One
book, read at its own scale — a collapse with nobody standing on the far
side of it, a frame with an endpoint and no occupant, and the rider the
blog’s telos rule now owes
Sixteenth of the readings, and the first whose
subject is energy. Every collapse this blog has
described has had a holder in it: the
mechanism post set out a state that cannot report itself and an
appraisal supplied from the far side, and the far side has always been
occupied — a group, an operator, a field of persons. The costume drew the boundary that keeps that
framework honest, levers without the mechanism are not
predation, and the boundary presumes a lever-puller. John
Michael Greer’s The Blood of the Earth* is a collapse of a
different kind — material, energetic, unowned — and its own answer to
the question it raises is that nobody is on the far side of it at all.
The machine has no reading
found a frame with no category for an interior event. This book is about
a frame with no category for its own ending.*
Status. This post reads one source. Every
quotation is verbatim from a complete digital text of the edition,
checked character for character, with the source’s typographic quotes
rendered as straight ASCII, its spaced dashes kept as the source sets
them, its italic-spacing artefacts normalised, and elisions marked. The
reading of them is an inference, offered as one.
The book’s theses are not endorsed in either direction
— nothing here adjudicates the peak-oil argument, and nothing here
claims that magic does or does not cause anything; §7 sets out what is
argued, what is documented, and what would count as evidence. It is also
a polemic by a practitioner, and §7 reports the
practice-level caution it carries and the clinical referral it does not.
No living author is diagnosed, and nothing here validates, disqualifies
or restricts anyone’s practice. As everywhere: describe structures,
diagnose no one.
1. The book, and
the case the blog has never had
The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil is by
John Michael Greer. The edition’s copyright page carries what can be
quoted rather than inferred — “Published by Scarlet Imprint under the
Bibliothèque Rouge banner at the Vernal Equinox 2012”, ISBN
978-0-9567203-8-2, design and typography credited to At-Tariq — and its
seven chapters, after an Introduction, are the argument’s spine: Magical
Thinking, Pluto’s Republic, Strange Bright Banners, A Lesson in
Practical Magic, The Path Between the Pillars, The Myth of the Machine,
Begin It Now.John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An Essay
on Magic and Peak Oil, Scarlet Imprint, published under the
Bibliothèque Rouge banner at the Vernal Equinox 2012 — ISBN
978-0-9567203-8-2. From the edition’s own copyright page: “© John
Michael Greer 2012. Cover artwork by J Henry Fair © 2012”; “Published by
Scarlet Imprint under the Bibliothèque Rouge banner at the Vernal
Equinox 2012. Design and typography © At-Tariq”; “Printed & bound by
CPI Antony Rowe Ltd.” Read from a complete digital text of the edition;
every quotation here was verified character for character against it,
with the source’s typographic single and double quotes rendered as
straight ASCII, its spaced dashes kept as the source sets them,
italic-spacing artefacts normalised, and elisions marked […].
Where a quotation is cited: by chapter title, which is
the address the book’s own running heads use. The chapter sequence at §1
is the edition’s own contents listing: Introduction; Magical Thinking;
Pluto’s Republic; Strange Bright Banners; A Lesson in Practical Magic;
The Path Between the Pillars; The Myth of the Machine; Begin It Now;
Bibliography; Index. The pairing is named as an oddity in
the book’s first sentence:
“Ceremonial magicians aren’t usually known for writing books on the
decline and fall of industrial society, and futurists don’t normally
write books on magic. It so happens that I’m both of these things and
write on both topics.”The Blood of the Earth, Introduction:
“Ceremonial magicians aren’t usually known for writing books on the
decline and fall of industrial society, and futurists don’t normally
write books on magic.”; “On one side of the balance, you have the claims
of current scientific materialism, which insists that magic is nonsense…
On the other, you have the claims of a variety of popular spiritualities
and pseudospiritualities, which insist that metaphysical factors can
overturn the ordinary laws of nature and make the concerns of today’s
scientists irrelevant. Neither of these claims is particularly useful –
it would be as accurate to say that neither of them is particularly
true.”; “The claims of the metaphysically minded, who trust that God or
the Space Brothers or some conveniently undefined leap of consciousness
will rescue us from the consequences of more than three centuries of
misguided collective decisions and more than three decades of
increasingly desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, rely on the
same failed reasoning that convinced people in the last days of 999 CE
to brick themselves up in towers…”; “The forces that have backed the
world’s industrial nations into a blind corner, and are keeping them
pinned there, have much less to do with strictly material realities than
with the realms of mind and consciousness that are the raw materials of
magic.”; “Global conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and has been
in decline since then.”; “after half a century of increasingly frantic
research, it has become all too clear that no other energy resource can
replace it as it runs short”; “Somewhere behind the bland emotionless
labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of
unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black
blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large
number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of
omnipotence and dreams of destiny” (the source sets a space before the
comma after “earth”; normalised here); “The toolkit of magic is one of
the few available options we’ve got to make that difficult transition a
little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet
even begun to darken the dreams of most of today’s humanity.”; and “As
the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of
the modern project are going to have to be discarded.”
The absence this book sits in is measurable, and it is
total. A case-insensitive search of the blog’s published posts
returns 0 hits for “peak oil”, 0 for
“deindustrial”, 0 for “fossil fuel” and
0 for “thermodynamic”.Absences and counts, reported as search results
and scoped to the texts searched — and a search shows only what it
indexes. Over the text of this edition,
case-insensitive: “safeguard” 1 (the mass-mind
passage at “Begin It Now”, quoted at [^begin]); “caution”
0; “safety” 2 (Dorothy Martin’s flight
to safety aboard flying saucers, “Strange Bright Banners”; “a margin of
safety in hard times”, “Begin It Now”); “psychiatr” 0;
“clinician” 0; “therap” 0; “suicide”
0; “emergency” 0; “psychosis”
0; “sanity” 0; “mental health”
0; “premature” 0; “too soon”
0; “breakdown” 1 (the breakdown of a
civilization); “catabolic” 0; “EROEI”
0; “energy returned” 0; “singularity”
0; “net energy” 1; “thermodynamic”
2; “Rapture” 2 (one of them the
index); “Space Brothers” 4 (one of them the index).
Over the texts of the blog’s published posts: “peak oil”
0; “deindustrial” 0; “fossil fuel”
0; “EROEI” 0; “net energy”
0; “thermodynamic” 0; “thaumaturgy”
0; “revitalization” 0; “John Michael
Greer” 1 (the revisor credit in the western column’s note on the Golden
Dawn edition); “theurgy” 9 (five in geosophia, four in two esoteric tarots). The absence of a
clinical referral is a report about a text, not about its author, and it
is not a claim that anyone’s practice was harmed. The
blog’s subject has all along been a collapse that arrives through a
system of persons — a state misread, an appraisal installed, a holder at
the exit. It has never described a collapse that arrives through
matter: a finite planet, a falling energy return, a
machine park that cannot be fuelled.
It is not a book the blog has never heard of either: the name appears
once, in the notes to the western column, as the revisor of a
Golden Dawn edition.Absences and counts, reported as search results
and scoped to the texts searched — and a search shows only what it
indexes. Over the text of this edition,
case-insensitive: “safeguard” 1 (the mass-mind
passage at “Begin It Now”, quoted at [^begin]); “caution”
0; “safety” 2 (Dorothy Martin’s flight
to safety aboard flying saucers, “Strange Bright Banners”; “a margin of
safety in hard times”, “Begin It Now”); “psychiatr” 0;
“clinician” 0; “therap” 0; “suicide”
0; “emergency” 0; “psychosis”
0; “sanity” 0; “mental health”
0; “premature” 0; “too soon”
0; “breakdown” 1 (the breakdown of a
civilization); “catabolic” 0; “EROEI”
0; “energy returned” 0; “singularity”
0; “net energy” 1; “thermodynamic”
2; “Rapture” 2 (one of them the
index); “Space Brothers” 4 (one of them the index).
Over the texts of the blog’s published posts: “peak oil”
0; “deindustrial” 0; “fossil fuel”
0; “EROEI” 0; “net energy”
0; “thermodynamic” 0; “thaumaturgy”
0; “revitalization” 0; “John Michael
Greer” 1 (the revisor credit in the western column’s note on the Golden
Dawn edition); “theurgy” 9 (five in geosophia, four in two esoteric tarots). The absence of a
clinical referral is a report about a text, not about its author, and it
is not a claim that anyone’s practice was harmed. The blog has cited a book he
corrected without citing him — which is the ordinary way an absence
looks from the inside: not a silence, an adjacency.
The question this reading exists to answer is about
the blog’s machinery rather than about oil:
What does the blog’s mechanism do with a collapse that has no
holder?
Two answers are available and they are not the same: either the
mechanism requires a holder, in which case a material
collapse is outside its scope; or it describes the shape of a
misreading, and a holder is one way to install one.
2.
What this book claims, and what belongs to a different book
Three of the book’s claims are load-bearing, and all three need their
exact form, because the author’s later vocabulary is more famous than
this text.
One: the non-overshoot thesis. The prediction is not
catastrophe and not rescue but decline, stated with a term that matters:
“Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a problem, since nothing
anyone can do will make it go away.”The Blood of the Earth, “The Myth of the
Machine”: “it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of
that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty that
industrial society accepts amount to, basically, more of the same thing
we’ve already got”; “the vast majority of cars for sale these days
simply ring changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in
the late nineteenth century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago.
That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the
usual kind – the hype surrounding the so-called hybrid revolution
conveniently fails to mention that a very similar system has been used
for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars
powered by electricity were common before a handful of major auto firms
succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last
Great Depression.”; “A good many years ago, Lewis Mumford wrote two
hefty volumes under the joint title The Myth of the Machine. It’s
vintage Mumford and thus by definition well worth reading, but it’s also
very much a work of its time… Since I first read it, I’ve wished that
Mumford could have found time to pursue the promise of the title in a
good deal more depth.”; “A machine, though, is never a subject; from a
certain perspective, that’s what defines the machine. Machines imitate
the actions of persons, of subjects, but they have no subjectivity, no
inner world; they’re always and only objects, and so the only
relationship you can have with them is an I-It relationship.” (Buber’s I
and Thou is cited in the edition’s notes); “Sort through any of the
narratives that play a central role in contemporary industrial culture,
and you’ll find a machine at the center of each one.”; “A solar panel, a
wind turbine, an electric car, a thorium reactor, a supercomputer, a
flying saucer or a nuclear bomb, take your pick, but it’s got to be
based on a machine.”; “Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a
problem, since nothing anyone can do will make it go away.”; “no
possible turn of events will allow industrial civilization to extract a
limitless supply of crude oil from a finite planet”; “the proud towers
of the magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand”;
“the most important resources we have left at this point, the most
promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap
abundant energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or
anything else outside the individual human being”; “Machines fill so
potent a role in our emotional lives that most people in the modern
industrial world shy away from the thought of doing much of anything
without them.”; and “The myth of progress is coming to pieces around us
as I write these words. The myth of the machine will follow it in due
time.” A
problem is something with a solution; a
predicament is something to be lived in:
“These limitations are not subject to change, or even to negotiation;
they define a predicament that we will all have to live with, one way or
another, for the rest of humanity’s time on this planet.”The Blood of the Earth, “Strange Bright
Banners”: “Revitalization movements emerge when all the practical
options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.”; the standard features — “a thorough critique of the
existing order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have
occurred because either the people who have suffered from them, or some
other group that’s to blame for them, have misbehaved and brought about
the troubles; a vision of a Utopian future that will arrive right after
the troubles if the right things are done; and a straightforward plan of
action to make the transition from the troubles to the Utopian future”,
with “the one problem with such an appealing program, in every
revitalization movement… is that the plan of action can’t actually
deliver the goods”; “when existing institutions fail and the collective
foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision
of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past
them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what
they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.”; “Ethics are
as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same
reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic.”;
“You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the
ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields
have already been pumped dry.”; “These limitations are not subject to
change, or even to negotiation; they define a predicament that we will
all have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of humanity’s
time on this planet.”; “the fundamental causes of the crisis of modern
industrial civilization can’t be overcome by magic”; “That leaves ritual
as the one remaining option…”; “Magic, to repeat Dion Fortune’s
definition, is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in
accordance with will; if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic.”;
“I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement
in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that
claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is
building around today’s industrial civilization.”; “the core faith of
the age that is passing, the faith that the future will always be better
than the past or present, has become a delusion”; “one to three
centuries of uneven decline until the curve of overshoot and collapse
bottoms out in a dark age that will endure for centuries more”; “It’s
our bad luck to be living at the dawn of the second great wave of
decline to hit Western civilization”; and the Pluto’s Republic account
of the actor-fitness reading of revitalization movements, in which the
movements that reshape their message to attract a large audience “will
inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of
things”.
The timescale is “one to three centuries of uneven decline until the
curve of overshoot and collapse bottoms out in a dark age that will
endure for centuries more”.The Blood of the Earth, “Strange Bright
Banners”: “Revitalization movements emerge when all the practical
options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.”; the standard features — “a thorough critique of the
existing order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have
occurred because either the people who have suffered from them, or some
other group that’s to blame for them, have misbehaved and brought about
the troubles; a vision of a Utopian future that will arrive right after
the troubles if the right things are done; and a straightforward plan of
action to make the transition from the troubles to the Utopian future”,
with “the one problem with such an appealing program, in every
revitalization movement… is that the plan of action can’t actually
deliver the goods”; “when existing institutions fail and the collective
foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision
of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past
them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what
they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.”; “Ethics are
as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same
reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic.”;
“You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the
ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields
have already been pumped dry.”; “These limitations are not subject to
change, or even to negotiation; they define a predicament that we will
all have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of humanity’s
time on this planet.”; “the fundamental causes of the crisis of modern
industrial civilization can’t be overcome by magic”; “That leaves ritual
as the one remaining option…”; “Magic, to repeat Dion Fortune’s
definition, is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in
accordance with will; if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic.”;
“I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement
in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that
claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is
building around today’s industrial civilization.”; “the core faith of
the age that is passing, the faith that the future will always be better
than the past or present, has become a delusion”; “one to three
centuries of uneven decline until the curve of overshoot and collapse
bottoms out in a dark age that will endure for centuries more”; “It’s
our bad luck to be living at the dawn of the second great wave of
decline to hit Western civilization”; and the Pluto’s Republic account
of the actor-fitness reading of revitalization movements, in which the
movements that reshape their message to attract a large audience “will
inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of
things”. And it is worth saying
what the book does not contain, because the shortest
description of Greer’s position usually comes from his later work:
“catabolic” does not appear, “EROEI”
does not appear — the energy case is put as “the net energy issues and
energy subsidies that make the quest for a replacement for fossil fuels
an exercise in futility” — and “singularity” does not
appear at all.Absences and counts, reported as search results
and scoped to the texts searched — and a search shows only what it
indexes. Over the text of this edition,
case-insensitive: “safeguard” 1 (the mass-mind
passage at “Begin It Now”, quoted at [^begin]); “caution”
0; “safety” 2 (Dorothy Martin’s flight
to safety aboard flying saucers, “Strange Bright Banners”; “a margin of
safety in hard times”, “Begin It Now”); “psychiatr” 0;
“clinician” 0; “therap” 0; “suicide”
0; “emergency” 0; “psychosis”
0; “sanity” 0; “mental health”
0; “premature” 0; “too soon”
0; “breakdown” 1 (the breakdown of a
civilization); “catabolic” 0; “EROEI”
0; “energy returned” 0; “singularity”
0; “net energy” 1; “thermodynamic”
2; “Rapture” 2 (one of them the
index); “Space Brothers” 4 (one of them the index).
Over the texts of the blog’s published posts: “peak oil”
0; “deindustrial” 0; “fossil fuel”
0; “EROEI” 0; “net energy”
0; “thermodynamic” 0; “thaumaturgy”
0; “revitalization” 0; “John Michael
Greer” 1 (the revisor credit in the western column’s note on the Golden
Dawn edition); “theurgy” 9 (five in geosophia, four in two esoteric tarots). The absence of a
clinical referral is a report about a text, not about its author, and it
is not a claim that anyone’s practice was harmed.
Two: the rejection of both answers. The book’s
opening move refuses scientific materialism and metaphysical rescue in
the same breath:
“Neither of these claims is particularly useful – it would be as
accurate to say that neither of them is particularly true.”The Blood of the Earth, Introduction:
“Ceremonial magicians aren’t usually known for writing books on the
decline and fall of industrial society, and futurists don’t normally
write books on magic.”; “On one side of the balance, you have the claims
of current scientific materialism, which insists that magic is nonsense…
On the other, you have the claims of a variety of popular spiritualities
and pseudospiritualities, which insist that metaphysical factors can
overturn the ordinary laws of nature and make the concerns of today’s
scientists irrelevant. Neither of these claims is particularly useful –
it would be as accurate to say that neither of them is particularly
true.”; “The claims of the metaphysically minded, who trust that God or
the Space Brothers or some conveniently undefined leap of consciousness
will rescue us from the consequences of more than three centuries of
misguided collective decisions and more than three decades of
increasingly desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, rely on the
same failed reasoning that convinced people in the last days of 999 CE
to brick themselves up in towers…”; “The forces that have backed the
world’s industrial nations into a blind corner, and are keeping them
pinned there, have much less to do with strictly material realities than
with the realms of mind and consciousness that are the raw materials of
magic.”; “Global conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and has been
in decline since then.”; “after half a century of increasingly frantic
research, it has become all too clear that no other energy resource can
replace it as it runs short”; “Somewhere behind the bland emotionless
labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of
unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black
blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large
number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of
omnipotence and dreams of destiny” (the source sets a space before the
comma after “earth”; normalised here); “The toolkit of magic is one of
the few available options we’ve got to make that difficult transition a
little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet
even begun to darken the dreams of most of today’s humanity.”; and “As
the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of
the modern project are going to have to be discarded.”
The first is the claim that magic is nonsense and has nothing to say
about energy; the second, that “metaphysical factors can overturn the
ordinary laws of nature”.The Blood of the Earth, Introduction:
“Ceremonial magicians aren’t usually known for writing books on the
decline and fall of industrial society, and futurists don’t normally
write books on magic.”; “On one side of the balance, you have the claims
of current scientific materialism, which insists that magic is nonsense…
On the other, you have the claims of a variety of popular spiritualities
and pseudospiritualities, which insist that metaphysical factors can
overturn the ordinary laws of nature and make the concerns of today’s
scientists irrelevant. Neither of these claims is particularly useful –
it would be as accurate to say that neither of them is particularly
true.”; “The claims of the metaphysically minded, who trust that God or
the Space Brothers or some conveniently undefined leap of consciousness
will rescue us from the consequences of more than three centuries of
misguided collective decisions and more than three decades of
increasingly desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, rely on the
same failed reasoning that convinced people in the last days of 999 CE
to brick themselves up in towers…”; “The forces that have backed the
world’s industrial nations into a blind corner, and are keeping them
pinned there, have much less to do with strictly material realities than
with the realms of mind and consciousness that are the raw materials of
magic.”; “Global conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and has been
in decline since then.”; “after half a century of increasingly frantic
research, it has become all too clear that no other energy resource can
replace it as it runs short”; “Somewhere behind the bland emotionless
labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of
unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black
blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large
number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of
omnipotence and dreams of destiny” (the source sets a space before the
comma after “earth”; normalised here); “The toolkit of magic is one of
the few available options we’ve got to make that difficult transition a
little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet
even begun to darken the dreams of most of today’s humanity.”; and “As
the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of
the modern project are going to have to be discarded.”
Three, and it is the one to hold at arm’s length: the book
subordinates the material to the mental.
“The forces that have backed the world’s industrial nations into a
blind corner, and are keeping them pinned there, have much less to do
with strictly material realities than with the realms of mind and
consciousness that are the raw materials of magic.”The Blood of the Earth, Introduction:
“Ceremonial magicians aren’t usually known for writing books on the
decline and fall of industrial society, and futurists don’t normally
write books on magic.”; “On one side of the balance, you have the claims
of current scientific materialism, which insists that magic is nonsense…
On the other, you have the claims of a variety of popular spiritualities
and pseudospiritualities, which insist that metaphysical factors can
overturn the ordinary laws of nature and make the concerns of today’s
scientists irrelevant. Neither of these claims is particularly useful –
it would be as accurate to say that neither of them is particularly
true.”; “The claims of the metaphysically minded, who trust that God or
the Space Brothers or some conveniently undefined leap of consciousness
will rescue us from the consequences of more than three centuries of
misguided collective decisions and more than three decades of
increasingly desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, rely on the
same failed reasoning that convinced people in the last days of 999 CE
to brick themselves up in towers…”; “The forces that have backed the
world’s industrial nations into a blind corner, and are keeping them
pinned there, have much less to do with strictly material realities than
with the realms of mind and consciousness that are the raw materials of
magic.”; “Global conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and has been
in decline since then.”; “after half a century of increasingly frantic
research, it has become all too clear that no other energy resource can
replace it as it runs short”; “Somewhere behind the bland emotionless
labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of
unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black
blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large
number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of
omnipotence and dreams of destiny” (the source sets a space before the
comma after “earth”; normalised here); “The toolkit of magic is one of
the few available options we’ve got to make that difficult transition a
little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet
even begun to darken the dreams of most of today’s humanity.”; and “As
the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of
the modern project are going to have to be discarded.”
That is the sentence the whole argument turns on. The physical limits
are real on this account — §7 quotes the passage where magic cannot put
oil in the ground — but the binding constraint is diagnosed as
non-physical: the reason technically solved problems were never
implemented.
3. The far side, with nobody on
it
Here is the chapter of this reading the blog needs most, and it is
not the one about energy.
The mechanism post describes a state
that cannot report itself, and the reason that is dangerous: the
appraisal is supplied from whatever stands on the far
side. In every case study since, the far side has been a party
— a group that builds a frame
while the system is open, an
operator who arrives inside a frame the target already holds, a field of persons that carries the collapse
between generations. The Blood of the Earth runs the same
shape with an empty far side, and it does it twice.
At the scale of a person. The book’s model of the
self is Platonic and threefold: a reasoning mind, a biological
self of appetites, and a social self — Plato’s
second horse, thumos, “the part that responds nonrationally to
praise or blame from others, and more generally is guided by the
pressures and influences of the community to which the individual
belongs”.The Blood of the Earth, “Pluto’s Republic”:
“whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper inevitably turns into
Pluto’s Republic in practice”; “The would-be political thaumaturge, the
person who wants to use magical manipulation to make people do what he
thinks is the right thing, is subject to the same rule.”; “That means,
first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful nonrational drives that
affect most people in much the same way…”; “the political thaumaturge is
always affected by his or her own magic”; “Just as you can’t spread
raspberry jam on toast without getting it on your fingers, in turn, you
can’t spend your time creating words and images that appeal to the
nonrational mind without having your own nonrational mind influenced by
them, and the more potent your thaumaturgy is, the more surely you will
be caught by your own spell.”; “mass thaumaturgy has its own internal
values and limits; there are things that it can do and things that it
can’t, and if you want to achieve a goal that can’t be achieved by
thaumaturgic methods, your only option may be to walk away”; “A would-be
mass movement that pursues a different path will thus reliably find
itself failing to attract members” (the same passage’s following clause
prints “atttract” in the edition; not quoted here); “The social self is
also one of the main vehicles of magic.”; the second horse, “thumos, the
spirited or irascible part of the self, the part that responds
nonrationally to praise or blame from others, and more generally is
guided by the pressures and influences of the community to which the
individual belongs”; “Challenge it – and the concept of peak oil, if
it’s taken seriously, challenges it to the core – and the social self
takes fright and shies away, dragging the chariot and the charioteer
with it, and quite possibly spooking the other horse and sending the
whole kit and caboodle careening down the nearest blind alley.”; “This
is not a new thing, of course, and it’s something that operative mages
have had to deal with in themselves and their students for a very long
time.”; “Initiation is very much subject to readiness factors. The
competent teacher of magic knows that at any given time, some students
are ready for a given grade of initiation and others simply aren’t.”;
“The wider issue here is that theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by
anyone else. It’s up to the individual.”; “There’s a long history of
operative mages and others who have realized that theurgy is only an
option for the individual, and attempted to perform thaumaturgy on their
society as a whole instead.”; and the Theosophical Society material —
Blavatsky’s Esoteric Section; Annie Besant’s turn to a mass movement
around Jiddu Krishnamurti; Krishnamurti’s 1929 dissolution of the Order
of the Star in the East — reported in the chapter as the book’s own
account. The social self is where a
culture’s narratives are stored nonverbally, and the book says what it
is for: “The social self is also one of the main vehicles of magic.”The Blood of the Earth, “Pluto’s Republic”:
“whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper inevitably turns into
Pluto’s Republic in practice”; “The would-be political thaumaturge, the
person who wants to use magical manipulation to make people do what he
thinks is the right thing, is subject to the same rule.”; “That means,
first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful nonrational drives that
affect most people in much the same way…”; “the political thaumaturge is
always affected by his or her own magic”; “Just as you can’t spread
raspberry jam on toast without getting it on your fingers, in turn, you
can’t spend your time creating words and images that appeal to the
nonrational mind without having your own nonrational mind influenced by
them, and the more potent your thaumaturgy is, the more surely you will
be caught by your own spell.”; “mass thaumaturgy has its own internal
values and limits; there are things that it can do and things that it
can’t, and if you want to achieve a goal that can’t be achieved by
thaumaturgic methods, your only option may be to walk away”; “A would-be
mass movement that pursues a different path will thus reliably find
itself failing to attract members” (the same passage’s following clause
prints “atttract” in the edition; not quoted here); “The social self is
also one of the main vehicles of magic.”; the second horse, “thumos, the
spirited or irascible part of the self, the part that responds
nonrationally to praise or blame from others, and more generally is
guided by the pressures and influences of the community to which the
individual belongs”; “Challenge it – and the concept of peak oil, if
it’s taken seriously, challenges it to the core – and the social self
takes fright and shies away, dragging the chariot and the charioteer
with it, and quite possibly spooking the other horse and sending the
whole kit and caboodle careening down the nearest blind alley.”; “This
is not a new thing, of course, and it’s something that operative mages
have had to deal with in themselves and their students for a very long
time.”; “Initiation is very much subject to readiness factors. The
competent teacher of magic knows that at any given time, some students
are ready for a given grade of initiation and others simply aren’t.”;
“The wider issue here is that theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by
anyone else. It’s up to the individual.”; “There’s a long history of
operative mages and others who have realized that theurgy is only an
option for the individual, and attempted to perform thaumaturgy on their
society as a whole instead.”; and the Theosophical Society material —
Blavatsky’s Esoteric Section; Annie Besant’s turn to a mass movement
around Jiddu Krishnamurti; Krishnamurti’s 1929 dissolution of the Order
of the Star in the East — reported in the chapter as the book’s own
account. That is the blog’s far side with
the occupant removed. The appraisal of the situation — progress is
inevitable, the universe owes us as much energy as we want — does
not arrive from a recruiter or an operator. It arrives from an apparatus
the person did not choose and cannot read, doing what the book says it
does:
“Challenge it – and the concept of peak oil, if it’s taken seriously,
challenges it to the core – and the social self takes fright and shies
away, dragging the chariot and the charioteer with it, and quite
possibly spooking the other horse and sending the whole kit and caboodle
careening down the nearest blind alley.”The Blood of the Earth, “Pluto’s Republic”:
“whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper inevitably turns into
Pluto’s Republic in practice”; “The would-be political thaumaturge, the
person who wants to use magical manipulation to make people do what he
thinks is the right thing, is subject to the same rule.”; “That means,
first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful nonrational drives that
affect most people in much the same way…”; “the political thaumaturge is
always affected by his or her own magic”; “Just as you can’t spread
raspberry jam on toast without getting it on your fingers, in turn, you
can’t spend your time creating words and images that appeal to the
nonrational mind without having your own nonrational mind influenced by
them, and the more potent your thaumaturgy is, the more surely you will
be caught by your own spell.”; “mass thaumaturgy has its own internal
values and limits; there are things that it can do and things that it
can’t, and if you want to achieve a goal that can’t be achieved by
thaumaturgic methods, your only option may be to walk away”; “A would-be
mass movement that pursues a different path will thus reliably find
itself failing to attract members” (the same passage’s following clause
prints “atttract” in the edition; not quoted here); “The social self is
also one of the main vehicles of magic.”; the second horse, “thumos, the
spirited or irascible part of the self, the part that responds
nonrationally to praise or blame from others, and more generally is
guided by the pressures and influences of the community to which the
individual belongs”; “Challenge it – and the concept of peak oil, if
it’s taken seriously, challenges it to the core – and the social self
takes fright and shies away, dragging the chariot and the charioteer
with it, and quite possibly spooking the other horse and sending the
whole kit and caboodle careening down the nearest blind alley.”; “This
is not a new thing, of course, and it’s something that operative mages
have had to deal with in themselves and their students for a very long
time.”; “Initiation is very much subject to readiness factors. The
competent teacher of magic knows that at any given time, some students
are ready for a given grade of initiation and others simply aren’t.”;
“The wider issue here is that theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by
anyone else. It’s up to the individual.”; “There’s a long history of
operative mages and others who have realized that theurgy is only an
option for the individual, and attempted to perform thaumaturgy on their
society as a whole instead.”; and the Theosophical Society material —
Blavatsky’s Esoteric Section; Annie Besant’s turn to a mass movement
around Jiddu Krishnamurti; Krishnamurti’s 1929 dissolution of the Order
of the Star in the East — reported in the chapter as the book’s own
account.
At the scale of a civilisation, the same mechanism
runs on a population, and the book locates the far side in nothing more
personal than a myth: “The myths you really believe, of course, are the
ones you don’t realize that you believe. The myth of progress is still
like that for most people.”The Blood of the Earth, “A Lesson in Practical
Magic”: “magic is not a substitute for technology, a way of making an
end run around environmental limits and the laws of physics, or for that
matter an effective means of forcing society as a whole to deal
constructively with the rising spiral of crises”; “It’s an old and
subtle craft that works with the boundaries between consciousness and
the universe of our experience, using the nonrational mind as its
principal tool; it has remarkable potentials for good and ill”; the
Péladan material — “We believe neither in progress nor in salvation, his
Manifesto of the Rose + Cross thundered to a mostly bemused Paris in
1891. For the Latin race, which goes to its death, we prepare a final
splendor, to dazzle and gentle the barbarians who are to come.”; “His
core work of magical theory and practice, Comment on devient mage (How
To Become A Mage, 1892), contains not a single magical ritual. Its
theme, to borrow a typically ornate term from his writing, was ethopoeia
– the making (poesis) of a way of living in the world (ethos), one that
would enable individuals to stand apart from the collective
consciousness of their time in order to think their own thoughts and
make their own choices. Society, Péladan wrote, is an anonymous
enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions”; “Fear the example
of another, think for yourself, wrote Péladan; this precept of
Pythagoras contains all of magic, which is nothing other than the power
of selfhood.”; “Ioan Culianu’s description of modern industrial
societies as magician states that rule by manufacturing a managed
consensus through the manipulation of nonrational lures would have been
music to Péladan’s ears.”; “It took an extraordinary degree of mental
independence to stay clear of the trance state and its appalling
consequences”; the advice on “how to open up an insulating space between
the individual mind and the pressures that surround it”, with “All this
advice is aimed at the social habits of another time and has not
necessarily aged well, but the basic principles still stand.”; and “The
myths you really believe, of course, are the ones you don’t realize that
you believe. The myth of progress is still like that for most people.”;
“The first is the rise of subcultures that can’t communicate with one
another at all… it’s that there’s no longer any narrative about
government at all that’s held in common between the two sides.”;
“Popular culture is a vehicle for mass thaumaturgy. It works, as mass
thaumaturgy always works, by inducing you to think less and react more.
Thus, in the strictest sense of the word, it makes you more stupid.”;
and “the replacement of The White Stag and its peers with the Care Bears
and theirs”. Which is why its
diagnosis of the present is not someone is lying. It is that
the culture has an appraisal and no author: the frame is unowned, and it
supplies the reading anyway.
And here is the reading, which is this post’s, and an
inference from the above. The machine has no reading’s
finding was that a frame with no category for an event does not remove
the event, it removes the language for it — and that a vacant reading is
a jurisdiction somebody will occupy. This book supplies a second kind of
vacancy, and it is the harder one: not a reading that is
missing, but one supplied by nobody and held by
everybody.
The blog’s mechanism does not require a holder. It requires a
misreading — and this book is the demonstration that the far side can be
occupied by a frame with no one in it.
4. The
religion of progress: a telos, and an empty seat
Now the correction, and it belongs to a specific post. The deep inheritance took the
telos/no-telos distinction to the root of the human record and drew a
rule from it: a cosmology with an endpoint is the
precondition for a seat. The Blood of the Earth has an
endpoint, and no seat, and it is not marginal — it is the book’s central
object.
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
It is a religion with an eschatology, named by its
own popular forms — “God or the Space Brothers or some conveniently
undefined leap of consciousness” — which the book compares to the
reasoning that convinced people in 999 CE “to brick themselves up in
towers, the better to ascend to heaven when Christ appeared in glory
with the new year”.The Blood of the Earth, Introduction:
“Ceremonial magicians aren’t usually known for writing books on the
decline and fall of industrial society, and futurists don’t normally
write books on magic.”; “On one side of the balance, you have the claims
of current scientific materialism, which insists that magic is nonsense…
On the other, you have the claims of a variety of popular spiritualities
and pseudospiritualities, which insist that metaphysical factors can
overturn the ordinary laws of nature and make the concerns of today’s
scientists irrelevant. Neither of these claims is particularly useful –
it would be as accurate to say that neither of them is particularly
true.”; “The claims of the metaphysically minded, who trust that God or
the Space Brothers or some conveniently undefined leap of consciousness
will rescue us from the consequences of more than three centuries of
misguided collective decisions and more than three decades of
increasingly desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, rely on the
same failed reasoning that convinced people in the last days of 999 CE
to brick themselves up in towers…”; “The forces that have backed the
world’s industrial nations into a blind corner, and are keeping them
pinned there, have much less to do with strictly material realities than
with the realms of mind and consciousness that are the raw materials of
magic.”; “Global conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and has been
in decline since then.”; “after half a century of increasingly frantic
research, it has become all too clear that no other energy resource can
replace it as it runs short”; “Somewhere behind the bland emotionless
labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of
unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black
blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large
number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of
omnipotence and dreams of destiny” (the source sets a space before the
comma after “earth”; normalised here); “The toolkit of magic is one of
the few available options we’ve got to make that difficult transition a
little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet
even begun to darken the dreams of most of today’s humanity.”; and “As
the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of
the modern project are going to have to be discarded.” And it names the parallel where it
diagnoses the amnesia that keeps a failed prophecy alive:
“It’s weirdly reminiscent of the acquired amnesia that enables
believers in apocalyptic prophecies to forget the last half dozen times
they talked themselves into believing that the Rapture or the arrival of
the Space Brothers or whatever was imminent, and treat the latest
prediction with the same earnest enthusiasm.”The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
So the book gives the blog a case its telos rule did not
have: an endpoint, and no one standing at it. The religion of
progress was not founded by an operator, is not administered by a group,
and has no membership list. It is inherited, held nonverbally by the
apparatus the book calls the social self, and it supplies an appraisal
of a situation it cannot see. The deep
inheritance’s rule is that a telos is the
precondition for a seat. This book refines it on one
side only:
A telos is necessary for a seat, and it is not sufficient for
one. A frame can name the endpoint and leave it empty — and still supply
the appraisal.
And an unowned telos is not harmless because it is unowned.
It is a vacancy in the sense the machine has no reading gave
the word — a place where the claim is authoritative and unobservable at
once. Greer’s catalogue of what arrives to fill it is his chapter
‘Strange Bright Banners’ (a three-thousand-word catalogue, and not the
book’s longest chapter but its fullest):
“Existing institutions fail and the collective foundations of meaning
crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision of destiny that will
make sense of the troubles and offer a way past them to some brighter
future. The economics of popular belief being what they are, that demand
very quickly finds an ample supply.”The Blood of the Earth, “Strange Bright
Banners”: “Revitalization movements emerge when all the practical
options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.”; the standard features — “a thorough critique of the
existing order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have
occurred because either the people who have suffered from them, or some
other group that’s to blame for them, have misbehaved and brought about
the troubles; a vision of a Utopian future that will arrive right after
the troubles if the right things are done; and a straightforward plan of
action to make the transition from the troubles to the Utopian future”,
with “the one problem with such an appealing program, in every
revitalization movement… is that the plan of action can’t actually
deliver the goods”; “when existing institutions fail and the collective
foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision
of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past
them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what
they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.”; “Ethics are
as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same
reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic.”;
“You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the
ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields
have already been pumped dry.”; “These limitations are not subject to
change, or even to negotiation; they define a predicament that we will
all have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of humanity’s
time on this planet.”; “the fundamental causes of the crisis of modern
industrial civilization can’t be overcome by magic”; “That leaves ritual
as the one remaining option…”; “Magic, to repeat Dion Fortune’s
definition, is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in
accordance with will; if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic.”;
“I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement
in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that
claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is
building around today’s industrial civilization.”; “the core faith of
the age that is passing, the faith that the future will always be better
than the past or present, has become a delusion”; “one to three
centuries of uneven decline until the curve of overshoot and collapse
bottoms out in a dark age that will endure for centuries more”; “It’s
our bad luck to be living at the dawn of the second great wave of
decline to hit Western civilization”; and the Pluto’s Republic account
of the actor-fitness reading of revitalization movements, in which the
movements that reshape their message to attract a large audience “will
inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of
things”.
The supply has a template — a critique of the existing order, a
Utopian future, and a plan of action — with the defining feature that
“the plan of action can’t actually deliver the goods”.The Blood of the Earth, “Strange Bright
Banners”: “Revitalization movements emerge when all the practical
options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.”; the standard features — “a thorough critique of the
existing order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have
occurred because either the people who have suffered from them, or some
other group that’s to blame for them, have misbehaved and brought about
the troubles; a vision of a Utopian future that will arrive right after
the troubles if the right things are done; and a straightforward plan of
action to make the transition from the troubles to the Utopian future”,
with “the one problem with such an appealing program, in every
revitalization movement… is that the plan of action can’t actually
deliver the goods”; “when existing institutions fail and the collective
foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision
of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past
them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what
they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.”; “Ethics are
as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same
reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic.”;
“You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the
ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields
have already been pumped dry.”; “These limitations are not subject to
change, or even to negotiation; they define a predicament that we will
all have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of humanity’s
time on this planet.”; “the fundamental causes of the crisis of modern
industrial civilization can’t be overcome by magic”; “That leaves ritual
as the one remaining option…”; “Magic, to repeat Dion Fortune’s
definition, is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in
accordance with will; if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic.”;
“I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement
in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that
claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is
building around today’s industrial civilization.”; “the core faith of
the age that is passing, the faith that the future will always be better
than the past or present, has become a delusion”; “one to three
centuries of uneven decline until the curve of overshoot and collapse
bottoms out in a dark age that will endure for centuries more”; “It’s
our bad luck to be living at the dawn of the second great wave of
decline to hit Western civilization”; and the Pluto’s Republic account
of the actor-fitness reading of revitalization movements, in which the
movements that reshape their message to attract a large audience “will
inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of
things”.
The book calls these revitalization movements and says
the present is ripe for them. The demagogue does not install that
vision; he arrives inside it — which is the operative master’s finding, that
the operator “arrives inside a frame the target already holds, and
fits”, said of a whole society instead of one
person.
The correction, then, in one sentence:
The blog’s rule needs a rider: an endpoint is the
precondition for a seat, but the endpoint does not have to be anybody’s.
The myth of progress is a frame with a telos and no owner, and it
supplies the appraisal from the far side as completely as a group or an
operator does — so the danger is not the telos alone, nor the seat
alone, but a telos that leaves a vacancy and a culture with no check on
who fills it.
That refines the deep
inheritance without overturning it, and it strengthens the costume’s boundary: levers without the
mechanism are still not predation, and a mechanism without a
lever-puller is still a mechanism.
5.
The myth of the machine: the frame that cannot imagine its own
ending
The chapter this blog’s readers will reach for first is “The Myth of
the Machine”, and its finding arrives from the opposite direction to the machine frame’s:
“It’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of that
very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty that industrial
society accepts amount to, basically, more of the same thing we’ve
already got.”The Blood of the Earth, “The Myth of the
Machine”: “it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of
that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty that
industrial society accepts amount to, basically, more of the same thing
we’ve already got”; “the vast majority of cars for sale these days
simply ring changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in
the late nineteenth century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago.
That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the
usual kind – the hype surrounding the so-called hybrid revolution
conveniently fails to mention that a very similar system has been used
for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars
powered by electricity were common before a handful of major auto firms
succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last
Great Depression.”; “A good many years ago, Lewis Mumford wrote two
hefty volumes under the joint title The Myth of the Machine. It’s
vintage Mumford and thus by definition well worth reading, but it’s also
very much a work of its time… Since I first read it, I’ve wished that
Mumford could have found time to pursue the promise of the title in a
good deal more depth.”; “A machine, though, is never a subject; from a
certain perspective, that’s what defines the machine. Machines imitate
the actions of persons, of subjects, but they have no subjectivity, no
inner world; they’re always and only objects, and so the only
relationship you can have with them is an I-It relationship.” (Buber’s I
and Thou is cited in the edition’s notes); “Sort through any of the
narratives that play a central role in contemporary industrial culture,
and you’ll find a machine at the center of each one.”; “A solar panel, a
wind turbine, an electric car, a thorium reactor, a supercomputer, a
flying saucer or a nuclear bomb, take your pick, but it’s got to be
based on a machine.”; “Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a
problem, since nothing anyone can do will make it go away.”; “no
possible turn of events will allow industrial civilization to extract a
limitless supply of crude oil from a finite planet”; “the proud towers
of the magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand”;
“the most important resources we have left at this point, the most
promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap
abundant energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or
anything else outside the individual human being”; “Machines fill so
potent a role in our emotional lives that most people in the modern
industrial world shy away from the thought of doing much of anything
without them.”; and “The myth of progress is coming to pieces around us
as I write these words. The myth of the machine will follow it in due
time.”
The example is the car, and the hybrid is the tell: “That’s as true
of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the usual kind –
the hype surrounding the so-called hybrid revolution conveniently fails
to mention that a very similar system has been used for more than sixty
years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars powered by electricity
were common before a handful of major auto firms succeeded in getting a
stranglehold on the industry during the last Great Depression.”The Blood of the Earth, “The Myth of the
Machine”: “it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of
that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty that
industrial society accepts amount to, basically, more of the same thing
we’ve already got”; “the vast majority of cars for sale these days
simply ring changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in
the late nineteenth century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago.
That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the
usual kind – the hype surrounding the so-called hybrid revolution
conveniently fails to mention that a very similar system has been used
for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars
powered by electricity were common before a handful of major auto firms
succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last
Great Depression.”; “A good many years ago, Lewis Mumford wrote two
hefty volumes under the joint title The Myth of the Machine. It’s
vintage Mumford and thus by definition well worth reading, but it’s also
very much a work of its time… Since I first read it, I’ve wished that
Mumford could have found time to pursue the promise of the title in a
good deal more depth.”; “A machine, though, is never a subject; from a
certain perspective, that’s what defines the machine. Machines imitate
the actions of persons, of subjects, but they have no subjectivity, no
inner world; they’re always and only objects, and so the only
relationship you can have with them is an I-It relationship.” (Buber’s I
and Thou is cited in the edition’s notes); “Sort through any of the
narratives that play a central role in contemporary industrial culture,
and you’ll find a machine at the center of each one.”; “A solar panel, a
wind turbine, an electric car, a thorium reactor, a supercomputer, a
flying saucer or a nuclear bomb, take your pick, but it’s got to be
based on a machine.”; “Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a
problem, since nothing anyone can do will make it go away.”; “no
possible turn of events will allow industrial civilization to extract a
limitless supply of crude oil from a finite planet”; “the proud towers
of the magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand”;
“the most important resources we have left at this point, the most
promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap
abundant energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or
anything else outside the individual human being”; “Machines fill so
potent a role in our emotional lives that most people in the modern
industrial world shy away from the thought of doing much of anything
without them.”; and “The myth of progress is coming to pieces around us
as I write these words. The myth of the machine will follow it in due
time.”
Put that beside the blog’s own finding and the two are not
the same claim — they are two holes in the same wall. The machine has no reading found
that a frame whose substrate is dead matter and impersonal force has no
category for an interior event: it can call a
dissolution a fault or a trick, and nothing else. Greer’s finding is
that the same frame has no category for discontinuous
change — the only novelty it can generate is a variation on
what it already has, which is why every proposed solution to peak oil is
a machine. He argues it from first principles:
“A machine, though, is never a subject; from a certain perspective,
that’s what defines the machine. Machines imitate the actions of
persons, of subjects, but they have no subjectivity, no inner world;
they’re always and only objects, and so the only relationship you can
have with them is an I-It relationship.”The Blood of the Earth, “The Myth of the
Machine”: “it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of
that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty that
industrial society accepts amount to, basically, more of the same thing
we’ve already got”; “the vast majority of cars for sale these days
simply ring changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in
the late nineteenth century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago.
That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the
usual kind – the hype surrounding the so-called hybrid revolution
conveniently fails to mention that a very similar system has been used
for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars
powered by electricity were common before a handful of major auto firms
succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last
Great Depression.”; “A good many years ago, Lewis Mumford wrote two
hefty volumes under the joint title The Myth of the Machine. It’s
vintage Mumford and thus by definition well worth reading, but it’s also
very much a work of its time… Since I first read it, I’ve wished that
Mumford could have found time to pursue the promise of the title in a
good deal more depth.”; “A machine, though, is never a subject; from a
certain perspective, that’s what defines the machine. Machines imitate
the actions of persons, of subjects, but they have no subjectivity, no
inner world; they’re always and only objects, and so the only
relationship you can have with them is an I-It relationship.” (Buber’s I
and Thou is cited in the edition’s notes); “Sort through any of the
narratives that play a central role in contemporary industrial culture,
and you’ll find a machine at the center of each one.”; “A solar panel, a
wind turbine, an electric car, a thorium reactor, a supercomputer, a
flying saucer or a nuclear bomb, take your pick, but it’s got to be
based on a machine.”; “Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a
problem, since nothing anyone can do will make it go away.”; “no
possible turn of events will allow industrial civilization to extract a
limitless supply of crude oil from a finite planet”; “the proud towers
of the magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand”;
“the most important resources we have left at this point, the most
promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap
abundant energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or
anything else outside the individual human being”; “Machines fill so
potent a role in our emotional lives that most people in the modern
industrial world shy away from the thought of doing much of anything
without them.”; and “The myth of progress is coming to pieces around us
as I write these words. The myth of the machine will follow it in due
time.”
That is Buber’s I-It, named in the edition’s notes — the blog’s own
blind spot seen from a different route. And the book’s answer to the
trap is not a lever but a noticing: the candidate advancing between two
pillars, where “the pillars were the opposite poles of the binary – of
any binary – and the path of wisdom lies between them”, and “once you
find a third option, it’s very easy to find more”.The Blood of the Earth, “The Path Between the
Pillars”: “the peak oil debate was stuck for many years in a binary that
insisted that the extremes of continued progress and sudden catastrophic
collapse were the only possible shapes of the postpetroleum future”;
“the traditional image of the candidate advancing to initiation through
the space between two pillars was meant to teach the same lesson: the
pillars were the opposite poles of the binary – of any binary – and the
path of wisdom lies between them”; “If you try to work with ternaries
when you’ve still got a great deal of emotion and personal identity
invested in binary thought patterns, for example, you’re probably going
to fall into a binary between the abstract concepts of binary and
ternary thinking”; “what you contemplate, you imitate”; “Contemplating a
new toaster oven, in other words, won’t get you one, it’ll simply make
you imitate a toaster oven”; “Again, contemplating a toaster oven won’t
get you one; it’ll just make you more prone to overheat and burn the
toast.”; “the ineffective but familiar strategy of trying to get people
to change by scaring the bejesus out of them – sinners in the hands of
an angry Gaia!”; “the most obvious, and most basic, is to go out of your
way to spend more time contemplating what you value than what you
oppose”; and the explicitly self-addressed warning that the same
reaction will catch the analyst — “If it’s visual media, watch for the
same things”, with the 1964 Johnson campaign advertisement given as “a
classic of the type”.
Its own account of the peak-oil argument is that it was stuck in exactly
such a binary.The Blood of the Earth, “The Path Between the
Pillars”: “the peak oil debate was stuck for many years in a binary that
insisted that the extremes of continued progress and sudden catastrophic
collapse were the only possible shapes of the postpetroleum future”;
“the traditional image of the candidate advancing to initiation through
the space between two pillars was meant to teach the same lesson: the
pillars were the opposite poles of the binary – of any binary – and the
path of wisdom lies between them”; “If you try to work with ternaries
when you’ve still got a great deal of emotion and personal identity
invested in binary thought patterns, for example, you’re probably going
to fall into a binary between the abstract concepts of binary and
ternary thinking”; “what you contemplate, you imitate”; “Contemplating a
new toaster oven, in other words, won’t get you one, it’ll simply make
you imitate a toaster oven”; “Again, contemplating a toaster oven won’t
get you one; it’ll just make you more prone to overheat and burn the
toast.”; “the ineffective but familiar strategy of trying to get people
to change by scaring the bejesus out of them – sinners in the hands of
an angry Gaia!”; “the most obvious, and most basic, is to go out of your
way to spend more time contemplating what you value than what you
oppose”; and the explicitly self-addressed warning that the same
reaction will catch the analyst — “If it’s visual media, watch for the
same things”, with the 1964 Johnson campaign advertisement given as “a
classic of the type”.
Two blind spots, one frame, and the difference is what each
does with the hole. The
machine has no reading’s tell was a question: does the frame say
I cannot see this, or does it say there is nothing there to
see? Greer’s machine frame does the second thing about endings,
structurally rather than by anyone’s failure of nerve. Neither is a case
against the machine frame, because the frame that can be checked is the
frame that made the mechanism post
possible.
The title is borrowed from Lewis Mumford, and the book says so, then
says it wished the promise of it had been pursued “in a good deal more
depth”.The Blood of the Earth, “The Myth of the
Machine”: “it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of
that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty that
industrial society accepts amount to, basically, more of the same thing
we’ve already got”; “the vast majority of cars for sale these days
simply ring changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in
the late nineteenth century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago.
That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the
usual kind – the hype surrounding the so-called hybrid revolution
conveniently fails to mention that a very similar system has been used
for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars
powered by electricity were common before a handful of major auto firms
succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last
Great Depression.”; “A good many years ago, Lewis Mumford wrote two
hefty volumes under the joint title The Myth of the Machine. It’s
vintage Mumford and thus by definition well worth reading, but it’s also
very much a work of its time… Since I first read it, I’ve wished that
Mumford could have found time to pursue the promise of the title in a
good deal more depth.”; “A machine, though, is never a subject; from a
certain perspective, that’s what defines the machine. Machines imitate
the actions of persons, of subjects, but they have no subjectivity, no
inner world; they’re always and only objects, and so the only
relationship you can have with them is an I-It relationship.” (Buber’s I
and Thou is cited in the edition’s notes); “Sort through any of the
narratives that play a central role in contemporary industrial culture,
and you’ll find a machine at the center of each one.”; “A solar panel, a
wind turbine, an electric car, a thorium reactor, a supercomputer, a
flying saucer or a nuclear bomb, take your pick, but it’s got to be
based on a machine.”; “Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a
problem, since nothing anyone can do will make it go away.”; “no
possible turn of events will allow industrial civilization to extract a
limitless supply of crude oil from a finite planet”; “the proud towers
of the magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand”;
“the most important resources we have left at this point, the most
promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap
abundant energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or
anything else outside the individual human being”; “Machines fill so
potent a role in our emotional lives that most people in the modern
industrial world shy away from the thought of doing much of anything
without them.”; and “The myth of progress is coming to pieces around us
as I write these words. The myth of the machine will follow it in due
time.” What the chapter gives is an
argument developed from Buber — a reading of a culture, not a
measurement of one.
6.
Magic, and magical thinking — the boundary the book draws, and the one
it keeps sliding
The first chapter’s title is a phrase the ambient culture owns, and
the book’s work in it is to take the phrase back and then hand it away
again.
The culture’s magical thinking is defined by example
— an investment analyst explaining why peak oil is not a problem:
“[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital creates oil.”The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
The book’s reading is that this is a symbol-system claiming “the
manipulation of symbols wields occult powers that can override the laws
of nature”, and that “this is not what operative mages – people who
actually practice magic – claim to be able to do”.The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
The verdict is the sentence the phrase is remembered for:
“What our society calls magical thinking, then, is clearly not the
kind of thinking that mages do, and the denunciations of magical
thinking flung at mages would be much more sensibly directed at
economists.”The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
So the book distinguishes the two words — and then, a page
later, it does not. The same chapter says magical thinking is
what the situation needs:
“There’s a rich irony, in other words, in the insistence that magical
thinking is less useful than scientific thinking, because magical
thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm
of motivations, values, and goals that scientific thinking handles so
poorly.”The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
Read together, the chapter runs the phrase in two
senses and does not keep them apart: a pejorative one, which is
what the economists do, and a sympathetic one, which is what the
situation needs. That is a real seam in the text, reported rather than
tidied.
What magic is for is a separate question, and the
book answers it twice — once in the abstract, once in the
concrete. The abstract answer is Dion Fortune’s definition,
adopted and then glossed:
“The point of magic, as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing
about change in states and contents of consciousness; it can have
effects on the material world as well, but that normally involves
influencing entities (for example, human beings) that in one way or
another bridge the gap between mind and matter.”The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such.
The concrete answer is the one this reading turns on, and it
comes from a nineteenth-century magician the book hauls out of obscurity
to make it. Joséphin Péladan — “the man Oscar Wilde was
imitating” — wrote a book of magical theory and practice with no
magic in it:
“His core work of magical theory and practice, Comment on devient
mage (How To Become A Mage, 1892), contains not a single
magical ritual. Its theme, to borrow a typically ornate term from his
writing, was ethopoeia – the making (poesis) of a way of living
in the world (ethos), one that would enable individuals to
stand apart from the collective consciousness of their time in order to
think their own thoughts and make their own choices. Society, Péladan
wrote, is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand
emotions.”The Blood of the Earth, “A Lesson in Practical
Magic”: “magic is not a substitute for technology, a way of making an
end run around environmental limits and the laws of physics, or for that
matter an effective means of forcing society as a whole to deal
constructively with the rising spiral of crises”; “It’s an old and
subtle craft that works with the boundaries between consciousness and
the universe of our experience, using the nonrational mind as its
principal tool; it has remarkable potentials for good and ill”; the
Péladan material — “We believe neither in progress nor in salvation, his
Manifesto of the Rose + Cross thundered to a mostly bemused Paris in
1891. For the Latin race, which goes to its death, we prepare a final
splendor, to dazzle and gentle the barbarians who are to come.”; “His
core work of magical theory and practice, Comment on devient mage (How
To Become A Mage, 1892), contains not a single magical ritual. Its
theme, to borrow a typically ornate term from his writing, was ethopoeia
– the making (poesis) of a way of living in the world (ethos), one that
would enable individuals to stand apart from the collective
consciousness of their time in order to think their own thoughts and
make their own choices. Society, Péladan wrote, is an anonymous
enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions”; “Fear the example
of another, think for yourself, wrote Péladan; this precept of
Pythagoras contains all of magic, which is nothing other than the power
of selfhood.”; “Ioan Culianu’s description of modern industrial
societies as magician states that rule by manufacturing a managed
consensus through the manipulation of nonrational lures would have been
music to Péladan’s ears.”; “It took an extraordinary degree of mental
independence to stay clear of the trance state and its appalling
consequences”; the advice on “how to open up an insulating space between
the individual mind and the pressures that surround it”, with “All this
advice is aimed at the social habits of another time and has not
necessarily aged well, but the basic principles still stand.”; and “The
myths you really believe, of course, are the ones you don’t realize that
you believe. The myth of progress is still like that for most people.”;
“The first is the rise of subcultures that can’t communicate with one
another at all… it’s that there’s no longer any narrative about
government at all that’s held in common between the two sides.”;
“Popular culture is a vehicle for mass thaumaturgy. It works, as mass
thaumaturgy always works, by inducing you to think less and react more.
Thus, in the strictest sense of the word, it makes you more stupid.”;
and “the replacement of The White Stag and its peers with the Care Bears
and theirs”.
That is what magic is for, in this book: a capacity rather
than an effect. The final chapter’s three instructions are that
sentence operationalised — “It’s simple enough, really: learn one thing,
give up one thing, save one thing.”The Blood of the Earth, “Begin It Now”: “the
search for a meaningful response to the deeply troubled future before
us”; “providing specific practical advice for operative mages isn’t a
useful part of this book”; “It’s a core teaching of the old occult
philosophies that your magical work, however deep it may reach into the
innermost realms of consciousness, has to be brought all the way down to
earth, and anchored right here in the world of matter by an appropriate
action on what many occultists like to call the material plane.”; “Good
intentions and idealism, it bears remembering, are not an adequate
safeguard against systematic manipulation of the mass mind, especially
when that manipulation moves in parallel with the desperate craving of a
great many people to have the lifestyles they think they deserve and
ought to get.”; “All this isn’t simply a good thing on abstract grounds,
though it is that.”; “one further lesson of history is that the
consensus view of the future is always wrong”; “It’s simple enough,
really: learn one thing, give up one thing, save one thing.”; “When they
make it through the dark age that follows the breakdown of a
civilization, nearly always it’s because someone cared enough to keep
them going as living traditions.”; “Du müss dein Leben ändern, you must
change your life”, given as Rilke’s message from the statue of Apollo;
and the closing quotation from Goethe — “Whatever you can do, or believe
you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and magic and power in it. Begin
it now.” Learn a skill the
deindustrial future will need; give up one dependence on the industrial
system now, while the choice is still yours; preserve one piece of the
culture you could not bear to lose — because “When they make it through
the dark age that follows the breakdown of a civilization, nearly always
it’s because someone cared enough to keep them going as living
traditions.”The Blood of the Earth, “Begin It Now”: “the
search for a meaningful response to the deeply troubled future before
us”; “providing specific practical advice for operative mages isn’t a
useful part of this book”; “It’s a core teaching of the old occult
philosophies that your magical work, however deep it may reach into the
innermost realms of consciousness, has to be brought all the way down to
earth, and anchored right here in the world of matter by an appropriate
action on what many occultists like to call the material plane.”; “Good
intentions and idealism, it bears remembering, are not an adequate
safeguard against systematic manipulation of the mass mind, especially
when that manipulation moves in parallel with the desperate craving of a
great many people to have the lifestyles they think they deserve and
ought to get.”; “All this isn’t simply a good thing on abstract grounds,
though it is that.”; “one further lesson of history is that the
consensus view of the future is always wrong”; “It’s simple enough,
really: learn one thing, give up one thing, save one thing.”; “When they
make it through the dark age that follows the breakdown of a
civilization, nearly always it’s because someone cared enough to keep
them going as living traditions.”; “Du müss dein Leben ändern, you must
change your life”, given as Rilke’s message from the statue of Apollo;
and the closing quotation from Goethe — “Whatever you can do, or believe
you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and magic and power in it. Begin
it now.”
One more distinction, and it is the one the blog has been
using half of without knowing it. The book’s operating cut is
between theurgy and thaumaturgy — the
magic that trains the operator’s own nonrational mind, and the magic
that manipulates other people’s. A case-insensitive search of the blog’s
published posts returns 9 hits for “theurgy”, all of
them names for the classical tradition, and 0 hits for
“thaumaturgy” anywhere.Absences and counts, reported as search results
and scoped to the texts searched — and a search shows only what it
indexes. Over the text of this edition,
case-insensitive: “safeguard” 1 (the mass-mind
passage at “Begin It Now”, quoted at [^begin]); “caution”
0; “safety” 2 (Dorothy Martin’s flight
to safety aboard flying saucers, “Strange Bright Banners”; “a margin of
safety in hard times”, “Begin It Now”); “psychiatr” 0;
“clinician” 0; “therap” 0; “suicide”
0; “emergency” 0; “psychosis”
0; “sanity” 0; “mental health”
0; “premature” 0; “too soon”
0; “breakdown” 1 (the breakdown of a
civilization); “catabolic” 0; “EROEI”
0; “energy returned” 0; “singularity”
0; “net energy” 1; “thermodynamic”
2; “Rapture” 2 (one of them the
index); “Space Brothers” 4 (one of them the index).
Over the texts of the blog’s published posts: “peak oil”
0; “deindustrial” 0; “fossil fuel”
0; “EROEI” 0; “net energy”
0; “thermodynamic” 0; “thaumaturgy”
0; “revitalization” 0; “John Michael
Greer” 1 (the revisor credit in the western column’s note on the Golden
Dawn edition); “theurgy” 9 (five in geosophia, four in two esoteric tarots). The absence of a
clinical referral is a report about a text, not about its author, and it
is not a claim that anyone’s practice was harmed.
7.
The counterweight: a polemic, a practitioner, and what would count as
evidence
The series requires an explicit counterweight in the body, and this
book needs an unusually candid one, because it is not a survey. It is a
polemic by a practising ceremonial magician who is also a
peak-oil writer, and three things follow that have to be said
before anything is drawn from it.
First, the empirical claims and the argument are different
kinds of statement, and the book mostly argues. The sourced
elements are thin and checkable — Hubbert’s 1956 warning, a claim that
“global conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and has been in
decline since then”, a critique of the hundred-years-of-gas figure,
Daniel Yergin’s 2011 essay and his earlier price predictions.The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such. The structure of
the rest is inferential: geological and thermodynamic limits, “net
energy issues and energy subsidies”, the diffuseness of renewables, the
absence of a substitute. Each is an argument from a model, and the model
is contested by serious people. This post does not adjudicate
any of it. What would settle it is production and energy-return
data measured over decades — settled by time rather than rhetoric, which
is the book’s own position.
Second, its central causal claim is its least supported and
most load-bearing. §2 quotes the sentence — the forces pinning
the industrial world “have much less to do with strictly material
realities than with the realms of mind and consciousness”. That is not a
measurement; it is a diagnosis of motive, offered by a practitioner who
works in that register. It may be right. Nothing here says it is wrong.
But a reader who takes it as established has adopted a thesis, and this
series does not do that.
Third, and it is what this reading has to be most careful
about: the book describes a magician and offers no referral.
Searched as the series searches, it carries a practice-level caution and
no clinical one. “Caution” returns 0 hits, and
“safeguard” returns exactly one — a warning about the
ambient culture, not to a reader:
“Good intentions and idealism, it bears remembering, are not an
adequate safeguard against systematic manipulation of the mass mind,
especially when that manipulation moves in parallel with the desperate
craving of a great many people to have the lifestyles they think they
deserve and ought to get.”The Blood of the Earth, “Begin It Now”: “the
search for a meaningful response to the deeply troubled future before
us”; “providing specific practical advice for operative mages isn’t a
useful part of this book”; “It’s a core teaching of the old occult
philosophies that your magical work, however deep it may reach into the
innermost realms of consciousness, has to be brought all the way down to
earth, and anchored right here in the world of matter by an appropriate
action on what many occultists like to call the material plane.”; “Good
intentions and idealism, it bears remembering, are not an adequate
safeguard against systematic manipulation of the mass mind, especially
when that manipulation moves in parallel with the desperate craving of a
great many people to have the lifestyles they think they deserve and
ought to get.”; “All this isn’t simply a good thing on abstract grounds,
though it is that.”; “one further lesson of history is that the
consensus view of the future is always wrong”; “It’s simple enough,
really: learn one thing, give up one thing, save one thing.”; “When they
make it through the dark age that follows the breakdown of a
civilization, nearly always it’s because someone cared enough to keep
them going as living traditions.”; “Du müss dein Leben ändern, you must
change your life”, given as Rilke’s message from the statue of Apollo;
and the closing quotation from Goethe — “Whatever you can do, or believe
you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and magic and power in it. Begin
it now.”
A case-insensitive search returns 0 hits for
“psychiatr”, “clinician”, “therap”, “suicide”, “emergency”, “psychosis”,
“sanity”, “mental health”, “premature” and “too soon”; “breakdown”
occurs once, and it is the breakdown of a
civilisation.Absences and counts, reported as search results
and scoped to the texts searched — and a search shows only what it
indexes. Over the text of this edition,
case-insensitive: “safeguard” 1 (the mass-mind
passage at “Begin It Now”, quoted at [^begin]); “caution”
0; “safety” 2 (Dorothy Martin’s flight
to safety aboard flying saucers, “Strange Bright Banners”; “a margin of
safety in hard times”, “Begin It Now”); “psychiatr” 0;
“clinician” 0; “therap” 0; “suicide”
0; “emergency” 0; “psychosis”
0; “sanity” 0; “mental health”
0; “premature” 0; “too soon”
0; “breakdown” 1 (the breakdown of a
civilization); “catabolic” 0; “EROEI”
0; “energy returned” 0; “singularity”
0; “net energy” 1; “thermodynamic”
2; “Rapture” 2 (one of them the
index); “Space Brothers” 4 (one of them the index).
Over the texts of the blog’s published posts: “peak oil”
0; “deindustrial” 0; “fossil fuel”
0; “EROEI” 0; “net energy”
0; “thermodynamic” 0; “thaumaturgy”
0; “revitalization” 0; “John Michael
Greer” 1 (the revisor credit in the western column’s note on the Golden
Dawn edition); “theurgy” 9 (five in geosophia, four in two esoteric tarots). The absence of a
clinical referral is a report about a text, not about its author, and it
is not a claim that anyone’s practice was harmed. So this book reports the
same absence three readings have now reported, and it does not report it
the same way. Where Undreaming
Wetiko named psychiatry as an adversary, this one never mentions it
— as though the question had not arisen.
What it does carry is a different kind of safeguard,
internal to the practice. Three instances:
- The planes are not continuous. The whole polemic
against metaphysical rescue rests on one axiom: “The technical term for
that mistake is confounding the planes; the planes of
existence, an old magical axiom has it, are discrete and not
continuous – which means in plain English that mind is mind, matter
is matter”.The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such. It is a book about magic that
forbids magic from doing the thing its readers most want it to do.
- The teachers expect the phone call. On the first
encounters with apparent spirits that serious training reliably
produces: “those of us who teach magic all know to expect the panicky
phone call or email that comes right after each student has his or her
first encounter with an apparent spirit”, and “The traditional lore
offers a great deal of useful guidance in how to deal with these
experiences while maintaining a state of relative mental balance”.The Blood of the Earth, “Magical Thinking”:
“It serves, rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling
awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on
the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource
can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”; “It’s meant to
soothe, not to solve, and so practical issues are beside the point.”;
the Porter Stansberry material — “[G]eology doesn’t create oil; capital
creates oil. The more capital you put toward oil, the more of it there
will be”, and “Most people would call this an example of magical
thinking… It’s worth noting, though, that this is not what operative
mages – people who actually practice magic – claim to be able to do.”;
“Behind that mismatch is a set of beliefs so deeply rooted in
contemporary industrial societies, and so emotionally important to most
of the people who live in those societies, that it may as well be called
the established religion of the modern industrial world: the belief in
the inevitability and beneficence of progress.”; “What our society calls
magical thinking, then, is clearly not the kind of thinking that mages
do, and the denunciations of magical thinking flung at mages would be
much more sensibly directed at economists.”; “There’s a rich irony, in
other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than
scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of
human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and
goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”; the purposes of
magic, “Around the world and across the ages, people have used magic to
tilt the odds their way in hunting, gambling, war, and any other
activity that combines high uncertainty with high stakes, and can be
influenced powerfully by expectations and perceptions; to establish,
improve, and shape the whole range of human relationships; to heal
illnesses of body and mind; to integrate the personality and bring it
into harmony with the structures of the cosmos, however those are
understood; and, not least, to deal with the fact that other people are
using magic for these same purposes, and not always with your best
interests in mind.”; “What do these things all have in common? They all
deal with mental phenomena, individual or collective. Grasp that, and
you start to grasp what magic is all about.”; “one of the most
distinguished twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of
magic, Dion Fortune, defined magic as the art and science of causing
change in consciousness in accordance with will”; “The point of magic,
as Fortune’s definition suggests, is bringing about change in states and
contents of consciousness; it can have effects on the material world as
well, but that normally involves influencing entities (for example,
human beings) that in one way or another bridge the gap between mind and
matter.”; “The technical term for that mistake is confounding the
planes; the planes of existence, an old magical axiom has it, are
discrete and not continuous – which means in plain English that mind is
mind, matter is matter”; “the changes in consciousness that would
actually do some good are changes that next to nobody in the industrial
world is willing to make”; “The traditional lore offers a great deal of
useful guidance in how to deal with these experiences while maintaining
a state of relative mental balance, and for the time being that’s about
all that can be said for certain”, in the passage that also has “the
panicky phone call or email that comes right after each student has his
or her first encounter with an apparent spirit”; “The myth of progress,
which serves as the central religious narrative of our civilization,
insists that magic is something that only primitive people do.”; and
“the acquired amnesia that enables believers in apocalyptic prophecies
to forget the last half dozen times they talked themselves into
believing that the Rapture or the arrival of the Space Brothers or
whatever was imminent, and treat the latest prediction with the same
earnest enthusiasm.” The Introduction’s survey of peak-oil literature
also cites “renegade Shell Oil petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert” and
the 2011 essay by Daniel Yergin; those are the chapter’s own
attributions, reported here as such. A frame supplied before the event —
one of the provisions the mechanism post
found the traditions had encoded.
- Readiness is graded, and the pace is metered.
“Initiation is very much subject to readiness factors. The competent
teacher of magic knows that at any given time, some students are ready
for a given grade of initiation and others simply aren’t.”The Blood of the Earth, “Pluto’s Republic”:
“whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper inevitably turns into
Pluto’s Republic in practice”; “The would-be political thaumaturge, the
person who wants to use magical manipulation to make people do what he
thinks is the right thing, is subject to the same rule.”; “That means,
first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful nonrational drives that
affect most people in much the same way…”; “the political thaumaturge is
always affected by his or her own magic”; “Just as you can’t spread
raspberry jam on toast without getting it on your fingers, in turn, you
can’t spend your time creating words and images that appeal to the
nonrational mind without having your own nonrational mind influenced by
them, and the more potent your thaumaturgy is, the more surely you will
be caught by your own spell.”; “mass thaumaturgy has its own internal
values and limits; there are things that it can do and things that it
can’t, and if you want to achieve a goal that can’t be achieved by
thaumaturgic methods, your only option may be to walk away”; “A would-be
mass movement that pursues a different path will thus reliably find
itself failing to attract members” (the same passage’s following clause
prints “atttract” in the edition; not quoted here); “The social self is
also one of the main vehicles of magic.”; the second horse, “thumos, the
spirited or irascible part of the self, the part that responds
nonrationally to praise or blame from others, and more generally is
guided by the pressures and influences of the community to which the
individual belongs”; “Challenge it – and the concept of peak oil, if
it’s taken seriously, challenges it to the core – and the social self
takes fright and shies away, dragging the chariot and the charioteer
with it, and quite possibly spooking the other horse and sending the
whole kit and caboodle careening down the nearest blind alley.”; “This
is not a new thing, of course, and it’s something that operative mages
have had to deal with in themselves and their students for a very long
time.”; “Initiation is very much subject to readiness factors. The
competent teacher of magic knows that at any given time, some students
are ready for a given grade of initiation and others simply aren’t.”;
“The wider issue here is that theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by
anyone else. It’s up to the individual.”; “There’s a long history of
operative mages and others who have realized that theurgy is only an
option for the individual, and attempted to perform thaumaturgy on their
society as a whole instead.”; and the Theosophical Society material —
Blavatsky’s Esoteric Section; Annie Besant’s turn to a mass movement
around Jiddu Krishnamurti; Krishnamurti’s 1929 dissolution of the Order
of the Star in the East — reported in the chapter as the book’s own
account. On the isolation the practice
requires, the book reports Péladan’s advice to open “an insulating space
between the individual mind and the pressures that surround it”, then
notes that “All this advice is aimed at the social habits of another
time and has not necessarily aged well, but the basic principles still
stand.”The Blood of the Earth, “A Lesson in Practical
Magic”: “magic is not a substitute for technology, a way of making an
end run around environmental limits and the laws of physics, or for that
matter an effective means of forcing society as a whole to deal
constructively with the rising spiral of crises”; “It’s an old and
subtle craft that works with the boundaries between consciousness and
the universe of our experience, using the nonrational mind as its
principal tool; it has remarkable potentials for good and ill”; the
Péladan material — “We believe neither in progress nor in salvation, his
Manifesto of the Rose + Cross thundered to a mostly bemused Paris in
1891. For the Latin race, which goes to its death, we prepare a final
splendor, to dazzle and gentle the barbarians who are to come.”; “His
core work of magical theory and practice, Comment on devient mage (How
To Become A Mage, 1892), contains not a single magical ritual. Its
theme, to borrow a typically ornate term from his writing, was ethopoeia
– the making (poesis) of a way of living in the world (ethos), one that
would enable individuals to stand apart from the collective
consciousness of their time in order to think their own thoughts and
make their own choices. Society, Péladan wrote, is an anonymous
enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions”; “Fear the example
of another, think for yourself, wrote Péladan; this precept of
Pythagoras contains all of magic, which is nothing other than the power
of selfhood.”; “Ioan Culianu’s description of modern industrial
societies as magician states that rule by manufacturing a managed
consensus through the manipulation of nonrational lures would have been
music to Péladan’s ears.”; “It took an extraordinary degree of mental
independence to stay clear of the trance state and its appalling
consequences”; the advice on “how to open up an insulating space between
the individual mind and the pressures that surround it”, with “All this
advice is aimed at the social habits of another time and has not
necessarily aged well, but the basic principles still stand.”; and “The
myths you really believe, of course, are the ones you don’t realize that
you believe. The myth of progress is still like that for most people.”;
“The first is the rise of subcultures that can’t communicate with one
another at all… it’s that there’s no longer any narrative about
government at all that’s held in common between the two sides.”;
“Popular culture is a vehicle for mass thaumaturgy. It works, as mass
thaumaturgy always works, by inducing you to think less and react more.
Thus, in the strictest sense of the word, it makes you more stupid.”;
and “the replacement of The White Stag and its peers with the Care Bears
and theirs”.
And one counterweight runs the other way, which is why this
book is easier to hand to a reader than some in this series. It
argues against the overturning of physical limits, at
length, and it is the only source here that does: “You can’t use
incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the ground if it
was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields have already
been pumped dry.”The Blood of the Earth, “Strange Bright
Banners”: “Revitalization movements emerge when all the practical
options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.”; the standard features — “a thorough critique of the
existing order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have
occurred because either the people who have suffered from them, or some
other group that’s to blame for them, have misbehaved and brought about
the troubles; a vision of a Utopian future that will arrive right after
the troubles if the right things are done; and a straightforward plan of
action to make the transition from the troubles to the Utopian future”,
with “the one problem with such an appealing program, in every
revitalization movement… is that the plan of action can’t actually
deliver the goods”; “when existing institutions fail and the collective
foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision
of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past
them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what
they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.”; “Ethics are
as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same
reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic.”;
“You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the
ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields
have already been pumped dry.”; “These limitations are not subject to
change, or even to negotiation; they define a predicament that we will
all have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of humanity’s
time on this planet.”; “the fundamental causes of the crisis of modern
industrial civilization can’t be overcome by magic”; “That leaves ritual
as the one remaining option…”; “Magic, to repeat Dion Fortune’s
definition, is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in
accordance with will; if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic.”;
“I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement
in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that
claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is
building around today’s industrial civilization.”; “the core faith of
the age that is passing, the faith that the future will always be better
than the past or present, has become a delusion”; “one to three
centuries of uneven decline until the curve of overshoot and collapse
bottoms out in a dark age that will endure for centuries more”; “It’s
our bad luck to be living at the dawn of the second great wave of
decline to hit Western civilization”; and the Pluto’s Republic account
of the actor-fitness reading of revitalization movements, in which the
movements that reshape their message to attract a large audience “will
inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of
things”. A book whose central claim is that
magic cannot do the thing a hopeful reader wants is carrying a safeguard
most of this material does not. Nothing here is a finding about
the author: that he holds the positions the text states is a
fact about the text; what kind of writer he is, and whether his energy
reading survives, is not decided.
8. What the blog owes
Two, and they are one correction and one gap.
The correction: the mechanism’s far side does not have to be
a person, and this book is the proof. The costume’s boundary rests on an unstated
assumption — that where the mechanism runs, someone is pulling
something. Every case study has had one. The Blood of the Earth
runs the same mechanism with an ontology instead of an
operator — the myth of progress, held nonverbally by the
apparatus the book calls the social self, supplying an appraisal of a
situation the culture cannot read, with no founder and no frame-builder
in it. And it runs the same structure a second time with no
occupant at all — peak oil as predicament, a material process
with no far side, arriving whether or not anyone reads it. Together they
give the blog something it did not have:
The mechanism describes the shape of a misreading, and a
holder is one way to install one. What it requires is an appraisal
supplied from outside the state, not a person to supply it — and the far
side can be a frame with nobody standing in it.
Two consequences follow, and both are narrow. First,
the blog’s account of harm was never a theory of predation, and this
book is the case that shows it: there is a way for a system to be
misread that involves nobody preying on anybody, which means the costume’s boundary can be restated as a
strength rather than a hedge. Second, the
vacancy finding generalises one step beyond the machine has no reading:
there the vacancy was a missing reading, here it is a present
and unowned one.
The refinement: the telos rule gains a rider. The deep inheritance established that
a frame with an endpoint is the precondition for a seat. This book gives
a frame with an endpoint and no seat, at civilisational scale, in the
present tense. The rule survives in one direction and not the other:
A telos is necessary for a seat and not sufficient for one.
What makes an unowned telos dangerous is not the endpoint: it is that
the endpoint leaves a vacancy, and the book’s longest chapter is a
catalogue of who arrives to fill it — the revitalization movement, the
three-part template, the demagogue who arrives inside a frame the target
already holds.
This does not weaken the deep
inheritance’s finding. It completes it: the endpoint is what makes
the position available, and the check is what decides whether
anything predatory stands in it.
And the gap, which is the same gap, in this book’s own
words. Undreaming Wetiko left
the blog with a remedy that is a first-person act and a witness who is
the same person. The Blood of the Earth states the identical
limit as a principle of the art, which makes it harder
to argue with, not easier:
“The wider issue here is that theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by
anyone else. It’s up to the individual.”The Blood of the Earth, “Pluto’s Republic”:
“whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper inevitably turns into
Pluto’s Republic in practice”; “The would-be political thaumaturge, the
person who wants to use magical manipulation to make people do what he
thinks is the right thing, is subject to the same rule.”; “That means,
first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful nonrational drives that
affect most people in much the same way…”; “the political thaumaturge is
always affected by his or her own magic”; “Just as you can’t spread
raspberry jam on toast without getting it on your fingers, in turn, you
can’t spend your time creating words and images that appeal to the
nonrational mind without having your own nonrational mind influenced by
them, and the more potent your thaumaturgy is, the more surely you will
be caught by your own spell.”; “mass thaumaturgy has its own internal
values and limits; there are things that it can do and things that it
can’t, and if you want to achieve a goal that can’t be achieved by
thaumaturgic methods, your only option may be to walk away”; “A would-be
mass movement that pursues a different path will thus reliably find
itself failing to attract members” (the same passage’s following clause
prints “atttract” in the edition; not quoted here); “The social self is
also one of the main vehicles of magic.”; the second horse, “thumos, the
spirited or irascible part of the self, the part that responds
nonrationally to praise or blame from others, and more generally is
guided by the pressures and influences of the community to which the
individual belongs”; “Challenge it – and the concept of peak oil, if
it’s taken seriously, challenges it to the core – and the social self
takes fright and shies away, dragging the chariot and the charioteer
with it, and quite possibly spooking the other horse and sending the
whole kit and caboodle careening down the nearest blind alley.”; “This
is not a new thing, of course, and it’s something that operative mages
have had to deal with in themselves and their students for a very long
time.”; “Initiation is very much subject to readiness factors. The
competent teacher of magic knows that at any given time, some students
are ready for a given grade of initiation and others simply aren’t.”;
“The wider issue here is that theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by
anyone else. It’s up to the individual.”; “There’s a long history of
operative mages and others who have realized that theurgy is only an
option for the individual, and attempted to perform thaumaturgy on their
society as a whole instead.”; and the Theosophical Society material —
Blavatsky’s Esoteric Section; Annie Besant’s turn to a mass movement
around Jiddu Krishnamurti; Krishnamurti’s 1929 dissolution of the Order
of the Star in the East — reported in the chapter as the book’s own
account.
The whole remedy is addressed to one person working on their own
nonrational mind, alone, on purpose, using a tradition’s toolkit. And
the blog’s hardest structural finding — from the mechanism post, the container, the holy heretics and the cosmos that refuses — is that
the instrument which would audit is the instrument under audit, and that
the second reader is the one thing no practitioner can supply for
themselves. This book does not supply it either; it makes the
absence a doctrine. It knows the exit is external — it is the
same book that says “if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic”The Blood of the Earth, “Strange Bright
Banners”: “Revitalization movements emerge when all the practical
options for dealing with a crisis are either unworkable or
unthinkable.”; the standard features — “a thorough critique of the
existing order of society, which is meant to show that the troubles have
occurred because either the people who have suffered from them, or some
other group that’s to blame for them, have misbehaved and brought about
the troubles; a vision of a Utopian future that will arrive right after
the troubles if the right things are done; and a straightforward plan of
action to make the transition from the troubles to the Utopian future”,
with “the one problem with such an appealing program, in every
revitalization movement… is that the plan of action can’t actually
deliver the goods”; “when existing institutions fail and the collective
foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision
of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past
them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what
they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.”; “Ethics are
as important in magic as sanitation is in surgery, and for the same
reason; neglect either one and you can count on things going septic.”;
“You can’t use incantations and rituals, for example, to put oil in the
ground if it was never there in the first place, or if the oil fields
have already been pumped dry.”; “These limitations are not subject to
change, or even to negotiation; they define a predicament that we will
all have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of humanity’s
time on this planet.”; “the fundamental causes of the crisis of modern
industrial civilization can’t be overcome by magic”; “That leaves ritual
as the one remaining option…”; “Magic, to repeat Dion Fortune’s
definition, is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in
accordance with will; if the will isn’t there, neither is the magic.”;
“I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement
in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that
claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is
building around today’s industrial civilization.”; “the core faith of
the age that is passing, the faith that the future will always be better
than the past or present, has become a delusion”; “one to three
centuries of uneven decline until the curve of overshoot and collapse
bottoms out in a dark age that will endure for centuries more”; “It’s
our bad luck to be living at the dawn of the second great wave of
decline to hit Western civilization”; and the Pluto’s Republic account
of the actor-fitness reading of revitalization movements, in which the
movements that reshape their message to attract a large audience “will
inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of
things”. — and it locates the will entirely
in the individual it is trying to save. That is the reading’s gap: a
magician’s manual for a civilisational collapse, with a graded
initiatory frame for the student and nobody named for the practitioner
whose internal work has gone somewhere they cannot see.
9. What a reading is for
A reading holds one source whole — its edition, its structure, its
eschatology, its omissions, its safeguards — and asks what a blog that
has quoted sources all along now has to change.
The case this one brings is the one the blog has
never had: a collapse that arrives through matter, with no one on the
far side. It does not fit the framework, and the honest report is that
the framework was never supposed to fit it. What the book does is
narrower and more useful than a new case study: it shows which half of
the mechanism was load-bearing. The appraisal, not the appraiser.
The refinement is small and real. The split between
a frame with an endpoint and a frame without one survives contact with a
book whose central frame has both an endpoint and no owner. What it
gains is the rider: the endpoint makes the seat available, and the state
of the seat is a separate question — which means the safeguard was never
in the shape of the frame, only in whether anyone could be asked about
the answer.
And the gap is unchanged, three readings after it
first appeared, and this source states it as a rule rather than an
omission, which is worse: theurgy can’t be done for, to, or by anyone
else. It is the individual’s work, and the individual is the one
instrument this series has established cannot audit itself.
Which leaves the reading’s own bottom line. This book’s three
practical verbs — learn one thing, give up one thing, save one thing —
are a program for a person whose situation cannot be reported from
inside it, because the culture that would report it is the culture that
cannot see it. The check cannot come from where the state
is. This source says it in the imperative, at the end of a
manual for a descent, and names nobody standing outside — which is why
the correction here is about who stands on the far side, and the gap
about who holds the far side of a person’s own practice.
Notes
Marking: a reading. Documented — the
edition’s identity and provenance (the copyright page carries the
publisher, the Bibliothèque Rouge banner, the Vernal Equinox 2012 line,
the designer, the printer and the ISBN, quoted at John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An Essay
on Magic and Peak Oil, Scarlet Imprint, published under the
Bibliothèque Rouge banner at the Vernal Equinox 2012 — ISBN
978-0-9567203-8-2. From the edition’s own copyright page: “© John
Michael Greer 2012. Cover artwork by J Henry Fair © 2012”; “Published by
Scarlet Imprint under the Bibliothèque Rouge banner at the Vernal
Equinox 2012. Design and typography © At-Tariq”; “Printed & bound by
CPI Antony Rowe Ltd.” Read from a complete digital text of the edition;
every quotation here was verified character for character against it,
with the source’s typographic single and double quotes rendered as
straight ASCII, its spaced dashes kept as the source sets them,
italic-spacing artefacts normalised, and elisions marked […].
Where a quotation is cited: by chapter title, which is
the address the book’s own running heads use. The chapter sequence at §1
is the edition’s own contents listing: Introduction; Magical Thinking;
Pluto’s Republic; Strange Bright Banners; A Lesson in Practical Magic;
The Path Between the Pillars; The Myth of the Machine; Begin It Now;
Bibliography; Index.);
the chapter sequence, from the edition’s own contents listing; every
quotation in quotation marks, verified character for character against
the digital text and cited by chapter in the notes; and the counts and
absences at Absences and counts, reported as search results
and scoped to the texts searched — and a search shows only what it
indexes. Over the text of this edition,
case-insensitive: “safeguard” 1 (the mass-mind
passage at “Begin It Now”, quoted at [^begin]); “caution”
0; “safety” 2 (Dorothy Martin’s flight
to safety aboard flying saucers, “Strange Bright Banners”; “a margin of
safety in hard times”, “Begin It Now”); “psychiatr” 0;
“clinician” 0; “therap” 0; “suicide”
0; “emergency” 0; “psychosis”
0; “sanity” 0; “mental health”
0; “premature” 0; “too soon”
0; “breakdown” 1 (the breakdown of a
civilization); “catabolic” 0; “EROEI”
0; “energy returned” 0; “singularity”
0; “net energy” 1; “thermodynamic”
2; “Rapture” 2 (one of them the
index); “Space Brothers” 4 (one of them the index).
Over the texts of the blog’s published posts: “peak oil”
0; “deindustrial” 0; “fossil fuel”
0; “EROEI” 0; “net energy”
0; “thermodynamic” 0; “thaumaturgy”
0; “revitalization” 0; “John Michael
Greer” 1 (the revisor credit in the western column’s note on the Golden
Dawn edition); “theurgy” 9 (five in geosophia, four in two esoteric tarots). The absence of a
clinical referral is a report about a text, not about its author, and it
is not a claim that anyone’s practice was harmed., reported as search results and
scoped to the texts searched. Inferred, as this post’s
— §3’s reading of the social self and the unowned myth as a far side
with nobody standing on it, and the structural claim that the mechanism
requires an appraisal rather than a holder; §4’s rider on the deep inheritance’s telos rule, and
its reading of the revitalization template as a vacancy being filled;
§5’s comparison of the two blind spots in the machine frame, and the
finding that they are the same finding at two levels; §6’s report of the
seam in “magical thinking” and the half-of-a-distinction finding at
“theurgy”/“thaumaturgy”; and §8’s two corrections. Not
adjudicated — the peak-oil case in either direction, and
whether magic causes anything at all. The book’s theses are not
endorsed: this post takes no position on the energy debate and
none on the magic claim, and §7 states what would count as evidence for
each. The counterweight is in the body at §7: the book
is a polemic by a practising magician, its central causal claim is a
diagnosis of motive rather than a measurement, its practice-level
safeguards are quoted and its clinical referral is absent and is
reported as a search result. No living author is
diagnosed, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or
restricts anyone’s practice.