Sunday, January 19, 2014

From EsoterX: "If Called By the Cult of the White Panther, Don't Anther"

From EsoterX, which has become one of my favorite blogs to follow:
If Called By the Cult of the White Panther, Don’t Anther | EsoterX: If everything is important, then nothing is important. There is simply no room for what Mircea Eliade termed a hierophany, that is “the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world” (Eliade, 1959, p11). This leaves us completely unprepared for an encounter with the mysterium tremendum (“the awe-inspiring mystery”), and in fact we have invented a whole category of “Weird News” that ensures the profane nature of any paranormal experience is maintained.

This is from EsoterX's home page, and tells us what the blog is about:
EsoterX is an anthropological investigation of the ontological status of things that go bump in the night.  The fact that monsters may or may not be corporeal is of no consequence, as Charles Baudelaire said, “I consider it useless and tedious to represent that which exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me.  Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial”.  I am an applied anthropologist by training, inclination, and neurosis, masquerading as a computational linguist and software engineer by day, busy accumulating obscure masters degrees in an attempt to assemble a set of letters after my name that spontaneously result in some sort of gematriac significance.  And I’m convinced the universe is a far weirder place than we like to admit and the only reasonable response is that recommended by Hunter Thompson — “When the going gets weird, turn pro”.
I urge readers to explore this blog, a lot of wonderful material over there.

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