Beachgoers rest on the beach of Moutchic on the shore of Lake Lacanau in Lacanau, southwestern France on July 24, 2026, as clouds of smoke rise into the sky from the Gironde wildfire
A bracing essay from Adam McKay (director of Don’t Look Up, Vice, and The Big Short, among many other films), arguing that our acceptance of assurances that we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperature record…
Lies are a lot like gourds. They come in hundreds of different varieties, sizes, and bulbous, twisty shapes. Some are off-puttingly spiked and prickly, while others remind us of fall childhood memories.
Some lies, if prepared correctly like squash or pumpkin, can appear delicious and irresistible, concealing a dark reality: “I can’t believe you’re not a model! For five thousand dollars I can photograph you so you have a portfolio.” The central aim of most lies is to avoid consequences. When an untruth is especially desperate and self-serving, it can be unintentionally hilarious: “Yes I tried marijuana… but I did not inhale.”
Embezzling money or murdering someone for the insurance pay-out are part of a phylum of lies that cross into serious criminality. These deceptions’ sphere of influence often stays fairly localized. But sometimes covering up the initial lie can spawn lots of other lies that spread and spread, like with Watergate or Bernie Madoff. What started as a little decorative Thanksgiving-gourd-sized lie suddenly becomes larger and quite ugly. This family of lies strives to not only avoid consequences, but to gain status and resources, another common end game of many deceptions.
And then there are the large society-wide lies: hulking distortions and misrepresentations watered and tended to by leaders, mass media, culture, and industry.
This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions have led throughout modern history to wars, mass death, societal collapse, and the theft of humanity’s great treasures. “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.” “Oxycontin isn’t addictive because it’s time-released.” These county-fair, blue ribbon-winning prevarications tend to be driven by a myriad of short-term incentives, irrational manipulated fears, unexamined assumptions, convenient blind spots, and of course… the desire to avoid consequences and expand status and resources.
“People always pay their mortgages” became the half-true rallying cry used by Wall Street, news media, and politicians to collapse the world economy in 2007. Turns out when you change lending rules to feed an unregulated derivatives market by giving mortgages to people who can’t pay them… they don’t. “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” (along with the subvariations on the central lie—“We want to bring democracy,” “If you don’t support the troops, you support the terrorists,” “Saddam orchestrated 9/11,” etc) killed a million people, devastated the entire nation of Iraq, and in many ways also gutted the United States, all while enriching oil companies, weapons manufacturers, big banks, juicing TV ratings, and expanding the power of the Bush/Cheney presidency.
However, there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.
It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day. It is a constantly growing gourd that even as a baby back in the 1970s was the size of three aircraft carriers. These days it is so massive it is almost easier to refer to what isn’t part of it (Disneyland, a BLT, that green croc by the side of the highway) than what is.
This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”
To be clear, we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and “climate skeptics” like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.
Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat.
No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”
Less embarrassing than “climate change is a Chinese hoax,” but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.
Sir David King—former science advisor to the United Kingdom, professor at Oxford and then Cambridge, winner of too many awards to list and as establishment as they come—was quoted as saying that what we do over the next three to four years will determine the fate of humankind.
He said this… in 2021…
[McKay unpacks a chilling variety of examples of “the lie” in action, contrasting government/media/corporate messages with the reality to which the )ostensibly) refer…]
… Still have doubts? If you do, I don’t blame you. We live in a consumer culture hammering us daily with triggering political proclamations, sales pitches, and clickbait designed to spike engagement responses in the brain. “Immigrants are coming for your way of life!” “This new SUV is the best ever!” “Great White Shark Eats Porn Star!” Most of it is misleading, in one way or another, so there’s a natural tendency to assume that “Planet about to boil!” might be too.
But Big Oil and its PR agencies know this, and they’ve weaponized the healthy skepticism we’ve developed as a survival mechanism against those voices speaking the truth about the urgent state of the climate.
After all, who are you going to believe? The New York Times, an outlet famous for downplaying climate urgency, or some weird scientist saying crazy things? Even when a profession famous for dead-eyed, bottom-line risk assessment like insurance actuaries releases a statement about how serious the situation is, corporate news media turns it into what people used to call a “below the fold story,” framing it as just another minor environmental item—not headline news.
In service of the Great Lie, the government of the United Kingdom even tried to bury a climate report from its own intelligence agency before it was leaked. To my knowledge there aren’t many spies being called tree huggers, unless they’re undercover of course. But the MI5 and MI6 are clear-eyed about the danger that’s coming. The report warned that “global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.”
No one wants to eat a raw pumpkin. It looks like a Dr. Seuss character’s brain, is full of seeds, and has no real taste. But like with any good lie, when the right sugar, spices, a buttery crust, and time in the oven is added, pumpkin pie becomes a cherished classic.
The same thing happens with the climate lie. The financial markets, massive oil companies, the banks that finance them, the travel industry, car companies, your career and job security, the people you’re having dinner with who don’t want to be bummed out, all of these incentives and forces don’t want you to know you are eating a big, weird gourd.
And as long as we go with their mendacious flow, hundreds of millions, and then billions will die well before “Net Zero by 2050” or “our great grandkids’ future” arrive. Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do…
As Pope John Paul II said, “An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.”
As we face up, we might spare a thought for Blaise Pascal; he died on this date in 1662. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g., the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes– and was foundational in the acceleration of the scientific/rationalist commitment to measurement (and the conclusions/actions they dictated).
Relevantly to McKay’s piece, Pascal also advanced the philosphical argument we know as “Pascal’s Wager.” While he posed the exercise as a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God, we can easily transpose it to apply to climate change action:
Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God. The reasoning for this stance involves the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell. –source
If the threat of climate change is, as “the lies” suggest, real but distant, then immediate action only costs us some short-term sacrifice. But if that threat is imminent, immediate action could preserve our way of life and the prospect of an improving future for us and our children and their children… while inaction is likely to end in utter disaster.
Clergy stealing from the nobility and handing it to the poor. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…
In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.
We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.
This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…
[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}
… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.
He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.
This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.
They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.
That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.
This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.
That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.
* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
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As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.
Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).
“Changes” is widely considered to be one of Bowie’s best songs and has appeared on many best-of lists. His biographers have suggested that the track is a manifesto of his entire career, predicting a constant change of musical styles: the first verse focuses on the compulsive nature of artistic reinvention and distancing oneself from the rock mainstream; the second verse concerns clashes between children and their parents, urging them to allow their children to be themselves as teenagers. Bowie frequently included the song in his live performances; it was the final song he performed on stage before his death in 2016.
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post… J. F. Martel explores why art matters, arguing that when early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…
In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. [See here.] Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy Wikimedia
These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity…
[Martel develops his case (fascinatingly). He concludes…]
… The idea, then, that human beings invented art, that art ‘belongs’ to humanity, is true only after the fact. In a more primordial sense, art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it brings forth a world, along with everything else.
What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
But again, we are led back to two kinds of art. Artifice is art that imitates nature: an attempt to represent the world on human terms, resulting either in imperfect reflections (according to Plato) or in perfected abstractions (according to Aristotle). Real art, by contrast, enacts natura naturans – that is, creation as such. If we can speak of imitation here at all, it is not in the sense of mechanical copying but of what the Christian mystics call imitatio Christi: the imitation that becomes instead of merely aping, a creative event transcending all the ways in which the intellect reduces things-in-the-making to things made.
Art alone puts us in touch with certain kinds of truth and beauty. And in that way, art restores us to reality. For it to succeed, however, it must be left to its own devices (or lack thereof). It must be free to eschew the logic of utility and to embody the freedom we stifle under the pressures of means-and-ends thinking.
‘All art,’ quipped Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ‘is quite useless.’ For Wilde, art necessarily and essentially serves no purpose – and artists ought to know better than to wish it otherwise. At the same time, he elsewhere argued with equal conviction that if it weren’t for the efforts of the Impressionist painters, the London fog would not exist. It was they, he claimed in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), who brought forth this aspect of the world, which had gone unseen until then:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? … The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last 10 years is entirely due to this particular school of Art … One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence … There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Claude Monet and his circle did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent. This power to make us see, for Wilde, is what makes art invaluable.
Is there a contradiction here? How can art be both invaluable and ‘quite useless’? It depends on how we define that last term. One might argue that if nobody paid attention to the fogs that crept through Victorian London until then, it was because there was no use in doing so. By attending to what no one cared to notice, the Impressionists drew from the invisible background of the human world a new entity that then became impossible to ignore. If art is useless for Wilde, it is only in the sense that it explores those regions of reality for which our present intellect has found no use – at least not yet. By making visible that which we could not see, to paraphrase Paul Klee, art expands our perception of the world. It thus fulfils a function precisely analogous to that of science; but whereas science is driven by an ideal of utility, art seeks what has not yet appeared on our radars. Artists alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know. Through their work, new realities, new ideas and new emotions become available.
Indeed, science begins – and can only begin – in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination’s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.
This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a ‘science of the sensible’. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a ‘qualitative multiplicity’, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.
Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless – that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:
How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness … ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?
The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art – and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.
Today, art is pressed upon by forces that would subordinate it to all-too-human ends. Some say that it should educate and elevate impressionable minds, training them to behave in accordance with a preexisting moral code. Others claim that it should play a therapeutic role, either as an instrument of medicine or as a means of escape by which workers might regain their strength before the next working day. Still others insist that art ought to serve the needs of the state or the market, upholding the preconceived ideas of a polity that mistakes its limited view of reality for the whole of reality. The rise of artificial intelligence has only intensified this levelling of art into non-art. By definition, artificial intelligence is capable only of artifice, since it inhabits a virtual universe of things made (data) rather than things-in-the-making. To fail to distinguish between the artifice it generates and the true art it imitates is to mistake representation for creation, and so to blind ourselves to the very source of what makes both art and humanity possible.
Art must remain useless (or become it again), and it must do so in the name of truth as well as beauty. At the beginning of this essay, I distinguished two forms of each of these ideals: one that merely confirms what we think we know, and another that reminds us of the mystery that underlies all our partial knowledge and imperfect beliefs. Above all, art confronts us with that radical mystery, without which our problem-solving and utilitarianism would be pointless. This mystery is not a theory but a truth, the very ground of that truth whose splendour Plato called beauty, Herzog called ecstasy, and Keats, speaking to his urn, declared to be one with truth itself. It is ecstatic because it takes us outside ourselves, connecting us with the wonder that burns at the heart of the world, and which, out of every search for answers, calls forth new questions – and, with them, new reasons to live…
As we muse on the mystery of musing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that French highwire artist Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century,” traversing a 200-foot steel cable across the 138-foot gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. 1,312 feet above the ground, he performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted observers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on. The unpermitted/illegal performance took Petit six years of planning.
Two figures related to the art of astronomy from a manuscript of the Ars notoria (NLI Ms. Yah. Var. 34), ca. 1550–1600. Each contains subordinate figures to be contemplated — while reciting accompanying prayers (orations) — in a prescribed sequence over time and with respect to the cardinal directions — Source.
As Anne Lawrence-Mathers explains, centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, and AI emerged promising quick command of any subject to any of us, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users…
Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.
Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.3 Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.
Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon.
St Thomas Aquinas was worried enough by the Ars notoria to name and condemn it specifically in his Summa theologiae — one of the most authoritative summaries of Christian teaching. He dealt with the very serious issue of superstition in Book Two, Part 2 — Question 96 is effectively devoted to the Ars notoria. Aquinas’ conclusion is wholly negative: the “art” is both “unlawful and futile”. It is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises. Still more seriously, its “signs” are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons.
That may seem a conclusive case for the rejection of the Ars notoria, especially as Aquinas’ objections were echoed by other major theologians. However, the number of surviving medieval copies of the work, and the fact that it was copied and owned in religious institutions until the end of the medieval period, show that the church ultimately had neither the interest nor ability to stamp it out. Moreover, it was translated in the early modern period and also went into print, demonstrating an ongoing — and more widespread — interest…
[Professor Lawrence-Mathers explains how the Ars notoria was used…]
… For some users, the rituals were so powerful that they seemed demonic. One of these was Brother John, an early fourteenth-century monk of the abbey of Morigny, near Étampes. John’s account of his introduction to the text, his powerful attraction to it, and the terrifying experiences he underwent while using it, was given in several chapters of John’s own, visionary work, the early fourteenth century Liber florum celestis doctrine.6
The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more. This led to an encounter with a “medical expert” from Lombardy, who informed John that what he needed was the Ars notoria, and that a copy of it was to be found within the walls of the school (at Orléans) where John had been sent. These details provide important evidence of the liminal status of works of ritual magic. They were recognised as dangerous, and were far from being officially approved, and yet were well known, owned and recommended by educated individuals, including monks and clerics.
For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body…
As we do the work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Frank Herbert’s Dune was published.
Herbert published a three-part serial Dune World in the monthly Analog, from December 1963 to February 1964. The serial was accompanied by several illustrations that were not published again. After an interval of a year, he published the much slower-paced five-part The Prophet of Dune in the January–May 1965 issues. The first serial became “Book One: Dune” in the final published Dune novel, and the second serial was divided into “Book Two: Muad’dib” and “Book Three: The Prophet”. The serialized version was expanded, reworked, and submitted to more than twenty publishers, each of whom rejected it. The novel, Dune, was finally accepted and published in August 1965 by Chilton Books, a printing house better known for publishing auto repair manuals. Sterling Lanier, an editor at Chilton, had seen Herbert’s manuscript and had urged his company to take a risk in publishing the book. However, the first printing, priced at $5.95 (equivalent to $60.79 in 2025), did not sell well and was poorly received by critics as being atypical of science fiction at the time. Chilton considered the publication of Dune a write-off and Lanier was fired. Over the course of time, the book gained critical acclaim, and its popularity spread by word-of-mouth to allow Herbert to start working full time on developing the sequels to Dune, elements of which were already written alongside Dune.
Herbert died in 1986; his son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson continued the series in over a dozen additional novels since 1999. Among them was Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel which chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.
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