John Michael Greer's Blog

Tolerably often, when I’m reading any of the documents that came out of the original Situationist International, I end up feeling as though the author is caught up in a desperate struggle between his own Marxist presuppositions and the world as it actually exists. That’s common enough in 20th century Marxist literature from outside the Communist bloc—those from inside that bloc rarely even attempt that struggle—and the Situationist documents aren’t even extreme cases of the type.

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of just how easily the mindset of leftist extremism motivates, excuses, and celebrates brutal savagery and mindless hate. Nonetheless I plan on continuing the discussion of Situati...

As we move from the first to the second half of Yeats’s programmatic essay “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” we leave the territory of poetry and the arts and plunge headlong into the second of Yeats’s lifelong passions, the realm of occultism. More specifically, he sets out in a single vivid paragraph the central theme of his own magical explorations, which proceeded to unfold after his time into one of the principal projects of twentieth century Western occultism: the finding of common ground betwee...

There’s much to be learned from studying movements that thought they were the wave of the future, and weren’t. To begin with, there’s a distinctive tone of strident triumphalism that most movements doomed to fail seem to adopt, some at the very beginning of their trajectories, others once they pass their peak and start down the long slope into irrelevance. Learning to catch that note when it appears in the political and cultural movements of the present, by listening carefully to past examples, ...

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

One of the experiences I’ve had tolerably often, over the more than nineteen years that I’ve been writing these weekly essays, is the discovery that a series of apparently disconnected posts I’ve written were all talking about the same thing. Yes, that’s happened again. It’s going to take some work to trace out the connection I have in mind this time, and unpack its implications; I also have no doubt that some readers are going to be upset or outraged by what follows—though of course that’s noth...

At this point in our exploration of Yeats’s great occult synthesis A Vision, it will help to step back and glance at an earlier work of his that provided that synthesis with many of its core ideas. That essay is “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” and we’ll explore the first half of it here, titled “Anima Hominis,” the Human Soul. (If you haven’t read it yet, you can download it free of charge here.) It originally saw print in 1917, just before Yeats’s marriage and the experiment in automatic writing th...

As a writer with an unruly muse, I’ve gotten used to accepting inspiration no matter the quarter from which it arrives. Even for me, though, this essay is a little odd. We’re going to be talking about one of the weirdest movies of the early 1970s, which is of course saying something; about a widely praised short story by a major science fiction author from the same era; and about what these two products of the same cultural movement ha...

You don’t actually understand an idea until you know its history. That lesson is one that most people have been doing their level best not to learn in recent years. Their unwillingness isn’t any kind of accident. Once you know where an idea came from and what kind of vagrant wanderings it’s been through on its way from its birthplace to the present day, it stops being possible to shove that idea into the simplistic straitjacket of “true or false.” You have to come to terms with who invented it, ...