Legends of the golem, usually sourced as an archetype in Kabbalah, are actually found in Talmud, but may stem from the same magical traditions. According to these stories, sometimes presented as cautionary tales, a rabbi could create a crude, humanoid being, in a travesty of God’s creation. These monsters had no will or intelligence of their […]
Counterintuitively, these losses would be concentrated, not in the Third World as comfortable Westerners might prefer to assume, but in the West itself. USA, the Five Eyes/ British Commonwealth countries, Western Europe and Scandinavia registered the most brutal reductions.
THE CONSPIRACY MYTH by Charles Eisenstein — A Response ‘The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the […]
Photograph by Sam Sherratt ‘Once upon the throne of kings, there shall never have been a tyranny to equal ours, no despot shall ever have put a thicker blindfold over the eyes of the people; plunged into essential ignorance, it shall be at our mercy, blood will flow in rivers, our Masonic brethren […]
In Hampton’s Fancher’s original screen adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, Rick Deckard, a ‘blade-runner’ or police assassin hired to hunt down rogue androids, is instructed to go to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to test their latest model, the Nexus 6. His task is to find out whether his equipment, the […]
In his documentary series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004), Adam Curtis parallels the rise of militant Islam with the ‘neoconservative’ movement in America. Both movements, he argues, represent irrationalist reactions against secular democracy. The original neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, and Paul Wolfowitz, came together as students […]
The Owl is in his leafy temple. Let all within the Grove be reverent before him. Lift up your heads, oh ye trees, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting spires. For behold! Here is Bohemia’s shrine and holy are the pillars of this house. Weaving spiders come not here. Hail, Bohemians! With the ripple […]
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, born in 1740 of a distinguished Provençal family, was not the man he wanted to be. For one thing, he spent half his life in prison, and for another, according to a police description of him, he was physically repulsive – short, pudgy, and ugly as sin. The sexual […]
I lived for six years in Amsterdam. I arrived there a few weeks before starting my new job, and just hung out in the city. The first three conversations I had with strangers all went the same way. They’d ask me what I thought of the place so far, and I’d say great, really chilled; […]
“One of the most profound stories in the world is really no more than an elaborate image: Plato’s Parable of the Cave (The Republic, Book VII). He conjures up the picture of a row of men, imprisoned in a cave, their gaze forcibly fixed in only one direction. Here on the wall in front of […]