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John Michael Greer | |
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| Born | 1962 (age 61–62) Bremerton, Washington, U.S. |
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John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on ecological overshoot, ecological economics, appropriate technology, oil depletion, societal collapse, ecocentrism, pantheism, and the occult.
Greer was born in Bremerton, Washington and was raised in the Seattle area. He is an initiate in Freemasonry and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. [1]
Greer came to Druidry by way of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids in 1995 after some twenty years' involvement in Hermetic occult spirituality. He received the Mount Haemus Award in 2003 from OBOD for his lecture "Phallic Religion in the Druid Revival". [2] He served as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), an initiatory organization teaching Celtic nature spirituality, from 2003 to 2015. He wrote The Druidry Handbook, which serves as the AODA's core textbook and curriculum. [3]
Greer also created the training program for the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, an order which fuses druidry with Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, which he founded in 2013. [4] He wrote The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidical Study, which serves as the orders's core textbook and curriculum. [5]
Greer describes himself as a moderate Burkean conservative, influenced by the political theorist Edmund Burke. [6] Greer has also been influenced by German polymath Oswald Spengler who wrote that civilisations have a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan. He has written extensively about the current decline and impending fall of America’s global empire and its client states, e.g., Israel. [7] He currently blogs at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics. [8]
He previously blogged at The Archdruid Report on peak oil, economics, history, philosophy and related topics from 2006 to 2017. [9] He believes that gradual societal collapse will ensue as fossil fuel–powered industries and societies decline through resource depletion. [10] In a 2009 blog post entitled "Hagbard's Law", he contrasted the attention global warming receives compared to peak oil. [11]
In a 2005 abstract, called How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse, he wrote an ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital [12] and published further thoughts on the topic on his blog. [13] Philosopher of science Jerome Ravetz summarized Greer's theory in his 2006 book chapter, titled "When Communication Fails: A Study of Failures of Global Systems." [14] Ravetz wrote:
A simple but powerful model of 'catabolic collapse', a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste, has been produced by John Michael Greer (Greer 2005). His activity in the 'contemporary nature spirituality movement' in Oregon has not prevented him from producing a model in the best economic style. His key variables are resources, capital, waste and production; crisis occurs when production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital. The continuing degradation of the infrastructure, particularly in the USA, provides evidence for his approach. He claims that he can account for key features of historical collapse, and suggests parallels between successional processes in non-human ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies. [14]
In The King in Orange (2021), Greer analyses the contemporary American political landscape through class analysis and occult practices. Focusing on the election and opposition to Donald Trump as president of the United States, Greer predicts a continuing combination of magic and politics from the various class factions of the country. He criticised the public magical workings of liberal occultists, arguing that political magic should be kept secret to prevent opposing magicians from tampering with the working. [15]
Greer has written many novels, including a series of eleven fantasy novels based on the worlds created by H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos entitled "The Weird of Hali". [16] He has also written deindustrial science fiction and a political-military thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming.
Writing in The Futurist magazine, Rick Docksai declared that Greer's book The Ecotechnic Future is "as realistic a portrayal of the end of civilization as one is likely to find." [17] It was also positively reviewed in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries [18] and was recommended in the industry journal Energy Policy . [19] The International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability referred to his book The Wealth of Nature as "challeng[ing] the paradigms that underlie the complex system of wealth distribution we know as economics." [20]
His book The New Encyclopedia of the Occult was selected as a reference text in 2005 by American Libraries [21] and noted by Booklist [22] and Publishers Weekly . [23]
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The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, more commonly the Golden Dawn, was a secret society devoted to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known as a magical order, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was active in Great Britain and focused its practices on theurgy and spiritual development. Many present-day concepts of ritual and magic that are at the centre of contemporary traditions, such as Wicca and Thelema, were inspired by the Golden Dawn, which became one of the largest single influences on 20th-century Western occultism.
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