ecosophia | Entries tagged with announcements

A bit of cheerful news to pass on!

I'm delighted to announce that Guillem Mateo Roca, who posts here under the handle Guillem66, has completed the process of qualifying as an Essene Master Teacher and has received all the necessary information and authority to begin training and attuning Essene students on his own. We now have three recently certified Master Teachers, and I look forward to seeing more as we proceed. Please join me in congratulating Guillem on achieving this rank; his hard work and commitment are helping to keep this part of John Gilbert's legacy alive for the future.

Current Mood: pleased

I'm very pleased to announce that Kyle Clayton, who posts here under the handle Kylec, has completed the process of qualifying as an Essene Master Teacher and has received all the necessary information and authority to begin training and attuning Essene students on his own. We now have two new Master Teachers, with more in the pipeline. Please join me in congratulating Kyle on achieving this rank; his hard work and commitment are helping to keep this part of John Gilbert's legacy alive for the future.

Current Mood: delighted

I'm delighted to announce that Regine Becher, who posts here under the handle Milkyway1, has completed the process of qualifying as an Essene Master Teacher and has received all the necessary information and authority to begin training and attuning Essene students on her own. As far as I know, she's the first person to qualify for that rank since John Gilbert retired more than a decade ago. Please join me in congratulating her.

I know of several other people who are hard at work finishing up the requirements for the same rank. It's good to know that one more of the teachings John passed on to me is going to survive for the longer term.

Current Mood: delighted

During 2020 I did mundane charts on five countries—the United States, Britain, India, Japan, and Australia. That was a learning experience in every sense of the word, but one of the things I learned by doing it was that there aren’t enough hours in a day for me to do that and keep up with my other commitments. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t casting and interpreting the charts that ate up most of the time, it was following the news closely enough to be able to make sense of the political and economic indications in the charts. (Effective mundane interpretation doesn’t take place in a vacuum—you have to know what’s going on in a country, in quite a bit of detail, to be able to figure out what the indications of the heavens are likely to mean.)

With that in mind, my mundane predictions in 2021 are going to deal solely with the United States and Britain, since following the news in two countries is about what I can handle and still have time for the other things I need and want to do. I know this will be a disappointment to my Indian, Japanese, and Australian readers, but I do have something to offer in exchange that I hope will help. I’m a writer by trade, as you all know, and one of the things I decided is that it’s time to begin work on a book on mundane astrology.

Is that going to take a while to write? You bet. This is why I’ll be doing it in the form of a series of essays, which will be posted monthly to my SubscribeStar and Patreon accounts, starting this month. The first essay will be a public post for everyone to read. After that, instructional essays—as in, detailed directions for how to cast and interpret mundane charts for ingresses, eclipses, major conjunctions, and other important events—will be available at the Moonwatcher ($5 a month) level. Case studies—starting with an analysis of why C.E.O. Carter should have known in 1939 that World War II was about to break out, and how he made a complete fool of himself instead—will be available at the Sunwatcher ($10 a month) level. My goal is to provide every reader with all the tools they need to do the kind of interpretations I’m doing here. In three or four years, the book (working title: The Destiny of Nations) will be on the bookshelves—but my subscribers and patrons will get to read all of it in advance.

One other thing. The goal of this whole project, as the book just mentioned may suggest, is not to set myself up as some kind of uniquely qualified oracle. It’s to reintroduce a set of highly useful and thoroughly neglected techniques into common use among astrologers and the astrologically literate public. With that in mind, I’m going to encourage those of my readers who want to begin casting and interpreting mundane charts to do so, and to post links to their predictions and delineations as comments to appropriate posts on this Dreamwidth journal. I’ve got quite a few capable and intelligent readers, and I’d be willing to bet that there are people ready, willing, and able to pick up the task of doing ingress charts for India, Japan, and Australia—among other countries. Let’s make it happen.

Current Mood: busy

...over on the main blog. Since the conversations on The Archdruid Report were one of the best features, I've decided to try the experiment of hosting a once-a-month online salon where readers can ask me questions and discuss topics of their choice. We'll see how it goes.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: half buried in boxes of books

I'm sitting at the computer in an unfamiliar apartment crowded with boxes, and Sara's sound asleep two rooms away, which is probably a better choice of activity than mine just now. Around us, East Providence, Rhode Island, is dozing off, and no doubt I'll be doing the same thing too in a bit.

Yes, we've moved to Rhode Island: "that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting," in H.P. Lovecraft's well-turned phrase. Those who are concerned about global warming, as most of us should be, may want to know that our apartment is 82 feet above sea level, well back from the bluffs along the Seekonk River, so a good long ways above any point that'll face flooding in our lifetimes. We're within a few blocks of a library, a farmer's market, a post office, and an assortment of local businesses, with ample public transit and an assortment of other amenities.

I'll discuss the reasons behind the move in due time. I noted back when we moved to Cumberland, MD, in 2009, though, that we were betting on the Rust Belt; one thing to remember about bets is that sometimes you lose. Many of the things I was hoping to accomplish by that move didn't happen, and certain other things shifted in ways I hadn't expected -- in some cases, mind you, I was pleasantly surprised. So a regrouping and reorientation was called for, and here we are.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: East Providence, RI

Me talking with the irrepressible Greg Moffitt about what comes after the accelerating decline and impending fall of industrial civilization. Cheery stuff, granted, but livened up with dollops of deindustrial science fiction, among other things. Check it out:

http://legalise-freedom.com/radio/john-michael-greer-beyond-collapse-the-future-of-civilization/

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: half buried in bubble wrap

Me chatting with fellow Freemason Chris George Zuger on my new book The Coelbren Alphabet, the new Aeon Books reprint of my translation of Gerard Thibault's Academy of the Sword, and just about anything else that comes to mind. Check it out:

http://www.denoflore.com/ep-040-letter-and-the-sword-w-john-michael-greer/

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: perched on a heap of cardboard boxes

And another one! This isn't exactly new, but the first volume of my seven-volume epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, has just become available in trade paperback format, after more than a year in fine hardback:

It's currently available on Amazon here, and will be on its way through the usual distribution channels shortly. I'm delighted, to say the least.

Meanwhile book 5, The Weird of Hali: Providence, is in final edits, and book 6, The Weird of Hali: Hyperborea, is 90% finished in draft. The saga slithers rugosely to its conclusion... ;-)

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Location: Innsmouth, MA
Current Music: Something by Isaac Jax and His Cottonmouths

...and another book of mine hits the shelves. I know, they're coming fast and thick just now.

This anthology contains all the short fiction from my former blog The Archdruid Report -- the three midwinter tales from 2006, "Adam's Story" from 2007, and all the rest of it, except for Retrotopia and Star's Reach (which of course have been published in book form already). I'm very pleased with the collection; it includes some of my best writing, and now that The Archdruid Report is going away, this is where you can read these stories should you want to do so. Copies can be ordered from the publisher here.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: Tillicum River
Current Music: The Grateful Dead, "What A Long Strange Trip It's Been"

Another new book of mine, and one I'm particularly pleased to see in print!

The Weird of Hali: Kingsport is the second novel in my epic-fantasy-with-tentacles heptalogy, The Weird of Hali, which takes H.P. Lovecraft's fiction and stands it on its head. Those tentacled horrors and sinister multiracial cultists? Yeah, they were the good guys all along: the old gods of nature and their worshippers, slapped with the usual blood libels by the cultural mainstream.

Each volume is written as a standalone novel and can be read independently of the others. The viewpoint character in this one is Jenny Parrish, whom readers of the first novel, The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, will remember as one of Owen Merrill's housemates. She's finishing up a postgraduate year at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, prior to beginning grad school there. A letter invites her to spend the winter holidays with her relatives in Kingsport, ten miles away on the coast, whom she's never met; there's a certain ancient festival held there once each century, this is the year, and Jenny's invited...

Lovecraft fans will already know that his story The Festival provided a chunk of the raw material, and may suspect -- accurately, as it happens -- that the Terrible Old Man puts in an appearance. (He'll be a major character in the sixth book, The Weird of Hali: Hyperborea.) Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow and Arthur Machen's The White People also contribute their quota, as do the stories of Clark Ashton Smith. That said, it's not just a pastiche; this is my own quirky vision decked out in borrowed finery, and I hope my readers will have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

BTW, this is the fine edition; the ultra-super-duper-fine edition, traycased and bound in shantak hide, will be out a bit later, and the ordinary trade paper edition is at least six months out, maybe more. The trade paper edition of The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth is now in preparation and I hope to be able to announce it shortly.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Location: Kingsport, MA
Current Music: "Cassilda's Song," set to music by Erik Satie

Me chatting about my fiction with host "Sully" Sullivan of The Podcaste, a DC-area podcast -- a pleasant conversation with someone who's as much of a fraternal order geek as I am (we met at a Masonic meeting, if that tells you anything). Check it out:

https://thepodcaste.com/2017/04/25/interview-with-author-john-michael-greer/

Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: Arkham, Massachusetts
Current Music: something by Silver John

If you’ve found this page — and if it’s before May of 2017, you’re either very intuitive or very good at using search engines — welcome. Starting later this year, probably but not certainly around the summer solstice, this Dreamwidth account will be a partial successor to my previous blogs The Archdruid Report and The Well of Galabes. My main blog will be at ecosophia.net, while Dreamwidth will host shorter pieces, announcements, and reviews.

-- John Michael Greer

Current Mood: working
Current Location: Cumberland, MD
Current Music: America, "Horse with No Name"