The Dionysian Naturalist

  The Paradox of Epistemic Accumulation When Plausible Ideas Accumulate into Implausible Theories Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. The discussion of Richard Tarnas, Stanislav Grof, Keiron Le Grice, and archetypal astrology reveals a broader theoretical problem closely parallel to the P aradox of Rational Accumulation . Individually reasonable intellectual propositions can be assembled into theoretical systems whose cumulative conclusions are substantially less warranted than any of their constituent propositions. The problem is not necessarily that any particular thinker, concept, or body of research is worthless. The problem arises in the inferential relations created as otherwise plausible ideas are accumulated. This can be called the Paradox of Epistemic Accumulation : The accumulation of individually plausible propositions does not necessarily produce an increasingly plausible theoretical system. Under some conditions, each additional proposition introduces new inferential relatio...

Rescuing Tarnas, Rescuing Le Grice: Critical Reenchantment Without the Astrology Research Note — Dionysian Naturalism / Western Esoteric Traditions Project Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. v4 — final 1. The Problem Richard Tarnas's Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (Viking, 2006) contains two projects that need to be analytically separated. Its opening chapters — roughly the first seventy pages — offer a compelling historical and philosophical diagnosis of Western modernity: the emergence of the autonomous modern subject, the mechanization and objectification of nature, the progressive disenchantment of the cosmos, and the resulting separation of psyche from world. The remaining five hundred pages then propose archetypal astrology as the empirical demonstration of a participatory cosmos capable of curing that condition. Kieron Le Grice, Tarnas's student and the founding co-editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology , performs a structurally similar mov...

  The Window and the Hall:  Brendan Cathbad Myers, 1974–2026 Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Brendan Cathbad Myers begins The Mysteries of Druidry with a boy walking alone down a dangerous road. His name is Setanta. He has left his mother's farm and is traveling toward Emain Macha, intending to join the Boy's Troop of the Red Branch Knights. For three days a crow follows him. Then, one morning, he awakens to find a strange woman standing over him: tall, red-haired, wrapped in a dark green cloak adorned with black feathers, carrying a shield and spear. She is the Morrigan, the great queen, and she has come to offer him a choice. Setanta can have a long life. He can have a home, a wife, children who love him, and an old age surrounded by those he loves. Or he can choose another kind of life: adventure, passion, danger, and greatness. If he chooses that life, poets and storytellers will remember his name long after he is gone. But he will die young. Setanta chooses. Myers calls t...

  Form and Fire:  Starhawk's Dionysian Naturalism Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Starhawk does not call herself a Dionysian Naturalist. I do. The designation is genealogical and analytical, not an attributed self-identification—the same move Corrington makes when he builds an ecstatic-naturalist lineage out of thinkers who never used his vocabulary for themselves. I call Starhawk a Dionysian Naturalist not because she offers a systematic naturalistic metaphysics—she does not—but because five decades of her work locate sacredness within the immanent, embodied world and develop practices through which that sacredness can be encountered: ritual, magic, eroticism, ecological attention, collective action, permaculture, song, dance, and the cultivation of altered consciousness. Yet Starhawk is not simply an opponent of Apollonian form. Her achievement lies in repeatedly making form serve vitality: ritual contains ecstasy, permaculture designs with wildness, organization enables coll...