We ought to start more weeks with three-parter essays as varied as this one, honestly.
It turns out that Burton is Episcopalian (per an interview about modern self-invention with Plough Magazine, if I recall correctly). Since it's a Protestant sister-denomination with Catholicism, where would you put her / her tradition between the Catholic "spiritualized sensuality and respect for female divinity" and the Protestant "too absolutist and and too masculinist Protestant-gnostic individualism"? It's not exactly the Protestant tradition where I worship, but it does have its own beautiful aesthetics and intellectual history on its own.
Fascinating, thank you—I should have googled! I think I thought she was a Commonweal Catholic because she went on that Know Your Enemy podcast. But yes, though I only see it from the outside, that's a very beautiful tradition going back, as I understand it, to the Elizabethan Settlement. You'll have to forgive me for processing everything through literature, but I think of Eliot in the Four Quartets imagining the reconciliation of Milton and Charles I in England's hour of need. I myself often like these things at their extremes—blind Milton hardly having a body, all spirit, sentences soaring to heaven; blind Joyce being nothing but a body, even his language a kind of eroticized excretion—but as far as everyday practice goes, the middle is probably best. (American Catholicism, being in practice rather Protestantized, is pretty much in the middle.)
No forgiveness needed, literature as process is why we all read GHA. Eliot is a great connection here, himself an adult Anglican convert and Four Quartets being something of a politely high-church apocalytic vision like that of St. John. Milton, Joyce as two extremes is a fun vision also. As to the "middle" here in the States, would you call that a product of syncretism? I'm thinking partly of how Catholicism historically and globally as synthesized folk customs into itself in the process of conversion.
The syncretism is real, as I've seen with my immigrant forebears who were sort of practicing folk magic along with the religion, but I think the Protestanitzation is more a product of its inevitable liberalization under pluralist and middle-class conditions. Which is fine, we don't want the theocracy, or I don't, but some of the aestheticism is forfeit as well. (I gave Ash del Greco's grandmother in Major Arcana an old line from my great uncle who died in 1990: "Churches in America look like bowling alleys!") With Vatican II, some of these changes became a feature of the history of the Church at large. No more Latin mass, songs written for guitar in the liturgy, etc.—but, like Joe Biden, I still know all the words to those songs, and they actually tended to be played on the booming organ when I was a kid. (Lol, I just found out Lana Del Rey covered "On Eagles' Wings" in tribute to Biden.)
Modernized, liberalized Christianity remains the question for the Church, then and now and likely always. (I recently read "Wolf Hall" like it was a gossip column.) We're from Catholics on both sides of my father's family, Italians and Czechs, and so the St. Nikolas Day tradition of shoes full of candy and coal is something I'm weighing adding back into my own family's Advent season (after my grandmother's faithful example). Per the aesthetic of worship: funny enough, a Methodist I know is still recovering from his church's fight against adding guitars to their seminal organ.
And may Lana remain, like Christ, unpredictable and mercurial always.
My family didn't do many traditions except the seven fishes—itself apparently a sort of fake-folk Italian-American custom rather than strictly Catholic or even strictly Italian—which attenuated after the old people died, until now, when there's no fishes at all, because the wholly American children present at the feast will gag if there's a fish in proximity to their food!
I like that American paradox, actually: gagging over fake-folk fish while likely living in surroundings that consider sushi a delicacy. I suppose what's old in European tradition is more familiar (and thus unseemly) than what's old in Japanese tradition. It's the kind of paradox that makes me wonder if our writers were always doomed to irony.
Good thoughts. It’s sorta interesting that substack is becoming mainstream and I suppose centrist enough to *have* these debates, considering that for a long time it was perceived as “the site for people who think Covid and racism aren’t real and trans women are men.” It’s still pretty right wing (occasionally I’ll look at a subscriber and think “you follow *me*???” although I should say I’ve yet to see any nazis myself.
Thanks! As one of those footnotes indicates, I'm enough of a 2021-style pandemic-dissident to count as an old-school Substacker, not that it's a live issue anymore.
The people I saw doing the petition seem to be in a 2017 Twitter timewarp as far as ideology goes and have missed several overlapping Overton Window shifts in both directions of the kind that have made the likes of Hanania objectively a mainstream pundit. It's a strange time to be going on about Nazis, a pretty negligible political force unless one extends the term unreasonably, when there's obviously a serious anti-semitism problem on the far left, with its much greater influence in important institutions.
Substack a big platform, so I'm sure there are Nazis and everything else—I've definitely seen far right figures in the Yarvin orbit, but not Nazis sensu stricto—and I'm aware I have a more cross-ideological readership than a lot of people, but I still feel like I mostly encounter the center left on here. No actual Nazis are reading me, surely: all I ever cite are gay and Jewish authors in pursuit of my elusive ultimate pacifisitic theory of syncretic androgynous universalist aestheticism!
Re: petitioners that was sort of my impression as well, a style that might’ve had some merits at one time, but the hour for is probably past anyway now that the more presentable elements of the alt right are just *the right.* In my experience at least the audience (maybe just mine admittedly) does seem to skew right, but on the other hand it’s mostly very civil- you don’t get shouted down by anybody here the way one sometimes does on other platforms.
Full of insightful projectiles, as always. What struck me about the WitchTok compilation accompanying Burton's article, was the childishness of it all (which is not necessarily all bad). I remember when I first heard about "shifting" I immediately thought "Isn't that just using your imagination?"
I also agree that Burton betrays a certain (understandable) Christian prejudice against the pagan that doesn't make the nuanced distinctions that you achieve in Major Arcana. Speaking of magic and literature, have you ever checked out Susanna Clarke?
Thank you! Yes, the WitchTok stuff is actually pretty different from what I was watching (mostly on YouTube since I'm old) to research the novel. The manifestation people on YouTube skew older. Many of them speak against spell-work, ritual magic, etc., as needlessly complicating the process of changing the way one thinks. At most, they might recommend using it only as a shortcut/hack. They often don't like Tarot and astrology either, since these limit your potential, suggesting you're at the mercy of fate and stars. Some of them also believe manifestation is biblical—this comes from Neville Goddard, who claimed to get everything from the Bible and from Blake—and therefore they also ironically have something like a Christian prejudice against the pagan.
(Re: Major Arcana: I decided for the sake of fun narrative logic I would treat magic as wholly real and effective if I was going to bother writing about it at all, but I hope the skeptical reader—I mean, I'm certainly skeptical of some of the things that happen in the book!—can also enjoy those plot turns as metaphorical ways of talking about how we use our wills.)
Never did read Clarke, was worried it would be too pastichey, but if you think I'd like her work...
You are right: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is probably more pastiche than original vision, but Clarke pulls off the magic-as-metaphor bit with charm and a certain Anglo-Catholic sensibility which, in its forgiving view of human nature, offers a useful antidote to the libidinal impulses of either iconoclasm or reactionism (Burton also seems more successful at this than most high-profile writers today, although I've not read her fiction). Piranesi sketches some arresting images, but I suspect you might get impatient with the extended Platonic allegories, however pertinent they might be to our contemporary anxieties about the real.
We ought to start more weeks with three-parter essays as varied as this one, honestly.
It turns out that Burton is Episcopalian (per an interview about modern self-invention with Plough Magazine, if I recall correctly). Since it's a Protestant sister-denomination with Catholicism, where would you put her / her tradition between the Catholic "spiritualized sensuality and respect for female divinity" and the Protestant "too absolutist and and too masculinist Protestant-gnostic individualism"? It's not exactly the Protestant tradition where I worship, but it does have its own beautiful aesthetics and intellectual history on its own.
Here's that interview: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6PdsbXJc7nhamG24u7KGUp?si=5bfa1cb4bf1c4776
Fascinating, thank you—I should have googled! I think I thought she was a Commonweal Catholic because she went on that Know Your Enemy podcast. But yes, though I only see it from the outside, that's a very beautiful tradition going back, as I understand it, to the Elizabethan Settlement. You'll have to forgive me for processing everything through literature, but I think of Eliot in the Four Quartets imagining the reconciliation of Milton and Charles I in England's hour of need. I myself often like these things at their extremes—blind Milton hardly having a body, all spirit, sentences soaring to heaven; blind Joyce being nothing but a body, even his language a kind of eroticized excretion—but as far as everyday practice goes, the middle is probably best. (American Catholicism, being in practice rather Protestantized, is pretty much in the middle.)
No forgiveness needed, literature as process is why we all read GHA. Eliot is a great connection here, himself an adult Anglican convert and Four Quartets being something of a politely high-church apocalytic vision like that of St. John. Milton, Joyce as two extremes is a fun vision also. As to the "middle" here in the States, would you call that a product of syncretism? I'm thinking partly of how Catholicism historically and globally as synthesized folk customs into itself in the process of conversion.
The syncretism is real, as I've seen with my immigrant forebears who were sort of practicing folk magic along with the religion, but I think the Protestanitzation is more a product of its inevitable liberalization under pluralist and middle-class conditions. Which is fine, we don't want the theocracy, or I don't, but some of the aestheticism is forfeit as well. (I gave Ash del Greco's grandmother in Major Arcana an old line from my great uncle who died in 1990: "Churches in America look like bowling alleys!") With Vatican II, some of these changes became a feature of the history of the Church at large. No more Latin mass, songs written for guitar in the liturgy, etc.—but, like Joe Biden, I still know all the words to those songs, and they actually tended to be played on the booming organ when I was a kid. (Lol, I just found out Lana Del Rey covered "On Eagles' Wings" in tribute to Biden.)
Modernized, liberalized Christianity remains the question for the Church, then and now and likely always. (I recently read "Wolf Hall" like it was a gossip column.) We're from Catholics on both sides of my father's family, Italians and Czechs, and so the St. Nikolas Day tradition of shoes full of candy and coal is something I'm weighing adding back into my own family's Advent season (after my grandmother's faithful example). Per the aesthetic of worship: funny enough, a Methodist I know is still recovering from his church's fight against adding guitars to their seminal organ.
And may Lana remain, like Christ, unpredictable and mercurial always.
My family didn't do many traditions except the seven fishes—itself apparently a sort of fake-folk Italian-American custom rather than strictly Catholic or even strictly Italian—which attenuated after the old people died, until now, when there's no fishes at all, because the wholly American children present at the feast will gag if there's a fish in proximity to their food!
I like that American paradox, actually: gagging over fake-folk fish while likely living in surroundings that consider sushi a delicacy. I suppose what's old in European tradition is more familiar (and thus unseemly) than what's old in Japanese tradition. It's the kind of paradox that makes me wonder if our writers were always doomed to irony.
Good thoughts. It’s sorta interesting that substack is becoming mainstream and I suppose centrist enough to *have* these debates, considering that for a long time it was perceived as “the site for people who think Covid and racism aren’t real and trans women are men.” It’s still pretty right wing (occasionally I’ll look at a subscriber and think “you follow *me*???” although I should say I’ve yet to see any nazis myself.
Thanks! As one of those footnotes indicates, I'm enough of a 2021-style pandemic-dissident to count as an old-school Substacker, not that it's a live issue anymore.
The people I saw doing the petition seem to be in a 2017 Twitter timewarp as far as ideology goes and have missed several overlapping Overton Window shifts in both directions of the kind that have made the likes of Hanania objectively a mainstream pundit. It's a strange time to be going on about Nazis, a pretty negligible political force unless one extends the term unreasonably, when there's obviously a serious anti-semitism problem on the far left, with its much greater influence in important institutions.
Substack a big platform, so I'm sure there are Nazis and everything else—I've definitely seen far right figures in the Yarvin orbit, but not Nazis sensu stricto—and I'm aware I have a more cross-ideological readership than a lot of people, but I still feel like I mostly encounter the center left on here. No actual Nazis are reading me, surely: all I ever cite are gay and Jewish authors in pursuit of my elusive ultimate pacifisitic theory of syncretic androgynous universalist aestheticism!
Re: petitioners that was sort of my impression as well, a style that might’ve had some merits at one time, but the hour for is probably past anyway now that the more presentable elements of the alt right are just *the right.* In my experience at least the audience (maybe just mine admittedly) does seem to skew right, but on the other hand it’s mostly very civil- you don’t get shouted down by anybody here the way one sometimes does on other platforms.
Full of insightful projectiles, as always. What struck me about the WitchTok compilation accompanying Burton's article, was the childishness of it all (which is not necessarily all bad). I remember when I first heard about "shifting" I immediately thought "Isn't that just using your imagination?"
I also agree that Burton betrays a certain (understandable) Christian prejudice against the pagan that doesn't make the nuanced distinctions that you achieve in Major Arcana. Speaking of magic and literature, have you ever checked out Susanna Clarke?
Thank you! Yes, the WitchTok stuff is actually pretty different from what I was watching (mostly on YouTube since I'm old) to research the novel. The manifestation people on YouTube skew older. Many of them speak against spell-work, ritual magic, etc., as needlessly complicating the process of changing the way one thinks. At most, they might recommend using it only as a shortcut/hack. They often don't like Tarot and astrology either, since these limit your potential, suggesting you're at the mercy of fate and stars. Some of them also believe manifestation is biblical—this comes from Neville Goddard, who claimed to get everything from the Bible and from Blake—and therefore they also ironically have something like a Christian prejudice against the pagan.
(Re: Major Arcana: I decided for the sake of fun narrative logic I would treat magic as wholly real and effective if I was going to bother writing about it at all, but I hope the skeptical reader—I mean, I'm certainly skeptical of some of the things that happen in the book!—can also enjoy those plot turns as metaphorical ways of talking about how we use our wills.)
Never did read Clarke, was worried it would be too pastichey, but if you think I'd like her work...
You are right: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is probably more pastiche than original vision, but Clarke pulls off the magic-as-metaphor bit with charm and a certain Anglo-Catholic sensibility which, in its forgiving view of human nature, offers a useful antidote to the libidinal impulses of either iconoclasm or reactionism (Burton also seems more successful at this than most high-profile writers today, although I've not read her fiction). Piranesi sketches some arresting images, but I suspect you might get impatient with the extended Platonic allegories, however pertinent they might be to our contemporary anxieties about the real.