John Michael Greer > Quotes

“Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.”
― John Michael Greer

“One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.”
― John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

“We cannot experience the world, even for an instant, without experiencing it through some myth, some narrative structure that sorts out our experiences and gives them meaning to us.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“There are two common and complementary mistakes, which have been made over and over again concerning spirits by people in the Western world. The first of these is the orthodox Christian habit of assuming that all spirits are malevolent, dishonest and evil; the second is the corresponding habit, common in many New Age circles nowadays, of assuming that all spirits are loving, wise and good. Both of these attitudes are as foolish when applied to spirits as they would be if applied to human beings.”
― John Michael Greer, Paths of Wisdom

“As polytheism is in religious belief reflected in the recognition of moral complexity, so henotheism in religious practice is reflected in the recognition of moral diversity. To worship different gods is to align oneself with different ideals, and to embrace different moral standards. The example of the mother and the judge shows one way in which this works out in practice. The mother places parental love above impartial justice, while the judge does the opposite. In the language of Greek Paganism, the mother bows to Hera, the judge to Zeus Dikaios, and both are right to do so.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.”
― John Michael Greer

“The attitude that psychologists call inflation and the traditional lore of Cabalistic magic, borrowing a term from religion, calls spiritual pride is one of the most serious dangers of this work.

Those who enter the path of magic with too great an appetite for flattery or too strong a need for ego reinforcement will very likely find these things, but they are also rather too likely to find fanaticism, megalomania and mental breakdown along the same route. The thing has happened far too often in the history of magic in the West.”
― John Michael Greer, Paths of Wisdom

“There’s a rich irony, in other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“The leprechaun, according to legend, can be forced to yield up its treasure if you can keep watching it without letting your attention wander for so much as a moment. This has so much in common with experiences in meditation that Zen masters in America use it as a metaphor for meditative practice. There’s an important lesson here: glamour is hardly limited to the realm of Faery. Most human beings live most of their lives under its spell, chasing after treasures that—like the golden coins in countless fairy tales—turn to dried leaves the moment one looks away.”
― John Michael Greer, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings

“After his break with Freud, Jung pursued
the connection between the unconscious and
the occult and found example after example
of ancient mystical and occult symbols in
the dreams of people who had never encountered those symbols in waking life. He came to believe that below the repressed memories of individual life, there exists a collective unconscious full of archaic images that appear in myths, legends, and the traditions of occultism. By bringing those images into consciousness, it is possible to achieve individuation: a state of psychological balance and wholeness as far above ordinary sanity as neurotic conditions are below it.”
― John Michael Greer, The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca

“A glance back over our past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause but by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“Questions about what counts as knowledge are at the heart of most dissensions about religion.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“We have all grown up, one might say, thinking of nature as an
adorable, helpless bunny that some people want to protect and
others, motivated by the will to power that is the unmentionable
force behind so much of contemporary culture, want to stomp into
a bloody pulp just to show that they can. Both sides are mistaken,
for what they have misidentified as a bunny is one paw of a sleep-
ing grizzly bear who, if roused, is quite capable of tearing both sides
limb from limb and feasting on their carcasses. The bear, it must be
remembered, is bigger than we are, and stronger. We forget this at
our desperate peril.”
― John Michael Greer

“[T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things.”
― John Michael Greer

“Concorde fallacy,” the conviction that it’s less wasteful to keep on throwing money into a failing project than to cut your losses and do something else.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“I know that I hung
on the windy tree
Nine full nights,
Pierced by a spear
offered to Odin
Myself to myself
of which none knows
Upon that tree
Where its roots run...”
― John Michael Greer, The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca

“Thus the tired fantasy of cheap, abundant nuclear power needs to be buried alongside the Eisenhower-era propagandists who dreamed it up in the first place.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“Consider the way that so many people nowadays use the word "imaginary" to mean "unreal." In actuality, of course, what we imagine is real in its own way, and it can be powerful and important as well.”
― John Michael Greer, The Druid Path: A Modern Tradition of Nature Spirituality

“Roman augurs and Chinese mandarins both knew well that when rumors about monstrous beings became more than usually common in a community, that might indicate rising stresses that could take a more overt political form later on. The same logic still applies today; the parts of America most caught up in the cattle mutilation panic of the mid-1970s, for example, were exactly those areas where radical anti-government activism took off most rapidly a decade later.”
― John Michael Greer, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings

“Alchemy was (and is) considerably more
than the attempt to turn base metals into gold. To an alchemist, all material things ripen toward perfection unless something gets in the way. The alchemist's mission is to remove the obstacles that keep material things from attaining their perfection. For metals, that perfection is gold; for the human body, health; for the human spirit, union with
the divine-and all these and many more are
appropriate goals for alchemical work.”
― John Michael Greer, The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca

“The symbolic and ritual tools of magical practice can be used to set off the same set of reactions that allow a child, or for that matter a baby baboon, to stock its social self with the nonverbal and emotionally charged patterns of its social group. In a capable initiation ritual, this is done in a careful and controlled way, with patterns that further the process of magical training, and the candidate – the person going through the initiation – is taught nonverbal signals that allow him or her to activate the new patterns when it’s time to use them, and deactivate them when it’s time to deal with the nonmagical world. In the short term, this makes it possible to practice magic without too much psychological strain; in the long term, the experience of shifting from one set of arbitrary social patterns and emotional charges to another teaches the reasoning mind to get some distance from the social self, and think its own thoughts rather than those it has been spoonfed by its society.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“Is insisting that one can only be saved by the best possible god so different from insisting that one will only ride in the best possible car?”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“The second half of the twentieth century in Japan saw the birth of scores of new religions – a phenomenon to which the Japanese have applied the appealing label kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Few ideas in all of human history have been more thoroughly misunderstood than the simple concept of evolution. Intellectuals in Victorian England, eager to use the science of their time to bolster a class system already cracking under the weight of its own injustice, invented the notion that some living things- and thus some people- are "more evolved" than others. That turn of phrase is still much used today, but in the real world, it is quite simple nonsense.

Every living being is just as evolved as every other, because every living thing has been shaped by evolution over the exact same period of time since life first evolved”
― John Michael Greer, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth: An Introduction to Spiritual Ecology

“Listen to the insults being flung around in the political controversies of the present day—the thieving rich, the shiftless poor, and the rest of it—and notice how many of them amount to claims that wealth that ought to belong to one group of people is being unfairly held by another.”
― John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

“the sociology of deviance – specifically, the way that human groups use seeming statements of fact the way baboons use bared teeth and threat postures, to stake out territory and drive off outsiders. As far as we know, baboons don’t try to use their territorial displays to make sense of their world, and this is to their credit. Human beings, alas, are not always so clever, and the resulting confusions play a massive though rarely recognized role in mangling communication in any complex society.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“The local political and religious officials
were more than ready to take action and
began rounding up suspects at once. Anyone
who was accused of witchcraft by at least three witnesses was arrested. Those who confessed were burned at the stake; those who refused to confess were tortured until they said what their accusers wanted to hear and then were burned. Clerk of the court Johannes Fründ, the author of the most detailed record of the Valais witch trials, noted with amazement that some of the accused kept insisting on their innocence until they died under torture; like most of the officials involved in the trials, he assumed that every person accused of witchcraft must be guilty.”
― John Michael Greer

“There are perhaps seven broad claims about the afterlife, with innumerable variations and combinations of belief.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Amythia,” the pathological lack of myths, has been diagnosed as the root cause of any number of modern sociological and psychological evils.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Plato compared the whole self to a chariot in which reason was the driver and two irrational parts, the biological appetites and the social reactions, were two very unruly horses. The challenge that had to be solved, to him and to the Neoplatonists, was how to train these horses so that they would accept the guidance of the reins and take the chariot the way the charioteer wanted to go. Several centuries of work went into finding the best ways to meet that challenge, and the toolkit that became central to Neoplatonism from the third century CE on – well, that’s where magic comes in.7 In the writings of Neoplatonist philosophers such as Iamblichus and Proclus, the word used was theurgy or divine work, which they distinguished from thaumaturgy, working wonders, the common or garden variety magical practice that went on in classical society in much the same way that it goes on in ours. The practice of theurgy was exactly the unpopular kind of magic I introduced in the previous chapter; in the technical language of the time, it was practiced to purify the vehicles of consciousness; in the terms I have been using, it was intended to see to it that the baboonery of biological drives and social reactions didn’t interfere with the reason and the will.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil