Hail and welcome. I started working on an essay addressing the ongoing Israel-Hamas war shortly after fighting broke out in mid-October. I was initially hesitant to tackle the topic but it’s a compelling force in current events and I wanted to understand more about it. These essays serve as focal points and expositions of such…
Tag: history
Reflections on the Eve of Insanity
On October 7th of this year, Hamas militants, in coordination with other Palestinian militias, launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza, planned in part by Iran (Said, Faucon, & Kalin, 8 Oct 2023), resulting in at least 800 civilian deaths and many hundreds of additional military deaths, though the exact numbers are heavily disputed….
German Parallels to American Fascism
In this essay, we’ll see some striking and deeply troubling parallels to Germany in the 1920s, parallels which should be of grave concern to anyone who doesn’t want to see genocidal fascists take control of the most powerful economy and military in the history of the world.
The Dialectic of Christian Fascism
Today I’ll be arguing that this progression is amplified by a dialectic within certain threads of modern Christianity, an internal contradiction that pushes those threads further and further in a fascist direction.
The Lessons of Ancient Egypt
What can Ancient Egypt tell us about the development of religion and civilization? The answer is: a great deal, more than I could possibly fit into a single episode. As part of a broader research project into economics, I’ve been studying various histories, and the history of Ancient Egypt has been particularly fascinating and informative. One of the world’s earliest civilizations, it extends over 3000 years of history, from the Bronze Age and through the Iron Age into classical antiquity. As I mentioned in a recent episode, the Great Pyramid was more ancient to Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, than Cleopatra is to us.
A Brief History of Magic and the Western Esoteric Tradition
The questions I’m aiming to answer are one, whether there are any phenomena like electromagnetism which might be considered magic if we considered their properties independently of their realness (in other words, whether there are any other forms of type K pseudomagic beyond electromagnetism and whether there are any forms of type N pseudomagic at all); and two, if magical practices might be incorporated into personal religious belief and practice in a non-realist way (whether type P pseudomagic is viable, in other words). But first I’ll need to figure out more about what magic is.
American Mythology: John Locke and Natural Law
The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is one of the most important names in modern philosophy. Following Descartes, he is often taken to be the second major philosopher of the modern era. Additionally, his philosophy was of particular influence on early American political thought, and he was even involved in the design of one of the colonial American governments, that of Carolina. Today, I’ll be looking at his philosophy, and to what degree contemporary America is living up to or failing to live up to his ideals, whether that’s even something we should be aiming for in the first place, and why all of this is relevant to us as Satanists and to American Satanists in particular.
American Mythology: Conquest and Colonization
Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be shifting the focus of my work towards more political matters, applying the way I approach problems in general to the historical and contemporary political situations in the United States, and the mythology that surrounds them. In order to ground my work in this area in its historical context, the specific matter I’ll be discussing today will be the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans, which began in the late 15th century.
The Two Christianities
A Satanist Reads the Bible is getting big enough that I’m starting to get requests for topics, and one of the requests I’ve gotten a few times now is to do an examination of different denominations of the Christian religion. I think that this is an excellent choice for a topic.
A Satanist Reads the Qur’an
I want to know why Islam has been so successful, seemingly more so than any other modern religion, in convincing people to abandon this world for some other world and to construct what remains of them in this life around what awaits them in the next. I would know, is this truly what Muhammad intended? As much as I have fallen in love with the mystical Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez, and as much as I respect Islam’s singularity of vision, I see this religion as one of the greatest fonts of nihilism in the modern world. Is this nihilism reflected in the religion’s sacred texts? Are these texts misunderstood and misrepresented in Islam as Christian and Jewish texts are in their respective religions?