Toward Ecosophy

These open posts on the Covid fiasco and its aftermath have continued to draw a steady stream of comments; clearly 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. The current schedule is to post one of these on the first Tuesday of each month, and keep it open and active until the next one goes up. 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.  

There are surprisingly few good books on Japanese occult and esoteric traditions in English. You'd think that in a society like ours that's certifiably crazy about anime, not to mention plenty of other aspects of Japanese culture, there would be plenty in print on the abundant and complex lore of Japanese occultism, but that's not the case. It takes plenty of digging to find even basic information about such core traditions of Japanese wizardry as Onmyodo and Mikkyo, to say nothing of the older and stranger dimensions of Japan's magic. 

One fine exception to that unhappy rule is Carmen Blacker's The Catalpa Bow. An English academic, Blacker became interested in the shamanistic dimensions of Japanese folk magic and spent years visiting isolated rural areas of Japan, attending ceremonies, participating in ascetic practices, and talking with practitioners who preserved the last scraps of traditions dating back centuries or millennia. The result was one of the genuine classics of the anthropology of religion, a sensitive and sympathetic study of branches of folk magic so archaic that few Japanese these days know much about them. 

This is a world inhabited by miko, female mediums who go into trance to foretell the future and give voice to ghosts and fox-spirits; shugenja, ascetics who practice harsh austerities on sacred mountains to win the power to banish evil spirits and heal supernatural illnesses; Buddhist clerics who wield the powers of esoteric mantras and mandalas; and the spiritual beings with whom all these interact and contend, from magic snakes and greedy fox-spirits through unhappy ghosts and nature spirits to the gods of Shinto and the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the esoteric Buddhist pantheon. It's a weird, wild world, and Blacker provides a fine introduction to it. 

This book has a special place in my heart; I first read it in the fall of 1980 as a college freshman, and it filled a role in relation to occultism that several previous books had done in other subjects. Elizabeth Seeger's The Five Sons of King Pandu, a retelling of the Hindu epic Mahabharata for young readers, did it in the field of legend and mythology, and Lester Brooks' Great Civilizations of Ancient Africa did it in the field of history; in each of these cases and others, I'd learned a lot about the Western world's experience and then encountered the parallel experience of another continent, and the encounter thoroughly redefined my understanding of the subject.  My way of thinking about occultism changed and broadened considerably because of this book. 

Beyond that considerable impact, Blacker's book also showed me that it was possible to investigate magical traditions in a scholarly manner without being dismissive about them. (Long before anyone else was talking about firewalks, for example, Blacker participated in a firewalk, admitted that something very strange was going on, and simply left the matter at tiat.) I Finally, the book's pleasant and lively to read.  If that sounds like a hearty recommendation, why, it should; I'd encourage anyone with the least interest in occult and spiritual traditions to give it a read. 

Well, I'm back from Los Angeles. It was a very pleasant trip, courtesy of my hosts, South Pasadena Masonic Lodge #290 and the Hermetic Consistory. I did have a little trouble on the homeward journey, which was none of their doing -- delays in transport ended up landing me back in DC at 3:30 this morning, and only the timely presence of a genial Ethiopian taxi driver at that dismal hour spared me a long cold wait at the Metro light rail stop. Still, it all worked out, and I put the time I spent cooling my heels to good use, writing most of a chapter of a future Ariel Moravec story -- the conclusion, in fact, of a story arc that's already been introduced (though very quietly) in the books of that series already in print. 

My official reason for being in LA was to speak at the 2026 Sages and Scholars Conference. The theme of the conference was "what it means to be human in the age of AI." My talk was titled "Technology, Myth, and the Religion of Progress" -- the image on the left is me giving that talk -- and regular readers will have guessed already that my approach to that theme was to pour cold water on the overheated fantasies of omniscient computers, and suggest a balanced approach to the new technologies of AI that will make room for its potentials while avoiding some of its likely downsides. Yes, the word "dissensus" got introduced to the audience, and so did the word "retrovation." They seemed to handle those heretical notions surprisingly well; we'll see if I can pull off the standard trick of the fringe intellectual and slip a few useful ideas through the barriers that keep mainstream thinkers safe from anything genuinely interesting or new. 

Still, I had other things in mind when I was planning the trip, and my hosts were kind enough to accommodate my vagaries. It so happens that one of the esoteric teachers, and one of the occult orders, that have had a powerful influence on my thinking and practice, respectively were and are headquartered in LA, so I had the chance to make a pilgrimage to two places that are important to me but that I'd never visited before. 

The first of those was the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) buildings on Los Feliz Boulevard -- that's the courtyard of the PRS on the right. Those were the longtime stomping grounds of that astonishing force of nature, Manly Palmer Hall, the most influential American occultist of the 20th century, one of the few people I know of who wrote more books than I ever will. Hall had the exceptionally good fortune to attract a couple of elderly widows with oil money early in his career, which enabled him to drop out of the rat race, devote the rest of his life to esoteric philosophy, and build the complex of buildings where he worked, trying to teach occult wisdom to Americans, from the mid-1930s until his death in 1980. 

Hall is one of the two esoteric authors who had the most influence on my thinking and my approach to occultism. (The other is Dion Fortune, and I had the chance to make a pilgrimage to her favorite place, Glastonbury, and lay flowers on her grave many years ago.) The image on the left is me standing at the doors of the PRS library, which has 50,000 occult texts, many of them quite rare. The staff was welcoming in the extreme, and gave me a tour of the whole facility. 

The PRS is currently raising money to put a new roof on the library, and I promised to mention that here.  If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, or if your tax situation would be improved by making a charitable donation before the end of the year, they're a qualified 501(c)3 charitable foundation and they'd be delighted to hear from you. (Practitioners of planetary charity will want to know that this would be an excellent choice for a Mercury charity.) They also have an online bookstore carrying many of Hall's books -- there are so many of those that they have to reprint them in rotation. You can find the current stock here. 

The second site on my pilgrimage list was the home temple of the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), an esoteric school founded nearly a century ago by Paul Foster Case. Case was a high-ranking member in the American end of the Golden Dawn scene who left the GD when its internal politics got too hairy and founded a school of his own. Like a great many occultists of the era, he ended up in the Los Angeles area, where he established a temple and correspondence school in a quiet set of buildings on Figueroa Avenue -- that's the place on the right. 

My late wife and I joined BOTA in 1990; she returned to the lessons in the year before her death, as part of a general review of her studies that I only realized later was preparation for the transition to come, and I followed her lead and returned to the BOTA work after her passing. These days I'm an initiate of the lodge side of their work, too, so a visit to the BOTA temple was high on my priority list. 

Once again I had a fine time -- the photo to the left is me in the temple room. My hosts and I took in a Vibratory Attunement, a guided meditation that includes chanting divine names on specific tones, and also had ample time to chat with the local members. I was just a little weirded out by one detail. It so happens that I've heard, and participated in, a lot of recorded guided meditations that were led by Case's successor Ann Davies. They were all recorded in that very room; the acoustics were unmistakable, and so were the tones of the old Hammond electric organ that provided accompaniment and gave us the tones to chant. It really did feel now and then as though Davies or Case himself were about to stroll back into the room. 

So my pilgrimage is complete. I expect to be back at some point -- there are already conspiracies under way to bring me back to LA to do my classic two-day geomancy workshop, which is open to complete beginners and teaches them how to do accurate, detailed geomantic readings, and I have a far faint hope that someday I will have an event in the PRS auditorium, sit in the chair where Manly P. Hall gave Sunday talks for more than half a century, and offer some teachings. We'll see. 

...which sounds like a bit from the Allan Sherman song "Harvey and Sheila"...

I've done a burst of podcast interviews in the last little while, and three of them got released today. (Okay, two got released and one turned up in my spam filter.)  In case you're feeling lonely for the lack of my voice or something, here you are, in alphabetical order.  ;-)

Okay, first up we've got the Dangerous Maybe podcast with hosts Mikey and Nance. Regulars will remember this as the show where I had a memorable and surprisingly congenial conversation with Nick Land, accelerationist mage and current idol of the Silicon Valley technofuturist scene. This one is another meeting of very different minds, and if anything it's a little odder. Chris Cutrone is a Marxist university professor who's spent years now talking about why the Marxist left has failed to deal with the realities of our time; he sometimes calls himself the Last Marxist. As Nance put it, "The last Marxist, an archdruid, and two high school dropouts walk into a bar..." 

That's more or less what happened, too. The four of us talked for a little over two and a half hours about philosophy, politics, magic,  and a great deal more; it was a pleasant, lively conversation, and while I don't think anybody changed their mind about anything, I think we all went away with a much richer and more nuanced sense of the landscape of ideas under discussion. Check it out here. 

Next is the Legalise Freedom podcast with host Greg Moffit. It's been quite a while since I was last on Greg's show but the chemistry was as good as always. Our ostensible topic this time was my anthology of W.B. Yeats's magical writings, but the discussion spun away as usual in all kinds of interesting directions, with politics particularly high up on the list. Greg ended up titling the conversation "What Is Magic? Mass Hypnosis, Mind Power, and the Struggle for your Soul," which pretty much summarizes the theme. You can listen to the first half of it free here, here, here, or here; the second half is for subscribers, but Greg is offering a steep discount for my readers -- enter the code LF50 and you get half off the subscription rate. Greg's shows are always lively, so if podcasts are your thing this might be just what you wanted. 

Third is the Pearl Snap Tactical Podcast with host Mark. I doubt anybody will have trouble guessing that Mark is on the opposite end of half a dozen spectrums from Chris Cutrone, who I mentioned above -- though I suspect the two of them could have a lively and pleasant conversation if they gave it a try! Mark and I talked about the rise of populism in today's America, the accelerating decline of the decadent managerial elite, the rise of a new entrepreneurial elite, and the cascading changes in American society, politics, economics, and culture that are unfolding out of the current elite replacement cycle. It's on all the usual podcast venues, but Mark suggests his Substack as a good portal; you'll find it here. 

So there you have it. Enjoy! 

These open posts on the Covid fiasco and its aftermath have continued to draw a steady stream of comments; clearly 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. The current schedule is to post one of these on the first Tuesday of each month, and keep it open and active until the next one goes up. 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. 

One of the reasons I lurk in various odd corners of the internet is that doing so quite often gives me unexpected access to the crawlspaces of the American collective unconscious. Partly that's entertaining, partly it tolerably often gives me advance warning of changes in consciousness that will sooner or later have political, economic, or cultural impacts...

...and then there are things like this. 

If you happen to go onto eBay and enter a search string along the lines of "Trump bath water," it will take you straight here: 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/336825356170

The person selling the item on the left insists that, via a relative who works at the White House, she got access to water in which Donald Trump bathed. You can have your own 1 oz. vial of the liquid in question for a mere $600.00. I have no idea whether the seller is telling the truth or whether she's an unusually imaginative scam artist, nor does that greatly matter. How many presidents since JFK, let's say, can you imagine having the kind of cultural mojo that leads people to try to sell their bathwater? 

I've suspected for quite some time -- since not long after the 2016 election, in fact -- that Trump was going to be turned into a folk saint among working class Americans. I thought, though, that in the usual way of things his folk canonization would wait until he was safely dead, and his merely human qualities could be safely buried under a vast heap of archetypal imagery. Apparently I was mistaken. It's already happening. 

Nor, I find, is this the only bit of quasireligious Trumpery to be had on eBay. The novena candle on the right is only one of quite a few Saint Donald Trump (sic) novena candles you can buy there. You can pick up this one here, if you're so minded: 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196584622911

Folk saints have had a significant presence in the culture of the American underclass for quite a while now -- most hoodoo shops, for example, carry novena candles of St. Martin Luther King, which African-American people burn as part of spells meant to protect themselves from the consequences of racial prejudice. Given the very wide spread of hoodoo among all ethnic groups in the American underclass, I suspect quite a few candles like this are being burnt right now by people who want to make their lives, their small businesses, or their countries great again. 

Strange days...

I'm pleased to say I've just gotten a timeline from Sul Books, the publisher currently handling my fiction, about upcoming releases for the next few years. Here's what to expect, and when: 


The final volume in the Yellow Sign trilogy brings Chris Allard, warrior of the Yellow Sign, to Arkham, Massachusetts. There a young composer named Brecken Kendall has written a chamber opera based on the haunting Decadent play The King in Yellow; around its first performances in an old Arkham church, a lethal dance of espionage and silent murder moves toward crisis -- and Chris himself faces a shattering confrontation with his own past and his future. 

So there you have it. I'll keep everyone posted as things become available for sale. 

This would be a saint's day for us. Today is the birthday of John Chapman, better known to two centuries of American children as Johnny Appleseed; he was born on this day in 1774.  Yes, he was a real person, and a far more interesting one than the Disneyfied stereotypes make him seem. John Chapman was a follower of the teachings of Swedish visionary and occultist Emmanuel Swedenborg, and spread Swedenborg's gospel as enthusiastically as he did apple seedlings. I did a blog post about him here. 

Some years ago, in the midst of the collective hysteria over Covid, I posted one version of the poem "Johnny Appleseed" by Vachel Lindsay, a brilliant American poet who (like so much of our culture) has been cancelled by our current corporate pseudoculture. Lindsay's poems are meant to be chanted aloud, and this one makes a fine incantation -- as I wrote at the time, a way back to an older and stronger magic. I'd encourage any of you who are interested to recite it aloud, at least once. You can find it here. 

And while you're at it, enjoy an apple, or a slice of apple pie, or a bottle of hard apple cider like the one that's open on my desk right now. 

"By the hour of dawn he was proud and stark,