JMG on Unherd

About a month ago, very much to my surprise, I fielded a contact request from an editor at the British news-and-opinion website UnHerd, asking whether I was interested in writing an article on the interface between magic and politics. Of course I was interested, and my piece, very nearly as I wrote it, is now up as a "Weekend Essay" on their website; you can read it here. 

I took a certain wry amusement in the way they positioned it as a silly season piece, with a less challenging title than the one I suggested, and a photo of the goofiest looking Druid they could find splashed across the top, as a wink and nudge to their sophisticated readers not to take the piece too seriously. Mind you, I'm not complaining.  That's bog-standard treatment for occultists in the English-speaking end of the industrial world, of course, and has been for well over a century now. As I learned back when I was a speaker in the peak oil circuit, it's also an unexpected means of influence. Very often people who don't think they have to take a set of ideas seriously never get around to raising mental barricades against it, and can end up accepting those ideas in whole or part without ever quite noticing their source. 

One way or another, it'll be interesting to see what reaction if any this essay gets, and where things go from here. It's not impossible that the crisis of legitimacy currently hitting political, academic, and cultural institutions like a well-aimed wrecking ball will give the vaticinations of Druids more attention than they've generally received so far. But we'll have to wait and watch how things unfold...