ve been watching events in the USA with interest, shock, and odd bits and pieces of both delight and horror. So much is happening so fast. I just went and got refills on my medications and am taking an eye to the contents of my food cupboards, because I have no idea what’s going to go down next and I’m a bit concerned something important might explode somewhere that effects me. Beyond the almost-tariffs, I mean. That has been confusing and worrying, and I’m by no means sure that we won’t end up with a trade war.
“I read many people who look forward to the end of what they call the American empire or some variation thereof.“
Daniil, count me as one of the Americans who wants this to happen. So much so I hope your country defeats mine in Ukraine. Though I hope it is pre-enlightenment ideas that take root instead.
Slithy and JMG, I don’t know about esotericism, but I’ve been ploughing through Maximus the Confessor, and if I’m understanding him correctly, which is possibly not true, the implications of his “The one Logos are many logoi and the Many are One” is precisely that. He had a tough job, trying to take the Christian consensus after Chalcedon, and prove the implications meant that the Creation was being co-created in the Word for a telos w the origin, and got his hand chopped off and tongue ripped out for his trouble. He also renovated the Platonic scale of Being. I have a feeling we will hear more about him in the Christian world in the future, and we had better because without that type of vision, Christianity may go down in the whirlpool of objectification swallowing up everything that can’t account for itself in terms of participation. In other words, he seemed to have done genuine creative work philosophically, along with the drawing out of the creed in a certain direction, and it makes him hard to understand. I wish CS Lewis had encountered him before he passed.
I’ve been wondering about the deeper psychology behind Hagen’s character and how he fits in the schema of the Ring Cycle. In an age of dead gods he seems to step in as a substitute-Wotan, and seems to do a good job of it, being the only other character in the operas to consciously drive the plot along (ironically, I think Wotan was referred to as “White-Alberich” at various points, if I’m not mistaken, which is quite Saruman-esque). The main difference being, while Wotan had a weak spot for his love of Brunhilde (liberty), Hagen has no such soft spots. Tellingly, in the dream scene with Alberich, Hagen states that he learned courage from his mother (notice he says nothing of love), he has no reason to thank her for going through with conceiving him, which of course is very unlikely to be consensual. He’s the Ring’s curse in the form of a person, only in this case love is just another weapon he can use, and where Wotan’s spear is a tool for law, Hagen’s is a weapon of treachery. There’s a deep nihilism to him, and the scene where he summons the Gibichug vassals to celebrate a farcical wedding to liberty by offering sacrifices to dead gods feels like some Nietzschean parable about perverted reason wearing the skinsuit of dead religions.
Speaking of dead religions, is there a meaningful connection to draw between the burning of Valhalla and the recent burning of Hollywood and the tragic death of David Lynch as an indirect result? The mismanagement of California’s water resources as a major contributing factor seems to make this all the more relevant.
JMG, a few Wagner posts ago you mentioned that German perople can be subdivided into types of personality like Gunter, Hagen and Gutrune. Can you elaborate?
It occurred to me about the subject of Götterdämmerung, that, now, Germany has existed long enough as an united national state (since the second half of the 10th century), that it is possiblew to tease out a pattern of self-destruction. The first round would have been the Kaiserreich, which ended through the 1st World War; the second round would have been the Weimar Republic, which ended through the Second World War, and the third round would be the Federal Republic of Germany, moving to some kind of denouement triggered by the Russi-Ukrainian War and, more generally, the current crisis of Western civilization.
About the disruptions at the Dreamwidth site, and the decline of the Internet, I can add that some sites that used to have free contene are now largely paywalled.
>the fusion of the two produced the Ptolemaic model…which proceeded to mislead the world for almost two thousand years. A model can be fruitful without being true!
Technically speaking the epicycle model of explaining things works, it just gets more and more unwieldy as you add planets and moons to it.
I would say we’re about where the Babylonians were when dealing with quantum mechanics. We have this lovely mathematical model that makes lovely predictions – but doesn’t tell you anything about what’s actually going on. It could very well be we need a new construct to weld to the math to more forward.
“given the extraordinary spread of USAID money directly and indirectly into censorship and propaganda ventures, very little would surprise me at this point. I’m going to be watching the publishing industry very closely over the next four years, in particular.”
We’ve all seen the big names get the big advances from the big publishing houses for decades now, without ever seeing the book sales that would justify such. I’ve always been curious how that worked, exactly. If that means a nod of thanks in the direction of Orange Man Bad, so be it.
Dreamwidth is down for me again this morning; and according to https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, for others as well. I also spotted on the site that Apple Pay is among the list of sites disrupted. The outage was only for 50 minutes, but that is still quite interesting, because Apple is one of the major players in the tech world. Assuming this is not a coincidence (which I am not sure is a valid asusmption at this point: tech issues on this scale happen regularly), then this is either deep down in the physical infrastructure, or there was a great deal of graft happening, or perhaps both.
I’m starting to worry there is a reason I suddenly felt the need to make sure I had a plan for how to handle a sustained internet disruption a couple weeks ago….
Pygmycory, keeping the cupboards well stocked strikes me as a really good strategy just now. Drastic changes are under way in Washington DC, and those are cascading outward with unpredictable results. I’d be startled if we don’t have a few trade wars this year…
Celadon, fascinating. Yes, that makes a great deal of sense, doesn’t it?
Ben, Wotan’s self-description was Licht-Alberich, “light-Alberich,” so you’re not wrong. It’s also a fine and tremendous piece of irony that Hagen pretended to be defending justice when he assassinated Siegfried — “I have avenged perjury!” is what he says. His is a more blatant blatant form of Wotan’s repeated attempts to finagle a way around the consequences of the contracts he’s agreed to. As for the burning of Valhallifornia, I’d say it’s a nice archetypal parallel.
Booklover, from an outsider’s perspective, Germans sort out tolerably readily into the Gunter-type fond of moralistic posturing in the service of ego, the Hagen-type full of blind and ultimately self-defeating ambition, and the Gutrune-type, also known as der Deutscher Michel, who has no clue and just wants to get along with everybody.
Other Owen, of course it works. The point is that it offers no useful predictions beyond itself — you can use it very well to determine where the planets will be at time X, but if you try to get a sample from those crystalline spheres or figure out what’s at the center point of each epicycle you won’t get far.
Karalan, exactly. Some of that’s simply money laundering — “outside investors” cough up the cash that’s paid to politicians in multimillion-dollar advances for books nobody reads, for example — but there does seem to be more going on than that.
Anonymoose, so far it seems to be oddly localized. I’ve also got such plans, of course, but the only aspect of them that may need to be activated soon is a Dreamwidth replacement, and that only if problems continue.
” I remind friends, family and acquaintenances occasionally that Earth has been around for quite some time, that she has experienced cycles of events and life we can barely even imagine,”
Given the rumblings around Santorini, and what happened when the previous volcano there relocated itself to the stratosphere that is something to keep in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
Ben Farmer @ 111 Speaking of mismanagement of CA’s water resources, the following link from May 2024 is highly relevant:
https://www.valleyagvoice.com/cotton-acreage-to-surge-in-california-amid-favorable-conditions/
JMG, I am trying to follow this discussion without being a fan of Wagner, afraid his music doesn’t appeal. Forgive me if my understanding so far is a bit simpleminded, but if the Rhine River is thought to represent the natural world, and the gold treasure guarded by Rhine maidens–spirits of place can be found in many if not all traditions, theft or misuse of said treasure is A Bad Thing, no matter how much profit can be made, correct?
Karalan, “Germany has existed long enough as an united national state (since the second half of the 10th century)… ” Really? My imperfect, I admit, understanding was that the Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork of kingdoms, counties and self governing cities up until about the mid-1800s. Could someone from Europe or who has studied European history please explain? I don’t see the Empire as a unified national state.
JMG, of the three prototypical Germans enumerated, it is the Gutrune type which is most widespread. Another interesting thing, this time to do with Donald Trump, it seems to me that Naked Capitalism doesn’t understand the meaning of Trumps presidency, instead, the people at Naked Capitalism think he’s an ordinary neocon. Do you still use Naked Capitalism as information source?
Speaking of Ragnarok. In my meanderings through various discussion spaces I have repeatedly done free advertising for JMG along the lines of this recent post.
“ I think we are watching a train wreck, except we are also passengers on the train. At best Trump or other reformers of any type can only apply a bit of braking to slow down the inevitable. I think John Michael Greer has portrayed what this slow train wreck and the coming future will look like in his books The Long Descent, The EcoTechnic Future, The Retro Future and other books unless we are in the wind up to the return of Jesus.”
JMG,
I think the best place to start is with Richard Rorty’s essay “Non-reductive physicalism” in his book Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Most of the papers in there are relevant — especially “Texts and Lumps” — but “Non-reductive physicalism” is an explanation and generalization of an argument by his mentor Donald Davidson’s argument for “anomalous monism” with regard to the mind/brain distinction.
Roughly, anomalous monism is that idea that if you posit that every mental state is the same as some neurological state, and that the “mind” model of how those states proceed from one to the next makes the same prediction as the “brain” model (that is, the predicted next mental state will be the same as the predicted next brain state in the same way that the current mental state is the same as the current brain state), then that’s a perfectly good physicalist account of mind, and in particular, you don’t need to posit that there must be some way to translate the rules of the mental model into the rules of the brain model (or vice versa) — there’s no need to identify sets (or types) of mental states with sets (or types) of brain states; the individual state-state identity (or token-token identity as Davidson puts it) is enough.
Now, Rorty was a physicalist and I’m not, but what I found enlightening is that Rorty across his various papers expands this strategy to basically everything: channeling C.S. Peirce and William James, if there are two ways to talk about some phenomenon and there is a way of translating the causal predictions (aka what sense perceptions we can expect) such that they are identical, then there is no point in saying one of them is more accurate or valid than the other, because those predictions are the only way to validate or invalidate the model.
In terms of the broader history, Rorty got this idea from Davidson, who was influenced by Wittgenstein, who was influenced by the pragmatists like Peirce and James. (Rorty also takes a lot of influence from John Dewey.)
Another major name in this is Hilary Putnam, who was the first to conceive of and advocate the functionalist theory of mind — essentially, that minds are just computer programs — and then a few years later repudiated the view and spent several more years attacking it. In fact, one interesting theme among these philosophers is that many of them started out taking extreme reductionist stances (Wittgenstein was a logical positivist and Rorty was an eliminative materialist, as was Paul Feyerabend whose later views are in the same ballpark) and then changed their minds.
Siliconguy, glad to hear that somebody else has that in mind. The thought of what a really whopping tsunami would do to the eastern Mediterranean just now has been occurring to me also in recent days.
Mary, it’s a little more subtle than that. It’s perfectly possible to make use of the natural world’s gifts without falling into the trap of commoditization — of reducing the value of everything to how much money it brings on the open market. That’s what Wagner is talking about: turn the gold of nature into a means of power and control, which is what commoditization always is, and it becomes a curse.
Booklover, granted, but the Gutrunes never make history — and just now the German political system is rather well supplied with Gunthers as well. (Are you listening, Ms. von der Lügen?) As for Naked Capitalism, of course — I make it a point to read news sources I don’t agree with, so that I don’t just get my own opinions mirrored back to me.
BeardTree, thank you. Does anyone seem to be taking the hint?
Slithy, many thanks for this. I see I have a lot of reading ahead of me.
Generally no pushback with the exception of John Carter of The Substack Postcards from Barsoom. He is enamored of going to Mars and space civilization as the next step. I mentioned your work- he knew of you and was dismissive. I tried pointing out that powering space travel on methane natural gas) and kerosene (derived from petroleum) , the fuels of Musk and Bezo’s rockets, was a long term no go. I guess the hope is utilizing Lunar water to make liquid oxygen and hydrogen for fuel, also used in present day rockets,
Jeff Bezos back in the seventies was a student of professor Gerard O’Neill, proponent of giant rotating (to provide gravity) space stations home to many thousands of people . https://nss.org/o-neill-cylinder-space-settlement/#:~:text=The%20O'Neill%20Cylinder%2C%20designed,and%204%20miles%20in%20diameter.
Apparently Bezos caught a permanent bug and still has faith in that type of future. The energy and resource use to pursue these visions is Brobdingnagian and doomed to very limited results.. Got to use that word for the first time in a sentence!
My viewpoint is let’s use resources on Terraforming/loving the earth not Mars!
JMG (and Slithy), yes it does to me, and has enormous explanatory power. The problem is the Platonists don’t like his insisting the creatures essence is created, and the Christians don’t like him saying that it is eternal, nevertheless, because of their priors and beliefs about Hell. Which makes me like him and suspect he’s going the right way with it. I’d be curious what happens when Christian esotericism assimilated his teaching. But yeah he’s the only theologian I know of that is consistently Christocentric on every topic., without losing philosophical depth. He’s fascinating. The two become one mystery never leaves his focus.
JMG, this series has made clear to me I need to pay more attention to the art of various periods. I guess Wagner never delved too deeply into esotericism, but art seems like a primal and unique form of it.
Mary Bennet, Germany was united as a national state in the 19th century, not in the 10th.
“Thus “laws of physics” are never more than models, and arbitrary models at that; all that scientists can say, when they’re being strictly honest, is “as far as we’ve observed, nature seems to act more or less the way this model does.””
Yep, we know for a fact that the laws of Gravity, Relativity and Quantum mechanics are all technically wrong and incompatible. But they work good enough to give the results we need. The issue is that so many folks act like we have all the complete rule book when we only have the outline.
It is fun seeing folks like Niel Degrass Tyson mention stuff like this as he slowly move towards the position of JMG year after year. 😉
@Annette2 and @JMG RE : Prioritizing Canadian products.
I was kind of happy to see that, I wish it wasn’t so adversarial and knee jerk reaction but the idea of promoting and focusing on home grown stuff is a great thing. It shouldn’t be exclusionary but nothing wrong with favoring home grown. I am semi jokingly hopeful that Trump turns his gaze on Australia and there is a bit of a push away from American corporate culture.
No need to go to the US to experience 90% of the corporate junk (Fast food etc) as American corporate culture has already infested us! There is nothing wrong with the American people and some trade but it is too much of the icky stuff from the country keeps washing up on our shore. It’s our fault for accepting it!
But one example of change, over the last 10 years or so that we have really gotten into making our own spirits as a nation. About 10 years back it was difficult to find much in the way of Bourbon, Whiskey, Gin etc that didn’t come in on a ship. Nowadays it is starting to compete on pricing and quality. A little breeze of change has come, soon to be a wind.
Stories of travel around the world only a century back would mean seeing wildly different life styles. The monolith of culture hadn’t taken place, many times you didn’t even have to leave the country. But when there is Coke and Pepsi in every country, something is definitely lost.
Mary Bennet @ 119 apropos Karalan
I suspect since the 9 and 0 are side by side, that was a typo
Celadon,
I regret that I didn’t have time to reply to you earlier, when I replied to JMG. From what I’ve been able to find about Maximus, the Logoi he had in mind seem to be the three persons of the Trinity, not you, me, and everyone else. Do you have a recommendation on where I can learn more about Maximus?
I disagree with you on many, perhaps most things… but damn, you’re good! Live long and keep writing, you do more good than you think you do…
Celadon,
Sorry again, I hit submit too soon on the last reply.
My own views on the subject of mind-and-world are heavily shaped by, on the one hand, my exposure to Advaita Vedanta and the Western schools of thought it has influenced, especially New Thought; and on the other hand my readings of the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers I mentioned. The latter tended to talk about the relationship of language to the world rather than the relationship of consciousness to the world but most of the insights of the former translate easily to the latter.
One place where I stand with the Western philosophers against most Vedantists is on the proper attitude toward the world: the fact that there is no “way the world is in itself” apart from our experience (and potential experience) of it doesn’t reduce it to a mere illusion. As William James pointed out about Bishop Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism, the idea that the world is nothing more than a subjective experience is more properly an explanation of what matter is than it is a denial that matter exists.
And this is further complicated by the fact that, as the Vedantists themselves point out, even our minds are, properly speaking, objects within the world — consciousness being pure subject, it’s a step beyond the mind. So to say that the world is an illusion is a kind of category error: the concept of “illusion” describes something inside the world not the relationship of consciousness to the world itself. It’s on a level with the sort of facile claim that says that since hobbits are fictional creatures they don’t really live in holes in the ground.
(I forget which paper it’s in, but Richard Rorty has a good discussion somewhere about how a statement can be literally true even though the things it refers are fictional.)
Slithy, participation is such a crucial thing, and everyone approaches from varied angles. That’s what the official version of Maximus will tell you he meant and that only. I reached the end of the road with orthodox orthodoxy and had to go further a field. Try Jordan Wood on his works as an intro. He has a new book, The Whole Mystery of Christ, which includes untranslated foreign language footnotes, and sums up all Maximus scholarship. But he’s also been on the lecture circuit. I like the interview w vervaecke a lot for starters because it’s Platonic but only as a start. https://youtu.be/qjyz-HwQM10?si=BM0Bs1NWpvVnMiZf. The logoi are the created essences, which (for him) are actually highest at the person, not the abstract essence. I can’t make sense out of history and art as a Christian, or full sense, without this backdrop. And I agree with JMG, from a different vantage perhaps, that this obsession is the (if I can say it this way) original sin of metaphysics, for the last two thousand years. No, for M, the logoi are the created essences. The Logos is the second person, who unites two unaffine and opposite natures, in one hypostases, which is not natural but is nevertheless primordial. The sum of all logoi and the Logos are the same in the hypostasis, but not by nature, which frees nature to remain exactly what it is, which is a process of becoming what it once was, without loss of its nature. Or so I understand it. To me it explains how it is that Vivaldi or Wagner can speak across centuries, and enhance their person and nature, rather than dissolving them in ideology.
I’m tired. The idea that Plato wanted an intellectual elite to rule society is one of the most ridiculous and overblown misinterpretations of the Republic as has ever been read, only directly standing beside it’s equally ridiculous and overblown misinterpretation that spouts from the mouths of religious fundamentalists when they say that every word of their holy scripture is literal. In short, it’s the very literalistic reading itself that is the cause of so much trouble. The Republic is about the organization of the soul, dealing with the parts of itself as a city-state. If you can’t actually give space to a better method of engagement with Plato than has been provided by autocrats, then the least you can do is vacate yourself from the premises of discussion if all you are going to do if reaffirm the negative interpretations of would-be tyrants.
Otherwise? Brilliant post as always.
I wonder what it is with dragons. You see their depiction in cultures all over, old world and new. All I can think of is that very early in human evolution our ape ancestors had some ugly encounters that became hard-wired into our neurons, maybe with crocodilian predators in rivers and waterholes or maybe with long extinct draconic life forms who lived contemporaneous with early humans but whose remains we’ve never uncovered. I can attest that as a preschooler I had a fascination for them. I was convinced that they lived hidden underground and underwater and that if you were watchful at night you could see them come out on the surface. But I cannot remember where I got those ideas.
For German speaking readers, there is a beautiful trilogy (“Stern-Trilogie”) by Barbara Frischmuth which uses the three ages without being strictly speaking fantasy literature. A poetic and empathetic writer with a light touch and positive world-view, the author sets one novel in the world of fairies and their interactions with one human in the Salzkammergut region. The second novel ist centered on a former fairy with dim memories of her supernatural powers, who now fulfils the magic act of pregnancy with a human being. The third novel finds the same heroine entirely human and grappling with the realities of being a single mother.
Wer here
Well JMG another interesting post here. It must had been a harrowing experience (for Wagner) to try send an important message about when he had guessed the society of Europe is going to end up ( look outside the window the rot and desolation all over the EU) and only to be surrounded by cheering masses that just like the visuals etc and not having a clue what is being send here…
JMG I’ve read some Polish authors discusing the ring cycle and one of them had come up with a more sympathetic interpretation of Siegfried than you (I think it is Polish actor Żmijewski who had once played the role in a TV drama)
He said the Siegfried in his interpretation is an naive and clueless individual who with out a second thought accepts the magic drink without thinking it will do something bad to his mind and causes him to betray what he once loved. He compared this to how many young people find themselves addicted to recrational drugs, pornography, video games and fast food after going to the internet because they had foolishly thought that the internet is a place of freed and good expresions after a local version of gunter and hagen invited them to the local internet sides.
Michael @ 129
You wish Australia would do something like Canada’s doing? If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Talk to some of your friends and acquaintances about starting a “Buy Australian” movement. Make a list of Australian products and set up a website and publish it. Print copies and take them to stores and ask to post the copies there. You may encounter a lot of resistance but you may also encounter a lot of enthusiasm. I’ve been involved in several grassroots organizations when I was younger that started off as a small group with an idea that took hold and grew. In a few months you may have your town completely behind you and other towns have decided to follow along. Then again, in 10 years, you may have only influenced 5% of the population. However, a small victory is better than no victory. You’ll never know until you try.
Act 1 where Siegfried comes in disguise to Brunnhilde, forcing her to take off the ring so she can be forced to marry ‘Gunther’ (Siegfried in disguise), is pretty brutal. It’s brutal in the symbolism too: the revolutionary hero, once in love with Freedom, abuses her and forces her to serve worldly powers so he can get his share of privilege.
There’s also an interesting parallel in the story of the World Tree, broken by the making of Wotan’s spear. The Tao Te Ching talks about laws being inferior to The Way – that people only need laws because they are alienated from each other and the Tao. The World Tree used to unite the entire universe, but now that it is dead Wotan rules with the spear of laws and agreements, which is inferior. Creating the spear destroyed the tree: creating explicit rules and agreements to bind people damages the trust between them, maybe?
Obviously this is an opera, but it’s striking how many times disaster could have been averted by someone being a little more humble and generous. The Rhinemaidens are brutally harsh to Alberich, and awaken his spite. Siegfried thinks about giving the ring back to the Rhinemaidens, but is offended by their threats, so he doesn’t. Mime could have been kinder to Siegfried, but wasn’t, so he dies. Hagen almost comes out on top but is defeated by Brunnhilde’s generosity.
A lot of the trouble comes from people insisting on what they’re owed regardless of the hurt caused to others. I think at a personal level we all have an opportunity to ‘give back the ring’, in two senses. One, to be more generous and less insistent on our entitlements, and two, to meet our own needs directly rather than through the economy.
Slithy, yes, no one lives as if a bullet to their head wouldnt jack them up. I’ve appreciated JMGs emphasis on matter and also scientific method in that regard. The idea that we can do ecbatic prophecy, or more precisely someone like our host can, by thoroughly participating Wagner, is something that merits an explanation that is adequate. In fact one can verify it first even as one explains it. Both verification and explanation ought to be artistic, which is to say philisophic, scientific and religious, beautifully harmonized. Because that’s the level Wagner’s at, love him or hate him. But within that work there is room for the cosmos. Which includes of course the gentleman you cite(
BeardTree, no surprises there. Space travel is the progressivist equivalent of going to heaven, and I expect believers will cling to it for centuries to come.
Celadon, interesting. I’ve made a note to look into his ideas as time permits. As for art and magic, there’s a deep kinship there — the great artists don’t need to study occultism if they go deep enough into their own disciplines.
Michael, exactly. I chuckle about the people who wrestle with how light is both a wave and a particle at the same time; “wave” and “particle” are both crude sensory metaphors we use to model certain aspects of how light behaves, and nothing more ,but as usual, what Korzybski called the “is of identity” trips up modern thinkers.
Altitude, thank you. I do my best to keep annoying people.
Richard, a fine spluttering tirade! Please note that I didn’t so much as mention the Republic here; you might see how you can make your argument work with his other dialogies that reference politics, or with the documented details of Plato’s life, including his ill-fated Syracusan adventure. As for the Republic, I’d suggest that interpreting it purely in terms of the government of the soul is as one-sided and unbalanced as interpreting it purely in terms of the government of the polis. Plato was always more multilayered than that. Whitehead’s characterization of philosophy as “footnotes to Plato” remains true, but some of those footnotes inevitably read, “Well, the old man was wrong about that one, wasn’t he?”
Smith, it’s a fine question to which I have no answers.
Njura, I wish my German was better than it is. I also wish more European fiction got translated!
Wer, that’s certainly a generous interpretation; I’m not sure it’s the one Wagner had in mind, though!
Kfish, those are excellent points. I don’t thing I’ve ever seen Lao Tsu invoked to make sense of Wagner, but it works. You’re quite right, too, that we all have the chance to cast the ring back into the water. Which of us will take that opportunity?
@JMG, BeardTree,
You said “No surprises there. Space travel is the progressivist equivalent of going to heaven, and I expect believers will cling to it for centuries to come.”
I think that you’re projecting a fake attitude/motivation onto John Carter. If you actually read his work, he’s pretty explicit that he thinks colonizing space will be difficult and lots of people will die. He seems to be motivated much more by a desire to recreate a particular epoch in the history of his own people – i.e. when the very toughest and most disciplined white people settled the Canadian frontier (which he has praised for being even harsher than that of the United States) and built a new branch of British civilization.
The irony is that he sees going to Mars or wherever as the “solution” to the problem of white people here on Earth letting their societies get overrun, with very little violence, by the degenerate riff-raff that he insists won’t be able to survive in space… while dodging the question of just why it is that people who didn’t have enough courage to preserve their civilization and keep themselves in charge in Canada and the USA… will be up to the challenge of staying alive on another planet!
IMO John Carter just really doesn’t want to think about the coming era of race mixing and ethnogenesis! There will be plenty of survival challenges in the next few centuries with hardscrabble cultures rising out of them – they just won’t have the racial purity he’s yearning for when he writes essays like “The WHIMs of Mars” (where “WHIMs” stands for “white hierarchical individualist men.”)
Here are the relevant essays on Carter’s substack; the first is where he extolls Canadian frontier culture & calls his country “The Prussia of North America” & the second is the aforementioned “WHIMs of Mars.”
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-prussia-of-north-america?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-whims-of-mars?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
JMG, things are becoming more and more interesting. If I understand Wagner correctly, what he found in his operas (the gods, the giants as political metaphors) were perhaps egregores (I don’t quite understand what an egregore is, as far as I understand it is a form of collective thought anchored to matter or 3D). These egregores (if they are) are characteristic of industrial societies (non-industrial societies are a world apart).
And if they are not egregores, then wagner was a trained psychologist, wotan would be the industrial capitalist elite (the one that understands the obviousness that an industrial society needs industry) that understands the problems of the concentration of power in industries, hagen would be the financial elite (or rentier) and the industrial elite that sold out to the financial elite (Nvidia would be an example case), the magaboys would be siegfried (yes, I know that trump is a magnate, but is there any intellectual movement that is not a movement sold out to the elites? trump is an educated class, in today’s intellectual movements there was no way to get a siegfried, the majority are hagen or gunther), gutrune would be and the love drink would be the search for wealth or the search for the power necessary to maintain the throne, and I could go on, this would be my opinion. I didn’t think I needed to read wagner, but now instead of reading him, now I will spend time watching his operas (subtitled, a form of indirect reading 😅).
In comment #89 I made a typographical error, I wrote 1930 instead of writing 2030, the parallels between the decades 1920-1930 and our decades can become a little alarming, but I think this discussion will be better for this month’s open discussion.
Kfish, the Rhine maidens remind me of the classical Greek goddess Artemis. She may have at one time been an avatar of the Sumerian Innana, later renamed Ishtar, but later the Hellenes worshipped her as a patroness of wild nature. As such, her treatment of those who offended her was both cold hearted and fatal. She could not be bribed, bought, cajoled, or seduced. Nature bats last and it cares nothing for human sympathies.
https://morgoth.substack.com/p/the-disenchantment-of-the-rhine-and
– a lovely poetic piece that touches on so many topics of this blog.
Wagner, climate change, consumerist culture, Weber, populations severed from the land.
Sandwiches, fair enough. Thanks for this.
Zarcayce, something like that, certainly.
JustMe, and thanks for this.
Celadon,
It seems like your post got cut off. I’ll respond to what I think is your concern: if we are fundamentally consciousness, why do we mind what happens to the body?
In some sense, cultivating an indifference to the body’s ultimate fate is the point of a lot of philosophical and monastic practices over the past two thousand years, and soldiers have been cultivating a “contempt for death” for even longer. We are all going to die, and shying away from that fact can keep us from living.
That said, I am certainly in no rush to get it over with, but not because I believe that death is the end of my true self. It’s because I rather like this little self that is my body and mind and have still have things I’d like to do with it.
It’s rather similar to how I hope I don’t develop the sort of catastrophic retrograde amnesia that’s much more common in fiction than real life, since losing all my memories would be a kind of death-and-rebirth on a miniature scale. But I’m not worried that it would be literal end of me as a person, much less as a soul.
@Annette2 re : Buy Canadian/Australian/whereever.
I have done that in the past as have many others but with little impact. Apathy is the most you will get out of people. Forget about Fentanyl, Convenience is the most powerful drug on people.
The most cynical take is, well, I will quote Vaclav Smil “If you want people to change their habits, hit them were it hurts. Their wallet!”. When the prices of stuff from overseas goes up, habits will change – might be a single economic word that encompasses that. Rhymes with barriff.
I am more likely to be a follower of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. What would Jesus buy? 😉
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverend_Billy_and_the_Church_of_Stop_Shopping
Re: Space travel
I would be eager to explore the galaxy, provided that (1) space travel is like driving or riding in a car (including artificial gravity generators & not getting killed by cosmic rays or relativistic-speed micrometeroids en route) , (2) that interplanetary trips take about as long as running errands, (3) that travelling to a star system in your stellar neighborhood can be a day-trip, and (4) travelling across the galaxy is like driving cross-country through the USA.
(When I was young, I watched a cartoon about a space robot family that had space travel like that, or so I gather from the one VHS I knew of it. Do these space colonization enthusiasts want to go to space because they think it would be like the cartoons they watched as children?)
“Realistic” space travel and attempts to establish colonies seems to me like the opposite of heavenly.