Herewith some Apophenia Votive Figurines posing as garden sprites, the middle one in black milliput over wire served to make a two part plaster mould for the other two cast from molten tin, without excessive collateral damage to the kitchen. The solid tin versions weigh in at over half a pound each. Lead free solder provides a convenient source of 98% tin. The plaster mould did not survive beyond the second casting.

With Immanent Neo-Pagan Deities, portable physical representations always come in handy for evocation or invocation. These figurines will feature in a forthcoming Grove event and in the next project at Arcanorium College.

Apophenia 2 Course, Arcanorium College January 2018

An Invocation of the Goddess Apophenia, She of the peculiar connections between various phenomena/perceptions/concepts/ideas and other phenomena/perceptions/concepts/ideas that ordinary mortals do not commonly perceive. This in support of assorted personal projects/quests/questions, and the execution and/or resolution thereof.

Caveat Emptor: -This may lead to inspiration, genius insight, mistake, or plain craziness.

Metaphysics exists as metaphor for the physical.

(Welcome to Chaos Magic – Post-Neoplatonic Esotericism in the raw.)

Metaphor provides the mechanism by which the mind relates to, and controls, physical reality.

We shall experiment with classical esoteric symbolism, Ars Combinatoria, Zairja, Cut Ups, Chaotic Torsion Pendulums, experimental investments of belief, non-chemognostic methods of hallucination induction, various mechanical, psychological and magical techniques for superposing ideas and concepts and mystical intuitions.

Participants will have to make and do a lot of stuff; and may anticipate finishing the course in a somewhat different state of brain to that in which they entered it.

See www.arcanoriumcollege.com

Mach’s Principle

The three Mandrakes (Mandragora Autumnalis) have exploded into leaf with great enthusiasm in just a week, herewith a picture of the one called Milady, as under the soil she sits with the thighs of her two main roots elegantly crossed.

I do not intend to eat her, when she gets old enough I hope to open a conversation with her.

I have divided my time between horticulture, sculpture (attempting to cast Apophenia in metal, pics to follow when finished), and physical/metaphysical calculations from a Lengian perspective.

Mach’s Principle has hung around on the periphery of our understanding of the universe for 100 years. Qualitatively stated it says that the inertia of any mass arises somehow from the presence of EVERYTHING in the entire universe. It sounds intuitively physically right and metaphysically holistic.

Yet nobody seems to have managed to formulate it quantitatively and mathematically so far.

The dominant Lambda-CDM cosmological model appears as the main problem, if we interpret the cosmological data to mean an expanding universe then the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass seems likely to have varied with time, yet cosmological observations of the deep past seem to rule this out.

However, within Hypersphere Cosmology, (an alternative interpretation of the cosmological data that we have), Mach’s Principle becomes relatively easy to quantify with a simple equation.

The equation appears here in this paper http://vixra.org/abs/1710.0066

Together with some further thoughts upon the nature of time and space.

The equation has lurked within Hypersphere Cosmology for a decade or more, and now seems blindingly obvious, like the discovery of an Unknown Known, and in many ways, it more or less completes the theory of Hypersphere Cosmology, opening the way for an exploration of the quantum aspects of Hypersphere Mechanics in general.

Unknown Knowns – perhaps what you get when you start talking to Mandrakes, Apophenia, and Yog-Sothoth.

Addendum 9/10/17, on further musing this begins to look like a complete armageddon equation for both the standard models of cosmology and particle physics; because not only does it get rid of such pesky theoretical artifacts such as an intial singularity, inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, but it also seems to get rid of the dubious idea of virtual bosons, and the Higgs Mechanism, so that miniscule blip on the di-photon channel at 125 GeV probably doesn't mean a Higgs Boson at all if (inertial) mass arises by the mechanism the equation indicates. 

MOND(H)

We had a pleasant time down at the surf cabin in Wales and met a pair of talkative ravens whilst walking the sea cliffs, and we also saw an adder and some seals. However due to a lack of good surf and a surfeit of rain I found time to call Leng and rewrite Newton’s Laws.

The basic principle of such invocations seems deceptively simple, firstly absorb all human knowledge on a subject of interest and then ask if anything in the universe has anything to add or any corrections to make. One would not want to ask stupid questions or one to which respondents could not reply in comprehensible terms.

The revised laws actually form a logical prequel to Hypersphere Cosmology and render it much more intuitively comprehensible.

In particular they show how a small positive spacetime curvature to the entire universe appears as an acceleration that decreases linear motion but increases the effect of gravity sufficiently to account for a couple of glaring anomalies in conventional cosmological models, and overturn the standard view of material reality.

The resulting paper appears here: -

http://vixra.org/abs/1709.0112

At the home of cutting edge physics, download the PDF and see what you think.

Newton’s third law about every action having an equal and opposite reaction remains unaddressed, however a symmetry of sorts between kinetic and gravitational energy suggests itself, and the universe may possess exactly equal and opposite amounts of each. 1 = 1, or 0 = 1 – 1, from zero cometh a duality?

As Samhain approaches the 3 mandragora autumnalis roots slumbering in my study have developed tiny buds in request for repotting for the winter. They did well in the greenhouse last year and doubled in size, perhaps they will flower and fruit for the first time this coming solstice.

Two book reviews.

The older generation of Chaos Magicians now begin to write their memoirs and histories and their magnum opuses. Heck hasn’t time flown since 1977 when Chaos Magic began to kick off.

I have recently received two such books, one rather good and the other abysmal; The Chaonomicon by Jaq D Hawkins, and Ouroboros by Ray Sherwin respectively.

Review. The Chaonomicon – Quintessential Chaos for the Serious Magician.

190 pages. £13.99.

By Pete Carroll.

Jaq D Hawkins’ Chaonomicon gives a fair sketch of the general history of Chaos Magic without going into excessive detail about the personalities and the inevitable personal squabbles involved. She shows the history and genesis of many of the ideas that came together to create a new way of thinking about magic and new ways of doing it.

The book contains a particularly good analysis of the historic and current functions of the Gods and Goddesses of Chaos, and the relationship between the Chaoism that began in the UK and the Discordianism that began in the USA.

Jaq also includes a chapter on the Chaos Sciences that developed at the same time as Chaos Magic and a fair bit on the life of Austin Osman Spare, artist and freestyle magician, and his techniques.

The Chaonomicon also describes many of the basic techniques of Chaos Magic in simple terms free from occult obscurantism, so readers new to the subject can find much to try out experimentally. Experienced modern magicians and esotericists working in non-dogmatic traditions may well think – yes, I already think and practise in such a paradigm. That perhaps stands as the real tribute to the Chaos Magic. What began as a revolutionary break with ancient, pre-modern, and 1880s received magical wisdom, has for many, become The New Chaos of the Normal.

An Order, The Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros formed to create and disseminate the ideas of Chaos Magic. The creative phase lasted for about five years. The dissemination phase continues and has resulted in the production of hundreds of books and manuscripts that have rendered the original Order irrelevant and now largely defunct.

The advent of Chaos Magic has had about the same effect on magical thinking as relativity and quantum physics has had upon classical science. Not everyone understands such things yet, it but those who do have a better model of reality and Jaq’s book makes Chaos Magic much more accessible.

Review. Ouroboros – A Grimoire – Ray Sherwin

By Pete Carroll.

About 100 pages of very large type and largely irrelevant pictures, overall content equivalent to a single small magazine. £25 (!!!)

The cover of Ouroboros by Ray Sherwin shows a worm eating his own tail and that very aptly describes what Ray has done in this sad, thin, and overpriced book.

If you thought Ray’s previous rant VITRIOL ill-advised and ill-informed you will find this latest offering even worse.

It hardly constitutes a Grimoire for it does not really say much about how to do magic or what sort of magic to do. It has a bit about sigils that fails to clarify his personal approach to them, and rather a lot of ‘mystical poetry’ steeped in paradoxical statements and personal idiosyncrasy. Overall, Ray has seemingly fallen into the lazy trap of declaring his every act an act of magic and of not actually doing any magic at all.

I shared with Ray (previously a scientologist, then a dogmatic thelemite), a set of ideas for a new approach to magic. He later shared with me an idea for a natural products business that he picked up in Cairo. In his typically lazy style, he did not bother to run very far with either of these ideas himself. He declined to contribute to the Chaos current when it adopted a bit of necessary structure as it went international. He did not bother to upgrade his business model when market conditions changed, and he fell out with all his former business and esoteric associates.

Ray never quite understood the full implications of the paradigm shift from the Platonic Pagan-Monotheist model to the new Quantum Neo-Pagan metaphysic, nor the compromises with culture we would have to adopt to disseminate the new paradigm. As Lionel Snell points out so well in MYOMT, magic usually follows on from changes in the scientific paradigm, and Chaos Magic represents the esoteric response to the quantum and relativistic revolution of the 20^th century. Unfortunately, Ray never bothered to appraise himself of any scientific knowledge at all.

Now retired, he languishes in a small villa in the sun in the middle of nowhere, with too much time on his hands and too much time spent on the internet whilst he chews the sour grapes of regret and envy. Having nothing much to say about magic he has descended to scandal mongering, conspiracy theory, and spitting bile about old friends and associates that he lost.

In the absence of any genuine scandal to report, he has sunk to the new low of using material from the paranoid internet rants of a former occultist who has formed a cult of two persons (just himself and his girlfriend) who believe themselves heroic and persecuted campaigners against an imaginary tsunami of satanic ritual abuse. Yes that hoary old discredited chestnut, SRA.

Ray uncritically repeats nonsense from this former occultist; I had to laugh about the dog rape anecdote. This comes from a potty-mouthed fantasist who makes such a strained effort to appear weird and sinister that he just ends up looking foolish and seedy. Sure, frisky dogs will hump anything from people’s legs to the furniture, but according to veterinarians, a dog could not possibly rape a human unless several people restrained and positioned the victim and assisted the dog. Ray you have had your leg pulled.

Ray also adopts this former occultist’s technique of saying that he has knowledge of heinous crimes without actually providing any evidence, references, names, dates, or places. He just tries innuendo and recycled rumour. This technique derives from the worst traditions of lazy Lunchtime O’Booze gutter ‘journalism’. If you have evidence Ray take it to the police, do not hide behind innuendo to protect yourself from derision, or perhaps you fear libel?  

Positive thinking works pretty well but negative thinking unfortunately works even better. Start nurturing regret and envy into paranoia and hatred and they manifest like, well, err, bad magic, and this fill-space offering from Ray does not even rise to the level of lousy magic.

The second expedition to the Necronomicon Mythos by Psychonauts of Arcanorium College continues to produce strange and unanticipated results.

From Hastur I received the following inspiration to complete a task that has bugged me all my life, to make some sort of simulation or boardgame that models the magical quest itself.

I have made many games in the course of a lifetime that model various real and imaginary scenarios, with the underlying thought that if you can identify the mechanisms underlying any system then you can perhaps understand the dynamics of it, and perhaps do it better in the game of ‘real’ life. Strategy Games certainly seem to sharpen the mind, and may bring us some focus on the Human Condition.

Yet most of the games involving magic that I have collected or read the rules of seem unsatisfactory. Magic typically appears only as a combat modifier in battle games, rarely as the focus of an activity or a quest in itself.

In this Hasturian inspired simulation the Elder Gods and their Knowledge and Power stand as metaphors for the abilities we humans seek in the quest for personal and species survival. They represent abilities we need to survive the future, not ghastly eldritch cosmic adversaries bent on our destruction, although with careless use they could have that effect.

Hastur may appear as an empty yellow robed void, countless aeons old, a well of cosmic indifferentism, yet it seems to take an occasional whimsical interest in promising species, perhaps to allay its existential angst awhile.

The concepts of the simulation may seem cruel and cynical; individual questors inevitably die although they may achieve much before senescence and mortality take hold. The numbers used to represent various factors all come from my calculations in an attempt to render the simulation realistic.

Oddly, the whole thing begins to look strangely autobiographical although several treasures still elude me. My own mistakes and that of others have become obvious during the course of many runs of the simulation. The virtues of maintaining a high Sanity, particularly in the early stages of a quest, become all too apparent.

See the Rules and some experimental board and pieces design in the Games section.

Build it, try it, and send feedback and questions. 

The second expedition to the Necronomicon Mythos by Psychonauts of Arcanorium College continues to produce strange and unanticipated results.

From Hastur I received the following inspiration to complete a task that has bugged me all my life, to make some sort of simulation or boardgame that models the magical quest itself.

I have made many games in the course of a lifetime that model various real and imaginary scenarios, with the underlying thought that if you can identify the mechanisms underlying any system then you can perhaps understand the dynamics of it, and perhaps do it better in the game of ‘real’ life. Strategy Games certainly seem to sharpen the mind, and may bring us some focus on the Human Condition.

Yet most of the games involving magic that I have collected or read the rules of seem unsatisfactory. Magic typically appears only as a combat modifier in battle games, rarely as the focus of an activity or a quest in itself.

In this Hasturian inspired simulation the Elder Gods and their Knowledge and Power stand as metaphors for the abilities we humans seek in the quest for personal and species survival. They represent abilities we need to survive the future, not ghastly eldritch cosmic adversaries bent on our destruction, although with careless use they could have that effect.

Hastur may appear as an empty yellow robed void, countless aeons old, a well of cosmic indifferentism, yet it seems to take an occasional whimsical interest in promising species, perhaps to allay its existential angst awhile.

The concepts of the simulation may seem cruel and cynical; individual questors inevitably die although they may achieve much before senescence and mortality take hold. The numbers used to represent various factors all come from my calculations in an attempt to render the simulation realistic.

Oddly, the whole thing begins to look strangely autobiographical although several treasures still elude me. My own mistakes and that of others have become obvious during the course of many runs of the simulation. The virtues of maintaining a high Sanity, particularly in the early stages of a quest, become all too apparent.

Build it, try it, and send feedback and questions. 

Junblog

Just a quickie here as a general election looms.

I do not like the British Conservative Party, nevertheless I always vote for them in parliamentary elections regardless of their candidates or their policies.

I do this because I have a long memory and because I look at what political parties actually do rather than what they say, (all politicians speak with forked tongues).

Every Labour government we have had in the UK since WW2 has left office leaving the country bankrupt. The following Conservative governments have then had to put the economy back together again.

It does seem rather important that that we have a government in a strong enough position to face down the EU by the end of next week and make a success of Brexit.

We do not have a housing crisis in the UK, we have an unsustainable population crisis on this small island with 300K people migrating here each year, but few will openly acknowledge this.

We do not have a funding crisis in the NHS. The UK lies rather high up the international scale of health funding but rather low on the international scale of healthcare delivery. The discrepancy arises from poor organisation. The NHS has far too many pen pushers, administrators and keyboard jockeys, and not enough people on the front line, but few will openly acknowledge this.

The EU gives back to the UK a proportion of the money it takes; however, it gives proportionately more to Scotland which it deems more deserving than say Wales or Cornwall. This fact underlies the stance of the SNP which doesn’t actually want either full independence from the UK and full fiscal responsibility for Scotland, or government from Brussels either, but few will openly acknowledge this.

Anyway, enough of such ephemeral matters, now to eternity: -

The probability space of any quanta in terms of 3-dimensional time comes out at the temporal volume of Gh^2/mc^7 according to my most recent calculation. The precise meaning of this remains to emerge but suffice to say that if no requirement exists for a spherically symmetric distribution then a single quantum could stretch right across the universe in some sense, as in the Transactional Interpretation.

Magic news, the great and good (well those of them that I know) have given their seal of approval to Lionel Snell’s masterful magnum opus ‘My Years Of Magical Thinking’.

On Arcanorium the results of the Shub-Niggurath working continue to come in and we prepare to approach the Necronomicon Mythos entity Hastur on matters of personal, species, and supra-species survival and change. 

Update 9/6/17. Ooops, not a good election result, Brexit may now get messier, however on the bright side comrade Corbyn will not now reduce the nation to bankruptcy and Scottish Independence looks kicked into touch for some while.

Game of Thrones Risk Deluxe.

I enjoyed the Game of Thrones so much that I arranged to receive the board game for xmas. Okay, so it follows the usual Risk format which provides a reasonable ‘beer and pizza’ evening for 5 or 7 student age people if you play it straight. However the beauty of the map and the pieces led me to wonder if I could get more out of it by using it to tell a longer story as a one player game over a number of evenings, rather as one might enjoy reading or writing a novel within defined parameters.

Herewith my rough house rules: -

Setup on the Westeros board only.

Each house occupies all of its own territory, plus use the red pieces for the Iron Islanders.

Use the blue pieces for neutral territories (Vale of Arryn, Riverlands, Stormlands.)

Place the blue citadel on Kings Landing as a second Baratheon citadel.

Each territory generates 1 troop unit, as does each town and each port, citadels generate 3 units.

Each town and port and citadel generates 1 (100) gold.

Ships – I used the galleons out of ‘Civilisation’, you need about 10 ship markers. Each house starts with one, except the Iron Islanders who have 2. They begin and end turns in ports.

At each player turn, 1) adjust forces and income as above. 2) move any troops 1 space within occupied territory. Spend income if desired on fortifications, catapults, knights, reinforcements, or treachery.

Costs, fortifications, catapults, knights, ships, 3 gold each.

Treachery, to subvert an adjoining enemy unit pay 1 gold and throw a 2 or less on a D6, pay 2 gold and throw a 4 or less, or pay 3 gold and throw a 5 or less to change that unit to one of the active players own house. This only works at all if all units on a territory plus knights become subverted, otherwise it all fails, and the gold wasted.

Attack any neighbouring territories from ones you initially own. Ships carrying troops may attack up to 4 ports away, and may sail around the bottom of the map but not the top.

The usual rules of combat apply but with the following modifications, you can employ multiple knights and catapults, so towards the end of the game the 8 sided dice get used more. (you may need an extra 8 sided attack dice)

Citadels offer +2 to defenders on dice but only if the defenders elect to retreat to the citadel for a siege. Attackers can elect not to assault but to lay siege, in which  case they own the territory, towns, and ports associated. If after 3 turns the siege remains in place, the defenders become eliminated.

Naval warfare. If a defender elects to defend an attacked port with ships then each ship can have a fighting crew of up to 3 troops plus up to 3 knights and one catapult if available, it may also carry another 3 troops as transports but not combatants. If a ship losses all three combat troops it becomes sunk, along with transports.

Ships can land troops on any territory to which a white line points even if it doesn’t count as a port, but then the ships must retire to their nearest friendly port.

Undefended ships in ports become automatically captured if attacked by crewed ships.

The single player should play each house in turn, considering the strategic options as they arise. Obviously alliances will become a critical consideration and part of the developing narrative. One simple rule can suffice here; any house breaking the terms of an alliance has to forgo all of its income in its next turn.

Objective- dominate Westeros, or at least form a stable alliance between the surviving houses.

Extra feature, when the last of the blue neutral pieces become eliminated the Undead as blue, begin to invade the The Gift. Roll a D8 to see how many appear each turn. They attempt to move south 1 territory per turn rolling D8s. Destroyed opposing pieces become replaced with undead pieces if they capture territory.