A new article was recently written exploring the influence of Rene Guenon on Steve Bannon. This article actually does give a fairly good short summary of the ideas of the late great Rene Guenon, despite misrepresenting Julius Evola. I haven’t really paid much attention to Guenon or Evola since coming to graduate school. Yet I […]
Poetry, Imagination, and Higher Consciousness
The American poet William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963) began his authorship with imagist poems and quirky mixtures of prose and verse like Spring and All (1923), which intersperses paragraphs of speculation concerning poetry, consciousness, and the world with seemingly improvised but in reality carefully composed verse-effusions that attempt an audacious transformation of the banal […]
The Many Sacred Veils: Language and Esotericism in Initiation
The significance of a word in translation is often the consequence of a considered and deliberate attempt to either metaphrase or paraphrase a given text. C.D.C Reeve states in his preface to G.M.A Grube’s 1974 translation of Plato’s Republic that ‘one and the same Greek word may have many different meanings and different Greek words […]
Time Cube: A Forgotten Word Virus
In the heyday of Geocities and American Online stood another titan of Internet lore. No, not the hallowed pages of Xanga, nor the graphic wonderland of Oregon Trail. It was a simple website crafted by an aged man in a stream of consciousness style formatted in a single column of text. This site was the […]
Sulfur, Salt, and Mercury: An Initiatic Guide to The Lesser Mysteries
The Initiate to Freemasonry is left alone to contemplate the subject of reality, death, life and truth. There is only a small glimmering light barely illuminating his surrounding. The initiate looks around. There is no one. He is alone in the bosom of mother earth. He is like a child in the womb, like a […]
Actor Turned Psychic; Setting Out on The Path of Magic
Only your own deep need to salvage something from the void—to act or to write or to create— can keep you from the commonplace and from dying out…. Be careful what happens to your talent. – Stella Adler. Let’s start out with a juicy magical story. During my woebegone days as an actor, I tried to […]
Adventures On The Magical Path
What a magical neighborhood I grew up in! There was magic everywhere – but don’t all children create magic out of their surroundings? The fireflies at dusk were secretly fairies; the nuns in white were secretly ghosts; and the woods behind us were definitely enchanted. And all the while the large Star of David from […]
Polydimensional Spirituality From Antiquity to Modernity
For the past 20 years, various statistical agencies, social scientists and concerned clergy have reported the increasing trend of Americans identifying themselves as “Spiritual but Not Religious”. The term itself is attributed to author, Sven Erlandson (Erlandson, 2000) and usually describes a person that does not adhere to any particular religious dogma but still believes […]
Sex, Movies, and Traditionalism on Mars
Christopher Mihm is a Minnesota-based producer and director of radically inexpensive, independently financed entertainment films whose gimmick is that they disguise the impoverishment of their production values by mimicking the low-budget, black-and-white “B” science-fiction films of the 1950s – and they do so with fairly consistent comedic brilliance. Mihm came on the scene in 2006 […]