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The Ritual Roots of Animism, Drama and Sports: The Work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists
My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers, Part II
Orientation Summing up Part I My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers
Orientation One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most […]
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Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans
Orientation Mythology and folklore can be used for political and religious purposes whether they be to support socialism or fascism. What was going on at the end of the 19th century politically and in the 1930s that made mythology so attractive to both German and French fascists? Why did the imagined gods of the Indo-Europeans […]
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Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans
Orientation Purpose of this article Almost 2 years ago I wrote an article called Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age based on the work of Robert Ellwood (The Politics of Myth). In it Ellwood showed the conservative nature of popular mythologists Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. My purpose was to show how […]
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The Irrational “Greed” of Geriatric Plutocrats
In his book Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud indulged in a speculative scenario for the origins of society. Everyone, young and old alike, once lived together in a “primal horde”– ruled by an aging, domineering father-figure, who selfishly monopolized the women for his own satisfaction. But one day (so to speak), the deprived “sons” defiantly […]
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Jean Houston’s Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self
Orientation How I came across Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self […]
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The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I
Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, […]
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Sea Monsters Threaten the World With Their Tridents
Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days. I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the […]
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Edgar Morin and the Magical Origins of Stardom
No one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist…Whenever there is a white screen in a black room a new religion has been established…We enter into the darkness of an artificial grotto. A luminous dust is projected and dances on a screen. We cross time and space, until some solemn music dissolves the […]
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