The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
By Jared Diamond
Discover Magazine, May 1987
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
September 10, 2010
September 5, 2010
The Primitivist Critique of Civilization
by Richard Heinberg
A paper presented at the 24th annual meeting of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, June 15, 1995.
I. Prologue
Having been chosen--whether as devil's advocate or sacrificial lamb, I am not sure--to lead off this discussion on the question, "Was Civilization a Mistake?", I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts.
From the viewpoint of any non-civilized person, this consideration would appear to be steeped in irony. Here we are, after all, some of the most civilized people on the planet, discussing in the most civilized way imaginable whether civilization itself might be an error. Most of our fellow civilians would likely find our discussion, in addition to being ironic, also disturbing and pointless: after all, what person who has grown up with cars, electricity, and television would relish the idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild foods?
The Lessons of Easter Island
The Lessons of Easter Island
By Clive Ponting
Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited places on earth. Only some 150 square miles in area, it lies in the Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America and 1250 miles from the nearest inhabitable land of Pitcairn Island. At its peak the population was only about 7,000. Yet despite its superficial insignificance, the history of Easter Island is a grim warning to the world.
The Dutch Admiral Roggeveen, on board the Arena was the first European to visit the island on Easter Sunday 1722. He found a society in a primitive state with about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meagre food supplies available on the island. During the next European visit in 1770 the Spanish nominally annexed the island but it was so remote, underpopulated and lacking in resources that no formal colonial occupation ever took place. There were a few more brief visits in the late eighteenth century, including one by Captain Cook in 1774. An American ship stayed long enough to carry off twenty-two inhabitants to work as slaves killing seals on Masafuera Island off the Chilean coast. The population continued to decline and conditions on the island worsened: in 1877 the Peruvians removed and enslaved all but 110 old people and children. Eventually the island was taken over by Chile and turned into a giant ranch for 40,000 sheep run by a British company, with the few remaining inhabitants confined to one small village.
September 2, 2010
Before the Fall: Evidence for a Golden Age
Before the Fall: Evidence for a Golden Age
By STEVE TAYLOR
If you asked them what life was like in prehistoric times, most people would conjure up an image like the famous opening scenes of 2001: Space Odyssey – groups of hairy savages grunting and jumping around, foaming at the mouth with aggression as they bash each over the heads with sticks. We take it for granted that life was much harder then, a battle to survive, with everyone competing to find food, struggling against the elements, men fighting over women, and everyone dying young from disease or malnutrition.
A whole branch of “science” has grown up around this view of the human race’s early history. This is a relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain all of the negative sides of human nature as “adaptations” which early people developed because they had some survival value. Evolutionary psychologists explain traits like selfishness and aggression in these terms. Life was such a struggle that only the most selfish and aggressive people survived and passed on their genes. The people with gentle and peaceful genes would have died out, simply because they would have lost out in the survival battle.
July 1, 2010
Conversation with Dave Foreman
Dave Foreman:
A Dialogue with Derrick Jensen
from EcoFuture"For more than twenty years, Dave Foreman has been at the forefront of the conservation movement, working where political activism intersects with ecological philosophy. In the 1970s, believing that the best way to preserve wilderness was to work within the system, he became the Southwest regional representative of The Wilderness Society. In 1980, disillusioned by the inability of mainstream conservation organizations to halt the destructive forces within our culture, he cofounded Earth First! The goal of Earth First! was to help develop a biocentric worldview and to translate that philosophy into action by fighting with uncompromising passion for the Earth.
More recently Dave Foreman helped to found The Wildlands Project, an effort bringing together grassroots activists and conservation biologists to design and establish linked areas of wilderness extensive enough to support large mammals. In addition to being chair of The Wildlands Project, he is executive editor of Wild Earth magazine and author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and The Big Outside (with Howie Wolke)." -- Derrick Jensen
June 24, 2010
Endgame
Premises of Endgame
An Excerpt From Endgame by Derrick Jensen
Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.
June 21, 2010
The Great Year and the Myth of the Eternal Return
Eternal Return
Copyright © 1996 The Circle of Ostara
From The Odinic Rite
We will look at the myth of Ragnarok, not as an old story of mere historic interest but as the symbol of basic truth. We do not intend to delve into the action of the tale, nor to consider the activities of the various protagonists. (That may be done, for example, by reading chapter 32 of The Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings by Kevin Crossley-Holland.) Instead we will examine its meaning in a wider context.
The story of Ragnarok is an example of the archetypal theme which has been categorised as the myth of the eternal return. Roughly speaking, this mythic theme symbolises the various recurring cycles of nature, the return of the sun every morning, the resurgent life of spring after the seeming death of winter.
June 11, 2010
Orlog
Orlog: The Procession of the Ages of the World
By Robin Artisson
A Suggested Schema for Understanding the Becoming, Perishing, and Re-Becoming of the Nine World System
Based on Voluspa and Gylfaginning
A Heathen Perspective on the History of the World and the Cosmos by Robin Artisson
Copyright © 2008 All Rights Reserved
The Perennial Wisdom of the World-Cycle
One of the most crucial functions of mythology, cosmology, and mytho-poetic history is to give a people a grasp on their place within the cosmos. It can situate people within a framework that can be understood in terms of both time and space, but also in terms of deeper meaning, as the various impelling, preserving, and destroying forces that are given names in any mythology can be realized and approached on more than one level.
Our Truth
Our Truth : The Heathen Legacy, and the Myths of the Modern World
by Robin Artisson
from Cauldron Born
Modern Heathenry is a very young system of religious expression. While it is true that Heathenry has deep and ancient origins, it was largely interrupted for over a thousand years, before its rebirth and recension in the modern day. After such an interregnum, there remains a lot of work to be done on the level of "reclaiming" the legacy of the old days, while still operating successfully within the modern context.
February 28, 2010
Silence
by John Zerzan
Silence used to be, to varying degrees, a means of isolation. Now it is the absence of silence that works to render today's world empty and isolating. Its reserves have been invaded and depleted. The Machine marches globally forward and silence is the dwindling place where noise has not yet penetrated.
Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silences. The silence-honoring Wittgenstein understood the loss of our relationship with it. The unsilent present is a time of evaporating attention spans, erosion of critical thinking, and a lessened capacity for deeply felt experiences. Silence, like darkness, is hard to come by; but mind and spirit need its sustenance.
Certainly there are many and varied sides to silence. There are imposed or voluntary silences of fear, grief, conformity, complicity (e.g. the AIDS-awareness "Silence=Death" formulation), which are often interrelated states. And nature has been progressively silenced, as documented in Rachel Carson's prophetic Silent Spring. Nature cannot be definitively silenced, however, which perhaps goes a long way in explaining why some feel it must be destroyed. "There has been a silencing of nature, including our own nature," concluded Heidegger,[1] and we need to let this silence, as silence, speak. It still does so often, after all, speak louder than words.
Dwellers Upon the Heath
Dwellers Upon the Heath: Germanic Heathenry as a Land Based Faith
by Brun Russellson
"Hail to the day! Hail to the sons of day!
"Hail to the day! Hail to the sons of day!
Hail to the night and her kin!
With gracious eyes may you look upon us...
Hail to the gods! Hail to the goddesses! Hail to the mighty, fecund earth!
Eloquence and native wit may you give us...”
—Sigdrifumal (Lay of Sigdrifa)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Setting a Stage
"Culture has led us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption."
— John Zerzan
We live in an age of endemic alienation. As dwellers of the so-called first world, we are largely estranged from the Land we exist (and ultimately depend utterly) upon. For much of the populace, food is what comes wrapped in plastic and stamped with a nearly indecipherable ingredient list of chemical constituents. Water is what comes out when we turn a knob at our sinks. Cold is what we banish at the turn of a thermostatic dial. Rain is what we try our best to avoid lest it muss our hair or muddy our clothing as we dash through it in attendance to matters more important.
Celts and Germans
Stephen A. McNallen
The chieftain towered over his seated warriors in the smokey hall. Clatter and chatter faded and all eyes turned to this mustachioed, muscular figure who was their leader.
Raising the mead-filled horn high over the throng, he toasted the High God, the one who carries the spear and has ravens hovering about his shoulders. All shouted their approval, and another warrior rose to his feet, lofted his horn, and praised the name of the Thunderer. The others echoed him, and in the warmth of their cameraderie, they might have well been in the great hall where warriors go when they die, served by the maidens of battle from the meat of the ever-reborn swine.
A scene from viking history? An evening in a typical Germanic mead hall? No - the word picture painted here is of a feast among their cousins, the Celts.
January 22, 2010
January 2, 2010
Revolution
by Gabriella,VAIDULUTE
There is no longer any left or right.There's the system and enemies of the system.
-Eduard LimonovWhat I see is the growing rottenness everywhere. Our civilization is dying. Our culture is being killed. Honor, morality, nobility — those are all things of the past now. What we have today is crookedness and deceit and degeneracy in every aspect of people’s lives. I see the rise of every sort of perversion and filth. Moreover, I see this filth declared as normal, even admirable, by the media, and even sanctioned by legislation... I can see it on the streets of American and European cities. I can see it in the sort of television people watch or in the music they listen to... That makes me very, very angry.
Primitive Green:An Interview With John Zerzan
Primitive Green:An Interview With John Zerzan
by G Sampath, DNA
John Zerzan first shot into celebrity philosopher status in 1995 after the New York Times featured him in 1995 as a supporter of the Unabomber's anti-technology doctrine. He has since become a leading light of the primitivist movement in the US. In an exclusive interview with DNA, he explains why modern civilization is fundamentally anti-human, 'green' technology is 'psycho' and Stone Age is the way to go.
Fire + Ice- GIlded By The Sun
The heartlessness of the modern commercial consumer society ruins the lives of many. FIRE + ICE takes the purity and philosophy of early music and melds it into a message redolent with powerful seeds of honour, truth, loyalty and the bond of true friendship. - Ian Read
Roots of Ragnarok
Roots Of Ragnarok
Midgard is the cradle that rocks above the abyss---our existence
is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The great Solar-myth underlies all the ancient mythologies. It commemorates the death and resurrection of the sun. It signifies the destruction of the light by the clouds, the darkness and the eventual return of the great luminary of the world. That which was most instrumental in conforming mankind to adopt the solar based religions took place in a time long before our written history. It was a thing so terrible, so incomprehensible, pitiless and destructive, that even today its dreadful aftermath still lingers deep in the genetic memory of all mankind.
In the Northern European pagan religion of Wotanism, this dreadful End of Days cataclysm is symbolized by three ominous spectres known as: Fenris Wolf, the giant world Midgard Serpent Jormungand and Garm the Dog. The Southern Europeans knew them as: Python and Typhaon and Cacus, which is the same as Vritra in the Indo-European sanskrit. The Christian bible referred to them as Satan, Behemoth and Leviathan. Yet, there is simply one name to describe the most terrible and unstoppable monster serpent of all, "The Great Comet."
