This is INCREDIBLE, and it will take me multiple re-reads to digest it, but I wanted to take a moment to thank you right now.
Much like you, I am centrally preoccupied with the crisis of meaning that so paralyzes our own time. You proffer a series of incandescent observations and analyses here, and I commend you wholeheartedly for the invaluable approach you offer.
For my part, I have found my way to a spiritual path in which I inhabit something resembling the mythic state of meaning you describe, the Great Reenchantment, and I've done so by means of two key elements:
1) Veneration of the Aryan gods and ancestors--and yes, Wotan is my tutelary deity. One of the great purposes of my career as a fantasy novelist is to evoke and conjure him, and I have begun a new series of European Bronze Age-inspired fantasy that owes much to Wagner as well as to my fascination with Indo-European myth.
There is incredible value in knowing oneself to be not merely an expression of a World-Soul but the particular inheritor of a Folk-Soul, of a racial metaphysic that embodies the higher instincts and powers of the race.
While I bear no animus toward Christians--indeed, many of my dearest friends and family are Christian--I cannot reconcile myself to the universalism and egalitarianism that seems so central a part of the doctrines of Christianity and its modern, secular permutations.
2) Commitment to a pole-star of personal excellence and Will-to-Power. To properly venerate the Gods and Ancestors requires a philosophy of personal responsibility and striving for excellence. Indeed, some of my most profound spiritual experiences take place when I am running and listening to folkish-minded metal (Bathory, Graveland, Nokturnal Mortum).
I proffer these thoughts not because they are or can be universal prescriptions, but rather with the hope that they might be of some small value in a broader interpretive web of discussion and mythogenesis.
Let me close by sharing a poem I wrote a couple of years ago:
"Cathedral in Twilight"
A Cathedral in ruin, her people all gone,
Reclaimed by nature, with vines overgrown
The sun sets in the west, paints fire in the sky
Cathedral in twilight, lost souls searching for why
There’s a tale of a serpent, of a fruit and a tree
He said if you eat of it, like God ye shall be
Well, it’s the Age of the Serpent, and the apple is all
To your ego be servant, to your lusts held in thrall
There’s a story still older, all of frost and of flame,
And a folk-soul, All-Father, Wotan His name
Hear the ancestor voices, a soul-river so vast
A Promethean journey, to connect with the past
A Faustian bargain, made modern the age,
Forfeit your birthright, your desires your wage
With all souls made equal, all lives are debased
And the price of this evil, is the end of the race
There’s a temple to pleasure, where liberation is king
And the worth of your measure, is the vice that you bring
Yes, it’s the Age of the Serpent, and the apple is calling
You know he’s an angel, but do you care if he’s fallen?
A Cathedral in ruin, sun fades toward twilight
A serpent-promise of glory has brought only night
Now the thrones are all empty, and the altars defiled
Will you seek out the Folk-Soul, or remain beguiled?
There’s a path for our people, through the Cross and the Oak
There’s a Promethean calling, the rebirth of our Folk
Sun sets in the west, and dark falls the night
Now let your vanguard be fire, and advance toward the Light!
Um, well... we know how ended the last heroic venture using the Will-to-power motive, with Folk ("das Volk") at its centre, don't we...
And by the by, Christianity is not egalitarian. Yes, every person is of equal value (in the eyes of God, and therefore should be in our eyes), but all people certainly do NOT achieve sanctification in equal measure. That is entirely a matter of how much each person, through their lifetime, contributes to - or destroys - the re-enchantment/sanctification/salvation of the world (and therefore themselves).
"The Nazis used that terminology, and they were bad and lost" is not a good argument against either folkish-mindedness or the striving for excellence that is the Will-to-Power.
So long as Whites remain the only people who refuse to engage in so-called identity politics, we will be handicapped in a world in which every other group of people is playing by those rules (just look at the massive grift of Black Lives Matter, to say nothing of the ongoing inundation by Third World hordes).
Christianity has a strong egalitarian tendency, as you've illustrated, and I quote: "every person is of equal value (in the eyes of God, and therefore should be in our eyes)..."
This is precisely what I can't accept. My wife and daughter are of infinitely greater value than any other human beings, and I value people like John Carter and other K-strategists infinitely more than I value the bottom-quintile underclasses--say, the hostile and helpless dependents among Breakfast-Americans.
All men are not created equal. More fundamentally, all men do not merit equal consideration. In the present historical moment, one of the great tasks dissidents need to accomplish is operationalizing this: teaching Westerners to harden our hearts, become ruthless, and enforce reciprocity by punishing the parasites.
Men are equal in the eyes of God, but we are not God, and to see with His eyes leads to hubris, which drives us mad. It is an essential part of His plan that we do not see with His eyes; thus, we were instructed to love our neighbors, the people in our immediate environments with whom we directly interact, not a faceless mass of anonymous humanity on the other side of the world.
" . . . we were instructed to love our neighbors, the people in our immediate environments with whom we directly interact, not a faceless mass of anonymous humanity on the other side of the world."
Yes! There is a whole book on this very subject, published in 1968, which predicts with astonishing accuracy exactly where we find ourselves today. It's titled "The Politics of Guilt and Pity." Available from
Kudos. Lots of good stuff here (meaning, as usual, things I was thinking around but hadn't gotten around to expressing so well). Will require, and deserve, much thinking about. A couple thoughts for now, if I may:
Good to see someone thinking about the problem of modernity beyond the usual cliches (Christianity is a hoax!/Paganism is demonic! or Science rules, religion is for morons vs. The only solution to child trannies is bringing back the Inquisition, etc.)
You might be interested in the books/video clips of Bernardo Kastrup. His version of Idealism is a superior alternative to Panpsychism (for reasons that don't affect your point) and unlike most panpsychists, he addresses the importance of myth, metaphor, the meaning of life (which he thinks idealism a la Schopenhauer can provide).
I addressed the notion of meme magick as a sort of accidental return of New Thought and other "official" esoteric traditions in an essay written after Trump's election:
The old dichotomies of science v religion or Christianity v paganism all feel rather outdated. Both sides tend to make very good points; that tends to make me think that everyone's correct but no one is completely correct. Of course being completely correct is impossible...
Regarding Kastrup, I've come across his work a little bit. Certainly one of the more interesting thinkers working on these problems.
Well, all of the abandoned scientific theories had good points. After all, heat does flow from object to object, thus Phlogiston theory certainly has a good point. But it does a poorer job than the modern theory of heat.
I opened Substack, saw "99 minute read", and literally laughed out loud. Kudos to you for another excellent piece, sir. Maybe next time you'll clear triple digits!
I have two wildly different thoughts, which is probably too few given the subject matter:
1) if you're at all familiar with "official" management techniques (and I hope for your sake you aren't), you'll know that these days any project being considered must have a story attached to it. it's not enough to say "doing X will help with Y", you must have characters struggling with X that will respond positively to Y. Leave it to modern bureaucracy to learn all the wrong lessons from mythology and generate the most banal stories known to history. We truly live in a dying culture.
2) I'm a Christian (in case the pseudonym didn't give it away), but I don't find much of anything you've written to disagree with. There's a spiritual world inhabited by spiritual beings, some are good and some are evil, and they interact with our world in ways we don't totally understand. Beyond placing the Triune God at the top of the spiritual hierarchy, I don't hold any fixed notions about the spiritual realm. In fact I try not to focus on in much, in part because there's a strand of mythology that warns against prying into the gods' space (Prometheus, Faust, etc) and in part because I've accepted that some things are unknowable (I really liked your God of Infinite Questions idiom). So I agree that there is much common ground that Christians and pagans could share, and that there's benefits to be had in teaming up to Reenchant the world. There's something akin to Pascal's wager here: after all, if the Christian spiritual hierarchy is true, Reenchantment will only help make that obvious to more people. And if it's not true, little has been lost.
1) Management reliably misunderstands everything. It tries to reduce things to process and system, to instrumentalize them, and thereby hollows them out.
2) In general it's probably wise to be wary of meddling too much in the unseen. To a certain degree the Christian tradition of ruling out everything as demonic is, for most people, probably the safe option: while not everything really is demonic, enough is that ordinary people should just stay back lest they open themselves to the influence of dangerous entities. However, while that can sort of work in a culture that implicitly accepts the existence of the spiritual, it breaks down in a culture that isn't - when the unseen is believed to be entirely fictional, there are no defenses whatsoever against the truly demonic, and it all comes roaring back. The only way to reverse that is to accept that the unseen is real, at which point other questions naturally arise.
Christianity as reenchanted life-hack: you accept the existence of the spiritual realm but don't have to worry about which entitites to deal with because you've got the support and protection of the head honcho. Not the usual Christian story, but not a bad one, either.
And I agree that there are some extraordinary individuals that have insights into the spiritual realm that most of us don't. I'm perfectly happy to be ordinary in this regard, as that vision seems to come with some significant trade-offs in terms of one's ability to enjoy and be present in the material world.
I think one of the dangers of a too-exclusive relationship with Mind is that it loses its specificity ... becomes too difficult to call up its different faces, too hard to approach. OTOH focusing too much on the aspects can occlude the Mind underneath.
making a new religion is massive meddling. yet people think it is ok to do it all the time in history. I suppose it was, to make people easier to control. Which take a Lot of FEAR, infused deep into the psyche. Reducing humans to helpless sheep, and which has us at the brink of an end times prophecy, near fulfillment if the 10 to 70 million christian zionsists (including my sister) are to be believed. it might be a good idea to look at the most stable religions in the past, first, to see what they had in common. Maybe you'd find my recent article interesting. The femboy cult, the life and murder of a religion. I wish there was a place for real joy and direct experience with the divine.
I'm going to have to brood on this before I have mych to say, but in the meantime two things.
First, I've thought more than once while reading your essays that this must be what it is like to see the glass bead game played by a master. So, well done John Carter. Your time on Mars has clearly benefited your Virginian intellect.
Second, Boquila trifoliolata is the ultraviolet catastrophe of our current scientific orthodoxy. A South American climbing vine that mimics the leaves of the plants that it climbs. Even plastic replicas of plants, ruling out pheromones or gene transfer.
We may discover that it utilizes some kind of parapsychological phenomenon or that it is tuned to Sheldrake's morphic resonance. Personally, I like my niece's theory best, that the universe just likes to fuck with us. But whatever it is in physical terms, it is also a round peg that simply won't fit in any of the square holes available to the current orthodoxy.
That vine is absolutely fascinating. I've never heard of that before. What a remarkable organism.
I really must read the Glass Beads at some point.
Edit: on the vine, given that it also mimics inanimate plastic leaves, I doubt this is morphic reasonance at work - I can't see plastic as having a comparable morphogenetic field to a plant's. Can't be pheromones either for obvious reasons. That leaves vision.
It also may mean something like I was getting at in River of Mercy; that life builds out psuedo-optimal biol9gical stuctures (for optimization purposes), but that life itself, unlike our machines, is ultinately structure-independent. To see without eyes is therefore a possibility, among virtually endless possibilities.
There are a lot of non-visual structures/methods for detecting shape (Helen Keller's lip reading springs to mind). Color seems much trickier to mimic with the structures of plant life (which stands to reason, since this appears to be the only known case of it). Though it's obviously not impossible, the only critters I've seen that convincingly pull it off build a lot of cones or rhabdomeres and some kind of ganglia/brain.
They are, indeed, extremely good at photoreception. Given that plants are demonstrably, in some sense, conscious, it would be surprising if they didn't possess some level of photoperception as well.
That leaves vision for conventional explanations. But vision requires some kind of eyes, neurons, and brains, none of which we have seen in plants. You could stretch that to somekind of mind and vision but we don't have anything like an explanation for how plants are using the plant structure that we know about to produce those functions.
Again, a round peg with only square holes available. Sciencing it out will be a scientific revolution at least on par with quantum mechanics and relativity.
All vision requires is photoreception and some means of parsing the resulting data. Cephalopods have "eyes" in their skin which they use to adjust the chromatophores they use for mimicry - these are just photoreceptors, though, not camera eyes.
As to the nervous system, there is abundant evidence that plants process information, learn from their environment, communicate with one another and even other species, despite not having brains. For example, there's an Australian plant that retracts when disturbed, but can be taught not to retract when it learns that a certain stimulus is not accompanied by danger.
vision as we know it. clearly plants can see where the sun rises, where the rain will drip. they may just see energy, which needs not eyes, but something else more fundamental to life. human skin has light receptors in the skin, and blind people can "see" with their hands in some cases, just as use of sonography can see shapes. some plants dance to music. some fungi generate light beneathnthe earth, Why? if it cannot be "seen" in some way?
I think a good engineer would be able to engineer a few sensible guesses as to how this is done. There's probably a baroque algorythim at the bottom of it, that is fed by fuzzy readouts of the environment. For example, did you know it's possible to track objects without being able to recognize shapes? DuckDuckGo isn't working for me now so I can't give the reference, but it's the algorithm used by optical mice to figure out how much they're moved. The same algorithm is probably used by our midbrains to keep our eyes trained on objects.
Right. The vine doesn't have any way of focusing the light since it doesn't have eyes, but it's getting light from every direction. Lots of fuzzy data to work with.
QUERY: are you aware of the orchid that defies radiocarbon dating? Supposedly when the flowers petals of a living plant are dated using radioactive carbon dating, they come up 10,000 years old. I've heard the story a long time ago but I can't find the reference. :(
Well, it's not this specific document because it's too recent. But it might be that species or that way of obtaining carbon. I learned about all this on a phpBB forum sometime in maybe 2006. Supposedly it was talked about on some conference, or symposium, in North America. Who knows if it's even indexed anywhere, if it's that old.
"and while I do not believe in just generating content for the sake of it, which is just noiseposting, at the same time there are limits to patience, and I hope not to exceed yours."
I never see writers I subscribe to as employees. And any limit to my patience would be a limit to their freedom, and genuinity. I never want any of that to be there.
Caveat: Obviously haven't read the whole thing. Yet. It's almost 2300 here, so it'll have to be a treat for after dinner tomorrow. But, because there's always one and I wouldn't be me if I didn't try to combine being trite with nitpicking:
The "Why?" is for most the same as it is for the eponymous mountaineer: "Because it is there".
"God is dead" is trickier. The quote itself doesn't tell anything about the context in which the phrase, in different permutations, appears in "Also Spracht Zarathustra".
One of the first (excepting when it appears in "The Gay Science") is when Zarathustra mentions that in olden days, crimes against god was the greatest crimes, but as god has died, crimes against earth is now the greatest crime. Here, the translation runs into problems: if Earth is capitalised it is the planet, if not it is the substance - the intended (and idiomatic) meaning from the context is "the world".
Crimes against the world is the greatest crime. Now, doesn't that remind us of certain groups and certain people and certain isms?
I felt it necessary to quibble a bit about this, since (in my experience) the phrase "God is dead" is much maligned, needlessly so, and has come to be misused as some sort of cheer or cry of triumph for man's triumph over god - which is not what the phrase means (and Nietzshe wasn't the first one to use it - it wasn't common but there was an undertow of theological-philosopical debate decades before he popularised it [or: it was popularised via his writings] among german and french protestants about the role of christian morality vis-a-vis Enlightenment, the millennia-long parade of crimes and corruption perpetraded by the papal church, and the proto-modernism of the 18th century).
Zarathustra, the work as well as the character, both laments and exults in that god is indeed dead. Laments, because something has been lost and those lost rather than striving for the lightning and the Übermensch instead recreate god (to me it alludes to Frankenstein creating "life"). Exults, because man is free to be the steward of his own fate with all that that entails.
And if I'm not misremembering things, towards the end of "ASZ", Zarathustra mentions that what killed god was love for the creation, especially the creation of (hu)man.
While I'm not christian, the text (as does yours) works just as well for any spiritual context which was indeed its focus - spirit. That unseen, unmeasurable, unquantifiable yet oh so seemingly real - even to the staunchest atheist.
Because how atheist is one who has to consciously and purposefully deny his or her emotional experience of reality?
Excellent summary of Nietzsche's use of the phrase.
I've always taken it to mean not only that the Christian God is dead, but that the very idea of any sort of conscious cosmic entity was ruled out of consideration. Of course this applies to the Christian God as well, and to all gods, along with all other supernatural entities. Once Mind is removed, the rest goes with it, and the cosmos dies (or rather, ceases to reveal itself to you).
At a cultural level, what matters is not so much what any given person thinks, but what the systems of power think, and those are configured mechanically, explicitly designed to take no notice whatsoever of theological concerns. The commanding heights of society behave as though the world is dead, and therefore we live in a dead world.
Thank you - waking up to being graded "Excellent" is coffee squared, or something.
Yes, that is my amateur's understanding of Nietzshe's intended meaning - god is dead, as in the very idea of spirit. The god of Abraham is of course the closest to him when he writes, and the most obvious example: faith is gone, replaced by rote ritual, belief is hypocritically rationalised into whatever those in power wants it to be, the church is akin to a hermit crab having become all shell, no crab and thus just a structure of death, and the clergy is just a bunch of venal conmen keeping humans in slavery and ashamed of themselves for simply being.
And Reformation, while it offered the opportunity of a new dawn has petered out to simply a more austere and stripped-down version of the perfidy of the papacy.
Also, we need to remember that he wrote in a time where not going to church could, often would, mean going to jail instead. If you have to (and do so) force people to crawl before your god, what are you really?
One thing I wanted to say in the article, but did not get around to including, is that Nietzsche was the most recent prophet. He saw more deeply into the soul than anyone who has yet followed. Moreover, his writing was prophetic in the usual sense of the word. Much of what he saw indeed came to pass.
He is not thought of as a prophet because his revelation did not preach God directly, but rather via negative space. With no God, but only the void, what does the human soul become?
The N-man meant that the men thought about God on Sunday and then forgotten about him the rest of the week, their behavior showing a greater faith in the clock like processes. If God was who they said he was, they would be asking him every day. They didn’t.
Courage. Courage certainly seems to be an element that is in need of rekindling. The passivity of the age has played right into the hands of those who enjoy exploiting the normies for their own ends. The new mythos is an unknown but I think a helpful element would be a Grekian-like bravery.
And courage was deliberately reduced by fear based religions. unfortunately, you cannot face truth, without courage, so, we have generation of people with a shaky grip on reality. that is the lesson of Perseus. he can handle the truth, which cannot all be seen at once, but through his courage, he uses the truth to win.
What an ending that was to an absolute banger of an essay. I think you are one of Substack’s best; I love these sweeping essays you’ve been releasing lately.
You have a great ability to coin new terms for dense concepts. I’m thinking particularly of your elucidation of ‘logomythy’ as the flipside to ‘mythology.’ I agree that in order for the sciences to survive in any meaningful sense they must reclaim the fundamental question of ‘why’ that was lost when modern scientists replaced the God-seeking natural philosophers. But do you have any ideas about how we can develop these logomythies? Are you suggesting that science fiction stories, insofar as they are hyperstitional, are themselves logomythic, or are they merely examples of what logomyths might look like? Are logomyths something you think can only develop organically through similar processes as the development of mythologies, or is it possible for a natural philosopher or storyteller of great vision to himself single-handedly generate a new logomyth that gets to the heart of the pursuit of science? And are logomyths essentially the same thing as egregores? I found this whole section very thought-provoking and would appreciate some clarifications.
Logomythy deserves an essay on its own, rather than the few paragraphs it gets here. Those are all fascinating questions deserving deeper investigation. The myths guiding science take many forms, and science fiction is certainly one of them.
I don't think that logomyth is really a necessary word though, as I can't think of any way in which that would differ from a myth, broadly conceived. The point of logomythy is really just to shift the emphasis slightly, to think about the story of study rather than the study of stories.
As to myths and egregores - yes, absolutely, the two are connected.
Maybe one reason why re-enchantment is so hard for us moderns to imagine is because of the way we conceptualize religion in a world where ‘God is dead.’ In antiquity there really was no such thing as atheism, separation of church and state, or multiple different religions that all competed with each other to be called the one true religion— no, every single thing in the enchanted world was infused with religious significance. The idea of religions as we think of them is very modern, including the preposterous idea that someone can be non-religious. That’s unthinkable in the enchanted world. I think for that reason re-enchantment needs to involve much more than merely telling a better story. It requires a fundamental reorientation to see the divine everywhere again. Maybe this is what John means by having an “orientation and openness towards the immanent and transcendent cosmic mind.” That's why you can't 'design' a religion. That doesn't really make any sense. Religion is just a word to describe how we interact with the divine, and relegating it to just what you do at church needlessly narrows its scope and power. Everything we do is religious.
Maybe we don’t see the divine everywhere because we have ceased to believe in it and so it has ceased to act as strongly in the world. Think about all the things we’ve lost: oracles, prophetic dreams, omens, sacrifices, etc. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible for the gods to awaken again and what that would even look like.
Or maybe the gods do still move in the world but they are just much more covert. An interesting thought experiment, and one I don’t know how I would answer, would be to wonder what spirit(s) the current American regime is currently aligning itself with or serving, like Wotan and the Germans. Mammon comes to mind.
Jung would probably say that the gods - the archetypes - are still very much active in the world, but that they have simply been displaced into the shadow of the collective unconscious where they are much more likely to go astray. In that case, one of the benefits of reawakening the gods would be that, by becoming aware of them (even if only as forces within our psyche), by addressing them, flattering them, and calling on their aid, they work for us instead of against us.
You found one of the key statements. It's fundamentally about maintaining a state of openness; without it, you won't see what's before you, and the world won't provide what a genuine, living religion needs to sustain itself and grow. That attention is like water to a plant.
(Nice comment. I'd Like but my old Mac OS doesn't allow anymore.)
They are moving in this world.
Greek gods were concerned with sacred boundaries and humans must be very careful when they violate them in any number of ways.
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy summed up tragedy as the Dionysian chorus of satyrs mocking the Apollonian hero.
Of the Greek gods only Dionysus was murdered and reborn. The giants who killed him and ate parts of his body were the ancestors of humans. If you can think metaphorically about that it means Dionysus himself was a sacrificial victim and humans are descendants of his murderers.
Concerning Dionysian madness, the maenads of today are obsessed with abstractions called racism and sexism (and human rights). But these are Apollonian in character, manufactured by intellectuals, and are an attack on natural order, one would think. Therefore, Dionysian nature is asserting itself by destroying modernism, not traditional Christianity.
Curiously, in Euripides’ Bacchae Cadmus and Tiresias were in opposition to Pentheus because of his impiety towards Dionysus. He (Pentheus) tried to force virtue on women. In fact, Tiresias calls Pentheus mad (line 326 in my edition).
I have an old mac too, i feel your pain. Dionysus was thrice born, so could be again. the think i like about him , is he created a safe space for the madness to live, so , it did less harm, i feel. women very much have psychological needs for this outlet of powerful emotions. my recent article, the femboy cult talks about this. Dionysus was Zeus chose heir.
It hit me the other night; where’s John been lol. Came on here to see if I might’ve missed some emails. Now I see what you have been doing. I always read your work very slowly as to digest it all. This will no doubt keep me busy. Am headed down. 👍
So many excellent quotable passages I lost count and stopped tracking. Freaking epic, truly, to say the least.
I struggle for words. I feel like I just ingested some combination of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Michener’s The Source, and Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. I have mental indigestion. But it is good indigestion, if such can be said, because it tells me I just consumed something quite rich, quite nourishing, quite Grand. I’ll be digesting it for some time.
Seems to my low-performing brain (I may be overstating my capacity) that chapters 1-7 were the preamble to chapters 8 and 9. In any case, chapter 8 was the crescendo, at least for me. Crescendo, in the sense that it gave me great, abiding hope, by reminding me in no uncertain terms, how BIG this thing we call Creation really is. Incomprehensibly BIG.
I can say with utter certainty, The Dark Powers do NOT want us to know that. And to quote Joe Banks, in Joe vs the Volcano, “Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG… thank you. Thank you for my life.”
Chapter 9–at first—was a let down for me. I suppose I was expecting you to reveal The Secret Code of Codes. The Code that would equip, embolden and guide us out of The Dungeon. Then I realized that we all already know the Code. Most us do, anyway. And certainly the great majority that read and appreciate your works are at least somewhat familiar with The Code:
Get off your damn, lazy ass and DO something; something good, something worthwhile, something that will make a difference. A big something or a little something, does not really matter in the least. Be you Man, or Woman, does not really matter. What matters is making a difference, moving The Needle toward The Light. Move. The. Damn. Needle.
So, Thank You, sir, for this. May the Creator bless and keep you, and yours.
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties. They both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority and full of love and kindness and approachable.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
In all this talk of a wild Christianity I see no talk of the wild spiritual life of Jesus had with God the Father. A wild life we can also have as being fellow sons of God filled with the Holy Spirit – John 1:12, Galatians 3:26, 4:6. A wild Christianity with the Father because it is empowered by the Holy Spirit doesn’t need nature immersion to happen, though having the privilege of nature immersion I suppose may be a useful adjunct for many. After all when Jesus gave prayer instructions in Matthew 6 he said to close the door to your room!, not to go forest bathing.
When you look at the actual spirituality espoused by Jesus and practiced by him in the Gospels it is utterly unfashionable by those who look to non-dual awareness, and “Christ Consciousness” "ground of being” as the ticket. No, nothing as ethereal as that! A Father in heaven, “pray to your Father who is there unseen”. Jesus was by no means ashamed of the old man and talked about and to him a whole lot. God speaking in an audible voice, expectation of specific even miraculous answers to prayer, lifting eyes in prayer, a robust intensely personal God the Father that isn’t you, but you can know, and directly know his love for you as an individual.
Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” far from being a cry of abandonment it was act of teaching and prophetic proclamation – which was a part of his job at the time, it was a quote from the first line of Psalm 22 which contains prophecy of what was happening at the moment, and was a statement of deep faith and knowing.
I could go on and on with more examples from all over the Bible of this wonderful experience of the Living God. The Father made us as individual humans and intends to keep us that way. This is all very childlike as Jesus says we are to be. I know vigorous attempts have been made to squeeze this knowing of the Father and the Biblical record into a new orthodoxy of a “wiser” quasi-Buddhism.
However The final state presented as the ultimate is us embodied as individual humans even as Jesus is now, in the presence of God, in a new physical creation of multiplicity, filled with the Holy Spirit, not generic vanilla pudding non-duality. Sounds like fun to me, which all children delight in.
By William Blake - we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. . . . . . And round the tent of God like lambs we joy . . .
Certainly from the hermetic maxim as above, so below, and as below, so above, one may analogize from the human to the divine, if one does so carefully. The danger of course is that one risks limiting the divine, by projecting the limitations of humans onto it.
I disagree. There is nothing prolix about this post. I read it over the course of two afternoons and intend to reread it and even print it out for further consideration. There are any number of comments I might write, but not at the moment. Right now I just want to thank you.
I intend to subscribe to your Substack soon. If my finances weren't in dire straits at this particular moment, I'd do so immediately. I truly appreciate your work! It is profound, complex, and deeply inspiring.
True. Especially challenging for me, though, if I may say so. I am a victim of gangstalking / directed energy weapons / electronic harassment of every imaginable kind as well as "analog" harassment of every imaginable kind. I've been of victim of this for thirty-four years, which is exactly half of my entire life.
The experimental torture program called MKUltra was its early incarnation, though very few people today know anything about what that entailed. The truth is that MKUltra never ended. It simply evolved into ever more satanic forms of torture, and the numbers of its victims continues to increase. There are millions of victims worldwide, though no one knows how many millions, except perhaps all the "intelligence" agencies of the entire world, who are the entities which carry out these attacks. Most victims are unaware that they are being victimized, at least at first, but that doesn't stop the damage that is done to them. My life partner was one of them. He hanged himself five years ago because of the torture he was experiencing from directed energy weapons and gangstalking. He never consciously realized that he was being victimized! (He never believed me when I had talked to him about the ways in which I was being victimized and tortured, so that is not the slightest bit surprising.) This is true of the vast majority of victims of this kind of torture. Please study this website for in depth information about this: TargetedJustice.com/
Apollo and Dionysus shared the temple of Delphi. They are inseparable. As for faith, it will start as small as a mustard seed. It will begin with three men. From there a Brotherhood will form. As their physical, material, and spiritual power grow, they will attract others and spread organically. With a right armed prophet-father, he will create a explosive system to change the world.
For a time being, today is a fertile field. The worms are breaking down the dead and fertilizing the field. Many new plants will grow, some in rocky soil, some in sanely soil, and some in a good soil. A father will come with an artist’s soul to create a new Homeric poem that captured imagination of many.
I feel it in the air. I feel it in the waters. I feel it in the good fresh earth. What was once lost is now found. The Barbarian is come, to stir the proud beast from its slumber within our hearts. To rewake our manly virtues once again with a howl. Let us throw ourselves into the dark forest, into the savage frontier, and renew our strength in mind and body again.
if i could like your comment it would. Could not agree more. I think tho, that what is called the barbarian, was in many ways more civilized that anything we have today. simply a matter of definitions.
It’s easier to be more civil when the man you insulted could rest his ax in your head without getting into trouble.
There’s also a tradeoff between a small population and a large population. A city of 10,000 is more likely to share struggle in a crisis or war or to even raise a barn. But once the percentage of men requires to fight starts to fall, more people will begin to specialize and the unity begins to disappear. It’s a rule of thumb that every soldier need 8-10 men as support with food, mining, fabrication, oil drilling and refining, medical care, and logistics. As long as the extra men are just this much, a nation will feel involved. But when the percentage of military is reduced to 40% or less, the civilians will grow disdainful of war and its manly virtues.
Expressive individualism will replace common struggle and people grow softer. By the time of Augustus, I think only 10% of men were in the legions and the results spoke for themselves. People cared more for money and fashion and pleasure and the elite disdained and exploited the Roman farmers, destroying the foundation of their power. They didn’t care, they could always hire more Germans to “do the job Romans won’t do.”
When there is an excessive population, there will be either civil strife or colonization. The second is better, especially if we settle the asteroids and put them along Earth’s orbit. Frontier will re-wild man even as he become more competent.
I deeply enjoy these long and syncretistic pieces which weave many elements together while maintaining a grand and compelling vision. If I wasn't living in a tent right now I would absolutely subscribe to this! Excellent work...
And other leftist policies as well, such as climate:
"In 2021, The Lancet published a poll of 10,000 young people (ages 16 to 25) in 10 countries (Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the U.K., and the USA) asking how they felt about climate change that found pervasive pessimism about the future... 39 percent saying they are “hesitant to have children"... In 2023, 76 percent of Americans in an NBC survey were “not confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.” That same year, a Wall Street Journal poll similarly reported that 78 percent of Americans believe that life for their children will not be better than it was for themselves."
Yes, the system does everything it can to depress birth rates, in most countries. Not all by any means, however, and those that are actively trying to raise the birth rate can't increase it either.
In many ways, the very existence of leftism can be seen as a sort of can be seen as a response to the absence of a real religion at the heart of materialism. It isn't a very good one, unfortunately, so it has a tendency to make everything worse ... particularly because it has redefined the gradual extinction of humanity that irreligiousity seems to lead to as a good thing in its ideology.
Yes, leftism is fundamentally nihilistic and misanthropic. The leftist idea of heaven is an earth with no human beings. As a religion, leftism is form of nature worship. NATURE IS GOD is a leftist bumper sticker.
This is INCREDIBLE, and it will take me multiple re-reads to digest it, but I wanted to take a moment to thank you right now.
Much like you, I am centrally preoccupied with the crisis of meaning that so paralyzes our own time. You proffer a series of incandescent observations and analyses here, and I commend you wholeheartedly for the invaluable approach you offer.
For my part, I have found my way to a spiritual path in which I inhabit something resembling the mythic state of meaning you describe, the Great Reenchantment, and I've done so by means of two key elements:
1) Veneration of the Aryan gods and ancestors--and yes, Wotan is my tutelary deity. One of the great purposes of my career as a fantasy novelist is to evoke and conjure him, and I have begun a new series of European Bronze Age-inspired fantasy that owes much to Wagner as well as to my fascination with Indo-European myth.
There is incredible value in knowing oneself to be not merely an expression of a World-Soul but the particular inheritor of a Folk-Soul, of a racial metaphysic that embodies the higher instincts and powers of the race.
While I bear no animus toward Christians--indeed, many of my dearest friends and family are Christian--I cannot reconcile myself to the universalism and egalitarianism that seems so central a part of the doctrines of Christianity and its modern, secular permutations.
2) Commitment to a pole-star of personal excellence and Will-to-Power. To properly venerate the Gods and Ancestors requires a philosophy of personal responsibility and striving for excellence. Indeed, some of my most profound spiritual experiences take place when I am running and listening to folkish-minded metal (Bathory, Graveland, Nokturnal Mortum).
I proffer these thoughts not because they are or can be universal prescriptions, but rather with the hope that they might be of some small value in a broader interpretive web of discussion and mythogenesis.
Let me close by sharing a poem I wrote a couple of years ago:
"Cathedral in Twilight"
A Cathedral in ruin, her people all gone,
Reclaimed by nature, with vines overgrown
The sun sets in the west, paints fire in the sky
Cathedral in twilight, lost souls searching for why
There’s a tale of a serpent, of a fruit and a tree
He said if you eat of it, like God ye shall be
Well, it’s the Age of the Serpent, and the apple is all
To your ego be servant, to your lusts held in thrall
There’s a story still older, all of frost and of flame,
And a folk-soul, All-Father, Wotan His name
Hear the ancestor voices, a soul-river so vast
A Promethean journey, to connect with the past
A Faustian bargain, made modern the age,
Forfeit your birthright, your desires your wage
With all souls made equal, all lives are debased
And the price of this evil, is the end of the race
There’s a temple to pleasure, where liberation is king
And the worth of your measure, is the vice that you bring
Yes, it’s the Age of the Serpent, and the apple is calling
You know he’s an angel, but do you care if he’s fallen?
A Cathedral in ruin, sun fades toward twilight
A serpent-promise of glory has brought only night
Now the thrones are all empty, and the altars defiled
Will you seek out the Folk-Soul, or remain beguiled?
There’s a path for our people, through the Cross and the Oak
There’s a Promethean calling, the rebirth of our Folk
Sun sets in the west, and dark falls the night
Now let your vanguard be fire, and advance toward the Light!
Brilliant comment. Pinned.
Fantastic poem, too.
Do you ever listen to neofolk? Danheim, Heldom, etc.
Thank you so much! I'm not familiar with either of those, but I'll rectify that. Cheers!
Um, well... we know how ended the last heroic venture using the Will-to-power motive, with Folk ("das Volk") at its centre, don't we...
And by the by, Christianity is not egalitarian. Yes, every person is of equal value (in the eyes of God, and therefore should be in our eyes), but all people certainly do NOT achieve sanctification in equal measure. That is entirely a matter of how much each person, through their lifetime, contributes to - or destroys - the re-enchantment/sanctification/salvation of the world (and therefore themselves).
"The Nazis used that terminology, and they were bad and lost" is not a good argument against either folkish-mindedness or the striving for excellence that is the Will-to-Power.
So long as Whites remain the only people who refuse to engage in so-called identity politics, we will be handicapped in a world in which every other group of people is playing by those rules (just look at the massive grift of Black Lives Matter, to say nothing of the ongoing inundation by Third World hordes).
Christianity has a strong egalitarian tendency, as you've illustrated, and I quote: "every person is of equal value (in the eyes of God, and therefore should be in our eyes)..."
This is precisely what I can't accept. My wife and daughter are of infinitely greater value than any other human beings, and I value people like John Carter and other K-strategists infinitely more than I value the bottom-quintile underclasses--say, the hostile and helpless dependents among Breakfast-Americans.
All men are not created equal. More fundamentally, all men do not merit equal consideration. In the present historical moment, one of the great tasks dissidents need to accomplish is operationalizing this: teaching Westerners to harden our hearts, become ruthless, and enforce reciprocity by punishing the parasites.
Men are equal in the eyes of God, but we are not God, and to see with His eyes leads to hubris, which drives us mad. It is an essential part of His plan that we do not see with His eyes; thus, we were instructed to love our neighbors, the people in our immediate environments with whom we directly interact, not a faceless mass of anonymous humanity on the other side of the world.
" . . . we were instructed to love our neighbors, the people in our immediate environments with whom we directly interact, not a faceless mass of anonymous humanity on the other side of the world."
Yes! There is a whole book on this very subject, published in 1968, which predicts with astonishing accuracy exactly where we find ourselves today. It's titled "The Politics of Guilt and Pity." Available from
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/books/politics-of-guilt-and-pity
Kudos. Lots of good stuff here (meaning, as usual, things I was thinking around but hadn't gotten around to expressing so well). Will require, and deserve, much thinking about. A couple thoughts for now, if I may:
Good to see someone thinking about the problem of modernity beyond the usual cliches (Christianity is a hoax!/Paganism is demonic! or Science rules, religion is for morons vs. The only solution to child trannies is bringing back the Inquisition, etc.)
You might be interested in the books/video clips of Bernardo Kastrup. His version of Idealism is a superior alternative to Panpsychism (for reasons that don't affect your point) and unlike most panpsychists, he addresses the importance of myth, metaphor, the meaning of life (which he thinks idealism a la Schopenhauer can provide).
I addressed the notion of meme magick as a sort of accidental return of New Thought and other "official" esoteric traditions in an essay written after Trump's election:
https://counter-currents.com/2016/12/lord-kek-commands-a-look-at-the-origins-of-meme-magic/
It appears in my book, Mysticism After Modernism, the theme of which is the rise of DIY esotericism. Robert Stark talks about it here on Substack: https://robertstark.substack.com/p/mysticism-as-the-path-to-political
Thanks for sharing those! Highly relevant.
The old dichotomies of science v religion or Christianity v paganism all feel rather outdated. Both sides tend to make very good points; that tends to make me think that everyone's correct but no one is completely correct. Of course being completely correct is impossible...
Regarding Kastrup, I've come across his work a little bit. Certainly one of the more interesting thinkers working on these problems.
Well, all of the abandoned scientific theories had good points. After all, heat does flow from object to object, thus Phlogiston theory certainly has a good point. But it does a poorer job than the modern theory of heat.
Sure. It wasn't accepted for so long for no reason.
I opened Substack, saw "99 minute read", and literally laughed out loud. Kudos to you for another excellent piece, sir. Maybe next time you'll clear triple digits!
I have two wildly different thoughts, which is probably too few given the subject matter:
1) if you're at all familiar with "official" management techniques (and I hope for your sake you aren't), you'll know that these days any project being considered must have a story attached to it. it's not enough to say "doing X will help with Y", you must have characters struggling with X that will respond positively to Y. Leave it to modern bureaucracy to learn all the wrong lessons from mythology and generate the most banal stories known to history. We truly live in a dying culture.
2) I'm a Christian (in case the pseudonym didn't give it away), but I don't find much of anything you've written to disagree with. There's a spiritual world inhabited by spiritual beings, some are good and some are evil, and they interact with our world in ways we don't totally understand. Beyond placing the Triune God at the top of the spiritual hierarchy, I don't hold any fixed notions about the spiritual realm. In fact I try not to focus on in much, in part because there's a strand of mythology that warns against prying into the gods' space (Prometheus, Faust, etc) and in part because I've accepted that some things are unknowable (I really liked your God of Infinite Questions idiom). So I agree that there is much common ground that Christians and pagans could share, and that there's benefits to be had in teaming up to Reenchant the world. There's something akin to Pascal's wager here: after all, if the Christian spiritual hierarchy is true, Reenchantment will only help make that obvious to more people. And if it's not true, little has been lost.
1) Management reliably misunderstands everything. It tries to reduce things to process and system, to instrumentalize them, and thereby hollows them out.
2) In general it's probably wise to be wary of meddling too much in the unseen. To a certain degree the Christian tradition of ruling out everything as demonic is, for most people, probably the safe option: while not everything really is demonic, enough is that ordinary people should just stay back lest they open themselves to the influence of dangerous entities. However, while that can sort of work in a culture that implicitly accepts the existence of the spiritual, it breaks down in a culture that isn't - when the unseen is believed to be entirely fictional, there are no defenses whatsoever against the truly demonic, and it all comes roaring back. The only way to reverse that is to accept that the unseen is real, at which point other questions naturally arise.
Christianity as reenchanted life-hack: you accept the existence of the spiritual realm but don't have to worry about which entitites to deal with because you've got the support and protection of the head honcho. Not the usual Christian story, but not a bad one, either.
And I agree that there are some extraordinary individuals that have insights into the spiritual realm that most of us don't. I'm perfectly happy to be ordinary in this regard, as that vision seems to come with some significant trade-offs in terms of one's ability to enjoy and be present in the material world.
I think one of the dangers of a too-exclusive relationship with Mind is that it loses its specificity ... becomes too difficult to call up its different faces, too hard to approach. OTOH focusing too much on the aspects can occlude the Mind underneath.
making a new religion is massive meddling. yet people think it is ok to do it all the time in history. I suppose it was, to make people easier to control. Which take a Lot of FEAR, infused deep into the psyche. Reducing humans to helpless sheep, and which has us at the brink of an end times prophecy, near fulfillment if the 10 to 70 million christian zionsists (including my sister) are to be believed. it might be a good idea to look at the most stable religions in the past, first, to see what they had in common. Maybe you'd find my recent article interesting. The femboy cult, the life and murder of a religion. I wish there was a place for real joy and direct experience with the divine.
I'm going to have to brood on this before I have mych to say, but in the meantime two things.
First, I've thought more than once while reading your essays that this must be what it is like to see the glass bead game played by a master. So, well done John Carter. Your time on Mars has clearly benefited your Virginian intellect.
Second, Boquila trifoliolata is the ultraviolet catastrophe of our current scientific orthodoxy. A South American climbing vine that mimics the leaves of the plants that it climbs. Even plastic replicas of plants, ruling out pheromones or gene transfer.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530
We may discover that it utilizes some kind of parapsychological phenomenon or that it is tuned to Sheldrake's morphic resonance. Personally, I like my niece's theory best, that the universe just likes to fuck with us. But whatever it is in physical terms, it is also a round peg that simply won't fit in any of the square holes available to the current orthodoxy.
That vine is absolutely fascinating. I've never heard of that before. What a remarkable organism.
I really must read the Glass Beads at some point.
Edit: on the vine, given that it also mimics inanimate plastic leaves, I doubt this is morphic reasonance at work - I can't see plastic as having a comparable morphogenetic field to a plant's. Can't be pheromones either for obvious reasons. That leaves vision.
It also may mean something like I was getting at in River of Mercy; that life builds out psuedo-optimal biol9gical stuctures (for optimization purposes), but that life itself, unlike our machines, is ultinately structure-independent. To see without eyes is therefore a possibility, among virtually endless possibilities.
Well, maybe. But I strongly suspect that the vine has some sort of photoreceptive structure in the physical realm ;)
There are a lot of non-visual structures/methods for detecting shape (Helen Keller's lip reading springs to mind). Color seems much trickier to mimic with the structures of plant life (which stands to reason, since this appears to be the only known case of it). Though it's obviously not impossible, the only critters I've seen that convincingly pull it off build a lot of cones or rhabdomeres and some kind of ganglia/brain.
They are, indeed, extremely good at photoreception. Given that plants are demonstrably, in some sense, conscious, it would be surprising if they didn't possess some level of photoperception as well.
Wait, are our plants watching us?
they are watching us. we are their TV.
That leaves vision for conventional explanations. But vision requires some kind of eyes, neurons, and brains, none of which we have seen in plants. You could stretch that to somekind of mind and vision but we don't have anything like an explanation for how plants are using the plant structure that we know about to produce those functions.
Again, a round peg with only square holes available. Sciencing it out will be a scientific revolution at least on par with quantum mechanics and relativity.
All vision requires is photoreception and some means of parsing the resulting data. Cephalopods have "eyes" in their skin which they use to adjust the chromatophores they use for mimicry - these are just photoreceptors, though, not camera eyes.
As to the nervous system, there is abundant evidence that plants process information, learn from their environment, communicate with one another and even other species, despite not having brains. For example, there's an Australian plant that retracts when disturbed, but can be taught not to retract when it learns that a certain stimulus is not accompanied by danger.
vision as we know it. clearly plants can see where the sun rises, where the rain will drip. they may just see energy, which needs not eyes, but something else more fundamental to life. human skin has light receptors in the skin, and blind people can "see" with their hands in some cases, just as use of sonography can see shapes. some plants dance to music. some fungi generate light beneathnthe earth, Why? if it cannot be "seen" in some way?
I think a good engineer would be able to engineer a few sensible guesses as to how this is done. There's probably a baroque algorythim at the bottom of it, that is fed by fuzzy readouts of the environment. For example, did you know it's possible to track objects without being able to recognize shapes? DuckDuckGo isn't working for me now so I can't give the reference, but it's the algorithm used by optical mice to figure out how much they're moved. The same algorithm is probably used by our midbrains to keep our eyes trained on objects.
Right. The vine doesn't have any way of focusing the light since it doesn't have eyes, but it's getting light from every direction. Lots of fuzzy data to work with.
QUERY: are you aware of the orchid that defies radiocarbon dating? Supposedly when the flowers petals of a living plant are dated using radioactive carbon dating, they come up 10,000 years old. I've heard the story a long time ago but I can't find the reference. :(
Fascinating, and no, I haven't heard of it.
I looked it up on perplexity.ai and found this:
https://plantae.org/some-mycoheterotrophic-orchids-depend-on-carbon-from-deadwood-novel-evidence-from-a-radiocarbon-approach-new-phytol/
I'm finding perplexity to be much better than Google.
Well, it's not this specific document because it's too recent. But it might be that species or that way of obtaining carbon. I learned about all this on a phpBB forum sometime in maybe 2006. Supposedly it was talked about on some conference, or symposium, in North America. Who knows if it's even indexed anywhere, if it's that old.
Oh that is so fascinating! Plants do have an awareness. It might be fun to grow.
"and while I do not believe in just generating content for the sake of it, which is just noiseposting, at the same time there are limits to patience, and I hope not to exceed yours."
I never see writers I subscribe to as employees. And any limit to my patience would be a limit to their freedom, and genuinity. I never want any of that to be there.
🤜🤛
Caveat: Obviously haven't read the whole thing. Yet. It's almost 2300 here, so it'll have to be a treat for after dinner tomorrow. But, because there's always one and I wouldn't be me if I didn't try to combine being trite with nitpicking:
The "Why?" is for most the same as it is for the eponymous mountaineer: "Because it is there".
"God is dead" is trickier. The quote itself doesn't tell anything about the context in which the phrase, in different permutations, appears in "Also Spracht Zarathustra".
One of the first (excepting when it appears in "The Gay Science") is when Zarathustra mentions that in olden days, crimes against god was the greatest crimes, but as god has died, crimes against earth is now the greatest crime. Here, the translation runs into problems: if Earth is capitalised it is the planet, if not it is the substance - the intended (and idiomatic) meaning from the context is "the world".
Crimes against the world is the greatest crime. Now, doesn't that remind us of certain groups and certain people and certain isms?
I felt it necessary to quibble a bit about this, since (in my experience) the phrase "God is dead" is much maligned, needlessly so, and has come to be misused as some sort of cheer or cry of triumph for man's triumph over god - which is not what the phrase means (and Nietzshe wasn't the first one to use it - it wasn't common but there was an undertow of theological-philosopical debate decades before he popularised it [or: it was popularised via his writings] among german and french protestants about the role of christian morality vis-a-vis Enlightenment, the millennia-long parade of crimes and corruption perpetraded by the papal church, and the proto-modernism of the 18th century).
Zarathustra, the work as well as the character, both laments and exults in that god is indeed dead. Laments, because something has been lost and those lost rather than striving for the lightning and the Übermensch instead recreate god (to me it alludes to Frankenstein creating "life"). Exults, because man is free to be the steward of his own fate with all that that entails.
And if I'm not misremembering things, towards the end of "ASZ", Zarathustra mentions that what killed god was love for the creation, especially the creation of (hu)man.
While I'm not christian, the text (as does yours) works just as well for any spiritual context which was indeed its focus - spirit. That unseen, unmeasurable, unquantifiable yet oh so seemingly real - even to the staunchest atheist.
Because how atheist is one who has to consciously and purposefully deny his or her emotional experience of reality?
Excellent summary of Nietzsche's use of the phrase.
I've always taken it to mean not only that the Christian God is dead, but that the very idea of any sort of conscious cosmic entity was ruled out of consideration. Of course this applies to the Christian God as well, and to all gods, along with all other supernatural entities. Once Mind is removed, the rest goes with it, and the cosmos dies (or rather, ceases to reveal itself to you).
At a cultural level, what matters is not so much what any given person thinks, but what the systems of power think, and those are configured mechanically, explicitly designed to take no notice whatsoever of theological concerns. The commanding heights of society behave as though the world is dead, and therefore we live in a dead world.
Thank you - waking up to being graded "Excellent" is coffee squared, or something.
Yes, that is my amateur's understanding of Nietzshe's intended meaning - god is dead, as in the very idea of spirit. The god of Abraham is of course the closest to him when he writes, and the most obvious example: faith is gone, replaced by rote ritual, belief is hypocritically rationalised into whatever those in power wants it to be, the church is akin to a hermit crab having become all shell, no crab and thus just a structure of death, and the clergy is just a bunch of venal conmen keeping humans in slavery and ashamed of themselves for simply being.
And Reformation, while it offered the opportunity of a new dawn has petered out to simply a more austere and stripped-down version of the perfidy of the papacy.
Also, we need to remember that he wrote in a time where not going to church could, often would, mean going to jail instead. If you have to (and do so) force people to crawl before your god, what are you really?
One thing I wanted to say in the article, but did not get around to including, is that Nietzsche was the most recent prophet. He saw more deeply into the soul than anyone who has yet followed. Moreover, his writing was prophetic in the usual sense of the word. Much of what he saw indeed came to pass.
He is not thought of as a prophet because his revelation did not preach God directly, but rather via negative space. With no God, but only the void, what does the human soul become?
The N-man meant that the men thought about God on Sunday and then forgotten about him the rest of the week, their behavior showing a greater faith in the clock like processes. If God was who they said he was, they would be asking him every day. They didn’t.
Bingo.
Outstanding. This comment alone worth the price of admission.
Courage. Courage certainly seems to be an element that is in need of rekindling. The passivity of the age has played right into the hands of those who enjoy exploiting the normies for their own ends. The new mythos is an unknown but I think a helpful element would be a Grekian-like bravery.
Absolutely, yes.
And courage was deliberately reduced by fear based religions. unfortunately, you cannot face truth, without courage, so, we have generation of people with a shaky grip on reality. that is the lesson of Perseus. he can handle the truth, which cannot all be seen at once, but through his courage, he uses the truth to win.
Facing truth isn't only about courage, but also pain tolerance. Our comfortable lives reduce both.
agreed. both courage and pain tolerance need practice to really bear the finest fruit. the meeting of truth.
What an ending that was to an absolute banger of an essay. I think you are one of Substack’s best; I love these sweeping essays you’ve been releasing lately.
You have a great ability to coin new terms for dense concepts. I’m thinking particularly of your elucidation of ‘logomythy’ as the flipside to ‘mythology.’ I agree that in order for the sciences to survive in any meaningful sense they must reclaim the fundamental question of ‘why’ that was lost when modern scientists replaced the God-seeking natural philosophers. But do you have any ideas about how we can develop these logomythies? Are you suggesting that science fiction stories, insofar as they are hyperstitional, are themselves logomythic, or are they merely examples of what logomyths might look like? Are logomyths something you think can only develop organically through similar processes as the development of mythologies, or is it possible for a natural philosopher or storyteller of great vision to himself single-handedly generate a new logomyth that gets to the heart of the pursuit of science? And are logomyths essentially the same thing as egregores? I found this whole section very thought-provoking and would appreciate some clarifications.
Logomythy deserves an essay on its own, rather than the few paragraphs it gets here. Those are all fascinating questions deserving deeper investigation. The myths guiding science take many forms, and science fiction is certainly one of them.
I don't think that logomyth is really a necessary word though, as I can't think of any way in which that would differ from a myth, broadly conceived. The point of logomythy is really just to shift the emphasis slightly, to think about the story of study rather than the study of stories.
As to myths and egregores - yes, absolutely, the two are connected.
Maybe one reason why re-enchantment is so hard for us moderns to imagine is because of the way we conceptualize religion in a world where ‘God is dead.’ In antiquity there really was no such thing as atheism, separation of church and state, or multiple different religions that all competed with each other to be called the one true religion— no, every single thing in the enchanted world was infused with religious significance. The idea of religions as we think of them is very modern, including the preposterous idea that someone can be non-religious. That’s unthinkable in the enchanted world. I think for that reason re-enchantment needs to involve much more than merely telling a better story. It requires a fundamental reorientation to see the divine everywhere again. Maybe this is what John means by having an “orientation and openness towards the immanent and transcendent cosmic mind.” That's why you can't 'design' a religion. That doesn't really make any sense. Religion is just a word to describe how we interact with the divine, and relegating it to just what you do at church needlessly narrows its scope and power. Everything we do is religious.
Maybe we don’t see the divine everywhere because we have ceased to believe in it and so it has ceased to act as strongly in the world. Think about all the things we’ve lost: oracles, prophetic dreams, omens, sacrifices, etc. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible for the gods to awaken again and what that would even look like.
Or maybe the gods do still move in the world but they are just much more covert. An interesting thought experiment, and one I don’t know how I would answer, would be to wonder what spirit(s) the current American regime is currently aligning itself with or serving, like Wotan and the Germans. Mammon comes to mind.
Fantastic comment.
Jung would probably say that the gods - the archetypes - are still very much active in the world, but that they have simply been displaced into the shadow of the collective unconscious where they are much more likely to go astray. In that case, one of the benefits of reawakening the gods would be that, by becoming aware of them (even if only as forces within our psyche), by addressing them, flattering them, and calling on their aid, they work for us instead of against us.
You found one of the key statements. It's fundamentally about maintaining a state of openness; without it, you won't see what's before you, and the world won't provide what a genuine, living religion needs to sustain itself and grow. That attention is like water to a plant.
(Nice comment. I'd Like but my old Mac OS doesn't allow anymore.)
They are moving in this world.
Greek gods were concerned with sacred boundaries and humans must be very careful when they violate them in any number of ways.
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy summed up tragedy as the Dionysian chorus of satyrs mocking the Apollonian hero.
Of the Greek gods only Dionysus was murdered and reborn. The giants who killed him and ate parts of his body were the ancestors of humans. If you can think metaphorically about that it means Dionysus himself was a sacrificial victim and humans are descendants of his murderers.
Concerning Dionysian madness, the maenads of today are obsessed with abstractions called racism and sexism (and human rights). But these are Apollonian in character, manufactured by intellectuals, and are an attack on natural order, one would think. Therefore, Dionysian nature is asserting itself by destroying modernism, not traditional Christianity.
Curiously, in Euripides’ Bacchae Cadmus and Tiresias were in opposition to Pentheus because of his impiety towards Dionysus. He (Pentheus) tried to force virtue on women. In fact, Tiresias calls Pentheus mad (line 326 in my edition).
I have an old mac too, i feel your pain. Dionysus was thrice born, so could be again. the think i like about him , is he created a safe space for the madness to live, so , it did less harm, i feel. women very much have psychological needs for this outlet of powerful emotions. my recent article, the femboy cult talks about this. Dionysus was Zeus chose heir.
I like your substack, especially the benevolent crone. Thank you.
my pleasure.
a culture without her - the benevolent crone - is imbalanced, you are welcome! i will explore your substack as well.
It hit me the other night; where’s John been lol. Came on here to see if I might’ve missed some emails. Now I see what you have been doing. I always read your work very slowly as to digest it all. This will no doubt keep me busy. Am headed down. 👍
Yeah it's sort of nine essays on one theme. It took a while to write so I expect it will take people some time to read.
Well now.
So many excellent quotable passages I lost count and stopped tracking. Freaking epic, truly, to say the least.
I struggle for words. I feel like I just ingested some combination of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Michener’s The Source, and Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. I have mental indigestion. But it is good indigestion, if such can be said, because it tells me I just consumed something quite rich, quite nourishing, quite Grand. I’ll be digesting it for some time.
Seems to my low-performing brain (I may be overstating my capacity) that chapters 1-7 were the preamble to chapters 8 and 9. In any case, chapter 8 was the crescendo, at least for me. Crescendo, in the sense that it gave me great, abiding hope, by reminding me in no uncertain terms, how BIG this thing we call Creation really is. Incomprehensibly BIG.
I can say with utter certainty, The Dark Powers do NOT want us to know that. And to quote Joe Banks, in Joe vs the Volcano, “Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG… thank you. Thank you for my life.”
Chapter 9–at first—was a let down for me. I suppose I was expecting you to reveal The Secret Code of Codes. The Code that would equip, embolden and guide us out of The Dungeon. Then I realized that we all already know the Code. Most us do, anyway. And certainly the great majority that read and appreciate your works are at least somewhat familiar with The Code:
Get off your damn, lazy ass and DO something; something good, something worthwhile, something that will make a difference. A big something or a little something, does not really matter in the least. Be you Man, or Woman, does not really matter. What matters is making a difference, moving The Needle toward The Light. Move. The. Damn. Needle.
So, Thank You, sir, for this. May the Creator bless and keep you, and yours.
Peace and Courage, all.
You may enjoy this. Something I wrote years ago.
Michelangelo and William Blake were right about God.
From a Biblical perspective the nature of God is seen as reflected in aspects of the created order. Yes, God to a certain degree does have the nature of space, wind, emptiness, mist, air, sky, force, energy, light, darkness so congenial to Buddhist/Hindu/New Age types. However humans as being made in the image of God, are the best representation of what God is like – especially a human at their highest development, a mature, wise, good, vital 50+ man or woman. I knew a dynamic, spiritual woman in her late sixties, another one in her eighties. They both reminded me of a female God the Father carrying personal authority and full of love and kindness and approachable.
To me saying God is NOT like a man – Our Father in Heaven - is dumbing God down, making God less than what he is, flattening the divine out, a less than human gas. In a true sense since humans are made in the divine image, humaness is intrinsic to God, God is even MORE human than we are, as our humanity is but an image of that which is being imaged. though divine humanity is an infinite multidimensional cube compared to our simple flat squares. God is even more perfectly human than us who are echoes, a flatter image of him.
There is much wisdom and truth in Michelangelo’s and William Blake’s depictions of God as a dynamic, active, wise older man. Far from being simplifications of God they point to his personal depth, his danger, his joy and love and perfect humanness and the familiarity and commonality we encounter when we meet him for he is like us for we are patterned after him.
In all this talk of a wild Christianity I see no talk of the wild spiritual life of Jesus had with God the Father. A wild life we can also have as being fellow sons of God filled with the Holy Spirit – John 1:12, Galatians 3:26, 4:6. A wild Christianity with the Father because it is empowered by the Holy Spirit doesn’t need nature immersion to happen, though having the privilege of nature immersion I suppose may be a useful adjunct for many. After all when Jesus gave prayer instructions in Matthew 6 he said to close the door to your room!, not to go forest bathing.
When you look at the actual spirituality espoused by Jesus and practiced by him in the Gospels it is utterly unfashionable by those who look to non-dual awareness, and “Christ Consciousness” "ground of being” as the ticket. No, nothing as ethereal as that! A Father in heaven, “pray to your Father who is there unseen”. Jesus was by no means ashamed of the old man and talked about and to him a whole lot. God speaking in an audible voice, expectation of specific even miraculous answers to prayer, lifting eyes in prayer, a robust intensely personal God the Father that isn’t you, but you can know, and directly know his love for you as an individual.
Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” far from being a cry of abandonment it was act of teaching and prophetic proclamation – which was a part of his job at the time, it was a quote from the first line of Psalm 22 which contains prophecy of what was happening at the moment, and was a statement of deep faith and knowing.
I could go on and on with more examples from all over the Bible of this wonderful experience of the Living God. The Father made us as individual humans and intends to keep us that way. This is all very childlike as Jesus says we are to be. I know vigorous attempts have been made to squeeze this knowing of the Father and the Biblical record into a new orthodoxy of a “wiser” quasi-Buddhism.
However The final state presented as the ultimate is us embodied as individual humans even as Jesus is now, in the presence of God, in a new physical creation of multiplicity, filled with the Holy Spirit, not generic vanilla pudding non-duality. Sounds like fun to me, which all children delight in.
By William Blake - we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. . . . . . And round the tent of God like lambs we joy . . .
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee
Beautiful.
Certainly from the hermetic maxim as above, so below, and as below, so above, one may analogize from the human to the divine, if one does so carefully. The danger of course is that one risks limiting the divine, by projecting the limitations of humans onto it.
A risk I am willing to take - “in your presence is fullness of joy” Psalm 16
And I thought my articles on reenchantment were long 😂
I am nothing if not logorrheic.
I disagree. There is nothing prolix about this post. I read it over the course of two afternoons and intend to reread it and even print it out for further consideration. There are any number of comments I might write, but not at the moment. Right now I just want to thank you.
Wow. Thank you for taking the time to say so.
I intend to subscribe to your Substack soon. If my finances weren't in dire straits at this particular moment, I'd do so immediately. I truly appreciate your work! It is profound, complex, and deeply inspiring.
Again, thank you very much for saying so.
I hope your finances straighten out soon. These are hard times for everyone.
True. Especially challenging for me, though, if I may say so. I am a victim of gangstalking / directed energy weapons / electronic harassment of every imaginable kind as well as "analog" harassment of every imaginable kind. I've been of victim of this for thirty-four years, which is exactly half of my entire life.
The experimental torture program called MKUltra was its early incarnation, though very few people today know anything about what that entailed. The truth is that MKUltra never ended. It simply evolved into ever more satanic forms of torture, and the numbers of its victims continues to increase. There are millions of victims worldwide, though no one knows how many millions, except perhaps all the "intelligence" agencies of the entire world, who are the entities which carry out these attacks. Most victims are unaware that they are being victimized, at least at first, but that doesn't stop the damage that is done to them. My life partner was one of them. He hanged himself five years ago because of the torture he was experiencing from directed energy weapons and gangstalking. He never consciously realized that he was being victimized! (He never believed me when I had talked to him about the ways in which I was being victimized and tortured, so that is not the slightest bit surprising.) This is true of the vast majority of victims of this kind of torture. Please study this website for in depth information about this: TargetedJustice.com/
Apollo and Dionysus shared the temple of Delphi. They are inseparable. As for faith, it will start as small as a mustard seed. It will begin with three men. From there a Brotherhood will form. As their physical, material, and spiritual power grow, they will attract others and spread organically. With a right armed prophet-father, he will create a explosive system to change the world.
For a time being, today is a fertile field. The worms are breaking down the dead and fertilizing the field. Many new plants will grow, some in rocky soil, some in sanely soil, and some in a good soil. A father will come with an artist’s soul to create a new Homeric poem that captured imagination of many.
I just wrote about that! i wonder if it is just in the aether somewhere.....Apollo and Dionysus, i mean. Mostly Dionysus.
I feel it in the air. I feel it in the waters. I feel it in the good fresh earth. What was once lost is now found. The Barbarian is come, to stir the proud beast from its slumber within our hearts. To rewake our manly virtues once again with a howl. Let us throw ourselves into the dark forest, into the savage frontier, and renew our strength in mind and body again.
if i could like your comment it would. Could not agree more. I think tho, that what is called the barbarian, was in many ways more civilized that anything we have today. simply a matter of definitions.
It’s easier to be more civil when the man you insulted could rest his ax in your head without getting into trouble.
There’s also a tradeoff between a small population and a large population. A city of 10,000 is more likely to share struggle in a crisis or war or to even raise a barn. But once the percentage of men requires to fight starts to fall, more people will begin to specialize and the unity begins to disappear. It’s a rule of thumb that every soldier need 8-10 men as support with food, mining, fabrication, oil drilling and refining, medical care, and logistics. As long as the extra men are just this much, a nation will feel involved. But when the percentage of military is reduced to 40% or less, the civilians will grow disdainful of war and its manly virtues.
Expressive individualism will replace common struggle and people grow softer. By the time of Augustus, I think only 10% of men were in the legions and the results spoke for themselves. People cared more for money and fashion and pleasure and the elite disdained and exploited the Roman farmers, destroying the foundation of their power. They didn’t care, they could always hire more Germans to “do the job Romans won’t do.”
When there is an excessive population, there will be either civil strife or colonization. The second is better, especially if we settle the asteroids and put them along Earth’s orbit. Frontier will re-wild man even as he become more competent.
I'll have to ponder this, thank you.
Brilliant summation.
I deeply enjoy these long and syncretistic pieces which weave many elements together while maintaining a grand and compelling vision. If I wasn't living in a tent right now I would absolutely subscribe to this! Excellent work...
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-echoes-of-existence?r=1neg52
“1 hr 39 min read”
I’m on vacation—what more could I ask for?
Optimistic time estimate. :)
Good discussion of depopulation. It is mostly caused by leftist policies. Obviously, the government and UN population control programs.
https://open.substack.com/pub/michael796/p/who-is-really-to-blame
And other leftist policies as well, such as climate:
"In 2021, The Lancet published a poll of 10,000 young people (ages 16 to 25) in 10 countries (Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the U.K., and the USA) asking how they felt about climate change that found pervasive pessimism about the future... 39 percent saying they are “hesitant to have children"... In 2023, 76 percent of Americans in an NBC survey were “not confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.” That same year, a Wall Street Journal poll similarly reported that 78 percent of Americans believe that life for their children will not be better than it was for themselves."
https://humanprogress.org/progress-rediscovered/
Yes, the system does everything it can to depress birth rates, in most countries. Not all by any means, however, and those that are actively trying to raise the birth rate can't increase it either.
In many ways, the very existence of leftism can be seen as a sort of can be seen as a response to the absence of a real religion at the heart of materialism. It isn't a very good one, unfortunately, so it has a tendency to make everything worse ... particularly because it has redefined the gradual extinction of humanity that irreligiousity seems to lead to as a good thing in its ideology.
Yes, leftism is fundamentally nihilistic and misanthropic. The leftist idea of heaven is an earth with no human beings. As a religion, leftism is form of nature worship. NATURE IS GOD is a leftist bumper sticker.