“Little profit for him there to use his mind, his reasoning powers,” writes Hamilton, referring to Egyptian dynastic society. “They could do nothing for him in the one matter of overwhelming importance, his status in the world to come. They could not give him hope when life was hopeless or strength to endure the unendurable. People who are terrified and hard pressed by misery do not turn to the mind for their help.” ^[1]

To some extent Hamilton’s assessment has been softened by more recent discoveries in archaeology, for example excavations of worker communities near the Giza pyramids which show evidence of a high level of nutrition in workers’ diets. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine sustaining a multi-decade building program solely on the strength of state repression and violence. Humans will submit, but only for so long. Any despot who relies too heavily on iron rule is ensuring a rebellion at some point in the future. This would not bode well for a project like a pyramid that could take two or more generations to successfully complete. “For a long time, the Great Pyramids were viewed as monuments built by the forced labor of thousands of slaves. However, over the last few decades, archaeological excavations led by Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass on the Giza Plateau have revolutionized our understanding. They discovered the ‘Lost City of the Pyramid Builders’ (Heit el-Ghurab), a highly organized urban complex that proves the workforce was a massive, well-fed, and skilled bureaucracy.” ^[2]

First it has to be said that Greece like all other ancient societies relied on slaves for its economic power and the leisure of its most prosperous era in the 5^th century BCE. But then, what are contemporary citizens, paying graduation-to-grave loans and mortgages, but glorified slaves? Still, Hamilton’s observations about the hierarchy of ancient imperial societies prior to Greek democracies remains valid. Writing of the priesthoods that held sway in the ancient near East, Hamilton aptly points out:

“To teach the people so that they would begin to think for themselves, would be to destroy the surest prop of their power. No one except themselves must have knowledge, for to be ignorant is to be afraid, and in the dark mystery of the unknown a man cannot find his way alone. He must have guides to speak to him with authority. Ignorance was the foundation upon which the priest-power rested.” —Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way ^[3]

Reading these words, it occurred to me that this in fact may be why our “elites” of the 21^st century CE have begun to dismantle the classical Greek foundations of Western society. After 200 years or so of the modern experiment in democracy, the wealthiest of the human race have decided it’s simply too much trouble. In order to pursue elite interests without hindrance, a democracy requires an active, ongoing program of political lobbying and financial influence peddling. This is expensive and cumbersome compared to the ancient imperial way of doing things, when a king, pharaoh or emperor simply commanded a thing and it was done, with nothing to stand in his way. It’s not hard to see Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and his “tech bros” lusting after precisely this kind of power.

That there has been an active, multi-decadal program of “dumbing down,” to quote the late educational historian John Taylor Gatto, is more than obvious in the continually plummeting IQ scores and academic averages for students. Universities have switched from their classical role of training and fostering the life of the mind—as Hamilton explains, certainly an ancient Greek ideal—to indoctrinating students in ideology and streaming students into career slots. Just as was the case prior to the great democratization of university education beginning in the 1960s, today’s elites wish to reserve genuinely higher education for their own kind. As the late great comedian George Carlin so aptly put it: “Governments don’t want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.” ^[4]

To a great extent this was the case during the early Industrial Revolution of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, when humans were the primary motive power in the factories. But thanks to libertarian thinkers like Thomas Paine and other intellectuals of the period, followed by technological advances that made human power increasingly redundant in mass production, we enjoyed an unprecedented period of middle class prosperity and public education. As Gatto pointed out so eloquently in his books and lectures, public education from the beginning was always aimed at producing cogs for the machine. Yet into that soulless enterprise crept the liberating educational philosophies of John Ruskin and Rudolf Steiner, providing a brief historical window of leveling the field between commoner and elite.

But already by the late 20^th century the cracks in egalitarianism were becoming blindingly obvious to anyone willing to face reality. John Ralston Saul, in his great work, Voltaire’s Bastards—published in 1992—wrote extensively of how the project of public education had by that time eroded to a shadow of its former self, as elites realized their mistake in allowing university education to be affordable to even the working class:

“Within the ethos of reason there was also the idea of encouraging generalized education. Education instilled knowledge. Knowledge dispelled superstition, thus making it possible to reason. A man capable of reasoning was fit to be a citizen. But this idea of creating citizens was vague. What did the elites want them for? The 18^th century philosophers believed, after all, in permanently established but benevolent authority. Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and bottom of society. Not to change the nature of the relationship.” —John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards ^[5]

That was certainly one of Gatto’s main arguments about modern public education: it wasn’t designed to liberate the proles, only make them more suitable for a technocratic society. The steady erosion of the humanities and the recent acceleration of universities in pitching classical studies overboard was already in evidence when Saul was writing:

“The removal of the humanities from education has undermined common sense and restraint and thus encouraged us to lurch from extreme to extreme in public policy. And yet there is still too much of the humanities in education to suit the technocratic elites. They blame the troubles of state-funded education on this. In fact, our elites no longer believe that it its possible to offer a general, universal education… In the United States large sections of the population were happily abandoned to illiteracy from the very beginning.” —John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards ^[6]

As Gatto, Carlin and Saul make abundantly clear, the golden age of modern public education is over. In fact it had barely begun when the elites realized it was contrary to their interests, as Saul explains. This is why more and more families are turning to home schooling, or enrolling their children in alternative educational systems such as Waldorf schools inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s philosophies. Despite mainstream media’s attempt to demonize parents who homeschool their children, the data suggests consistently greater academic scores for these students, including 21 percent higher math and 18 percent higher reading scores in one 2023 study, scoring up to 30 percent higher than public school students overall. ^[7] This at a time when college and university professors complain that high school graduates entering their programs can’t even perform rudimentary math and language skills. An open letter signed by 600 University of California professors calling for the reinstatement of SAT exams illustrates the point graphically: “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must re-teach middle school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the letter read. ^[8]

Add to that the fact that, in a 2025 survey, 40 percent of Americans read no books at all that year. Of the remainder, only 19 percent read 10 or more books. A mere four percent read 50 or more books per year. ^[9] I’m not the first to point out—and I pray I won’t be the last—that reading is fundamental to developing the capacity to think. According to one research paper:

“Students are compelled to think deeply, critically, and analytically while reading, which helps them master certain higher-order thinking skills. They develop inferential skills, make connections between texts, and cultivate the ability to think about, and beyond, what is stated in a text based on evidence. Additionally, reading enhances creativity, imagination, and empathy, teaching students to see things from the perspectives of others and understand different traditions.” ^[10]

In other words, reading is the basis for original thinking. Which of course is the very thing the technocracy does not want in its digital citizens. The passive act of consuming podcasts and video or social media feeds cannot substitute for the active process of reading—not skimming 500-word articles on a screen—but preferably, reading books.

This alarming trend toward illiteracy is both symptom and motivation for the technocratic elites’ mad rush into the unregulated development of AI and the destructive build-out of data centres around the world. Add to this the fruition of decades of development in robotics and it becomes apparent that these elites see no role for a middle class anymore. And what will disenfranchised workers do all day? We’re already seeing the leading edge of it, as one of the globalists’ chief propagandists, Yuval Harari, has said: play video games and scroll social media feeds.

What he didn’t say was that elite tolerance for a new class of “useless eaters,” to use the late, not-great Henry Kissinger’s term, isn’t likely to last. In fact, if billionaires like Bill Gates are anything to go by—a man cultured in a 21^st century version of 19^th century Malthusian eugenics—their goal is to seriously reduce the Earth’s population. I wrote extensively on the history of eugenics in my essay, “Means and Ends: Our Shattered Ethical Compass,” in the anthology Covid-19 Pandemonium, so I won’t go over it again here. ^[11] It doesn’t take much research to support the fact that to social elites since Darwin’s day, reducing the population by one means or another has been one of their prized fever dreams. This was graphically illustrated during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when billionaire Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend were photographed grinning outside the Taj Mahal, emptied of all tourists (who after all couldn’t travel during the “pandemic.”) But hey, why should they have to share it with the rest of us?

That the eugenics agenda remains active was bolstered recently by an announcement by “scientists” (one wonders who’s signing their paycheques) calling for a reduction of Earth’s population by four billion if we’re to “save the Earth.” ^[12] To refer again to the razor-sharp wit of comedian George Carlin, the very notion of “saving the Earth” is a joke—as if we ever possessed such godlike power! It’s a fiction spun by Club of Rome globalists in the 1970s who needed a new enemy for humanity to focus its energies on: itself! It seems our technocratic elites reached “compassion fatigue” far earlier than the public did. The club published their misanthropic manifesto in a book titled The First Global Revolution, by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, published in 1991 as a follow-up to their foundational document, The Limits to Growth (1972). Here’s a quote:

“The sudden absence of traditional adversaries has left governments and public opinion with a great void. New enemies, therefore, have to be identified. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” ^[13]

Never mind that we’ve been hearing disaster prophecies from the likes of the Club of Rome and eugenicist Paul Ehrlich for more than 50 years now, and that the source of these world-ending catastrophes is a constantly shifting target. Even within the decade The Limits to Growth were written, the 1970s, front-page stories in Time magazine shifted from a looming ice age, to the more popular global warming messaging still in vogue today. Remember the 1980s, when we were told the expanding ozone hole would spell our doom? And on and on… “Climate change is a reality on this planet, folks,” I can hear the spirit of George Carlin saying. “Get used to it.” Ice ages, massive floods and landslides, runaway fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions—as any geologist should be able to tell you, climate stability is at best a temporary condition on this planet. That we’ve enjoyed a few centuries of it in recent history is no guarantee it will continue, no matter what desperate measures we throw at it. Neither, of course, should we exacerbate the problem. As Chief Seattle is reputed to have said: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” ^[14]

All of which is a long way from my starting point, commenting on Edith Hamilton’s thorough study of classical culture, The Greek Way. Writing from the vantage point of the 1930s, an era of increasing sociopolitical instability that many awake souls clearly realized was leading to another world war, Hamilton found new meaning in the old classics: “But in truth what the Greeks discovered, or rather how they made their discoveries and how they brought a new world to birth out of the dark confusions of an old world that had crumbled away, is full of meaning for us today who have seen an old world swept away in the space of a decade or two.” ^[15]

Her words are as fresh today as when she wrote them nearly a century ago, as are the words of the great classical writers—Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, et al.—from nearly three millennia ago. To throw them overboard as no longer relevant—for whatever politically correct reason—only reveals the poverty of our current institutions. This is why I tend to avoid contemporary academics’ books and monographs on classical sources: too many of them succumb to ideological interpretations that will almost certainly not survive the test of time, as the original works have done. Certainly the past century of research into archaeology, anthropology and to some extent psychology has modified some of the conclusions of classical scholars from an earlier era like Hamilton. But what differentiates them from the current crop is motive: Hamilton et al. write of their subject from a place of respect, even reverence, whereas a reflexive institutional cynicism seems to be the default mode now. On this point, I’ll close with yet another apt quote from Voltaire’s Bastards:

“The philosophers of Europe, England and America threw themselves into the arms of reason, convinced that birth would be given to new rational elites capable of building a new civilization. This love affair was fertile to the point of being miraculous and society was subsequently reformed for the better beyond what any of these thinkers had imagined. And yet the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, rapidly became the religion of these new elites. And their reforms included an unparalleled and permanent institutionalization of state violence. …Were Voltaire to reappear today, he would be outraged by the new structures, which somehow deformed the changes for which he struggled.” ^[16]

^[1] Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way, “East and West,” Time-Life/W.W. Norton & Co., 1930 (1963 ed.), p. 10.

^[2] “The Giza Plateau: Mapping the Workers’ Village and Bakery,” The Archaeologist, April 28, 2026: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/the-giza-plateau-mapping-the-workers-village-and-bakery

^[3] Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way, “East and West,” Time-Life/W.W. Norton & Co., 1930 (1963 ed.), p. 11.

^[4] George Carlin quotes, GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9717046-governments-don-t-want-a-population-capable-of-critical-thinking-they

^[5] John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards—The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Penguin Books Canada, Toronto, 1992, p. 130.

^[6] John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards—The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Penguin Books Canada, Toronto, 1992, p. 131.

^[7] “Home Schooling Statistics: Homeschoolers often outperform peers on tests, with rapid U.S. growth and strong parent preparedness,” World Metrics report 2026: https://worldmetrics.org/home-schooling-statistics/

^[8] “UC professors say they’re teaching middle school math after SAT ban,” New York Post, May 27, 2026: https://nypost.com/2026/05/27/us-news/uc-professors-say-theyre-teaching-middle-school-math/ UC faculty letter:

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

^[9] “Most Americans Didn’t Read Many Books in 2025,” YouGov US government survey: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53804-most-americans-didnt-read-many-books-in-2025

^[10] “Reading Books: An Effective Tool for Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills Among English Langauge Learners,” Journal of Visual and Performing Arts, ResearchGate, June 2024: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385883871_READING_BOOKS_AN_EFFECTIVE_TOOL_FOR_ENHANCING_CRITICAL_THINKING_SKILLS_AMONG_ENGLISH_LANGUAGE_LEARNERS

^[11] Covid-19 Pandemonium: A Pandemic of Ignorance, Fear and Greed: The Capture of Our Institutions, Steven Pelech and Christopher A. Shaw, eds., Ekstasis Editions, 2025, pp. 269–298.

^[12] “Scientists say Earth must cut population down to 4 billion,” Christian Saclao, Yahoo News, August 3, 2026: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/scientists-earth-must-cut-population-110158802.html

^[13] “Club of Rome: ‘The Real Enemy… Is Humanity Itself,’” Lioness of Judah, Substack, July 22, 2024:

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2 years ago · 126 likes · 21 comments · Lioness of Judah Ministry

(italics mine)

^[14] Chief Seattle’s speech has been the subject of controversy almost since it was first published by Henry A. Smith in 1887. It has been altered to suit political and environmental agendas in the century since, and according to an article in Wikipedia, one research team found 86 versions of the speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Seattle%27s_speech

^[15] Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way, “East and West,” Time-Life/W.W. Norton & Co., 1930 (1963 ed.), p. 3.

^[16] John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards—The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, “In Which the Narrator Positions Himself,” Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1992, p. 5 (italics mine).

He sent me to Troy, and he often used to say to me, ‘Let your motto be I lead. Strive to be best.’ ^[1]

Having recently read The Iliad in preparation for reading The Odyssey, I decided it was well past time I watched Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy. Before I get too deep, I should note that the movie states that it was “inspired by” The Iliad, not a literal rendering of Homer’s tale. Odysseus in the film is only a minor role, but well played by Sean Bean. Actor Peter O’Toole, who plays King Priam of Troy, astutely quoted playwright George Bernard Shaw, who once said: “No one has satisfactorily placed a boundary between myth and history.” ^[2]

It’s a useful disclaimer to set up an analysis of the film as it stacks up against Homer’s original. According to Wikipedia, both O’Toole and Brad Pitt, who plays Greek hero Achilles, expressed disappointment with the film. O’Toole “spoke negatively of the film during an appearance at the Savannah Film Festival, stating he walked out of the film fifteen minutes into a screening, and criticized the director, slamming him as ‘a clown’.” ^[3] Pitt’s disappointment was that “the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be,” and admitted to making mistakes in his portrayal, without specifying. To his credit, he felt he was given too much prominence in the film, that he “could not get out of the middle of the frame,” that it became too commercial, too intent on action, with Achilles as the central hero. ^[4]

Pitt is correct in suggesting that Achilles in Homer’s original tale, despite his legendary prowess as warrior, is actually a secondary character. It’s only late in The Iliad that he is roused from a bitter dispute with King Agamemnon, who has taken away Briseis, a captured priestess of Troy’s temple to Apollo—a spoil of war earned by Achilles. Until she is returned to him, he refuses to fight, and even then, his bitter hatred of Agamemnon makes him reluctant to return to the battlefield after nine long years. (In typical movie dramatics, the film compresses a decade into just a few weeks. Understandable, but inevitably you lose important details.) It takes the death of Patroclus, his cousin (or adoptive brother), at Hector’s hands to stoke his rage enough to raise his fighting spirit again. Achille’s hatred of King Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the Greeks (in the original: Achaeans), is well portrayed in the film as a mutual animosity. If not for the fact that Achilles is a human killing machine vital to the war effort, Agamemnon would happily have had him assassinated. This mutual hatred is firmly based on The Iliad.

Pitt’s Achilles is portrayed as a war-weary soul whose sense of the glory of combat has long since dimmed into a hardened resignation. When Briseis, cousin of Trojan prince Hector, asks him of the war: “When does it end?” He answers: “It never ends.” Certainly, sadly, this is true of history—there are always wars. It does however cast shade on his motivations for continuing, and indeed, twice in the film he tells his Myrmidon fighters to prepare to leave Troy for home.

What begins as a sexual dalliance with Briseis gradually softens Achilles. This is a love story that is certainly not present in Homer’s original, and screenwriter David Benioff departs radically from the original tale throughout the film. Early in Troy, when a fellow Greek soldier says he wouldn’t dare to go up against Hector in battle, Achilles says, “That’s why your name will never be remembered.” Yet as I noted in my two-part article on The Iliad, when Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld realm of the dead in The Odyssey, the great warrior says he would rather be a simple ploughman still alive on Earth than a king of the dead: “Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand / For some poor country man, on iron rations, / Than lord it over all the exhausted dead.” ^[5]

Prince Hector is portrayed in the film as an agnostic where the gods are concerned, scoffing at his father Priam’s faith in the gods of Olympus. As in Homer’s original, he is shown to have a tender family side to his character, concerned for his wife and baby son, despite his fearsome reputation as a warrior on the battlefield. By contrast, Achilles is a lone wolf with no family, despite fathering a son, Neoptolemus, with King Lycomedes’ daughter Deidamia during a brief liaison at the war’s outbreak. In Troy Hector is shown revealing an escape passage out of the city, urging his wife to promise him she will flee when the city falls.

Eric Bana does an excellent job of portraying a sympathetic Hector. For him, this is a matter of pure survival. Like the Achilles portrayed by Brad Pitt, he is under no illusions about the glory of war. Yet at one point when urging his Myrmidons into battle Achilles shouts: “Immortality—take it, it’s yours!” Meanwhile King Priam tells Paris: “I’ve fought many wars in my time. Some for land, some for power, some for glory. I suppose fighting for love makes more sense than all the rest.” All spoken by one of the greatest actors of the big screen: Peter O’Toole.

Diane Kruger was wisely cast as Helen, said by Homer to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived (up to that time). Kruger is, appropriately, a blonde, since she was described by the ancient writers as “golden-haired.” This is why some classicists objected to a black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, being cast as Helen in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Diversity and inclusion is all very well, but when you start inserting people into a culture and tradition to which they don’t belong historically, you are acting in bad faith. I can’t wait to see the reaction from these same DEI advocates if Matt Damon is ever cast as Martin Luther King Jr. As with so many sociopolitical doctrines, it’s a double standard.

As to Nyong’os complaint that women had only a minor role in The Odyssey, historian Victor Davis Hanson notes that the actress admitted not having read Homer. He asks: “How can you go in the United States to a premier college and then get a master’s from Yale and not have ever read The Odyssey?” ^[6] Helen was not only a legendary beauty, but being the wife of Menelaus—and therefore the Queen of Sparta—she would have been an educated woman. The Spartans reserved their boys for early training as soldiers but their girls—unlike the Athenians—were well educated.

In The Iliad, it seems clear to me that Helen was not abducted by Paris but made the choice to elope with him, which is how Petersen framed it in Troy. The Trojan horse scene written much later by Virgil in The Aeneid has Helen trying to get the Achaean warriors inside the wooden horse to call out to her, in order to betray their presence. Odysseus must clap his hands over their mouths to prevent them succumbing to the temptation. It’s a scene begging for dramatic presentation onscreen. This certainly suggests to me that she had gone over fully to the Trojan side of her own volition. In The Odyssey Homer has her back in Sparta with Menalaus, because when Troy was destroyed, he couldn’t bear to kill her along with the Trojans. (Incidentally, one of the annoying mistakes in Troy is having the actors pronounce Menelaus as “Menelouse,” instead of sounding out the final two vowels as they should be: “Mene-lay-us.”)

Feminist concepts of the powerlessness of women in ancient Greek society are based on them not having the vote in democratic Athens and not being allowed to own property, although heiresses kept property through the male line of their husbands. Spartan women had more freedom and were economically significant, often managing family estates while men were engaged in military campaigns. ^[7] Even Athenian women engaged in family business, according to classical scholar Steven Johnstone:

Despite an Athenian law that explicitly said that women could not conduct a transaction worth more than a certain amount of barley (a medimnos, a modest but not trivial quantity), women bought, sold, lent, and, in general, engaged in many transactions, sometimes well above this limit. Scholars have concluded, therefore, that, because of their important position within the oikos (household), women were often invested with considerable “informal” power over property, in contrast to the formal, legal rights men enjoyed. ^[8]

Certainly it’s not the gender parity of the 21^st century by a long shot, but it’s not absolute powerlessness either. And yes, women were considered the spoils of war and thus taken as slaves, but so were men. But which would you rather be when the city of Troy is being burnt to the ground: the men and boys who are all brutally butchered—the common fate of males on the losing side of ancient wars—or a woman taken alive into slavery (admitting that this could include sexual slavery, but not always). Actress Diane Kruger, who plays Helen, was quoted as saying she felt “like meat” during the screen test for the film. ^[9] Like Nyong’o, this makes me wonder if Kruger had ever read Homer or any of the classical Greek authors, who portray Helen as a powerful figure renowned not just for her beauty but her charismatic character. Kruger tends to portray Helen as a willowy victim figure, truly in love with Paris but with little of the power of Homer’s version. Helen after all was ancient royalty.

Added to that is the powerful role of the goddesses in Greek mythology—well explained in the special features to Troy the movie which, alongside the male gods, provides biographies of Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, Athena, and Demeter. ^[10] If you add Hestia, goddess of the hearth, that makes six of the 12 Olympian immortals goddesses, and none of them are in any way subservient to their male counterparts. Only Zeus, the supreme god, can stay their hands, but that’s true for all the gods. Even Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love and beauty, can use her charms to exercise a powerful influence over mortal men. All of these goddesses take an active part in the war against Troy, some siding with the Trojans, some with the Achaeans. Even if we take gods and goddesses as mere psychic projections, there’s a strong implication that Homer and the other ancient poets understood well the potential skills and powers of women. In The Odyssey, Penelope—Queen of Ithaca—reveals both her faithfulness to her husband through his 20 years of absence and her cunning in holding off the suitors invading her household.

Which brings me to the fact that neither Petersen’s Troy nor Nolan’s Odyssey makes much space for these gods and goddesses in their interpretations of Homer’s epics. As I wrote in my review of The Iliad, ^[11] it’s not surprising given that we’re on the tail end of a century of psychologizing God and gods out of existence. In Troy Hector says he has foreseen his death in a dream, but unlike the original tale, does not credit it to a god. Yet in The Iliad, at least a third of the action is located in the realm of the Olympian gods and goddesses. Zeus mostly remains neutral, letting the chips fall where they may in the battle for Troy, though not always. But the others on Mount Olympus are constantly scheming and interfering on behalf of their favourite mortals in the fight. Even if you believe that gods and goddesses are just projections of our own psyche—fair enough—you’re still leaving out an entire realm of subconscious urges and motivations that Homer deftly fleshes out with these deities. Director Terry Gilliam turned down an offer to direct the film, as he “did not understand how you can make a film based on the poem the Iliad without the participation of the Greek gods.” ^[12] And as I’ve argued before, whether or not you believe these gods and goddesses were real is beside the point. As in all such myths and wisdom tales, the point is what they teach us about ourselves.

The ancient Greek concept of fate is another casualty of modernism and postmodernism, with the rise of narcissism and the notion that we are the “captains of our souls,” that only our personal choices factor into how our lives will play out. This idea is encapsulated in William Ernest Henley’s famous 1920 poem, “Invictus,” with its concluding lines: “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” ^[13] Depending on which of the ancient classical writers you read, there was by no means a universally agreed-upon understanding of fate. But it nevertheless remained a potent element in their stories, poems and plays. They understood that while our choices remain ours, often they must be made in response to forces beyond our control, such as inherited intergenerational or cultural trauma and the limitations imposed on us by the crapshoot of our genes. This is why the current obsession with “equality of outcome” is so absurd: biological reality doesn’t bend to our needs and whims. Equality on the playing field is fine, but equality of outcome is impossible given that no two humans are alike in capabilities. And lowering the bar so that no one is excluded only fosters a race to the bottom, not a meritocracy. No society embracing such a standard can expect to survive, any more than Athens’ fledgling democracy could when it was plunged into decades of internecine warfare thanks to its internal contradictions and tensions.

2. Situating Troy in History

The production values of the film are superb—the costumes of the kings, princes and princesses are suitably luxurious, as befits the opulence of both ancient Greece and Troy in the late Bronze Age. This was proven by the Uluburun shipwreck discovered off the coast of Turkey (where Troy is located) by divers in 1982. The ship’s hold contained copper and tin (crucial for making bronze), Canaanite tree resin, ivory, ebony, amber, glass, and beautifully crafted luxury items such as a gold scarab beetle embossed with Queen Nefertiti’s name, a gold chalice and gold pendant. There were even ivory writing boards that used a wax surface for writing. ^[14] The ship is dated to the late 14^th century BCE, around 1320. ^[15]

An archaeologist who comments on Troy in the special features with the film said she got goose bumps seeing Petersen’s reconstruction of the city, which she says is known as “Troy VI.” (Today the site is known as Hisarlik, in modern-day Turkiye.) However, the sixth iteration of the ancient city, dating to around 1300 BCE, was actually destroyed by an earthquake. ^[16] But there are other layers in the archaeological excavations that have revealed destruction by fire as portrayed in the movie. The city dates back to approximately 3,000 BCE and has so far had nine layers excavated by archaeologists. “Long before Homer immortalized the city in epic poetry, generations of farmers, merchants, builders, and craftsmen transformed a small Bronze Age settlement into one of the eastern Mediterranean’s most important urban centers.” ^[17] Troy VIIa (1250–950 BCE) shows all the signs of destruction by fire, and its timing and destruction “closely match the traditional period associated with Homer’s epic.” ^[18]

The interior sets for the city of Troy were built on the island of Malta before the outbreak of the Iraq war forced the production to relocate to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. There the impressive city walls were constructed by the crew, with 40-foot towers and 30-foot walls—all textured, of course, to look like stone. When Hurricane Marty ripped through the area, it destroyed much of the set. Deciding it was still the cheapest option, the crew decided to rebuild it. Although CGI was used to multiply the three or four Greek ships into a thousand and make a few hundred extras look like thousands, Petersen’s production is thus still done with techniques used in the analog era of filmmaking. A set manager commenting on scenes depicting the burning of Troy said he estimated it was the largest set built since the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind. While this may or may not be true, it gives a sense of the immense scale of the sets built for Troy.

This brings me to one of my pet peeves with academic historians and professors of literature, who since the Victorians have cast a shadow on the classical Greek writers as mostly liars and fantasists. This was part of the new rationalist revolution supposedly brought on by the European Enlightenment and the emergence of science as a dispassionate discipline. Granted, epics, plays and poems are not history, but why would ancient Greek writers deliberately distort what their audiences would have known about as a common part of their culture? I watched one video that said, in fact, even that most disputed of historians, Herodotus, has been more—not less—corroborated as new research and archaeology is done. And as is well known, it was amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann whose crude efforts discovered the site of Troy—right where Homer said it was. In fairness to the Victorian scholars, archaeology was only just getting started as a disciplined science in the 19^th century. And Schliemann did not, in fact, find the Troy of Homer’s epic, but a much earlier iteration of the city.

3. Concluding Thoughts

Petersen’s production shows attention to historical detail that makes Homer’s tale spring into pulsating life, so it’s a shame that so many liberties were taken with the original story. For anyone who’s actually read The Iliad, this has a jarring effect as you realize: This didn’t happen in the original. At least, it did for me. The early and sudden deaths of both Ajax and Menelaus in the film betray the spirit of the original, in which both are—like Achilles—seemingly unstoppable killing machines who cut a wide swath through the Trojan army. Although Ajax doesn’t survive the siege of Troy in the original story, Menelaus does, as I noted earlier.

By far the most tragic deaths in the film are that of Patroclus and Hector, but especially Patroclus. The awful tragedy of Hector’s death is one of the most gripping moments in The Iliad. Petersen—wisely in this case—leaves out the chase scene of Hector running away from Achilles, just one of a couple missteps I think Homer makes. Achilles is so eaten up with rage over the death of his cousin/brother Patroclus that he defies funerary custom by dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy—a deliberate act of desecration. Petersen wisely includes a few close-up shots of Hector’s dead face, bloodied, chalk-pale and smeared with dust. You see a corpse where only moments ago you saw onscreen the handsome, glowing bearded face of a great hero who had only recently parted from his wife and infant son. Petersen wisely retains the Iliad’s original scene of King Priam stealing into the Greek camp and Achilles’ tent to plead with him for his son’s body. And it provides O’Toole with his most emotionally gripping scene in the film. Thankfully screenwriter David Benioff uses some of Priam’s original words from Homer: “We men are wretched things, and the gods, who have no cares themselves, have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives.” ^[19]

The death of Patroclus in Troy is enough to make you cry. Petersen chose to cast a younger actor, Garrett Hedland, to play Patroclus, who looks like he can’t be more than 18 years old. He is shown being put through combat exercises by his older brother Achilles. And just as in the original Iliad, he gets tired of being held back by Achilles, told he’s still too young and inexperienced for battle. So one day he puts on Achilles’ armour and storms into the fray. In Homer’s original, Patroclus acquits himself well on the battlefield, killing many Trojans, until Euphorbus seriously wounds him and Hector finishes him off. In the film, when Hector pulls off Achilles’ helmet and realizes to his horror that he has killed an adolescent boy, you see the shock in his face. And you see the terror in Patroclus’ face as he realizes he is about to die, having barely lived. This has been the terrible fate of young soldiers down through the ages. For me, this was brought most forcefully home in reports of First World War soldiers who lied about their age in order to enlist. Some of these boys were only 16 when they were shipped to the Western Front to be chewed up in the human meat grinder. Perhaps the most poignant lyrics I’ve ever heard sung about WWI come from Sting in his “Children’s Crusade”:

Pawns in the game are not victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium and France
Poppies for young men, death’s bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed ^[20]

Once again, in the words of Achilles in the film, wars “never end.” Petersen took a pretty clearly anti-war stance in his presentation of Troy, for all its battle action. And since we’re talking Greek mythology, this seems to be the fate of Earth’s top predator: with nothing else to take down our numbers, that job falls to us, epidemics and natural disasters. These days the predatory “elites” are doing a pretty good job of meeting their goal of reducing the Earth’s population, through the bio-hacked Covid-19 virus, its even worse mRNA “vaccines,” Canada’s infamous MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) program, poison in our food, air, crops and water, and “medicines” that kill almost as often as they cure. And just as they did with Covid to game the science with payoffs and propaganda, they’re now repeating the message that “scientists say we must get the world population down by four billion if we hope to save the Earth.” ^[21]

Of course, it’s patent nonsense, since the real problem is the very system of industrial over-production, throwaway goods and mega-corporate dominance of government that is causing all the damage. In British Columbia, I defy you to find one even halfway-informed person who thinks logging clearcuts are a good idea. Yet they go on without letup, destroying forests across the province, thanks to politicians bought off by industry.

Also note how the public relations efforts for recycling and lifestyle modifications are always aimed at the individual, never at the corporations whose factories produce more pollution in a single year than a family will in a lifetime. But it’s always best to blame it on the serfs when you’re a misanthropic billionaire. The difference between our era and classical Greece and Troy is that we live in the most propagandized generation in history, so that now people are brainwashed to believe we’re “a cancer on the Earth.” I hear people repeating this suicidal nonsense all the time. This is then taught to their children. And we wonder why we’ve raised a generation of kids with zero motivation, resigned to a nihilistic view of their world and the future.

In contrast to Homer’s active gods and goddesses, I felt like a passive god watching the carnage and horrific pain caused by battle. I wondered: Why didn’t Homer’s gods and goddesses feel this heart-rending ache at such mass killing, maimed bodies, children made fatherless and women made widows? The sheer tide of grief billowing from the Earth to the godly realm like the black smoke of battlefields? Why didn’t they work to end, rather than prolong, the war with Troy? The current war of the US/Israel with Iran, Gaza and Lebanon begs similar questions. It only deepens the spiritual crisis we face: If God exists and is a god of love, why does he permit each new generation to slaughter one another? It’s a question I first asked at the tender age of 12. Or is God either nonexistent or impotent, that he cannot reach down and eliminate the psychopaths who continually foster the bloodshed?

I would say a new era of heroism desperately needs to be born. Reading Homer’s epics is an excellent place to start, with the caveat that heroism in the 21^st century cannot possibly look like it did in the late Bronze Age. But a discussion of what it would like certainly needs to be had. But in order for dialogue to occur, the arrogance of solipsism must be left behind. Like Socrates and the Tao, we need to become comfortable with uncertainty. Not insisting we have the answer on any topic you care to name. We need to admit, like Socrates, that “the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know much about the world.” Surely this would go a long way toward damping down the “flame wars” continually erupting on social media. This kind of narcissism has been weaponized by our social programmers since it serves the “divide and conquer” tactic so well. But listen to Homer’s words:

We could sling plenty of insults at each other—enough in fact to sink a merchantman (ship). The tongue is glib. With a wide range of words at its command, it can express our thoughts in any style; and as a rule one gets the kind of answer one has asked for. ^[22]

Perhaps resisting this narcissistic tsunami is the first step toward a new heroism.

^[1] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), p. 122.

^[2] A search for this quote online does not turn up any results. O’Toole may have been recalling something he read by Shaw, or by another author, that has not been indexed online.

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film)

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film)

^[5] The Odyssey, Book XI, lines 579–81, Robert Fitzgerald trans., Vintage Classics ed., Random House, New York, 1990, p. 201.

^[6] Victor Davis Hanson: Everything Wrong with the Rewrite of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey,’ YouTube:

^[7] “Rights and Roles of Women in Ancient Greece,” World History Edu: https://worldhistoryedu.com/rights-and-roles-of-women-in-ancient-greece/

^[8] “Women, Property, and Surveillance in Classical Athens,” Steven Johnstone, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 22, No. 2, October 2003: https://www.academia.edu/27988010/Women_Property_and_Surveillance_in_Classical_Athens

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film)

^[10] Wikipedia has a good page of biographies for the Greek Olympians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_deities#Twelve_Olympians

^[11] “The Iliad: Still Vital After 3,000 Years Pt. 1,” Sean Arthur Joyce, Substack, August 11, 2026: https://seanarthurjoyce.substack.com/p/the-iliad-still-vital-after-3000 “The Iliad: Still Vital After 3,000 Years Pt. 2,” Sean Arthur Joyce, Substack, August 12, 2026: https://seanarthurjoyce.substack.com/p/the-iliad-still-vital-after-3000-01c

^[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film)

^[13] William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51642/invictus

^[14] “The Ancient Ship’s Cargo That Mapped Bronze Age Trade Routes,” Missed History, March 2026: https://www.missedhistory.com/article/uluburun-shipwreck-bronze-age-trade-routes

^[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluburun_shipwreck

^[16] “Troy VI-VII,” Livius.org: https://www.livius.org/articles/place/troy/troy-3/

^[17] “The Nine Layers of Troy: Understanding the Ancient City’s 4,000-Year Timeline,” Apasas Travel, March 8, 2026: https://www.apasastravel.com/en/blog/troy-travel-blog/the-nine-layers-of-troy-understanding-the-ancient-city-s-4-000-year-timeline

^[18] “The Nine Layers of Troy: Understanding the Ancient City’s 4,000-Year Timeline,” Apasas Travel, ibid.

^[19] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), p. 451.

^[20] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sting/childrenscrusade.html

^[21] “Scientists say Earth must cut population down to 4 billion,” Christian Saclao, Yahoo News, August 3, 2026: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/scientists-earth-must-cut-population-110158802.html?guccounter=1

^[22] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), p. 372.

4. The Pathos of the Dead, the Living and the Gods

Contrast the impulse for kleos (“glory”) so prominent in The Iliad with the scene Virgil paints in The Aeneid, when Aeneas visits the underworld where many slain heroes of the Trojan War such as Achilles now reside: “Now voices crying loud were heard at once— / The souls of infants wailing. At the door / Of the sweet life they were to have no part in… Next / Were those sad souls, benighted, who contrived / Their own destruction, and as they hated daylight, / Cast their lives away. How they would wish / In the upper air now to endure the pain / Of poverty and toil!...” ^[1] Of course, Virgil is hardly comparing infant deaths and suicides to glorious heroes who die on the battlefield. But Hades is not depicted here as a place of eternal bliss, regardless of how one enters the realm of death.

(Click on the link for more information on The Aeneid, written by Virgil in the 1st century BCE as an origin myth for Rome, with Aeneas the Trojan War veteran its hero and founder of the city.)

It’s widely acknowledged that doctrinaire Christianity’s depiction of Hell and purgatory at least partially originates in Virgil’s underworld, where both suicides and those guilty of various sins are found to be in a state lacking all hope and grace. The unrepentant are bound for permanent residence in Tartarus, the place for souls beyond redemption. I can think of quite a few political and corporate leaders today who belong there. It’s too bad they haven’t read The Aeneid’s description of Hell—not only is it deeply moving, but rather terrifying. Maybe if they had read it and believed they had a soul, it might act as a restraint on their actions:

Here is the place

Where the road forks: on the right hand it goes

Past mighty Dis’s walls, Elysium way,

Our way; but the leftward road will punish

Malefactors, taking them to Tartarus.

...

Here come those who as long as life remained

Held brothers hateful, beat their parents, cheated

Poor men dependent on them; also those

Who hugged their newfound riches to themselves

And put nothing aside for relatives… ^[2]

The difference here is that the goal is not simply paying recompense for sins committed but the purification of the soul, with a view to eventual reincarnation (not unlike the Buddhist concept of the afterlife):

Then are they happy, when by length of time
The scurf is worn away of each committed crime;
No speck is left of their habitual stains,
But the pure ether of the soul remains.
But, when a thousand rolling years are past,
(So long their punishments and penance last,)
Whole droves of minds are, by the driving god,
Compell’d to drink the deep Lethaean flood,
In large forgetful draughts to steep the cares
Of their past labours, and their irksome years,
That, unrememb’ring of its former pain,
The soul may suffer mortal flesh again. ^[3]

Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” published in 1955, is as perfectly succinct a portrait of the difference between Homer’s epic and the 20^th century as could be imagined. After two world wars and humanity’s first two atomic bomb attacks on civilian cities in Japan, the very notion of kleos seems offensive to contemporary ears. The contrast between the glistening prose of Homer’s shield and Auden’s is pointed up in the very first verse:

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

—W.H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles” ^[4]

No more are there depicted on the shield “Earth, Sky and Sea, the indefatigable Sun, the Moon at the full, and all the Constellations with which the heavens are crowned…” but “An artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead.” These are the wet, thunder-brooding skies of First World War trenches, a wilderness made artificial by military technology and its bloody harvest. “A plain without a feature, bare and brown, / No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, / Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down…” in Auden’s words.

The irony is that, of all wars, World War I launched us into the current era of propaganda wars, made extra deadly to the public mind thanks to a new, sophisticated knowledge of mass psychology. The field arguably began with Charles McKay’s awkwardly-named but important 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a history of mass delusions from the Middle Ages to the early Victorian era. It was perfected in the Covid era, when billions of people were suddenly induced to inject a previously unknown, experimental substance into their veins. As Auden writes: “Out of the air a voice without a face / Proved by statistics that some cause was just / In tones as dry and level as the place…” Naturally we’ve given up the clipped, dry tones of the BBC announcer of the 50s for the circus histrionics of today’s news announcers. But the point is the same.

For me, Homer makes his only serious misstep as a storyteller in Chapter XIII of The Iliad, in Rieu’s translation titled “The Funeral and the Games.” It chronicles the agonies of grief Achilles and his Myrmidons suffer over the funeral pyre of Patroclus. (Incidentally, attempts to graft a homosexual tone onto Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus is yet more evidence of 21^st century sexual politics. If you read the text, the two grew up in the same household, and thus were brothers, not lovers.) But then the chapter moves into a kind of mini-Olympics, with boxing, wrestling, chariot races and more, and all with glittering prizes.

Yes, on one hand, you could say it’s a good release of pent-up energy and angst over their dead. On the other, it feels a bit clumsy being placed after the death of Hector, the funeral of Patroclus, and before the appeal of Priam for Hector’s body, as if some editor goofed and got the chapter order wrong. You have this powerfully moving, tragic series of events moving up the emotional scale, and suddenly this trivial diversion of competitive sports. I found myself skipping paragraphs, partly out of annoyance, partly due to wanting to move quickly into the final chapter—Priam’s willingness to abase himself before his son’s killer in order to retrieve his body and give Troy the closure of a proper funeral and mourning period.

Was Homer saying in the funeral and games chapter that the gods are always toying with us, that the whole of the battle for Troy and indeed life itself is little but a grand cosmic game? Given the strength and competitiveness of the Achaean warriors, even the games result in some major injuries. And of course, just as in these games, in the deadly competition for control of Troy and the return of Helen, many are likewise injured and killed. However, I still find its placement odd and out of place in the book.

Much has been made of the fact that Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey leaves out the gods and goddesses except for a few mostly mute, inscrutable appearances. This is quite at odds with the highly vocal—even noisy—way these deities behave throughout The Iliad. It’s as if the pantheon of the gods ruled by Zeus are rooting for opposing football teams. Except that they’re willing to stick their foot in from time to time, either to foul the opponent or give their precious favourite an advantage. In a way it’s not surprising that Nolan left out the divine presences, given that for more than a century we’ve psychologized gods out of existence. (Though not New Age goddesses—a fact that speaks volumes of the feminization of our age.)

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve always agreed with the Jungian explanation for gods and goddesses as unexamined aspects of human shadow nature. And the more unexamined the psychic shadows, the more deadly, as they project their force and bile outwards. The gods of Zeus’s pantheon are petty, jealous, unpredictable, unreliable and incredibly dangerous to offend. The simpler explanation of course is the ancient mind needing to attribute the more dangerous aspects of nature—storms, thunder and lightning, tsunamis, floods and fires—to some humanlike yet supernatural creature. But the Jungian explanation has equal merit.

Interestingly, when gods or goddesses appear at the side of heroes like Hector, Aias (later, Ajax), Achilles, Aeneas or other warriors on both sides, they often appear in the guise of trusted friends, family or fighting companions. This immediately grants the divine personage the trust of the hero, making them more inclined to follow any advice or direction given. For example, when Athena appears to Hector as his friend Deiphobus, urging him to stop running from Achilles, face the foe, and accept his destiny—which is to die a warrior. My Jungian inclination sees this as the psyche generating the persona it needs to accept what it already knows but is reluctant to accept. Or in cases where gods are urging heroes to a certain course of action, that “still, small voice” that somehow knows which path to take. (Jung wrote at length about the concept of the personae, plural, which originated in classical Latin theatre as the “masks of the play.”) One thing is certain about the Greek pantheon of gods, it’s about as human as you or I, as riddled with flaws and clashing passions. “Phoebus Apollo spoke his mind to the immortals: ‘You are hard-hearted folk, you gods—monsters of cruelty.” (Rieu, p. 438) It’s Homer holding up a mirror to his own culture, getting two stories for one while allowing both to interweave.

5. Conclusion

The Iliad is a powerful book for me. Despite having sensitivity to violence that causes me to avoid watching action or horror films, I found myself helplessly gripped to the unfolding nightmare of the Trojan war. It was almost as if I felt every spear thrust and deadly sword wound. This is always the mark of a good dramatist, and I’m sure scriptwriters study some version of Homeric technique when they learn to write for TV or film. At one time, Christopher Vogler’s dramatic techniques in his book The Writer’s Journey, based on Joseph Campbell’s Jungian archetype of the hero’s journey, was in vogue in Hollywood. After having informed writers like George Lucas in his original Star Wars trilogy—among other screenwriters—it gradually fell out of favour. Instead we have the current obsession with sexual identity and virtue signaling replacing compelling storytelling that makes you care so much you can’t look away. As happens when you read Homer.

Of all the heroes in The Iliad, I cared most about Hector—but then, I’ve always had a tendency to root for the underdog. Helen says that of all the people in Troy, only Hector seemed to care about her well-being, seemed to understand the difficult transition she wrought for herself by running away with Paris. As Helen says during the mourning period for Hector that has the entire city of Troy in its grip:

“…in all the nineteen years since I came away and left my own country, it is from you that I have never heard a single harsh or spiteful word. Others in the house insulted me—your brothers, your sisters, your brothers’ wealthy wives, even your mother, though your father could not be more gentle with me if he were my own.” —Helen, after the death of Hector (Rieu, p. 458)

Homer thus reveals a sensitive, kind side to this powerful warrior, described during the offensive to drive the Achaeans back to their ships as “mowing down” enemy soldiers with a ruthless efficiency. It’s Hector’s fully-rounded character that makes his death doubly awful, and all the more so when Achilles defiles his corpse, not just once but repeatedly. Achilles is described more than once as having a “heart of iron,” and Homer repeatedly likens his fighting power and prowess to that of an enraged lion. Perhaps seeing a disturbing mirror image of themselves in Achilles’ cruelty, the gods act to preserve Hector’s body from decay so that his father Priam can recover the body. By contrast, my impression of Achilles is of a sulky, spoiled prince who happens to be the Achaeans’ secret weapon, yet prefers to sit out the last phases of the war due to a booty dispute with Agamemnon. It’s only when Patroclus is killed that Achilles is finally roused to action, though in fairness, he has already been fighting for nine years. And in fact, another warrior—Euphorbus the Dardanian—actually strikes the first wounding blow before Hector finishes Patroclus off.

Thus, to me, while the Achaeans are fighting for the honour of King Menelaus, whose wife was stolen by Paris a decade earlier, the Trojans are fighting for the very survival of their city and families, a city Homer describes as a jewel in the crown of the near East. Contrary to the motive of honour or glory (“kleos”) though, some modern commentators have seen in the Achaean quest simply the desire to obtain control of the richest city of the ancient world, situated as it was at the critical juncture of the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. In that respect, the motive for wars has never changed in millennia.

In our era the very notion of heroism and honour has acquired a negative connotation, thanks in part to feminist revisionism, but we cannot impose our value system over one that existed 3,000 years ago. A curious diffidence and apathy seems to have set in now, as Big Tech bros run rampant as Mongolian warlords, pillaging the social and ecological landscape. As if the 21^st century zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”) is pictured by one of the lambs or calves whose throats were slit for sacrificial offerings to Zeus. It’s an attitude no less submissive to fate than the ancient Greeks, if not more so.

We may not need to go slaughtering enemies to earn honour, but it wouldn’t hurt if we earned it by the hero’s willingness to face mortal risk for a cause deemed to be greater than ourselves. As indeed many courageous doctors, nurses, scientists and ordinary people did to resist the lies of the Covid fraud. That alone could solve a lot of problems in our shattered society, so addicted to comfort and ease. No risk, no reward.

So when Glaucus the Trojan approaches the fearsome Achaean warrior Diomedes, his words bear repeating in our postmodern ears: “Let your motto be I lead. Strive to be best. Your forefathers were the best in Ephyre and Lycia. Never disgrace them.’ ^[5] And surely, never disgracing our ancestors would include not cheating or faking our way to glory or fame, using technological shortcuts as a substitute for mastering one’s craft. It shouldn’t be too much to expect that honour is earned by our actions, our integrity, not by performative words.

^[1] Virgil, The Aeneid, Robert Fitzgerald, trans., Vintage Classics ed., 1990, pp. 174, 175.

^[2] Virgil, The Aeneid, Robert Fitzgerald, trans., Vintage Classics ed., 1990, lines 723–78, 813–17, p. 178.

^[3] John Dryden translation: https://americanliterature.com/author/virgil/book/the-aeneid/book-vi

^[4] Selected Poetry of W.H. Auden, selected by the author, The Modern Library, New York, 1958, p. 135.

^[5] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), p. 122.

1. Catching Up With Antiquity

This is yet another of those classics that sat on my bookshelves for years and years before finally being read. What prompted me at last to read it—aside from my growing interest in recent years in classical Greek literature—is the release this summer of Christopher Nolan’s film version of The Odyssey. I decided that, before plunging into the original tale, I wanted to read The Iliad first, since it chronologically precedes The Odyssey. Even though the two books are distinctly different stories and can stand on their own, many of the characters—not least of them Odysseus—are first developed in The Iliad.

Nolan’s film has been beset with controversy from the very outset, even before it hit theatres, with criticism especially hard on its DEI casting choices, particularly black actress Lupito Nyong’o, cast as the Helen whose beguiling beauty, in the classic phrase, “launched a thousand ships” in the effort to win her back from the city of Troy and the clutches of Paris. As an article in International Business Times reported:

“Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wrote on X, ‘Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave “the most beautiful woman” role to a white woman. Nolan is technically talented but a coward.’” ^[2]

Nolan’s response: “The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen. And Lupita makes it look effortless. I’m sure there’s a tremendous amount of discipline and training that goes into projecting that kind of poise and feeling—the emotion bubbling beneath the character, the layers of the character right there underneath,” he said. Others have detected a more underhanded motive for Nolan’s choice: Hollywood’s current quota system for DEI actors as a prerequisite for Oscar nomination. In today’s polluted information stream, who really knows?

Instead I’ll concentrate on The Iliad, which in E.V. Rieu’s 1950 translation is written in prose, not the poetry of Homer’s original. (I’m on the lookout for a poetry translation of The Iliad by Robert Fitzgerald, who also translated Virgil’s Aeneid as well as The Odyssey.) There were days when I found myself so gripped by the scenes Homer describes of the Trojan War that I couldn’t put the book down. This despite the continuous parade of death it often graphically describes, e.g. “the sharp bronze cleaved his helmet and caused his brains to splatter,” the awful tragedy of powerful, beautiful young men cut down in their prime by the hundreds. Of course, this is the perennial tragedy of war—which for the vast majority of history has been fought by men. And Homer shows us that the cinematic use of gory details is not a new invention.

One of the hallmarks of Homer’s poetry that has presumably led to its enduring status as a classic is the epithets he uses to distinguish the various heroes: “sharp-witted Odysseus,” “swift-footed Achilles,” “Dawn’s rosy fingers,” and of course the much more famous “wine-dark sea.” In prose this almost looks out of place, yet Rieu wisely retains it as a potent reminder of the poetic original. Rieu in the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition brushes aside the scholarly trend that sees Homer as a compendium of different writers. Scholars such as Hans van Wees “suggest that the true author of the Iliad and the Odyssey was a poet called Terpander. He lived in the 7th century BC and is generally accepted as a historical figure. Like Homer, Terpander was renowned in antiquity for his contributions to poetic tradition in ancient Greece. He was also said to have devoted himself primarily to the recital of the Homeric poems, that is, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some ancient sources also mention that he imitated the musical style of Homer.” ^[3] (Reminiscent of the “who was the real Shakespeare” debate—a non-starter as far as I’m concerned.) Here is Rieu’s argument:

“…it was the practice of ancient poets to build up their own edifice with the help of bricks taken from existing structure. In fact we should expect the Iliad to contain quite clear indications that it is the last of a long line of poems. …To me, the proof of unity afforded by Homer’s consistency in character-drawing is the most convincing of many. …I would argue that such a high degree of consistency would have proved impossible for more than a single author, particularly without the assistance… of a full-length portrait from the original creator’s pen. The same is true if one follows the major figures—Athene, Odysseus, Nestor, or Helen herself—from the Iliad into the Odyssey. They are always themselves. I feel sure, on general literary grounds, that a fresh author taking them over could not have helped revealing his hand.” ^[4]

Rieu’s assessment makes eminent sense. As is often the case in the ancient world, well before history became an established academic discipline, sources place Homer in different centuries, some of them to within 100 years of Troy’s fall. However, as Caleb Howells explains, “Demetrius of Magnesia in the 1st century BC made Homer a contemporary of Thaletas, a 7th-century BC individual. We should also not ignore the tradition that Homer was a contemporary of the grandfather of Pythagoras’ teacher. Given that Pythagoras was born in 570 BC, this clearly places Homer in the 7th century BC.” This attribution of Homer’s chronology seems now to be widely accepted, placing him at least a 500-year remove from the events he describes in The Iliad. The very existence of Troy was disputed by historians during the 19^th century, that is, until Heinrich Schliemann dug at the site and found remains that have since demonstrated not only its existence as an important Bronze Age city, but one that had been repeatedly destroyed by fire.

Howells relates that an entire school of poets was fostered by Homer’s epics, known as the “Sons of Homer,” who strove to write in a similar heroic verse. Thus, again, indirectly providing evidence of Homer’s authorship: “The entire existence of the “Sons of Homer” and the desire to attribute their poems to their old master would be nonsensical if Homer had not been the composer of renowned poems. The idea that a rhapsode composed the Iliad and the Odyssey and simply attributed them to Homer would negate the entire reason why Homer was famous and considered worthy of such attributions in the first place.” ^[5] As for Terpander the poet, not a single ancient source attributes authorship of Homer’s works to him, which they certainly would have done were that the case.

Given the half-millennium between Homer writing The Iliad and its historical origins in the late Bronze Age—around 1200–1500 BCE—it is however largely agreed upon by scholars that he was writing from much older sources than his own 7^th century BCE. Troy is described retrospectively by Homer: “I know there was a time when the opulence, the gold and bronze, of Priam’s city was the talk of all the world. But that has passed.” ^[6] The usual explanation is that the Fall of Troy had been circulated as an oral tradition for centuries beforehand, a reading Rieu favours:

“And it is my surmise that the stories we read in Homer issued, with an esoteric or at least ritual content, from the mouths of wise men who lived long before him; that in the course of centuries they spread across the world, undergoing many changes of nomenclature and language, and sinking to the folklore level, where, even if they were not fully understood, they were at least enabled to survive by their intrinsic interest and excellence…” ^[7]

Before anyone scoffs at the idea that oral tradition is capable of transmitting a story in anything but the most garbled fashion, it’s important to remember that in the absence of writing, those known as rhapsodes in the ancient Greek tradition would have been assiduously trained in feats of memorization. When the entire history of a culture depends on such transmission, it’s ludicrous to believe they wouldn’t have trained such orators intensively. This was also the case with the much later tradition of the Celtic bard, who according to some sources had to be trained for 7–12 years before they were considered a capable steward of oral history and tradition. (See for example Seumas McManus’ The Story of the Irish Race, which was in its 40th edition in 1986. McManus succumbs to Irish chauvinism in claiming the Irish “invented” rhyme, but his point on the rigor of bardic training is echoed elsewhere.) ^[8]

There’s even an echo of this in Socrates’ disdain for writing down his dialogues—a task that fell to his protégé Plato—for fear writing would degrade the capacity for memory. It appears Socrates was correct, though writing has many advantages, especially when ecological disruptions, plagues, wars and other catastrophes wipe out a culture dependent entirely upon an oral tradition. (“Few elders, little knowledge,” is how one indigenous elder explained it to Graham Hancock in his Ancient Apocalypse series.) We can be grateful to Plato for preserving a Socratic tradition that otherwise might have been lost forever.

2. The Problem of Literalism

Rieu asks if Homer’s narrative in The Iliad is historical, and while noting that Troy, a.k.a. Ilium, was indeed an historical place, opts for the tale of the war as primarily allegory. “It was a fiction of a very special kind, which had existed long before Homer’s time—a fiction that he adorned with the names of people whom his audience believed to be the ancestors of their own ruling princes, and some of whom we ourselves may well accept as having lived. …I would rather have the Iliad than a whole shelf of Bronze Age war reports, however accurate.” ^[9]

This is essentially the argument I make when discussing the Bible, The Iliad, or any other classical work of mythology: Its value lies not in whether it is strictly true or not, but in the wisdom and art it contains. Biblical literalists fall into the trap of having to accept that all sorts of impossibilities are literal facts: Jesus walking on water, Enoch being taken bodily up to heaven, one loaf and fish being enough to feed a thousand people, etc., etc. Each of these stories are what the Gnostics would likely have called “wisdom tales”—the discerning reader is called upon to glean the hidden message in the story: what is the author/teacher attempting to convey in spiritual terms?

But to arrive at this realization, we must first cast aside the contemporary usage of the word “myth” to mean “falsehood,” a prejudice first introduced by Victorian scholars. Since Schliemann and another century and a half of archaeological discoveries, it’s clear that all great myths have some historical truth at their core. When the spiritual value of a myth is discerned, then, its literal truth becomes far less important. This is why in recent years I’ve turned away from the atheism I initially adopted after leaving doctrinaire Christianity, and no longer see the Bible or other spiritual books as lacking value. I see all such books as part of the canon of wisdom literature, much as the Gnostics did two millennia ago.

The real problem creeps in when religious adherents succumb to literalism, which leads to all manner of cognitive dissonance and often-bizarre practices and beliefs. If you’ll forgive the allusion, this is most cogently satirized in the Monty Python comedy film The Life of Brian. In one scene, as Brian is desperately trying to flee followers who would make him the Jews’ promised messiah, he loses a sandal. To avoid being caught by the crowd, he leaves it behind and keeps running. One of the crowd picks up the sandal and yells: “Look! It is his holy sandal! It is a sign! We all must wear only one sandal to be worthy of him!” The same kinds of mistaken interpretation occur when readers unaware of the purpose of allegory and parable read teaching stories literally.

This is something I find regrettable about the current resurgence of Roman Catholicism and evangelical Christianity in the West in response to growing social pressures from without and within. Once again we are being asked to believe in the literal interpretation of these now-ancient Biblical stories and, in the case of Catholicism, its corpus of exegesis literature. Do we literally have to believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead in order to appreciate and deeply value the spiritual example he set for humanity? The Gnostics certainly didn’t think so; they understood the resurrection as a spiritual—not literal—event. Indeed, when one reaches a new spiritual insight, it is a kind of resurrection. I’m reminded of when I left Christianity in the late 1990s and spent a year reading the Tao te Ching. Its idea of the harmonious coexistence of opposites, its willingness to embrace uncertainty without fear, was like a ray of light opening up my brain. It gently refuted the need for an answer to every moral or spiritual question, which in any case is often too complex for simple answers.

In my view, humanity’s greatest enemy—now more than ever—is dogma or ideology. Too often, ideology is a substitute for thinking, for the hard work of spiritual seeking each of us is called upon to do. Dogma becomes a kind of spiritual Wikipedia, with all its attendant errors and prescriptions for belief. No original thought required—simply scroll the index on any topic for the “correct” answer. By contrast, the Gnostics understood “salvation” as a process unique to each individual. To that end, they read voraciously any wisdom literature they could get their hands on, which explains the variety of scrolls found in both the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea finds. Just think how history might have changed for the better had the Gnostics not been hounded out of existence and their books destroyed!

3. Bronze Age Collective Memory

As to the historical setting of The Iliad being firmly in the late Bronze Age, Homer himself makes this clear with the repeated, detailed descriptions of bronze armour and chariots. Homer’s descriptions are often precise. When a warrior is killed on the battlefield, it is considered the right of his vanquisher to strip him of his weapons and armour. And no wonder: all of it was wrought with the most fantastic craftsmanship. Describing Hector’s shield: “Tychius the master-currier, who lived at Hyle, had made this glittering shield for him with the hides of seven big bulls, which he overlaid with an eighth layer of bronze.” (Rieu trans., p. 137) Agamemnon, the overlord of the Achaean expedition to Troy, is no less magnificently adorned for battle:

“Agamemnon slung his sword from his shoulder. Golden studs glittered on the hilt, but the sheath was of silver, with a golden baldric attached. Then he took up his manly and man-covering shield, a nobly decorated piece, with its ten concentric rings of bronze, and twenty knobs of tin making a white circle round the dark enamel boss.” (Rieu trans., pp. 197, 198)

This makes utter nonsense of film adaptations showing the Achaeans (ancient Greeks) and Trojans with clunky-looking weapons and shields, like the disastrous made-for-TV adaptation of The Odyssey produced in the late 1990s and starring Armand Assante in the lead role. He is dressed in rags most unbecoming (and unlikely) of a Bronze Age king and warrior, who would have had only the best craftsmanship available. Homer makes this abundantly clear.

And then there’s the Shield of Achilles, commissioned for him by the gods and built by master-smith Hephaestus once Hector’s fate has been sealed. No wonder poet W.H. Auden was inspired to write his poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” though with a distinctly 20^th century Modernist philosophy underpinning it. The description of it in Homer is so visually stunning it leaps alive from the page. The scenes embossed on the silver and bronze tell an entire epic of their own and seem animated to life rather than static representations on metal:

“The shield consisted of five layers, and he decorated the face of it with a number of designs, executed with consummate skill and representing, first of all, Earth, Sky and Sea, the indefatigable Sun, the Moon at the full, and all the Constellations with which the heavens are crowned, the Pleiads, the Hyads, the great Orion, and the Bear… Next he showed two beautiful cities full of people. In one of them weddings and banquets were afoot. They were bringing the brides through the streets from their homes, to the loud music of the wedding hymn and the light of blazing torches…” (Rieu, pp. 349, 350) Homer goes on to describe several more scenes embossed on the shining metalwork, including “a vineyard laden with grapes. It was beautifully wrought in gold, but the bunches themselves were black and the supporting poles showed up throughout in silver. All round it he ran a ditch of blue enamel and outside that a fence of tin.” (Rieu trans., p. 352)

Homer’s vivid description leaves the reader breathless imagining the incredible combination of metallurgy and artistry in multiple materials—bronze, gold, silver, tin and enamel. Given the legacy of oral literature Homer drew upon to write The Iliad, one wonders if he is interweaving what postmodernists like to call a “meta-narrative” that came originally from another tale altogether:

“Next the god depicted a dancing-floor like the one that Daedalus designed in the spacious town of Cnossus for Ariadne of the lovely locks. Youths and marriageable maidens were dancing on it with their hands on one another’s wrists, the girls in fine linen with lovely garlands on their heads, and the men in closely woven tunics showing the faint gleam of oil, and with daggers of gold hanging from their silver belts. Here they ran lightly round, circling as smoothly on their accomplished feet as the wheel of a potter when he sits and works it with his hands to see if it will spin; and there they ran in lines to meet each other.” (Rieu trans., pp. 352, 353)

Cnossus—or Knossus—is of course the royal city of the ancient Minoans on the island of Crete, considered a precursor civilization to classical Greece. “Knossos was inhabited for several thousand years, beginning with a neolithic settlement sometime in the seventh millennium BC, and was abandoned after its destruction in 1375 BC which marked the end of Minoan civilization.” ^[10] Scholar Eric Cline has written and lectured extensively about the late Bronze Age collapse that occurred in his view in 1177 BCE, ^[11] and affected the entire Mediterranean basin. According to Britannica online, a concurrent civilization, Mycenae, existed in Greece itself in the Argos region (where most of the Achaean military force originated for the war with Troy). It was “celebrated by Homer as ‘broad-streeted’ and ‘golden.’ According to legend, Mycenae was the capital of Agamemnon, the Achaean king who sacked the city of Troy.” ^[12]

The Shield of Achilles is decorated with curiously peaceful, joyous scenes considering it was built specifically so that the great Achaean warrior could kill Trojan warrior-chief Hector while wearing it. Is this a case of the poet using the technique of counterpoint to provide a sense of transcendent beauty amid the chaos and mass murder of war? I must confess, reading the battle scenes in The Iliad, I often winced and cringed at the carnage. Certainly we have to be careful not to impose our 20^th and 21^st century biases upon Homer’s tale, derived from a time when men—aside from the poets and craftsmen whose position in society was equally valued—believed the highest glory (“kleos”) they could attain was an honourable death on the battlefield. This would guarantee them a place in epics composed by the poets, as indeed many individual warriors are memorialized by name throughout The Iliad. Achilles stoically submits to his fate of an early death on the plains of Troy rather than a long, quiet and peaceful life back in Argos because he is aware it will make him immortal in song and story. But when Odysseus encounters Achilles in the underworld during his quest to return home to Ithaca, the legendary warrior seems to express serious regret for his fate:

Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand

For some poor country man, on iron rations,

Than lord it over all the exhausted dead. ^[1]

Other translations make Achilles’ regret more explicit: “I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.” ^[2] For the ghost of Achilles, the glorious death of a warrior pales in comparison to even the humblest life on Earth.

^[1] The Odyssey, Book XI, lines 579–81, Robert Fitzgerald trans., Vintage Classics ed., Random House, New York, 1990, p. 201.

^[2] Poetry in Translation version. A. S. Kline is a poet and translator previously published by Borders. He created the Poetry in Translation site with the goal of increasing accessibility of the classics: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey11.php#anchor_Toc90267984

Part 2 to follow…

^[1] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), p. 122.

^[2] “Christopher Nolan Reveals Why He Cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey,” International Business Times, May 22, 2026: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/lupita-nyongo-helen-troy-casting-odyssey-1798273

^[3] “Did Homer Really Write the “Iliad” & “Odyssey”? Who Wrote the Trojan Epics?,” Caleb Howells, The Collector, April 2, 2026: https://www.thecollector.com/did-homer-write-the-trojan-epics/

^[4] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), Introduction, pp.xi, xii.

^[5] “Did Homer Really Write the “Iliad” & “Odyssey”? Who Wrote the Trojan Epics?,” Caleb Howells, The Collector, April 2, 2026: https://www.thecollector.com/did-homer-write-the-trojan-epics/

^[6] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), p. 344.

^[7] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), Introduction, p.xiii.

^[8] Seumas McManus, The Story of the Irish Race, The Devin-Adair Co., Old Greenwich, Connecticut, 1921 (1986 ed., 40^th printing), p. 179.

^[9] The Iliad, Homer, Penguin Classics, E.V. Rieu, trans., 1950 (1986 ed.), Introduction, p.xiv.

^[10] https://ancient-greece.org/archaeology/knossos/

^[11] James Blake Wiener, “Interview: The Mysterious Bronze Age Collapse with Eric Cline,” World History Encyclopedia, September 19, 2019: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1446/interview-the-mysterious-bronze-age-collapse-with/

^[12] “Mycenae,” Britannica online: https://www.britannica.com/place/Mycenae

Terry Watada’s novel, Hiroshima Bomb Money, is a bold, complex and powerful tale of Japanese culture leading up to the infamous atomic bomb explosions that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But rather than indulge the all-too-prevalent tendency these days to create yet another entry in the “victim porn” sweepstakes, Watada faces both the light and darkness of his own culture with unflinching honesty and courage. The result is a novel that elucidates a truth seldom uttered in today’s virtue-signaling media: Every culture has at one time been victim and at another time oppressor—sometimes simultaneously. Like the old but nevertheless true trope says: Read your history. Preferably not the revisionist ideological stuff being peddled these days.

Hiroshima Bomb Money follows the separate trajectories of three characters in the prosperous Akamatsu family, residents of Hiroshima prior to the fateful event of 1945. The youngest sister, Chisato, decides at age 16 she is ready to marry and puts her name into circulation for the mail-order brides being offered to Nissei men living on Canada’s west coast. It was news to me that in Japan’s pre-war culture, the Emperor encouraged young women to go overseas to marry and get an education. Chisato is soon connected with wealthy Vancouver lumber businessman Kiyoshi Kimura and sets sail with other hopeful young Japanese women already engaged to marry men they’d never met. From the moment they hit the Vancouver docks some are disappointed to realize the photos the men had sent to Japan were of movie stars, not images of themselves. Some of these men are traditionalists who treat their new wives as slaves and don’t hesitate to beat them when they disappoint.

Chisato’s older sister Chiemi decides to stay behind in Hiroshima, eventually enduring an arranged marriage to a prosperous kimono merchant who is soon drafted for the war with China. Her mother-in-law takes an instant dislike to her, but Chiemi’s headstrong spirit is equal to the challenge, and she eventually becomes an adept manager of the business while her husband is away. Once the war with America is declared, food rationing becomes the norm and non-essentials begin to be pruned out of the Japanese economy, ruining the livelihoods of formerly prosperous business owners. Chiemi ends up taking in one young woman whose husband is killed in China, adding her two children to her own two sons in the Akamatsu family compound.

Hideki, brother of the two sisters, is gripped by the war propaganda being produced by the Japanese imperial government and is anxious to join the army and its promise of glory in service to the Emperor. Once in basic training, he is soon confronted by a sadistic sergeant who takes delight in targeting weaker members of the platoon. His dreams of finding glory begin to dim as he realizes the harsh reality of military life. His first deployment is to the invasion of Nanking, (or Nanjing) now known to be one of the worst atrocities of the 20^th century, with 100,000–300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers killed by the Japanese army. Interestingly, his sister Chiemi notes that almost no one believes the war propaganda being produced by the Japanese government regarding military casualties and the conduct of the war, either with China or the Allies.

To this day, the Japanese government has yet to fully acknowledge responsibility for the Nanking massacre. ^[1] According to Britannica online: “In 2015 China submitted archival documents related to the massacre to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, an act China understood as securing the historical record against denial; Japan criticized the submission as politically motivated and subsequently lobbied to reform UNESCO’s inscription process.”

None of this is to downplay the horrors suffered by the Japanese population during the Starvation Blockade imposed by the Allies during the latter stages of WWII, or the nightmare of the atomic bombs. Watada opens his novel with the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, as a badly burned Chiemi—flesh hanging from her limbs—stumbles through the wreckage seeking her two boys. However, I do think his one stumble in the entire book is choosing the post-bomb scene to open the novel. For more sensitive readers, its graphic horror may be off-putting. I know I had to put it down for some weeks and come back to it after finally deciding to continue reading.

The Canadian government’s declaration of Japanese-Canadians as “enemy aliens” and their subsequent deportation to internment camps in the British Columbia interior is tracked through Chisako’s story. But even the pre-war situation in Vancouver’s Japanese community isn’t glossed over, as she learns that her husband is mixed up with a local yakuza (gang) boss running prostitution and drug networks. Once again, Watada is signaling us that no cultural community is exempt from exploiting its own members where power and profit are involved—another perennial truth.

Chisako is assisted by the generosity of the Vancouver Christian community, in particular a Reverend James who helps an abused Japanese mail-order bride escape her husband. He eventually helps Chisako relocate to the Britannia Beach settlement, a copper mining community near Vancouver whose filthy, often violent living conditions come as a shock to her, raised as she was in a clean, prosperous home in Hiroshima. When the Canadian authorities come to round up Japanese-Canadians, both Issei and Nissei, to send them to Sandon, New Denver, Tashme and other internment camps, she is stung to the core—what has she done to deserve this fate? She has never so much as spoken out of turn to anyone in Canada. The camps are segregated by religion, with Sandon being reserved for Buddhists while New Denver and other camps are designated for Christian internees.

I live in New Denver, where we still have remnants of this history in our Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre (NIMC), designated a national historic monument by the Canadian government in 2007. The NIMC has preserved some of the internment shacks, plus an interpretive centre, traditional Japanese garden, and an Obon shrine consecrated by annual ceremonies. I was privileged to be part of the ceremonies for the 2010 celebration of the Centre’s designation as a national monument, and again for its 20^th anniversary celebrations in 2014. Terry Watada performed a song at one of these events. (Terry, feel free to remind me which one!)

Hiroshima Bomb Money isn’t for the faint of heart. It is not light entertainment, but substantive storytelling that in the best tradition of literature forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the human condition. It falls into the dramatic tradition of tragedy, which in its most adept form compels the reader to continue despite the painful scenes. Watada is skilled enough to make us really care about these characters, so we want to follow them to the end.

What makes the novel all the more genuine is the fact that it is based partly on the story of Watada’s family. As he writes in the Author’s Note, “My wife’s family live in Hawaii but came to the US from Japan in the 19^th century. They did experience the attack on Pearl Harbor. …At the end of the war, the family heard about the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—of great significance since the extended family lived in Hiroshima. Many were lost, including Chiemi Tanagawa, maiden name of my wife’s Great Aunt.” Watada thus chose her name as one of the three main characters in the novel.

But I’ll leave the mystery contained in the book’s title, the “Hiroshima bomb money,” to you the reader to discover for yourself.

This is a tough book to read, but an important and richly rewarding one.

^[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/Nanjing-Massacre

Farran fell on hard times during the Covid era—both personal and professional—a not uncommon story for many musicians who suddenly found their access to live audiences cut off. For many the lockdown era dealt a mortal blow to their careers, while others are still struggling to regain their foothold. For a band like the Stones that have become a cultural institution, the blow was temporary, but for others not nearly so famous, it hasn’t been so easy. The irony is that the Stones cast a long shadow—both of inspiration and deep shade for those less fortunate. Even in normal times, keeping a band together can be a monumental challenge.

Here is my interview with Farran.

• When were The Ramblers formed, and what was the basic idea or inspiration?

My first gig with my band was in August 2000. When we started rehearsing we didn’t have a name and the first idea was The Gamblers. But then, because I’ve always been a Stones fan, and because of the “Midnight Rambler” song we switched it to the Ramblers. Had I known the Ramblers was the most common name for blues rock bands all over the world, I wouldn’t have chosen it! So now we just call ourselves Eric Farran and The Ramblers. Sometimes it will be just a duo if I’m doing it just with my guitarist or sometimes I’ll just call it Eric Farran.

In 1992 I was watching a bootleg video of the Stones called “Cocksucker Blues.” On that video Jagger does a super cool intro of “Midnight Rambler.” I was sitting in the living room of my parents watching this and said, “Shit I wanna do that!” I asked around about how to do it and was told just go to a music store and they’ll set you up. So they sold me a harmonica and at first I was just fiddling around, not aware you had to have them in key for each song. So then I went to see (Montréal blues harp legend) Jim Zeller and thought, shit this is what you can do with just this small instrument!

• Did you have any prior musical training or experience?

None! When we started this I had no experience in the music business but I used to work in a bank, I had a degree in business. So I do everything—booking gigs, arranging studio time, everything. In Québec Zeller is one of THE two harmonica players in the province. When Johnny Halliday came to Quebec to do a show, they got Zeller to play with him. He’s played with Bob Dylan and Muddy Waters. I followed him so much and almost harassed him for lessons, but now we’re friends.

• What are your musical influences—although I can guess, given your sound, that Muddy Waters, Little Walter and of course the Stones must figure into it.

My family is Jagger, then my actual family and my band members. Obviously I checked out Little Walter, Sonny Terry, and Magic Dick of the J. Geils Band. And John Popper with American band Blues Traveler, which isn’t really a blues band. He just took harmonica in another direction, stuff that no one does. He’s like a shredder on guitar. Blues purists don’t like him, but fuck blues purists! There’s other harmonica players on the Quebec scene and I went to see them a lot. Harmonica is not a big community—not like drums or guitars—so we all know each other. There’s this incredible respect between harmonica players.

• How were you able to produce your recordings? Did you do the crowd-funding approach? Or did you sign to a Québec-based music label?

I’m still independent to this day. My first CD, Bad Boys of the Blues, we recorded the whole CD in my guitar player’s bedroom and basement. He plays guitar and bass and we used drum programming. But then for the second, Love Automatic, we recorded with a whole band in a studio. This was already a working band so I brought my demos and we did rehearsals and went to the studio of a friend. We recorded all the parts individually. There was only one guitar player, so we did multi-tracking so we could have a rhythm guitar under the lead.

• Tell me a bit about your band—I’m amazed how your guitarist has captured the Keith Richards sound. I see your lineup has changed recently. Originally your bass/drums rhythm section was Donato Spallone and Nando Spallone.

I know I use a band name but it’s more of a solo project. Pierre Boutillier was my original guitarist and still plays with me to this day, although he’s not my official guitarist—that’s Dave MacLean now. He has an incredible sense of music and a great sense of rhythm guitar; he also plays bass. That’s what I like—I don’t give a shit about solos. Dave’s not going to shred on guitar but his musical sense is great—where he puts the accents. Usually his first take is the one we keep. Pierre is my Ronnie Wood and Dave is my main guitar player and I’ve often had them play together. When we have a bigger budget I always try to get two guitars. They both know the material so I play with both of them.

My bass player now is Serge Dionne and my drummer is Louis Doré. I love the skip high-hat—next to harmonica it’s my favourite instrument. I told my new drummer, I want a Charlie Watts style drummer, no matter what we do.

• Tell me about your fan base—is it primarily in Québec or have you toured other parts of eastern Canada? Was it built on mostly club dates or touring?

We just had Québec’s national holiday St. John Baptiste Day so we played on a covered outdoor skating rink. Every city in Québec was organizing events for the national holiday, so there were bands everywhere. We did the songs we do in blues and rock ‘n’ roll, but it all had to be done in French. And we did songs from French artists from France.

There’s a mining company called Raglan that has a dry mining camp (no alcohol allowed) near the top of Québec and they fly us in to play for the miners—it’s a very good paying gig. We do 12-hour days, 14-day shifts. We sometimes get hired by Hydro Québec to play for their employees. But we also do private events. There’s a town called Joliette we played in a lot. Ever since 2010, it’s like there’s something in the air and water with my band there—they loved us. We always did well, this went on for years and years, and we always got the dates I wanted. But then came Covid. Sometimes they have us back to reminisce, but it’s just not like before.

We played the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2014 and the next day we flew out to play at the Raglan mine. The jazz festival was awesome; they gave us an hour set. Jim Zeller helped us get in. Everyone we knew came to see us and I have great video of it. We were well rehearsed—it was great, a wonderful experience. I’ve tried to get in since but so far they’ve turned us down.

• Is there a blues scene in Montréal?

The blues scene everywhere is very niche, it’s very small. It does exist but it’s not prominent. 20-year-olds don’t give a shit about blues or the Rolling Stones. I’m 56, meaning the people that come to my shows revolve around my age. There’s often non-blues headliners at blues festivals; Motley Crüe was the headliner at the Ottawa Blues Festival one year. These days you have to do that to bring in the crowds. We also have festivals that operate one year and then close down.

Every time I get invited somewhere, it’s to play Stones (Farran does Stones tribute shows), “Honky Tonk Women” or “Sympathy for the Devil.” It’s really cool that I get to do this; it changed my life.

• How much of your time is taken up by Stones tributes?

Not that much really, but they’re very lucrative. For me they’re easy, I know Mick Jagger’s voice, I know his movements. Our versions are a thousand miles an hour. For me they’re easy gigs. You really don’t have to win anybody over; they’re there because they want to hear those songs. I love my Stones gigs. And now the Stones have a new album out!

Sometimes I’ll say I uncovered a lost Rolling Stones song, but then I play it and say, “Motherfuckers, that’s an original song of mine!” That’s an old trick Metallica does sometimes. I modeled “The Last Time We Say Goodbye” after “Sweet Virginia.” We play the fast version of “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll.” (NOTE: There are two versions of “The Last Time We Say Goodbye,” a slow version done in country style similar to the Stones’ “Country Honk” and a fast electric version.)

• You also advertise as a teacher for blues harmonica. Tell me about that.

I’m a harmonica teacher, not a blues harmonica teacher. Usually it’s for people who are starting at zero. I learned really quickly, it was easy for me. It’s not easy to master, but it’s easy to learn. It’s easy to get bum notes. I did that several times last night at a gig. Every harmonica player does that sometimes, but people just smile when they hear it. Every time I give a harmonica lesson, I say it has to be FUN.

• What plans do you have for a new recording?

Suicide Blues came out in 2017; from then ’til ’22 I’ve been recording demos and ideas. But then I was getting close with this girl and I fucked it up. I had a broken heart and lost all motivation to continue. I’ve hardly touched my music for four years. I have 17 songs ready, drums and bass are recorded, most of the guitar and some of the harmonica. I have plenty of friends with studios. Now that we’re talking about it maybe it’ll give me a kick in the ass to get it done. Like the other albums it’ll be a mix of English and French. I use my bilingualism to my advantage. My parents spoke French at home but they sent me to an English school.

I would love to have the new recording out by my birthday September 7^th! There’s not much to do, it’s almost all recorded. My voice has to be redone; on all the recordings it’s a demo version. And we have to mix it. I just have to kick myself in the ass and get it done.

Throw in a bonus: The Ramblers sound like the Rolling Stones would if they were still kicking out the walls making Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. Farran out-Jaggers the man himself on their smokin’ hot version of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down,” the slashing rhythm guitar interlaced with mellifluous lead guitar a distinct echo of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor on Exile. Farran’s harmonica climbs and soars like a swallow in a bomb dive, with the ghost of blues harp master Little Walter hovering in the background. On tracks like “The Last Time We Say Goodbye,” possibly a nod to the Stones’ “Til the Next Goodbye” on It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Ramblers sound like they’re channeling a bourbon-soaked Jagger from Exile through the original midtempo, trundling hand drums of “Sympathy for the Devil” on Beggar’s Banquet. This is music crackling with energy and the long lost original fire of rock ‘n’ roll. This is take-no-prisoners rock that reminds us: back in 1969 when Jagger growled “Oh, yeah!” it was bloody dangerous.

We forget that what is today mainstream music was once considered dangerous to the status quo. We forget how shocking it was for audiences to watch as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis stood on their pianos bashing like banshees, Elvis waggled his hips, and Chuck Berry duckwalked across the stage chooglin’ the rhythm that launched a thousand guitar players. Kids loved it but parents shook in their boots, wondering what the world had come to. Rock ‘n’ roll was the antidote to the milkbread crap being fed to kids in the bland radio drivel of the ’50s. No wonder it inspired what would later become the greatest musical artists in history—people like Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Lennon and McCartney, Pete Townshend and too many others to count.

It was loud, it was rude, and it didn’t give a damn about your parents’ social club and its rules. Sure, the boys still loved their mamas and papas, but they were still allowed to be boys and rattle the windows once in awhile. That’s the true original message of rock ‘n’ roll—loosen up! And let there be a “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Society may be a whole lot safer now, but that thrill, that shiver in the spine when you heard “Johnny B. Goode” or “Great Balls of Fire” or “Good Golly Miss Molly”—that’s long been stripped away by what the late sociologist David Graeber ironically dubbed the “Utopia of Rules” in his book of that title. I’ll stop there before I say anything nasty about what passes for music now and the way our technocratic elites are destroying music with AI.

We also forget that even the mighty Stones started out as a bar and club band before they became the global behemoth they are now. Some of The Ramblers’ videos are shot in Montréal clubs and bars, though they also appeared in that city’s venerable Jazz Festival. Hell, even The Beatles had to slog it out in German bars and strip clubs before they made it big. This is where rock ‘n’ roll is born, not in some corporate CEO’s so-called imagination.

A caution for sensitive listeners: The Ramblers can be subtle as a hammer in their lyrics and obviously don’t care about political correctness. (Hint: Remember when sex was fun instead of a topic of fear and loathing?) But I have to say it gives me a chuckle and a rush to hear them rip through “Electric Sex,” “Baby Be Mine,” and “Love Automatic,” propriety be damned. Both the country and rock versions of “The Last Time We Say Goodbye” are equally brilliant. We forget that the term rock ‘n’ roll originated as a Black slang term for sex. Hearing these songs is the closest I’ll get to that feeling of hearing rock music for the first time—you know, when your brain is still young and a neural track is being laid down in your head, never to be forgotten. Like when I stepped into my high school dance—the gym dark except for blacklights and strobe lights—and heard for the first time the speaker stacks pounding out “Smoke on the Water.”

It’s ironic—we live in times when all manner of formerly forbidden things are permitted and even promoted, yet raunchy lyrics could still get you a sticker warning about “explicit lyrics.” We do a lot of virtue signaling but otherwise lay back into our earpods while civilization crumbles. So when The Ramblers lean into the country groove of “Everybody’s Busy Doing Nothing,” easily as gritty as similar tracks on Sticky Fingers, the lyric really lands: “Everybody’s busy doin’ nothing, nothin’ at all. Nobody ever does anything… everybody’s waitin’ on somebody to come and be the one…” So true—but as they say, it’s complicated. As Bono once sang before he lost his mojo: “I can’t change the world / but I can change the world in me.” If only he’d listened to himself and kept off the soapbox.

We may think we killed God (we didn’t; we just invented new, worse ones), but here we are, still waiting for a messiah. Hell, rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t going to destroy civilization. But it sure makes its slow demolition by sociopathic technocrats a lot easier to bear. And as rock songs with new relevance go, I’d put my vote in for The Ramblers version of “Stop Breaking Down.” Could there be a more appropriate theme song for our times? Who needs drugs or booze when you’ve got rock? And I haven’t even got to the songs on their other two albums, Suicide Blues and Bad Boys of Blues. Like the Stones, The Ramblers followed Robert Johnson to the crossroads, Muddy Waters and Little Walter to Chicago and found salvation for us all.

The apocalypse is now officially on hold ’til further notice. Thanks guys.

NOTE: Watch this space for a forthcoming interview with bandleader and blues harpist extraordinaire Eric Farran. To sample Ramblers tracks, click the links on the song titles in this article.

For any garden to thrive takes consistent attention to detail and the all-too-familiar task of weeding out the undesirables. In that respect, every poem is a garden. It should grow shoots of new meaning with each reading—today, or 50 years from now. In going over poems I hadn’t read in 30 years, I didn’t expect to like them. Many have never been published outside of poetry journals, making this very nearly a “lost” book. The pleasant discovery is that they’ve held up surprisingly well despite my subsequent development as a poet. Hopefully what is presented here represents the best of my early work, and will be a pleasing discovery for readers.

I began publishing poems in the heady days of the photocopied ’zines of the 1980s, but most of them reflected my stumbling, immature attempts at poetic craft and have since been abandoned. The scrappy, independent ’80s ’zine scene died out and was superseded by the glossy, perfect-bound, tightly curated literary magazines published at universities mostly by and for creative writing students. Many of the poems you see here were published in Canadian literary journals during the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s. But with the exception of a few published in regional anthology Bread & Bones and the chapbook The Shattered Icons, published in 1994 under my own imprint Chameleon Fire Editions, most have not yet appeared in book form.

How could this happen? For at least 10 years I submitted no work at all to any publications. I was tired of receiving rejection notes from editors that read, “This is obviously well-crafted work, but…” fill in the blank—their current issue was full, it didn’t fit the theme they were looking for, it was too long, too short, etc. I felt exhausted by the process and also somewhat betrayed by it. I had been advised by writers’ guides that the path to getting a book of poems published was to acquire enough individually published poems first. I had done that. But after repeated rejections of the book-length manuscript from which this collection eventually emerged, I was fed up. I’ve always had a short fuse for futility.

I continued to write poetry but was content to publish it in limited editions or read it at open mic events. Still, it was painful coming to grips with the possibility that I might never see a book of poems published. It’s the age-old struggle of young artists anxiously seeking to get established in a world indifferent to their work.

Finally I met Ernest Hekkanen of New Orphic Publishers in Nelson, BC. He believed enough in my writing to publish three books, The Charlatans of Paradise (2005), Star Seeds (2009), and The Price of Transcendence (2015). He’d already published many of my poems in his journal, the New Orphic Review, which hewed to no party line or any particular school of aesthetics so long as its editor (Hekkanen) enjoyed the writing.

I’ve always been the “outsider of all outsiders,” as I call it. Always on the wrong side of the prevailing winds in literary trends. Like William Blake, I had no desire to follow anything but my own muse. Hekkanen was among the few in the literary community who respected that, provided the writing craft was of a high standard. In my youth I had a Romantic notion of poets as Byronic rebels. That hasn’t borne up well in the 21st century, with more and more of the arts in Canada dependent upon government grants to survive.

In the 1950s Dylan Thomas could fill lecture halls across America. In Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Yevtushenko could fill stadiums. Beat poets like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti gripped the popular imagination. But by the ’60s the masses in their millions turned instead to popular songwriters, whose work spoke more directly to the man or woman in the street. Leonard Cohen’s iconic poetry soon became popular songs. And when Bob Dylan’s lyrics became too opaque and mystifying, even he found himself in hot water with some critics and listeners. Complicating the picture, the academic fixation with postmodernism turned poetry into an elite occupation that produced baffling riddles impenetrable to the average reader. This has largely destroyed the public appetite for this ancient art. No longer is poetry the vox populi it had been. People now memorize song lyrics as they once did poems.

Dylan Thomas once said that “narrative is essential” if poetry is to be clear. From as far back as ancient Sumeria, with the Epic of Gilgamesh (approx. 2600 BC), and of course the epics of Homer, poetry began as a storytelling (story-singing) medium designed to both record and celebrate the human sojourn on this Earth. Aside from inscribing the collective consciousness with dreams, histories and visions, Dylan the First said: “A good poem is a contribution to reality.” But, he added, poetry has the power to reach out even further: “A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him…”

In other words, poetry must reach out and profoundly, personally touch us. It is in my view the most spiritual of all the arts. I wouldn’t waste your time with anything less. It’s what I hope to offer the reader with Garden of Pomegranates. Here’s another poem from the book for you.

The Rain Man Dances

The rain man dances

through ocean depths

as easily as grass—

dolphins laughing

as clouds fly out in streamers

from his fingertips.

Ideas are white coral reefs

blossoming in aquamarine

depths

and as he drifts

raindrop-leaved avenues,

evening reminds him—

no hell could shine like this—

nor any heaven burn

with such obsidian fire.


©1995 Sean Arthur Joyce 

Well, friends, I’m proud to announce the launch of my 8th book of poetry, Garden of Pomegranates, released by Chameleon Fire Editions, the imprint I established in 1990. During those 35 years I have published collectible limited editions by Canadian poets such as Timothy Shay, Catherine Owen, Chad Norman and Margaret Hornby. Shay and I edited the Chameleon Fire anthology Homeless in Paradise in 2007 featuring the contest winners of Nelson youth and adult poets writing to that theme. Currently Chameleon Fire publishes the popular Slocan History Series, a set of 9 booklets on the history of the Slocan Valley region of southeastern British Columbia. Our most popular title, Sinixt in the Slocan: The Last 3,000 Years, tells the story of the indigenous people that originally inhabited the valley and has gone into three printings so far.

I have on occasion used Chameleon Fire to publish my own books when it seemed they didn’t fit the publishing agendas of other publishers, most pointedly Diary of a Pandemic Year, published in 2021 while the Covid madness was still in its heat. It was clear to me that the Canadian publishing industry was lining up on the side of the official narrative and condoning lockdowns and vaccine mandates, so there was simply no point in submitting a book of poems on the “pandemic” from a dissenting point of view. I see it as a 21st century example of Samizdat underground publishing in the Soviet Union during the worst of the Stalinist years. And it saddens me to have to say that this ever occurred in Canada, the land of my birth.

Another book I used Chameleon Fire to publish is one I’m very proud of—Dead Crow & the Spirit Engine, produced in a beautiful glossy stock to better render my original colour photographic art that illustrates the poem cycle. I worked on this cycle for ten years, honing and perfecting it both as text and as a performance piece I did a brief tour with in 2016 and 2018. There are videos of me performing the Prologue on my author website on the media page, fully in costume and with original music by composer extraordinaire Noel Fudge.

The history of literature is riddled with books that were deemed of no value to publishers when submitted by authors, and Dead Crow, sadly, is no exception, despite its rich allusions to mythology, its carefully crafted verse, and a narrative that covers “life, the universe and everything,” to quote the late Douglas Adams. (The history of literary criticism is even worse—do a web search to see just how many books that are now considered indispensable classics were hated by reviewers when first published.)

But I digress! Garden of Pomegranates is not actually a book of new poems but work that was written and published between 1988 and 2005. As I note in the Foreword to the book, after not reading these poems for most of 30 years, I didn’t expect to like them anymore. Yet with fresh eyes I found they’ve held up remarkably well in terms of poetic craft. That era was my “wilderness period” as a poet, when I was consistently getting rejection letters that read, “This is well crafted, but not for us,” due to reasons of theme, length, deadlines, etc. Many of the poems appeared in Canadian literary magazines like The Fiddlehead, New Quarterly, Whetstone, Horsefly, Rift and others, many of them no longer with us. But despite these publications, I’ll be damned if I could interest a publisher in releasing a full-length collection. I felt betrayed by the literary system and retreated for many years, writing poems but not bothering to submit them anymore.

In fact, I seldom do even now. For 40 years now I’ve studied and learned my craft, edited and re-edited my poems to a fine polish. I don’t feel at my age the need to “submit” (note the term) to some 22-year-old intern on the editorial staff of a university literary journal who has far less experience than I do yet is placed in a position of passing judgment on my work. I contented myself with building a regional following, although I also published poems in anthologies in the US, UK and Canada. I reconciled myself to the realization that poetry in the 21st century is one of two things: 1) An elite occupation of universities and their graduate students, not intended for the general public; or, 2) a quickly fading relic of the past, a boutique product of interest only to diehard poetry fans. From this latter perspective, a limited editions press makes perfect sense. Quality, not quantity.

In the coming days I’ll publish the Foreword to Garden of Pomegranates, a kind of poetic manifesto explaining why I persist with such a doomed art in our technologically obsessed world. And why I consider poetry such a vital art, such a critical soul support in soulless times.

Meanwhile, here’s the title poem. Although originally written in 1997, I can still remember the inspiration: an article I read about a heart transplant patient who found that she had acquired personality traits distinctly unlike her own. When she was able to track down the family of the donor, she learned where these traits had come from. Contrary to the lies of the transhumanists, my friends, the heart is not merely an organic-mechanical blood pump, nor is the brain a mere collection of algorithms. Poetry reminds us that we are soul and spirit, far more than merely the sum of our biological parts.

Garden of Pomegranates can be ordered directly from the author for $25 Cdn plus shipping via my author website contact page.

Garden of Pomegranates

For three days after the transplant,

she wept. Her fingers

couldn’t keep away from the purple scar

on her breastbone, her sleep

a garden of bulbs

in freshly turned soil.

In her dreams,

a young woman’s pale arms

hold up a soft clay bowl

brimming with tears

and the dust of roses

sent by ardent lovers.

Her body carries the aching

of another soul’s memory—

unfinished writing on a page,

half-developed faces on a strip of film,

unkept rendezvous

in coffee-steamed cafés.

Questions are surfacing

like hungry trout in a pool—

When winter turns in your breast,

will my voice lay its wreath of snow

over yours? Is this gift of mine

a mute pump of pistons and valves

or a garden of pomegranates

pregnant with the red, red seeds

of the sun?

©1997 / 2026 Sean Arthur Joyce 

I hesitate to write about poetic form during a time when, to most people, poetry is little more than an artifact of the past. If they think about it at all, they think of free verse. Those familiar with the history of poetry will know that free verse, while not entirely new to the 20^th century, fully took hold then and has become the default form of poetry today. But “free” doesn’t mean free of craft. I was influenced early on by the great T.S. Eliot, who once said: “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” [1] Often misquoted as Eliot saying, “No verse is libre,” this is a reference to the original French term vers libre, which, according to Babette Deutsch, “flourished in France in the eighties of the last century,” i.e. the 19^th century. [2] “As the term implies,” she explains, “the form does not obey the rules of metrical verse. It demands of those who use it and those who would enjoy it a sensitiveness to what its practitioners call cadences.” [3]

Although free verse thus espouses a “form follows function” aesthetic, the irony is that a “cadence” is defined as “a rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds in language,” or “the beat, time, or measure of rhythmical motion or activity.” [4] So even without the formality of traditional metre or verse structure, all poems—free verse or otherwise—use language to create a sense of beat or rhythm along with other linguistic effects that mark poetry as distinct from speech. Another great poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote: “Poetry should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song,” [5] as perfect a definition of poetic language as I’ve ever seen in one sentence.

Unfortunately for me, I seemed to have an inherent disability when it came to remembering the classical forms of metre and rhyme. No matter how many times I studied these forms, they refused to stick in memory. So, like most 20^th century poets, I began by writing strictly in free verse. However, from the beginning I was haunted by Eliot’s phrase regarding poetic craft, and as someone who was taught by my father as a boy to value high craft, was determined to learn all I could about it. Serendipity guided me to pluck from a bookstore shelf early in my writing career a copy of the second edition of 20^th Century Poetry and Poetics, edited by Canadian poet Gary Geddes, whose great contribution in this anthology was to place Canadian poets in the same rank as British and American poets of renown. Even better, the essays on poetics at the back of the volume from the featured poets revealed a very broad palette of craft, none of it prescriptive. As a young poet this was particularly freeing, the realization that even the great ones often took a highly individualistic approach to poetic forms. Among the poets in this book, Charles Olson’s concept of “projective verse” never really landed with me—it seemed opaque at best. Yet I resonated completely with his statement that the poet “can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself.” [6] Arguably, this basic aesthetic has been at the root of most poetry published in the last hundred years.

I’ve often observed that life is governed by paradox, that almost nothing is ever either/or, but both/and. Thus, as I gained experience as a poet, I found myself veering into more structure in my poems, though as Mick Burrs (Steven Michael Berzensky) once observed in a review of my poetry, demonstrating a “unique formalism.” That’s quite a leap from the young free verse poet I started out as, with early attempts at haiku my only formalism at the time. Although I’ve since realized that mastering haiku is a lifetime’s work all by itself, I credit the form for teaching me the importance of not wasting a single syllable in a poem. I began to develop a characteristic line that was tightly edited and highly compressed in its language, even before venturing back into structured verse forms such as quatrains and tercets—the latter now perhaps my most definitive form. (More on this in a moment.)

What I call the “long, loping line” best characterized by Walt Whitman is not an easy one to master. Poets are often misled to think the reverse, that because the line is longer and looser, it’s easier to work with. Not so. “In the abundance of words there does not fail to be transgression,” says the proverb. [7] Walking a tightrope without a net below is only for the most sure-footed of professional acrobats. Allen Ginsberg, who placed himself in the tradition of Whitman, adopted his long, loping lines but too often let them get out of control and deteriorate into meandering rants. Of the Beat poets, probably only Ferlinghetti successfully managed the long line. Again, it must land “somewhere between speech and song,” and not, as Ferlinghetti warned, be merely chopped-up prose. “Walking through our prose buildings in the 21^st century, one may look back and wonder at this strange age which allowed poetry to walk in prose rhythms and still called it poetry.” [8]

2. Sacred Symmetry

I have links to the Celtic tradition on both sides of my family. My mother’s side, who were American, included the Breen family, who emigrated to the US in the 19^th century from County Carlow, likely escaping poverty for the promise of the “New World.” My family name, Joyce, actually has its origins on the coast of France in Normandy before it became an honoured Irish name. One source claims the name is of Breton origin, in neighbouring Brittany, a French province with deep roots in Celtic history. The Joyces originally came over with William the Conqueror as princes or barons during the conquest of Britain in 1066, and there are many variants of the name. “The earliest mention of the name was of Cil de Jort who was with William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Some twenty years later a Robert de Jorse is recorded in Nottingham and then there is a passage of a couple of hundred years until we find evidence of the de Jorse family in Wales and Ireland.” [9] Foolishly perhaps, I submitted my DNA to Ancestry.com to have it tested and sure enough, it proved a link to Normandy. The Normans originated in Scandinavia, hence “North men,” or “Norman.” Incredible, the persistence of genetics even over a thousand years!

A common name in the Joyce clan, extending back through this early period in British history, was John, a name that shows up in my family tree in the 18^th century. Hence my reason for choosing “Sean” as a nom de plume—the Irish variant of John. It took about another century after 1066 for the Normans to fight their way through the Irish tribes to Galway on Ireland’s west coast, where they “founded” the city we see today. If you visit Galway City you can see the banners of the 14 tribes fluttering in downtown Eyre Square, including the Joyces. Although some Joyces remained in England—including my line, who settled in the southwest England counties of Dorset and Devon—Australian genealogist Laurie Joyce explains: “The vast majority of Joyces however are descended from several distinct male lines with origins in Ireland.” Hence the region in County Galway today known as Joyce Country, where the name is as common as Smith in England or Jones in Wales. Elsewhere in the world, Joyce is far from a common surname and is rare in my native Canada.

The genealogy website Tribe Joyce cites the commonly told story of Thomas de Jorse, “who fled Wales in 1283 and landed with a fleet of ships in Galway where he married Norah (or Onora) O’Brien, a descendant of Brian Boru and founded the Joyce Tribe in Connemara.” [10] This is considerably later than the Norman Conquest. As is often the case with Irish history and genealogy, there is a considerable blend of truth and folklore in the Joyce story. After Thomas de Jorse married O’Brien, he put out to sea:

“… arriving in the western part of Connaught, where he acquired considerable tracts of territory. While on the voyage, his wife gave birth to a son, whom he named Mac Mara, son of the sea. This son extended his father’s acquisitions, and from him descended the sept of the Joyces, a race of men remarkable for their extraordinary stature, who, for centuries past inhabited the mountainous district, in Iar Connaught, called from them, Duthaidh Sheodhoigh, or Joyce country, now forming the barony of Ross, in the County of Galway.” [11]

What prompted me to delve so deeply into family history was the sudden realization in my 30s that I seemed to have a natural affinity for traditional Celtic music. The hair would stand up on the back of my neck when I heard Loreena McKennitt’s crystalline voice singing “Carrickfergus,” “The Wexford Carol,” or “She Moved Through the Fair.” Tears would come to my eyes when Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance sang “I Am Stretched On Your Grave,” not just once but every time. You could argue that anyone with a heart would be moved by these songs. But for me there was a visceral quality to my reaction that seemed beyond mere stimulus response. It was as if this music was somehow in my very bones. As a poet, it didn’t hurt that McKennitt also set great poems to haunting music, such as Yeats’ “Stolen Child” and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”

So it was a short leap for me from Irish music to Irish mythology and poetry. I learned that traditional Irish poetry tended to use a syllabic count rather than the traditional English counting of “foots,” or patterns of recurring stresses. Deutsch again helpfully explains: “Anglo-Saxon prosody organizes verse on the principles of stress, or intensity of emphasis, and alliteration.” [12] Interestingly, before I learned this I tended to organize my line lengths by syllabic counts rather than stresses. Plato said “all learning is remembering,” a drawing up from the deep well of ancestral knowledge and experience. [13] I tend to agree.

Over time I found myself gravitating toward the tercet, or three-line verse, in my own compositions. In part this was due to time spent studying Celtic mythology, with its emphasis on the trinity, the three-leafed clover, and other triune icons such as the triskel or triple spiral. Often, though not always, I’ll end a poem of tercets with a single line coda. This provides a satisfying conclusion both thematically and visually, like an anchor that grounds the poem at its end. I was pleased to discover that I was certainly not the first to use the tercet form in this way, as demonstrated in the structured verse of Louis MacNeice—another “unique formalist.” As Babette Deutsch explains, this verse structure has links to the Italian form known as terza rima, whose “interlinking rhyme” provides “a strong effect of continuity.” [14]

I was never fond of end rhymes, and indeed, the mainstream of poetry practice during the past century has evolved away from this rhyme scheme. Only songwriters still use the form with any consistency. Still, I love the way the English language has vowel sounds that chime or echo each other, and consonants that create another kind of rhythm and rhyme. Vowel rhyme, known as assonance, and consonantal rhyme, known as dissonance, is collectively dubbed “internal rhyme.” If you read my poems you’ll hear a lot of it going on. It’s largely absent from much contemporary poetry, and I miss the way our language can be so musical. It hearkens back to ancient times when music and poetry were not separate arts.

With the repeating verse structure, whether quatrains or tercets or any other structured poetic form, we hear the human love of symmetry. As Canadian songwriter Jane Siberry sang in a clever bit of double entendre, “You can’t chop down symmetry.” [15] It’s not a new observation that all art, whether music, poetry, sculpture or static art is an attempt to carve out of time a new creation that stands both inside and outside time. The great tragedy of modern art for much of the past century, whatever the aesthetic school, is that it abandoned the classical love of symmetry in favour of chaos, dislocation and nihilism. I suspect it will be looked back on in the future as a kind of “lost period” in humanity’s long history of art.

Siberry was right: symmetry is baked into the cosmos. As the lyrics to her song attest, you can’t escape it. Consider the history of sacred geometry, whose precepts were used to design and build all the great cathedrals of Europe, based on recurrent patterns and numerical relationships observed throughout nature since the most ancient civilizations. Numerology, far from being merely a historical curiosity or an adjunct to the astrologer’s art sometimes found on tarot cards, turns out to have firm grounding in material reality. As I am at best a novice in sacred geometry (and barely that), I won’t try to explain it all. There are many fine books on the topic. But let me quote from the book Quadrivium with regard to the sacred number 3:

“Male in some cultures, female in others, 3, like a tree, bridges heaven and earth. The Triad relates opposites as their comixture, solution or mediator. The synthesis or return to unity after the division of 2, it is also traditionally the first odd number. …Stories, fairy tales, and spiritual traditions abound with portentous threes, juggling past, present, and future with the knower, knowing, and the known. As birth, life and death, the triad appears throughout nature, in principle and form. The triangle, trinity’s most simple and structural device, is the first stable polygon, and defines the first surface.” [16]

As Quadrivium notes, the primary form within sacred geometry, the vesica piscis—two overlapping circles that create a third form at the centre resembling an eye, fish or vagina—“immediately invokes triangles” within that third form. As more and more equally overlapping circles are added to the vesica piscis, the basic structures of atoms are evoked, and ripple out from the micro- to the macroverse. According to this ancient philosophy, six circles around one central circle create the “Flower of Life,” the molecular basis of all forms of life. [17] I’ll leave it there for now, because the complexity of this numerical science quickly soars beyond my grasp.

3. The Holy Three

Returning to Celtic symbolism, here is what “Celtic Sprite” Joran Elane has to say about the number 3: “Riddles and triadic phraseology pepper Celtic folklore and faerie stories. The triskel, a figure composed of three spirals, signifies the three-layered nature of a human soul, and is in itself a central figure in ancient Celtic symbolism. The earth, sea, and sky share a three-fold marriage in oaths and as witness to deeds, and represent sacred elements.” [18]

As she notes, the triskel (triple spiral) symbol is found carved into the curbstones of ancient megalithic site Newgrange, dating to 3200 BCE. “Besides the entrance stone of Newgrange, there are several other examples of Triskele (sic) use in Ireland,” explains the Brehon Academy. “One of the most notable ones is the Triskele carving found on the famous Turoe Stone, which is a decorated granite stone located in County Galway.” [19] Crowning this ancient legacy is the Irish literary tradition, among the oldest in Europe, dating back to the 7^th century CE, producing priceless treasures such as the Book of Kells, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Durrow, and many others:

“The Triskele is also commonly found on early Christian artifacts such as the Ardagh Chalice and the Book of Kells… It is commonly associated with ancient Celtic art and is believed to have been a symbol of various concepts, such as the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, the three domains of earth, sea, and sky, and the interconnectedness of the three aspects of the goddess.” [20]

What’s interesting about this—and the other spirals carved into these stones—is their relationship to the Fibonacci spiral. This figure, with its precise mathematical relationship of the parts to the whole, is often referenced in sacred geometry. Further, the spiral figure manifests throughout nature, from the fiddlehead fern to the shapes of galaxies. How did the ancients know this? How did “Stone Age farmers,” as Britannica online puts it, build such a complex structure, so precisely oriented to the winter solstice? [21] Are we to believe in the caricature of grunting cavemen or hunter-gatherers somehow figuring out the complex mathematics required for such a monumental task? I visited Newgrange in 2009 and learned that it was engineered with such a clever system of water drainage (using sloped stone gutters) that, to this day, it does not leak into the central passageway or inner chamber.

Given all these confluences and repeating patterns throughout nature and the universe, it’s no wonder humans are drawn to a certain amount of structure in music, architecture, art and poetry. Of course, any artist or poet who has mastered their craft understands that rigid conformity to structure can quickly lead to monotony or predictability. The finest poets of the pre 20^th century era often broke out of metre, sped up or slowed down the line through repetition, commas, parenthetical phrases and other devices. This not only relieved the rigidity and the potential boredom of an audience, it allowed the poet to choose particular points of emphasis, especially in narrative poems and epics. But in the end, a consistent structure provides a reliable, almost comforting vehicle for the poem, so long as it is enlivened by surprise.

It seems unlikely poetry will ever completely return to its classical forms after a century of free verse. This is probably why Louis MacNeice, a fine and truly original poet, was so much less famous than contemporaries and friends such as W.H. Auden. Sadly, MacNeice remains something of a footnote, if an impressive one, in 20^th century poetry. Unfortunately, the “free” in the genre has provided cover for a lot of mediocre or outright bad poetry. The musicality of poets like Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins has all but vanished from 21^st century poetry, replaced by a bland, detached style that often reads like terse notebook entries.

I’ll let Lawrence Ferlinghetti have the last word, from his essay, “Modern Poetry is Prose.” Published in 1978, it sadly remains relevant to the present day:

“Modern poetry is prose because it doesn’t have much duende, dark spirit of earth and blood, no soul of dark song, no passion musick. (sic) Like modern sculpture, it loves the concrete. Like minimal art, it minimizes emotion in favour of understated irony and implied intensity. As such it is the perfect poetry for technocratic man. But how often does this poetry rise above the mean sea level of his sparkling plain? Ezra Pound once decanted his opinion that only in times of decadence does poetry separate itself from music.” [22]

One of the reasons I love Ferlinghetti is that he never leaves us stranded on the rocks of our own folly. In Poetry as Insurgent Art he provides an entire little book of witty poetic aphorisms that point us in the right direction: “Poetry is the shook foil of imagination. It can shine out and half blind you.” [23] Poetry “is the face behind the face of the race.” [24]

[1] Eliot, T.S., ‘The Music of Poetry,’ the third W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, delivered at Glasgow University in 1942, and published by Glasgow University Press in the same year. From On Poetry and Poets by T.S. Eliot. Quoted here from 20^th Century Poetry and Poetics, ed. Gary Geddes (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2^nd edition, 1973), p. 490.

[2] Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms (New York/Cambridge/Philadelphia, et al.: Harper & Row, 1957, 4^th ed., 1974), p. 58.

[3] Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms, ibid., pp. 57, 58.

[4] Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Massachusetts: G&C Merriam Co., 1980).

[5] Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, Poetry as Insurgent Art (New York: New Directions, 1975; 2007 ed.), p. 44.

[6] Olson, Charles, “Projective Verse,” from 20^th Century Poetry and Poetics, ed. Gary Geddes (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2^nd edition, 1973), p. 527.

[7] Proverbs 10:19: https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Proverbs%2010%3A19

[8] Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, “Modern Poetry is Prose,” from Poetry as Insurgent Art, ibid., p. 86.

[9] Joyce clan notes from Laurie Joyce, website no longer available. Copied to author’s files. See also Tribe Joyce website: https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/joyce/about/background (Retrieved June 30, 2025)

[10] Tribe Joyce: A History of the Tribes of Galway, ibid.

[11] Joyce clan notes from Laurie Joyce, website no longer available. Copied to author’s files. See also Tribe Joyce website, “Background” page. It cautions: “However, there are no records of that name (de Jorse) from Connemara that have been found for that time frame. We do have are records of Thomas and Hugh Joy in 1289 in Catherskeehaun and Seafin.”

[12] Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms, ibid., p. 91.

[13] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/45599/origin-of-proverb-all-learning-is-remembering

[14] Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms, ibid., p. 181.

[15] Siberry, Jane, “Symmetry (The Way Things Have to Be,” from No Borders Here, Duke Street Records, 1984: https://genius.com/Jane-siberry-symmetry-the-way-things-have-to-be-lyrics

[16] Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music and Cosmology (New York/London: Bloomsbury Publishing/Wooden Books, 2010), p. 16.

[17] Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music and Cosmology, ibid., p. 70.

[18] Joran Elane, “Celtic Symbolism: The Trinity of Number 3,” Celtic Sprite website: https://branawen.blogspot.com/2011/02/celtic-symbolism-trinity-of-number-3.html

[19] “The Power of Three: The Trinity in Irish Mythology, History, and Culture,” Brehon Academy, February 17, 2023, retrieved June 30, 2025: https://brehonacademy.org/the-power-of-three-the-trinity-in-irish-mythology-history-and-culture/

[20] “The Power of Three: The Trinity in Irish Mythology, History, and Culture,” Brehon Academy, February 17, 2023, ibid.

[21] Britannica online, “Newgrange; Neolithic tomb, Ireland”: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Newgrange

[22] Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, “Modern Poetry is Prose,” from Poetry as Insurgent Art, ibid., p. 86.

[23] Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, “Modern Poetry is Prose,” from Poetry as Insurgent Art, ibid., p. 43.

[24] Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, “Modern Poetry is Prose,” from Poetry as Insurgent Art, ibid., p. 66.

Solar Genesis

—with thanks to Anne Champagne for the first line

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What if the sun dreamed up

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the Earth? Found Mother Water

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sleeping and kissed her to life?

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Serpents in the sky seeded

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her womb—spiral fireworks

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of breath embodied, sparks

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from the sun wheel of thought

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birthed out of and into a dream

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that rises and sets each day

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from solar embers orange warm.

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Oceans leap, dive and geyser oxygen.

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Grassy steppes gallop, swerve,

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drink shade in noonday heat.

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Skies woven and tasseled with birdsong,

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arabesques of swallow.

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Soul a proton shower step-dancing

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in solar wind, casting its roses

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everywhere. What if the sun

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dreamed up the Earth? Too lonely

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to orbit alone its neurons of fire,

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generous as pollen on a breeze.

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Sower of worlds on wing, hoof

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and foot, tender of seedlings

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that arch to touch the cradling light

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that rises primordial over the Garden.

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©2025 Sean Arthur Joyce

Far Side of the Sun

—with thanks to Mexican poet laureate Homero Aridjis and geophysicist Stefan Burns

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The far side of the sun

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seen through our tiny,

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Tinkertoy eye—brow [1]

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knotted, red-faced

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with fire—battle

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between rage

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and restraint. [2] Hold!

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Hold! Hold. Let them pick

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sanity from the gravel

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on their own time.

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Let them hunger, thirst

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for light. Let them ache for it.

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Go! Go! Go—let fly

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your plasma streamers,

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your electromagnetic

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dragons in the sky

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of Asylum Earth—slam

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the killing blow

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of tectonic clashes, [3]

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serpentine crackle of light

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turning technology

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to charcoal. [4]

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Nine times now, Great Mind,

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Great Soul has circled [5]

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its grief, the perpetual

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burn of its love

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for this fated race—

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so brilliant, so beautiful,

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so blind, so damned.

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Shadow of an eagle [6]

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streaming stars too miniscule

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for the eye, splashdown

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in the human aura—

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eloquent beyond words.

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©2025 Sean Arthur Joyce

Solar Shockwave

—for Amy Mori, upon her 98th birthday and the power grid chaos of May 31, 2025 following the M-class solar flare that struck Earth

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A deer arcs over the hood

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of my car in the snap

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of an eye. Mama grouse

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and her eight chicks amble

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single-file across the highway.

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One little straggler stumbles

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at the end of the line—my breath

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stopped, quick prayer—thank God

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no cars come. Feathers melt safely

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into a thatched bank. Light grids

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wink out in town after town.

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Wind smacks a backhand

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through the valley’s funnel—

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shower of twigs, garbage cans

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airborne, ache of bending trees

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trying not to snap. Dinner party

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driven inside to share

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a 98th birthday by lamplight

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and laughter. We look

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to her one-hundredth, but she

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shrugs: I take one day at a time.

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Rain drums its soft-gloved

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tattoo above our heads,

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first one side, then the other.

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We swap garden talk and dream

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of leaves and tendrils thick

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around our ankles, summer’s

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relaxed sigh in the sun.

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Touch the harp strings of wind

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and feel the thrum

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in your veins. Lift your eyes

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from the dirt and ground

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bare feet in grass. Welcome back

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the living light.

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©2025 Sean Arthur Joyce

[1] “Tinkertoy eye” is a poeticism for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, which on May 9, 2025 was transmitting images from the far side of the sun.

[2] The image transmitted by SOHO, with its dark patches representing coronal holes, had the distinct appearance of a frowning face.

[3] Scientists are finding increasing evidence of a connection between high-speed plasma storms from coronal holes and increased earthquake activity on Earth.

[4] A veiled reference to the Carrington Event, the largest solar flare observed since scientists began recording solar observations around 1750. The flare knocked out telegraph systems around the world. Risk analysts say a similar flare today would be disastrous for today’s technology.

[5] A reference to the belief of Plato and other ancients that the stars are conscious.

[6] One of the coronal holes on the sun during Solar Cycle 25’s maximum period in April 2025 had the approximate shape of an eagle. Symbolically the eagle represents far-sightedness and vision, both literal and spiritual.

To my subscribers, all, I want to thank you for reading and supporting my Substack with your eyes on the words I so carefully craft, and your comments. I’ve noticed from the beginning of Substack that its long-form format tends to attract a more intelligent reader than those that frequent Facebook, TikTok, and other attention-challenged social media. That Substack readers are a special breed is apparent from the thoughtful, intelligent comments they leave on my essays.

To my PAID subscribers, a warning: the Stripe payment system appears to be holding up my payments, claiming that I need more ID verification. Every time I open up my dashboard I get the warning that “Your payments appear to be blocked on Stripe. Check your Stripe dashboard for instructions on how to resolve this.” Yet, at least three times now, I’ve gone to the Stripe account to remedy this by providing more ID, and still this warning comes up.

At some point between my establishing this Substack in January 2022 and now, Stripe has obviously changed its authentication requirements. Most alarming to me, besides the withheld subscription funds, is the fact that they are now asking for photo ID such as a driver’s license to be uploaded onto the Stripe account site, something they did not require during my first two years on the platform. Given what we know about massive data leaks these days, I find myself highly uncomfortable with this requirement. Foolishly perhaps, I’ve uploaded a scanned version of my driver’s license just to keep the rollers oiled, but still, Stripe refuses to release my funds.

So what’s really going on? Is Stripe just another Trojan horse for scooping up our most private data for some Deep State database? Given what’s just happened with Elon Musk ransacking US government databanks under the guise of “trimming waste” in spending through DOGE, I have to wonder. This is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect this unfair advantage gained by Musk will be a great boon to the development of the X AI over all his competitors. Worst of all, it continues the movement toward the 24/7 surveillance society, as if it weren’t bad enough already.

What I find both suspicious and annoying is that neither Substack nor Stripe offer any form of actual customer support, at least that I’ve been able to find. There are no help lines to call, not even a customer service department that can be contacted through email. So, you go through the automated steps on the website, and if that doesn’t work, you’re SOL. Yet another reason why automating everything with AI is a really, really bad, stupid, unworkable and pointless idea. Think of all the customer service jobs that are being eliminated, for one thing.

Fortunately I live in an area where I know a lot of my readers and subscribers, and often they’ll come up to me at the farmer’s market and say, “Hey, I love your Substack. Here’s some cash to help you keep going.” (Another reason Big Government wants to do away with cash—it can’t be taxed and it can’t be tracked.) Some readers tell me they flat out don’t trust online payment systems to keep their data secure, and instead opt for the more personal, cash-based approach.

So how long before Stripe, like so many databases before it, is the victim of a major hack that leaks all our private data? You know, like the one that happened with genetic database 23andMe? (Stupidly, I sent a DNA sample for testing to Ancestry, which hasn’t been hacked—yet.) In the absense of any accountability whatsoever, no possibility of engaging with actual humans in customer service departments, this is only a matter of when, not if.

I believe information should be a public resource, especially information that is carefully researched and well-written and edited. (Increasingly harder to discern with all the AI deepfakes circulating now.) So I’m not worried about the money. But I don’t want to be responsible for subscribers paying money on good faith that it’s going to me when it isn’t.

So for now, unless or until I can solve this problem, I suggest that paying subscribers stop paying Substack for subscriptions to Sean’s Newsletter of Arts and News. You may view the content free, with my compliments.

Readers may have noted that my posts on Substack of late have been infrequent. My health has required that I step back from the continuous, daily barrage of global insanity. Poetry, as ever throughout my life, has been a creative refuge. Writing of poetry, Edward Curtin said: “Silence, like so much else in the present world, including human beings, is on the endangered species list. Another rare bird—let’s call it the holy spirit of true thought—is slowly disappearing from our midst.” I do my best to prevent poetry from disappearing from the public square but often I feel like the practitioner of an antique art. During a period of much-needed rest and recovery, I’ve been writing poems inspired by the work of geophysicist and “Space Weatherman” Stefan Burns, with his highly informative podcasts regarding the current maximum period of Solar Cycle 25 and its implications for our global environment and personal health. I will be publishing the cycle of poems soon, now that I’ve written six of them in a suite I call Solar Fire.

While writing these poems, I recalled a Progressive Rock record I’ve had in my collection for many decades, Solar Fire by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (c. 1973), and quote from its lyrics here. Mann was inspired by classical composer Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets. The lovely song “Joybringer” on the album is based on “Jupiter” from The Planets, originally composed between 1914 and 1916. [1] Lord knows we could all use more joy right now! Canadian classic rock band Chilliwack also produced a suite called “Far Side of the Sun” on their 1974 album Riding High. Both are well worth a listen both for their music and lyrics—two lost gems in the star-studded catalogue of the Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll. A third one just for fun would be from another Canadian band—Lighthouse—the perennially cheerful “Sunny Days.”

I find it endlessly fascinating that artists often precede scientific discoveries by decades or even centuries, lending credence to the idea that they are tapped into universal consciousness at a deep level. Most can only access this level during periods of creative inspiration. Keep in mind that the word “inspire” literally means to take in breath: “from mid-14^th century, enspiren, “to fill (the mind, heart, etc., with grace, etc.);” also “to prompt or induce (someone to do something),” from Old French enspirer (13c.), from Latin inspirare “blow into, breathe upon,” figuratively “inspire, excite, inflame…” [2] Anciently to be inspired was to take in the breath of God. The online Etymology Dictionary says of the related word “spirit”: “In English it is attested from late 14^th century as “divine substance, divine mind, God…”

The great Dylan Thomas once summed up beautifully how poetry illuminates and even adds positively to our sense of reality:

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him…” [3]

1. Waking Up to the Sun

Father of loneliness and pain
Father of night, Father of day

Father of grain, Father of wheat
Father of cold and Father of heat
Father of air, Father of trees
Who dwells in our hearts and our memories

Father of night, Father of day
Father, who taketh the darkness away
Father, who teacheth the bird to fly
Builder of rainbows up in the sky

Father of loneliness and pain
Father of night, Father of day

—Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, “Father of Night, Father of Day” from Solar Fire [4]

Incredible as it may seem, modern civilization is only now, after some 500 years, emerging from a collective fog that has had us looking at our feet more than the sky. We may be the first advanced civilization in human history to have largely ignored the movements of the stars and planets. At best we’ve relegated them to the specialized fields of study known as astronomy and astrophysics, about as relevant to the average person as the manual for a rocket booster. In part this is an unfortunate byproduct of our technology—with the proliferation of electric grids around the planet, cities are now lit up 24/7, flooding the night skies with light that obscures the constellations. Astronomers must seek remote areas further and further afield in order to avoid this “light pollution.”

And then there’s that giant ball of fire in the sky we seem to have forgotten. How is it that our environmental scientists have missed the Sun’s critical importance in Earth’s climate for so long? The question is rhetorical—vested financial and political power interests have for decades promoted a particular interpretation of climate change that depends upon us ignoring solar influences on planetary environment. Thankfully, this is beginning to change, as more and more scientists are emboldened to “come out of the closet” to debunk simplistic climate theories and explore the incredibly complicated complex of forces that all factor into climate.

Though it was a necessary development, the severance of science and philosophy, a union that had existed in human society for thousands of years, has reached its illogical limits. I’ve often said that the poets and mystics get there first and the scientists bring up the rear, due to the much slower progress of the empirical method. Even in the field of history this has been the case, with archaeology increasingly confirming what was written by the epic poets. Since the Victorian scientists, it was fashionable to assume that poets were fuzzy thinkers who mostly invented their historical scenarios to serve a fanciful narrative. That conceit was first shattered when the remains of Troy were discovered by amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1873, proving that classical Greek poet Homer had, at very least, set his epic in a city that actually existed. Subsequent archaeological explorations at the site further confirmed that it had been destroyed by fire. More recently, Viking funerary rites involving the interment or burning of longships that were described in the English epic Beowulf have been confirmed by archaeologists. [5] It’s time we gave up the conceit that poets are mere liars or fantasists.

This may seem like a digression from the importance of the Sun on our Earthly environment. My point is that the ancient astronomers, notably the Egyptians, Babylonians and Chinese, tracked the movements of the stars in minute detail. “In the year 185, Chinese astronomers became the first to document a supernova,” notes the Canadian Space Agency. [6] Babylonian astronomers of the first and second millennia BCE had identified at least five of the planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This intense attention to the movement of stars and planets was not mere intellectual curiosity—the ancients believed that these heavenly movements not only affected humans here on Earth, they could potentially predict future events. For this reason, ancient Chinese astronomers could be executed if they made errors in their celestial calculations. The emperor relied upon their exactitude as a vital component of decision making in social and military events. As Xiachun Sun writes:

“Ancient Chinese astronomy, viewed from the scientific perspective, has a lot to be proud of (Needham 1959). It has maintained for continuous periods longer than any other civilisation (sic) accurate records of celestial phenomena such as eclipses, novae, comets, meteors, sunspots, etc. These records have found many applications in modern astronomy (Ho 1997).” [7]

While such accuracy is deeply impressive, Sun explains, one must ask what the motivations were for such close astronomical scrutiny:

“To have a more precise picture of ancient Chinese astronomy, one must also ask what the purpose of astronomy was. … The universe was conceived not as an object independent of humans, but as a counterpart or mirror of human society. There is a certain harmony and proportion between the heavens and humans, the order and pattern of the universe prevails in the world, and changes in the heavens are correlated with changes in the world.” [8]

Oddly enough, the empirical method of modern science, while revealing a great body of new knowledge, has also obscured our connection with the Sun, which, as Xiachun writes, is “not an object independent of humans” any more than the rest of the universe is separate from us. “Since the very beginning of Chinese civilisation, (sic) the Chinese had been worshippers of Heaven, or the Supreme High (Shang Di). … On the archaeological site of Liangzhu Culture from around 5,000 years ago, archaeologists in 1980s discovered two altars for worshiping Heaven. … In building the altar, the constructor had already taken into consideration the Sun (Liu 2007). The observation of the sunrise and the sunset was part of the rituals of Sun worshiping.” [9] As is much more well known in the popular consciousness, the civilization of ancient Egypt was heavily oriented to the worship of solar deities, most commonly depicted by the god Ra. Journalist Marilyn Shuttleworth summarizes the social role of astrology in ancient Chinese society:

“Unlike other cultures charting the stars at this period, astrologers were separate from astronomers and their job was to interpret occurrences and omens portended in the sky. As the astronomers began to chart regular events, such as lunar eclipses, these were removed from the realm of astrologers, who Emperors consulted before every major decision.” [10]

The rise of modern science succeeded in finally sundering the connection between astronomy and astrology, the latter now mostly seen as pseudo-scientific quackery. But is it really? Could it be that as science continues to confirm the records of ancient astronomers and poets, we’re coming full circle? When I was growing up in the 1960s, we were taught in school that space is “empty,” a void outside planetary systems. We now know this isn’t true—space is a medium that is filled with plasma—the fourth state of matter after liquids, solids and gases. Plasma is “an electrically conducting medium in which there are roughly equal numbers of positively and negatively charged particles, produced when the atoms in a gas become ionized.” [11] Every time the Sun emits a solar flare, coronal mass ejection (CME) or a high-speed stream from a coronal “hole,” it is ejecting various forms of plasma. This is why we can now speak of “solar winds” and “space weather” within planetary systems that have a sun. These solar plasma streams form an interplanetary medium that affects the constituent planets, especially those like Earth that have a geomagnetic system and an electrically-charged atmosphere.

Thus, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that weak gravitational fields from even planets furthest from the Sun could have an effect on this entire interplanetary medium and thus on Earth itself. “A series of experiments claimed that gravity may be induced or generated by superconductor with high voltage and strong magnetic field.” [12] Advances in electrodynamics in the second half of the 19^th century “postulated that the gravitational force exerted by the Sun on the planets of the solar system had an additional ‘magnetic’ component.” [13] This brings us full circle to astrology—not the silly stuff published in newspapers that purports to foretell a person’s daily experiences, but astrology writ large, across an entire solar system of periodic planetary alignments and lunar phases, all continuously interacting with the “space weather” created by solar winds.

2. Great Ball of Fire

On the far side of the sun

There’s another world turning just like ours

And inside everyone

There’s another world turning just like yours

It’s turning with the sun, round and round it’s turning

And in that world there’s a saying and it goes like this:

Give your love, don’t waste it, don’t misplace it

But give it all away

On the far side of the sun

There’s another world, it’s a mirror of this one

And the secrets that keep us apart

Are revealed on the far side of the sun

—Chilliwack, “Far Side of the Sun” [14]

Given that we are electromagnetic beings—another fact ignored by science for far too long—it should come as no surprise that solar weather would have an impact on humans, both collectively and individually. Once again the Chinese (and their Western counterparts the Babylonians and Egyptians) were in the vanguard of this awareness historically.

“The Chinese used the term tianwen to indicate what we nowadays would call astrology. Tianwen literally means patterns in the sky. It studied patterns in the sky—constellations and all kinds of celestial phenomena—and interpreted them in connection with society,” writes Xiachun Sun. “Chinese astrology was mainly concerned with state affairs, such as war, famine, epidemics, flood, drought, and court politics.” [15]

But Russian scientists of today are equally interested in the role of solar cycles on human society. “Famous British economist and statistician William Stanley Jevons developed the theory explaining the period of the trade cycle with variations in solar activity. In Jevons’ lifetime, ‘commercial crises’ occurred at intervals of 10-11 years, which broadly matched the average solar cycle length,” writes Mikhail Gorbanev. “According to long-standing theoretical claims, cyclical maximums of solar activity could be associated with economic recessions (W.S. Jevons), revolutions and migration (A.L. Chizhevsky). …Even though the exact reasons of it remain unclear, economic recessions in the US and other advanced economies do occur more often around cyclical maximums of solar activity.” [16] Gorbanev cites another Russian scientist, Alexander Chizhevsky, who went so far as to assert that solar cycles shaped all of human history, as they likely did Earth’s climatic history:

“Chizhevsky scrutinized the available sunspot records and solar observations comparing them to riots, revolutions, battles, and wars in Russia and 71 other countries for the period from 500 B.C. to 1922. He found that a significant percent of revolutions and what he classified as ‘the most important historical events’ involving ‘large numbers of people’ occurred in the 3-year periods around sunspot maximums.” [17]

Such a bold assertion wouldn’t have met with much debate if you were in the court of an ancient Chinese emperor or Babylonian king. For most of human history, the influence of the Sun and stars on human affairs was accepted as a given. It’s ironic that the “rational revolution” of the so-called Enlightenment in the West led to the obfuscation of this truth.

The powerful influence of the chemists on the early development of modern Western science posited a human physiology that was primarily a kind of chemical soup. This was certainly convenient for the developers of pharmaceutical medicines, with their advertising mantra of “a pill for every ill.” The allopathic approach to medicine displaced millennia of homeopathic, herbalist and Ayurvedic medicines, sweeping it away with a wave of its mighty industrialist arm. Unfortunately it ignored the synergistic effects of compounds formulated in nature over billions of years, an effect reducing a therapeutic compound to its singular active element failed to account for. This same insistence on human physiology as a chemical soup also ignored the fact that without an electromagnetic circuit, a human body is a dead body. The multi-billion-dollar telecommunications industry has actively suppressed studies revealing that even low power fields in the microwave-frequency spectrum are biologically active and can cause cellular damage. There are now literally thousands of high-quality studies attesting to this effect. The Global Consciousness Project, a bona fide scientific study group, contextualizes the impact of solar energy on human energy systems:

“All biological systems on Earth are embedded in an environment of fluctuating magnetic fields that encompass a wide range of frequencies, and virtually every cell and circuit in biological systems can be affected. Numerous studies have found links between human physiological rhythms and collective behaviors which are synchronized with solar and geomagnetic activity.” [18]

Geophysicist and “Space Weatherman” Stefan Burns [19] has pointed out in his space weather reports that periods of solar maximum have a wide range of biological effects on humans. Some feel energized, spurred into new bouts of creativity, while others feel fatigued, plagued by headaches, dizziness and other symptoms. Mikhail Gorbanev alludes to “a growing body of literature on the solar activity influence on human health and behavior. Geomagnetic disturbances driven by solar activity can increase cardiovascular mortality risks, with the number of cases of myocardial infarction increasing during geomagnetic storms (Zilli Vieira et al. 2019; Gurfinkel and Breus 2014). Solar flares can be associated with higher rates of heart failures (e.g., Mahayni et al. 2024).” [20] I can attest to this on a personal level: During the current Solar Cycle 25, the maximum phase of which has lasted since the beginning of 2024, I’ve suffered recurrent bouts of exhaustion, an uncharacteristic tendency to headaches, alternating with bouts of almost manic energy. Anecdotal in the extreme, of course, but many others are reporting similar stories.

The Global Consciousness Project 2.0 affirms the Russian scientists’ perspective, linking periods of extreme solar activity to sociopolitical upheavals on Earth:

“Related to the discussion of interconnectivity and consciousness is well-known associations between solar activity and human consciousness. Russian scientist Alexander Tchijevsky first linked World War I’s more intense battle (sic) to peak sunspot periods, and subsequent research revealed correlations between solar cycles, geomagnetic field disturbances, and larger societal trends, including increased violence, crime rates, social unrest, revolutions, and terrorist attacks.” [21]

But it’s not all doom and gloom—far from it. As I wrote in “New Wine in Old Wineskins”:

“With the Sun in one of its most vigorous Maximums in awhile, it seems we’re being flooded with more than just Coronal Mass Ejections, solar flares and fierce proton winds. Not only is our planet’s global electric circuit being given an extra jolt, so are we. Light has always been a symbol of knowledge, illumination, enlightenment. In the Sun’s partnership with Gaia, Mother Water, they form a perfect marriage. Each provides what the other lacks.” [22]

The Global Consciousness Project seems to agree that there are positive as well as negative impacts from solar hyperactivity: “Importantly, heightened solar activity has also coincided with periods of human flourishing, marked by innovation, creativity in architecture, arts, science, and positive social change.” [23] GCP 2.0 explains its mandate:

“We’re on a mission to understand the nature of our collective consciousness, its impact on our everyday life, and the ways we can use it create a better world. Developed and maintained by the donor-funded HeartMath Institute, the Global Consciousness Project 2.0 is collaborating with scientists and engineers around the world to research the interconnectivity between human consciousness and the physical world. By measuring shifts in the data from random number generators (RNGs) hosted by citizen scientists around the world, GCP 2.0 helps us to begin to understand the true impact of individual and collective consciousness in our world.” [24]

Spiritual seekers since the dawn of humanity have realized in moments of profound insight and lucidity that the separateness humans experience is an illusion, that at what we today would call the molecular level, all in the universe is One—all is linked. The great psychologist Carl Jung realized that we are all linked by what he dubbed “the collective unconscious,” marked by a consistent architecture of mythic archetypes. Maverick scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake have made it their life’s work to study how all creatures are woven into what he calls the “morphic resonance field,” so that indeed—in some cases—the butterfly effect of certain actions or awareness ripples out across the ocean of human consciousness. As I mentioned earlier, science and spirituality, science and poetry, are now reuniting after a half-millennium of divorce. The research of Sheldrake, Burns, and Professor Robert Schoch is closing this circle, along with The Global Consciousness Project, which concludes:

“Taken together, the observed correlations between the GCP data, solar radio flux, and moon phase are important in the study of interconnectivity as they provide empirical support for the hypothesis that there is an interconnectedness or interrelatedness between human consciousness and external environmental factors like solar activity and lunar phases.” [25]

If you’ll forgive me for quoting myself again, let me close with this thought:

“Could that kitschy old 60s song, ‘Age of Aquarius,’ have intuitively hit upon the truth, that we are indeed entering a new age, rebounding from the black abyss of depravity we’ve fallen into in the waning days of the Kali Yuga?” [26]

Pray that in our darkest hour, it is so.

~§~

[1] “The Borrowers – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: Joybringer,” Arcana FM: https://arcana.fm/2015/02/01/the-borrowers-manfred-manns-earth-band-joybringer/

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/inspire

[3] Thomas, Dylan, Quite Early One Morning, essays and broadcasts, New Directions, 1954 (1968 ed.), “On Poetry,” p. 122.

[4] Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, from Solar Fire, Polydor Records 1973:

Although some cultural myths such as the Japanese define the Sun as female, most depict it as male.

[5] Curry, Andrew, “Setting Sail for Valhalla,” Archaeology, July/August 2025, pp. 37–43: https://archaeology.org/issues/july-august-2025/features/setting-sail-for-valhalla/

[6] “A brief history of astronomy,” Canadian Space Agency, Government of Canada: https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/basics/brief-history-astronomy.asp

[7] Sun, Xiaochun, “Connecting Heaven and Man: The role of astronomy in ancient Chinese society and culture,” Institute for the History of Natural Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 137 Chaonei Street, 100010 Beijing, China: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2011IAUS..260...98S

[8] Sun, Xiaochun, “Connecting Heaven and Man: The role of astronomy in ancient Chinese society and culture,” ibid., emphasis mine.

[9] Sun, Xiaochun, “Connecting Heaven and Man: The role of astronomy in ancient Chinese society and culture,” ibid.

[10] Shuttleworth, Marilyn, “Ancient Chinese Astronomy,” Explorable: https://explorable.com/chinese-astronomy

[11] “Plasma,” definition, Encyclopedia Britannica online: https://www.britannica.com/science/plasma-state-of-matter

[12] Zhiu, Yin, “Gravitational-magnetic-electric field interaction,” Science Direct/Elsevier: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rinp.2018.07.029

[13] Mashhoon, Bahram, “Gravitoelectromagnetism: A Brief Review,” Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0311030

[14] Chilliwack, from Riding High, Goldfish Records (Canada), 1974; Sire Records (US), 1975:

[15] Sun, Xiaochun, “Connecting Heaven and Man: The role of astronomy in ancient Chinese society and culture,” ibid.

[16] Gorbanev, Mikhail, “Extraordinary Economic and Social Events Associated with the Solar Cycle Maximum,” Munich Personal RePEc Archive (2025): https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/123402/

[17] Gorbanev, Mikhail, “Extraordinary Economic and Social Events Associated with the Solar Cycle Maximum,” (2025), ibid. SEE ALSO: Vladimirsky, B.M., “Space Weather and Social Instability: Verifying D.O. Svyatskii and A.L. Chizhevskii’s Research Findings as a Case Study of the 12th–17th Centuries,” 02 March 2021: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0001433820110109

[18] Plonka, Nachum; McCraty, Rollin; Welss, Claudia, “The Path to Global Coherence: The Role of the Global Consciousness Project 2.0,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion: https://doi.org/10.51327/UDIY4331

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jmsr/rmsr20/pre-prints/content-jmsr_ft0063;jsessionid=3sa05eqvhh7nt.x-ic-live-03

[19] https://www.youtube.com/@StefanBurns

[20] Gorbanev, Mikhail, “Extraordinary Economic and Social Events Associated with the Solar Cycle Maximum,” (2025), ibid.

[21] Plonka, Nachum; McCraty, Rollin; Welss, Claudia, “The Path to Global Coherence: The Role of the Global Consciousness Project 2.0,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, ibid.

[22] Joyce, Sean Arthur, “New Wine in Old Wineskins,” Substack, May 27, 2025: https://seanarthurjoyce.substack.com/p/new-wine-in-old-wineskins#_ftn3

[23] Plonka, Nachum; McCraty, Rollin; Welss, Claudia, “The Path to Global Coherence: The Role of the Global Consciousness Project 2.0,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, ibid.

[24] Global Consciousness Project 2.0, About Us: “Our Collective Consciousness Can Change the Physical World”: https://www.gcp2.net/about

[25] Plonka, Nachum; McCraty, Rollin; Welss, Claudia, “The Path to Global Coherence: The Role of the Global Consciousness Project 2.0,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, ibid, emphasis mine.

[26] Joyce, Sean Arthur, “New Wine in Old Wineskins,” Substack, May 27, 2025, ibid.

—Mark 2:22, New Living Translation

We aren’t just living through a time of crisis, the time of the Great Dying post-pandemic, but a time of revelation. A time when new wine is being poured into old wineskins and the old skins are bursting. When long-held, too-long taught misconceptions or outright lies are finally being exposed for what they are. For some this revelation will be too much. They may already be ill or physically weak, or spiritually unprepared to accept such great changes in understanding. “Some of us will always stay behind,” David Bowie sang. [1] “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left,” said the King James Version. [2]

With the Sun in one of its [3] most vigorous Maximums in awhile, it seems we’re being flooded with more than just Coronal Mass Ejections, solar flares and fierce proton winds. Not only is our planet’s global electric circuit being given an extra jolt, so are we. Light has always been a symbol of knowledge, illumination, enlightenment. In the Sun’s partnership with Gaia, Mother Water, they form a perfect marriage. Each provides what the other lacks. This is the great lost message of being in relationship with the Other in a dimorphic species. Too much now, the focus is on what a person gives up in relationship, how their needs aren’t fully met, instead of on what they give, how the sum of their contributions makes a greater whole. How many times do we have to learn that only serving the Self leads to disaster and misery? Wisdom the Ancients had yet we somehow lack in the black light of our so-called “Enlightenment.”

What if the Ancients intuitively catapulted over the whole obstacle course of Reason and landed right on the central point? That the Universe is conscious, the stars are conscious, the Sun is conscious, the Earth is conscious. To many of the Ancients, this appeared to them as gods and goddesses. So when the sky cracked with lightning or a solar geomagnetic pulse (EMP), people saw gods dancing in rage, creation or destruction. With the implicit assumption that deities do indeed exist. Another way of saying it: that there was a larger consciousness than themselves out there that was owed some reverence and respect. We can now explain how these physical phenomena manifest, but to the Ancients it was the why that mattered. Was it something they did? Or failed to do? And who was behaving in this way, and why? I’m not saying we should return to this way of thinking. But neither can we go on deceiving ourselves that the only consciousness in the Universe exists in our skulls.

Could this be the “light” the Sun is earnestly trying to send us? According to Michael Tellinger, the pine cone symbol seen on ancient Sumerian or Akkadian relief carvings of godlike kings with long beards and wings appears all over the world in iconography. [4] The documentary I watched even shows a large carving of a pine cone housed in the Vatican! Tellinger sees the pine cones as visual metaphors for the pineal gland, that gland seen by many as the key to knowledge or wisdom, even enlightenment.

What is also shared by many of these monumental carvings around the world are the “handbags.” This symbol, according to Dr. Robert Schoch, has even turned up on the so-called “Vulture stele” at Gobleki Tepe. Could a handbag be another visual metaphor for the divine gifts of civilization? In the ancient Mesopotamian myth tales, a consistent theme is that these gifts were taught to the people by a godlike race:

“In Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Egyptian myths, gods create civilization ex nihilo and gave it to humans, sometimes through special human or semihuman interlocutors. The arts and sciences they create are almost always beneficial, and their point of origin is usually associated with cities, not with peoples.” [5]

In this case I’ve always thought that the godlike appearance, the giantism described (not so glowingly given their behaviour) in the Bible, the Nephilim, is a metaphor for greatness of spirit and knowledge. To people who may still have been herders and hunters, someone who could build a bridge, a water pump or a temple—and also read and write—would indeed be godlike. Others speculate that these are the mythic prediluvian race Plato associated with Atlantis—his recollection tracing their cataclysm right to the end of the Younger Dryas cooling period—9,000 years before his own day. Dr. Schoch says this places it almost exactly at the end of that transitional climate event, when the Ice Age finally well and truly ended. Whether it was literally Atlantis or not doesn’t really matter. Dr. Schoch accepts that for such technology as the building of Gobleki Tepe to exist at the very end of the last ice age, sophisticated arts of civilization must already long have been in existence.

No account of Atlantis would be complete without its component of divine retribution for a litany of sins. Dr. Schoch argues for a massive solar electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that caused a sudden—in some places almost instantaneous—melting of glaciers, releasing millions upon millions of tons of water across the landscape. Randall Carlson has made a career of explaining how American landscape features like the Washington “scablands” with its glacial erratics and the Grand Canyon itself are physical evidence of a sudden, catastrophic impact of freshly released water. In his view, and some others within the scientific community, the cataclysm is said to be unleashed by a comet impact on an ice sheet. But other scientists, according to Dr. Schoch’s research, dispute this theory. Either way, the “catastrophist” explanation does seem more plausible than the mainstream “gradualist” concept of glacial melting. These and other features in the northern hemisphere do seem to bear the marks and gouges of a massive force.

So much of science seems to have been about proving by rational means what was already common knowledge in most of the world’s ancient religions. So now we learn through geophysics and astrophysics that, indeed, periods of increased sunspot activity and the plasma storms buffeting the Earth cause spikes in earthquake and volcanic activity. Dr. Schoch postulates that there was indeed a well-established high culture—a civilization even before the end of the last Ice Age c. 9700 BCE.

Gobleki Tepe has been a standing rebuttal to the standard narrative of so-called history claiming that civilization and all its arts only began some 5,000 years ago at most. Now we have living rock in Turkiye that gives the lie to that notion of history. As it does to any stereotype of a grunting Neanderthal clad in animal skins barely able to figure out how to make a bow and arrow to survive. Yet here, when this was supposed to be happening, we have people building monumental stoneworks that reflect a knowledge of astronomy, lithography, sculpture and other arts and sciences. With three-dimensional animals carved into granite pillars that obviously had to be planned—envisioned first—from the rough block.

And I haven’t yet touched the fact that the architectural relationships on ancient and medieval monumental architecture around the world—the Egyptian pyramids, Angkor Wat, Tenochtitlan, Stonehenge, Newgrange, Chartres et al—ALL reflect the Golden Ratio, the Fibonacci spiral equation, and other interlaced Russian dolls of sacred geometry. ALL are placed with specific astrological and equinoctial alignments. These were people who were far closer to gods than apes. Yet themselves knew their place in the Universe.

For something old and worn out to not only get out of the way but contribute its energy to something new, it must often first be destroyed. There’s archaeological evidence of temples being ritually destroyed or simply abandoned. Jesus used the analogy of old wineskins, how unfit they are for new wine. It’s a basic principle of the Universe that from creation comes destruction, from destruction creation. This dance is going on throughout space all the time—neutron stars exploding, black holes imploding. But always, new life is birthed from Thanatos. (The ancient Greek archetype for the death impulse, in contrast to eros, the life impulse.) A Phoenix rises inevitably from the ashes. As the Sun reaches the end of a Grand Solar Maximum—eight or nine individual Solar Maximums or roughly a century [6]—is its hyper-charged light trying to activate our pineal gland, prompt us to rise to the next stage of consciousness? Listen to Dr. Schoch, who is far from a New Age mystic:

“Mental functioning and psychic ability are affected by electromagnetic fields. … Could occasional periods of intense plasma phenomena on Earth act to alternatively accelerate, or decelerate, organismal change, both physical and mental? Might powerful plasma phenomena act as a switching mechanism, causing biological and mental changes?” —Dr. Robert Schoch [7]

During Solar Cycle 25, the Sun has been spitting out massive flares that have had an effect on Jupiter and Venus but not once has a plasma cannon of cataclysmic power struck Earth directly. Why is this? It’s as if the Sun doesn’t want to strike Earth a blow that could cause decades or even centuries of backward, grueling darkness. Though, Lord knows, it’s happened plenty of times before in Earth’s eons-old geological history. And not so long ago, with the medieval Little Ice Age. Granted, according to geophysicist and “space weatherman” Stefan Burns, Solar Cycle 25 isn’t a record-breaking one compared to others, for example Cycle 19, peaking in 1959–60. Burns calls Cycle 25 a middling one, more vigorous than Cycle 24 but not quite as outsized as Cycle 23. Yet Burns explains that there isn’t a strict one-to-one relationship between the size and number of solar flares and their potential impact on Earth in solar storms and its geomagnetic impacts on the planet. Even a solar maximum cycling down into its minimum phase can spit out a flare that causes havoc.

But all this begs the question: Is the Sun indeed conscious? And if so, is He sending us a message: Pay attention! With barely a shrug, I can knock you back a thousand years. Lucky for us—for now, at least—He doesn’t want to just now. Could it be the Sun is bursting our old wineskins so they can be filled with the new wine of enlightenment? Could that kitschy old 60s song, “Age of Aquarius,” have intuitively hit upon the truth, that we are indeed entering a new age, rebounding from the black abyss of depravity we’ve fallen into in the waning days of the Kali Yuga?

And will we wake up in time? Drink this new wine of the holy spirit and ascend to a new level? As we’ve seen throughout history, often our artists have a kind of prescience to glimpse what’s coming. Thus, it’s fitting to end (begin) with a lyric from David Bowie:

Everything has changed

For in truth, it’s the beginning of nothing

And nothing has changed, everything has changed
For in truth, it’s the beginning of an end

And nothing has changed, everything has changed [8]

[1] David Bowie, “Slip Away,” from Heathen, produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti, 2002; https://genius.com/David-bowie-slip-away-lyrics

[2] Matthew 24:40: “Two men will be working together in the field; one will be taken, the other left,” according to the New Living Translation;

[3] I use the male gender to describe the solar deity because it most often appears in mythology this way, though there are of course female exceptions. Keep in mind that the Earth and water are almost always pictured as feminine. This makes perfect sense, and a perfect marriage. As with a male and female human, without either sperm or egg, human life cannot continue. No sun, no water, no life.

[4] “So THIS is what they’ve been protecting…” The Pyramids Something Unbelievable,” Anonymous Official, time stamp: 39:18, YouTube:

I do not endorse all the ideas in this video but it nicely integrates sacred geometry into ancient monumental structures around the world.

[5] McCants, William F., “Gifts of the Gods: The Origins of Civilization in Ancient Near Eastern and Greek Mythology,” Princeton Scholarship Online, November 2011; https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691151489.003.0002

[6] Carpineti, Dr. Alfredo, “Obscure 100-Year Solar Cycle May Have Hit Minimum – Expect More Activity For Decades To Come,” IFL Science, April 19, 2025. The Grand Solar Maximum is known in scientific circles as the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle. https://www.iflscience.com/obscure-100-year-solar-cycle-may-have-hit-minimum-expect-more-activity-for-decades-to-come-78872?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[7] Schoch, Dr. Robert with Catherine Ulissey, Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-induced Dark Age (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2012; 2021 revised and expanded ed.), p. 222.

[8] David Bowie, “Sunday,” from Heathen, produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti, 2002; https://genius.com/David-bowie-sunday-lyrics

A Review by Brian d’Eon

In Pole Shift & Other Poems, Sean Arthur Joyce takes the reader on a dizzying, and often profound, journey. We apologize to bees and oregano plants, marvel at the ancient wing beats of a dragonfly, are haunted by the howls of nearby coyotes, and are even whisked out to distant suns and galaxies. All the universe is Joyce’s playground and his homage to its contents, sacramental.

The collection opens with Joyce’s twelve-part poem, Pole Shift, where Joyce takes as his premise that, while humanity may currently be at its nadir, it may also be at a tipping point, and that nature herself is signaling an imminent and fundamental change—signs such as increased solar activity, volcanism, and an erratic and accelerating migration of our north magnetic pole. In Pole Shift, Joyce taps in to much of humanity’s current grief, asking questions such as:

“What has become

of Athens’ stargazers and their pupils?

Why have our cities blinded

the stars’ eyes? Why are all

the mountaintop lookouts vacant?”

(Pole Shift II)

Later he grieves over our “urge to hammer down / certainty, the spirit’s love / of mystery beclouded.” (Pole Shift VI)

In all his poetry, there is an underlying yearning for connection. Indeed, in his opening epigraph, Joyce quotes Rainer Maria Rilke who writes, “The wall between us is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry from one of us break it down?” (The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God) In almost all his poetry, we hear Joyce echoing this cry—often with powerful imagery and exquisite poetry. “Lean, / lean into the geomagnetic / wind—do not resist—and feel / your skin bristle with feathers” (Pole Shift X) or, later, “cascade / over the lip of the veil, canoes / tumbling down a waterfall, / unafraid of its liquid power, / letting it rain, rain, rain.” (Pole Shift XII)

It would be worth buying Joyce’s book just to bathe in the powerful imagery of Pole Shift, but there is much more.

In “Lament for Gaza,” Joyce leads us into the depths of despair, but our hopes are soon revived in “The Wasteland Awakens” where Joyce writes:

“Raise your cross, your minaret,

your Declaration of Independence,

your menorah. Walk out

in prayer-beaded moss, sing

to skies baptized in blue,

washed clean by love.”

There is a recurring rhythm in these poems: inhalations of hope, exhalations of grief. In “The Bodies of Easter,” Joyce reflects on his/our ultimate fate as our mortal bodies break down. Will we become “a sugar cube dissolved in the rain” or become infused in “another embodied world, another / pair of eyes through which the universe / lives its own countless lives?”

Part Two of Joyce’s collection is entitled Odes to Earth. In these poems, Joyce’s deep connection to the natural world shines, his attention to minute details, indeed his love for the world’s smallest, most modest lifeforms. Speaking to a chickweed plant (“New Arrival”), he whispers, “Welcome—welcome / to the struggle, shouldering / through stone-packed soil / to pierce the lawn’s green thatch.”

The poems of Part Three (e.g. “To My Unborn Children”) are highly personal, confessional, and, at times hard to read, but always filled with beautiful language. Joyce writes of (unborn) daughters “sleek and adoring / as foxes, their ponytails / parting fields of wind-teased flax.”

In Part Four (House of Blues) Joyce continues in his bittersweet voice. Speaking to a Christmas tree, he writes (“Undressing the Tree”), “As I undress you, / I am undressing my own heart / to walk out alone / into the ice-brittle darkness.”

As I close the pages of this magnificent collection, with the glorious imagery still echoing in my head, mostly it is Joyce’s sense of hope that remains in my thoughts, his yearning, his conviction that the wall between us can be lifted. “Teach me the many tongues of love,” Joyce writes (“What Flower is This?”), “the touch that erases the lie of separation, / the song that makes the two one.”

We live in a PsyOp minefield. Just as in a war zone, where a territory—whether land or sea—is mined with explosives designed to take out enemy combatants, 21^st century cognitive warfare uses the psychological equivalent. Take two steps this way—BOOM! The Covid PsyOp. Take another step that way—BOOM! The trans PsyOp. Step over there—BOOM! The climate crisis PsyOp. And it goes on—and on, and on…. Never before have Deep State social engineers been so spectacularly successful at dividing an entire population—a global population.

I find that even those within the Freedom movement that consider themselves “awake” are not immune to this PsyOp minefield. I speak to many who are fully aware of many of the above-mentioned PsyOp mines and know better than to “step” on them, yet will suddenly come up with some theory that viruses don’t exist, or extraterrestrial aliens are controlling the global elites, or nanobots are in everyone’s blood now—you name it. And now with the proliferation of AI, which is fully capable of independently generating articles and videos, the information sphere is only further muddied. At times it’s blatant, almost comical if it weren’t so harmful to people, for example, fake celebrity death videos and reports. I too was taken in briefly when a video surfaced on YouTube claiming that former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor had died. While this may seem like a harmless AI prank, think of the shock that Taylor’s extended family might have endured.

In a way it’s the ultimate triumph of what should by now have been a fully disgraced concept—postmodernism. The idea that because there is no verifiable reality, therefore any person’s perception of reality is equally valid. (Imagine trying to engineer a car or a space rocket with that mentality!) Although it began as a postwar aesthetic movement in art and literature, its application to the PsyOp realm must quickly have become apparent to our so-called intelligence agencies. Prisoners are often put under intense physical pressure—torture—designed to cause them to question reality and get them to confess to crimes they never committed. The truth of the matter isn’t the point. As the CIA has long shown by its activities—both domestic and international—in order to reach a political goal they are quite capable of creating a narrative and then putting in place the elements that make it “real.”

It’s for this reason I’ve never been quite comfortable with Freedomites using the term “awake” to describe one another. It’s yet another idea that is easily abused to create the same kind of in-group, out-group division used to keep mainstream society divided. It’s naïve to think that we’re somehow immune to the process Mattias Desmet describes as “mass formation.” And it may reflect a naïveté that ignores the fact that intelligence agencies like the CIA and CSIS are as much engaged in seeding opposition movements with PsyOps as they are in tactically offensive actions. So far the best single source I’ve found on this topic is Dr. Robert Malone’s book PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order. For the history of the CIA and its manipulations of the public mind, David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard is an excellent source. A smart military intelligence agency not only undermines its opposition, it sets up its own “opposition” that it can control from the inside.

In this information- and disinformation-saturated age, people seem to feel a deep need to know everything, or at least to have a strong opinion about everything. Whatever happened to the world I grew up in, when people were free to agree to disagree, with no hard feelings? When did a personal opinion become an ideological purity test?

With so much uncertainty and cognitive dissonance permeating the culture now, it’s natural for people to seek a sense of security—some bedrock beneath their feet. I’ve been trying to teach people about the pressing need in our times for learning critical thinking skills, for allowing Socratic dialogue rather than pitched, argumentative battles. Christopher Phillips, founder of the Socrates Café events, explains how this obsessive need for certainty is not only contrary to the Socratic impulse but can actually defeat it:

The one thing Socrates knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, he was fond of saying, was that he didn’t know anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yet Socrates, contrary to what many think, did not try to pose as the ultimate skeptic. He wasn’t trying to say all knowledge was groundless, that we were doomed to know nothing. Rather, he was emphasizing that what he had come to know, the truths he had discovered by hard-won experience, were slippery, elusive, always tentative at best, always subject to new developments, new information, new alternatives. Every last bit of knowledge, Socrates felt, should always be questioned, analyzed, challenged. Nothing was ever resolved once and for all. —Christopher Phillips ^[1]

In “The Fallacy of Binary Thinking,” I write: Buddhist sage Seng Ts’an once said: “If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” My point is that in every age throughout history humans have doggedly held to theories that later turn out to be false, often dangerously so. That should be enough to remind us how limited our capacity for understanding reality on this Earth actually is, whether you drive a plow or a multi-million-dollar computer simulation at Harvard. Our current social paradigm, in which a running battle is waged between the forces of globalism and freedom, with long-held truisms daily exposed as falsehoods, aptly illustrates the provisional state of knowledge—“slippery, elusive, always tentative at best, always subject to new developments, new information…”

I often joke that everyone should become part of a cult at least once in their life, if for no other reason than to learn how to deprogram themselves from it. I had this experience myself when I joined a cultist Christian sect in my late teens and early 20s. I’d always been an avid reader across a broad range of topics, so I wasn’t locked into the Bible as my sole source of knowledge as so many were in the cult. This naturally caused questions to arise in my mind. I was able to compare what I was being taught with my lived experience of reality and see that the two often did not match. Eventually this caused me to leave the religion. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It was a close-knit organization which described its members as “brothers and sisters,” one big spiritual family. All your friends and associations were confined to within the group. It was like leaving home all over again, or worse, breaking up with your family.

Further, as many fundamentalist religions do, it provided a sense of spiritual and intellectual security. Ask a question on any topic, no matter what it is, and the answer was there, spelled out for you in black-and-white. None of that messy existential angst or uncertainty, just the comforting sense of having an answer for everything, no further thought required. It’s no wonder such religions attract millions of followers.

Leaving the cult pitched me into a profound period of introspection, having to “rewrite the manual,” as it were. As often happens, serendipity intervened in the form of the Tao te Ching, which I spent a year studying. With its assertion that “the Tao that can be told is not the Tao / The name that can be named is not the eternal name,” ^[2] it aligns with Socrates’ philosophy, though I didn’t know it at the time. Gradually the sense of panic about not knowing lessened and I became comfortable with uncertainty, which as it turns out is also the gate to limitless possibilities. In that respect, the famous yin-yang symbol illustrates the tension of opposites held in union without tearing each other apart. Friends, I can assure you, you won’t die if you don’t know the answers to everything. Honest. What’s so awful about saying: “I don’t know”? Buddha and Socrates would likely say such a statement is the beginning of wisdom.

For a time I gravitated toward atheism, but as I grew older realized the severe limitations of this philosophy. Now, I believe that it’s the act of faith that matters, that has sufficient power to nourish the spirit no matter what doctrinal content happens to fill it. As Phillips says of the Socratic method, this is a far cry from mere cynicism. It’s an opening up, not a closing down, of possibilities. In fact, humans seem to be hard-wired for a sense of the sacred, as burial rituals for proto-humans dating back 100,000 years confirm. Yet as the Tao suggests, critical intelligence and a sense of the sacred can indeed coexist. However, an important distinction must be made: Critical thinking is distinct from a mere criticizing or negative attitude.

Julius Ruechel has written in his masterful geopolitical analyses that humans seem to have a suicidal impulse that kicks in at a certain stage of “civilization,” something many great historians such as Arnold Toynbee, Will and Ariel Durant, and Oswald Spengler have amply testified to in their intensely-researched works. I do have to wonder what our geopolitical masters think will be achieved by so undermining society that virtually no one can agree with anyone else on so many issues. How do you “make America great” again if people are so divided they refuse to cooperate with each other? How do you create technological or scientific innovation if even these realms have been infected by the need for ideological purity? Tearing all this down is a textbook suicidal impulse.

2. Hitting the Wall

On a personal level, I’ve hit the wall. Throughout my life I’ve been an avid reader, consuming and annotating more than 50 books per year. I have a higher than average concentration and reading retention rate and a near-photographic memory. But lately, I find that I can’t keep my mind on what I’m reading. I’ll realize my mind has wandered off part way through an article—something that never used to happen to me. I’ve given myself permission not to impose on myself this year my usual intense reading schedule, which often includes digesting 600-page tomes on history, psychology, and other weighty topics. I’ve stopped taking copious notes on everything I read. I simply don’t have the mental fuel to do it right now. The energy and the motivation is just not there.

I’m probably just another of the casualties of the PsyOp Shock and Awe campaign that continues unabated. I’m sure I have readers who can relate to feeling this way. That’s part of the design of a PsyOp—to pummel the senses without letup until the person’s psyche collapses. The constant stoking of micro-divisions in society has reached right into our own homes. Even husbands and wives can’t talk about certain issues because one or the other will become enraged so quickly. And before you know it, they’re not talking to each other. Mission accomplished!

Our social structure is so shattered that even here, in our remote mountain community, people are still divided and resentful of one another due to the “pandemic.” This includes people now suffering declining health due to the mRNA shots, yet who still give me the evil eye in public for saying these are dangerous. Even people we’ve tried to reach out to help direct them to healing protocols. Their minds are completely captured even as they’re dying, our social fabric in this village nearly destroyed. I’m getting awfully sick of being the target of the Kill the Messenger syndrome. I find myself sad all the time now.

Although I have a new book finished on the Deep State, frankly I’m afraid to publish it. At this stage, when they are murdering journalists all over the world, it might be better to keep one’s head below the parapet, so to speak. I think we may be entering a period when the Freedom movement must go fully underground. That means no more social media posts, no more posting on Substack, no more YouTube videos. It may well have to be a return to handwritten messages or papers typed on typewriters that are passed from hand to hand. I don’t think this is an unduly paranoid scenario given where things are headed. In Britain they’re already jailing people for the “wrong” social media posts, but look the other way when a woman or young girl is sexually assaulted by an immigrant.

I’m simply exhausted after five years when I had to hit the ground running to expose the Covid PsyOp, only to discover that there were 100 more similar PsyOps in the pipeline gushing at us. I’m sick of exposing myself as a truth-teller in a community that, instead of thanking me for spending years doing this work for free as a public service, treat me like a pariah, so that I can’t even go to a village concert, lecture or any other event without having to endure someone’s evil eye on me.

Granted, I am truly blessed to live where I do. Absolutely. And not for a moment do I doubt that my suffering isn’t a microdot on what the people of Palestine are enduring.

So, friends, for the forseeable future, I’m signing off. At my age I don’t relish spending the last of my days in a prison cell. So call me a coward. Fair enough. There are plenty of people taking up the baton—great thinkers like Julius Ruechel, Dr. Malone, Dr. Meryl Nass, Toby Rogers, Dr. Peter McCullough, Catherine Austin-Fitts, Judge Napolitano, Whitney Webb, James Corbett, and more. I’ll refrain from giving my opinion of a “canon” of “approved” sources because I want you to do the work to sort that out for yourself. Socrates would demand no less of his students. Reserve to yourself the right to take the best of what someone says and leave the rest if you disagree. No source will ever be 100% reliable or accurate. That doesn’t mean we can’t trust anything they say, as we’ve been led to believe. That smacks of an ideological purity test.

Live the illusion or live the truth, that’s the choice confronting us. Each comes with consequences. And the only way to discern truth from disinformation is to cultivate critical thinking, do your own research with credible sources, and—at all costs—resist your own herd impulse. Not an easy task, given that most of us are hard-wired for it.

Classic rock band Nazareth once sang, “I’m gonna go down fighting.” Absolutely. But when the war is mostly lost, sometimes all you have left is to try to protect yourself and your family from immediate harm. Were protestors and dissidents able to make a dent in the invasions of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, or Napoleon? I wish. Sadly, the law in the material dimension is that a larger force will almost always defeat a smaller one. In the battle between the principled or the ethical and the psychopathic, guess who usually wins? Sometimes all those driven from their homes in these purges—such as Gaza—can do is get the hell out of the way, find somewhere else they can thrive. History is far from sentimental. It is what it is. Power politics the same brutal game from the beginning of time.

As Voltaire recommended in his novel Candide, I will retreat to my garden for as long as I am granted the privilege to have it. I will fight to protect my home, even if all I have to do it with are sticks and stones. I was determined to stay behind to fight the fires encroaching on our homes here in this valley, despite official evacuation orders. But beyond that, friends, I’m tapped out. I’m sorry if that lets anyone down. I’m sorry if it seems like capitulation. I’m only one small person whose platform remains miniscule compared to many more famous dissidents. And I have no desire to turn my face into a YouTube celebrity.

I’ll continue to publish on Substack, but will stick to poems, book or concert reviews for now, and leave the heavy geopolitical lifting to people like Corbett, Webb, Napolitano and Ruechel, who are clearly great at it. Obviously my previous Substack articles will remain available as a resource, assuming they are of any use to anyone.

You’re welcome!

People hate the truth because its fire

demands they feed the light

with their bones, not just their words,

those cheap things we scatter like confetti… [3]

And one more, dedicated to Julian Assange and all the investigative journalists, whistleblowers and other truth-tellers, including poets:

Angel of the Flaming Sword

This angel’s fire bars the gates

to all the false Edens we build,

suck dry, and then destroy.

His parents wonder:

Where does this child come from?

He’s nothing like us or

anyone else in the family.

Where we like hammers and bolts,

pistols and knives, he prefers

songs in strange keys, poems

that have their own mind, music

born in another dimension.

When we say, Go left,

he goes right. When we say,

Go right, he goes left.

He prefers the path barely parted

that plunges into a labyrinth

no one else dares tread.

We train him up right. We tell him,

Good children don’t lie.

But when he grows up,

we expect him to lie for the good

of society, the company,

the country. Somehow it still

surprises us when he cries out

in a crowded hall, his words a blade

that cuts us, bitter to the bone.

We’ve warned him repeatedly,

Such angels throughout history

have been tortured on racks,

chained to rot with the rats,

hanged without right of trial

or self-defense. The herd

must be protected at all costs,

even as the lip of the abyss

crumbles beneath their hooves.

Only dimly have we heard

the glassy bells chiming

in his voice, baptizing the day

with light. [4]

[1] Christopher Phillips, Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), p. 8, emphasis mine.

[2] Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Vintage/Random House, 25^th anniversary ed., 1997), Part One.

[3] Sean Arthur Joyce, “The State of Resistance,” Diary of a Pandemic Year (New Denver, BC: Chameleon Fire Editions 2021).

[4] Sean Arthur Joyce, “Angel of the Flaming Sword,” Pole Shift & Other Poems (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2024).

It reads very much like a manifesto of today’s oligarchs and intelligence agencies cast in the mold of Allen Dulles’ CIA, or a policy paper from the World Economic Forum, minus the media savvy (and not intended for public consumption). Whether or not it’s genuine, it accurately summarizes the mentality of globalist elites:

“It is patently impossible to discuss social engineering or the automation of a society, i.e., the engineering of social automation systems (silent weapons) on a national or worldwide scale without implying extensive objectives of social control…” —“Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” [2]

In a chilling echo of Edward Bernays’ principles in Propaganda, the document declares: “It was soon recognized by those in positions of power that the same methods might be useful for totally controlling a society.” The document calls for “better tools,” and with the postwar boom in the science of psychology, the best tool for the job proved to be psychological operations (a.k.a. “PsyOps”). This social engineering was to be accomplished in part through the manipulation of the postwar economy to produce a race of passive consumers. With the invention of mass communication devices such as television, this consumptive ethos could be ingrained and continually reinforced, just as Aldous Huxley said in a 1958 TV interview with a young Mike Wallace. This results in a kind of economic “slavery,” a social component explicitly mentioned in “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.” Another passage in this document explains how this economic and social hierarchy is baked into the system through its public education:

“The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life. This form of slavery is essential to maintain some measure of social order, peace, and tranquility for the ruling upper class.” —“Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” (emphasis mine)

This is something the late John Taylor Gatto—author of the iconic book Dumbing Us Down—realized from his decades as a teacher, writer and researcher. I strongly recommend watching his interview, “Underground History Lesson.” [3] (You’ll have to watch it in instalments—it’s 5 hours long!) Again, whether the “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” document is genuine or not is less important than the fact that it accurately sums up the mentality of our global “elites” as typified by the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, and a new breed of technocratic billionaires. If it didn’t come directly from the Bilderbergers, it accurately sums up their philosophy.

This philosophy is being reinforced by our Big Tech bros in “new” concepts such as the “Dark Enlightenment” (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) and “Accelerationism,” [4] which use thousands of words to encode the same old, same old philosophy of oligarchy that stretches all the way back to Plato’s concept of the Republic 2,400 years ago. Plato believed that class differences were inherent in nature, so instead of fighting it, why not empower it in society? In his Republic, the aristocratic class was born to rule, with skilled craftspeople and artists on the next rung down the ladder, farmers next, unskilled labourers and slaves at the bottom. In Plato’s Republic, there is no social mobility—except downward, for those of the upper class who fail. Just as Plato did, today’s elites see democracy as a failed experiment, a hopelessly flawed philosophy that can never work in practice.

A modern version of Plato’s Republic was created in the 1930s with the birth of Technocracy—a political philosophy that eliminated messy democratic processes for a class system that places scientists and technocrats in the ruling hierarchy. It enshrined the concept of “expert culture,” since after all, they know better than the mere plebeians of the working classes, right? It reinforces the elitist belief in their superiority—a position the “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” concept explains how to perpetuate through social engineering. “(Peter) Thiel’s “unthinking dēmos,” who aren’t worth bribing because their share of sovereignty is derisory, simply become the ‘not very bright’ customers of gov-corp,” writes Iain Davis. This is the very “gov-corp” that Elon Musk seems to be creating before our eyes, with all government services subject to efficiency reviews and balance sheet justifications for their continued existence. Any system of social services in this calculus is deemed inefficient and unprofitable. President Trump has clearly given Musk and his fellow technocrats a blank cheque to restructure government in this way. This “gov-corp” slots neatly into Technocracy, advocating, according to Iain Davis, “global solutions for global problems,” i.e. a globalist, technocratic state:

“Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. The customer, then, is an NPC (non-playing character) whose only purpose is to act as a cash cow—although money won’t exist—for the neoreactionary shareholders (stakeholders) of global gov-corp.” —Iain Davis

“Nothing less than the total transformation of international economic, financial, political and social structures can save us, we are told. … an all-powerful state where we are controlled minions,” Davis continues, that “wave away class antagonisms ... Nonetheless, the socialist utopia of enforced idleness (no work) and Universal Basic Income (UBI), as we abandon all notion of a ruling class and instead submit to parochial lives under state ‘care,’ is practically indistinguishable from our envisaged enslavement as customers of gov-corp…” [5]

Davis quotes Paul Mason—an architect of the New Left—as saying, “information technology makes Utopian Socialism possible.” [6] We will “own nothing and be happy,” to cite the World Economic Forum mantra that drew so much public ire. Davis’s article is a challenging read but raises some alarming red flags about the rationalizations being bandied about by our “elites” in the name of “solving” our social problems. Their “Dark Enlightenment,” enabled by the kinds of structural collapses represented by “market failures” such as the ones engineered in 1929 and 2008, utilizes an “accelerationist” philosophy of “creative destruction.” Don’t worry, they assure us as they tear down democracy, we’re doing this for your own good! Look—our new plan eliminates class altogether! What they don’t seem to understand—likely due to either their own ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation of Western political history—is that it’s yet another rebranding of oligarchy and fascism.

I would disagree with Davis that the globalist state they envision abandons “all notion of a ruling class.” To the contrary, it would cement into place Plato’s elitist class hierarchy. If anything this “new” plan eliminates the lower classes, not the ruling oligarchy. After all, who needs lower classes? All you really need is an all-wise elite who control everything. Globalist shills like Yuval Noah Harari see the masses as passive blobs reduced to the status of 24/7 video game and porn consumers. So who will collect the garbage, unblock the sewers after a flood, repair downed power lines in a storm? Robots? Drones? What our so-called elites seem blissfully unaware of is the fact that no technology ever functions at 100% reliability. Who will service the damaged or defective robots and drones? More robots? What happens if a solar electromagnetic pulse fries all digital circuits globally? Suddenly the plebeian worker doesn’t look quite so dispensable.

Just so I don’t leave readers with a ‘black pill’ to choke down, let me remind you that we’ve seen significant pushback from the masses during the past five years: the Canadian Truckers’ Convoy, the farmers’ revolts in Europe, the trouncing of leftist political parties in both Europe and America, record low uptake of Covid-19 “boosters,” and the proliferation of alternative media like dandelions in a spring lawn. This is likely why the elites are shifting their agenda into high gear, increasingly shedding the velvet gloves for the iron fist. But with the revelations of fraud and lies regarding the “pandemic,” historic low confidence in mass media, and widespread awareness of corruption in media, science and government, the masses are waking up. Just don’t buy into it—central bank digital currencies, digital ID, transhumanism—none of it. As The Doors sang way back in 1968: “They got the guns / but we got the numbers / Gonna win, yeah, we’re takin’ over!” (“Five to One”) The Who composed the appropriate sequel to that song when they wrote: “We don’t get fooled again!”

Or as Captain Picard was fond of saying: “Make it so!”

[1] “Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars Original Document Copy,” Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/SilentWeaponsForQuietWarsOriginalDocumentCopy/page/n1/mode/2up

[2] “Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars Original Document Copy,” Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/SilentWeaponsForQuietWarsOriginalDocumentCopy/page/n1/mode/2up

[3] John Taylor Gatto, “Underground History Lesson,” Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/UltimateHistoryLesson

[4] Iain Davis, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Disillusioned Blogger, October 6, 2024: https://iaindavis.com/the-dark-enlightenment/

[5] Iain Davis, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Disillusioned Blogger, October 6, 2024: https://iaindavis.com/the-dark-enlightenment/

[6] Iain Davis, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Disillusioned Blogger, October 6, 2024: https://iaindavis.com/the-dark-enlightenment/

INTRODUCTION:

For many years now, Carol Hand and I have been “virtual” friends through discovering each other on our blogs. I had begun my WordPress blog, chameleonfire1 in 2011, and her blog Voices From the Margins was established around the same time. We read each others’ essays and commented on them in a collegial manner—a dialogue that has been refreshing in these times of social fracture enabled by our social—really antisocial—media. During May 2024 we began corresponding on the seldom-discussed issue of social class in Western society and how it seems to be the “elephant in the room” of race discussions. It proved a useful and engaging dialogue.

As a disclaimer, let me state at the outset that my concerns with class are NOT driven by doctrinaire Marxist ideas of class struggle, which he saw as primarily a political and especially an economic issue. However, I do see class as an important factor in race relations—really any social relations. It’s arguable that in 21^st century Western society class is far more important in positioning people both socially and economically than race.

Race. Where does it end and class begin? In today’s explosive social environment, with our power elites weaponizing dialogue against the populace, it’s difficult to even broach the discussion. Yet as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has so truly said, dialogue is central to the concept of a functioning democracy. Without dialogue, we degenerate into a citadel mentality that perceives debate and disagreement as dire threats. Our social engineers have done a fine job of convincing the public to be terrified of ideas—or at least, any ideas different than their own. That’s why your invitation to dialogue is so valuable, Carol—and sadly these days—so rare.

In part, this clash is a legacy of two phenomena: the cultivation of narcissism in Western society, and the technology of social media. The irony is that people who are secure within their identity don’t need to fear someone else’s opinions or political views. As psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell outlined in their seminal book, The Narcissism Epidemic, “narcissism causes almost all of the things that Americans hoped high self-esteem would prevent, including aggression, materialism, lack of caring for others, and shallow values.” [1] Enter the algorithms of social media, which place people in self-reinforcing echo chambers where contrary opinions are either screened out or loudly shouted down. As Twenge and Campbell explain, however, social media was merely the gasoline thrown on an already smoldering dumpster fire in Western culture.

It’s worth remembering that both the Internet and social media were developed by the military-industrial complex before being commercialized for public use. It would be naïve to think that the social engineering goals of this complex would suddenly end with the popularization of these technologies. In this context I refer you to investigative journalist David Talbot’s historical exposé of the CIA, The Devil’s Chessboard, [2] which reveals the extent to which public opinion has been molded since the end of World War II with the goal of social control. Ronald Reagan’s CIA director William Casey put it bluntly: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Social media is just the latest technological tool deployed by this complex. It has all but destroyed our capacity for civil dialogue, creating a social landscape of constant running skirmishes or pitched battles between competing interest groups. The classic “divide and conquer” strategy. Works every time, and has done for thousands of years.

While I hesitate to introduce economics into the equation—a field I find incomprehensible and riddled with internal contradictions—sadly it has always been part of the issue where class is concerned. Wealth has historically been the determinant of a person’s social status and thus of their rights. It’s easy to forget that prior to the democratization of governments that followed on the heels of the Enlightenment, class was much more out in the open. Even Plato in his Republic said that class was simply a part of nature, immutable and unchangeable. Similar arguments were made by wealthy British industrialists in the 19^th century who justified child labour in mines and factories in what was supposedly one of the most “enlightened” nations of Europe. It’s what allowed for the export of the nation’s poorest children to the colonies as slave labour. (We get into the British Home Children discussion in the ensuing dialogue.) It took writers like Charles Dickens and social reform-minded Christian evangelists like Annie Macpherson and Dr. Thomas Barnardo to challenge the Malthusian doctrine that the poor were mere collateral damage of class and economics—disposable human beings. They asserted the value of these poor children’s lives even as they were forced to work within a system that exploited them.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, [3] drew upon their expertise in the socio-economic determinants of health to make an argument that where societies allow for widening gaps in economic equality, disease, death and social unrest increase. These negative factors decline where the opposite is true—when the gap between rich and poor is less pronounced. Nowhere is this more apparent in the history of European colonization of North America and the brutal marginalization of its Indigenous peoples. Pushed to the economic margins, for two centuries or more these people have suffered the same denial of human rights that the children of British slums did when they were brutally taken from their families and sent overseas to work on farms and chain gangs in the guise of “helping” them. Poverty becomes not only an indicator of class, but a justification for the removal of rights. Writing in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, Wilkinson and Pickett note: “…the truth is that both the broken society and the broken economy resulted from the growth of inequality.” [4]

Once again, this is a class argument from which no race is exempt. Making it an argument about race dangerously misses the point and ultimately serves the agenda of the very power elites who seek to keep us divided. As Bob Marley sang in Get Up, Stand Up: “We’re sick and tired of your ism and schism game… You can fool some people sometimes / But you can’t fool all the people all the time…”

Amen to that.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Dr. Carol A. Hand is an enrolled member of the Sokaogon Ojibwe Community, one of the 6 bands of Ojibwe people located in what is now the state of Wisconsin. “During my early childhood, I spent my school years in New Jersey where I was born, and my summers with relatives on the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe reservation in Wisconsin. My bi-cultural heritage has had a profound influence on my life.”

Carol’s educational background includes a BA, MSSW, and Ph.D., all from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During her career, Carol has served on social work faculties for universities in Wisconsin, Montana, and Illinois with a primary emphasis on organizational change, community development, policy analysis and advocacy. Before joining academia, Carol worked as the aging network supervisor for a state department of health and social services and as deputy director of health and human services for an inter-tribal council. In 2011, Carol retired and taught part-time for a private college satellite program located at a tribal and community college until 2022. Her passion is to work with “individuals and communities that have experienced oppression to transform oppressive social structures through consciousness-raising and non-violent community-directed action.”

“In my free time, I enjoy writing, reading, gardening, listening to stories from diverse cultural backgrounds, and spending time with my family and grandchildren. I have recently learned how much I love reading blogs that teach me about diverse topics from so many different perspectives, and I try to contribute in small ways to the voices of resistance from the margins.”

Carol’s blog can be found at

https://voices-from-the-margins.blog/

Sean Arthur Joyce is a poet, journalist and author of 12 books of poetry, Western Canadian history, essays and a novel, Mountain Blues. He studied magazine journalism and electronic publishing way back in 1990 at Selkirk College but is mostly what German polymath Rudolf Steiner would have called self-educated, studying 50 books per year across a wide range of subjects that include archaeology, history, literature, and current affairs. He has published probably thousands of articles in his 35-year writing career, including essays on poetics in peer-reviewed literary journals. His 2014 book, Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest—Canada’s Home Children in the West, was described by the late Cole Harris, Professor Emeritus of Historical Geography at the University of British Columbia, as “a significant contribution to Canadian history.”

In 2022 Joyce published Words From the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age (Victoria BC: Ekstasis Editions), calling upon the words of great thinkers from Socrates to George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Karl Popper, John Ralston Saul and other writers to pierce the veil of confusion regarding the Covid-19 “pandemic.” Rather than merely discredit the now fully debunked mainstream narrative, Joyce sought to illustrate the principles of critical thinking that can help readers achieve clarity on any issue. The book is supported by over 600 research references.

“My first love is poetry, though,” Joyce explains. “It’s what made me fall in love with books as a child. My parents were working class—my father a civil servant—but they were both avid readers and my sister and I were encouraged to read from a young age. One of my fondest memories is of my father reading aloud Robert Service poems like ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee,’ and ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew.’ In high school I met an amazing, charismatic teacher who introduced me to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and that was it—I was permanently hooked on poetry. I began publishing poems in the school newspaper and never looked back.”

Joyce has published 7 collections of poetry. His latest, Pole Shift & Other Poems (Victoria BC: Ekstasis Editions), examines the role of terrestrial and cosmological forces on our current social dilemma. In addition to books he has produced several poetry videos, such as “The Day After Covid,” “Summer of Fire,” “Lost Highway,” and “Star Seeds.” More are due to be released on YouTube. Joyce’s author website is

https://www.seanarthurjoyce.ca/

CLASS MATTERS DIALOGUE: Carol Hand and Sean Arthur Joyce

Sean Arthur ‘Art’ Joyce (May 7, 2024):

I had some thoughts about your latest instalment on WordPress.

Is there a consensus among American Indigenous studies regarding feminism? For instance, you quote Brenda Child as saying, “In every journey and story of survivance, women were at the heart of the Ojibwe sense of their world.”

How do Ojibwe men feel about this statement? While feminism was useful and needed in its earliest incarnations, it has morphed into a destructive force that perpetuates the “divide and conquer” strategy of the power elites now so dominant in Western society. Do Indigenous scholars not see feminism therefore as a white, Western construct? Just another strategy to keep Indigenous people divided? Not having read much Indigenous history I thought I should ask.

Carol Hand (May 10, 2024): Thank you for your thoughtful suggestions and comments, Art! You have raised an interesting issue about gender in Indigenous studies. Many scholars and writers have mentioned the deliberate attempt by colonial governments and Christian proselytisers to destroy the egalitarian nature of gender relations in tribes, including the Ojibwe. Boarding school policies also specifically mentioned their role in stopping grandmothers, in particular, from passing on culture to the next generation. I don’t see Brenda Child’s work as “feminism” at all. It wasn’t about gender, it was about preserving healthy community connections, cultural resilience, and “survivance.”

And it’s a funny thing about how some Ojibwe men view gender role issues. It’s something I have talked to my friend, Carl Gawboy, about, as we laughed about the attempt by some Ojibwe men we have met who tried to emphasize men’s roles as warriors in the long ago past. Actually, they were more successful as diplomats and ambassadors, wise and humble leaders and gifted orators who helped prevent war and land loss. In his work as an artist, writer, and scholar, Gawboy has tried to address the egalitarian, inclusive nature of Ojibwe culture, including in his most recent book, Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History. He critiques the absence of women from the artwork and history in most published accounts of the fur trade.

I am curious to know how your book, Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest, is doing. It’s an important and fascinating topic!

JOYCE (May 10):

Thanks for asking about my work on the British Home Children, Carol. Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest continues to be a perennial seller for the very small press that publishes it in Regina. I’ll return to this topic in a minute.

The reason I asked about the perception of feminism among Indigenous people is that I see Third Wave feminism as a divide and conquer strategy that has been co-opted by the Deep State to keep us all fighting each other instead of confronting corrupt governments. No society that has men and women fighting each other can stand—history proves that. In that respect, I offer this quote from the Russian anarchist philosopher and evolutionary biologist Peter Kropotkin, from early in the 20th century:

“Life in societies enables the feeblest animals, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or protect themselves from, the most terrible birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the gregarious animals to migrate in search of new abodes… we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay; while those animals which know best how to combine have the greatest chance of survival and of further evolution…” —Peter Kropotkin (emphasis mine) [5]

Interestingly, in my own genealogical research I discovered a British ancestor—Henry Stanley Joyce—who was a naturalist, artist and author publishing books about fishing and nature in the 1930s and ’40s. In these books he made it very clear that in the rural English country life of the Dorset county he grew up in, respect for the environment was a given. His father taught him never to take too many eggs from a nest, so the birds would have enough offspring to carry on. He never caught more fish than the family could eat. He hated seeing streams being polluted by factories, and wrote about it quite vehemently. His beautiful etchings and line drawings of nature revealed a deep love for all creatures.

Thus, the sadly now all-too-common narrative of rapacious white people destroying the environment proves to be just another racist falsehood. Yes, there are people like that among us, but as with all such tropes, it fails as a generalization. My father was the same as my great uncle in England; when he took us out on camping trips (usually with the family canoe), he was very strict about limiting our fish catch, and about leaving our campsite looking as close to undisturbed as possible.

Most often in history, it seems, it’s not the “little people” who are responsible for the worst damage but greedy corporations and governments. Racism becomes just a tactic—a false flag—to justify the rapacious taking of resources, land and wealth. Some among the oppressors may believe the racist nonsense, but for most it’s just a convenient excuse to steal stuff and make themselves rich.

HAND (May 10):

Thank you for sharing the great quote from Kropotkin, Art.

You have made an important point about the ease with which those in power can easily create and exploit divisions among those who can be portrayed as competitors in a context of scarcity that those in power actually orchestrate. I apologize for turning to popular culture for an example of bridging that divide, but it’s a story that made a lasting impression on me, depicted in a film on Netflix, The Best of Enemies [6] It’s based on real life events that brought a Black advocate and a KKK leader together as human beings in 1971 to work together on addressing discrimination in a North Carolina town. It’s a powerful example of courage and integrity. It’s not easy to create and sustain those kinds of transformative partnerships.

I just finished reading a novel, Empire Falls by Richard Russo, [7] that was more about a different approach for dealing with divisions. The story inspired me to think about how important parenting and socialization are in producing “humans who are humane,” a paraphrase of something Urie Bronfenbrenner said in The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. [8] Class positionality and context mattered a great deal for the people of the relatively homogeneous little Maine town that’s the focus of the story. Generations of lives, both the “little people” and “the big fish in the small pond” who thought they were the top, were affected in ways that were profound, as was the history of the community overall. I wonder if, and how, then, societies could be transformed to produce humane humans. Adding culture to the mix would make that even more complex. I suspect that it’s a puzzle that will continue to fascinate me without any definitive answers.

Thank you for initiating an interesting dialogue!

JOYCE (May 11):

Carol, as you say: “Class positionality and context mattered a great deal for the people of the relatively homogeneous little Maine town...” For some reason, class divisions are the silent yet rather large elephant in the room when it comes to race discussions. I discovered during my extensive research for Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest [9] that it was actually social class—not race—that was the most important factor governing how poor children were treated in Britain.

Under this system of class hierarchy, it really didn’t matter what your race was. However, if you were lower on the social ladder, i.e. poor, suddenly a whole different system of rights applied (or didn’t apply) to you. The state could come and take away a poor family’s children in the guise of “offering them a better life” in a “new” land, i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Most poor parents could not afford to travel and so would never see their children again. Some kept up correspondence by letter, but many parents were illiterate. This of course could never happen to the children of rich families. There were cases of poor families that tried to get their children back by court action but they soon were forced to give up due to the expensive legal fees, a problem the rich would not have.

There were of course sincere people in the early movement to assist Britain’s poor children. Annie Macpherson, a devout Scottish Christian, was among the first to establish day schools in British slums. This served a dual purpose: it got them out of illiteracy, and was an excuse to feed them at least one good meal per day. Naturally as a devout Christian Macpherson also provided some religious instruction. Dr. Thomas Barnardo in his early years learned a lot from Macpherson, also establishing his own day schools. However, the demand soon outstripped what they could supply, and Dr. Barnardo was shocked to learn that when the boys and girls left school at the end of the day, they were discovered sleeping in alleys, coal bins and roofs. That led him to establish 24/7 “orphans” residences, or Barnardo Homes, but once again, the demand was so huge—poverty in London in the late 1800s was around 20%—these facilities soon were full to overflowing. (The Barnardo’s children’s charity survives to this day in Britain, though obviously no longer supporting child emigration.)

This is where things began to go off the rails. Dr. Barnardo was nothing if not a savvy self-promoter and had come to the notice of British aristocracy and government. They began funding his operations and the idea arose to emigrate these children to the colonies as indentured farm labourers. “Offering them a better life,” supposedly. A good film in this regard is Oranges and Sunshine [10] about the Australian experience of British Home Children, who were told they were being sent to a paradise of “oranges and sunshine” where they could pick oranges from trees and ride ponies all day. Once there, they were exploited mercilessly as labour on chain gangs to build highways, schools, hospitals, etc. Worse, they were sexually abused by the Catholic priests that ran the group homes they lived in. Canadian Home Children fared somewhat better in that they were not required to live in group homes but were “adopted” by farm families, though seldom welcomed as full family members. Most were not actually adopted in a legal sense.

The children were supposed to get a small stipend—collectible only upon reaching legal age—plus room, board, and regular schooling. To be fair, it was wealthy philanthropist Maria Rye—originally a women’s rights activist—who was the first to export British Home Children overseas, to the Niagara region of Canada. She was a harsh mistress and many children ran away from the home, some of them making their way to the US. Rye was later the subject of an investigation for her alleged mistreatment of children but was never indicted or convicted. Dr. Barnardo followed her blueprint and soon was exporting tens of thousands of children overseas every year, at least 100,000 to Canada alone. My grandfather, Cyril Joyce, was one of these children, sent to Canada to work on a northern Alberta farm at age 15, though in his case he was sent by an Anglican Church child and family immigration program.

As you can imagine, all this shocking research had a profound impact on my view of “racism.” Here were white children from a wealthy white country being treated exactly the same as Black slaves or Indigenous people—and at the same time. This is a critical insight: In the calculus of capitalism and state power, they all ranked the same on the balance sheet. It’s then I realized the racism card is a red herring, a distraction from the real motivations of stealing resources and territory. Sadly, of course, once played, the race card creates even more damage in this game of geopolitical power.

HAND (May 12):

Thank you so much for sharing a little of the history of the home children. I agree with you. Class is the elephant in the room, Art. It reminds me of a similar history in the US that I wrote about in a series of papers I had to complete before I was able to conduct my research study on Ojibwe child welfare. Here’s an excerpt...

“In 1853, Charles Loring Brace established the New York Children’s Aid Society (Holt, 1992), [11] and implemented a massive “placing out” system that would survive until 1920 and ultimately affect the lives of over 100,000 children directly (Costin et al., 1996). [12] A product of an era of massive immigration, crowded and unsanitary urban living situations, boom and bust economic cycles, and staggering poverty, the placing out system was intended to place orphaned and dependent children in healthier rural settings... Brace’s writings, whether in a society circular or his notable book, The Dangerous Classes of New York, paired charity with the caution that their children, left untended, would some day threaten society,” explains Marilyn Irving Holt in her book The Orphan Trains. [13]

Critics paint a picture of children being scooped from the streets of New York and sent by train in groups to places on the western frontier, to any family that was willing to take them. Since many of the relocated children were not orphans, their “new” families could not adopt them. Additionally, because the “new” families were under no legal obligation to care for their new wards, they could simply turn them out. There was little or no Society oversight of children once they were placed, and when follow-up was later attempted, it appeared that some children had simply disappeared.

As you point out, Art, discrimination is affected profoundly by the interactions among “isms,” and interestingly, classism often remains the most invisible and profoundly divisive and destructive. It’s so easily manipulated by those who wish to foment controversy among those who share the margins.

JOYCE (May 13):

Carol: Your citation is excellent, and indeed I had come across this American counterpart to the British Home Children—popularly known as the “Orphan Trains”—in my research.

In the context of the discussion about class and race in its relation to the plundering of resources, I’m reminded again of Canadian history. During the first contact period of the 17th century in what is today known as Canada, British capitalists saw the Indigenous nations as indispensable allies in the developing of the fur trade. After all, who would know better where to trap beaver, lynx, or whatever commodity happened to be most in demand in Europe at the time? Even at this time, fur traders pitted Indigenous nations against each other who already had longstanding feuds—even wars—amongst themselves. Canadian author Joseph Boyden wrote some very candid, even graphic, descriptions in his novels of the slaveholding and torture practices of these Indigenous nations.

Then of course, as with all boom and bust economies, when the fur trade collapsed, the relationship between British and French colonialists and the Indigenous nations changed. As the focus shifted from furs to timber and other resources, the imperative necessarily had to shift from mutual cooperation to getting Indigenous people out of the way, off their lands, so that extraction could proceed more easily. This I believe is when racism first began to be weaponized against North American Indigenous peoples. Just as in war, it’s a lot easier to justify killing and removing people from their traditional lands (as is now happening in Palestine) when you can dehumanize them, even dub them “subhuman” or “savage.” (Witness members of Israel’s government on record calling Palestinians “human animals.”) Interestingly, you should know that historian Arnold Toynbee, in his A Study of History, wrote about this very tactic:

“Another tendency of imperialist conquerors of foreign lands is to class the indigenous inhabitants as ‘natives’—a word now almost devoid of any but the most pejorative associations, though originally its moral content was nil. In stigmatizing the members of an alien society as ‘natives’ of their homes, the top dog is denying their humanity by asserting their political and economic nullity. … By designating the inhabitants as ‘natives’ sans phrase, he is implicitly assimilating them to the non-human fauna and flora of a virgin ‘New World’ that has been waiting for its predatory and acquisitive latest human discoverers to enter in and take possession on the basis of a right of ‘eminent domain’…” —Arnold Toynbee [14]

So much for British historians propping up the narrative of colonialism! Certainly some did so, but Toynbee is clearly not one of them.

HAND (May 17):

Thank you for sharing such an important part of Canadian history. It’s fascinating and highlights deliberate tactics used by those in power to impose colonial agendas on a global level.

When I was reviewing a study report prepared by thoughtful (privileged white) researchers completed in the 1920s that documented the great harm done to Indigenous peoples by federal policies in the US, they kept comparing the family practices of Indigenous peoples to those of “white” families. It was clear that the report authors never considered what the lives of poor white families were like at the time. They were completely omitted...

On a more applied level, I noticed how crucial socio-economic backgrounds were when I taught at universities. The importance of class background profoundly affected the treatment of social work students from working class or poor families in universities, especially when they were in practicum settings. Their skills relating to clients from lower-income families were often noteworthy. In fact, they were often more effective at building trust and rapport with clients than were their faculty or field agency supervisors. However, faculty and supervisors from professional class backgrounds labeled the students’ ease of building rapport as a deficiency—their inability to refrain from improper, unprofessional personal self-disclosure. Learning what to share is a knowledge-based skill that is easily remedied by bringing it to students’ attention and helping them discern when that technique is appropriate and helpful for the clients they’re working with and when it is not helpful.

There are so many ways to go here... Hopefully it could end with practical things people can do to pay more attention to the ways in which “class” affects people’s lives in covert and overt ways. For example, when my grandson recently graduated from a two-year community college, a friend from an Ivy League background commented on the audience’s reaction when each of the students were named—cheers and hoots and applause. That’s not something most universities allow. We had been talking about the importance of class recently and I pointed out that’s one of the many ways class difference shows...

While reflecting about your insights, I had an idea. What would you feel about sharing this dialogue? I think the topic of unacknowledged classism and the problematic, masked association with “racism” is something that needs to be discussed in a thoughtful way as a foundation for building understanding and future possibilities for collaboration among diverse groups relegated to the margins. I look forward to hearing what you think about this idea.

JOYCE (May 17):

Carol: That sounds like a great idea! I’m happy to collaborate with you on it. You can send me a draft and we can go from there.

NOTE: Stay tuned for my POSTSCRIPT in the next post.

[1] Twenge, Jean M. and Campbell, W. Keith, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York, London, Sydney: Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009), Introduction, p. 9.

[2] Talbot, David, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York, London, Toronto: Harper-Perennial, 2015).

[3] Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin Books, 2009).

[4] Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone , ibid., p. 5.

[5] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Introduction by George Woodcock, Black Rose Books, Montreal/New York, 1989, Introduction p. xxvi.

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Enemies_(2019_film

[7] Russo, Richard, Empire Falls (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

[8] Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. xiii.

[9] Joyce, Sean Arthur, Laying the Children’s Ghosts to Rest: Canada’s Home Children in the West (Regina: Hagios Press, 2014/Radiant Press 2017).

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_Sunshine

[11] Holt, Marilyn Irvin, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

[12] Costin, Lela B., Howard Jacob Karger, and David Stoesz. The Politics of Child Abuse in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

[13] Holt, Marilyn Irvin, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America, ibid., pp. 46-47.

[14] Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962 abridged edition by DC Somervell), pp. 430–438.

[15] “Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars Original Document Copy,” Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/SilentWeaponsForQuietWarsOriginalDocumentCopy/page/n1/mode/2up

[16] John Taylor Gatto, “Underground History Lesson,” Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/UltimateHistoryLesson

[17] Iain Davis, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Disillusioned Blogger, October 6, 2024: https://iaindavis.com/the-dark-enlightenment/

[18] Iain Davis, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Disillusioned Blogger, October 6, 2024: https://iaindavis.com/the-dark-enlightenment/

[19] Iain Davis, “The Dark Enlightenment,” The Disillusioned Blogger, October 6, 2024: https://iaindavis.com/the-dark-enlightenment/