Saturday Substack Digest - 6 May 2023
Conscientious objection, transracialism as a suicide bomb, AI killing all the right jobs, civil war, and moving to Russia ... or escaping to Hyperborea?
Welcome to the third weekly instalment of the Saturday Substack Digest. Ha, I bet you didn’t think I’d last this long. I know, I’m surprised too. Although I’m rather enjoying the opportunity to do some low-effort editorializing.
In this week’s digest we look at how conscientious objectors to World War GAE are reconsidering their loyalties in the light of the racially targeted transgender suicide bomb ripping through their communities, while snickering at the coming AI replacement of "woke" jobs, bracing themselves for secession and civil war, groaning under the male purdah enforced by the feminine corrosion of the workplace, and contemplating a move to Russia or, perhaps, an escape to the fractal outposts of faerieland that may (if you know where to look) still emanate from Eden ... just beyond the shimmer of the Northern Lights, second star to the right, and take the straight way to the True West....
Did you like that? I had ChatGPT do the summary. Had to re-roll a few times; the first time I asked it to turn those topics into a sentence, the dumb machine just listed them and said ‘these don’t seem to be related’. Shows what it knows. They’re all related. Then I rewrote it so it wasn’t garbage and boring. The woke LLM added the scare quotes to woke, by the way.
Honestly it probably would have been easier to just write it myself.
Anyhow, I hope you find this collection as fun and informative as I did. If something here catches your eye, remember to click through to the author’s blog, read the whole thing, hit the heart, and subscribe! And maybe leave them a nice comment.
As always, don’t be shy about leaving your own recommendations in the comments. Including for your own blogs. I still haven’t gotten through all of the recommendations from the first digest, but don’t worry, I’m getting there. If I tried to cover everything these digests would be even more obscenely long.
On to the links!
I’m opening today’s digest with a public service announcement from Morgthorak the Undead, who’s concerned - I think with good reason - that a draft may be imminent. He notes that after over a decade of relentless being spat upon by the anti-white diversicrats, young white men appear to be staying away from the US military in droves, leading to the well-known recruiting crisis. This at the same time that there’s a far-from-negligible chance of a great power war breaking out with the Russo-Chinese Eurasian coalition; indeed, given NATO involvement in Ukraine, and the GAE terrorist actions in the Baltic Sea, this war has essentially already started, and it’s just a question of how far it escalates.
Morgthorak also points out that there is nothing the occupation government would love more than to round up all those troublesome young white dudes and send them to get chewed up by Russian and Chinese missiles. Quite apart from the obvious malice with which they’re regarded, those youthful heartlanders are the most obvious source of political and cultural resistance to the Great Reset. Using them to grind down the Eurasian pillars of the multipolar alternative would eliminate two problems for the price of one godawful war.
Personally, I suspect that if there is a draft, American forces are going to be beset by a plague of abysmal morale and rampant sabotage that will make Vietnam look like a day on the clean, orderly, and collegial Starship Enterprise.
In any case, Morgthorak’s advice is to seek conscientious objector status, and to do so now. He provides strategies and resources with which to do:
Chris Waldburgeris a South African in the thick of the fight to preserve something resembling a future for one of the most unjustly maligned and forgotten groups of white people on the planet. In his latest piece, Waldburger traces the connection between the racial reckoning and the Great Tr00ning of the 2010s. He draws on an article in the City Journal interviewing mothers of teen girls that have abruptly decided they are teenage boys:
Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)—that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.
Sounds like Patricia got exactly what she voted for.
Older friends of mine will sometimes remark on the sudden genderqueering of the youth, which took them completely by surprise. What the hell is going on in the schools? Is it something in the water? I’ve been saying for years that it all comes down to the racial shaming white kids are immersed in. As a straight white kid, you’re at the bottom of the victim hierarchy, the maximally privileged oppressor eternally condemned to lose the Oppression Olympics. Unless! As it turns out, you can rocket straight to the top of the inverted pyramid with this one weird trick. However, while the psychological mechanism seems obvious to me, I don’t think I’ve yet encountered this dynamic noticed so directly in the context of a sequential temporal evolution.
As Waldburger observes, the utter sexlessness of our demoralized youth suggests that none of this sexual identity stuff is motivated by sex, while the rise of performative gender confusion happened at the same time as certain other notable cultural developments:
The trend also explains why young people, despite having much less sex than in the past, somehow identify with boutique sexual and gender identities: because the issue is not primarily sexual, but social or racial.
White skin is tainted. Thus redemption is sought in the cleansing waters of sexual identity.
And whilst things like affirmative action and leftist-style ‘liberation education’ have been popular since at least the 1950s, it is clear that a mass escalation occurred in the Obama era ... The Lightworker began his first term as the great racial healer, the great community organiser who would now organise the US and a new postracial western world.
We all know how the Obama years went. During the 2008 presidential campaign I watched the messianic treatment Obama was given with a degree of bemusement. Even in Canada, where American politics is essentially a spectator sport, his election was greeted with a rapturous joy that would normally be associated with the apotheosis of a religious prophet. I hadn’t realized that the indigo children were saying that he was an ascended master, however.
Waldburger concludes:
Why do I bring this all up in an essay on the great sex change revolution?
Because the psy-op that sex changes should be celebrated is based on the foundation of the unique badness of white bodies.
The great irony of our times is that just as we are screamed at about the violence done to ‘black bodies’, it is the white body which is now called to bear the sins of our great wicked race.
People generally look at self-sterilizing teenagers and think the world has gone insane. What they rarely notice is the racial angle. Virtually all of them are white, basically none of them are black, and the Asian, brown, and Hispanic trannies I’ve encountered are … well I don’t encounter many. Seen in this way, transgenderism is a racialized assault on the reproductive future of Europeans.
Read the whole thing.
Continuing on the theme of noticing horrific things about teenage biohorror, professor of evilHarrison Koehlihas some thoughts on the relationship between rapid onset gender dysphoria, teenage suggestibility, social contagion, and suicide. Parents are asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?” in order to bully them into acquiescing to the termination of their lineage. But what happens when you plant the idea in kids’ minds that the transgendered are very likely to commit suicide?
the idea that trans-sterilizations and -mutilations are necessary in order to prevent suicide is dubious to begin with. But there may even be something even more sinister going on here.
Here’s the thing about suicides: they tend to cluster. I first learned about this when reading Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves by Lee Daniel Kravetz. Suicide clusters are an example of social contagion. The more media reporting on a teenage suicide, the bigger the cluster will be.
How much of the trans suicide phenomenon (to whatever extent it may or may not be real) is a result of the ubiquitous commentary about trans suicide?"
My understanding is that the phenomenon is probably very real. I can easily imagine that the genuinely gender dysphoric suffer from an irresolvable anguish. A much larger fraction, however, are gaslit into thinking that they’re trannies, when really they’re just gay. Or tomboys. Or going through puberty. For this population, when they’ve been led all the way down the path of ‘gender-affirming care’, from puberty-blockers to cross-sex hormones to have their tits chopped off to being medically sterilized, and they wake up one day in their 20s, realize that they’ve made irreversible changes that have rendered them into an abomination, that they’ll never have children, and that even assuming they can find a sexual partner in a world that regards them with revulsion they’ll never even be able to have sex properly, and on top of all of that you’ve already been primed to believe that ‘people like you’ commit suicide all the time, well….
Now, combine Harrison’s insights here, with Waldburger’s observations above, and you have a systematic psychological assault implicitly targeted at an entire generation of European youth that is removing them from the gene pool while in the mean time turning them into vectors for enourmous emotional anguish for everyone around them. Oh and they seem to be predominantly girls, too ... a society can lose a lot of young men and still bounce back, but if the wombs are removed....
Check out Harrison’s full essay here:
Switching gears entirely,Ignatius of Maidstonehas been building out his predictions for 2030. Today’s entry is his third part of the series:
In Part 1 of this series, I outline how the U.S. dollar will be dethroned as a global reserve currency, resulting in a multipolar world that is split between East and West. In Part 2, I explain why this will lead the U.S. to adopt Orwellian surveillance tools like central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to cement its dominance.
Here, in Part 3, I show that the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics, while it will replace jobs, will also lead to something counter-intuitive: economic and political power concentrated in the hands of conservative, right-wing, and libertarian individuals. Wokeness will vanish, and common sense will prevail.
I already linked Ignatius’ essay in my recent piece exploring some of the possibilities for people to stay employed (or to be employed) in a world of AI, but I wanted to draw it to your attention here because it is a very good and worth your time to read. As Ignatius notes, most of the jobs on the chopping block belong to the enemy:
A Goldman Sachs study suggests that AI systems like Chat GPT could replace 300 million jobs worldwide. Business Insider did a study, and found that the following professions are most at risk … Glancing through this list, a thoughtful reader might notice that aside from the finance-related roles, these jobs are dominated by Leftists. The power of wokeness comes from teachers, journalists, lawyers, and Big Tech monkeys — and all of these jobs are under threat from AI.
It’s an interesting reversal of the trend from the latter half of the 20th century, in which it was primarily blue-collar jobs that got smacked around by robots.
After Chat GPT and robots cause teachers, computer programmers, and Uber drivers to become unemployed and rely upon government-provided Universal Basic Income (UBI), there will still be a few jobs remaining. It is hard to replace a stone mason, fine carpenter, or car mechanic, after all, and even robots cannot easily replicate skilled trades.”
Again, a thoughtful reader will realize that men in these professions tend to be conservative. I have not met any plumbers who are woke soyjaks. AI will therefore purge woke workers from the economy, while retaining right-wing men (there aren’t many women in the trades).
The elite rely upon carpenters, mechanics, and electricians to keep society functioning. If these men are not properly compensated, then society will collapse, along with all of the dreams of the World Economic Forum (WEF) crowd. Therefore, it stands to reason that skilled tradesmen will accumulate economic and political power.
Will skilled tradesmen really become a new power centre? It’s a strange thing to think about but it’s not impossible. In a world of commodified intelligence, those who can do what machines can’t become the scarce resource. On the other hand, it’s possible that the skilled trades will stop being so skilled: slap an augmented reality headset on Pablo or Ahmed and the expert system can feed him enough instructions to make him 80% of the electrician Dave was, only without the years of apprenticeship and journeyman training. Think about the way that GPS technology enabled recent immigrants to navigate new cities as Uber drivers with about the same level of efficacy as cabbies who’d grown up in its streets used to have. Notably, cabbies used to be able to support themselves in relative comfort; Uber drivers generally do not.
While I’ve no doubt there’s some scheming little startup founder grifting venture capital to deskill the trades as we speak, the real world with which the trades deal is a messy place and unlikely to be automated for a few years. Until that happens, I for one am going to sit back and savour the schadenfreude as the office hens and their soft-spoken uptalking castrata find themselves surplus to requirements.
It’s also worth wondering if the trades will remain a bastion of conservatism, and if so, why. My guess is that they will, and that this is related in some way to basic neurology … occupations that are purely theoretical, that do not involve getting one's hands dirty in any way, seem to be the most prone to disappearing up their own posteriors into purity spirals of self-referential and self-righterous morality, while occupations that are maximally engaged with reality seem to be resistant to this.
See Ignatius’ full analysis here:
While we’re talking about 2030, let’s talk about every American’s favourite topic, namely Secession and Civil War:
let’s say by a hypothetical year of 2030, the U.S. has degraded exponentially to the point where the division in society and within the government is even far worse than it is now, and so many other geopolitical problems are flaring that the central government’s hands are completely tied.
I discoveredSimplicius The Thinkerwhen he wrote Epidemic Diffusion in response to my schizo-poast about the purpose of SARS-CoV-2, in which he suggested that the main purpose of the plandemic was to throw chaff in the air to cover the financial collapse. He’s not wrong about this, at all, and I don’t see any conflict with my own hypothesis that the virus was intended to degrade cognitive function. There’s the nature of the weapon, and there’s the timing of the weapon’s use.
Simplicius is not optimistic about the prospects for the medium-term political stability of the United States:
I often mention my long-held forecast that I predict the United States will either devolve into civil war or secession by the year 2030. Hearing this, many have asked me to expound at length about my thoughts on this, why and how I see it unfolding. So I’ve decided to finally treat the topic in a more in depth manner than the usual comment reply allows.
However, it’s important to be specific about what we mean by civil war:
Particularly in today’s cultural climate, when they conjure up ‘civil war’, many people are subconsciously referring to some sort of Rwandan Genocide-style conflict between the two opposing sides of Liberals and Conservatives, where the actual civilians have taken up arms and are battling it out in the streets. This notion of a ‘civil war’ is driven by endless memes posted by both sides which depict things like armed antifa leftists against conservative militiamen rifling it out in some dystopian suburban battlefield, perhaps akin to Seattle’s CHAZ ‘Autonomous Zone’.”
...
There is a third option some people refer to when invoking civil war: that of ‘people vs. the government’.
Neither of these are the kinds of conflict that Simplicius has in mind, and while he expects that the second form of conflict would be over quickly (since the government after all depends on the civilian populace for its logistics, and is furthermore outgunned to an absurd degree when considering small arms), it is rather the classical form of civil war, the type that starts with a secession, that he expects:
Now, several prominent politicians like Marjorie Taylor Green have even begun to do soft-calls for a ‘national split’ which in some ways can be considered merely a safe euphemism for civil war.
It’s a thorough and thoughtful analysis, in which he gathers together the sentiment analyses describing the national mood, political segregation due to internal migration, the likely political consequences of a federal government redistributing cash from prosperous and productive red states to failing blue states and the way in which these splits will be exacerbated by deepening cultural divides, and the likely disposition of military facilities given the fault lines along which the union will probably fracture (hint: think Texas), The whole thing is worth reading:
Not On Your Team, But Always Fair
In the first digest I linked three essays on the new blog motheRucker dealing with tonic vs. toxic femininity through the lens of the sneaky passive-aggressive concern trolling women love to fight with. It turns out Bridgette isn't the only one thinking about that subject lately. Lorenzo Warby has turned his incredible brain towards the question in Feminisation has Consequences:
This one can be adumbrated thusly: Just because men commit far more violent crime than women does not make women the superior sex. Women, too, compete with each other in destructive ways. Given substantial female movement into the professions and governance, female competition styles are now having consequences.
This is actually the fifteenth entry in Lorenzo’s ongoing series Worshipping the Future, which the incomparable Helen Dalehas been hosting on her own blog in order to give Lorenzo some much-needed exposure. The purpose of the series, which you should read in its entirety, is to try to come to grips with the bizarre collective psychosis we call wokeness:
There are endless critiques of ideas currently labelled “woke”. It can be fun, even informative, to trace the intellectual history of those ideas. To dissect their limitations, failings and falsities. This despite the fact that those to whom it is applied reject it, yet other folk can readily understand what is meant.
What is, again and again, lacking in critical explorations, no matter how clever, insightful, funny or witty they may be, is any serious sense of what we should do in response. The critiques neither contain nor imply any useful response, any useful action plan.
Relatedly, the sense of the underlying mechanisms that led to where we are is thin, weak, or absent. Key elements about how woke ideas became so socially pervasive are neither understood nor explained. Hence the critiques do not lead to any useful response.
Lorenzo looks at these questions through an evolutionary psychology lens. In considering the consequences of societal feminisation, he starts with the cognitive differences:
We are a cognitively dimorphic species. In terms of the 15 personality traits* that aggregate into the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism), 70 per cent of each sex has a specific pattern of personality traits that no member of the other sex has. This is because the distribution of various traits tend to have different median points in each sex, with the male distributions being “flatter” (meaning longer “tails”). You only have to have one trait that is outside the distribution of the other sex to be cognitively distinct.
Aggregating that together (because each sex has all the congruence but only half the non-congruence), over 80 per cent of us has a specific pattern of personality traits that does not occur in the other sex.
That is a high level of dimorphism. Such significant cognitive dimorphism has to have been selected for.
This is an interesting observation. You’ll often hear leftists proclaim that humans aren’t very dimorphic at all, when compared to, say, mountain gorillas or cows. And this is true (although the physiological differences are still rather significant: lady apes don’t have boobs). Pointing out that humans are cognitively dimorphic strikes at the heart of the interchangeability assumed in diversity initiatives.
So why are we so dimorphic? It’s all about the babies, and how long they take to mature:
Even given that Homo sapien males (particularly fathers) are at the far extreme in their investment in resources for children among male mammals, or even primates, there are good reasons for Homo sapiens to show a high level of cognitive dimorphism. There is the biologically normal pattern of the sex that takes greater reproductive risk being choosier. This is enhanced because human mothers breastfeed particularly helpless infants. This is coupled with the human pattern of risks being transferred away from childrearing and resources to childrearing.
On female competitive strategies:
Women compete with other women for the best mating opportunities and prospects for their children, with the most effective form of competition being attacking or undermining the reputations of rivals. This generates shaming and shunning: a form of aggression that can be highly self-deceptive and is easily moralised.
Meanwhile:
Men, as part of both transferring resources to child-rearing and risks away from it, have evolved to be team players, to be the solidarity sex.
This is a very important point. People will often say that men are competitive, and women are cooperative, which is an old trope from 70s-era, dancing-naked-under-Mother-Moon, second-wave Wiccan Earth Goddess feminism. It’s utter nonsense of course. Men cooperate much more effectively than women do.
On mixed workplaces that leave everyone unhappy:
Women in male-dominated workplaces can often become emotionally bruised due to the “ragging” that is part of team-building-through-testing. Meanwhile, men in female-dominated workplaces can often feel emotionally smothered due to overt emotionalism.
Bring your whole self to work” is both classic feminisation and a really dumb idea. You want work relations to be functional, not familial or emotionally charged.
Professional environments dominated by women aren’t just stultifying. They gradually stop functioning entirely:
It is not that feminisation is a sign of decadence. Rather, it is a source of social corrosion.
The corrosive effects of mean-girl aggression and weaponised propriety are greatly aided by social media, structured as it is for propagating propriety-based aggression, status and social leverage.
Patriarchal or not, societies rely on male-dominated teams to be effective. Feminisation means undermining such teams and replacing them with cliques that enable forms of aggression that target individual connections to others. These include such techniques as weaponised compassion (X doesn’t care enough) or ostentatious propriety (X is not conforming to the right norms).
The brief excerpts here really don’t do justice to the full essay. You really just need to read the whole thing:
Have you ever wanted to move to Russia? Sounds crazy, I know. It’s cold, poor, dirty, bleak, and filled with unfriendly, drunken, violent Slavs.
As it turns out, I have thought about moving to Russia. I visited St. Petersburg a few years ago, and found it to be absolutely lovely. The streets were clean, the people healthy-looking and well-dressed, the women thin and beautiful. There were children playing unsupervised in the broad alleys between shops, something you almost never see anywhere in the West. At the same time, Russia has emerged as something of a bulwark against the demonic faggification that has overtaken the Rainbow West. As the totalitarian cloud has spread its miasma through our air, I’ve wondered if Russia might be a place to take refuge. If you’ve spent any time on university campuses, particularly in the natural sciences, you’ll have encountered Russians and Ukrainians who fled the Iron Curtain or the apocalyptic gangsterism of the post-Soviet collapse and parlayed the first-rate technical educations they’d obtained at Soviet universities into comfortable careers in the West. Perhaps by symmetry a similar refuge might be found for some of us Westerners?
I even spent several months on Duolingo learning Russian (which I stopped when they forced their ridiculous cartoon characters into the lessons. Being glared at by a feminist with a purple half-shave was just too much).
In any case, then I found out just how ridiculously difficult the Byzantine Russian immigration system is to navigate.
This week,Rolo Slavskiytook a break from covering the clown show of the Ukrainian Special Military Operation to interview high-ranking Russian officials about the Russian immigration system, and the prospects for reforming it:
Deputy Dmitri Kuzetsov, a conservative opposition voice in the Duma, agreed to an interview with me on the topic of Western immigration into Russia and this is what he had to say
So here’s what he had to say:
RS: So there is no ideological opposition, in your opinion, just lethargy on the part of the Russian government, correct?
DK: No ideological opposition, no. Mostly, I think that our government is surprised to learn that Westerners want to move to Russia at all. They genuinely seem baffled by the phenomenon and treat it with suspicion. I don’t think that they understand that America is a Trotskyist society now and that we are dealing with ideological fanatics. That America is the new USSR hell-bent on conquering the world.
There’s a lot of inertia in people’s views about other countries, or even about their own country for that matter. For example, most Americans still think America is a first world country.
RS: Some American dissidents even refer to the USA as the USSA nowadays. But do Russians know that Trotskyists run America now? Do they know the story about how they got kicked out of the USSR and then came to America and became neocons?
DK: No, Russians don’t know anything about the neocons. They think, as you said, that America is still in the 1950s. This is reflected both on the street level and on the political level. Many do not believe just how much America has changed and believe that this is simply state propaganda coming from our side similar to what we were being fed in the USSR.
I don’t blame them. It’s hard for we Westmen to wrap our heads around it, too.
RS: So what would be your ideal migration policy scenario?
DK: [Former American football player Tim Kirby] said that our migration policy should be similar to the strategies employed by sports teams. They pick the people that they know that they need to win the game. So we ought to pick people who are helpful to us. It is no secret anymore that droves of Russian Liberals left the country over the last year. So we lost many IT workers and the like. We need to forget these people. Moving to Russia ought to be an act of love. Let us replace them with Western specialists instead. Especially IT workers and other skilled professions. We do not need these Liberals anymore. Let them stay wherever it is that they have run off to.
Then we also have lots of land that is not being used. So, we need more farmers. People with a tradition of working on farms who know what they are doing.
Russia, strange as it sounds, is a country of immigrants. We have had a lot of people moving into Russia. Many times in history, we accepted ideological dissidents. They became contributors to Russian society and we were made better off because of them.
It sounds like Mr. Kuzetsov would like to change Russia’s immigration policy to make it easier for Westerners to enter, but it also sounds like an uphill battle against the lethargic leviathan of the Russian state.
The rest of the interview can be seen here:
And a second interview:
As part of a series of interviews I did, I spoke to Timur Beslangurov an immigration lawyer and the leading expert in the country on all things related to resettling. in Russia.
Timur on the Russian immigration service having the wrong mindset:
Our migration services are built as a police force. Contrast this with Israel, which has a head-hunting policy when it comes to attracting talented migrants from the West. It is not even necessary to be a Jew anymore. They simply seek out talent.
But, how does a Westerner with a family move over to Russia? I mean, just think, during the application process, if the time limit on the visa expires, the whole family has to leave the country. And the Russian bureaucracy is very strict - one misspelling somewhere and the whole application is tossed out. Westerners simply don’t know how to fill out Russian application forms correctly.
It’s unwieldy and kafkaesque.
A few years ago, there were headlines about Boer farmers potentially resettling in Siberia in order to escape the persecution of the South African government’s official Black Economic Empowerment policies and unofficial Turning a Blind Eye to Farm Murders policy. About that:
In contrast, Georgia has a far better policy. So, two-hundred Boer farmer families moved to Georgia and only two families stayed in Russia. How does that sound? But it is true! Also, there, the wife of the president took a personal interest in their fate and helped them out. But in Russia? The media and chinovniks fulfilled their PR quota and then dropped the issue because no one could be bothered to actually figure the thing out and no one gave a damn.
You can read the rest of the interview here:
Let’s leave behind the wintry wastes of Siberia to tarry a while in the enchanted forest:
Originally, this entry of my mythology series was going to cover the archetype of the enchanted forest, as a part two to the discussion on the Mirkwood archetype.
I did not plan on it becoming a discussion of Eden.
The Saxon Cross is a mythologist and a Tolkienist inspired, as his name suggests, by his deep love of Christianity and England. He’s written on the connection between Tolkien’s mythopoeic world and its potential connection to Ice Age Europe as revealed through Middle Earth’s maps, on the moral vacuity of capeshits who refuse to issue the coups de grace to evil men, and is in the process of writing a novel, Tales from the Age of Ice and Shadow:
Many ages after the destruction of the white city of the sea-kings, yet many ages before our own time, there was an era little-mentioned in our histories, remembered now only in some distant memory of great sagas and heroes, and nightmares of ice and shadow and ever-rising waters.
This week he did a deep dive into the mythological descriptions of the enchanted forest, and uncovers some fascinating connections:
In Eden we find Olympus, the world tree, the rainbow bridge, Hyperborea, the apples of immortality, and all manner of elves and gods- in addition to our birthplace.
This connection was made more evident to me recently when I heard my priest told me that the church sanctuary (a sort of indoor “sacred grove”) is meant to represent the garden of Eden, and that the garden’s tree of life has ties to the cross.
Saxon’s aim in the essay is to
coherently demonstrate that Eden, Fairyland, Valinor, Asgard, Olympus, etc are all the one and the same.
He begins by looking for the location of Eden, which he provocatively suggests may be the same as Hyperborea ... although as he points out:
If you sail to the North Pole today, you won’t see much of anything but floating ice. (You won’t find the Holy Garden looking in the Middle East either if you care to look there).
After all:
After the fall, the garden was “sundered” from mankind. We cannot simply travel to Eden, much in the same way that in myth not just anyone can stumble upon the enchanted forest.
As an aside on the inhabitants of faerieland:
One ancient tradition from Scandinavia says that “elves” are children of Eve that she hid from God (because they were unwashed), resulting in them becoming a sort of in-between entity, not full human or fully spirit. It could perhaps be interpreted that these children still dwell in Eden.
But this is the connection I love so much, that all the elves and nature spirits of myth and folklore are not demons as some have said, but are children of Eve just as we are. Our sundered cousins. This is where religion meets the enchanted.
This is a perspective that has seemed intuitively pleasing to me for some time – for example, that the pagan gods might be better thought of as angels, and can thereby be incorporated smoothly into the Christian tradition.
Ironically though, these enchanted forests are not in the any of the realms of Faerie at all, but in our own. I think they are best described as “outposts” of Eden, much as how a priest told me that modern church sanctuaries are little Edens.
The archetype of the enchanted elven forest contains all that we’ve already spoken of, only smaller.
Faerieland is a fractal!
There’s a lot more to it, and I think you’ll find Saxon’s full essay as fascinating as I did. Careful though … when you venture into the summer lands, an age can feel but a moment….
That’s all for this week!
If you enjoyed this, don’t forget to
And especially, don’t forget to
Great collection of interesting perspectives! If the US if Gay does bring back the draft, they will no doubt get many red state young white heterosexual men to join the military, but it won't go down the way they want. I'm guessing a draft would be the catalyst for secession and, if the US of Gay tries to stop the states from leaving, it will lead to the civil war that everyone's known is inevitable. Russia will probably be an attractive option for a lot of people. As an American, it's really sad how quickly and completely things have changed.
Thanks John. Perhaps one day we’ll all take that rainbow bridge to Valinor together