American author and druid
John Michael Greer |
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| Born | 1962 (age 61–62)
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| Occupations |
- Author
- blogger
- occultist
- teacher
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John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American author and druid who writes on ecological overshoot, ecological economics, appropriate technology, oil depletion, societal collapse, ecocentrism, pantheism, and the occult.
Personal life
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. He currently lives in East Providence, Rhode Island with his wife Sara.[1]
Druidry
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]
Occultism
He has blogged on occult topics on The Well of Galabes (2014-2017), which is now hosted on Ecosophia.[6] He currently writes on political astrology using mundane ingress charts via the subscription services SubscribeStar[7] and Patreon.[8]
Politics and nonfiction
Greer describes himself as a moderate Burkean conservative, influenced by the political theorist Edmund Burke.[9] He is currently blogging at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics.[10]
He previously blogged at The Archdruid Report on peak oil, economics, history, philosophy and related topics from 2006 to 2017.[11] He believes that gradual societal collapse will ensue as fossil fuel–powered industries and societies decline through resource depletion.[12] In a 2009 blog post entitled "Hagbard's Law", he contrasted the attention global warming receives compared to peak oil.[13]
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.[14][15] 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."[16] 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.[16]
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 criticises the openness of liberal occultists, arguing that magical practices benefit from more obscurity and secrecy.[17]
Fiction
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".[18] He has also written deindustrial science fiction and a political-military thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming.
Reception
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."[19] It was also positively reviewed in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries[20] and was recommended in the industry journal Energy Policy.[21] 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."[22]
His book The New Encyclopedia of the Occult was selected as a reference text in 2005 by American Libraries[23] and noted by Booklist[24] and Publishers Weekly.[25]
