Julblog 2023

Liber Kaos, Chaos Magic for the Pandaemonaeon. The New Classic Edition.

First published by Weisers in 1992, this grimoire of magical theory, practise, and philosophy develops and expands the paradigm shift from the old ‘ancient wisdom’ approach to magic to something far more irreligious, powerful, and scientific. It builds upon the insights developed in the seminal first book of Chaos Magic – Liber Null & Psychonaut (~1980-7) through a decade of further intensive research and experiment, and now this updated edition comes with the benefit of a further two decades of work and contemplation.

Herewith the astonishing list of contents: -

Those unfamiliar with the concept of the Pandaemonaeon may choose to read these prophetic words: - https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/156-pandaemonaeon

Herewith a link to the availability of the book and some sample pages.

https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/liber-kaos

Knights of Chaos. Ukraine campaign.

A message from the Acting Marshal.

Most battles and wars begin with someone’s expectation of quick victory by manoeuvre, but most become settled by grim attrition. The war in Ukraine shows no exception to this.

On March 3^rd, 2022, the KoC called upon the free world’s magical community to: -

‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him.’

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Speculation surrounds the split between Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary army and Putin, yet there seems little doubt that the split has substantially weakened Putin’s political, military, and diplomatic position. We shall not have lasting peace in Europe until both Putin and dictatorship become rejected by Russians.

My thanks to the many who have already raised their wands and cast spells and sigils.

We ‘Enchant Long’ in this protracted struggle, and now as tide of war may begin to turn decisively, we need to redouble our efforts. KEEP THOSE CONJURATIONS COMING!  

Book Review.

https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Mindset-Champions-Daniel-Domaradzki/dp/B0C6VWRGDC/

Crowley’s dictum that magic consists of the raising of the whole person to the power of infinity seems often ignored by the magical community. Crowley appears to have explored all forms of debauchery to extreme levels but he also free climbed Beachy Head and performed quite astonishing feats of physical endurance, self-discipline, and concentration. For those who think they may need a bit more of the latter (and particularly for those who don’t) this book provides an invigorating challenge to become stronger and more focussed.

Personally, I have always considered physical and mental strength and resilience an invaluable support in the development of magical power and knowledge, so I have gladly taken a few tips from Daniel as we discussed the application of magical and esoteric techniques to strength training in which he works professionally. Techniques from both traditions appear in the book.

Expect a boot camp of a book, written simply and directly with no compromises offered or excuses accepted.

Junblog 2023

Travelogue, archaeology, cuisine, etc.

The month of May proved a splendid time for a visit to the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The hillsides around Loch Ness blaze with great lush thickets of vibrant yellow gorse, the midges have not yet erupted from the bogs and ditches to make hillwalking hellish when the breezes drop. The Scottish secessionist movement has thankfully imploded under scandal and infighting. Our kids and grandkids thrive. The Scots Steak Pies* remain the pinnacle of British cuisine. I had a splendid time.

(*The ubiquitous Cornish Pasties remain a severe downside to my life in the Southwest. Bakeries seem to serve little else here except these artless greasy pastries filled with ghastly shovelfuls of swede, turnip, and mean gristle, whereas the noble Scots Steak Pie contains nothing but generous portions of bovine muscle tissue in fine gravy.)

On the slopes above the Ness, I came across a rare patch of about twenty False Morels, Gyromitra esculenta: -

These strange fungi resemble something between blowtorched spaghetti and mummified brains. They can kill you if you eat them, they can also kill you if you merely try cooking them, as they then give off methyl hydrazine gas.

Mainland Orkney seemed even more heavily livestock farmed than when we visited it half a century ago. Barely a tree or hedge remains anywhere, just endless rolling slopes of fenced grassland and sad stinking barns full of livestock kept mainly indoors to fatten whilst machines plant, harvest, and fertilise the grass for them. (I had better check on the ethical sourcing of those pies.)

All the wildlife clings to the Orcadian coast, we saw plenty of seals and a splendid variety of seabirds. As I went beachcombing in heavy boots, three layers of clothing, woolly hat, and gloves against the chilly conditions, our three hardy oat-fed highland grandchildren stripped off and hurled themselves into the icy north sea to frolic in the waves, laughing at us soft Sassenachs.

Fairly recent archaeological discoveries on the Ness of Brodgar between the small stone circle of the Stones of Stenness and the huge stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar have led to some interesting speculations. The historian Neil Oliver has presented some rather grandiose ideas about their significance. Do the neolithic remains on the Ness of Brodgar imply that Orcadian neolithic culture predates and inspired the culture that built Stonehenge? Do these remains imply that a Neolithic Theocracy dominated Orkney and built the stone huts and stone circles as a centre of religious cult activities?

I rather doubt this. The stone huts do not seem that large or temple-like when you get close up. They probably built in stone because wood had become increasingly scarce. Neolithic cultures consumed huge amounts of wood for cooking and heating, tool hafting, and roof building. The small lathe and hide Neolithic boats could not have transported significant quantities of timber from mainland Scotland once supplies had become exhausted on Orkney. Orcadian civilisation appears to have gone into severe decline until the development of bigger boats in the iron age.

The Ring of Brodgar seems singularly unsuitable for religious or cultish rituals, or even as a ceremonial meeting place. It has a diameter of 340 feet, you cannot even shout across it in a slight breeze, and it does not seem to have any features in its centre. The ring seems more like an example of Clan Power Bling to me. It seems more likely that some local warlord had it built as a statement of authority, control, and ownership of the land and the people. The stone huts contained very few items that looked like they could have had a religious function, but they did hold a number of finely worked stone mace heads for cracking skulls and intimidating people.

Appeal

I had a very enjoyable and fascinating day at Joanna William’s Fire Iron Art forge and studio at Bristol Docks after receiving a voucher for a day’s blacksmithing experience for my birthday.

See Joanna here at work in her forge and studio: -

Joanna guided me through the basics of the blacksmith’s craft showing me how to heat iron in the forge and then shape it with hammer, anvil, vices, and tongs. Herewith my apprentice pieces made on the day, a selection of useful hooks and hangers with a pleasingly rugged antique aesthetic.

Towards the end of the day Joanna indulged my request to try and hand forge some esoteric instruments and she expertly guided me through the process. Herewith three forged iron Pocket Wands which can also serve to delineate Triangles of Arte in works of evocation.

I had a great day at the forge, and I commend the experience to anyone interested in developing their creative craft skills.

I have since seem Joanna exhibiting her own creations at various sculpture and craft events and her skill and dedication, and artistry never ceases to amaze. One day I hope to commission her to create splendid wrought iron gates for my home.

However, disaster has struck Joanna’s enterprise. A night-time arson attack on adjoining buildings in the Underfall Yard at Bristol Docks has also pretty much destroyed her forge and studio.

Here is a link to the crowdfunding appeal to help Joanna restore her facilities and continue to practise and teach the skills of blacksmithing and artistry in iron. 

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/fireironartblacksmith?utm_term=pWbX8gyJx

Please give what you can towards restoring her forge and studio after the tragic fire.

The CMBR

Hypersphere Cosmology has successfully explained most the data from which orthodox cosmology has cobbled together the conventional concordance model of LCDM Big Bang Theory and replaced it with a simpler and more elegant model that has no singularities, inflation, expansion, dark matter, or dark energy.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation alone remains not rigorously reinterpreted within Hypersphere Cosmology.

Within the LCDM model the CMBR consists of relic radiation from a period about a third of a million years after a Big Bang when the primeval fireball had expanded and cooled to a mere 3,000⁰ Kelvin and deionised to become transparent to light. Subsequent ‘expansion of space’ or the separation of gravitationally bound structures within the universe has supposedly stretched out and redshifted the wavelength of the 3,000K light to a wavelength corresponding to 2.7⁰ Kelvin. We can make out a fairly credible mathematical case for this but at the price of assuming that the contents of the entire or observable universe once occupied an infinitely or insanely small volume at unrealistic temperature and density.

As Hypersphere Cosmology can provide an alternative interpretation for all the rest of the cosmological observational data without using the hypotheses of a big bang or an expanding universe then it requires an explanation of the CMBR to complete its case for a new paradigm.

Some cosmologists continue to wonder of the CMBR may arise from the redshifting of starlight from distant sources to the point where it thermalises into equilibrium with cold dust and gas in intergalactic space. In other words, the thin intergalactic medium has a basic temperature of only 2.7⁰ K and once starlight has become redshifted to a corresponding temperature it continues to bounce around at relatively short ranges and remains at that wavelength, in thermodynamic equilibrium with the medium.

A couple of fairly recent papers explore this idea further.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2197/1/012026/meta

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/478/1/283/4975800

Alternatively, Hypersphere Cosmology can perhaps supply a mechanism. As any gravitationally bound structure in the universe will rotate by hyperspherical vorticitation to its antipode position within the universe every 13 billion years, and any light emitted will also tend to reconverge in highly redshifted form on its antipode position in the same period, then the CMBR we observe may consist of light emitted from our own and nearby galaxies reconverging here 13 billion years later.

A redshift of 3.000⁰ K starlight by a factor of z = 1100 suggests that it may have come from a region of space about 1/1000 of the size of the universe. This corresponds roughly to the local group of gravitationally bound galaxies - our Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, and a swarm of smaller ones. The power output of the local group roughly matches the power input of the CMBR; however, the photon count seems badly off.

All collaboration on this topic welcome.

My Sci-Fi Hobby.

The winter storms have washed up more insulation blocks on the shores of the Welsh hideaway that conceal the spaceship yards of Lithonia and other empires. Plus, over winter I have collected spent vape accessories, old electric razor components, discarded nitrous cylinders, and small bits of metallic scrap and junk from all over.

The Lithonian empire now faces a challenge from these dark dreadnoughts.

In time this may lead to a vast boardgame on the beach with a scale of a yard to ten light years, or perhaps to a novel about Artificially Intelligent ship-minds and their motivations as a metaphor for the great existential and political questions.

Mayblog 2023 (comes a little early due to impending cable works)

The Mandrakes of Chateaux Chaos.

With Igor and Boris having thrown their leaves for the coming summer and the huge communal pot looking very overcrowded it seems a good time to repot all three of them separately. Circe has retained some of her foliage till now, strange behaviour for Mandragora officinalis, but perhaps she finally attempts to adapt to the chilly British climate. They don’t really like it here and have taken eight years to achieve a collective mass of about a kilogram from seeds sent from Thessaly in Greece.

Magic.

It seems that a whole new academic industry has sprung up studying the recent history of western esoterics. History as they say, starts yesterday, but in practise, most academics today prefer to let events settle for a decade or so before they start writing about them. This allows for events which may have appeared confusing at the time to have become even more confusing in recollection, some possible consequences to have emerged, and for the interviewing of some of the surviving guilty. I get quite a number of academics asking for interviews these days and seem to have become an historical figure in my own lifetime. Herewith an interesting offering from one of the leading lights in the field. It discusses the somewhat paradoxical aims the IOT set itself and it presents multiple perspectives on ‘The Ice War’. I once got a round of applause at one of the early big IOT meetings by proclaiming the IOT Pact as ‘A Cult for those who don’t want to join a Cult’. Just how that played out in practise remains a subject of considerable controversy and ongoing debate. The following paper provides a substantial read.

https://www.academia.edu/35746068/The_Illuminates_of_Thanateros_and_the_Institutionalisation_of_Religious_Individualisation?email_work_card=view

Not Magic.

This years ‘Breaking Convention’ has come and gone with predictable and dreary results - a bunch of would be scientists and shamans reinforcing a collective neurological/psychological based compromise to use their arts to merely restore acceptable normalities rather than to explore the extremities of human potential.

How much has the western esoteric tradition neutered and emasculated itself since the heady Promethean idealism of the magical revival of the late twentieth century?

Does anyone else find the current fashion for reinterpreting/downgrading esoterics into mere ‘therapy’ rather disheartening? Today the esoteric scene seems pervaded by those who merely proffer psychological therapies with new-age twists, (new-age rhymes with sewage), or they bleat on endlessly about their mental health as somehow emblematic of their spirituality.

Whatever happened to the quest for weird knowledge and strange occult powers?

(I guess few people realised just how much hard work it would take to achieve any real strange knowledge or any useful magical powers.)  

Psychedelics largely failed to enlighten. Now we have a new wave of psychedelic gurus pushing their products as mere remedies for depression or trauma. The new theory runs that such substances randomly shake up many of the patterns that have become fixed in the brain and can allow for a normalising restructuring. Electroconvulsive therapy supposedly worked by exactly the same mechanism.

Physics.

Mach’s Principle remains an intriguing cosmic concept. Ernst Mach (popularly remembered for his work on the speed of sound and shock waves) first seems to have informally suggested the idea although Einstein formally attributed it to him as Mach’s Principle.

Broady stated, it asserts that the properties of the parts of the universe depend upon the properties of the whole of it. That sounds intuitively right to the holistically minded, but theorists have struggled to give it mathematical form and rigour. Einstein took some inspiration from it, but he failed to fully incorporate it into his relativistic cosmology.

Let us see how well Hypersphere Cosmology incorporates Mach’s Principle. Herewith the Wikipedia list of 11 of the more popular interpretations of the principle with annotations concerning the Hypersphere Cosmology model.

Mach0: The universe, as represented by the average motion of distant galaxies, does not appear to rotate relative to local inertial frames.

Agree. Although Godel’s theory asserts that  ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density’, w = 2sqrt(piGp), it can do so about randomly orientated Hopf Fibration axes within a hypersphere giving the universe an average or overall angular velocity and angular momentum of zero.

Mach1: Newton's gravitational constant G is a dynamical field.

Agree. G = Lc²/2M, where L = antipode length, M = mass of universe. The value of the gravitational constant depends on the antipode length of the universe, lightspeed, and the mass of the universe. A universe of a different size or mass would have a different value of G.  

Mach2: An isolated body in otherwise empty space has no inertia.

Unfalsifiable but probably true. See Mach 7.

Mach3: Local inertial frames are affected by the cosmic motion and distribution of matter.

Agree. See Hypersphere Cosmology equations: -

6) The gravitational mass of the entire universe removes energy from photons in transit. (Redshift)

7) Individual inertial masses arise from the gravitational mass of the entire universe.

8) The gravitational mass of the entire universe slows matter in transit. (Pioneer Anomaly)

10) The gravitational mass of the entire universe reduces linear accelerations and increases orbital velocities.

11 – 15) The mass and size of the entire universe controls the proton-electron mass.  

Mach4: The universe is spatially closed.

Agree. It consists of a Hypersphere L = 2GM/c² within a Black Hole r = 2GM/c².

The conventional interpretation mistakes the Antipode length for the Hubble length.           

Mach5: The total energy, angular and linear momentum of the universe are zero.

Agree. Energy = Motion. The opposed centripetal and centrifugal accelerations A = c²/L, match on the cosmic macroscale, and probably also on the quantum microscale, we could probably mathematically summate the totality of all the multidimensional spins and all the motions that give rise to all the forces and particles within the universe to zero. 0 = +1&-1.

Mach6: Inertial mass is affected by the global distribution of matter.

Agree. m_i = 2GMm_g/Lc²  the inertial mass of anything within the universe depends on the mass and size of the universe which also control the c²/G ratio.

Mach7: If you take away all matter, there is no more space.

Unfalsifiable but probably true. At least it explains what lies outside of the closed universe – nothing – not even space.

Mach8: 4πpGT^2 is a definite number, of order unity, where p is the mean density of matter in the universe, and T is the Hubble time. (I don’t know who put in the pi or why.)

Agree. As p = M/2pi²r³ and T^-2 = pi²r³/c²,  then 4pipGT^-2 = 4piMGpi²r²/2pi²r³c²

= 2piGM/rc² ~ 1.

Mach9: The theory contains no absolute elements.

Agree. The ‘fundamental’ constants G, c, M, L, and A all depend upon each other.

Mach10: Overall rigid rotations and translations of a system are unobservable.

Unfalsifiable but probably true.

It would seem that Mach’s Principle can only apply if the universe consists of a Hypersphere of constant size.

Black Holes and Hyperspheres.

How much spacetime does the universe contain? Conventional LCDM Big Bang Cosmology asserts that the observable universe has a radius of about 13.8 bnlyr, but that due to its apparent expansion since a hypothetical big bang it may now extend to perhaps 95 bnlyr and it may have the potential to expand into spacetime indefinitely.

Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the entire universe consists of a finite but unbounded Hypersphere, closed in both space and time with an Antipode length of only13 bnlyr. This still makes it awesomely huge, but considerably smaller than the observable LCDM universe and certainly not even potentially spatially infinite. Such a Hypersphere will exist within a Black Hole with a radius equal to the Hypersphere’s Antipode length, as shown below.

.

Physicists commonly assume that if matter collapses under its own gravity to form a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 2GM/c² then it will continue to collapse until the matter forms a zero size singularity inside that Schwarzschild radius. The Penrose – Hawking Singularity Theorems assert this, but only on the basis that they cannot conceive of anything that would stop it.

Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that matter will cease to collapse within a black hole when all the matter has collapsed to half the Schwarzschild diameter because at this point a Hypersphere will form within the Black Hole. Such hyperspheres will have a rotational velocity of lightspeed and will resist further compression which would push their rotational velocity past lightspeed.

If the Schwarzschild radius r and the Hypersphere antipode length L both equal 2GM/c², then  L = r, or L = d/2, where d means Black Hole diameter. See A).

If we inhabit a universe that consists of the inside of a Black Hole and a Hypersphere has formed within it, then the optical horizon conventional cosmologists estimate to lie at ~13.4 bnlyr, and which Hypersphere Cosmology estimates to lie at almost exactly 13 bnlyr, represents the universe’s antipode distance not its radius.

If so, then the Hypersphere Cosmology universe has considerably less volume and a considerably higher density than conventional cosmology currently asserts. No surprise then that the Hubble Deep Field contains such an astonishing number of galaxies.

Furthermore, a Black Hole of any mass within the universe should contain a Hypersphere.

Breaking News

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/522/2/1736/7035603

The occurrence of greater numbers of quasars at long cosmic distances has become interpreted as evidence for the evolution of galaxies since a big bang, on the basis that younger (more distant) galaxies would have plenty of gas surrounding their central black holes, this gas would become sucked in to give rise to the quasar effect, and then when it had become exhausted the quasar activity would cease.

It now seems that quasar activity arises from the collision of galaxies driving gas towards their central black holes.

In which case, quasar distribution ceases to provide supporting evidence for the big bang hypothesis!!!

Spring at last.

The few Ravens that we have up in the Scots Pines on the nearby hill have started making funny noises; less raucous crawking, more gentle cooing, hopefully they’re making more Ravens.

As the autumnal Mandrakes at Chateaux Chaos spring into inactivity by shedding their foliage and going to sleep for summer, the pond receives an influx of amphibian guests, toads, frogs, and newts. Herewith a menage a trois of frogs. I later saw six males clamped onto that female. The following day I saw her pale and dead at the bottom of the pond. She has left a mass of spawn, but her tadpoles will face the dragonfly larvae lurking in the depths.

Counterfactual Indefiniteness.

Einstein famously asked if the Moon continues to exist when nobody looks at it.

I can now answer this with a (heavily qualified*) Not Necessarily.

An interesting example of this strangeness cropped up during some collaboration with a terrestrial correspondent upon Hypersphere Cosmology.

If cosmological redshift depends only on distance, then it has to remain indeterminate until measured.

See the graph below in which observed frequency (blue) decreases with distance travelled across the universe. This leads to an asymptotically increasing redshift of wavelength (red).

Note that as frequency decreases directly with distance travelled f_o = f_e (1-(d/L)) see: -

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/322-equation-6

We cannot define what frequency a photon ‘would have’ at any point on a journey between two points, we can only calculate and confirm by measurement what frequency the photon has when we actually observe it. This means that the ‘counter-factual’ - the frequency that we do not observe, cannot have a definite but unknown value.

To take a simple example with rough figures: -

In Hypersphere Cosmology the antipode to any observer in the universe lies almost exactly 4 Gigaparsecs away, (1.23 E26 metres, 13 billion light years).

Imagine two distant galaxies ‘A’ at 2 Gigaparsecs, and ‘B’ at 1 Gigaparsec distant from an observer, with both laying roughly in the same direction. Light from A will have lost half of its frequency when it arrives at the observer. Light from B will have lost a quarter of its frequency when it arrives at the observer. This all accords with calculation and observation.

If we stopped the light from A at B, then we would find that it had lost a quarter of its frequency.

But what about the light from A as it flies unobserved past B? We cannot assign any value to its frequency that remains commensurate with the loss of a quarter of its frequency per Gigaparsec and a half of its frequency over 2 Gigaparsecs!

Plainly we have a quantum effect at play here. The frequency does not become defined until we stop the light and measure it, or equivalently it hits something and acquires a definite value.

Of all the interpretations of quantum mechanics, only Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation seems to offer a ‘reasonable’ or visualisable account of how this can happen. In this interpretation, retro causal advanced waves have to complete a quantum handshake across spacetime in any emission-absorption event before it acquires a definite value.

If, as in standard cosmology, the cosmological redshift arises from recession velocity in an expanding universe, then it can have a classical explanation that preserves the idea of a definite state of the unmeasured light at any point along its path.

I suspect that recession velocity and hence the expanding universe model became selected precisely because it preserved a classical description for cosmological redshift.

The orthodox standard cosmological model, the LCDM Big Bang theory, remains purely classical and relativistic. Hypersphere Cosmology, at least in respect to cosmological redshift, incorporates both General Relativistic and Quantum Mechanical perspectives.

Counterfactual Indefiniteness has interesting metaphysical implications. Does the mind have a definite state when it does nothing for example? Anyone for Zen?

*We can assume that the Moon may continue to exist in some definite form when we don’t look at it, but only because of the zillions of quanta there interacting with each other and with the rest of the universe tend to keep it in a fairly definite form on the macroscopic scale.

Nyarlathotep – Aiwass.

It now seems generally accepted that the alien entity Nyarlathotep posing as Aiwass inspired Aleister Crowley to write the abominable Book of the Law and to found a cult based on slavish obedience to its spittle flecked rantings. Many other messiahs, prophets, ideologues, and demagogues seem to have drunk from the same source in search of power. Nyarlathotep also finds amusement in provoking sentient creatures to explore all manner of antinomian scientific, technical, and political extremes. It expects us to either learn from our mistakes or to destroy ourselves, and it remains indifferent to the outcome, as H P Lovecraft realised.

The universe contains countless sentient species, some will transcend themselves, some will auto-destruct. Nyarlathotep enjoys stirring them to do either, it wears many masks. Sometimes it takes an occultist to see through the metaphors within the metaphors.

AC fell for it. HPL saw through it.

Politics.

Despite the diplomatic niceties, President-Dictator Xi of China has visited Putin in Moscow with the air of a man inspecting the goods on offer in a fire sale. Plainly he sees no prospect of Putin winning the war and will not send him any armaments. Plainly Xi looks forward to heavily discounted fuel from Russia. Xi probably contemplates the prospect of exporting the full panoply of the technology of repression to Russia. Plainly he must now contemplate what sort of new regime in Russia he will soon find himself dealing with.

Putin runs out of friends, only fear motivates his remaining associates. Keep those conjurations coming: -  https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Scottish Independence RIP. The election of Humza Yousaf as SNP leader probably represents the final nail in the coffin of the secessionist movement. Hurrah! The Scottish secessionist movement stands revealed as an economically illiterate project led by careerist political incompetents, and now even the ethnic tartan romanticism has gone.

ChatGPT.

Despite occasional outbreaks of Artificial Stupidity, ChatGPT can apparently compose poems and essays that can fool university professors.  It only seems a matter of time and computational power before we iron out the issues of humour and nuance.

I intend to feed an AI with all my works, let it absorb my style and ideas, and then sit back and enjoy all the books I haven't had time to write, and collect the royalties.

The royalties will fund an immortal AI version of myself to comfort my relatives and engage my readers after I die.

But until further notice these blogs will continue to originate from the Meatware version of myselves.

Marblog 2023

Matt Kaybryn -  call off the search, my thanks to all. Matt telephoned me from his mountain fastness in a faraway land and we have sorted the issue. Mandrake of Oxford will henceforth distribute The EPOCH in its huge altar sized collector’s edition form, and also bring out this entire triple grimoire (including The Necronomicon) in a smaller more portable edition.

Dark Matter? – A solid disc like a gramophone record rotates with the same angular velocity at any distance from its centre. The planets of the solar system on the other hand rotate about the sun in a Keplerian fashion with an inner planet like Mercury orbiting the Sun in a much shorter period than an outer planet like Neptune. Weirdly, the stars in a galaxy rotate around the centre of it more like a solid disc rotates than a planetary system rotates. Neither Newton’s laws of gravitation nor the refinement of them in Einstein’s basic general relativity can account for this. Plus, clusters of galaxies do not seem to rotate as these theories predict, plus, large structures in the universe seem to have evolved more quickly than such theories predict if the universe went through a big bang.

Such discrepancies between theory and observation have led to the hypothesis that the universe must contain a lot of invisible matter to supply the apparently missing gravitational forces. Such ‘dark matter’ cannot consist of the same stuff that makes up us, this planet, the moon and mars, the sun, and everything else that we can observe. It apparently does almost nothing except add extra gravity and because it cannot absorb or emit light, we can never see it. To fix the mismatch between theory and observation the universe would have to contain about five times as much dark matter as the ordinary matter that we observe. Yet its existence has entered into the standard concordance LCDM model of cosmology as a ‘fact’ and some science fiction and fantasy writers, and esoteric speculators have played with the idea.

I become equally annoyed when magicians invoke dark matter to patch up their paradigms.

Over the last few decades physicists have conducted ingenious and exhaustive experiments to catch and identify particles of this dark matter which supposedly dominates the matter of the universe. All such experiments have failed to find any dark matter.

Rather than add a vast extra amount of hypothetical matter to the universe some theorists have attempted to tweak our theories of how gravity works to resolve the discrepancies, but these modified gravity theories all seem to depend on adding some ad hoc fudge factor to the equations to align them with observations.

Yet a simple and comprehensive resolution occurs if we merely add in an old exact solution to the field equations of general relativity found by Kurt Gödel back in 1949.

w = 2sqrt(piGp), angular velocity equals twice the square root of pi times G times density.

This adds an additional angular velocity w to any form of rotation.

thus:-

v_(r) = v_i(r) + 2sqrt(piGp) r

Where the velocity at any radius v_(r)  equals the velocity expected from the usual inertial and gravitational considerations  v_i(r)  plus a Gödelian contribution which for a galaxy derives from the radius of the entire spherical gas halo and the overall density of the disc and gas halo. This gives an excellent result for the nearby Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies where we can now observe their surrounding gas halos.

We expect a suitable accounting for the probable distribution of ordinary matter within galactic clusters will also show a result in accordance with this correction.

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology/item/319-equation-9

Hypersphere cosmology denies that a big bang occurred, so it does not require dark matter to resolve the apparently anomalous rates of star, galaxy, and megastructure formation that standard theory implies.

The State of the Nation – That treasonous wee krankie traitor, the Loch Ness Sturgeon, has quit her post rather than face the increasing likelihood of failure. I always suspected that for her, Scottish independence merely provided a means of advancing a personal political career. She must have realised that had she ever become the leader of a breakaway Scotland she would have ended up with her head on a pike within six months as its economy imploded and a refugee crisis ensued. She played a long game of making incessant demands on the Union that she dared not break. She kept quiet about Alex Salmond’s behaviour until it became politic to turn against him. When Scotland exhibited an outbreak of royalism on the Queen’s death she bizarrely proclaimed that Scotland would keep the monarchy. She did a grubby deal with the Greens to stay in power and paid the price of having to foist the deeply unpopular wokeist gender recognition act upon the Scottish people. Sturgeon’s only legacy remains a Scotland more divided within itself.

I love Scotland, I have family married into a clan up there, my grandchildren consider themselves Scots, I have invested much in the place. Thankfully the tide of secession now seems to recede.

Brexit. The wails of the ‘Remoaners’ have grown a little lounder and from the other side we hear some stirrings of ‘Bregret’.

Brexit has proved expensive, as anticipated. Freedom always has costs, but nations that give up political freedom for economic gain always end up losing both. The corrupt and undemocratic synarchic shambles of the EU took decades to construct, as did Britain’s half-assed relationship to it. It will take a while to sort the mess out, particularly with the damn French making a nuisance of themselves out of pique and spite. Let us hold our nerve.

Theory of Mind and AI.

According to conventional theory, as we develop from infants we gradually learn to attribute ‘mind’ to other phenomena in our environment (mainly people) which do not behave in an entirely mechanical and predictable way. We develop a ‘Theory of Mind’ which attributes agency and intentions to mainly living things. We come to recognise that the immediate and longer term behaviour of people may not match, as it does for most inanimate objects.

The idea of Theory of Mind’ usually implies that after an infant recognises that it has a mind it starts to recognise that other people have minds too. However, it seems more likely that we only realise that we have a mind after we have conceptualised its presence in others. Full sentience implies self-awareness and self-consciousness, the ability to think about thinking (and emoting).

Some degree of failure to adopt the socially approved form of Theory of Mind often seems associated with autism. Autistic people tend to take other peoples behaviour at face value without accounting for what they might actually have intend. They also sometimes exhibit apparent difficulties with self-knowledge and with assessing their own social impacts.

Current machine learning and AI programs display a high degree of what we might call autism in humans. Although they can perform well defined tasks with astonishing accuracy, this comes at the price of their not ‘knowing’ that they do so. They often create Artificial Stupidity when given more open ended or less tightly constrained tasks like making up conversation or telling you what they ‘think’ about.

It seems that the development of fully sentient AI probably depends on using machine learning to develop a Theory of Mind within a machine, by first analysing the anomalies and peculiarities in human behaviour to discern the intents, and then to turn the resulting Theory of Mind upon itself and examine and perhaps modify its own programmed intents.

The Chaoist theory of the Multi-Self also suggests that self-consciousness depends not on a singular self but on various selves within monitoring each other. Any truly sentient AI will probably require many semi-autonomous sub-programs.

Perhaps we should take care what sort of data we bring potentially sentient AIs up on. A bad upbringing can have unfortunate consequences.   

No Big Bang

The latest analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed six new fully formed galaxies as big as our own Milky Way. These galaxies lay at a vast distance away that puts them very close in time to the supposed Big Bang event.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2

Most astrophysicists consider it impossible that such huge galaxies could have formed so quickly after a big bang.

This it seems ever more likely that the universe has the same large scale structure at all points of space AND time – exactly as Hypersphere Cosmology predicts.

Putin’s War

We will only get a lasting peace in Europe when the crony-capitalist oligarchic dictatorship in Russia falls and becomes replaced with a free democracy.

The real history of Europe (and its gift to humanity) consists of a centuries long struggle against absolute monarchs, oligarchs, autocrats, emperors, and dictators. The remaining one has to go.

Putin now knows that he cannot win and that he cannot survive if he loses.

To reduce the devastation and the humanitarian costs, Turn His People Against Him.

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Feblog 2023

Matt Kaybryn. Does anyone have any contact with this artist who seems to have completely disappeared off-scene and off-net? If he still lives, I would really like him to contact me to discuss future publications of the EPOCH artwork.

Cosmology - JWST update. At the time of writing, the James Webb Space Telescope has astonished conventional cosmologists by revealing huge numbers of apparently ‘young’ and ‘old’ galaxies at very high redshifts. According to conventional theory this means that we now see them at vast distances in space and time as they would have looked just a few hundred million years after the hypothesised big bang event 13.8 billion years ago.

At the very least these new observations will lead to a severe revision of the theories about how fast galaxies can come into existence and develop after a purported big bang.

If the JWST can find stars and galaxies even closer to the CMBR horizon, then the LCDM big bang hypothesis will die.

Hypersphere Cosmology predicts with increasing confidence that we inhabit a finite and unbounded non-expanding universe, homogenous and isotropic in space AND time on the large scale. It only appears to expand, and at an increasing rate, because conventional LCDM theory fails to acknowledge the gravitational origin of cosmological redshift in a universe with a small positive curvature which leads to a redshift dependent only on distance, and an overall hyperspherical cosmic lensing which dims distant objects and creates the optical illusion of an accelerating expansion.

The CMBR arises from highly redshifted galactic light from near antipode distance, and this creates an effective horizon that we cannot see beyond.  

FSW Update.

Frontier Space War has remained a work in progress intermittently for the last 50 years. It consists of related game ideas for modelling interstellar conflict at the level of individual spacecraft and surface forces.

In the FSW universe, spacecraft can warp jump from one star system to an adjacent one between points of equal gravitational potential and they can also manoeuvre in system to engage enemy ships or surface units.

The latest innovations to this simulation system appear in the scenario shown below: -

Spatial Topology – The board represents a three dimensional volume of space with five factions (empires, corporations, polities, alien races, neo-feudal great houses?) within it, each having borders with the other four, note the identification of opposite corners of the board by the placing of halved areas in the corners. The territories of the five factions thus have a topological relationship equivalent to a pentachoron.

The use of discs to represent star systems and the touching of discs to represent permitted jump routes allows for a clearer and less ambiguous positioning of pieces than point like stars joined by lines.

The use of metal pieces throughout allows for a vertical aesthetic (they have a pleasing weight and don’t easily fall over). The pieces consist of nuts and bolts, ball bearings, woodscrews, masonry and plaster anchors, and plumbing fittings, with 2 part epoxy resin glue where appropriate.

Art -  As the project begins to take on its mature form I have blinged it up with high end metallic spray paints.

Rule structures continue to evolve in several directions. For simpler play, combat proceeds using Risk like protocols with polyhedral dice, D20 for fortresses/manufactories, D12 & D10 for capital ships, D8 for cruisers and carriers, D6 & D4 for destroyers, frigates, fighters, and forts. More complex play depends on the use of Asymmetric Combat Polygons, secretly selected tactics, plus also diplomacy and simultaneous moves on written orders in the afficionado versions.

Ethical note: Nobody gets killed in FSW. As animals cannot survive the stresses of interstellar warship manoeuvring, backed-up AIs and droids crew all the vessels. Civilians merely become informed of new laws and taxes as planetary ownership changes.

Alternative Physics. The Quantum Chromo-Dynamics model of how the nuclei of atoms work looks increasingly like a mess of questionable suppositions and dodgy mathematics that have little explanatory or predictive power. In response to the extensive zoo of meson and baryon particles that arise from smashing nuclear particles together at high energies the quark-gluon QCD model evolved. In this model protons and neutrons both consist of three quarks each and gluon exchanges hold them together. Each of the two major types of quark has to have a fractional electric charge of one third or two thirds, and to come in one of three possible ‘colours’ which represents another abstract property, plus it has to come in one of three possible ‘flavours’ which differ only in their masses. Additionally, each variety of quark has its own fundamental field, and an antiparticle with an anti-charge and an anti-colour, although not an anti-mass. This deceptively ingenious scheme does have the virtue that it can qualitatively describe all baryons like the proton and the neutron and all the heavier baryons that we can create for fleeting moments in particle colliders as quark triplets and all the fleeting mesons as quark-antiquark doublets.

However, quark theory doesn’t add up without the additional assumption that the three ‘valence’ quarks which supposedly make up a baryon each have a surrounding cloud of ‘virtual’ ‘sea quarks’ with seemingly arbitrary properties to fix the maths.

Yet individual quarks (virtual or sea) and gluons remain undetectable, and far too few things really add up quantitatively in QCD. Murray Gell-Mann who largely devised the model did sometimes wonder if quarks and gluons only existed as mere explanatory devices of our own creation.

The model of baryons as quark triplets demands that something like colour-anti-colour gluons must hold them together. This leads to the supposition that attractive proton-proton and neutron-neutron forces exist.

Yet apart from hydrogen which has only a single proton in its nucleus, all clusters of nucleons in all atomic nuclei have to consist of a mixture of protons and neutrons. Poly-proton nuclei without neutrons do not exist. Heavy nuclei require that the number of neutrons exceeds that of protons to overcome the mounting electric charges and forces which tend to push protons apart. Thus, it seems that a proton-neutron attraction  remains the only significant force required to bind atomic nuclei together if we discard the quark hypothesis. The relatively simple exchange of charged Pions can account for this. (The gravitational forces and the chiral spin alignment forces between nucleons remain orders of magnitude weaker.)

What then could explain the whole zoo of transient exotic baryons and mesons that our particle smashers can create? Why do orthodox theorists think in terms of ‘coloured’ and ‘flavoured’ down, up, strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks, plus all their antiparticles and meson and baryon combinations and eight varieties of colour-anti-colour quarks, and twenty six separate fundamental fields of which each of these particles constitutes an excitation?

It would seem far more economical to explore the hypothesis that only a single fundamental field, that of spacetime itself, actually exists, but that it has more dimensions than commonly supposed and that it can support quantised spinorial rotations in various of its dimensions. And that these spinorial rotations remain conserved in all particle interactions. In this case only a single type of stable fundamental baryon really exists – the proton, (or if it spinorialy rotates  in the opposite direction the - anti-proton). The neutron then just consists of a proton with an added opposite electrical spinorial rotation. All ‘higher’ versions of baryons simply consist of excited states with exotic extra spinorial rotations. Neutrinos play a big part in the universe but only because they carry away leftover spinorial spins and anti-spins from nuclear interactions. The ubiquitous nature of attractive gravity arises because any and all distortions in an elastic medium will tend to attract each other weakly regardless of their relative direction of ‘twist’.

This line of speculation has a manifold motivations: - both quantum mechanics (particularly in its Transactional interpretation) and certain esoteric phenomena seem to demand extra-temporal dimensionality in the universe. Gravity remains impossible to integrate with current quantum field theory. Quantum field theory looks like it has gone down a mathematically intractable blind alley, particularly with the overenthusiastic application of SU3 symmetries. Such triplicities as exist may well arise from the three dimensionality of time.

Entertainment. Only Prince Harry seems to have realised the real function of royalty in a constitutional monarchy – to act as highly paid entertainers in a family soap opera. Let us hope he turns up for his father’s coronation bash and does something ‘interesting’. I don’t watch either of them, but here in the UK we have two popular soap operas: Eastenders, a proletarian soap opera, and Westenders, an aristocratic one. Eastenders does not have much of an export market, so well done Harry for creating one for Westenders. Marrying a professional actress has obviously helped.

Actual War. I guess the main question for the western alliance has now become ‘How quickly do we want Putin’s forces in Ukraine defeated?’

A rapid defeat would prove easy to accomplish and economically cheaper, but it increases the slight possibility of the use of WMDs, and it increases the chances that Putin could manage a retreat into an even more repressive neo-feudal Fortress Russia which might effectively become a client state of totalitarian China.

A slower defeat may prove more costly in humanitarian and economic terms, but it would reduce the chances of WMD use, inflict even greater damage on the Russian economy and the standing of Putin and his cronies, and increase the chances of a regime change, hopefully towards something more democratic.

Keep up the good work https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Janblog 2023.

The Predator Mindset - Review

Acting as Chancellor of the world’s premier online magical training facility at Arcanorium College does keep me in touch with the evolving esoteric zeitgeist, and sometimes an aspiring alumnus will come up with something interesting and provocative in their own research.

I have always thought that physical and mental fitness aids the quest for magical abilities, yet Daniel Domaradzki has looked at it the other way round -  How about using Chaos Magic for Strength Training, Bodybuilding, and the development of Mental Resilience?

We have exchanged ideas on magical techniques and physical/mental techniques for some time. Whilst at 70 years of age I merely want to stay in about the same shape as 50 years ago, he trains athletes and competitors professionally.

Daniel has just released a book infused with all the fire and fury that I would expect from a promising young Mage – The Predator Mindset.

This book basically sneaks the magical techniques into mental resilience training without using magical terminology – it functions as a book of magic for the non-magician, yet it may inspire some to explore the esoteric arts more deeply.

The book reads well - short and direct and loaded with effective ideas and practises, and by slipping in the magical concepts in psychological terms it won't put off those who reject such ideas. I think a lot of people who call themselves magicians could and should also learn something from what it says. I have seen some laughable examples of wannabe magicians living hopelessly ineffectual lifestyles. I suspect that the approach he suggests may well prove appropriate for the challenging times ahead. No more hippy-dippy magical mysticism! Go for the Jugular! The Triumph of the Will and the Imagination!

Available here: -

https://primexaos.com/product/the-predator-mindset-mental-toughness-in-practice/

French Books

Eliphas Levi crossed the English Channel ( or La Manche as he would have called it) in the middle of the nineteenth century and met the British magicians and occultists of the day. His writings afterwards became translated into English, and they had a profound influence on Mathers and the Golden Dawn and later upon Aleister Crowley.

In the twentieth century, few if any exchanges seem to have occurred between Francophone and Anglophone magical traditions. Although Levi did become republished during the magical revival in the UK during the last third of the century, nobody here had much of an idea about what, if anything, went on in French magic. We generally lived under the assumption that French alternative thinkers had become entirely preoccupied with politics and philosophy.

Anglo-Germanic collaboration in magical matters occurred intermittently through the twentieth century despite interruptions due to wars. Crowley’s OTO grew from a Germanic neo-masonic organisation, and I like to think that my own crossing of the North Sea in the 1990s to Germania and the subsequent publication of my books there did much to promote Anglo-German magical collaboration. Yet whenever we had pan-European meetings the question often arose – where are the French magicians?

Well perhaps we shall soon find out, a French publisher - Alliance-Magique - has just released Liber Null & Psychonaut with Liber Kaos to follow. I look forward to seeing what French speakers make of them.

Vive l’Alliance!  Vive La Revolution! Vive Le Chaos!

Threescore Years and Ten.

A ramble upon becoming seventy years of age.

I distinctly remember a question posed in 1967 by my English master at school - Old Bill, a clever and charismatic old cove who had taken it upon himself to provoke his charges to actually think. “How old will you boys be in the year 2000 - and what will you be doing?”

Blimey, forty seven! That’s nearly dead, isn’t it? Older than my dad? It seemed so unimaginably far away, that I couldn’t guess what might become of me.

“What are you here for boys?”, he also asked rhetorically, and then he answered, - “You are here to be made into clerks!” (It was an old style grammar school). He had a talent for provocation. It worked; none of us became clerks to my knowledge. He also told me that I would never write because my essays were an illiterate and opinionated mess. Nice move Bill.

Now looking back from the perspective of the traditional finish line, it all seems to have gone so quickly and with increasing speed. Back in my fifties and sixties I sometimes wondered if I would live for precisely 84 years, the orbital period of Ouranos which featured so prominently in my natal chart and my later magical career, however I now begin to doubt the usefulness of this belief, it seems as useless as a belief in immortality. Uncertainty seems a better motivator. I still have an active mother of 92 with a serious golfing habit.

‘Threescore years and ten’ does today sound like the finishing line from a previous generation, only a few of my contemporaries have died so far, yet I do feel myself at the beginning of getting old now, everything still functions, but stamina has started to decline, recovery time from exertions has lengthened. On the bright side, excessive algebra has brought with it Mentat eyebrows; plus, the thickening of fingernails into proper wizard’s talons suitable for light engineering works and handling hot metal braziers has proved useful.

Though now it all seems to have passed so quickly, my world has changed drastically in seventy years. I grew up in the long shadows cast by WW2 which had indirectly brought my parents together and brought nuclear power and weapons, radar, computers, jet engines, and liquid fuelled rockets into action perhaps twenty years before they would otherwise have appeared. The post-war period also marked the end of the British empire and the relative decline of Britain during a worldwide boom in population and industrial and agricultural production. I remember ‘the sixties’, a cultural period which for my social class in the UK ran from about 1968 into the 1980s, as one of intense optimism despite the cold war. We hippies had more freedom and opportunities than our parents and we would change the world for the better.

Yet so much went wrong, the drugs did not deliver the advertised enlightenment, the economic slack disappeared from the system. Much of the developing world got into a mess as Islam failed to decide on whether it wanted to live in the twenty first or the eleventh century, and the climatic, ecological, and political consequences of a carbon fuelled growth boom and globalisation became increasingly apparent. Our science and technology have so far failed to realise our dreams of space travel.

A lot of the optimism of the late twentieth century seems to have evaporated as the costs of ‘progress’ have risen. Few from the more recent generations can probably look forward to the easy material increments enjoyed by the post-war baby-boomers. So much of the modern art and architecture that has arisen in my lifetime seems destined for demolition and forgetting. The same probably applies to a lot of the current notions at the bleeding edge of science in cosmology and in the quantum realm.

The process of dissociating magic from religion has advanced well during my lifetime and magic can now stand on its own theories and vocabulary and practices without reference to theological concepts. Yet as Chaos Magic shows, you can still throw religious ideas in at whim for a bit of colour and fun if they offer beliefs of convenience and utility. Humans obviously create gods, goddesses, and spirits in their own image, not the other way around.  

The old political systems consisting of various conflicted mixtures of monarchy-aristocracy-democracy seem to give way to conflicted mixtures of oligarchy-synarchy-democracy as communication technology ramps up. Synarchy has crept up on us. The Chinese Communist Party has achieved absolute synarchy over 1.4 billion of us. The EU strives for synarchy over a further 0.4 billion despite democratic resistance. Russia has become an absolute oligarchy. In the USA democracy still contends with oligarchy. Communism failed miserably everywhere, but socialism landed western Europe with the biggest welfare bills in recorded history, and a resulting decline in Christianity.   

I have seen social and moral fashions come and go, and huge shifts in what we are officially required to think and what we are officially forbidden to think. Multiculturalism failed and became replaced by multi-ethnic and multi-racial monoculturalism as an ideal. The Romans had worked that out millennia ago. The wokeist fashion for promoting every possible alternative to the traditional family and every possible consensual sexual deviancy appears to  have passed its peak as the social consequences mount. Opportunities for women in westernised societies do seem to have improved in my lifetime because late and post-industrial societies co-opted them into both production and consumption, yet Feminism looks as much a symptom as a cause of this. Imperialism has become anathemised except where it occurred so long ago that we can celebrate it as advancing civilisation.

Lessons from life so far? The cultivation of health and wealth creates more time in which to do what matters to you, – and time remains the ultimate resource. Pick a lifetime partner with a very similar level of intelligence but with a significantly different personality so that you can compensate for each other’s weak points. The social capital of friendship counts for at least as much if not more than financial capital. Give your children every last bit of your accumulated wisdom and let them sort out the mess of contradictions. Don’t expect self-consistency from anyone, particularly yourself(s).

Things left to do?

Despite spectacular advances in science and magic, much of humanity still lives under the scourge of religion and the scourge of tyrannical regimes. I will redouble my modest efforts to undermine both. Religion and Tyranny both depend upon fragile beliefs.

Although we now have in Hypersphere Cosmology a more accurate map of the cosmos, we still haven’t got starships. I will continue looking into the equations.

Magical Theories and Quantum Theories do not yet have comprehensive descriptive or predictive powers, nor do we know if, or how, they relate to each other. Either way, both require further research and substantial upgrades. This may all take longer than I have left.

Yet at the end, to believe: -

That your descendants prosper,

That your deeds and ideas may outlive you awhile,

That your enemies all lay neutralised or dead,

- That seems enough.

Decblog 2022

Monkey Squabbles

Has Britain reduced itself to an international laughingstock by replacing its Prime Minister twice and reversing all its policies in the space of a couple of months?

Rather, I prefer to think that we have set a shining example to people living under ghastly systems of glorious authoritarian leadership the world over.

Nevertheless, we do look set for a winter of discontent having demanded that the government print half a trillion pounds to subsidise furlough in lifesaving covid lockdown and to subsidise hiked fuel prices.

Printing money effectively devalues the existing money, and it thus acts as a tax.

As we have ended up with about 10% more money in circulation than goods and services, those goods and services will inevitably inflate in price making everyone 10% poorer for it.

Now every faction and interest group argues that some other faction or interest group should take the hit rather than them.

COP-out 27 - another monkey squabble

It seems we have decided to throw a few peanuts to the worst affected members of our own species by way of a risible climate change compensation, and to carry on burning fossil fuels until it either becomes climactically catastrophic for us all, or clean energy becomes a cheaper way of fuelling our demented addiction to growth.

The state of the nation, UK end 2022

Some things do look a bit buggered. In an attempt to inflate property prices, provide cheap labour, and depress wages we have let another 500K people into these stupidly overcrowded islands. The costs of Covid Furlough, resisting Russian aggression, and Brexit have proved high but will prove worthwhile. Paradoxically everybody and his uncle wants a pay rise in excess of inflation - but nobody wants any more inflation………

Yet on the bright, side over half the nation has managed to disabuse itself of the infantile delusions of religion. Have a look at the recently released the results of the 2021 census: -

I note that the locations of my place of birth, Chateaux Chaos itself, and my holiday retreat all feature as hotspots of atheism. Cause or effect? I don’t know, but I do like to think that I can still deconsecrate a diocese at a hundred paces with a single chaobolt. London remains a bit of a worry, but the residues of religion there probably arise because of its >50% immigrant population, and in time our freethinking British culture will probably corrupt them.

Putin

The last Czar of the Russians must fall, and the corrupt neo-feudal despotism he has created from the ashes of Soviet communism must fall with him and become replaced by a prosperous free democracy. Putin has revealed himself as monstrously egocentric and deluded, inhumanly barbaric, and also geopolitically and militarily incompetent.

Keep those conjurations coming. Support for him wanes as his hideous ambitions crumble.

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Festive Gifts for the Illuminati.

Royalties from the books funds the maintenance of this free Specularium website and its Arcanorium College facility. Thus, we unashamedly promote the books here. If you haven’t yet read the lot so far, then herewith a guide: -

Liber Null & Psychonaut  and Liber Kaos. These two seminal books revolutionised the theory and practise of magic and they remain indispensable for the modern understanding of it.

Psybermagick. This quirky book explores a variety of strange ideas in variously provocative, offensive, and humorous ways.

The Apophenion and The Octavo. These two books explore the magical imagination and the magical creation of personal realities and the creation of useful gods and goddesses.

The EPOCH. The great triple grimoire of elemental, planetary, and stellar magics embodies the only workable version of the Necronomicon ever brought to this world. This giant book comes replete with full colour illustrations and a separate deck of altar sized cards for evoking or invoking just about anything the magician may require.

Interview with a Wizard. A book about almost everything, the distillation of a lifetime’s experience in 365 questions and answers, plus the probably correct alternative to the big bang theory in the appendix.

(For all these books see the Publications pages on this site)

Singularities?    

Using a little known tool developed by Kurt Godel, one of the world’s most outstanding logicians who remains famous mainly for his Incompleteness Theorem and his decent into madness, I have created a seasonal present for the world, - a remedy for all those pesky singularities that plague our physics and our understanding of the universe.

THE ANTI-SINGLARITY THEOREMS.

We must remain highly suspicious of any theory which asserts that an infinite amount of any physical quantity exists. We can never observe an infinite quantity of anything, and we have no reason to suppose that an infinite quantity of anything can exist. The concept only arises when we introduce it by mistakenly assuming that something else has no limits or by erroneously dividing something by nothing.

If spacetime and mass/energy have a mutual dependency, then we have no reason to assume that spacetime exists independently and infinitely beyond the presence of mass/energy.  

Contemporary theoretical physics suffers from the delusion that mass/energy can become concentrated in an arbitrarily small volume, including zero volume. This has led to the assumption that black holes must contain singularities and that this universe arose from a zero dimensional singularity and the assumption that fundamental quanta can exist as zero dimensional point particles.

The Schwarzschild  Solution of General Relativity: -

r = 2Gm/c^2 shows that an event horizon at radius r will arise when a given mass m collapses to that radius under its own gravity creating a black hole.

The Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems assert that nothing can prevent further collapse and thus that a spacetime singularity consisting of a zero-dimensional point of infinite density must inevitably form within any black hole.

The Godel Solution of General Relativity: -

w = 2sqrt(piGp) does however indicate that something will prevent the collapse of matter into spacetime singularities. 

 ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity (w) of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant (G) times the density (p)’.

As matter becomes denser, spacetime curvature increases and a compact body acquires a radius excess which gives it more volume on the inside than an outside observer would expect from its exterior radius by assuming 4/3 pi r^3 for flat Euclidian space.

When a body contracts to r = 2Gm/pi c^2  (or pi r = 2Gm/c^2) the radius excess makes its internal ‘diameter’ equal to half of its circumference and the body becomes a Glome Hypersphere. With a volume of 2pi^2 r^3 or 2L^3/pi where L means antipode distance.

The Godel Metric w = 2sqrt(piGp) then supplies the internal metric of such hyperspheres in the reference frame of internal observers, and it shows that such bodies must have an angular velocity w.

Substituting hypersphere volume into the Godel metric shows that a Glome hypersphere will rotate with an angular velocity of pi c/L and hence a frequency f of c/2L and have balanced centripetal and centrifugal accelerations a of c^2/L.

Given that: -    w = 2sqrt(piGp),  w = 2pi f,   p = mass m/volume v,    2Gm/L = c^2

And that hypersphere volume v = 2L^3/pi

Then: -    w = 2sqrt(piGp),         w^2 = 4pi^2Gm/2L^3,            w^2 = pi^2c^2/L^2,

w = pi c/L,        2pi f = pi c/L,      f = c/2L,    a = c^2/L.

The mass inside a Glome hypersphere does not rotate as a simple sphere with a single axis of rotation, but rather it rotates about the randomly orientated axes of the Hopf Fibration.

Hence such Glome Hyperspheres cannot contract any further because that would cause them to rotate faster than light. This falsifies the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems for both black holes and the universe as a whole.

If the mass of the universe remains constant, then so does its size, despite appearances. (See the Hypersphere Cosmology redshift-distance and hyperspherical lensing relationships.)

Now if such hypersphere mechanics forbids the formation of spacetime singularities at cosmic and astronomical scales then it most likely also forbids the formation of fundamental zero dimensional point particles. Yet we cannot usefully regard quanta as miniature cannon balls.

Quanta also have characteristic wavelengths many orders of magnitude greater than the antipode lengths suggested by L = 2Gm/c^2 for such particles. Yet the wavelengths of quanta have a directional quality which we most commonly observe in the direction of propagation rather than transverse to it.

The following calculation shows that given the Planck-Einstein relationship E = hf and the Godel metric w = 2sqrt(piGp), quanta with mass have a definite volume: -

Given that: -  E = hf,    w = 2sqrt(piGd),   w = 2pi f,   E = mc^2,   p = mass m/volume v

Then: -      f = mc^2/h,         w = 2pi mc^2/h,         2pi mc^2/h = 2sqrt(piGm/v),  

pi^2 m^2c^4/h^2 = piGm/v,       pi mc^4/h^2 = G/v,

v = Gh^2/pi mc^4       

This closely matches the Einstein-Cartan volume of a quantum ~ Gh^2/mc^4  (derived by other means).

Thus, it seems probable that quanta embody a hyper-geometrical component in their probably variable dynamic geometry, rather than existing as simple 3-sphere Glome Hyperspheres. Rotating Hypertoruses of some kind may supply a solution. Research continues.

As quanta have a spatial volume, then that volume sets yet another limit to the compressibility of matter and its maximum possible density. This also sets a minimum bound for the mass of any black hole.

Merry Solstice, Alban Arthan, Mithrasmas, Christmas, or whatever; from Stokastikos, Pete.

Novblog 2022

Weather The unseasonably mild weather has occasioned an unscheduled last break down at our Welsh coastal hideaway and by the edge of a wood against the dunes I met the parasol mushroom of a lifetime Macrolepiota procera

COP 27 Agreeable as the recent weather may have seemed, we must not forget that it comes as a side effect of increasing climate disruption due to anthropogenic global warming. Globally we still burn a thousand barrels of oil per second - every second of every day, and also perilous volumes of gas and coal. The future of civilisation lies at stake, its future simply does not add up on current projections – flood, rising sea levels, drought, devastating heatwaves, wildfires, desertification, ecological and agricultural collapse, famine, mass migration, and war will all continue to increase until well after we have stopped burning fossil fuels. The climate catastrophes currently devastating the polar and tropical/equatorial regions of the planet will increasingly afflict the temperate regions as well in the near future.

Yet nearly all politicians still believe they have to deliver economic growth now rather than the medium term survival of civilisation, and this prevents them making the massive and immediate commitments to clean energy we so desperately need now. 

Lithonia A last tour of the Lithonian naval spaceship yards coincided with the arrival of the ancient dreadnought the LSN Varspik. Long presumed lost in space, this vessel disappeared 256 years go. As it limped into dock after its epic odyssey, its furious AI Ship-Mind lamented that 73% of its droids had become dysfunctional, noted that it was fortunate it hadn’t carried any animal crew, and it demanded an upgrade to its lousy antique relativistic navigation equipment.

Forgive me, the nights grow long. As a kid I would always discard the irritating instructions that came with any plastic kit model aircraft or ship I was given and built it to my own imaginations. Now in my dotage I eschew plastic entirely and create from recycled junk and scrap.  

Review - of Interview with a Wizard - on Amazon by Jozef.

This book is a true gem that brings a touch of the authentically Chaoist perception of the reality. Not only in content, but also in form. Magic, physics, politics, psychology, history, technology, cosmology, and lots of humour. The questions are thematically mixed in different ways, they don't create huge monothematic blocks, which was a great idea and adds a chaos magical flavour.

However, this is not random rambling. The whole reveals a philosophically holistic Pete's view on reality, which does not derive primarily from theories, but from experience and decades of bare Chaos Magic practice. This perspective is unique and cannot be precisely labelled; it is the result of a fruitful life dedicated to magic.

The emphasis here is on fruitful. I can say with a clear conscience that Chaos Magic, as presented here, is one of the few magical currents, if not the only one, that in its application and true function expands, enriches, and vitalizes life, not the other way around. Along with this, and importantly, it is consistent with our current empirically based knowledge in, for example, psychology (Steven C. Hayes), statistics and probability (Nassim Taleb), and others.

The occasional criticism of Chaos Magic that I hear is that it has no roots and is just a confused postmodern creation. My argument is exactly the opposite, that Chaos Magic is currently one of the few, if not the only, authentic continuation of the magical tradition. This book is a proof of that. The magical tradition has never been based on a blind adoption of something from the past, nor has it been based on religious dogma. It has always been eclectic, creative, and sought to integrate up-to-date knowledge from other disciplines. This is convincingly demonstrated in Stephen Flowers' book Hermetic Magic or in the Ronald Hutton books.

Last but not least, Interview is also a highly practical book. There are gems in the answers regarding magical practice that I didn't find in Pete's other books. This is probably due to the way Ian Blumberg-Enge asked the questions, as he doesn't appear to be a long-time practitioner of Chaos Magic, but he has an incisive, inquisitive mind and is able to capture the essence well. In doing so, he extracted particularly interesting details from Pete. This makes the book suitable for complete beginners who want to learn what Chaoism and Chaos Magic are all about, as well as for experienced practitioners who are inspired to augment their own practice.

Pete can be proud of his legacy and the significant mark he has left on the Western magical tradition. He seems to have single-handedly reshaped it - forever and definitely.

Available here https://www.amazon.com/Interview-Wizard-Peter-J-Carroll/dp/1914153154

And here https://mandrake.uk.net/interview-with-a-wizard/

Quantum Biology and Magic.

For many years most theorists have dismissed the possibility of significant non-classical quantum effects occurring in biological systems. They have generally reasoned that the warm temperatures, and the wetness and the chemical interactions would instantly cause the decoherence of any ‘interesting’ quantum states.

Yet IF the brain and biological systems do use some of the non-classical properties of quanta like indeterminacy, superposition, entanglement, coherence, and spatial and/or temporal non-locality, then it becomes far more interesting IF that can explain something about 'consciousness' and parapsychology which seem to have similarly non-classical properties.

These two big IFs have become something like holy grails for many contemporary esoteric theorists.

The Penrose-Hameroff  hypothesis of Orchestrated Objective Reduction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction

Postulated a possible basis for a quantum component to consciousness, but the hypothesis lacked much experimental support and attracted widespread criticism.

However, a correspondent recently sent me this: -

‘Experimental indications of non-classical brain functions.’

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/ac94be

Experimentalists seem have discovered a measurable quantum coherence signal in the brain synchronized with the heartbeat, and not due to classical effects. This occurs only in the brain's neural tissues, and it changes radically when the subject falls asleep.

Plant biologists seem to increasingly agree that plants use quantum superposition and non-locality to hugely increase the efficiency of their photosynthesis. It seems that they exploit the superposition/non-locality of excited electrons created by incoming photons of light to catch them exactly where they need them at their chemical synthesis sites. Virtually all life on earth depends on photosynthesis and this seems to depend on non-classical quantum effects.

If plants can exploit quantum strangeness, then we should expect animals to do so as well.