The Idea of Integral Culture by Stephen Edred Flowers

I. Introduction

Our culture is sick. It has been undergoing a process of disintegration for a number of centuries now. Its various constituent parts have progressively been scattered and disconnected from their natural or organic moorings. Such disintegration can only be rectified, healed, as it were, by integration, or reintegration.

The word ”culture” has somewhat irritated me over the years.

People seem to use it in a vague and ambiguous ways. When I began teaching world literature in translation at the University of Texas in the fall of 1984 I undertook a more detailed study of the term ”culture”, with the intention of using what I found in my lectures. What resulted was the discovery of the ”culture grid”.

Culture is made up of a minimum of four different categories, each of which is essential to the whole idea of culture, and none of which can be ignored when trying to describe a culture in its entirety. These four categories are: ethnic culture, ethical culture, material culture, and linguistic culture.

Wisdom for the Wolf-Age:A Conversation With Dr. Stephen Flowers

Wisdom for the Wolf-Age:A Conversation With Dr. Stephen Flowers

by Michael Moynihan

One of dominant paradigms of modern society is fragmentation. In the world of popular culture this translates into dazzling distractions and endless ephemera, while in the world of academia it engenders over-specialisation and an unspoken refusal to even attempt to understand the “bigger picture,” especially from a metaphysical perspective.

In this atomised environment, anyone extolling a cohesive vision that is marked by traditional values – not to mention high standards – automatically becomes an anomaly. So it is the case with Dr. Stephen Flowers, who is the rarest of breeds: a scholar with spirit, one who is single-minded yet open-minded. For more than a quarter-century he has dedicated his energies toward unraveling the mysteries not only of the ancient symbolic alphabet of the Runes, but also of the deepest realms of the Germanic myth and culture from which they arose. For Flowers, this quest is summed up in a single word, RUNA, which is the old Gothic language form of “rune” and was equivalent to the Greek term mysterion (“mystery”). It was in the early 1970s that Flowers heard this word audibly whispered in his ear, and since that time he has tirelessly pursued a path of understanding its implications.