Crowley Tarot - The Fool

Finally a rainy day and I can spend some time updating my blog.  As mentioned in my previous post I’ve set put upon a three year journey to see how much I can learn about primitive living and survival skills.  Along the way I’ll be documenting my experience as best I can and providing survival tutorials and updates on lessons learned in hopes of helping out others who – like me – finding the daily grind and routines of modern life unsustainable and are desperate to find some other mode of existence.

While my ultimate goal is to live a full year in a minimalist survival situation without any modern conveniences, for now I’m setting up a home base camp at Lothlorian nature sanctuary in Needmore Indiana.  Lothorien is the perfect place for me right now, a community of nature loving folks with a passion for creating a sustainable community living in harmony with nature.  This may sound like a lot idealistic mumbo jumbo to some but by my reading of the current state of humanity the future – if there is any future to humanity – is much more likely to be arrived at though communal experiments like Lothroien then from Washington think tanks, New York bankers, or LA marketing execs.

As an undergraduate at Indiana University in Bloomington during a discussion on Nietzsche I expressed an interest in dedicating a few years of my life to learning primitive living skills and “living off the land.” My professor, Chris Kerns, then Dean of the Comparative Literature Department at IU, said for a modern person to take on a hunter gatherer life style would be to die.

Alester Crowley's Thoth Torrt Death Card

While Chris Kerns defiantly had a philosophical disposition and a flair for the dramatic, his comment on adopting a hunter gatherer lifestyle by modern peoples seems to me lately to be a valid statement. So much of who we are – our anxieties, pleasures, and pains are so completely wrapped within the context of a consumer culture. It’s very difficult if not imposable to really look at, understand, and evaluate ourselves minus the influence of modernity. So much so that to successfully removal of oneself from modernity would require a complete reappraisal of one’s own identity – and this interests me very much.   And if you agree with assigning death as a description of the changes that occur when one abandons modernity,  and returns to a life close to the earth then on August 9 Aaron Wolf will die.