Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***  

Comments

[ecosophia]

Yes, but in Nietzsche's case the connection is a little complex. He was gay -- it's astonishing how much effort his biographers have had to put into obscuring that very obvious point -- and he never got over the crisis early in his college years when he discovered his sexuality. It used to be a very common story: a sensitive and devoutly Christian young person, who's been taught that same-sex relationships are always and only the most debased form of lust, falling head over heels in love with a person of the same sex and having to deal with the conflict between the nasty moral slanders of his religious background and the discovery that romantic love, in the highest and richest sense of the word, also happens between people of the same sex. Such people usually become atheists of an unusually bitter type. (I'm pretty sure that's what happened with James Randi, for example.) Nietzsche's problem is that he remained powerfully attracted to his former Christian faith; he turned his life into a war against God as a reaction against that attraction, and the internal conflict finally shattered his mind. Read his late books, as his tone gets more and more shrill, and you can see the conflict build to the breaking point.

[(Anonymous)]

"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound." -- Jeeves

Interesting take, I'd not considered that. Thank you.

[youngelephant]

Are there any specific Nietzsche books you think are worth reading? I bought two because a specific idea in a video on him piqued my interest; not sure when I'll get to them though.

[ecosophia]

Nietzsche is very much worth reading. Just because a writer is slowly going crazy doesn't mean his works aren't any good! Nietzsche was one of the greatest prose writers in the history of German literature, a brilliant essayist and one of the few people willing to pursue the intellectual conflicts of post-Christian Europe all the way into the deep places of thought. So long as you approach his writing thoughtfully and critically, a close reading of Nietzsche is an intellectual adventure not to be missed. Combine it with a bio or two of Nietzsche and with a reading of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which is about Nietzsche in fictionalized form, and it's even more so.

[neptunesdolphins]

Are you saying that James Randi was gay?

That is interesting how people can't let go of their early religious training, but constantly go back to it. I have discovered that with various Goddess worshipers who are trying rewrite Bible stories instead of creating their own mythology.

I am curious if hanging on to early religious training has to do with living in western industrial cultures.

[robertmathiesen]

Well, Randi's spouse (since 2013) was a man ... So, yes.

[ecosophia]

Good heavens, of course Randi was gay. He was quite public about it later in life. As for hanging onto early religious training, it's not just a Western industrial thing -- it affects almost everyone to one extent or another.

[(Anonymous)]

I know quite a few gay men who are really quite irritated the lengths people go to erase gayness from historical figures; and especially when they do the same to modern figures. It's rather odd to watch.....

[ecosophia]

I get that. The same effort goes into erasing occult interests from historical figures who were up to their eyeballs in occultism, and it's just as irritating!

[(Anonymous)]

One of my friends is a gay occultist, and he's said it's more irritating when they do it with gayness, for the simple reason that it's quite often people who claim to pride themselves on tolerance, on being friends of the gay community, who do it. So he finds that the hypocrisy of it all makes it worse.

[brendhelm]

What, I wonder, is the motivation in doing that? Is it because the myth of progress implies that couldn't have possibly lived a successful life in that time period on account of their orientation and therefore, since they were successful, they must have been straight?

erasing gayness

[ritaer]

This applies mainly to literary figures--the school of criticism popular in middle of the 20th century, known as the New Criticism, emphasized close reading of the text, analyzing such linguistic features as metaphor, simile, imagery, paradox, ambiguity. Social aspects of literature, including the biographical facts of the author's life were downplayed. I suspect that one reason for its popularity in the US was that it avoided Marxism during the era when being suspected of socialist leanings could doom an academic career. In any case, this type of criticism made the sexual life, or the occult life, of the author irrelevant. This made it attractive for those who did not want 'warts and all' treatment of their literary heroes, whether the wart was homosexuality, alcohol or drug abuse, rampant womanizing, unpopular political or social beliefs, unacceptable religion, etc. OTH there is still a large number of people who regard homosexuality as a sin, or a sickness, and who do not wish to be confronted with this "failing" in an author they like. I had a professor who promised to discuss the sexuality of Henry James, but somehow never got around to it, and this was in 1991, well into the time of modern attitudes. On the third hand there are the homosexual activists who wish to "recruit" the famous dead, sometimes on the slimmest of evidence.

Rita

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting. I'm not very familiar with Nietzsche, but from what I do know of him and his writings, I was struck by the sharp contrast between how he acted in his mundane life and the tone he adopted in his writings. It always seemd to me that was indicative of some deep inner conflict.

To put it in the language of his three metamorphoses, the impression I got of him is that he longed to become the child but couldn't let go of the lion.

[ecosophia]

That makes sense. Yeats always used to say that every great creative mind was trying to embody, in his or her creativity, whatever was most opposite his or her own personality...