Here We Go Again

[ecosophia]

I suppose it was inevitable...

One of my readers who keeps an eye on the Neopagan scene forwarded me a link to the latest project of longtime Pagan leader Oberon (né Timothy) Zell of the Church of All Worlds, which you can find on this website. Those of my readers who enjoyed watching the runup to December 21, 2012 aka Nothing Happened Day will want to keep a close eye on this one, as it promises a great deal of wry entertainment over the year ahead. 

To be fair, Zell and his allies aren't simply sitting back and waiting for the millennium to arrive, the way their equivalents did in 2012. Their plan is to get as many people as possible to focus their intention and imagination on a particular set of visions of the future, and on this year as the crucial turning point at which those visions began to take on reality. That's a common way to do certain kinds of collective magic, and while it's not the most sophisticated or effective approach, it's succeeded often enough in the past that it's not guaranteed to be a waste of time. 

No, the core difficulty with this project is that there's nothing new about the future it's marketing. The vision of the future that Zell presents is the same one he's been trying to promote since the days when he was a twentysomething science fiction geek agog over this brand new TV show called Star Trek. (He still considers the premiere of said show in 1966 to be a turning point in human consciousness, or something like that.) With a few minor tweaks -- for example, legal pot in place of flying cars -- it's the same gimmick-ridden Tomorrowland future that's been dangled in front of the leftward end of American society for decades by the marketing flacks of the status quo.  And of course the first step toward that supposed future, the one toward which much of the project's practical dimension is focused, is voting the senile Democratic gerontocracy back into power so that we can go back to their failed and overfamiliar neoliberal policies -- you know, the ones that were welded in place for the fifty years before 2016 and drove the American working class into poverty and misery. 

I've met Oberon Zell, though I doubt he remembers me from Hu Gadarn's off ox. I've even corresponded with him -- like every other author of books on magic published by Llewellyn, I got an invite to teach at his Grey School of Wizardry, which I declined as tactfully as possible. He came across to me as an amiable old pothead with a lot of interesting stories. It makes perfect sense that as his generation sunsets out and the causes to which he's devoted much of his life sink into the decadence that awaits every social movement that's past its pull date, he would try to make one more great effort on their behalf.  There's even a certain tattered grandeur in the deed. 

But it's going to fail, of course -- and my working guess is that this may finish the job that the total failure of the Magic Resistance began, and push Neopaganism as a popular phenomenon into history's dustbin, the way the Great Disappointment of 1844 put paid to the Transcendentalist movement and Nothing Happened Day seems to have drawn a line under the New Age. Still, we'll see. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

This reminds me of the "starseed" gimmick. Apparently they are incarnating en masse now and will usher in a Golden Age.

It's new age marketing, telling people what they want to hear and flogging merch and events while they're at it.

[ecosophia]

Of course. Telling people that they're the most specially special of special snowflakes is always a good marketing gimmick, too.

[deansmith]

I'm only vaguely familiar with Zell, but that was one of the weirdest things I've read in quite some time. It reminded me of exactly the kind of thing I heard and read in charismatic Christian circles in the 90s about the next millennium if Christ didnt come back first. All fantasy and no real work.

[ecosophia]

The comparison is exact; the charismatic Christian scene in the 1990s was desperately trying not to come to terms with the failure of their hopes, just as Neopaganism is now.

[(Anonymous)]

I read a book that surveyed prophetic (failure) movements. It seemed that there was a pattern to the issuance of prophecy. There are a few tentative ones (Arguelles 1987, Prophet 1990, Nidle 1996, Y2K 2000, Golden Dawn 2010), then the all in big one (Arguelles, again, 2012). When the big prophecy fails it prompts the first large fall away of believers. But those that remain don't seem to learn anything. They double down on a new date. When it passes the second great exodus happens. This results in either the complete dissolution of the movement or the few remaining believers begin to build a less prophetic based faith.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! That's fascinating. Do you recall the title of the book? It sounds like something I'd like to read.

[(Anonymous)]

This year's election is going to be one for the record books, especially since the Democratic Party candidate will almost certainly be Joe Biden, a man who even many of my Democrat friends call "Creepy Joe". It won't help the Democrats either that Biden almost certainly has early stage dementia and that his mental incapacity will become more and more apparent as the year goes on. I have no doubt the Dems will crash and burn in spectacular fashion come November. Gotta love the blowback that's coming to the Magical Resistance and the rest of the "privileged progressives" and other liberal elites.

I did get a kick of the plugola page for the Church of All Worlds website, complete with pot leaf pentagrams.

[ecosophia]

I'd definitely recommend stocking up on the popcorn.

[deborah_bender]

I think you are overrating Tim/Otter/Oberon's influence.

I met the Zells not long after they moved to Northern California. They and I moved in circles that sometimes overlapped, especially back when the NorCal Pagan community was a few hundred people. It was easy to meet everybody and get invited to things. I remember a small rural festival in the 1970s at which they led an interesting ritual with an ecological theme. The late Alison Harlow, who was one of the founders of the Covenant of the Goddess and its first (appointed) First Officer, let them live on her country parcel for a long time. As the community got larger and more diverse, it necessarily became less close knit.

I was friendly with the late Morning Glory, though we didn't see each other very often. I have a fond memory of the two of us getting hammered on a flight of single malt Scotches in the bar of a hotel where we were attending a pagan con twenty or thirty years later.

Oberon is one of the last few standing from the leadership of the generation of American Neopagans who got involved with Paganism in the 1950s and 1960s. For most of his adult life, he has been a full time freak, hippie, Pagan, magic worker, and artist, and he deserves some credit for persistence. My impression is that these days, he has a niche following.

[ecosophia]

Zell's a symptom, not a mover and shaker. Do you remember when he tried to launch the United Federation of Pagans? It didn't get far, but it was a bellwether for the broader attempt to get the whole range of Neopagans into one big tent. I see this as the same thing: a straw in the wind, basically.

[booklover1973]

And in a related note, there is the doubling-down on cosmopoliticalism / openness / wokeness propaganda to a degree that the whole western world seems like a lunatic asylum now; it becomes impossible to read much mainstream publications and not to get irritated. Add to this the hype around the Coronavirus and it is really an interessant question how that all will turn out. Among others, what actually happens to the cultural and political mainstream when a senile and colorless Biden gets clobbered by Trump, who wins reelection by a landslide.

[ecosophia]

Interesting times indeed. I expect it's just going to get more frantic until after the election, when there will be a great disturbance in the Force, followed by stunned silence. (Come on, a being can dream...)

[booklover1973]

Excuses for bringing it up again, but a good example of the mass madness of current time is this: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/03/coronavirus-three-vignettes.html. Cherrypicking the bad data and neglecting the good data; chiding whole populations for not being apocalyptically minded enough; and so on. The funny side is, that the mainstream media really believe that Biden can beat Trump (with Biden, dignity and civility will again chome to Wahington, was the gist of it)!

[ecosophia]

Naked Capitalism has predicted something like thirty of the last six economic downturns, so I'm not at all surprised to see them jump on the coronavirus hysteria.

[(Anonymous)]

Not even the part about the eclipses is accurate. He typoes 2023 and 2024 as 2003 and 2004. (And that's not even taking into account their being billed as harbingers of a Golden Age - when has a solar eclipse EVER presaged a Golden Age?).

The magical part strikes me as straight-up wishful thinking. The non-magical part just seems to be a smorgasboard of predictions, most of which are trend-following and some of which are self-contradictory: "We're going to have global warming AND a new ice age, simultaneously, and we're also going to have massive depletion of everything, yet we're still going to clone woolly mammoths and phase out meat while simultaneously reverting to savagery in spite of our cold fusion reactors and our true AI's (which are rebelling against us).

- Barrigan

[ecosophia]

I used to know some really serious potheads in my first, not very successful pass through college, and the predictions read like the kind of things they used to say when they were ripped and started talking about the future. I can just hear Zell saying, "Wow, man!" at the end of each paragraph...

What to do now?

[(Anonymous)]

So... What should those of us who are interested in magic and religion do besides try to get out of the way of a collapsing movement?
(Besides reread the unedited 1991 edition of Stranger in a Strange Land, that is.) Rusty

Re: What to do now?

[ecosophia]

Gather up any books, card decks, etc. you want that may be going out of print once the Meopagan movement finishes folding, and other than that, stay out of the way!

[(Anonymous)]

All this makes me think of how paganism is differently perceived in the States and UK/Europe: I'm not exactly right into the UK pagan scene but, to my knowledge, British pagans seem less obsessed with contemporary politics than their counterparts in the USA (vg there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of UK pagans trying to hex Brexit, for instance...). England and Scotland have independent Pagan Federation groups whose aims are to stand for all pagans in the public arena, without imposing a particular religious, cultural or political agenda. If I'm correct (and might not be), maybe the decline and end of Neopaganism could be limited to this particular American version? In fact Neopagan seem to be more of an American term, with just paganism being the preferred option in the UK, often also used to refer to non-Wicca/Witchcraft traditions (Druidry, Heathenism, etc)

Just a thought,

Manuel

[ecosophia]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if things are different in the UK and in Europe -- two separate places, these days. ;-) That's why I've said repeatedly that my predictions apply to the one country I know well, that is, the USA.

However, as an artist ---

[(Anonymous)]

Zell did create the lovely (except for that blissed-out smile) Millennial Gaia figure which has adorned many an altar in the Albuquerque pagan community since I first bought one. She used to sit on my public altar on the front room fireplace mantel, but I could never really relate to her. My private altar, where I actually did meditations and divination etc, still had the terra-cotta figure of the great primordial mother found at Willendorf.

I note the price has come down.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/516TkrcLlpL._AC_UL160_.jpg

Re: However, as an artist ---

[ecosophia]

I know a lot of people like that. I'm not really a fan, but chacun a son gout...

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm.. Good News (I like how he brackets 'hope' after it)

Well of course the Republican Party will go down. And why will it go down? BECAUSE WE WANT IT TO!

Guess I better buy up stock on pot products.

And it looks like I missed the solar eclipses on 10/14/2003 and 4/8/2004. Dang! (at least he got it right on the map...) I might get to see the April one but only if it's not cloudy.

Nice to see the kids will finally quit texting and actually do something.

Baby Boomers will all be gone in the 2020s? Only if coronvirus gets us. As a baby boomer myself (1954) I plan on sticking around til at least the 2040s.

Psychic phenomena more widespread? I can feel my ESP kicking in now telling me none of this organic fertilizer will come to pass any time soon. (sure would like to see some wooly mammoths though...)

JLfromNH

[ecosophia]

I'd like to see the mammoths also, and iirc there are scientists in Japan hard at work on the project. Other than that -- yeah, it's pretty giddy. And geriatric. I remember all these same claims being made in the late 1970s, as things we'd all see before the year 2000...

[(Anonymous)]

It amuses me to no end that if the 2020s mark a change on the same scale as the 1960s, they'll be sitting there with a discredited, widely mocked, and "old-fashioned" vision of the future just a few years from now!

[ecosophia]

True enough! They may get that, too, if the Kek-worshiping shaleposters of the chans turn out to be the harbingers of the new counterculture.

One Big Tent

[deborah_bender]

There is a pan-pagan organization called the Pagan Federation which was founded in Great Britain in 1971 and seems to be well established. It also has some presence in western Europe, at least in the Netherlands. https://www.paganfed.org

Conditions in Britain are quite different. It is a smaller country. It has a state church, which probably makes the idea of having an organization representing Pagans in general more appealing and perhaps more useful than it is in the United States. The identification of Paganism with what used to be called the counterculture is probably less marked in the British Isles than here.

Re: One Big Tent

[ecosophia]

Of course. As I noted in response to Manuel's comment, conditions may well be different in Britain, which is why I've noted repeatedly that my predictions focus on the one country I know fairly well, the USA.

[booklover1973]

Quite a few years ago my sister showed us a video, where many people were swaying and chanting: "Every cell of my body is happy! Every cell of my body is happy!"

Furthermore, due to the current craziness, my impression is that the year 2020 marks a cultural turning point; there is, if I'm not mistaken, something strange in the air.

[ecosophia]

Something is definitely shifting, but it's not shifting in the direction of Zell's tired fantasies!

Astrologically, with the Grand Mutation coming up this December, we're at a major historical inflection point, the end of a set of influences that's been in place since 1842 and the beginning of a new set that will remain in place until 2219. Whether that's specifically what's at work at the moment is a question I'm not yet prepared to answer.

As for apocalyptic daydreams

[(Anonymous)]

Readrs be warned, I am about to commit Filk.

(TTO "MArching to Pretoria")

Oh, you are doomed and I am doomed and let us weep and wail together
let us weep and wail together
let us weep and wail together,
you are doomed and I am doomed and let us weep and wail together,
as we drift along.
We are drifting to dystopia, dystopia, dystopia
We are drifting to dystopia
Dystopia, today.....

Re: As for apocalyptic daydreams

[ecosophia]

Okay, that's worth keeping. Thank you.

That's a lot to do.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow so in the 2020s we're going to colonize mars and the moon during the 2020s while also cloning dinosaurs, birthing a new global techno consciousness and developing cold fusion.

Meanwhile Europe will be suffer two years of winter due to a volcanic eruption, nuclear wars will be going on and Japan will sink like the new Atlantis.

What an eventful decade its going to be!

Re: That's a lot to do.

[ecosophia]

On the last day of 2029, I plan on having some serious fun with these predictions...

[(Anonymous)]

(Tolkienguy)

Not entirely on topic, but I didn't want to butt into the Cosmic Doctrine thread...

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/time-to-slap-a-tariff-on-oil-imports/

The good people of TAC have finally admitted that nobody's made any money off of shale oil, that most of the original investors in it aren't going to get their investment back (though they appreciate said investors taking one for America), and that, with the Saudi-Russian price war, shale oil's days might be numbered.

Their solution, of course, is for the government to bailout-err, protect the shale industry by slapping a tariff on Saudi and Russian oil. Sigh, sometimes, TAC seem like they get it, and sometimes, well...

[ecosophia]

Actually, a modest tariff on imported oil might be a good idea if the price stays low. Sensible tariffs are what enabled the US to develop its own industries in the first place; the abandonment of tariffs is what caused those industries to fall over and die.

OT: The crisis has come to a head

[(Anonymous)]

Very OT: The current crisis era, which began in 2001 with 9/11, has finally come to a head after 18 1/2 years. About the usual length. As Fourth Turning predicted, it was and is an internal crisis. They noted this was a pattern here in the United States. The American Revolution was external, the Civil War & Reconstruction was internal; the Great Depression and WWII was external, and so on. If the pattern holds, "Generation Alpha" - children of the Millennials - will be a pack of civic reformers.

I say it's coming to a head because, as defined in that excellent book, the vast tangle of insoluble problems had narrowed down to a clear-cut one of overwhelming importance: the COVID-19 pandemic/scare and the ongoing Great Correction wringing the vaporware out of the stock market. One item in the business news was "oh, horrors! The Treasury is no longer liquid...."

This does not mean the political divisions are coming to an end, but there is a gathering consensus which has all my left-minded friends very badly upset by the thought of That Man In The White House. Note the polarity reversal between FDR's day and ours! We are, alas, being reduced to the Very Distressed Opposition.

Now, there are many losers in a situation like this, and I'm right in the middle of one cohort that will be going down the drain. A tiny handful of us may live to see the recovery, but recovery there will be when the dist settles.

One sign that this is happening is that the right has noticed the need for a robust public health system and some way to cushion the blow for people left jobless, homeless, or in bankruptcy due to everyone being in quarantine; and the left is starting to agree with the need to control our borders and cut back on the globetrotting.

I now return you to talk of magic, aging hippie pothead wizards, and other interesting topics.

Oops! Forgot to sign that piece

[(Anonymous)]

Analysis of crisis turning point courtesy of Patricia Mathews

The Sardonic Convergence and All That

[(Anonymous)]

"...while it's not the most sophisticated or effective approach, it's succeeded often enough in the past..."

In that case, what *would* be the most sophisticated and effective approach? Would that be a matter of sussing out the current trends and trying to nudge forward the ones you want to encourage, or something else? And could this be classified as thaumaturgy, political magic, or some other variety of magic?

Re: The Sardonic Convergence and All That

[ecosophia]

Er, do you expect me to hand that information out in public? To know, to dare, to will, and to...

[booklover1973]

The air of change to which I alluded isn't about the Jupter-Saturn conjunction; rather I meant the current coronavirus craze, the changes in the United States which are responsible for the end of politics as usual, and the rise of populism. One thing to add is, that, historically, events in the United States often came before similar events and changes came to Europe. But it is, even noe, difficult for me to imagine how politics in Europe can change at all. The belief in the alternativelessness and the unthinking acceptance of globalization, outsourcing, unregulated mass immigration, open borders, free trade, and wokeness is so fixed in place among the population, not only among salary-class persons, the I can't imagine how people will ever be able to shake free of these ideas and, once in a time, elect someone than mainstream parties and politicians in Western and Middle Europe.
Strangely, the mass media suddenly exhort in unison the virtue of sacrifice and collectivism.

[ecosophia]

The situation in Europe reminds me very much of the situation in the Communist countries of eastern Europe for a decade or so before they collapsed. Nothing changed, and nothing changed, and nothing changed...and then everything changed.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I know some people who are still holding on to the 2012 prediction in the form of a slow death by Fukishima. So, the apocalypse came as promised, but is still being distributed. The fact that the Fukishima plant incident happened in 2011 doesn't seem to deter them. I thought it was a rather creative workaround for the failed prediction problem!

Thanks,
Johnny

[ecosophia]

Too funny. It's reminiscent of the Christian sects who insisted that Christ would return in 1914, and have been explaining ever since that he really did return then, on the spiritual plane, and the effects will be filtering through to the material plane any day now...

Hu Gadarn's off ox

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't be so sure Oberon doesn't remember you. Several years ago, he was the GoH at Paganicon, and one panel was him and a local of identical vintage spending an hour talking about how infinitely superior his Theagenesis vision was to your Long Descent prediction. You and all your facts are just total bummers, man!

-- Sister Crow

Re: Hu Gadarn's off ox

[ecosophia]

Too funny. I'm sure his vision is far, far superior to mine; the only thing mine has in its favor, in fact, is that it might actually happen, unlike his.

[(Anonymous)]

Regarding CoVID-19, I'm thinking the gods are having a bit of fun with us.

I mean, something on the order of half a million people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan from our wars. 150,000 people have died in Mexico in the cartel wars. About 70,000 people are dying in the U.S. from drug overdose each year. And this barely rouses the average American from their latest Netflix binge.

But 3,000 people die in China, and all of a sudden markets are collapsing and people are duking it out in supermarket aisles for the last roll of toilet paper.

Also, regarding Zell, wouldn't it be far more feasible to do a specific working to legalize cannabis, if only to bring some sanity to our law enforcement situation?

-Cliff

[ecosophia]

Oh, no doubt. I'm pleased to say, though, that at least here in Rhode Island nobody's getting into fistfights over toilet paper. The local dollar store has plenty, and so do the local grocery stores. Chalk one up for media hyperbole!

As for Zell and a more specific working, sure, but that only makes sense if you haven't fried your brain on way too much weed...