Toward Ecosophy

I'm very pleased to report that two more books of mine have just been released. (I know, my bookshelves are overloaded too.) 

The first  is an offshoot of my book The Celtic Golden Dawn. Back in the day William Gray, one of Dion Fortune's students, published a fascinating little book titled The Office of the Holy Tree of Life, in which he used his own highly idiosyncratic version of the Tree of Life as the basis for a sequence of prayers and invocations calling on each of the spheres and paths of the Tree. I worked with that volume for some years back when I was exploring Gray's Sangreal Sodality system, and found it extremely effective as a way of working with the Tree of Life. 

It's always surprised me that nobody else picked up the same practice and applied it to any of the other occult systems of Cabala. Since leading by example is always the most effective approach, I worked up a set of comparable prayers and invocations for the version of the Cabala given in The Celtic Golden Dawn, worked with it for a couple of years, revised as needed, and then circulated it privately among members of the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, making more corrections as needed. Now it's in print and available from Aeon Books. You can order a copy here in the US and here elsewhere in the world. 

The second book -- well, it's not new, but it's been republished in a new and improved edition, which almost counts. ;-)  The Retro Future was the last of the books in what I suppose you could call my peak oil period, the years in which I was an active participant in the movement to try to get the industrial world to notice that the engines of economic growth were running on fumes. Yes, we failed -- and that's something I'll be discussing elsewhere, in some detail -- but if you take a look at the price of gasoline just now, it may start to sink in that we weren't wrong...

The peak oil movement also helped a lot of us think outside the narrow limits of acceptable discourse in industrial society, and in particular to challenge the mythology of progress that provides the modern world with its unacknowledged official religion, and undergirds most of the superstitious thought about technology that's landed us face first in so many pitfalls in recent years. The Retro Future was the third and final book in my trilogy on that subject. The first volume, After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (available here), explored faith in progress as a religion and discussed what was happening as progress ground to a halt around us. The second, Retrotopia (available here), is a utopian novel set in post-United States America, in which a recently founded republic in the Midwest achieves prosperity and peace by abandoning progress and moving back rather than forward. The Retro Future, the capstone of the trilogy, discusses how to get from our current mess to a stable and relatively prosperous society by using the past as a resource for the future. 

Scandalous? You bet. The blog posts where I originally floated these ideas fielded tirades from the offended; the book itself got uneasy looks followed by avoidance. Now The Retro Future is back in a new revised edition. As the price of gasoline heads toward the stratosphere, and the price of everything else climbs in lockstep, maybe it's time for another look at the alternatives. Interested? You can get it here.