[Main Blog Post] The Open-Minded Materialist's Gentle Introduction to Spirituality

[jprussell]

I've written my first "full" blog post of the year and posted it to my main blog here. If you have any thoughts or ways I might make it better, kindly let me know by commenting here or dropping me an email!

Comments

[deketemoisont]

Yeah, sam[]zdat linked to Hotel Concierge at least once. A series on Technics & Civilization does sound appealing, but my podcast consumption has been approaching 0. Steiner: yeah, need to read something by him - unfortunately, not someone I can e-mail! (Which book?)

"recommendations from his commentariat" - JMG's, not Steiner's? :P Yes, the recommendations there are very good fairly often, but not much on other occultists; I wasn't aware about how close to occultism Christopher Alexander might get, and I thought wrathofgnon (whose Substack I read) was some kind of pseudo-conservative, not-that-interesting, Christian, religion-wise?

The ones I could mention that come closest (none scratches JMG by volume; I might consider arguing some have written at similar quality sometimes) - and I do imagine you already heard about a bunch:

- Ceisiwr Serith's site and YouTube channel have material on Indo-European culture(s); also, he's (surprisingly for a Neopagan?) a US patriot I thought had some good stuff to say on that;
- I'd say Don Webb (former Temple of Set leader, only in books), Ivy Bromius ( circlethrice.com ), and Jason Miller all have written good personal/social/professional advice, that you'd need no interest in occultism to appreciate (Jason got a favorable review of Financial Sorcery from a personal finance blog with no occult aspect), but I think Ivy's the only one with a blog containing articles you could point to someone with no occult interest (assuming they don't run from a sidebar containing "Magic");
- (sometime Ecosophia commenter) Kenaz Filan did the above, plus some cultural commentary I found correct if not that hard to find elsewhere;
- Gordon White, IMO, is the only one with a fairly extensive body of non-occult writing - I haven't been reading him of late, but I did like a bunch of his articles;
- John R. King IV's ( imperialarts.livejournal.com ) blogging is always occult, but I consider it just about always relevant to non-occult activity (since he's known for talking about *evoking demons*, I figure I should link to https://imperialarts.livejournal.com/13280.html and https://imperialarts.livejournal.com/18341.html ).

(Of those, *maybe* White, Bromius, and Serith are presentable to people without occult interests ...)

[jprussell]

1) On Hotel Concierge - I've been chugging through the archive since your recommendation, and the comparison to sam[]zdat was apt - a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses, and insights in similar areas. I just finished reading The Tower, and yeah, that's gonna have to get integrated into my thinking about aesthetics.

2a) Yeah, I agree that I've been a bit disappointed on finding other contemporary occultists via JMG and his commentariat, except sometimes in the form of book recommendations - such as JMG's recent link to the Humoral Herbal, which looks very promising, but is not written in an area I have time to take on right now.

2b) On Christopher Alexander, wrathofgnon, and similar, don't really get much into religion, much less occultism, but both are examples of folks who aren't afraid to bring values, and sometimes even "spirituality" into the discussion. The closest Christopher Alexander gets to directly writing about the spiritual is his four part book series "The Nature of Order", which I have but have only glanced through. I don't know if he would have had a literally spiritual explanation, or a fundamentally materialist one that shook out to "acting spiritual". As for wrathofgnon, he approvingly quotes G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and openly admires cathedrals, so I suspect he's some flavor of Tradcath, or at least appreciates what they're about, but he doesn't tend to get directly into spiritual matters, more just adjacent, by talking about beauty and quoting folks who make more explicit connections, like Sir Roger Scruton.

3) I read The Way of Initiation by Steiner, as recommended by JMG as a good starting point. I also listened to a bunch of Hermitix podcast episodes interviewing folks interested in Steiner (one academic who wrote his disertation about him and one guy at the less-fundamentalist end of active Anthroposophy).

4a) Ah, I have Cesiwr Serith's A Book of Pagan Prayer and have gotten some use there, so I'll have to check out his other work.

4b) All three of these are new to me, so thank you!

4c) I recognize Kenaz Filan's name, but haven't checked out any of his own writings

4d) I enjoyed the "Rune Soup" interview with JMG and branched out to a few others, such as him interviewing Rune Rasmussen (Nordic Animism) and Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk). He sounded like someone capable of having a reasonable disagreement about this kind of stuff, which is itself a rare and valuable skill

4e) Thanks for the specific links, I enjoyed those and from them King sounds reasonable and like he's focused on the right things, which I wouldn't have expected if you or someone else had just said "oh, he writes about the Goetia".

5) ::smacks forehead:: I completely forgot to mention the very person who first sent me down the rabbit hole of "you make a lot of sense in other areas, and now you're talking about magic?" which was Eric S. Raymond, hacker of the old school. Unsurprisingly, most of his stuff is about tech, but he's also an enthusiastic libertarian and gun nut. More surprisingly, he apparently does/used to engage in Neopagan/Wiccan rituals from a "this is all just a non-obvious way to get certain things out of my subconscious" materialist standpoint. He has written about that far less than his other subjects, but he has this FAQ and this essay which for a long time served as my beachhead in the world of the occult, though my approach has moved rather far from here over the years.

[deketemoisont]

Forgot to say: I do see a lot to like about Peterson. Barely started 12 Rules for Life, intend to take a not-so-short look at Maps of Meaning to decide whether I should read all of it someday, know mostly his class videos - man, he used to be HAPPY.

"I've been chugging through the archive since your recommendation, (...) and yeah, that's gonna have to get integrated into my thinking about aesthetics."

I'm pretty sure that's a serious contender for nicest thing that could be said to me. Thank you. (And here I don't see/mean "nice" as an insult!)

Regarding JMG's commentariat - there's the obvious factor that it disproportionately has people who began occultism thanks to him (but that includes me, and I got some familiarity with a substantial number of authors not particularly linked to him), but, if I may: I at least 99% believe JMG when he says he doesn't want a cult and took (partially working) measures against it, but there's definitely a non-0 amount of echoing going on (unavoidable with someone who did so much, I'm pretty sure). I seldom mention other occult books on Magic Monday, even about subjects that are asked about specifically, for lack of qualification.

The Humoral Herbal is great - I need to get me some pots (it's not only herbalism, of course). I was about to ask you whether you'd read The Nature of Order. Thanks for confirming I didn't miss something *big* about wrathofgnon. King IV definitely's had his screw-ups, but he does seem to me to go in the right direction.

I got the ESR article link from your article already, in case I hadn't already read him; what I don't remember is whether I first read Dancing With The Gods before or after a large amount of Archdruid Report - not sure what I'd have thought before (JMG's history of ideas was *well* within the things I thought I could evaluate myself, and I think more closely linked to his occultism than ESR's to his hacking). And it's just the one article and the FAQ - should I go ask him to write an occult book?

[jprussell]

1) On Peterson: I had vaguely heard of Maps of Meaning, I think maybe via ESR, then a friend shared a "clean your room" video, and then I started hearing about all the controversy, so I did a deep dive - read all of Maps of Meaning, taking pretty extensive notes, listened to every lecture and podcast he had put out by that point (2018-2019-ish?). I found him very helpful at the time, and these days I see him as most helpful as a) a reasonably good intro to/map of Jung and Jungian thinking, and b) a good source for highlighting links between big, influential thinkers like Nietzsche and Jung, and between the sciencey-er side of psychology and the humanities-er side. 12 Rules for Life was alright, but I had already listened to so many of his lectures by the time I read it that not much was new, and I haven't read Beyond Order yet. I think Maps of Meaning is likely far more interesting/helpful for making sense of how psychology works, but it's also a lot less concrete, and already knowing what he's on about makes a lot of it easier to digest. From an extremely uncharitable review a friend of mine shared with me, I realized that a lot of the description/diagrams are so simplified/schematic as to be not-actually-helpful unless you have a pretty good feel for a lot of the complexity they're pointing to. For example, reducing all of "Chaos" to "Good Mother and Devouring Mother" doesn't do much on its own, but gives valuable insights once you know what those mean and start applying them automatically to feminine figures in myths and stories.

Incidentally, a previous draft of this post had a lot more of my "how I got here" in it, and included the fact that Peterson's Genesis lectures were 1) incomprehensible to me when I tried to watch them as the first thing of his I had seen, and then 2) a very useful step in my process of realizing "oh, maybe there's some there there when it comes to religion". And oh yeah, seeing happy, jokey JBP was pretty weird after some of his portrayal as angriest man on the planet or his own grimness in some more recent stuff.

2) Well, I ended up reading every post in the archive of Hotel Concierge instead of doing other work I should have been doing, and my assessment stands - a lot there that is consonant in places with other thinking I have found helpful, a lot of helpfully different takes on stuff I care about, and a handful of "huh, I never thought of that" moments, so thank you again for the recommendation. I'm just sad he hasn't posted anything new in so long.

3) On JMG's commentariat, yeah, you're definitely right there. Even if everyone involved were utterly devoid of hero-worship, sycophantism, in-group policing, or the other shitty behaviors of cults of personality (and as you say, it very much is free to a blessed degree of such things), there's a lack of other vectors of potentially relevant information, and that's sad. Because even if all the information shared is great, there's still got to be vast swathes of interesting stuff from people and fields that just happen not to have noticed JMG or vice versa.

4) Oh, hah, I hadn't forgotten to mention that influence from ESR after all! And I'm not sure on ESR writing an occult book - if you had asked me 5 or 6 years ago I would have said "HELL YES!" I think if you do a site-search of his blog for a few juicy search terms like "neopagan", "ritual", "zen", or "meditation" and then look through the comment threads, he's maybe said a touch more on his thinking, but the basic impression I get is that he is firmly in the little-r "rationalist" camp, has scorn for "mysterians" (folks who believe in non-material causes that affect material reality), and evaluates any "mystic practices" (his seemingly preferred term) on their compatibility with that worldview. Further, he's made a few comments that make it seem like they're not a huge focus for him - he does zazen for its clarity and serenity, occasional neopagan rituals for the emotional fulfillment and bonding, and that's most of what I can remember him talking about. The adjacent topics where I think he might be most interesting would be his epistemology and his experience with altered awareness in martial arts.

[deketemoisont]

1) "an extremely uncharitable review a friend of mine shared with me" - Do you remember how to find it?

"Incidentally, a previous draft of this post had a lot more of my "how I got here" in it" - And why did you go to the trouble of cutting it? :) (OK, it may've been too personal.)

"happy, jokey JBP (...) angriest man on the planet" - I saw the first first - and his largely female students (or at least the ones laughing were largely female, but we know how it is in psychology these days) laughing at his jokes - clearly a man who despises women and beats his wife and daughter every day, you know!

2) "Well, I ended up reading every post in the archive of Hotel Concierge instead of doing other work I should have been doing" - Sorry for that part!

"I'm just sad he hasn't posted anything new in so long." - Same here.

3) "there's still got to be vast swathes of interesting stuff from people and fields that just happen not to have noticed JMG or vice versa." - I think that for other occultists using the Internet in English, to not have noticed JMG at all is pretty hard; but for us to get something through his blogs, it'd be a matter of him noticing the others (much easier for him not to, maintaining large conversations with his own readers and preferring to read dead people), or his readers (about which I commented previously).

4) "the basic impression I get is that he is firmly in the little-r "rationalist" camp, has scorn for "mysterians" (folks who believe in non-material causes that affect material reality), and evaluates any "mystic practices" (his seemingly preferred term) on their compatibility with that worldview" - You think I wouldn't take a book on magic from someone with that perspective (sure, not my ideal these days) as smart and unconventional as he is?

"they're not a huge focus for him" - Yes, that's true; however, he supposedly invented some Wicca stuff back then, some of which he might still use sometimes? (A Wiccan I'd listen to! OK, JMG's commentariat has at least 2 - ritaer and Deborah Bender.)

"epistemology and his experience with altered awareness in martial arts" - Well, and if *that* is the non-hacking subject he could be convinced to write a book about ... it's not as if Meditations on Violence isn't one of my (even on a very short list) favorite books.

[jprussell]

1) It was "The Intellectual We Deserve" from Current Affairs, a quick search of my text message history tells me.

2) Naw, that's fine, I think it was worth it

3) Fair enough, though I've adopted something of a heuristic like "folks I'm interested in probably aren't as well-known as I assume" - obviously that applies less within their particular field, but sometimes I'm surprised, like I meet a science fiction fan that's never heard of Neal Stephenson.

4) Yeah, I'd also still be thrilled to read such a book, I just reckon I'd find it far less helpful than I would have five or six years ago.

And hah! Meditations on Violence is great. I don't know how short a list of favorite books it would go on, and I haven't read it in like 10 years, but I remember it being great. I'd also pre-order an ESR book on such topics the moment I could.

[deketemoisont]

Thanks for the link!