The second part of my conversation with Earl Fontainelle for his Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast has just been released. Here’s Earl’s summary:

We discuss the cosmological dimension to the death of god in Nietzsche; the radical Nonconformist Protestant sects of the Civil War era, with their quasi-animistic take on god’s presence to the lay brethren; the ‘Gnostic’ world-view of the material kosmos as a dark, dead place, and man’s true home located elsewhere viewed cosmologically as one iteration of the polar cosmos; the political entanglements between the polar axis and worldly power in a number of contexts; the modern interiorised ‘individual self’ as a fragment of the fallen world-tree; Norse mythology and Plato’s use of the cranium; the story of triumphant modern explorers seeking the actual, ‘physical’ poles; esoteric fascists and their occultural echoes; the radical democritisation of esoteric materials in contemporary culture, and possible ramifications thereof; conspiracy-theory as ‘incomplete Copernican revolution’; Giordano Bruno’s infinite cosmos and run-ins with established church authority; the Chinese polar cosmos as a test-case for making broad conclusions about what happened in the west in the seventeenth century; and much more.

Check it out.

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