AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Pan is not always in the picture, but always exerts an influence.
The place of Pan in Greek culture and mythology. Pan as liminal figure (half animal, half wild). A figure of mediation (alter to the Arcadians in the middle of Athens)
PF admits to not vibing with Pan. Is Pan in America? Maybe in the counterculture. Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
"the state that you fall away from is created by the fall" – that actually makes sense, there is nothing primitive until you are beyond it.
Very interesting dissection of some deeply reactionary scholarship within anthropology.
He posted this on WS Discord, My response:
Thanks for posting that. I'm really not competent to evaluate this kind of academic work, but I shared your basic reaction – it is alarming and toxic, and way over the line into antisemitism. As you point out, they are very clever about not being explicit about it, but it's too obvious, they must be aware of what they are doing. Tricksters indeed.
As to their actual thesis: at first at struck me as absurdly dense to think of tricksters as figures of evil (rather than ambivalence or amorality). Talk about not getting it. Then suddenly the opposite thought struck me as almost as hard: the connection is obvious, almost tautological. After all, the western conception of evil traces it back to the act of a trickster figure (the serpent in Eden), so duh. Of course tricksters are evil to reactionaries whose highest values are order, stability, and authority. Tricksters represent the opposite of all that, and so does modernity, with its radical skepticism and chaotic energies. It kind of makes sense from an ultraconservative perspective. Whether that perspective deserves intellectual attention is another question.
I sometimes worry about the murky links between antimodernism and antisemitism. Obviously there are plenty of ways to be antimodern (or postmodern or simply desiring to fix the obvious defects of modernity) that don't involve "luridly fantastical imagery of parasitism, underground machinations, and dark sacrificial rites" and obsessing about the purity of your effluences.