The
Modern Occultist
Interview #9
JOHN MICHAEL GREER
Merlin's Wheel:
Self-Initiation in the Druid Tradition & The Secret of the Temple:
Earth Energies, Sacred Geometry, and the Lost Keys of Freemasonry
Aeon Books, 2025 & 2026
An exclusive from our third issue! One of the most respected writers and teachers in the
occult field today, John Michael Greer has written more than fifty books on
esoteric traditions, nature spirituality, and the future of industrial society.
An initiate in Druidic, Hermetic, and Masonic lineages, he served for twelve
years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). He
lives in Silver Springs, Maryland with his wife, Sara. He can be found online
at www.EcoSophia.net
MODERN OCCULTIST
I’ve long admired how one of
your earlier books, The Occult Philosophy Workbook,
can be used as a perfect primer for nearly any magical or esoteric
systems that a reader would continue to study post-coursework. Your most recent
works, however, have largely combined your own passions in ethical nature-based
philosophies with modern Paganism—which I love!
JOHN MICHAEL GREER
Thank you. I’ve gone back and
forth between these two general themes through most of my writing career. I
first broke into print with a sequence of Golden Dawn-themed books back in the
1990s, starting with Paths of Wisdom,
then started writing about Druidry in the next decade, and—well, my interests
include both those themes as well as others, so my book projects wind back and
forth across a fairly broad landscape of ideas. We’ll talk a little later about
how artificial the current barriers between those themes really are.
MO
In Merlin's Wheel you
make a compelling case that the figure of Merlin—pop culture wizard
aside—preserves the memory of a genuinely archaic Celtic deity, one whose myths
encode a system of spiritual transformation that predates Stonehenge. How did
you first begin to suspect that the Merlin legends were pointing back to
something that ancient, and what was the moment in your research when that
suspicion became a conviction?
JMG
Three books did it. One was Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for
Merlin, a first-rate study of the
historical realities behind the Merlin legend; the other two were R.J.
Stewart’s The Prophetic Vision of Merlin and The Mystic Life of
Merlin, which unpack two of the
core medieval Merlin texts to show the profound occult philosophy woven into
them. By the time I finished reading those it was clear to me that the
Disneyfied Merlin I’d grown up with was not merely fake but a crass debasement
of a deep spiritual reality.
MO
On a personal note, do you have a
favorite on-screen Merlin? Full disclosure, Nicol Williamson IS Merlin to me…
JMG
There I’m going to have to disappoint you. I’ve never seen a visual-media version of Merlin I liked. That’s one of the two reasons I put Merlin as a character in my novel The Weird of Hali: Arkham, the last volume of my epic fantasy with tentacles—I wanted to portray Merlin something like the way I imagine him. (The other reason was that H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories gave me much of my raw material, included Merlin as a minor figure in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and that was far too tempting a morsel to leave out of my tale!)
MO
The fissure you describe in Merlin's Wheel between ceremonial magicians and the broader Pagan community is something many of our readers will recognize acutely—they've lived on one side of it or the other (and many, like myself, due to your wonderful previous books on the Grail and its place within modern Pagan practices!). Your work in books like The Celtic Golden Dawn and now Merlin's Wheel seems designed to heal that divide by demonstrating that the two traditions were never actually separate. Do you think that reunification is happening in the broader community, or are the two camps still talking past each other?
JMG
I’d love to say that I’ve seen evidence that ceremonial magicians are getting more interested in nature-centered spirituality, or that a significant number of today’s Pagans are getting past the bunny slope level of esoteric practice, but I haven’t seen it. On the one hand, the ceremonial magic scene is still trying to grapple with the sheer volume and complexity of a tradition far older and vaster than most people realized until recently. On the other, most modern Pagans, at least in the US, are so caught up in political activism these days that it’s surprising they have time to do anything else. If the barriers are going to fall, it’s going to be a slower process than I once hoped.
What makes this all the more annoying is that the barriers in question were manufactured in the late 20th century and did not exist before then. Was Dion Fortune a ceremonial magician or a Pagan? Both, of course. William Butler Yeats? Ditto. Ross Nichols, the most influential figure in twentieth century Druidry? Ditto. Oh, and let’s also include esoteric Christianity in that mix. Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, was also an ordained priest in an esoteric Christian church, and was active in it at the same time as he was leading his coven. Dion Fortune saw no contradiction in attending Anglican services, practicing Golden Dawn magic, and invoking Isis and Pan, all in the course of a single week. All these things and more are part of a wider Western esoteric tradition that is far stronger in its unity than it is when, as now, it’s chopped apart into bloddy gobbets by fossilized bigotries among competing factions.
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MO
The Secret of the Temple
advances one of the most quietly audacious arguments in contemporary occult
scholarship: that ancient temples—from Solomon's to the great Celtic
shrines—functioned as a literal folk
technology for agricultural fertility, and that this technology was
deliberately encoded in what became the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff and the
Grail romances. For readers encountering this thesis for the first time—what's
the single most persuasive piece of evidence you found, the thread that, once
pulled, made the whole pattern visible?
JMG
It’s not a matter of a single piece of evidence; if there was some such piece, the whole pattern would have become visible long before I started work on it. I began to guess that there was a practical technology underlying the ancient temples when I started finding references to agricultural fertility as a central theme in a giddy profusion of sources, from Jewish texts about the Temple of Solomon to the practices of Japanese Shinto to the legends of the Holy Grail and more. Always it was the same theme: do certain things that have to do with architecture and ritual, and the fields flourish.
The thing that convinced me that there was really something
to it, though, was a detail mentioned in Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty,
a fascinating book by John Burke and Kaj Halberg. They’d discovered that
exposing seeds to a strong magnetic field made them sprout and grow more
vigorously, and happened to find out that certain sacred structures, such as
Mayan pyramids, concentrate the earth’s magnetism at their peaks. Then they
visited the Yucatan peninsula and found out that the local native peoples, who
are descended from the ancient Mayans and speak Mayan languages, still take
their seed corn to the tops of the old pyramids and leave it there for a while
before planting it. That wasn’t the technology I was exploring, but it proved
that archaic folk technologies related to agriculture did exist, and could be
connected to religions practice.
MO
Both books circle around the
same deep question from different angles: what gets lost when a living mystery
tradition dies, and what—if anything—can be recovered or reconstructed? In Merlin's
Wheel you argue that self-initiation through ceremonial practice can
genuinely reconnect a practitioner with the inner realities behind a lost
tradition, and in The Secret of the Temple you suggest that the
"Waste Land" of the Grail legends may be something more than
metaphor—that something real went out of the land when the temple technology
was suppressed. Are these two ideas connected for you? And, like so much
proactive occult education, is the work of recovery both inner and outer
simultaneously?
JMG
The ideas are connected only to the extent that both have
left traces in Arthurian legend—but then a whale of a lot of other things have
left traces in the vast storehouse of archaic myth, sacred science, and dimly
remembered magic we call “Arthurian legend.”
The material I’ve tried to tease out of the Merlin legend in Merlin’s
Wheel is primarily inner, relating to the spiritual development of the
individual. The material central to The Secret of the Temple is
primarily outer—it’s a technology, and at least in theory, anyone who can
reconstruct the technology can use it and benefit from it, irrespective of
their spiritual commitments. The temple technology was used by religious
traditions ranging from medieval Western Christianity to Japanese Shinto, so I
don’t imagine there are many paths it can’t work with!
MO
You've been extraordinarily
prolific across an enormous range—Druidry, Hermeticism, geomancy, peak oil,
political philosophy, fiction—and yet there's a recognizable “Greer
sensibility” (and readability!) running through all of it: a deep respect for
what we might call the limits of the case, a refusal to overclaim, a
willingness to say this is speculative but here's why it's worth following. Where
does that epistemic discipline come from, and do you ever find it in tension
with the demands of magical practice, which sometimes seems to require a degree
of commitment that goes beyond what the evidence strictly supports?
JMG
It astonishes me that basic epistemic humility is so rare these days. Can we please be real? The human brain is a lump of greasy gelatin six inches long. It can do some remarkable things, but to claim that it can make any kind of sense of a universe trillions of light years across is obviously absurd. All we have to go on is our own experience, and the experiences of others handed down to us in the form of teachings; summed up, that amounts to nothing more than the hoots and grunts of a very few members of one species of social primate inhabiting the wet film on the third rock from a minor star in an incomprehensibly vast universe.
Mystics have been pointing this out for thousands of years. Philosophers demonstrated it with unanswerable logic centuries ago: Immanuel Kant, for example, showed conclusively that we can know precisely nothing for certain about the world as it really is, because everything we get is filtered through the complex kluge job of our senses, nervous systems, and psychology. None of this should be news. It struck me as basic common sense even before I started getting a grasp on the impressive philosophical evidence that backs it up.
Yet people keep stumbling along, insisting that whatever cerebral flatulence they inhaled from their parents, their schools, their churches, or the corporate media is The Truth, full stop, end of sentence. That it certainly is not. What it is, all it is, is a rough approximation, as far from what it represents as a child’s stick figure of a horse is from the surging, sweating reality of a horse at full gallop. Now of course the stick-figure teachings we get can be useful, but it baffles me that so many people go out of their way to mistake the map for the territory!
As for conflict between epistemic limits and magical
practice, oh, quite the contrary. Dogmatism is a massive hindrance if you’re
engaged in magical practice; the competent mage must always be prepared to set
aside preexisting opinions and simply pay attention to what works, what gets
results, in terms of his or her own personal experience. You don’t have to
“believe in” the Tree of Life, let’s say, in order to use it, and getting hung
up on one particular version of the Tree as The One True Version can get in the
way of being able to work creatively with the many versions out there. To
borrow a convenient bit of Greek, this is the difference between doxa,
“opinion,” and gnosis, “personal acquaintance.” You have to
be ready to set aside doxa to be open to gnosis. You have
to realize how little you know if you want to learn.
MO
In your personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students
and initiates—how would you describe “Occult Philosophy”?
JMG
A set of symbolic descriptions that help practitioners of
occult disciplines make sense of their experiences. The teachings of occult
philosophy should never be taken as truths; to borrow a line from Dion Fortune,
they are meant to train the mind, not to inform it.
MO
What was your personal start on your own journey on this
path (or chosen profession)?
JMG
From early childhood I had the sense that there was something wonderful hidden off beyond the plastic façade of 20th century suburbia, where I grew up. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a feeling that it was something rejected, something weird. That led me into any number of odd byways, helped by the explosion of books on alternative culture that made the 1960s and 1970s so colorful. Then one bleak and wintry day in 1976, while I was being dragged around a department store in downtown Seattle by my mother, I happened to end up in the book department. (Department stores had those back then.) There on one of the racks of paperbacks was Techniques of High Magic by Francis King and Stephen Skinner, a basic intro to Golden Dawn magic, with a fine lurid cover I recall vividly to this day.
If the Holy Grail had been wafted down to me by angels,
right there in that department store, my world wouldn’t have been rocked any
more dramatically. I knew, with gut-punch intensity, that magic was the thing
I’d been looking for all along, that magic was going to be the keynote of my
life, and that the book in my shaking hands was the first stepping stone that
would lead me out of my miserable childhood toward better things. Did I buy it?
You bet. I took it home, read it with feverish intensity, and then I did what
fifteen-year-olds generally do: I set it aside, dabbled in it, read lots of
books and did very little practice. It wasn’t until 1984 that I began serious
practice. Even so, the die was cast; when I got to work following a magical
path, I started with the same Golden Dawn tradition I’d learned about from the
book by King and Skinner, and spent the next fifteen years or so working hard
on that approach to magic. From there, the rest followed.
MO
To this magazine, the concept of “modern occultism” can (and
should) be equally viewed from both the academic and practical sides. What
would you recommend to a person only now coming along to these subjects, and is
uncertain if an objective academic career, or a true “practical path” may be
right for them?
JMG
That’s a very difficult question to answer right now because the academic scene in the US is in terminal crisis. Most of the people I know in academia are either scrambling to get out or hoping that they can retire before things fall apart completely. The sheer financial cost of an academic degree these days is so high, and the opportunities to do anything with most degrees are becoming so scarce, that I honestly can’t recommend an academic career to anybody these days. If you want to become an independent scholar, that’s another matter, but in that case you’ll have to write, blog, or find some other venue outside the academy to attract an audience for your work.
I also note that much of the best work being done these days on esoteric traditions is from people who bridge the gap between academic and practitioner paths. Right now, for example, I’m reading a first-rate book, The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience, by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen. Both authors are capable scholars with a fine command of the academic literature on the history of kundalini; both are also practitioners with personal experience of kundalini yoga. This combined approach gives their work a clarity, a cogency, and a relevance that neither a purely academic nor a purely practiced-based approach can provide.
Thus I’d like to recommend that anybody who is interested in
occultism should study it from both academic and practice-based perspectives.
They should study the literature and learn the history, but they should also
explore the practice in person. The division between these two is artificial
and harmful, and the academic politics that made it necessary for scholars to
avoid practice—well, that’s collapsing along with the current form of the
academy itself.
MO
What is one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped
shape your journey and personal philosophies that you would recommend to a new
student or occult practitioner (or historian / academic)?
JMG
Dion Fortune, who’s been mentioned several times already in
this interview, has been the single most important influence on my own
conception of occultism, and I recommend her work to anyone interested in
modern occult theory and practice. If I had to specify a book, it wouldn’t be
one of the famous ones—the novels, say, or The Mystical Qabalah,
important as those are. What I found most useful were the collections of her
essays: Applied Magic,
The Training and Work of the
Initiate, and so on. Reading one or more of those volumes an
essay at a time, and reflecting on what they say and avoid saying, is an
education worth having.
MO
And finally, what is one daily activity that you believe
is a MUST for all seekers of the occult philosophies and/or arts?
JMG
There isn’t one. Occultism is emphatically not a one-size-fits-all activity—you might as well ask if there’s one piece of scientific equipment that’s of central importance to quantum physicists, botanists, oceanographers, and every other kind of scientist! In the same way, each branch of occult study has its own requirements, and each school of occult practice has its own basic exercises and disciplines, which are not interchangeable: the skills and knowledge base that will make you a first-rate astrologer won’t help much if you take up traditional Southern conjure, or radionics, or Golden Dawn magic, or what have you.
Even within specific disciplines, I can’t see any way to
narrow things down to a single activity. In the quirky forms of ceremonial
magic I mostly teach these days, there’s a set of three basic practices—a
ritual to protect and balance the mind and the subtle bodies, a form of
meditation, and some kind of daily divination—that students do every day. Those
three will take you very far, but no one of them can replace the others.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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