Here We Go Again
Mar. 10th, 2020 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 04:01 am (UTC)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...
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 08:38 am (UTC)Speaking of irresponsible media and government responses to CoVID-19, I read a WSJ article earlier not-so-subtly hinting that we really ought to be arresting anybody who disregards the CDC’s suggestion of a 14-day quarantine... www.wsj.com/amp/articles/us-considers-how-to-enforce-coronavirus-quarantines-11583963653
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 05:37 pm (UTC)On the other hand, news stories indicate the east coast is going nuts. My uncle agrees. He lives in CT just across the state line; he can stand in his yard and throw a rock into New York State, should he feel so inclined. He says shelves are totally bare in his area.
Meanwhile, I just cooked the leanest 🥓 bacon I have ever seen. It STUCK TO THE PAN. I had to use Pam. Truly the apocalypse is upon us.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 06:33 pm (UTC)As for the bacon -- good heavens. That's got to be an omen of some kind, probably dire. No doubt a blue-ribbon Holstein will shortly bear alive two insurance salesmen!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 07:49 pm (UTC)Rhode Island has always gone its own way, totally ignoring all other colonies/states, ever since it was founded. (And that habit of life does conduce to sanity.)
The colony began as a haven for everyone who was a thorn in the side of Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut. It also happened to have by far the best and richest farmland anywhere in New England. So even in the 1600s it was always in danger of being forcibly seized and broken up by its Puritan neighbors. (Self-righteousness mixed with greed is always a heady brew.)
In consequence its inhabitants developed the excellent habit of distrusting and rejecting pretty much everything that was pushed on them from the outside (including mainstream notions of morality, ethics and "good" government). During the "bloodless revolution" of 1935, it also rejected its older Yankee WASP-ish heritage. Its state symbolic statue, perched atop of the State House, is called "The Independent Man"; and he is a much loved icon here in Rhode Island.
In sum, Rhode Island has always very much been a "cat that walked by himself, and all places were alike to him." At the moment it is busy walking by itself with respect to the coronavirus panic.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 09:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-14 11:24 pm (UTC)As an added bonus, there were druids--or at least one druid--here in RI in the late 1800s. His name was Joseph Peace Hazard (1807-1892), of an old RI Quaker family; and he was also a avid Spiritualist. He had a druid circle build around his proposed family tomb in Narragansett, RI, and had a chair-shaped boulder dragged from the nearby beach to his circle. The boulder is now called the druid's chair. There is a second druid circle in Lincoln Woods (Lincoln, RI), but that is a natural collection of boulders that form a very rough circle and something that is very like a dolmen.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-15 03:09 am (UTC)Toilet Paper
Date: 2020-03-14 08:07 pm (UTC)Re: Toilet Paper
Date: 2020-03-14 09:02 pm (UTC)Re: Toilet Paper
Date: 2020-03-14 09:54 pm (UTC)Geez, c'mon people leave something for the rest of us....
JLfromNH
Re: Toilet Paper
Date: 2020-03-15 08:01 pm (UTC)Beekeeper in Vermont