Hi Everyone, this is Charles Eisenstein. I’ve lost control of my FB account, but am still able to post on my author page. I’m not sure how long that will last either. So I’d like to share a few paragraphs from the intro to my new book, The Coronation. It is named after the 2020 essay by the same name. It includes other Covid-era essays plus new material tying them together.
INTRODUCTION
In India, I have heard, various faiths have made of Covid a new goddess, and installed her on their altars along with the rest. And why not? In pantheistic religions, the gods personify forces of man and nature, mediating the known and the unknowable. A goddess can be placated, propitiated, angered or appeased, but never can she be conquered nor definitively understood.
The essays in this collection approach Covid from multiple directions. In part these reflect the evolution of my perspective over the last two years, but their multiplicity also bespeaks Covid’s god-like ungraspability. What is Covid? In these pages I view it as a religious hysteria, as a disease pandemic, as a tool of totalitarian forces, and as an upheaval of latent Girardian sacrificial dynamics. Each of these lenses affords a view of features invisible from the others, but none can fully capture the goddess Covid. That is why in many of the essays in this book I step back into a metaphysical vantage point, hesitating to reduce Covid to any one, nameable thing.
The pattern of reductionism is in large part responsible for this horrifying mess we are in—the reduction of illness to pathogens, the reduction of public health to metrics, the reduction of citizens to medical objects. Let us not repeat the pattern by reducing the Covid phenomenon to one thing also. It is many things.
Whatever it is and is not, certainly Covid has wielded a mighty power, transforming society more than anything else in my lifetime. It has been apocalyptic, revealing in stark relief shadowy forces of the collective psyche. And of the individual psyche. And of my psyche! I know I am not alone in having undergone a deep journey in the time of Covid, even a kind of an initiation. These essays trace that journey as each element of the collective psyche finds expression in me. The polar forces that Covid has flushed to the surface match similar hidden conflicts in myself, bubbling up for me to grapple with. These essays for the most part don’t describe my inner process directly, but they certainly bear its trace. Defiance, despair, resignation, rage, doubt, hope, fear, dismay, conciliation, militancy—each takes their turn as author at some point in this book.
By the end, you will see where I have arrived as of the beginning of 2022. Covid has not finished with us yet. Even if it is declared over, it has set a process in motion that will play out over years and decades.
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The Coronation Controversy and despair, hope and isolation, courage and division, withdrawal and reunion. How can we find meaning within this complex Covid moment–and emerge renewed? Buy on Bookshop Buy on Amazon My newest book compiles my best Covid-era writing, with an added prologue, epilogue, a…
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