I’ve a couple of pieces published this week.
Where They May Be Found: The Dead
These are the dead who scream, gathered in voiceless shouting to be remembered. Once you see the skeletons of the skyscrapers, they can’t be unseen. So many sacrificed upon those altars, blood pouring in rivers to overflow our bank accounts.
They are in the leaves of books, the leaves of trees.
These are the dead we fear. They’re waiting just on the other side, waiting to be heard.
The opening part of the piece happened the day before I wrote this. It’s not uncommon to see a homeless man on the street pour out some of a beer for those who’ve died. It’s awfully uncommon, however, to have him ask a stranger who passes if they “mind.” Unsurprising now, though.
Alchemical Capitalism
Karl Marx described the process by which we imbue meaning into money as “commodity fetishism.” Noting the similarities between how Capitalists in Europe appeared to do the same thing with money as non-Capitalist peoples did with religious items, Marx suspected that we treat physical objects as more-than-physical, endowed with qualities, meaning, and “value” that are not intrinsic to the item itself.
I shall restate this. We treat money as if it were enchanted. Like Animists recognizing the spirit-in-nature, money functions for us on an unseen realm, embodied with a quality invisible but nonetheless quite powerful.
This essay’s a mere introduction. There’s a preponderance of alchemical and theurgic observations about value and labor within Das Kapital waiting to be explored. Crystallization of value and the intrinsic and recognizable aspects of labor within commodities and products could be a book on its own, and another book could be written on the wyrd-borrowing of usury and the shadowed spinning of skald upon the proletariat. Books, not internet essays.
Another Observation
A recent Wild Hunt article about a band losing their place at a festival brought out quite a bit of anger, and also brought to light the influence of certain ideas within some of the cultural Heathen-Asatru communities in America. They’re soaked in racist ideologies, unfortunately, but there’s something we should not throw away in their experiences.
See, they’re railing against the same thing that radicals are. They noted the liberal stranglehold upon culture and the flattening of difference inherent within Capitalist societies. Their attempts to revive lost cultural forms are precisely what we all should be doing.
The problem? Their understanding of Liberalism is too influenced by American discourse. They rail about “cultural marxists,” whom they identify with the Democratic party, as if there were a single drop of marxist blood in those pandering, pro-Capitalist fools.
It’s something I want to delve into further, and I’m considering starting up correspondence with a few people within those movements in order to understand better where that disconnect is. I’d particularly like to understand why so many of them don’t identify other groups in precisely the same position as allies, and I suspect the inherited racialist thinking in their ideologies is the problem. Capitalism operates best when the lowest classes hate each other, and racism is the most effective method for this. If First Nations’ groups and Folkish Heathens, for instance, ever noticed they’re on about the same thing, they’d be a huge fucking threat to the system.
I, of course, want to help them be that threat.
Rhyd Wildermuth 
This reminds me of how Occupy and the Tea Party should have gotten along.
Thanks for introducing the Eliot quote, so true.
And for sharing your experiences with Ghede. I’d heard of Baron Samedi but I hadn’t come across Ghede before. He’s a fascinating deity.
Particularly in the city of Preston, which is built on so many forgotten graves, where the dead are exhumed and reinterred to make way for car parks I also get that feeling ‘we walk on the dead’ or we walk through the places that are still their places because even the bodies are gone the ghosts refuse to leave.
‘History is their voiceless litany’ – absolutely – and I guess it’s up to those who take the time to listen to give their stories voice.
The Folkish Heathens I know are all well aware and completely in support of First Nations groups.