The Alchemical Panic Part 2 [TE]

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 28 seconds. Contains 1095 words

SURPRISE! I’M BACK IN YOUR INBOX. YES ALREADY.

This is the Trenchant Edges and we’re talking the deep roots of fringe culture.

I’m your host Stephen and today we’ve got two things to do.

1. Overview of some of some of our relevant topics from past blogs

2. Dig into some of the places I think we need to dig further.

Alright? Cool.

And for those just glancing: This isn’t me pretending that I can suddenly do a massively focused research project. This is going to be a subject we go back to again and again.

Enjoying a nice dissociation

Where We've Been

There’s a history to tropes and the way they mutate over time and can be repurposed by multiple audiences for different reasons.

We’ve been dancing around this subject for a while. Let’s start with an overview.

Our exploration began with gnosticism, conspiracies, and hints of the dark enlightenment. Shortly after that, I found some bread crumbs back to Abbe Barruel and Conservative reactions to the French Revolution as the hinge between medieval antisemitism and modern grand conspiracist antisemitism.

That really shifted my thinking to a long scale because while the Protocols of the Elders of Zion codified both modern antisemitism and modern grand conspiracism, they built on the previous century of work.

This was never really the focus of the blog, but I kept coming back to the nature of conspiracies as a subject. I wrote about the flaws and benefits of using project management to explore conspiracies. And I eventually broke down the history of Qanon as a fascist movement with deep roots.

Of course, once you start writing about something as expansive and messy as Qanon it’s hard to stop so I explored the deep contradictions in the worldview and how Planning related to the nature of Q.

And then I finally got around to mentioning Theosophy. It’s a weird subject for me because my main interest in it was between 2006 and 2012. So I read a ton of stuff and mostly ignored it for a decade before coming around to it here.

But before I went back to it I spent some more time with American Gun Culture’s paranoia. And finally I got to mentioning the phrase, “The Cultic Milieu” which has been an organizing principle for me. And we explore it more here.

It’s a bit out of place but I think my speculations on Ur (eternal) Gnosticism are highly relevant. It’s me trying to make a list as good as Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism. Eh. I also explored how John Keel got on a cognitive treadmill that ran him ragged.

And finally we actually address the content of Theosophy. Well, start to. There’s more to say.

ooooh, we also got to maybe my best trilogy of works:

Yeah those are super annoying links. But whatever. It’s for some of my best work.

OK, so I also discussed some problems with the culture of debunking here. And why people get into conspiracy theorizing anyway. And some thinking about thinking.

OK, I’m going to be honest here I’m kind of losing the plot. What I’ve done here is create a lot of pieces of good essays that aren’t really, uh, complete or fully coherent.

There are over 200 posts on this blog and each of them ties together a bunch of threads at once. I clearly need something a bit more, uh, coherent than just a list of links. a problem for another day.

The Perennial Awakening

In last night’s post I hinted at the pattern I want to explore but I didn’t make it explicit. Let’s do that.

I’m calling it the Perennial Awakening because it keeps happening and because Aldous Huxley wrote a 1945 essay about the “Perennial Philosophy” where he lays out a case for a unified mysticism found in all culture at all places and times.

Once I was very taken with this idea but the older I get the less plausible it seems. I’d say maybe we’ll explore why but I doubt that will happen.

Let’s start with a definition that won’t survive scrutiny: Outbreaks of revelatory fervor culture-wide.

I want to start with a bad definition because this is a very broad phenomena and we won’t really be able to see it clearly without getting into the muck of it.

So we want to err on the side of being too general now to let the details focus us on the differences or perhaps to discredit the notion entirely. Over time we’ll know.

The Perennial Awakening is an extension of the Great Awakening, which was a series of mostly Calvinist revivals in Great Brittan and its colonies from 1720 to 1740.

The Second Great Awakening ran from 1795 to 1835 and created a more institutional kind of revivalism.

After that there have been several further awakenings proposed: A a Third that lasted for most of the end of the 19th century and a Fourth in the 1960s and 1970s.

These are generally understood in Christian terms, of course, but I think that might be misleading.

I’m mostly familiar with the history of the Second, so digging into the first and third are going to be a major theme here.

I’d also like to specifically propose a Fifth Great Awakening that started in 2015 or so and has built up a new body of antiestablishment Christianity in the fringe space.

Getting the full context of the Fifth Great Awakening is our major motivation. While Pizzagate technically precedes Qanon and wasn’t particularly religious, it sets up an awful lot of the ideas which would become fundamental to the MAGA movement.

In some ways it’s the spirituality of the Used Car Salesman ascendant. Both in its class character and the Big Tent Con Artist vibe. Anyone willing to lie for money is welcome.

Okay, so let’s get into places to dig. In no order.

1. The Great Awakenings (1-3)

2. Christopher Columbus’ Book of Prophecies

3. The German Volkish movement.

4. The Dawn of Everything Thesis about Indigenous Criticism of Europeans sparking the Enlightenment

5. More Goddamn Theosophy

6. The Golden Dawn

7. Christian Millenarian

Woosh.

OK, that’s a lot of homework.

I think the places to start are with Columbus and the Dawn of Everything. They’ll perhaps provide some deep context for things.

Wow, I can’t put more than 5 topics. Well, suck it Golden Dawn and Christian end times shills.

Excelsior!

OK. Lots of fun.

Much to do.

We’re going to nibble on this stuff when we can.

Columbus is definitely the place to start.

We’re not going to of course, though.

We’ve got some old UFO friends I’d like to catch up with for our 5th anniversary and a gnarly Matrix essay to finish rewriting.

See you soon.

-SF

P.S. Would love to hear your thoughts on any of this.