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Current Music: Will Ackerman, "What the Buzzard Told Suzanne"

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Magic Monday

It's a little past midnight, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

(The image? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

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The Danger of Living Provisionally

The Christians are not OK, and the latest evidence of this is a Rapture that was supposed to arrive by September 23 or 24, 2025. A man in South Africa had a vision that the Rapture would arrive with this year’s Feast of Trumpets (whatever that is) and Rosh Hashanah. More than a few American Christians took this prediction as a new gospel, walking away from their jobs, selling their cars, (allegedly) giving their children to DCFS, attempting to arrange permanent caretakers for their pets, and generally flocking to social media with the good news that they were going away.

The internet could not resist such delectable cringe, and naturally there were at least five parodies for every two-cent Rapturetok influencer who assailed the general public with smug, fake tears about the glorious future that only applied to them and a few other saved souls. Predictably, Kingdom Come failed to arrive on schedule, the loudest of the crows deleted their TikToks in shame, and many more kicked the Rapture can down the road, re-setting the date for another arbitrary goalpost.

For me, September 23 was just another equinox marked by my usual solitary, occult hygiene practices and unusually lovely weather. I worked that day. I made lunch. My husband made dinner. I swept the floor and washed dishes. I did yard work. Mainstream media exploited September 23 for its various psyops and mass hypnosis attempts. I ignored all of it.

Tomorrow never comes

The term provisional living was the Jungian analyst H.G. Baynes, who used it to describe a special sort of immaturity in an adult person. Jung thought of provisional living as an aspect of Puer aeternus, the inner child who, like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up. Jung described provisional living as “the modern European disease of the merely imaginary life” and considered it a form of neurosis. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Jung about provisional living being a form of immaturity, it is also contains a misguided form of discipline which has more to do with Senex than Puer. I also think it is a dire mistake to think of provisional living as confined to the West.

The essence of a provisional life is to wait. Those who live provisionally cannot truly enjoy the now. The current moment is always a bridge (a broken, precarious structure at that) between yesterday and a far more exciting future.

In order to talk about the latest Rapture misfire, it is useful to understand that it is one in a long series that neither began nor ended with William Miller, the 19th century Protestant preacher who had his own vision of the world ending on October 22, 1844. Biblical-literalist Miller crowed about the Second Coming from 1831 onward, garnering a crowd of approximately 100,000 believers who sold their belongings, walked away from prosperous farms, and threw their lives under the bus in order to join his doomsday cult. Newspapers and the penny press (yesteryear’s equivalent of tabloids) had a field day satirizing Miller and his movement, calling him out for personally profiting from his lectures and lambasting his devotees as future insane asylum patients.

I wish the Rapturetok people had done a tiny bit of digging on Google to discover the story of the Millerites. The aftermath of Miller’s failed prophecies was called the Great Disappointment. The Great Disappointment gathered too much steam to go out with a whimper, and the massive egregore it grew ended up birthing both the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Adventists and the Witnesses are proselytizing doomsday cults that are remarkable among mainstream religions (this is a real achievement considering their competition) for their prolific abuse of children and the rampant, barely-contained psychoses of their congregants. I have yet to meet an Adventist or a JW who is not deeply unwell, and more often than not, they are plagued with provisional living that comes from their religion’s fetishization of a golden city that is always a few weeks, months, or years in the future.

Coronapocalypse: when faith fails, make your own Rapture

The Left cannot help to imitate what it hates. The Left, headed by a bunch of psychopathic gay luxury communists, fomented its own Rapture in the form of overreaction to a manufactured virus that was said to have “escaped” LOL from a lab into a nearby Wuhan wet market. The crazy thing about the Coronapocalypse is it almost worked, mainly because it delivered Rapture to a small set of lucky, upper-middle class people in the form of home confinement and telecommuting.

In lieu of a New Jerusalem, the Bathroom Class got to stay home while the masked, lumpen proletariat delivered their pad thai to them by car. Unlike those gullible Christians, the Bathroom Class got their Paradise immediately, paid for by the suffering and disenfranchisement of regular people who lost their businesses, those who stroked out from the mandatory vaccine and lost their jobs anyway, and those who were not allowed to enter the hospital to hold grandfather’s hand one last time as he passed out of this world into the next. Their City of God was the living room, binge watching Netflix on the flat screen as the world burned. Their baptism rite was the Covid vaccine. Their altars were any screen with an internet connection.

Coronapocalypse actually delivered, and that is why it had to be stretched out. At first it was three weeks to flatten the curve; this quickly morphed into three years. They pretended the apocalypse had not yet truly happened while it was ongoing. Situations were always being depicted as worsening even while nurses and doctors had ample time to choreograph elaborate dance routines in empty hospitals. Even while they luxuriated in stimulus money that for them was not exactly the difference between living and dying, they lived provisionally, anxiously awaiting the real luxury communism revolution when Covid rules went permanent, everybody had Universal Basic Income, and all of life’s necessities were delivered mysteriously and magically to one’s door by drone. They remained an anxious lot, quaffing copious Zoom-doctor-prescribed antidepressants (among other substances) and trying to squelch/outrun that nagging feeling that something was very, very wrong.

The moral of the story is that some people will never be happy in the moment no matter how many goodies they acquire.

Not just for kids

Like I said earlier in this essay, it is a mistake to think of living provisionally as a hundred percent childish. It’s not all Puer all the time. There is quite a bit of Senex in provisional living, because it involves imposing strict limits upon oneself to satisfy the requirements of the future. Jung attributes provisional living to Puer and the element of air because of its rootlessness and Puer’s dislike of commitment, but I would argue provisional living is all about commitment. The commitment of living provisionally is not to the world around them, nor is it to live in the moment, no matter how hedonistic some of them may be. The focus of someone who lives provisionally is laser-accurate — it’s on the future. The future is what drives them above and beyond normal limits. The future is what causes them to abuse and neglect their children. It is why they are terrible to all of the people around them and why they do not appreciate anything or anyone they have. It is why they are all signal and no virtue. They are always putting the current moment on layaway for the future, and 99.9 percent of the time, they die paying for a product they never get to put their hands on and enjoy.

I knew a religious woman for whom the disease of provisional living was incurable and acute. She lusted for an Apocalypse that never arrived, goaded on by the Protestant Christian cult that told her it was on a nearby horizon. She had loved ones, half of whom she alienated with provisional living behavioral tics such as conning relatives into buying her large ticket items and then selling those items to people who lived in her apartment complex. She was always on the make with such schemes, and when she was not preoccupied with interfamily con jobs, she was complaining about her aches, pains, and other horrors of age. She did not complain about the Rapture. For one day, she was confident she would be scooped up to the clouds with the other chosen ones to sit at the right hand of Jesus. She would be without pain and made perfect as she sat next to her Creator.

Strangely, when she got old, she was afraid to die. Though she had fantasized about rejoining the other side since girlhood, when the time finally came, she was absolutely terrified.

Putting the mori into hikikomori

The provisional life is full of fantasy, and it is not of a sort that winds up being productive. The future can never be real because it is always out of reach, and the provisional life takes place in the future, whether that is the Golden City of the Rapture or some other place. I am not a fan of video games (a.k.a. games) because they take Puer’s infantile fantasy of a perfect, idyllic world and make it real enough and full of dopamine triggers that keep him or her trapped and useless until he or she is a hikikomori — still technically alive but otherwise dead in almost every meaningful sense of the term.

The provisional life is full of excuses. When those truly affected with provisional living syndrome have jobs, it is either by some nepotistic/convenient miracle or it is an extremely temporary condition. They cannot stand to work because work takes them away from their intoxicating fantasy worlds. We cannot claim that the provisional life is for the lazy; actually it takes more work to live under threat of homelessness because of dedication to an absurd dream than to stay on the straight and narrow and collect a reliable paycheck. I saw one provisional Puella Aeternis bounce through several homes (one paid for in cash by her father) until she died homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. She never gave up hanging out at the goth clubs though, no matter how sick or immobile she became.

Jung suggests Puers get a job — any job — and to stick with it no matter how bad or unsuitable, in order to break the cycle. I wonder if he ever got any of his patients to do this, and if so, how did it work out?

The Rapture, or whatever ideal lies just down the line, in the afterworld, or next life, keeps its victim saying “not yet, not now”. There is no point in getting anything done or investing any part of one’s real self in a human relationship because it is all an illusion and it is all temporary. I have no idea what ancient Gnostics were like nor do I have any way of speculating, but if they were like the modern day black-pilled crew who think the world is run by evil Archons, they are annoying gits. It’s not worthy of them being genocided of course, but I can at understand the impulse. There is an element of holier-than-thou about provisional living — if only we denizens of the “real” world could measure up to the lowliest NPCs of the fantasy, the gameworld, or the Golden City, then the hikikomori would come back down to Earth and join the living again.

The Great Awakening

I barf a little in my mouth when I see the term "Great Awakening" in print, and I truly do not like to vomit. Humans are never going to collectively ascend because humans are not that bright of a species. We are somewhere in the lower middle between plankton and angels, and with the huge influx of animal souls into our teeming, nearly 10 billion large population, we are not getting smarter anytime soon. Humans have been engaging in the same stupid foibles since our beginnings in trees and grasslands as recent ex-chimpanzees. We have always formed groups and violently raided other groups for resources just as our chimp cousins like to do; we are actually more stupid about it now because we have nuclear weapons. Everyone from dippy-hippie-trippy New Agers to New Right podcasters thinks we are on the precipice of mass enlightenment, and this merely proves that spiritual retardation is at its all-time worst.

This is the most materialistic age the Earth has ever seen. There is only one thing special about our era, and that is how decidedly obtuse most people have become to the subtle planes. We live in an age of spiritual leprosy where almost everyone, including myself, is born with a set of spiritual impediments that shut us out of the kind of self-development past mystics were able to take for granted.

The Native Americans found this out quite horribly when white men marched on them, took their land, and were able to wipe out their civilizations with betrayal and smallpox. Their magic failed them and not for lack of trying. The strength of materialism and capitalist greed proved to be stronger magic, at least for the time being. Materialist enchantments still hold the land and will not let go until the last plane falls from the sky and the last car sputters to a halt on the last intact asphalt road. That time is coming and with it, the old ways will re-establish themselves. They are not coming in great proliferation anytime soon; this is not the cycle for them. Living for that era is not a good idea because it is a long way off.

People who live provisionally are jerks

Living provisionally is expensive, both literally and figuratively. When a person does not consider pulling their own weight as important as say, going to the club, playing the latest Roblox game, or being at home during the scheduled time allotted to this year's Rapture, everyone around her is going to have to work double time in order to keep her afloat. I wrinkle my nose in disgust whenever I pass a certain recently rebuilt McMansion in my old hometown. I know the McMansion’s owner: she is the mother of a drunk/drug addict. I am pretty certain she had an attached guest house built for her ne’er-do-well child so that child can pretend to live an adult life while staying regularly inebriated and sleeping until 3:38pm. There is a young mother on TikTok who ought to be more concerned that she was fired from her job after fervently praying to be home on September 23 and trying to take time off that her boss would not allow. My friend who died homeless in LA often acted like a deranged stalker if a band she liked came to town.

There are many Rapturetok believers who clearly were not about to take their pets or children with them when they were to be swept away by Jesus. That sort of perversion takes both an unwillingness to commit to children and pets and an extreme commitment to some random South African dude’s vision. Being a jerk takes commitment, and let's not even go into what Coronapocalypse believers were willing to do in order to extend stay-at-home mandates.

Guilty!

You don’t have to be a Rapturetok, Millerite, or a Covidiot cultist to live provisionally; not by a long shot. If you’ve ever fantasized about gaining a windfall, winning the lottery, or “making it”, you've probably been a victim of the provisional lifestyle. If you have ever held on to a piece of clothing that does not fit because you have delusions of losing weight, you have lived provisionally. If you have ever stayed with someone you hate because he or she was "good enough" until you got someone better, you have lived provisionally. Living provisionally is miserable. I know this from personal experience.

To my own chagrin, it has taken me over a half century to understand that I too make the mistake of living provisionally, and to add insult to injury, I still do it. My entire youth was misspent in princess/girlboss fantasies egged on by my own milieu’s demented secular religion of Disney movies (this is back when they were good), sitcoms, magazines, pop music, public schools, and other forms of upper-middle class conditioning. I was taught that going to college would fulfill all my dreams, and though I survived intact, it did not deliver anything near what it promised.
I have credit card debt that is the direct result of taking on expenses I had faith I would one day easily pay off. The day has come for me to pay off my debts and it has not been easy. I have had to train myself to go to the bathroom when nature calls, because I am the sort of dumbass who ignores her own biological signals in order to stay in whatever zone I am in, whether that is work or play. To ignore the need to pee because a task “needs to get done” or because some important person cannot be interrupted is profoundly stupid and a form of living provisionally — “I will listen to my body’s needs someday when I am not so beholden to others”. Ugh...It’s garbage. Listen to your body now, not someday.

I wish these were the only examples of times I have lived provisionally… No, they are not, and I have many that are much, much worse. In order to stop living provisionally, we must first catch ourselves doing it and recognize it as a defense mechanism.

Provisional living is a defense. To live provisionally is an attempt to protect oneself from the “real” world that is perceived as hostile, horrible, and disappointing. The Great Disappointment was a fascinating and apt term because the truth of living provisionally is disappointment. The woman I mentioned who lived for a Rapture that never came, yet was afraid of death, is someone who lived in constant disappointment. Nothing on this planet was good enough for the likes of her, and the second it was, she tried to sell it or whined about how long it would take to get more. People who live in disappointment die in disappointment: the goofy idea among provisional livers that the state of death changes consciousness that is simply untrue. The karma of being constantly disappointed is to continue being disappointed until you learn not to be disappointed.

Once again, the solution is simple but not easy: gratitude. There is only one way to extricate oneself from aspects of Meatworld life being so consistently disappointing and that is to take yourself out of the Roblox game, to exit the Society for Creative Anachronism LARPs, to rip yourself out of the visions of your sandaled feet on streets paved with precious gemstones with that entity pretending to be Jesus, and to start appreciating what you have, exactly where you have it.

That means staying with your job as long as they will tolerate you, reframing the relationship with your children and mate as permanent and not just a stop on a way station going somewhere better, and thanking the bed you sleep upon. It means being thankful for the strip mall being open when you need a quick snack instead of being full of anger that it is ugly and used to be a lovely field of wildflowers before it was paved over. It means sweeping your floor in the morning and washing your own dishes. It means replacing the urge to escape with the determination of making the best out of what is here and now. It means seeing the good in what is all around you and being thankful for what you have. It means being humble and not feeling that the world owes you a living. It means you have to stop asking God for favors and then pretending the small signs you are being given are meant to fulfill your wishes. It means understanding that the will of God is not going to be what you want exactly when you want it.

Being grateful is extremely hard work and it takes great determination. It is worth it. Life begins when you stop living provisionally. Life begins when you get rid of the old stuff you no longer use. Life begins when you go to the bathroom when you need to go. Life begins when you hang the ugly wallpaper merely because it makes you happy. Life begins when you stop waiting for someone else to clean your room and make your bed and do it your damn self. Life begins when you say “thank you” instead of planning your escape.

Entry tags:

ogham,
readings

Ogham Readings on Saturdays

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from October 23 - November 6.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal. If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: George Winston, "Longing/Love"

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Frugal Friday

Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc. I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

Rule #5: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm.

With that said, have at it!

Current Mood: giddy
Current Music: Yes, "Heart of the Sunrise"

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The Forbidden Tome of All Forbidden Tomes

...or at least it looks like that. The deluxe limited edition of my new translation of John Dee's Propaedeumata Aphoristica, Dee's first major publication, will be released next month, and there are still copies that haven't been preordered yet. The photo on the left is the riveted leather traycase marked with Dee's hieroglyphic monad. The photo below is the volume itself, with gold leaf and brass corner protectors on the cover, handsewn signatures, ribbed spine, fine Spanish endpapers, and a sewn in satin ribbon bookmark. Yes, I know it looks like the ultimate Lovecraftian tome! Azoth Press always does a good job with its fine editions, but to my mind this one's exceptional even for them. Yeah, I'm feeling a little giddy about it.

more tome

The book itself is probably the best general introduction to the worldview of Renaissance astrological magic ever written, and I've included a commentary to help unpack it. It's also essential if you want to make sense of Dee's cryptic Monas Hieroglyphica.

The deluxe edition will set you back $550 and can be purchased here. For those whose quests into eldritch and forbidden lore aren't quite so well financed, there's also a very nice hardback edition, not bound in the skins of beasts better left unnamed, for $69, which can be ordered here.

Current Mood: excited

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Announcing Launch of "Rhetoric for the Renaissance Man"

Howdy all,

I've launched a new blog (not that I'm shutting down or giving up on the "Webstead," but having a more dedicated one seemed like a good idea) called Rhetoric for the Renaissance Man.

The goal is to share some of what I've learned about persuasive communication skills in the business world and as a university lecturer in a less morally-ambiguous/non-committal way. Basically, I want to treat these more mundane ways of changing consciousness in accordance with will with the same ethical rigor as the obviously "magical." To achieve that, I'll be drawing on not only modern approaches, but also looking back on the more integrated, holistic, humanist tradition of Renaissance education.

So, I'll be sharing approaches on how to formulate goals in accordance with your values, craft strategies to make them more likely to be achieved, and learn the skills of public speaking and writing that will help you get others on board with those strategies, all with an emphasis on doing things "the old fashioned way."

If any of that sounds interesting, you can check out my more in-depth introduction to what I hope to share on the blog here.

Cheers,
Jeff

Entry tags:

cedric,
trees

My Life According to Trees

Aside from the usual trade of oxygen for carbon dioxide, trees have saved my life on more than one occasion. When I was sixteen years old and ready to kill myself, the oak trees around my parents’ house told me not to do it because I had important work to do in the future. At that time, I had no idea how to properly talk to trees and any time I did, I was winging it. I also had no inclination to believe the experiences were real, which was a product of my casually Christian upbringing. At least I did not think of talking to trees as demonic — my friends at the time with overbearing Christian parents would have probably had to deal with that sort of attitude.

My parents bought a cottage in Michigan in the 1980s. The cottage was on the shore of a small lake. Though the property was the size of a small, ranch house with a detached garage, we still called it the cottage. The cottage was considerably larger than the house I live in now, where I wrote Sacred Homemaking.

I had a love/hate relationship with the cottage. Though it was a restful, tranquil place, it isolated me from the few friends I had at that age. At the exact time my few female friends were going on group dates and getting boyfriends, I was stuck in a remote-yet-luxurious cabin in the north woods. They kissed under the bleachers while I read Jane Eyre.

The cottage and lake were adjacent to a managed forest of white pines. The pines were planted in rows so they could be easily harvested. The rows were organized in grids separated by fire breaks. I spent a great deal of my lonesome adolescence walking those fire breaks. In the middle of the forest, behind the ring of cottages and houses around the lake, there was a patch of meadow that had been left gloriously alone for at least a hundred years. In it were the remnants of an apple orchard and a few huge maple trees, giants from an earlier era with trunks that dwarfed the largest oaks of the posh neighborhood in which I grew up. The best memories I have of the cottage involve time spent under the great maple tree. There was a huge bed of creeping periwinkle underneath it which was likely planted sometime between the World Wars. I often talked to the maple. I named it the Wishing Tree. At the time, I thought of myself as somewhat crazy for talking to the Wishing Tree, not understanding that talking trees would one day become my normal.

My teenage torment over the plight of trees was a large part of the reason I became vegetarian in my teens. Sting and Peter Gabriel did a world tour for Amnesty International, and though I neither attended the concerts nor knew of the tour while it happened, I became obsessed with a documentary made about the concert series and the liberal causes it championed. One of these was the Save the Rainforest campaign, and since the British rock stars were plonking themselves down in South America to sing and strum, I became upset that the Amazon rainforest was being devastated for cattle farming. My bleeding teenage heart broke for the trees of the Amazon being mowed down for McDonalds hamburgers. I stopped eating meat despite neither Sting nor anyone else on the Amnesty tour being vegetarian (nowadays Sting eats meat and Peter Gabriel eats fish, back then I have no idea what they ate) I took up vegetarianism and tepidly convinced myself I was doing my part for the trees.

College arrived and I had no more time to go to the cottage or to hang out with trees. I spent the majority of the time either commuting on the bus and train or indoors. Predictably, college was a miserable time in my life, marred by insomnia and various forms of blind groping. I would mostly forget about trees until my forties, when I took up the practices of revival Druidry around the year 2015.

Must love trees

Druids come in all sizes and shapes. There are Christian Druids, atheist Druids, and Hawaiian Druids. There are the original Druids whom we know very little about because they refused to write anything down. Perhaps the only thing all Druids have in common is we all must love trees.

My college experience was crap because I did not spend enough time wandering outside looking for trees to hug. I was too preoccupied with the busywork of life, not realizing most of my sorrows could be ameliorated by touching a tree. The three daily practices of Revival Druidry, discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection banishing ritual, and divination had the weird effect of drawing me back into the forest preserve. As a post-college atheist, the few walks I took in the forest preserve felt odd and a little bit frightening, like a botched attempt to recapture the enchantment of the Wishing Tree in Michigan. I felt good after I walked in the forest preserve, but it took me a great deal of planning and motivation to get there. It felt like exercise — an activity that I knew I should do because it was “good for you” yet I did not feel I truly needed. It was easy enough to put it off or not do it at all. When I walked in a forest preserve, I was encapsulated in my own bubble world of self-concern, worry, petty irritation, and anxiety. In short, I was more like the majority of humans who sped on bikes or jogged by me as fast as they could go with helmets, ear buds, and expensive arrays of specialty gear. An alien who landed in any of the preserves would have thought the forest preserve district instituted a yuppie dress code.

(Though a stained T shirt and jeans would be more than adequate on the forest preserve path, the affluent and wannabe affluent wish to be both protected and seen. For them, nature is an outdoor gym where the goal is to take selfies to prove they got their steps in. This is how they attempt to win the perceived game of life, by being well-equipped, driven, determined, and fabulous. They exert Herculean, grueling effort in order to stay fit, never slowing down or turning off the techno beats long enough to hear the sound of sandhill cranes or to see the rare hummingbird moth land on an open mallow bloom. They might as well ride a stationary bike in an air conditioned basement somewhere, with a virtual reality headset providing an AI simulation of the world outside. This would certainly be safer than spinning down actual Meatworld paths where trees fall and create surprise death traps for speeding bikes, but I digress…)

Discursive meditation led to deeper thoughts about my own experiences with trees and helped me to rediscover my childhood memories of the great oaks around my parents’ house. The deciduous oak groves of the upper Midwest are the providers of the web of life in any lands where prairie does not rule. They are what mangroves are to swamps and what grasses are to grassland. Though imported white oaks came to supplant the native red oaks, the relative newcomers absorbed the spirit of the land just as the Wishing Tree embodied the Michigan lakeland.

I was the luckiest girl on earth when I was adopted at a week old to live among the trees in the white oak grove. Instead of being marooned with my mother by birth who hated me from the moment I was conceived, I was spirited away to a paradise of generosity where I could walk among pussy willows in Spring and fly in my nightly dreams through the canopy of sheltering oak giants.

For even as an atheist, the trees reached out to me. In the deepest cloak of godlessless, I had recurring dreams where my feet lifted off the ground and I flew up to the branches of the huge oak trees of my hometown. Between each gap of oak branches yawned a dimension door to a new dream world. This was not unlike Dr. Strange comics and movies where Dr. Strange and his mystical brethren conjure escape portals to other worlds. The main difference was that I did not conjure the dimension doors — the oaks did. I had the dreams for long enough that when I was truly suicidal, the oaks intervened, asking “If you go, who will talk to us from your plane? Who will see us?”

I am a slow learner and an even slower worker. It took me over ten years to write and (badly) produce an album of songs called the Dream of Flight, which centers around a leitmotif I had during one of my tree portal flying dreams. Nevertheless, the oaks got their album. I hope to rework and re-produce all the songs again someday.

Druidry reoriented my focus from trees as dream portals to the trees themselves as personalities and collectives. Trees are individuals as distinct as you and me. They have preferences, love, hatred, and intention. Most are friendly towards us humans and most of them want to talk. Some do not.

As you can probably guess, I found this out by spending plenty of time with trees. Like a former recluse who decides to start introducing himself at gatherings with low expectations, I found myself outside a great deal more after picking up Druidry. I went on walks, often forcing myself despite feeling rather stupid. If I found a tree of interest, I stopped at it and stared at it for a moment, opening myself to any impressions that came up. I went home and studied my observations. I meditated on various trees, often meditating on the same species of tree over and over again for its features, its history, it uses by mankind, and its lore. I wondered what the tree would say if it spoke human language. I began doing Druid tree rituals, which sound fancy but are nothing more than sitting with one’s back to a tree for a few minutes.

Cedric, the tree who changed my life

I was fewer than five years into my daily Druid practices when I met Cedric the Eastern cedar. At the time, I was still teaching music out of a rented commercial space in a small storefront in Naperville, a busy suburb of Chicago. I often hung out on the rickety back porch of my bit of commercial rental. The porch, which was little more than a catwalk, faced a scraggly out lot and the backs and dumpster areas of other nearby buildings. Near my building, there was an Eastern cedar that was growing so close to the building that a large chunk had been shaved off. I began talking to this tree when I went out there. I called her Mama. One cold and slightly rainy day in late winter/early spring, I spied a tiny green growth sticking out of the base of the building near a power box and a mess of incoming tubes with cables in them. As I drew closer, I could nearly hear Mama shouting at me, “SAVE MY BABY!” Against my own better judgement, I went inside where I just so happened to have a small, orange plastic garden shovel. I spent the better part of twenty minutes slowly digging around the Eastern cedar seedling, knowing that one false move could get me electrocuted. As I dug, I could see the visions of horror Mama was trying to put in my head of the seedling being uprooted and thrown in the dumpster, poisoned, or chopped. He was destined for death and the bigger he got, the worse his fate.

I mentally yelled in my head “I GOT HIM!” once I had extracted the seedling, scooping him into a cracked plastic bowl because I did not have a plant pot. I took him home that day and planted him in front of my little house in the light rain. I named him Cedric because he is an Eastern cedar. Get it? Ced-ar. Ced-ric.

After Cedric was safe in my yard, I asked Mama if she missed her baby and I assured her he was doing well. She said she knew he was doing fine because the network of trees would always connect her to him even beyond their deaths. Years later, Cedric is a big boy. He is thriving. He still converses with his mother and other trees in the tree network, which works better than any human communication system in existence.

Going native

Talking to trees and Cedric especially broadened my perspective. If I could receive primary, specific directives from individual trees, perhaps I could do the same with other objects, including objects that most people do not consider to be alive. Perhaps I could do the same thing with spaces. Cedric and his mother showed me that it wasn’t the world that had always been dull, it was me who had been dull all along. The trees, places, and even my toaster were sentient this whole time. All of the things and beings are infused with what Native Americans called the manitou or Great Spirit. When I opened my eyes to the concept of non-human beings having intention and will just as I have them, I became part of the great whole instead of a squeaky cog presuming it was the entire universe. A productive member of an ecosystem is one who does not try to dominate that ecosystem, but instead assumes her tiny part in making that ecosystem a better place.

Cedric in 2020

Cedric in 2025

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Cultural Backlash: An Open Post

There were some interesting discussions on yesterday's Magic Monday post and on the past month's or so posts on the Ecosophia blog regarding the collapse of alternative spirituality in the West and a likely impending cultural backlash against decades of general rot and grubbiness that is decaying our civilization from within.

Some of us here in the US are afraid that a sudden cultural jolt in the other direction, away from leftism/progressivism, will result in any type of spirituality that doesn't fit a narrow, literalist Christian/Abrahamic format as being seen by the reaction mob as "part of the problem." Anything the people leading and directing this backlash deem to be adjacent to the aforementioned cultural rot will be lazily lumped together into one big, bad conspiracy against what they believe they are trying to save and preserve. This likely means anything occult/esoteric, overtly pagan, or too foreign will be included, with very little nuance. As we know, the moral collapse of both Neopaganism and the postmodern occult scene hasn't helped matters at all in this respect, especially in light of recent tragic events.

Anyway, I want to know what anyone else here thinks of this and anything in your own area (US or somewhere else) you have seen indicative of a new cultural direction that may or or may not involve the condemnation of the things I listed above (or anything else that comes to mind). Also, we could use this space to think up ideas on how to preserve and carry on various spiritual teachings and practices if/when an intolerant religious climate becomes reality.

This is an open post that will stay open for quite a long time.

Current Mood: on edge
Current Music: David Bowie, "Changes"

Entry tags:

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 214

We are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; new revelations are leaking out about just how bad the Covid vaccines are for human health; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules have been slightly expanded due to a recent discussion here:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: George Winston, "Reflection"

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Magic Monday

It's almost midnight, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

(The image? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

Entry tags:

ogham,
readings

Ogham Readings on Saturdays

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from October 23 - November 6.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: W.A. Mozart, "Bastien und Bastienne"

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Frugal Friday

Current Mood: wry
Current Music: Led Zeppelin, "Misty Mountain Stomp"

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A Modest Proposal

As regular readers here know well, large language models (LLMs) -- the technology falsely labeled "artificial intelligence" by flacks in industry and media -- have managed to evoke the testier side of my personality. I've banned LLM-written text from this journal and my blog, and stomped hard from time to time on attempts to divert conversations into rhapsodies about the supposed wonders of the technology or the equal and opposite rhapsodies about how LLMs will surely destroy us all.

Partly, my reaction is driven by the sheer dishonesty of the "AI" label. LLMs are not intelligent. They possess no consciousness, no understanding, no capacity for reflection. All they do is produce strings of words (or other coded responses) that are statistically likely to be associated with each other. In effect, they're simply much more complicated equivalents of those automated text generators so many of us had fun with a few years back, which would produce plausible-sounding gobbledygook imitating, say, postmodern scholarship.

All this came to a head, in a certain sense, when one of my readers asked yesterday how the word "AI" ought to be pronounced, and suggested "Aaaaiiiieeeee!" While a case can be made for that bloodcurdling possibility, my immediate reaction was, "They're not artificial intelligences, they're just large language models" and to try to figure out how "LLM" would be pronounced.

That was when I achieved enlightenment. Okay, it was a very small and rather silly enlightenment, but I'll take what I can get.

Say "LLM" out loud. If you've ever heard a recording of JRR Tolkien reading a certain selection from The Hobbit, you'll know instantly what you're saying. You're saying the sound that gave one of Tolkien's characters his name. You're saying "Gollum" -- or, more precisely "goLLuM."

Imagine these programs slinking around in the dark places of the internet, muttering something about "My Precious." Makes sense, doesn't it? And of course a lot of the people who get obsessed with LLMs show definite Gollum-esque characteristics. So I think from now on we should start referring to these programs as goLLuMs. What do you think?

Note 1: I should probably add: goLLuMs, not golems. The golem in Jewish legend and folklore is capable of doing useful work. I'm far from sure that this is actually true of goLLuMs.

Note 2: An online thinker who goes by Korobochka has posted a very thoughtful piece on the cataclysmic economic fallout that's likely to be caused by the current goLLuM mania, which you can read here. It seems uncomfortably possible that these goLLuMs, like the one in Tolkien, will undergo a sudden plunge in due time, and bring the Mordoresque landscape of the modern speculative economy crashing down in ruins...

Current Mood: grim
Current Music: David Bowie, "Ashes to Ashes"

Entry tags:

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 213

Entry tags:

college,
education

The High Cost of College

I have been plagued with reoccurring dreams of being in high school over the years which have morphed into dreams of being back in college. Like many who suffer the School Dream I always find that I have one year to go. I am late and/or I have missed a crucial class that might have expedited my graduation. My classes, though dutifully attended by others, are a miserable farce of unnecessary, impractical subjects, yet I must still master these pointless fields in order to matriculate to the next phase of life.

I went to musical college back in the early 1990s. My father paid for it. In hindsight, if I had a brain in my head at the time, I would have walked away from college and saved him tons of money. One of my brothers wisely opted to do two years of community college and then went on to become a waiter, bartender, and eventually a manager of restaurants. He did far better than I did and did not cost my parents a small fortune. To my credit, I do use the skills I got in college as a music arranger and teacher. Not a day goes by that I do not employ at least one aspect of the musicianship my dad paid for in money and I paid for in fourteen hour weekend instrumentation and orchestration homework marathons. Nowadays, nearly all of my incredible music theory skills could be gained with self-motivation and a few free apps such as Earpeggio, Music Tutor, and Ella. The internet is a magnificent learning tool. Those who are good at being their own instructors should exploit this boon while it lasts.

An expensive diversion

We have known for a long time now that college is not necessary. It is estimated that 91% of jobs in the United States do not legally require a college degree, including most jobs in the field of medicine. In my own case, I teach music lessons at a music lesson studio where most of my fellow teachers do not have degrees in music. When I was a member in my local music teachers’ association, some of the presidents of various chapters lacked a music degree. One teacher I worked with extensively for years on various chapter projects had a college degree in textiles. Another completed her masters in English literature.

Teenagers are targeted while still in high school so they will blind themselves to options outside college and its accompanying grifts. Even in my day, college was what you did to extend your adolescence a few more years in hopes of avoiding the crushing, dream-squelching responsibilities of adulthood. College has not been necessary for anything besides the avoidance of being a grown up for a long, long time.

Men go to college in order to get laid and women go in order to get married. The whole higher learning rationale is a fig leaf. I remember making the rounds at parties in my first months at college despite being a consummate nerd who had not been invited to a single party my entire high school career. These events revolved around casual hookups that were the sexual equivalent of Costco sample day. Serial monogamists quickly paired off with The One who inevitably became The Wife or The Husband. Others played the field for the whole time or as long as they were able.

Aside from serving as a sexual sandbox, it was abundantly clear that learning played a distant, second fiddle to the real reason for being in college: extending childhood a few more years, but with the addition of plenty of hot sex. In order to participate, you either needed wealthy parents or huge, predatory loans. In either case, the fantasy and lie we all bought was that we would all be stepping into good jobs that would provide the middle class comforts our parents completely took for granted. All it took was graduation.

Little did we know that the upper middle Bathroom Class had already ascended that ladder and pulled it up after itself when I was starting out in my adult life. It is much worse now. The youth of today have to be literal millionaires if they want to afford a basic suburban house, two kids, and a couple of yearly vacations to Disney or the lake. College is a racket and a grift that hoodwinks the gullible into entire lifetimes of undischargeable debt. Often a person who takes on college debt will sign a contract for a fixed interest rate that later mysteriously changes into variable, ballooning the amount owed and cancelling whatever they paid in, guaranteeing they will be Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill for the rest of this incarnation. It hardly matters that changing the terms of a loan after it is made is a clear breach of contract law — predatory college loan sharks count on the fact that hiring a lawyer and suing the loan company for breach of contract is expensive, especially for those who did the honorable thing and kept their end paid up. They know that those who are already loan slaves will not have the resources to sue them. Besides, by the time the loan slave sues, the original loan company is most likely out of business, its assets hidden and offshored and its profits spent and re-spent by whatever umbrella stand-obsessed trophy wife of a CEO got her finely-manicured hands on it.

They proved him wrong about their ability to engage in civil discourse

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk was the apex of a sordid pyramid built on the ample wrath produced by half a century of college grift. Whether you are Team Psyop or Team Life Happens, it is clear that Charlie was wrong about the ability of college students to engage in civil discourse. Charlie was an optimist who refused to believe the college students today are midwits or worse who are only ten lost brain cells away (that is one mRNA vaccine or one estradiol shot) from throwing their feces like chimpanzees and hanging themselves in the closet. Don’t let their specialized knowledge fool you: acing standardized tests is not a hallmark of knowledge. They are booksmart coomers who worship video games. Their entire worlds revolve around masturbation of various forms, whether it is literal circle jerks or the mental masturbation of their beloved games where they can be pornime heroes who cannot die. Charlie espoused the genteel values of an era of thinkers. He did not realize he was trying to reason with demon-possessed compulsive masturbators who were so incredibly stupid, they were en route to castrating themselves and thus ending any possibility of normal genital sensation. Nobody involved or adjacent to the trans scene could ever be accused of being overly logical. How smart can anyone be if they don’t understand the difference between male and female? These kids, despite robust health and perfect GPAs, proved time and time again they would rather descend into internet Romper Rooms of cosplay, games, and memes than to assume the dreaded manliness of a clean living space and ownership of intellectual mistakes. To call them scum would be an insult to smegma.

Charlie Kirk’s college events attracted an all-too-common breed of post-intellectual, Infantifa, Looney Troon male who thought that knocking off all the pieces on the chessboard was the same as winning the game. Charlie himself was a college dropout, having taken the harder road of teaching himself how to run a successful business. He was no fan of college despite his efforts to visit them on the debate circuit. He threw his pearls before swine in hopes of reaching the few who were still human in the pig farm.

College makes babies, not literally

Just as a woman reaches her peak fertility, Planned Parenthood swoops in and convinces her to abort a healthy fetus so she can play Fertility Hit or Miss down the road in her thirties and forties. Planned Parenthoods are usually found near college campuses, including the ones that are semi-rural. Those who successfully conceive in their thirties and forties of course risk a baby with horrible defects and disabilities — the better to strip mine the woman and her family of wealth, my dear! College makes abortions. The babies are not conceived. They are adult men and women, trapped in a temporary Neverland that is a LARP of those who can actually afford tuition plus living and commuting expenses of twelve to forty thousand dollars per year. The inevitable piper behind the song is a taskmaster who issues useless degrees in exchange for lifetime indentured slavery in the gig economy, struggling and scraping and living with Mom and Dad until everybody dies and still not being able to afford the family home. Nobody signs up for loan sharks who call, email, sue, and show up at your door, doxxing you to anyone willing to listen or care, and garnishing your wages until you are nothing but the ashes of your former college-educated, pauper self. You wanted to extend childhood for four or five years max and you ended up living with your parents until death did you part.

There is no education here

Though a PhD used to command a modicum of respect, nowadays, the highly educated idiot with a doctorate is more of what you are likely to see as the result of extended college education. Any random upper middle class neighborhood is full of PhD’d “experts” who cannot figure out how to use a lawnmower, cook a nourishing meal, or understand that their electric car is inefficiently powered by coal and other fossil fuels because a great deal of electricity comes from coal. No, Dr. Levenbaum, energy is not generated by the outlets in your home by magic or from wires that come in near the roof; it often originates from a mix of mostly fossil fuels, a bit of hydropower, sometimes nuclear, and sometimes a wind farm or two, but mostly fossil fuels. I once thought about taping signs on some of Naperville’s electric car charging stations that said “Naperville gets 80% of its electricity from coal” but I figured it was not worth wasting the paper or the time. I’m not Charlie Kirk; I don’t have faith in people to be smart or make smart decisions.

Part of the reason there are so many highly degreed fools populating posh suburbs and urban corridors is the dismal state of primary and secondary education. Public school is little more than state funded babysitting these days, offering almost no knowledge of use in exchange for copious property taxes and occupying the bodies of the young for four fifths of the year. For instance, ask your local “gifted” high school senior how to grow salad greens or how to do the simplest 1040 form taxes — chances are they will not know and if they do, they will not have learned either of those things in school. No, the brightest of the bright will have spent fourteen years memorizing trivia. Kids with no chance of ever becoming world leaders will know every detail about the predations of the United Nations, as if that will help them in their futures as Starbucks baristas and Ubereats drivers. Any math that would teach them to get a leg up in life such as how credit cards and mortgages work will be eschewed for total immersion in drawing parabolas and pumping numbers into the Pythagorean theorem. Instead of learning to make a tasty meal from foraged and cheap ingredients, they will munch on Frito Lay products from a vending machine after an in-one-ear-out-the-other spiel on the geography of Machu Picchu.

They will be distracted, amused, and disconnected until they are obedient, comfortably numb automatons who (like Professor Levenbaum) essentially think food comes from the grocery store and electricity from the wires in the sky. Their primary goal in life will be getting enough money to win the game that nobody will admit to playing… when they are not playing actual video games. By getting money, I do not mean earning it. Winning the game of the rat race will entail collecting enough goodies until others take care of all your needs and wants. This outcome will be emotionally divorced from whatever and whoever it exploited to get there.

To become highly educated is to be one of the lucky ones who could afford kicking the can down the road. One of my husband’s highly educated relatives made a lifelong career of amassing degrees while running away from debt. He spent his early manhood in jail for fraud, having been caught for thinking he was the smartest in the room. He fought the law and the law won. Once he got out, he engaged in more legal forms of fraud by going back to school… forever. The loophole he used was that of the Perpetual Student. He was allowed to delay paying his debts as long as he was technically still in school, so he stayed in school until he died. He actually got himself a job as a community college professor despite being semi-retarded. Throughout his adult life, he did not know the difference between you’re and your or there, their, and they’re. His ego was so huge, he did not feel it was important to know these things, even as a college professor in charge of grading papers.

College degrees are merits of extreme specification. They are badges that say to the world “I am very, very good at an impractical, niche skill that almost nobody can use.” My degree in Music Theory is a good example of the above. The world would survive if nobody in it was able to notate sheet music. It is only my ability to combine aural mastery with notation that makes me a rare bridge between the sheet music people and the play by ear people. Music is a bizarre language that I happen to be able to read, write, and speak, but to think it is a practical skill the world needs would be a mistake.

At least my niche skill uplifts the mind and spirit. Compare the plight of someone with a degree in Economics or Gender Studies. To study either one is to waste one’s time and money and potentially the most productive years of one’s life. Even doctors are not immune to the overspecification racket. Instead of graduating with a degree that enables them to heal local populations, doctors are shoehorned into specialties and rabbit hole niches with no way towards the light. A dentist will send you to an ear, nose, and throat specialist if you have chronic mouth infections, and the ear, nose, and throat guy will probably return you to sender because he won’t have a damn clue on how to heal you either. Or maybe he will give you some addictive pain pills. A heart surgeon cannot deliver a baby. Psychiatrists know absolutely nothing about gut health and its relationship to mood and the brain. Your IBS could be ruining your life and your psychiatrist will take a blind shot in the dark by prescribing antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. Ask Jordan Peterson how that worked out for him.

We still live in an era where most have not woken up to the real cost of college, despite the landscape being littered with bankrupt ex-collegiates and an economy falling apart at the seams because of educational grift. In future essays, I will be discussing some ideas I have for those who would walk away from the college system and some ways we might heal the damage that has been inflicted by college culture. I hope you will stay tuned.