30 Tuesday Jun 2015
Posted in civilization, nature
“The return to nature is an abandonment not of the benefits but of the evils of the civilised state, a reversion not to the vices but to the virtues of wild natural life”.
Henry S. Salt, Richard Jefferies: His Life and His Ideals
29 Monday Jun 2015
Posted in civilization, nature
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“I despise this foul industrial epoch”.
Herbert Read, Poetry and Anarchism
28 Sunday Jun 2015
Posted in religion, spirituality
“The Virgin Mary was permitted to exist as a kind of bowdlerized version of Isis, resolutely unacquainted with the biological, emotional and spiritual imperatives of real women, a makeshift goddess created by misogynists for misogynists. But it was unlikely that the sexless Virgin Mary would have taken over from Isis without some kind of backlash from her followers. How could the good, but essentially colourless, mother of Jesus fully take the place of the well-rounded Isis – not only Virgin, Mother and Crone, but also sexual iniatrix and controller of men’s destinies? Could it be that the cult of Mary Magdalene, like that of the Black Madonna that is so despised by the Church, actually hides a much older and more complete idea of womanhood?”
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation
27 Saturday Jun 2015
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“In church they took off their hats and knelt down, just as they uncovered their heads and knelt before their social superiors. God was ‘the great landlord’, as some preachers called him; or he was the authoritarian father whose attributes were those of the fathers men themselves knew. His ordinances were those of society itself”.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
26 Friday Jun 2015
“A great part of politics and law is always theatre; once a social system has become ‘set’, it does not need to be endorsed daily by exhibitions of power (although occasional punctuations of force will be made to define the limits of the system’s tolerance)”.
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common
25 Thursday Jun 2015
“To maintain that anarchism is only a theory of classes is to limit it to a single viewpoint. Anarchism is more complex and pluralistic, like life itself. Its class element is above all its means of fighting for liberation; its humanitarian character is its ethical aspect, the foundation of society; its individualism is the goal of mankind”.
Voline and other Russian anarchists
24 Wednesday Jun 2015
Posted in authority
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“The individual who has been more deeply marked by this impoverished spectacular thought than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of spectacular domination’s success”.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle
23 Tuesday Jun 2015
Posted in civilization, land, life, spirituality
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“It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds”.
Black Elk
22 Monday Jun 2015
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“In a word, we reject all legislation – privileged, licensed, official and legal – and all authority, and influence, even though they may emanate from universal suffrage, for we are convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the vast majority in subjection to them. It is in this sense that we are really Anarchists”.
Michael (Mikael) Bakunin, The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution
21 Sunday Jun 2015
Posted in civilization, life
“Coerced to the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living death; and if any considerable number of the members of a civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have been passed”.
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology
