Sundry Notes, January

Anglo-American exceptionalism, Body politics, and a ritual recommendation

Because announcements tend to get a bit buried in the Sundry notes, I thought I’d post these at the top.

First of all, I’ve unlocked two of my best essays from 2024 for all readers. One of these was per popular request, as quite a few paid subscribers asked me to unlock it so they could share it. That’s Are We The Baddies: The “left” versus the working class. It’s a rather in-depth essay on how the working class and the online left have nothing in common anymore, and how we got there:

“Left” especially doesn’t mean Marxist/anti-capitalist left anymore, but rather Neo-Liberal “Left.” Instead of organized attempts to increase wages and worker protections, and to force restraints on capitalist disruptions (the gig economy/internet of things, massive immigration, etc), the Neo-Liberal Left has focused on identity concerns and technocratic change, and that latter bit is especially the opposite of what workers actually want and need.

The other was written in August and is called The Immigration Crisis … and its most beautiful solution. It’s quite a personal one, as I’m of course an immigrant to Europe (and no, not an “expat.”) And like a lot of my other work, it’s an attempt to remind people that the “woke vs far right” dichotomy buries older and much more useful frameworks for understanding these crises:

This is something leftists all knew until class consciousness got replaced with the false enlightenment of social justice. Immigrants are not the enemy, but disruptive mass immigration is one of the enemy’s weapons. When a large group of us (remember — I’m an immigrant) move into a place, we will change it no matter whether we want to or not. This is even more true if the communities into which we move have already begun to fall apart through cultural erosion or economic damage.

And one more note: if you’ve been wanting to pick up copies of my books, all print editions of my titles at Sul Books are 20% off (use code RHYD25). I just noticed a really nice mention of my latest book, A People’s Guide to Tarot, this morning:

That’s precisely why I wrote the book. Occultists and academics both try to make everything so, well, occulted, mostly to sound deeply intelligent. Magic, divination, and life itself are all a lot more simple than that.

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Alright, now on to the Sundry Notes:

Anglo-American Exceptionalism

If you’ve not done public saunas — and I’m going to especially guess most of my American readers haven’t, as “paying to get naked in hot rooms with strangers for non-sexual reasons” isn’t really a thing post-Puritan colonies really do — then the experience might sound quite foreign. I’ll admit it was a bit difficult for me the first time especially, and had I not been brought along by a friend I’d likely not ever have gone.

Saunas here are usually part of a public swimming complex. In Luxembourg, there are at least eight of these, including one close enough for me to bike to. In all of them, you pay for either part of a day or an entire day, and besides several heat-levels of sauna, they also have steam rooms, hot tubs, cold plunges, and a lounge where you can go relax for awhile.

Especially interesting to me is the mixed-sex nature of public saunas here. While some of them have specific days set aside for one sex or the other (usually women-only days,¹ though one also has a men-only day), it’s otherwise assumed that you’re going to be fully naked with people of the opposite sex, and it won’t be a big deal at all.

The matter-of-fact way that people treat other bodies in such spaces is really quite fascinating, and its difference from Anglo-American attitudes seems to parallel the way alcohol is approached in each place. In most places in Europe, youth are exposed to and can drink alcohol often five or more years earlier than in the US and a few years earlier than in the UK. Similarly, nudity is not something parents are told they must shield their children against, so one sees a lot more bare breasts, asses, and genitals in media as a child than American or Anglo children do.

The different results of these attitudes can be best summed up by a seemingly-unrelated story from a German friend who’d done her PhD in one of those “enlightened” Pacific Northwest cities. She’d recounted to me the strange obsession many activists in that city had with a bicycle “protest” called Critical Mass. In Critical Mass, cyclists would gather monthly and ride through the city together. The idea behind it was that once the number of cyclists gathered was large enough, cars would have to accommodate them and the cyclists would experience a kind of collective freedom and power.

My friend, herself a cyclist who rode daily to work in Berlin, was understandably dismissive. “Critical Mass is basically every day in any city in Europe. It’s not a revolution, it’s just a commute.”

The same can be said about quite a lot of other “radical” cultural ideas generated in Anglo-American culture. Americans especially suffer from the idea that the particularities within their societies are universals, and that it is therefore up to them to liberate the world from oppression and repression. Critical race theory and Butlerian gender are both ready examples of this, but there are many other examples of it.

For instance, trying to explain to Europeans what Luigi Mangione did is often difficult. First, you have to explain the entire US health care system to them, including the very idea of a health insurance CEO. And then you have to explain how an insurance claim could be denied. Oh, and also that the costs for doctor visits and prescription medications aren’t uniform across even a city, let alone the entire nation. And that people die all the time because they don’t have the money for really basic treatments that would be free or practically free in most European countries.²

Certainly, European nations have plenty of problems of their own, and the point here isn’t to gloat that I escaped the US and others haven’t. Rather, it’s to underline how absurd it is that “left” American political activists nevertheless present themselves as the vanguard of a global revolution while simultaneously failing to secure even the most minor political changes in their own country. The same is equally true for UK “leftists,” who prattle on about remaking the world into a fair and just utopia with theories utterly disconnected to — and often considered odious by — the actual working class there.

And to be as fair as possible, I should admit I suffered greatly from this same problem. I lived the first 39 years of my life in the United States, and was absolutely as blinded by Anglo-American exceptionalism at those I am criticizing. Also, this applies equally to “left” and also to “right” ideologies. There’s no shortage of conservative or traditionalist thinkers — especially those obsessed with a “pure” culture untainted by Eastern or Islamic cosmologies — who believe a Britain or a United States restored to its true purpose and nature would somehow “repair” the world.

They suffer from the same exceptionalism as the “woke” activists and are caught in the same absurd orbit. And it should be obvious to anyone who’s read my series, The Mysteria, what the roots of this exceptionalism are.

John Calvin’s powerful lie to the world was that a sacred elect have a god-ordained responsibility to manifest the true destiny of all human societies.³ Neither the left nor the right in the cultures Calvinism shaped — especially Britain and the United States — can easily escape that belief. That’s because it’s woven into the very fabric of how they think of the world, regardless of whether or not they see themselves as religious or secular. Thus, without exorcising that core foundation of their cosmologies, they’ll find themselves relentlessly trying to save the rest of the world while their own lives fall apart.

To be fair, interrogating and then uprooting that Calvinist core isn’t easy. It’s taken years for me to even notice it within myself, and that work isn’t done through intellectual delving. Instead, it’s done through the body, experiencing the world in ever more unmitigated and raw ways until, slowly, the old way of seeing the world as a place in need of repairing and salvation is displaced by an ever-increasing curiosity about what is truly possible.

“The Body is the Source of Ultimate Reality”

Speaking of both the body and the matter of Luigi Magnione, one of the best essays I encountered about the matter was from

Alexander Beiner

. His essay, Best Served Cold: Luigi Mangione and The Age of Breach, is absolutely worth your time, and I’ve bolded a few bits of this excerpt to give you a sense as to why I think so.

As Varoufakis points out in Technofeudalism, one of the paradoxes of capitalism is that when you as a worker are hired somewhere, there are two kinds of value being exchanged. There’s your ‘exchange value’, or how much money your time is worth in the free market. And then there’s your ‘experiential value’, the value of your qualities as a human being.

Because you are a body, you can’t separate these two aspects, so employers get access to your mind and soul for free as part of your exchange value. An employer can’t force you to care about your work, or give them your full creative potential, but they can capture your body for 8 hours and try to extract additional experiential value where they can.

…

So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”

They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity. That is, unless we want to make the claim that Thompson is more valuable as a CEO than as a father. It puts the whole of corporate America in an impossible double-bind.

I do suspect that any significant revolutionary political action would need to be a revolution of bodies, rather than of theories. It’s anyway what truly drives politics, though its source is relentlessly buried under endless layers of obfuscation. Only re-anchoring all political ideologies into the reality and needs of bodies would ever affect significant change.

But there’s not yet a politics that can really do this. We have definitely seen a few moments of its radical potential, as when people from multiple political formations in Europe seemed to agree about the regime of Covid-related laws here. Restricting human movement is anti-Body, as is restricting the ability of humans to meet together as bodies. Of course, we then saw an orchestrated re-narration of those shared desires for bodily sovereignty as a dangerous fusion of “far right” and “far left” ideologies to be fought at all costs.

“Become Who You Are”

Imbolc approaches, which for me means the beginning of spring and the real return of the light. This Imbolc particularly is quite meaningful to me, as it marks several anniversaries of my life and represents the fulfillment of certain desires and magical acts which led me to where I am now.

It was on an Imbolc, many years ago and on another continent, that I clumsily performed a ritual which brought me here. I didn’t know what “here” would look like or where it would even be, but that’s how magic works.

Setting an intention for the future is best done without too many details, otherwise you’ll just manifest a tired version of the past. To see what I mean, imagine asking a teenager to tell you exactly what his or her life should look like at 40, and then holding the 40 year old version of that person to all those earlier intentions. The result for most would be a terrible limitation, rather than anything we’d actually want,⁴ because we cannot know what we’ll desire and who we’ll be when we arrive there.

So, the 37 year old me couldn’t possibly have even known to ask for the life I have now at 47. Instead, he could only ask Brigid to help guide him to a place where he could be more himself, and that’s precisely what happened. Of course, I had no idea what that would look like or even what “more myself” actually entailed.

The phrase “become who you are” comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, and though there’s quite a lot written on it (including an entire self-help book titled thusly), I’ve found it works much like a koan. Meditate on it repeatedly, over days, weeks, and years, and it still keeps unfolding because “who you are” is also always unfolding.

I don’t normally give magical or ritual advice, but in this case I’d absolutely recommend this to anyone struggling with a sense of being “stuck” in a prescribed life. Especially, if you get have the sense your life is already written out for you, or if you feel blocked in every direction by what others think of you, and especially if it seems like your favorite parts of you are too “rough” for others to ever accept, this phrase is quite powerful.

You can of course apply it as you like. I often include it in the prayers I say each morning and evening. If you’re gods-bothered like I am, quite a few of them are quite keen on helping with this sort of magic (Brigid, Freyja, Apollo, Diana, Arianrhod, for just a few names). If you don’t know any gods, you can still certainly do add the phrase to meditations,⁵ or just write it down somewhere you’ll occasionally notice it (mirrors are a particularly good place for this).

Also:

I’m trying to restrain my overwhelming desire to talk about my gym training, because really I could talk forever about it. But if you’ll allow me a slight indulgence here, something kind of crazy happened.

Despite — or perhaps because of — my shoulder injury several months ago, I gained three kilograms (6.6 lbs) of muscle over the last three months and actually lost half a kilo (about a pound) of fat during the same period.

How? I’m not really sure. Here’s what I did, though:

• I stopped counting calories, and instead only made sure I was eating at least 220 grams of protein a day.

• I switched from four 2-hour days of training a week to three 2.5-hour days, and added ten minutes of cardio at the beginning of each session.

• I dropped all compound lifts (no squats, deadlifts, etc) and replaced them with targeted lifts.

• For most lifts, I added a set (now four sets for some lifts, three sets for others) and focused on increasing weight rather than repetitions.

• I increased the recovery time between sets to 3 minutes for really heavy lifts and 2 minutes for moderate ones.

I don’t think there was one specific change that caused these gains — it was probably the entire combination. But needless to say, I’m quite impressed with what happened.

Be well, all of you!

-Rhyd

1. And if you’re wondering, to the best of my knowledge there’s not been the same kinds of controversies over single-sex spaces as there have been in the US and UK. In fact, the tendency here among the very (very, very) small trans population has been to seek out spaces exclusive to them (for instance, asking for devoted hours where transmen can swim shirtless without fear of others seeing their mastectomy scars) rather than trying to force all of society to accept them.

2. In comparison, consider the total cost for my shoulder, including the doctor’s visit, an initial anti-inflammatory treatment, ultrasound scans, and 10 weeks of physical therapy: 92 euros.

3. I’ve also written how this belief essentially created Zionism. The short summary of this process is that many Jewish converts to Calvinism saw the obvious parallel between Calvin’s “elect” and the idea of Jews being a “chosen people” (that’s anyway where Calvin got it from) and began applying it to the Messianic restoration of Jerusalem. Incidentally, the British occultist John Dee — Queen Elizabeth’s advisor — took this idea and applied it to England itself, and that’s where all the real mess of modernity began.

4. That’s incidentally why I think so much of the writing on magic I encounter is useless, especially anything derived from Crowley.

5. There are several ways of doing this, but one extremely good way is to play with the words in your head, meditating on each one until they seem to “disappear” completely.