One thing Jordan Peterson defenders have right is that he's provoking some interesting discussions. I'm fed up of the more heated ones, the ones where everyone's assuming about everyone else (i.e. most of them), and the fact that it's all feeding his fame demon. But amongst all that, there's some important gems popping up.
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We just lost a great explorer, a wonderful writer, one of the most important chroniclers of the mind's inner treasures and its fertile congress with the plant world. He had a true rascal's twinkle in his eye and deep, bodhisattvic compassion. He will be missed, and celebrated -- a joyfully knowing presence in our moments of poetic ecstasy, a warmth strong enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with bitter world-weariness.
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I’ll be speaking on Pan the goat god in the British landscape – especially Avebury – on Saturday 18th November at Conway Hall, London, at an all-day event, The Haunted Landscape 2017: Folklore, Ghosts and Witchcraft, hosted by the London Fortean Society. Honoured to appear alongside Jeremy Harte, Owen Davies, and other illustrious folklore folk.
Tickets available at Eventbrite.
It’s been interesting recently noting how some key ideas found in James Hillman’s work seem to be cropping up in cutting-edge anthropology.
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Just about twenty years ago, Simon Dwyer died, at the age of thirty-eight, after living for six years HIV positive. I imagine it's safe to say that I'm not the only one whose life was changed by his publication Rapid Eye. Given the scope of the influence of this explosively fertile creation, together with the seeming difficulty these days of keeping information off the web, it's astonishing that there is almost no information at all on Dwyer out there. There's just... Rapid Eye.
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To coincide with my recent efforts to get the contents of 2006's Dreamflesh Journal online, Amodali has created a large-format serigraph print of the art she created for the cover. Amodali is an artist, writer, performer and magician, dedicated for nearly three decades to working with the 156 current of the goddess Babalon. Her forthcoming book The Marks of Teth looks set to be a unique and authoritative documentation of her ground-breaking work in this powerful current, exploring intense trance practices and sex-magical work emphasising female subtle anatomy. Subscribe to her blog or Facebook for updates on its release.
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On the summer solstice eve in 1997 I was in The Red Lion pub in Avebury, getting drunk with friends and poring over the latest Towards 2012, my journal which had just arrived from the printers. A friend introduced me to Matthew Watkins, who not only turned out to be someone also fascinated by Terence McKenna's predictions about 2012, but someone who had just the previous year presented McKenna with his objection to the mathematics underlying his predictions.
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Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist who's gained fame and notoriety recently as a fervent opponent of postmodernism and Marxism. Thanks to his well-publicised fight against Bill C-16, which added 'gender expression and identity' to the grounds protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act, Peterson is especially well known for his refusal to use non-binary gender pronouns. He's gained an adoring following, composed of disaffected leftists, right-wing libertarians, and sundry constituents of the bitter 'alt-right' cauldron.
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I was asked on Twitter to comment on this 'alt-right' piece on sedentism and nomadism by Charles Jansen. I can see why. It traverses some of the territory covered in my book North, from an almost polar opposite angle. I want to get some initial reactions down here, roughly addressing some of the issues it raises, to the extent that I can without doing further research.
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It's been nearly a decade since I immersed myself in the popular and academic debates around prehistoric violence. It was a fascinating tangent to my research into prehistoric art and consciousness, and it resulted in the brief study War & the Noble Savage. I've caught wind of a few bits of related material since then, and generally the grounding provided by that research has enabled me to digest and react to them critically --- and little has made me consider seriously rethinking my conclusions.
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