Charles Eisenstein - The Coronation: Essays from the Covid Moment

Praise for The Coronation

Charles Eisenstein is one of those courageous dissidents who also holds the faith that people can return to love after a hiatus of hate. As we go deeper into this new era of permacrisis, Charless writings will become ever more pertinent.

PROFESSOR JEM BENDELL, founder and former coordinator, Deep Adaptation Forum

Charles Eisenstein has taken on the hardest task in the worldwriting an intelligent, compassionate, and uncompromising book on the Covid-19 pandemic, without falling into either partisan hysteria or a shameless defense of power. This is a necessary and brave read.

PAUL KINGSNORTH, novelist; founder, Dark Mountain Project

There are moments in our history in which the art of the written word captures the extraordinary beauty of the human condition as it hangs suspended in tenuous polarity at a tipping point of evolution. The Coronation is one of these moments. In between these words that are as prophetic as they are poetic is the space of our collective metamorphosis. Tread lightly and dive deep here to find your own sovereign beauty.

ZACH BUSH, MD

Charles Eisenstein is one of the most original writers working today, and his essays on the social and spiritual impact of the pandemic event are among his best work. The Coronation is essential reading for anyone concerned about the damage that has been done to our societies and how we might recover and collectively go forward from here.

C. J. HOPKINS, award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist

If theres one thing this dangerous collection of essays about the coronavirus pandemic shows, it is that the virus that irrupted into the stolid course of our everyday lives back in 2019 is something more than a pathogen: It is an indictment of the village by the masqueraded fool outside its fences; it is a composting of the colonial altars dedicated to the worship of the one true God of knowing, science; it is a crystallization of the racialized economies of suffering and quotidian violence behind the spectacular; it is an expos on the theatricality of contemporary politics and the care it promises good citizens. It is thought itself. Weve been visited by this wild ferocious goddess, and few can do as well as Charles does in tracing out an ethnography of her passing. Whether or not we agree with the maps Charles composes, we will need this struggle, this wrestling-together-with-our-exposed-selves, if we hope to thrive as an entourage species.

BAYO AKOMOLAFE, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

Charles Eisenstein is one of the few voices worldwide who have the capacity to be critical and gentle at the same time. His work is brilliant, crystal clear at the logical level, evocative and eloquent at the stylistic level. Charles went down the road of rationality to the very end, and at the end of it, he entered a world of mystical and spiritual knowledge and beauty. Charless discourse contains the seeds of a new way of living together and of a true solution for the series of crises our culture is going through at this very moment.

MATTIAS DESMET, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Also by Charles Eisenstein

The Ascent of Humanity

Sacred Economics

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

Climate: A New Story

The Coronation

Essays from the Covid Moment

CHARLES EISENSTEIN

CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING

White River Junction, Vermont

London, UK

Copyright 2022 by Charles Eisenstein.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone

Project Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

Copy Editor: Diane Durrett

Proofreader: Tara Dugan

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing June 2022.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 122 23 24 25 26

ISBN 978-1-64502-178-0 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-64502-179-7 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-64502-180-3 (audio book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, Vermont USA

Somerset House

London, UK

www.chelseagreen.com

Dedicated to the children of our children.

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 Covids godlike 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, yet 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 inthe 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 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 dont describe my inner process directly, but they certainly bear its trace. Defiance, despair, resignation, rage, doubt, hope, fear, dismay, conciliation, militancyeach takes its 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.

Among other things, Covid has revealed how close we are to totalitarianism. It took so little for its full machinery to spring into motion: surveillance, censorship, propaganda, restriction of movement, suspension of civil liberties. One explanation is that nefarious forces have been preparing for this moment for a long time. Perhaps. But to do so, they exploited psychosocial patterns and myths that are older than history. These will not easily disappear even if the pandemic is declared over and corrupt institutions and individuals punished. I explore these patterns and myths repeatedly throughout this book: the story of separation, the program of control, the myth of redemptive violence, the story of good versus evil, the paradigm of reductionism, the denial of death, the cult of quantity. As long as these patterns and myths remain intact, then even if the goddess Covid is exiled to the history books, they will soon draw in a successor.