Toward Ecosophy

As many of you will already be aware, these open posts on the Covid fiasco and its aftermath have changed from weekly to monthly; message traffic has decreased far enough at this point that weekly posts get too few comments, but there are still plenty of people who want access to a forum for discussion on that topic not dominated by either of the two heavily promoted narratives -- the medical-industry party line or the conspiracy-culture party line. My current plan is to post a new one of these on the first Tuesday of each month, and keep it open and active until the next one goes up.

So here we are. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button. 

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion. 

I was delighted yesterday to be back on The Dangerous Maybe podcast with hosts Michael Downs and Bryce Nance. This was the same podcast that hosted my recent conversation with post-chaos magician and accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, and they wanted to have me back on to talk about my most savagely denounced book, The King in Orange. 

This was a weirder conjunction than you may think. Mikey and Nance come out of the same sort of avant-garde Marxist background that gave rise to the Situationist movement, which I've been discussing and critiquing over on my main blog. Apparently that scene has been moving in interesting directions of late, as they were intrigued by the class analysis at the center of The King in Orange -- the division of American society into investment, salary, wage, and welfare classes -- and how the bitter conflict between the salary and wage classes played out in the election and the subsequent career of Donald Trump. 

So we talked about that, as well as magic, frog gods, tentacled horrors from the dawn of time, and the Freudian implications of all those women flinging their dildos at symbols of the Trump administration in a recent protest -- I mean, come on, ladies, do you really think the rest of us wouldn't pick up on that? -- and had a lively two-hour conversation on the subject. Check it out here: 

https://youtu.be/xk4g1hFkDVw?si=Ik8HEpl0pZcUFert

Or here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk4g1hFkDVw

One of the people currently studying for the Universal Gnostic Church ministry -- tip of the bishop's mitre to Gnosticlombe --  did some digging into the literature of the Independent Sacramental Movement, the tradition of free-range bishops with apostolic succession to which the UGC belongs. In the process he found something quite unexpected. 

One of our many lineages of apostolic succession comes to us via that astonishingly colorful figure Bishop Michael Bertiaux, author of The Voudon Gnostic Workbook and presiding bishop of the Neo-Pythagorean Gnostic Church. Bertiaux's lineage entered ours in 1993, when one of the bishops of his line consecrated Bishop John Gilbert sub conditione -- at that time there was some question about the origins of the UGC's original lineage, though that's been cleared away since then. 

Bishop Bertiaux was an indefatigable collector of lineages and initiations, which he passed on to his students -- a worthwhile task at a time when many such traditions faced the risk of extinction. One of his many consecrations, however, came from a figure even more colorful than he is. 

William C. Conway was born in 1865 in Redondo Beach, California, where he spent most of his life, and died in 1969 at the age of 104. He was raised in the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) church and became a bishop in the Aaronic priesthood and a high priest in the Melchizedek priesthood. In the early 1950s, however, he broke with the Salt Lake City branch of the Mormon movement to found his own independent Mormon church. He had connections with Native American spiritual teachers in Mexico, and somewhere -- I have not been able to trace the details yet -- made contact with the Druid Revival, whereupon he founded a Christian Druid church called the Ancient Irish Church of IESU. 

In 1954, this remarkable figure consecrated his student Roland Merritt Shreves as a bishop of his church, and in 1967 Shreves and Michael Bertiaux exchanged consecrations. Follow it down from there and the UGC has inherited Conway's lineage -- as well as that of the Latter-Day Saints, though admittedly in a schismatic and heretical form. 

The Mormon tradition is among the most colorful and complex of homegrown American religious movements. Alongside the church based in Salt Lake City, there are many dozens of smaller churches in the Latter-Day Saints tradition, which differ from the Salt Lake City church in various ways, some minor, some much more significant. Two good scholarly studies, D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View and John L. Brooke's The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644-1844, provide solid evidence that Christian occultism had a major role in Joseph Smith's life and the founding of the Latter-Day Saints faith. I'd been interested in the esoteric dimensions of the traditions, in an outsider's sort of way, for many years...and now it turns out that I, and the rest of the clergy of the Universal Gnostic Church, were schismatic Mormon elders all along and didn't know it. 

I'm not at all sure what to make of this, but I thought my readers -- and even more, present and prospective members of the UGC -- would like to know about it. Strange days...

Edit: It gets better. Conway was also a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis and its Gnostic church, the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. He received the XI°, the highest degree in the OTO, on January 1, 1945. I wonder where else he'll turn up as I keep digging! 

This journal is starting to look a little thin since Frugal Friday and the Covid open post both went to once a month, and so I've decided to try something a number of readers have suggested from time to time: little potted reviews of books I've read recently that might be of interest. "Old Prose" will be the label for these, if you want to search for them. 


This inaugural review goes to Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art by Joshua Knelman. Why am I reading about art theft? Well, Ariel Moravec, the heroine of my series of occult detective novels, has already gotten tangled up in one case that involved stolen art (The Carnelian Moon), and in the story I'm writing right now (The Greater Key), the Macguffin at the center of the case is a letter, maybe authentic, maybe forged, that might just pass on some of the lost secrets of Giordano Bruno's system of magical memory. 

This kind of research is essential in good fiction, and is too often neglected by novice writers. Knowing something about a subject that comes up in a story is essential to capturing the sense of reality that makes a novel convincing and gripping. Partly it's that anybody who knows something about a subject will be able to tell at a glance if you're faking it, but there's more to it than that. Reality is more richly textured than your imagination, and borrowing bits of texture and detail from reality to fill out the products of your imagination makes for more vivid scenes in fiction. 

Knelman's book is a good source for this sort of texture and detail because he's a journalist in the modern mold, as interested in the personalities he meets and his own experiences while researching his book as in the facts of the matter. The facts are intriguing enough. The short form? The art industry is among the most corrupt economic sectors in modern life, full of theft, forgery, insurance fraud, money laundering, and the like. Most deals are cash, most transactions go unreported, and many collectors, dealers, and auction houses are perfectly happy with illegal activities. Art crime accounts for an estimated US$6 billion in criminal transactions every year, and a lot of it ties into other criminal enterprises as well. 

If you want detailed statistics and analysis of the field, Knelman's not your source, but as a lively narrative with colorful characters and plot twists, it stands comparison well with the better sort of mystery novels and true-crime books. I give it four out of five stars. 

Several of you noticed that my main blog, ecosophia.net, was offline for a little while and still has some hiccups. I'm in the process of transferring it to a new host, and the usual e-hiccups have occurred. The new hosting firm assures me that everything should be up and running again shortly. If anything untoward happens, I'll post here. 

In the meantime, welcome to the Long Descent. ;-)

I could probably just stick the poster here and be done with it, but in case anybody's too busy having flashbacks to absorb the data, I will be speaking at the 2026 conference of the Institute for Hermetic Studies on June 5-7 this year at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The theme, as you can probably guess from the poster even through a haze of tie-dyed memories, is the occult legacy of the 1970s, and my talk is titled "The Morning of the Magicians: 1970s Pop Culture, Alternative Realities, and the Revival of Occultism."  More details? Those can be found by scanning the Mark of the Beast on the lower left or, for those with more old-fashioned tastes, going to the IHS website. See you there!