My Years of Magical Thinking by Lionel Snell.

A Review.

If you look up ‘Magical Thinking’ on the internet, the first several dozen entries take a uniformly negative view of it. Scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists tend to regard Magical Thinking as something foolish, childish, or primitive, whilst religious commentators tend to regard it rather negatively as some misguided precursor to proper religion.

However Lionel makes a very strong case for Magical Thinking as a very necessary way of understanding the world and of interacting with it. He also demonstrates that we all use the magical style of thinking, and use it effectively, far more often than we realise, although we do tend to call it by other names, and shy away from fully exploiting it.

Until the advent of this book nobody had managed to properly and inclusively define Magical Thinking. ‘Magical Thinking’ seemed like something you sort of hopefully acquired by osmosis through studying and practicing magic. Unlike ‘Scientific Methods & Principles’ which we can state and teach explicitly, the magical style of thinking remained ill-defined until this seminal book.

So many magical books seem unsatisfactory and this book shows us why. So many of the older and newer magical books failed to encompass real magical thinking and ended up as confusing and confused tomes of either bad science or poor religion or dodgy art, or mixtures thereof.

Perhaps only a thinker such as Lionel, fluent in science, art, magic and religion, and with the keen analytical mind of a mathematician, could have precisely identified what ‘Magical Method & Principles’ actually consist of, precisely how they differ from the methods and principles of science, art, and religion, and how they provide a distinctive and powerful way of interacting with reality.

I had gradually come to assimilate and appreciate some of the methods and principles of magic over the course of a career but to see the whole lot and more, the entire philosophy of it, all in one place, came as a revelation.

I refuse to try and summarise the book here, you must read it yourself, preferably at least twice. Lionel’s exposition of the relationships between art, religion, science, and magic has tremendous depth and subtlety and explanatory power. Most fascinatingly he argues that magical thinking naturally follows on from scientific thinking in a cyclic fashion, rather than acting as some distant precursor for it.

Nobody should attempt to write another book of magic or about magic, until they have thoroughly studied and understood this one.

This book looks like a game-changer.

Pete Carroll.

2017 seems to have begun with Visions and with fading Visions.

Perhaps we should speak of Imaginations rather than Visions, because Inspirations do not necessarily come in visual form.

MAGIC

My esoteric year began on Stokastimass, January 8^th with an Invocation to The Morrigan, Goddess of Love, War, and Death, (Venus, Mars, Saturn) the Celtic equivalent of Ishtar/Eris. Does she really exist? WELL SHE DOES NOW! (Subject of course to suitable results from the various spells cast by the 15 participants physically present at the rite.)

In terms of the EPOCH chaobala scheme it would seem that many of the polytheistic deities outside of the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon actually correspond to tri-planetary aspects (or more) of the human psychocosm, and that does imply a rather large number of them. Indeed, it can probably accommodate just about any deity/goddess/god form in a way that traditional neo-platonistic kabala, hermeticism or gnosticsm cannot easily do. If I had another lifetime to spare, I would attempt to adumbrate the whole lot. Celtic, Mayan, Polynesian, etc., etc., etc.

An Invocation of Nyarlathotep coordinated via internet by participants on several continents via Arcanorium College on January 21^st produced some astonishing results. For me the insight that Imagination not Will shall prevail in the pandaemonaeon of post-truth, para-rational politics, and information overload in religions, sciences, arts, and esoterics, came to the fore. Other participants received inspirations about where contemporary magi should direct their imaginations next.

POLITICS

We have just seen a newly re-visioned Tungsten Theresa launch herself and her nation, Elizabeth the First Style, against the insipid tyranny of the EU. I hope it works. The EU never really had a strong positive vision of itself. It failed to forge a European identity that captured its people’s imaginations. We just got a vast bureaucracy that works lousily and a malfunctioning currency. Thus, regional identities, idiosyncrasies and economic needs have reasserted themselves; the Germans will probably end up with an EU consisting of just East Germany and West Germany. The grandiose project to resuscitate the Holy Roman Empire seems doomed for the n^th time.

Theresa May has the awesomely good fortune to have Jeremy Corbyn as her main domestic opponent. Corbyn has failed to grasp that the British appreciation of fairness depends on reciprocity rather than equality, and thus he remains mired in a vision of faux 1970’s student Marxism. The British do not actually mind if people become rich, so long as they spread it around and pay taxes. Nobody knows what vision the Illiberal Dimocrats have, and neither do they. UKIP at least had visions of what it vehemently did not want, blue UKIP did not want loss of sovereignty, and red UKIP did not want uncontrolled immigration and the outsourcing of manufacturing. Whilst I worked for them, I considered myself Purple UKIP, a bit of both. They have probably done their job now. Give Nigel Farage an Hereditary Peerage. Pelt Nicola Sturgeon with crap in the stocks for treason, her position makes no sense beyond faux tartan sectarian troublemaking.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic Donald Trump has assumed the office of POTUS with a visionary acceptance speech. Instinctively (as a businessperson) I tend to trust businesspeople over politicians because businesspeople always calculate costs, whereas with politicians, ideological insanity so often prevails.

Although Trump obviously belongs to the American financial elite, he can see clearly that current policies have screwed the less elite, who form his customer and employee and supporter base, and like any sensible businessperson, he wishes to redress the balance. As Henry Ford once observed, you need to enable your staff to buy your own products. Your average American now has to buy cheap imports from China. This does not seem sustainable.

Of course, all the privileged Hollywood luvvies and rich liberals have predictably come out against Trump yet it seems likely that Trump will only roll back those items of the ‘Liberal Agenda’ that have begun to fail socially and economically: -

The neo-liberal economics of uncontrolled free trade need questioning.

The neo-con-liberal idea that a western style democracy must fit all sizes and that we must therefore use military might to impose it seems in severe need of a cost-benefit analysis.

The liberal social agenda of rights rather than responsibilities needs a rethink.

The big-government politically correct health and safety nanny state, and the hyper-regulation that seem in danger of infantilising whole populations needs sweeping away.

The economic migration, which fuelled developing economies, now needs reconsideration.

The so-called positive discrimination in favour of minorities and multiculturalism need re-examination.

Culturalism needs reasserting. The liberal idea that we should respect other people’s beliefs and cultures has become perfidious, particularly when those others exhibit either no respect or envious hatred of ours. Any multiculturalism that supports the suppression of women or the primacy of theocratic principles does not deserve any respect or toleration.

Worldwide we seem to progress towards a fresh model of CAPITALIST NATIONALISM with variable degrees of mixed economy. In this, States encourage indigenous private enterprise, provide varying degrees of social security, and ‘negotiate’ bilateral economic, security, and dominance arrangements with other States.  Both Russia and China belatedly came to successfully pursue this policy just as Europe and America had mistakenly relaxed it and opened their borders to uncontrolled capital, manufacturing, and population movements.  

A new western world order seems in the making and it seems appropriate that Britain as the most senior of modern democracies should have led the way towards a new settlement. In Britain, we have, after centuries of struggle, pragmatically cobbled together a peculiarly sophisticated yet largely unwritten constitutional arrangement. In this we have evolved a stable balance between monarchy, parliamentary democracy, judiciary, labour and capital, that allows us to change our rulers and our political direction with minimal casualties. In Britain the membership and influence of extreme right and extreme left political groups remains negligible. On the continent things begin to look nasty.

The EU tried to impose a polity upon Europe using an insipid ideology and a mega-bureaucracy, and it looks like it will now go down very messily and perhaps bloodily into history’s wastepaper basket.

MAGIC again

Jake Stratton Kent has unfortunately written yet another book on magic for the aeonically challenged. He began his career with so-called English Kabala, supposing that the letters of the English alphabet and their modern ordering somehow embodied intrinsic thelemic esoteric secrets rather than just representing an accidental historic mash up that has evolved from many roots. Sure, you can submit any alphabet to Kabbalistic procedures to create a bit of lateral thinking and apophenia, however random kabbalas work just as well as supposedly sacred ones in this respect.

After English Kabala failed to provoke enlightenment, JSK reinvented himself as the UKs Grimoire-ologist in chief, and the results seem similarly weak. Our understanding of magic has moved on from the late medieval and early modern periods and thus a regurgitation of ideas from those times in ‘Pandemonium: A Discordant Concordance of Diverse Spirit Catalogues by Jake Stratton-Kent’ adds nothing to our understanding of magic in theory or practice, although it will look suitably gothic to the gullible on a bookshelf.

I wish JSK a long life, hopefully within decades he may stumble upon late 20^th century magic and then perhaps 21^st century magic some decades after that, and perhaps eventually he will write ‘Pandaemonaeon, a Chaobala for Modern Times’, which may well regurgitate The EPOCH, a mere century after its publication.

SPECULATIVE SCIENCE

The Hopf Fibration probably represents the trajectories of material within a vorticitating hypersphere such as this universe, and it possibly relates to the modes of fundamental particle behaviour.

This means I shall now probably have to master quaternion and perhaps octonion algebra, groan. However, on the bright side another mathematician has joined me in the quest.

See http://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/216-hopf-fibrations

New Year’s Address 2017

Literary News.

1) Penumbra Livros have just published Liber Null and Psychonaut in Brazil in Portuguese. My hardback sample copies arrived as a surprise present on xmas eve, it all looks very well done with the diagrams beautifully reproduced. Although I cannot read the text, the emails I’ve had from the translators indicate their fluency in English, so I guess the translation will have come out equally well done.

http://www.penumbralivros.com.br/nossos-livros/liber-null-psiconauta-peter-carroll/

2) I have just read the latest draft of ‘My Years of Magical Thinking’ by Lionel Balgrave Snell, aka Ramsey Dukes, aka Dr Wunlita Suzuki (and no end of other aliases) who must surely rank as the finest metamagical theoretician currently, or perhaps ever, incarnate. In this masterly summary and exposition of a lifetime of magical thought, Lionel muses deeply on the relationships between art, science, magic, and religion. You may not find much of immediate practical use in this tome but it certainly expands and contextualises the magical way of thinking as a distinct and increasingly relevant way of relating to perceived reality. Lionel told me he had tried to write about magic for the general reader in this latest book. He may achieve that, in places he digresses into magical thinking strategies in the dark arts of politics and marketing, yet I will always regard him as ‘The Thinking Magician’s Magician’, the wizard who looks into the ideas behind the ideas, and as such he may well go down in history as the 20^th & 21^st century’s version of Paracelsus.

I found his idea of the symmetry between scientific ‘falsifiability’ and religious ‘non-believability’ stimulating, and wondered if that symmetry might extend to ‘improbability’ in magic and ‘dislikability’ in art. Each discipline need to find the appropriate level of such things and ‘modern’ art seems to have tried to enhance its exclusivity by going heavy on the dislikability.

Hopefully Lionel will publish MYOMT sometime in this coming year.

3) A Robert Anton Wilson Biography by Gabriel Kennedy may perhaps appear this year. http://www.rawillumination.net/2016/04/propanon-man-behind-new-raw-bio.html

I have passed on a few reminiscences from my meetings with Bob; and some contacts to those who knew him for the project. RAW had a very seminal impact on the lineage of ideas from which much of Chaos Magic took its inspiration. RAW did apparently join the IOT Pact along with William Burroughs and Dr Richard Alan Miller towards the end of their lives but I understand that in Bob’s case this probably meant a largely honorary position.  

Magical News.

The ancients happily invoked various gods and goddesses for technical and political advice, how to catch game, when or whether to wage war and son on.

In the dreary monotheist aeons, humanity seems to have scaled back its expectations and merely contented itself with creating deities to advise on quotidian matters of personal and social morality and emotional wellbeing.

All this will change this coming months when psychonauts from Arcanorium College get down to the serious business of invoking the Elder Gods of the Necronomicon Mythos to ask some questions of a more serious nature concerning technical matters about life, the universe, and everything.

On Wednesday I shall present a challenge to the assembled philosophers and metaphysicians of The Salon in this city: - the idea that Neoplatonism perhaps needs replacing as the default spiritual/metaphysical idea of the west.

Politics

2017 shapes up to become the year when neo-liberal economics and social liberalism go into reverse. The neo-liberal economics forged in the Thatcher-Reagan years seem to have eventually delivered economic decadence. Free-trade has hollowed out the manufacturing capacity of developed nations and left their economies dependent on service industries and property investment. Only the very rich in developed economies and some of the poor in developing economies have really prospered from this.

In developed nations, social liberalism has similarly promoted social decadence. Multiculturalism and minority ‘rights’ have eroded social cohesion. The nanny states have increasingly replaced responsibilities with ‘rights’, and the inevitable backlash approaches.

‘Globalisation’ has failed rather badly because uncontrolled market forces act mainly to the benefit of those few people able to exploit them. The EU has failed to benefit the majority of its citizens and this coming year will probably see it unravel further.

A Europe predicated upon the exclusion of Russia has never made much sense anyway. Donald Trump’s desire to seek a rapprochement with Russia could well show Europe the way. All three blocs have far more to worry about in the shape of Chinese geo-political ambitions and Islamic militancy.

Of the four major blocs in the world, Europe seems the weakest player as this year’s round opens. Whilst it still has a large but sluggish economy it remains militarily weak and unwilling. The EU experiment has failed miserably and needs replacing with practical trade and defence treaties because the attempt to impose political union by mega-bureaucracy has failed.

Global warming becomes ever more alarming. Despite what they say, the world’s politicians seem determined to avoid an economic downturn by reducing fossil fuel use, and instead they have pinned their hopes on technical solutions evolving without enormous investments.

That seems like a huge gamble, we desperately need massive improvements in renewable energy technologies, efficient solar plants, massive wind and tidal power projects, better battery storage facilities and so on.

Hypersphere Mechanics.

Hypersphere Mechanics proceeds apace; if it doesn’t get falsified then a book explaining the behaviour of both the entire universe and fundamental particles using the same principle may eventually emerge.

See the latest here http://vixra.org/abs/1612.0069 at the home of rebel scientific publication.

Every quantum has a spinning hypersphere in its heart.

I don’t know where this will all lead; it began with a youthful intuition, when looking up at the stars having just learned about atoms. Hermes Trismegistus’ assertion of ‘As Above, So Below’ added encouragement when I started to read Hermetics.

So far it has generated the result that the universe has no temporal boundaries, merely a temporal horizon, so it must have already spawned almost unimaginably advanced intelligences of almost unimaginable age. Quantum effects may permit communication….. and they may also explain the strange and erratic phenomena of magic.

A caterpillar inflicted moderate damage to the middle sized of the three mandrakes; I wonder if it got stoned whilst doing so, I repositioned it outside in the garden, having a moral rule against destroying higher life forms to save lower ones. Slugs and snails go into adjoining woodland. This rule of course allows me to eat anything.

When someone said that “90% of science fiction was crap” the Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon replied “90% of everything is crap”. This has become known as ‘Sturgeon’s Law’. It seems generally true, just look at most architecture, most books, most music, most of what appears on television, most of the things politicians say, most of the uninhabitable planets in the galaxy.

However it also seems a pretty hard law to live up to as it means achieving an average of two hours and twenty four minutes of personal excellence every day, a tough call.

Review. The Dr Strange film.

I had both eagerly awaited this and dreaded what Hollywood might do with it. The Dr Strange comics played some part stimulating my youthful interest in magic. As expected the film uses a vast amount of CGI to depict the effects of magic but these occur mainly in astral and mirror worlds or the dark dimension, so ordinary reality does not get too non-believably distorted. The ‘Energy Paradigm’, as they call it in magical circles, remains hotly disputed with many including myself preferring the ‘Information Paradigm’ in which magical ‘energy’ appears only as an imaginative metaphor for effects which do not actually depend on ‘energy’ at all.

The scriptwriting and storyline seemed both sufficiently similar yet interestingly different enough to the Marvel Comic stories to prove engaging, look out for some Lovecraftian touches to the plot. Plus it looked pretty damn good in 3D.

I don’t know why the Eye of Agamotto appeared as green though.

P.S. For the wizard in your life get the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, order soon for xmas. http://www.esotericon.org/

By the grace of Azathoth and partly thanks to a wearying dose of flu that left me idly playing with algebra under the duvet, something coherent seems to have come through on the Quantum Hypersphere front. See it here http://vixra.org/abs/1611.0133 at the home of rebel scientific publishing.

Basically it shows that we can recover the basic fundamental equation of quantum physics by treating quanta as hyperspheres, (‘magnified’ by the Uncertainty/Indeterminacy Principle), that ‘rotate’ in exactly the same way as the entire vorticitating hyperspherical universe, thus revealing a deep and unsuspected* symmetry between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Everything spins. Spin and Spacetime mutually uphold each other, and matter and energy arise from their interaction.

(*Well actually I intuited that at age 14 having learned about atoms and then staring at the stars. Now half a century down the line some maths finally emerges.)

At Arcanorium College www.arcanoriumcollege.com we prepare for a second expedition into the Necronomicon realm of the Elder Gods to seek the Gods of the Future and whatever eldritch secrets they may choose to impart. The preparations will take a month or so; so time to build instruments and amass sanity points ready for January. Courageous Psychonauts may apply.

A family holiday in Crete in October proved fascinating. The island probably inspired Plato to write of Atlantis. The Minoans seem to have had a very agreeable bronze age culture, they worshipped a goddess whose name we do not know and who probably didn’t hold a pair of snakes (it seems that the British archaeologist Arthur Evans reconstructed 2 figurines doing that because he thought they looked more pagan that way, but all the other goddess statues have outstretched arms) The Minoan culture seemed fairly peaceful, the cities didn’t have walls and we haven’t found much weaponry. There doesn’t seem much evidence of sacrifice except votive offerings of cute little bronze and pottery animals. Cretan ‘bullfighting’ didn’t involve killing the bull, just a display of bravery by getting yourself tossed over its back. Bronze axeheads feature everywhere as both ceremonial and actual tools but these look far more like tree felling axes than battleaxes and tree felling must have featured as a very significant activity for an agricultural society on a heavily wooded island. Minoan culture, like the mythical culture of Atlantis, came to an abrupt end ~1,240BC, probably due to catastrophic earthquakes and/or the explosion of the Santorini volcano and subsequent tsunami.

The three Mandragora Autumnalis that came as seeds from a wizard in Greece have sprouted on cue at Samhain again for their 4^th year. They don’t seem to like the British climate, they grow only very slowly and now resemble small parsnips, and they haven’t flowered yet, but this year they have a space in the greenhouse rather than the kitchen window.

Happy new POTUS to all my American correspondents. A Clinton victory would have meant more of the same which doesn’t work. The parallels with the Brexit result seem worth noting, both phenomena depended heavily on the issue of Globalisation. We haven’t managed Globalisation at all well, and now the furious people have elected politicians who say that they will manage it. The religious right have inconsequential influence in the UK but they can hardly claim a victory in the person of Trump. Sovereignty proved a significant issue in Britain; we didn’t want to become swallowed up in the failing superstate of the EU. However as Archdruid Greer USA points out, the sovereignty of the states in the face of an overbearing and out of touch federal government played a part in Trump’s victory too.

I don’t imagine that as a businessman Trump will start any wars that do not have a good expectation of making a profit. An alliance with the Russians against the common enemy of civilisation in the Middle East seems like a good idea. If I held the presidency of Mexico I’d build that wall myself to prevent the vast exchange of drugs for guns that has so badly scarred my own society.

Trump’s climate change policies do however give cause for alarm.

Nevertheless he likes Britain and he has already bought parts of Scotland, and he likes our dear old Nigel Farage.

The autumnal solstice passes, the best weather seems over for the year, the days get shorter and gloomier and a chill invades the air. Somehow, personal spring equinox resolutions to eat a protein only diet and to exercise furiously seem to fade now, slobbery and warmth beckon. As a species we have not given ourselves the luxury of fattening up and hibernating till the climate improves, the bills still need paying. Still, at least we have midwinter socialisation and feasting and commerce to look forward to.

Yet we do now have artificial lighting and spectacles, and stored carbohydrates seem to stimulate the brain, do the best discoveries occur in the dismal darkness of winter?

A number of interesting developments have occurred: -

Turdcrete, a composite sculptural material of my own devising consisting of roughly equal volumes of Portland cement and sieved fibrous compost, plus a small amount of water (handle it with rubber gloves) has proved an excellent craftworking material, see above examples. It handles like clay and sets like weak concrete and it looks like baked earth. I gave an autumnal course in its use to local enthusiasts and the professional potter amongst them became very enthusiastic about its possibilities.

Both pieces contain soft iron scrap wire. The Giacometti style figure also has a lump of lead in the base as well. The cauldron piece got stolen from the semi-public workspace. How thrilling, I have never offered artwork for sale but someone has actually stolen a piece (easily replaced), validated as an artist at last!

According to Weiser’s recent royalty statements, Liber Null and Liber Kaos have together clocked up sales of over sixty thousand, although as Gordon kindly points out these act as primers for the more difficult and challenging aficionado material in The Apophenion and The Octavo and The EPOCH.

http://runesoup.com/2015/04/chaos-magic-fracking-the-spirit-world/

Since rather publicly disowning the shambles that the Ineffectualists Of Transgression* have descended into since my retirement from them, I have received an invitation from apparently the next level of the Illuminati, well they seem to have an awesome amount of academic and intellectual firepower going for them. They say that if you search long and hard enough for the Illuminati you will eventually find yourself in it.

(*Contrary to the impression that some may have gained from the recent crop of Blog of Baphomet blogs, real magic barely concerns itself with the trivial phenomena of XI⁰ and chemognosis.)

The quest to understand the microcosm, has taken an interesting turn;

Perhaps we can unite the Azathothian quantum Gnosis with the Yog-Sothian cosmological Gnosis; -

See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301197960_Quantum_Entanglement_on_a_Hypersphere

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283349888_THE_BORSUK-ULAM_THEOREM_EXPLAINS_QUANTUM_ENTANGLEMENT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsuk%E2%80%93Ulam_theorem

If fundamental particles do have the same hyperspherical nature as the universe itself on the macro scale, then the Borsuk-Ulam theorem may have much to offer. If mapping from n to n-1 dimensions creates the apparent phenomenon of quantum entanglement and superposition then we can probably do a lot with the idea of fundamental particles as quantum hyperspheres (as both 3-spheres in space and 3-spheres in time), despite the illusion that we inhabit a mere 3D space and 1D time metric on casual inspection, (and which can appear gravitationally/geometrically flat if you accept the crazy phlogiston riddled expansion hypothesis).

Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.

Or

Whatever is below is similar to that which is above. Through this the marvels of the work of one thing are procured and perfected.

As Hermes Trismegistus wrote on the Emerald Tablet

We might just get some tech or magic out of this eventually.

Lastly, I remain provisionally impressed with our new UK Prime Minister. Britain has usually done well under Queens; Elizabeth 1, Victoria, and Thatcher all left this Sceptered Isle a better place than they found it. Will Theresa May prove our new Gloriana? These days all political careers tend to end in failure, but she has made a sensible and resolute start.

Lughnasadh

 In this season of Harvest Festival a number of items seem to have come to fruition.

Tarot. I recently received a copy of the Chaos Magic Tarot direct from the printers but with no indication of who authorised its dispatch to me (but thanks anyway).

http://www.chaosmagickgroup.com/

If a camel consists of a horse designed by a committee then what do you call a tarot designed by 47 artists? Well it looks CHAOTIC. Some may find it creatively chaotic; others may find it a rather random entropic mess. I remain doubtful about it. The coordinators of the project have stuck to the traditional 4 suites and court cards and 22 trumps and the continuing influence of antique and discredited ideas of the classical elements, astrology, and kabala remains vaguely apparent. Well I suppose occultists can continue to use it for the same old attempts at tarot reading without seriously challenging any paradigms. Overall it looks rather like someone bought 78 different tarot packs and selected one card from each, a lot of bother for no real improvement in principle, plus it doesn’t seem to have the usual accompanying booklet to broaden the users’ appreciation of the images with written exegeses, and some of them seem to have arisen from minimal thought and effort.

I feel a little disappointed that a bunch of self-professed modern Chaoists has fallen back on the old formulaic structure rather than boldly creating something new and imaginative.

Just how much of a hand the Ineffectualists Of Transgression XI⁰ had in this remains unclear, nobody seems to have claimed responsibility.

Graphic images on moveable cards can certainly prove useful for a lot of esoteric purposes beyond sortilege for divination, they can additionally function particularly well as an aid to visualising forms for invocation and evocation, and for this reason Matt Kaybryn and I decided to break with the old tarot structure and do something completely different with EPOCH.

http://www.esotericon.org/

Brexit. The sky has not fallen in since we voted for Brexit, cocked a snook at the Synarchy of big-business and the political class, and demanded back the right to address the challenges of globalisation on our own terms. The export side of my little enterprise has achieved a magnificent harvest over the last weeks as a result of the currency correction.

Frequency. Hypersphere Cosmology on this site has clocked up nearly 1/3 of a million reads with some sign of argumentation or agreement but no sign of a refutation in sight.   For this month’s Ouranian meditations on Arcanorium College I took a fresh look at Cosmological Redshift from the ‘other side’, and it provided an interesting clarification. Redshift of course refers to the increases of wavelength that we can readily observe with spectroscopes and the simplicity of that observation has led to the fundamental misconception underlying standard cosmological models; that the expansion of the underlying spacetime has led to the observed increases. If we had chosen to focus on the accompanying decrease of cosmological frequency shift instead we might have ended up with a very different explanation. Frequency decreases in proportion to cosmological distance, implying a deceleration and this appears quite clearly if we rearrange the Redshift equation to show the Frequency Shift instead, we get the more intuitively obvious: -    

f_o/f_e = c – (dA)^1/2/c

Where f_o = Observed frequency, f_e = Expected frequency, d = Astronomical distance, A = Acceleration due to the small positive curvature of the universe, as appears in the residual Anderson deceleration.

Sculpture. As I have already fashioned a ‘bronze’ of Lugh, this year’s summer sculpture consists of a figurine of The Morrigan. (I need the long hours of natural daylight to work on small fiddly constructions in dark materials).

The Morrigan represents the Celtic Ishtar, goddess of love and war, sex and death, so in the absence of authentic historical Celtic iconography I’ve borrowed a bit from Babylonian and Greek imagery and given her a Raven’s headdress and mask, an instrument of war, and a suggestive fruit in the form of a peach (debate rages over whether the ‘golden apple’ of Eris actually implied an orange or an apple, or another fruit). Inside her milliput form she has skeletal reinforcements of steel and copper wire for war and love, and some sheet aluminium (the Ouranian metal of magic, flight, and extreme amphoteric chemical reactivity) in her headdress. I might arrange a limited edition in bronze if anyone has an interest, they will come out at around a couple of grand each, admittedly rather more than the JV tea towel, but they will last for millennia. 

On what we will remember as Independence Day I voted very early, cast my final spells, and later adjourned to my cabin in cyberpurdah in Wales for a long weekend, hence my lack of early response to the amazing result.

So much of what I heard on the radio sounded like hysteria, sour grapes, denial, or triumphalism, none of it helpful. Politicians and financial markets all stand guilty of over-reaction, but this will pass.

Enough of the British People came forward and simply put Democracy itself before their short term economic interests.

And this despite the frenzied predictions of Project Fear and hollow threats from the EU.

Britain taught the world Democracy, Britain had the first revolution, it put a king’s ‘divine right’ to the axe and invested sovereignty not in a sovereign but in a Parliamentary Democracy, and as a result it has never fallen under Dictatorship.

Thus it seems fitting that Britain should have struck the first serious blow against Synarchy, the continental European delusion that we should hand over government to a largely unelected self-selected clique of people who think they know best.

To the younger people of Britain the Remain campaign made a strong pitch to conflate European culture with European politics. This seemed basically dishonest, whilst European cultures contain much to delight us all, European politics has become disfigured with a Synarchist agenda that plainly doesn’t work and has The Totalitarianism of the Centre as its final federal objective.

Hopefully the EU will now start to disintegrate and become replaced by a limited number of sensible agreements between sovereign democratic nations, each pursuing their own unique contribution to European culture(s), rather than striving for some ghastly vision of Synarchist Monoculture.

To the Scots the SNP made the basically dishonest pitch of ‘The Auld Alliance’ once again, siding with continental European power against the English & Welsh merely to increase its regional bargaining power. This didn’t work in the Scottish referendum, most Scots realised that divorcing from the UK and getting fully into bed with the EU and adopting the euro didn’t actually look like a very attractive proposition at all.

Britain now needs to show Europe what a free democratic nation can do.

So Keep Calm and Carry On.

The only thing worse than Democracy is every other system ever tried – Winston Churchill.