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Winter Solstice Address 2015.
Winter Solstice 2015.
The year ends on several hopeful notes. The Paris Climate Conference has at least resulted in an agreement about the reality of anthropic climate change and the need to prevent it, so two cheers for that. However we should have had a result like this a decade or more ago and effective measures in place by now. Whether or not the recommended measures become implemented and whether or not they can save global civilisation remain open questions. This planet already has a human population level lying terrifyingly in excess of long term sustainability levels even at current rates of resource destruction.
If we wish to avoid a 21st century characterised by resource conflicts, environmental degradation, constant wars and extremist political and religious ideas, we had better fix our climate changing behaviour and our population and consumption levels, because at present the figures for the future simply don’t add up………….to anything except disaster.
The British people should will finally get a referendum on the EU, this coming year or the next, another cheer for that.
UKIP has fulfilled its function, it has forced the other parties to offer a referendum, and now, win or lose, UKIP seems to have little further use. It only ever had one worthwhile policy and everything else seemed like buffoonery. Yet I feel justified in having worked for them in their early years, for now we get to answer the question that most of the political class didn’t want to even ask us: -
Do we wish to remain part of the creeping synarchist totalitarianism of a corrupt, mega-bureaucratic and undemocratic EU that favours only the political class and big business; or do we prefer freedom and democracy?
Any nation that trades its political independence for economic gain will end up losing both, as so many of the smaller nations in the EU have already discovered.
The EU stands built on bluff, fear, lies, and deceit and faux-internationalism. We would lose nothing and regain much by leaving, and Brexit may well bring down the whole rotten edifice.
On a more festive note I have made two seasonal gifts for my fellow humans, firstly a lifesize statue of Hercules who will go on extended loan to some semi-public gardens around here to celebrate the several years of backbreaking toil we have put into renovating it.
Secondly, after two decades of mental toil the Hypersphere Cosmology hypothesis has probably reached its final form, see the recently updated version here: -
http://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
and full paper here: - http://vixra.org/abs/1601.0026
My thanks to all those physicists, both orthodox and alternative, who have exchanged so many emails, criticisms, observations, and related ideas on this subject. The hypothesis now seems reasonably robust and anti-fragile, but please do try to break it if you can, or if not then try challenging your commanding professor with it.
Historical accident has led to the current dominance of the Lambda CDM Big Bang theory. Perhaps if we had discovered the CMBR before we discovered the Cosmological Redshift then Einstein might have stuck with his Riemannian Hypersphere model of the universe with a cosmological constant, and looked a bit further into the properties of the hypersphere to find that he could have stabilised it with a cosmological constant supplied by a 4-rotation (rather than a Gödelian 3-rotation), and that the positive curvature of the hypersphere would itself create a cosmological redshift without any expansion at all. All other observations could then have become interpreted within such a framework to yield a theory such as this.
It may not turn out as the final answer in cosmology but it certainly seems less wrong than the current official model. If nobody manages to falsify it, I shall devote my remaining years of theoretical endeavour to modelling quantum fundamentals and particle physics in terms of three dimensional time, plus of course the related and more difficult matter of a general theory of magic.
At Grove last night many spoke of the Winter Solstice as marking the end of the year, and how much they looked forward to the return of the Sun (despite that so far we have had the mildest winter here for thousands of years). The great megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge, Maes Howe, and Newgrange all plainly align to the Midwinter Solstice, despite that Druid-revivalists tend to look to Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice, and that the megaliths originate from pre-druidical cultures anyway.
But what the heck, all cultures in temperate latitudes seem to evolve some excuse for an end/beginning of year party. The Christians, having no clue about the actual birthday of their saviour decided to slot it in on 25th December to try and supplant Pagan festivals at that season, Mithras’ birthday in particular fell on 25th December. However by this date the sunrise and sunset have started to perceptibly march north again bringing hope of summer and rebirth and all that sort of thing.
Personally I like to consider Winter Solstice as the end of the year, a time to look back on events and then to look forward to Xmas as a celebration of Family and Friends and Commerce, (oops that should have read ‘The Bounty of the Earth’), and then again to celebrate New Year……..sort of Look Back, Look Now, Look Forward.
All the best for the festive season. Pete Carroll.
Addendum 29/12/15. Contrary to widespread rumour, the destruction of Boleskine House (The dread Kaaba of Crowleyanity) and my seasonal visit to Inverness remain not even coincidental. I did indeed visit my eldest in the surrounding highlands over the xmas period, however I arrived there on xmas eve, as my airline booking clearly demonstrates, to find the place already burnt down a day in advance of my visit.
Interregnum.
A pre-solstice blog.
A bit of an interregnum prevails before the festive season. The Knights of Chaos have launched their conjuration in support of the Climate Change Conference in Paris. The festive gifts and cards await dispatch, the Solstice Grove and Eisteddfod loom, and later my clan will gather in the Scottish Highlands this year.
On Arcanorium we prepare to invoke Venus in her many forms, as the first of a sustained series of planetary style workings based on the EPOCH. This seems particularly apposite for the season of love and goodwill towards all creatures.
A new Hypersphere Cosmology 2 paper awaits the attention of my artist and IT friend before it appears here and on viXra.
Whilst waiting for the paint and the sigils to dry on the 54 Lamens of a new Epoch Astronomicon and for the composites to harden on the new lifesize Hercules statue for the gardens, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth provoke further musings upon the hypothesis of 3D time……
This very long term 3D time project seeks to complement the Hypersphere Cosmology thesis which now nears completion, and to make some conceptual improvements and revisions to the Standard Model of particle physics and to quantum fundamentals which currently look very messy, full of seemingly arbitrary constants and short on unifying principles.
The Standard Model predicts that a Higgs Mechanism accounts for some of the mass of mass bearing particles and that the presence of a ‘Higgs Field’ to endow such particles with mass implies that a Higgs particle (the Higgs Boson) will exist. However this flies directly in the face of General Relativity which describes mass as arising from/as spacetime curvature. The General relativistic description works very well indeed although it may require a tweak or two at very high intensities and at very long distances as suggested in Hypersphere Cosmology. The Higgs idea also flies in the face of the hypothesis of 3D time which seeks to geometricate the quanta rather than to quantise gravity.
Plus adding a Higgs Field to the standard Lambda CDM cosmology model looks like creating an even worse mess.
The purported Higgs Mechanism does not seem to even half quantise the inertial or gravitational manifestations of mass, for the Higgs field or boson would have a different coupling constant for each type of particle that it supposedly confers mass upon.
Thus I have volunteered to eat the relevant pages of The Octavo in the event of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Why have I not done so then?
Because I don’t think that little blip in the data at 126GeV indicates a Higgs Boson or a Higgs Mechanism at all, I remain completely unconvinced.
After spending many billions of euros on building the largest most expensive scientific instrument in human history and failing to get anything spectacular or decisive out of a series of exceptionally messy experiments designed by huge Euro- committees, CERN felt under intense pressure to announce something; even if it meant highly selecting the data and then torturing the remaining data statistically till it yielded the appearance of a significant result.
The graph shown here gives a plot of selected proton collisions at various energies which produced a pair of detected gamma ray photons which may have come from a Higgs Boson which itself remains undetectable because it decays almost instantly after its creation.
Note that pairs of gamma ray photons get produced at a large range of energies, the apparent slight peak of them at around 126GeV apparently indicates something of immense significance, the other small anomaly at around 138GeV gets ignored.
Other experiments seem to show slight blips in the numbers of pairs of Z bosons at roughly similar energies.
Despite that the CERN team assert that they have 99.999% confidence that they have found something slightly anomalous at around 126GeV that might correspond to a Higgs Boson, and that the popular science press confidently proclaims the existence of what they have dubbed ‘The God Particle’, the internet and the scientific journals remain alive with dissent.
See this from a worried statistician http://tonyohagan.co.uk/academic/pdf/HiggsBoson.pdf
If the CERN team had conducted similar experiments and statistical analyses with the aim of disproving the existence of significant evidence for a Higgs Boson at these energies they would have succeeded. It remains a theoretical construct in my view, and probably a fallacious one at that.
Why do I care?
I love Science. If the Higgs turns out as a fudge created by a huge committee then many will interpret it as institutional fraud on a vast scale which will have a very detrimental effect on the perception and funding of science.
I love Metaphysics. The quest for the underlying structure and functioning of this mysterious universe never loses its fascination.
I love Magic. A largely dismissive attitude to magic generally prevails and this suits me fine as I therefore cannot get arrested for it. However any general theory of magic will probably require 3D time.
Unknown knowns
The three Mandragora Autumnalis roots awoke around Samhain as usual to produce green shoots, so now after their repotting they reside on a window ledge soaking up the faint autumn sunshine. Perhaps the largest one will flower and produce some seeds this year; they certainly seem to take their time about it.
We serious British pagans don’t do Halloween, that awful American tradition of teaching children to extort with menaces and mock at Death. We do Samhain respectfully on the closest Sunday evening.
Bonfire night passed with a splendid conflagration which did not include an effigy of the Pope this year, as for the first time in centuries we seem to have a decent bloke in the post.
Meanwhile a life size statue of Hercules takes shape in the garage using the old clothing mannequin and Jemsonite trick. He will eventually stand with Flora, the pair flanking an old rustic doorway in the walled garden. He will have a spade and a chainsaw as a modern touch. Pic to follow eventually.
And now to some “Unknown Knowns”. Stuff we don't realise that we already know. This Apophenic concept takes its inspiration from the missing part of Rumsfeld’s Theory of Known knowns, Known unknowns, and Unknown unknowns. (His excuse for the screw up in Iraq.)
We probably already have more than enough of data and theories from which we could distil a much more accurate and useful description of the universe. However the trick lies in intuiting what to select from it all, and how to interpret the bits which apparently don’t fit in a way that they might.
Why do this? Why write The Octavo? What the heck has magic and esoterics got to do with cosmology and quantum physics?
Perhaps everything: - The Natural Philosophers and Wizards of old did not shy away from science in terror of the mathematics, rather in pursuit of a philosophy of nature in its entirety they sought to leave nothing out. Hermes Trismegistus (who may have consisted of a committee), John Dee, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, Isaac Newton and all the rest of them, took a keen interest in the workings of the material world and only the most myopic of contemporary quantum and cosmological physicists fail to muse and speculate upon the metaphysical implications of their disciplines.
A Speculation: - Hypersphere Cosmology depends on spacetime curvature. The hypothesis of Three Dimensional Time depends on torsion (spin). Einstein-Cartan theory includes both curvature and torsion. EC theory remains unfalsified and in play, though few theorists reference it today, except perhaps to remove the nonsensical spacetime singularities that arise in the conventional big bang theory and in the black holes that straight general relativity predicts. Instead EC theory proposes that mater particles have a minimum size rather than a point like nature and that they resist compression beyond this, so instead of a big bang singularity we may have a universe which bounces back and forth between a very small and a rather large size, yet the theory does not usually get used to eliminate ‘ordinary’ black holes, although it does eliminate possible pesky little black holes of less than 1016kg, the mass of a substantial asteroid.
In EC theory, particles have a spin or torsion component which gives them a minimum spatial displacement, the Cartan Length lCA.
Where lCA3 = Gh2/mc4 where h = Planck’s constant.
Interestingly, we can decompose the Cartan ‘volume’ lCA3 above into: -
Cartan volume = Planck area (Gh/c3) x Compton length (h/mc)
And/or/or possibly both…….
Cartan volume = Compton area (h/mc)2 x Hypersphere length (Gm/c2)
(Note that hypersphere length lH differs from hypersphere external radius r,( lH = pi r)
These components may in some way correspond to the wave/particle duality and can confirm that particles do indeed have some kind of hypersphere properties.
Another Speculation: - Hypersphere Cosmology seems capable of explaining quite a lot of the structure and behaviour of the universe using rather different assumptions and interpretations of the data than the popular standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter Big bang theory uses. Both approaches still have their problems and require further modifications before we can tell which seems the least wrong.
Hypersphere Cosmology has taken flak over the issues of Metallicity and Black Hole build-up.
Basically cosmologists refer to all the chemical elements heavier than hydrogen (and sometimes helium as well) as ‘metals’ as most of them have metallic qualities. These elements get formed in stars by nuclear fusion (although according to BB theory a lot of the helium got made at the BB.) Now if stars continually fuse hydrogen to heavier elements and no mechanism to break those heavier elements back down exists, then the Perfect Cosmological Principle implied by a finite and unbounded universe hyperspherical in space and time that should appear pretty much the same on the large scale at all points in space and time, seems violated.
The Perfect Cosmological Principle also becomes violated if all the matter in the universe will eventually become sucked into black holes from which it can never escape.
Several observed and hypothesised phenomena may solve the metallicity and black hole problems.
Neutron stars almost certainly exist. Metallic elements falling into neutron stars will get broken back down into neutrons. Neutrons which escape into space rapidly undergo beta decay creating electrons and protons which recombine eventually to form hydrogen. But can they escape?
Pair-Instability Supernovae may well occur. In these events the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently heavy star results in a very powerful gamma ray flux in the core. The gamma rays interact with matter particles initiating electron-positron pair production; this causes the pressure to drop in the core and further collapse to occur. This initiates electron-positron (matter-antimatter) annihilation which explodes the star completely into space leaving no remnant core. Astronomers have observed several possible examples of such an event.
Neutrons may act as Marjorama rather than as Dirac fermions under extreme conditions. In other words they may act as their own antiparticles and annihilate to gamma rays under conditions of extreme compression and temperature.
We do not know what mechanism creates Gamma Ray Bursts, but about once a day one goes off somewhere in the universe. These titanic GRB explosions appear to liberate the energy equivalent of the masses of entire planets or entire stars in brief moments.
Massive and very dense objects of multiple solar masses seem to exist in the universe and most galaxies appear to contain objects of thousands or millions of solar masses at very high densities in their cores. Whether any of these objects have actually formed black holes remains undecided. The maths breaks down at black holes and we cannot directly observe them.
Black holes may not actually exist at all if some mechanism like the above or perhaps some other mechanism limits their maximum density and consigns them to eventually explode, recycling the matter of the universe.
Lastly: - Whilst musing upon ‘Theory of Mind’ it occurred that perhaps Autistic people would not suffer from The God Delusion.
If the god delusion arises from the application of Theory of Mind to find agency or mind or essence not just in people but also in inappropriate phenomena or basically everywhere; and if Autistic people don’t make much use of Theory of Mind, then one would expect Atheism of them. A quick googling of the topic confirmed this hypothesis in general terms.
Perhaps we Chaoist-Neo-Pagan-Pantheists have a surfeit of theory of mind, we tend to see multiple sources of agency even within ourself(s)!
Cosmology
Into the Darkness.
The last late Dragonfly of the season took to the air above the pond at Chateaux Chaos a week ago. She hovered around planting her eggs in the moss and weeds. In three years’ time her children will emerge having gorged themselves on the toadpoles in the depths.
As the evenings draw in, and the nights become chill and clear, it seems time to prepare poetry for the Samhain Eisteddfod, to invoke the Elder Gods, and to return again to cosmological questions.
Standard conventional Big Bang Cosmology depends on the idea of an expanding universe, and the fairly recently observed mismatch between the redshifts and the luminosities of type 1A supernovae has led to the further twist that the hypothesised expansion of the universe has apparently progressively speeded up during the last half of its expansion to date.
Despite the manifold problems with all versions of the Big Bang theory, and its general metaphysical distastefulness, it seems difficult to find papers on cosmology that do not automatically assume that we inhabit an expanding universe and which try to interpret all observational data accordingly.
However an interesting exception occurs here http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.0525v1.pdf
The ‘Angular Size’ of structures in the cosmos may give some indication of the geometry and topology of the universe in space and time. Many models based on expansion predict that structures at very great distances in space (and therefore time), should appear magnified because of the subsequent expansion.
Hypersphere Cosmology also predicts the magnification of very distant structures, but for a different reason. In Hypersphere Cosmology the small positive spacetime curvature of a non-expanding (vorticitation stabilised) cosmic hypersphere will exert a lensing effect which will not only magnify very distant structures but which will also diminish closer structures. This diminution of closer structures will create the optical illusion of a universe which appears to have undergone an accelerating expansion during the last half of its expansion to date, if observers wrongly assume that they look out over a gravitationally ‘flat’ universe.
In the graph below the horizontal axis, (shown marked with 1 billion light year divisions) stretches from the observer at the origin to the limit of observation which corresponds to the hyperspherical antipode distance in Hypersphere Cosmology. We have used the figure of 13.8 billion light years here. The actual distance may differ slightly from this; we await a more precise measurement of the Anderson deceleration or the undistorted Hubble distance.
(GM/L^2 = A, where G = Gravitational constant, M = Mass of universe, L = Antipode distance which corresponds to Hubble distance, A = Anderson deceleration which corresponds to the spacetime curvature.)
The vertical axis for a number of factors runs from zero to three, marked in divisions of 0.5 with the unity line highlighted in purple for clarity.
The red line shows redshift Z, where Z = (c/(c-(dA)^0.5)-1 where d = astronomical distance.
Note that a redshift of 1 at about 7 billion light years denotes the halfway point to the antipode distance. Redshift climbs exponentially towards infinity at the antipode; observations become increasingly difficult up to redshift 10 and then virtually impossible beyond.
The yellow line represents schematically the hyperspherical geodesic from the observer to the observer’s antipode; the curved path that light actually takes in the cosmic hypersphere.
The blue line represents schematically the observer’s assumed sight line for flat space.
The green line represents schematically the difference between the actual and the assumed sight line, and thus the degree of Hyperspherical Lensing LH, that light becomes subject to at various distances. Note that in this revised version of the model, the line has the inverse configuration to previous models on this site and the equation governing it has the form
LH = 1/(1+((d-d^2)^0.5))-d) where here, d = astronomical distance/antipode distance.
The negative lensing at distances below 7 billion light years explains the anomalously low luminosity of type 1A supernovae without recourse to the hypothesis of an accelerating expansion driven by some mysterious dark energy.
The positive lensing at distances greater than 7 billion light years explains the increase in angular size of very distant structures without recourse to the hypothesis of an expanding universe at all. 
Shellout!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34377434
http://www.specularium.org/blog/item/181-global-psi-attack-on-shell-arctic-drilling
My thanks to all participating Knights, Dames and Squires of the KoC, and to all participating allied magical support. Thank you for your conjurations.
Herewith our next target:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference
Magical Questions
Having returned from Cyberpurdah in deepest Wales I notice that Comrade Corbyn got elected as labour leader. Splendid, the labour party can now return to doing what it does best, providing opposition and nurturing grievances and introducing young people to the extremities of ideological debate. Hopefully we shall not see it in government exercising its customary economic mismanagement for some long while yet. Now that the UK conservative party has adopted social liberalism, the labour party has only fiscal fecklessness left to offer.
Anyway, to the more significant questions of Esoteric and Magical Theory.
Some people seem to think that they basically know everything about magic now so they have nothing left to research or to teach.
I get mad at this and assert that we still don’t know a fraction of it, and so herewith a few of the things that remain unanswered or unasked.
I should point out that I consider that the whole universe runs on magic but the bits of magic that work fairly reliably we now call science; so I’ll try to confine myself to the bits of magic that work rather unreliably and which we still call magic.
The World
The Tree of Life gives a map of the solar system, so one up to the wizards for anticipating the planets beyond Saturn, but our kabala doesn’t look big enough now.
What about the geometry and topology of the whole cosmic caboodle?
Do we have room enough for the other worlds of Giordano Bruno?
Or the Mad Indifferent Demon Gods of HP Lovecraft?
Do we treat the Space Gods as incarnate, discarnate, or imaginary?
Can we communicate with them by quantum telepathy or whatever, can we specify?
The Future
Do we divine the future states of reality directly, or do we divine our future experiences of them? (We could devise tests for this.)
Should we enchant for direct effects on reality or should we enchant to enhance our mundane abilities to get those effects?
The Past
In what form does the past persist? In memory, in records, and in physical traces obviously.
But what about in the aether, in the astral, in morphic fields, in the akashic records or whatever wizards call the stuff?
What do we actually get when we try out antique gods, ancestors, and necromancy?
The Pasts Plural
The future seems to open like a garden of forking paths of various probabilities.
Does delayed choice quantum erasure and retroactive enchantment suggest many paths behind us also?
A garden has a width as well as a length. Does time have a sideways as well?
The Presents
Do we exist in and as an interference pattern between all the possible pasts and futures?
Does consciousness consist of a superposition of several states at once?
I find myselves in two minds about this.
Emergence
Stuff plainly develops properties and behaviours which don’t seem inherent in its component parts.
The Universe exhibits Imagination.
For example: -
Hydrogen consists of a colourless odourless gas that slowly turns into people, - if you leave enough of it lying around for long enough.
Emergent phenomena seem to slip out between the interface of deterministic and random behaviour, from between order and chaos, and take on a life of their own, raising BIG magical questions: -
How much top down causation (or chaos) can emergent phenomena exert on their component phenomena?
Do we inhabit a Panpsychic Universe?
Can an apparently emergent vitalism or life force have real effects?
Does Chi or Vril or Prana or whatever you call it, meaningfully correspond with anything to do with ‘Energy’, or does it correspond more to something like ‘Intent’.
Does the apparently emergent ‘Self’ have real effects, or does our emergent free will remain largely subconscious?
How far can we take the idea of Magic as The Real Effects of Imaginary Phenomena? (Imaginary in the psychological sense, and Imaginary in the sense of orthogonal time vectors.)
Ars Notoria
Does this much maligned and frequently ignored magical art actually offer the possibility of inspiration to learn all sorts of knowledge in support of a magical quest?
Style and Technique
Psychedelic autognosis can reveal the self as a contingent construct, the subconscious as a well of creativity, and the belief system as somewhat reprogrammable. Yet these things should occasion the Buddhist or the magician no surprise. Psychedelics seem unsuitably imprecise and dangerous for work in psychotherapy or psychiatry. The idea that societies have generally banned them out of fear of mass enlightenment seems undone by the observation that massive illegal use has not had this effect.
Did a whole generation get taken in by the sixties myth and marketing hype that psychedelics could confer mystical and magical powers?
Does Apophenia serve as a more suitable goddess for magicians than Eris?
Magical Research
Magical Research
What differentiates a top world class university from a bottom class university?
Intense competition and selection operate in a top university, both for the academics and for the students, both have to work very hard and many of the students compete to stay on and become doctors and professors themselves.
On the other hand in some crummy jumped up polytechnic none of these things applies. The mediocre students just muck about, the teachers just go through the motions teaching second-hand stuff, and they usually have to cover a lot of admin duties as well.
Basically RESEARCH differentiates between a top university and a bottom one.
Prestigious institutions do the difficult research and create knowledge, and intense competition exists to either work there and to help create it, or to go there and receive it first-hand. Mediocre institutions merely recycle it. Most academics teach in institutions less prestigious than the ones they qualified in. Only outstanding research keeps you at the top.
Research can look impossibly challenging and difficult, but basically you just have to look for unanswered questions, or even more challengingly, for unasked questions.
All of the above applies to magical traditions and orders.
The magical revival which began in the 1880s came from the massive research efforts which created the Golden Dawn corpus, a great synthesis forged mainly by Macgregor Mathers, and from it flowed most of the western esoterics of the 20th century.
However, fairly soon after it ceased to research and innovate the GD disintegrated and its alumni took its ideas and applied them elsewhere to create other traditions. Wicca, Neo-Paganism, Druidry, Thelema and most of the new age ideas derive directly from it. Aleister Crowley actually added surprisingly little to the theoretical magical paradigm he learnt in the GD but he added techniques of erotognosis and chemognosis and a dash of Islamic flavour in his creation of the OTO, but with basques replacing burqas for the ladies. Of the GD alumni perhaps only Austin Spare tried something radically different. We still find his theory impenetrable and obscure, (it seems to have some relationship to Freudian ideas of the unconscious and/or unconscious mind) but his stripped down practical techniques proved a remarkable innovation.
If everyone had settled for Mathers’ great GD synthesis as the final word on Magic the subject would have become moribund and capable only of preserving itself as a minor religion that no longer attracted the influential minds that it did in its early days.
Some groups seem to have developed the idea that Magic or Chaos Magic has become a closed art, and that we know it all now, so research and the attempt to develop new teachings have become pointless.
I believe that we have barely scratched the surface of Magic and that thousands of questions remain unanswered and unasked.
I consider it the duty of anyone aspiring to the rank of Magus, to Research, to Teach, and to promote the Great Work of Magic.
Research and Teaching drive each other.
Magi and Initiates should live in terror of each other, with the Magi forced to create to attract Initiates, and the Initiates eager to catch out their Magi and to eventually surpass them.
So do you have your own top ten list of unanswered or unasked questions in Magic?
Discordianism
Discordianism seemed a major influence amongst the people I worked with from the mid-nineteen seventies till the mid- nineteen nineties and it still seems to have a big appeal for some Chaos magicians, but what at one time seemed a source of liberation, inspiration and innovation seems to have subsequently developed into a serious flaw.
This short Wiki entry summarises Discordianism fairly concisely: -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism
We used a bit of Discordianism when it seemed fashionable in the early days but it got out of hand later. I think our misunderstanding of it led to a lot of problems. Discordianism does two things. Firstly and mainly it pokes sacrilegious and in-defferent fun at religions and power structures. Secondly it allows a group to poke a bit of fun at itself and to make light of its own pretensions. Unfortunately the second facility of self-parody eventually proved self-destructive.
A little self-parody can give a ritual or a hierarchy a bit of an edge, but an excess of it will undermine both eventually.
The Discordian approach led to people styling themselves things like Sorror Preposterous, groups called things like Temple Misanthropy, me getting called His Pestilence Pope Pete The First of the Zero Degree, Banishing by laughter, and spoof, surrealist, and neo-Dadaist rituals like the Eris Rite which invoked bizarre and unpredictable consequences.
Discordianism promotes a humorous lack of deference towards organised religion, monotheism, patriarchy, sexual prudery, and religious and political power structures and conspiracies.
To do this it exploits ‘Camp’ and ‘Transgressive’ themes, both by using them to parody what it seeks to provoke in-deference to, and also by using such themes to establish its own alternative subcultural cult, or in-group, or fashion as ‘A joke masquerading as a religion or a religion masquerading as a joke’.
‘Camp’ means useless or ineffectual in a way that seems vaguely humorous or self-parodying. A Goddess who provokes creative disorder may have some value, but invoking a Goddess who merely screws things up, like Pratchett’s ‘Anoia’, seems either a parody of religion or an invocation of useless ineffectuality, or worse; an excuse for it.
Chaos magic already had a fairly ‘Transgressive’ attitude to organised religions and towards Thelema and Crowleyanity, and it partly defined itself by its opposition to these things. In adopting the god-form of Baphomet it had followed Eliphas Levi’s blasphemous conception of a supreme deity. However transgression easily goes stale, particularly among the converted for who it becomes merely a tired in-joke, and it can descend into little more than a compulsion to annoy outsiders.
My Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos included many antinomian themes but little or no Discordianism. However Discordian practices had gradually tended to come to the fore amongst the groups I worked with and probably contributed much to the problems that developed. These days I have ceased to recommend experimentation with the Eris Rite.
The book Psybermagick that I wrote in the middle of my career whilst on extended sabbatical seems the most heavily influenced by the Discordian perspective, although it also contained the seeds of later research in other directions.
My last three books, The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch contain only minor references and appendices about Discordianism, as Apophenia began to assume far more importance for me than Eris.
Discordianism basically served to attack the old aeon paradigms. I think we should avoid it as a model for the coming Pandaemonaeon.
Discordianism seems dead or dying, having served its purpose. Any new serious currents and orders seem unlikely to use it again.
Nodens & Hound
Nodens.
Herewith Nodens and his Hound, a study in faux bronze (milliput over iron and copper) made as part of my continuing druidical studies of the ancient pagan Gods and Goddesses of my area.
Nodens had a large temple by Romano-Celtic standards; just over the River Severn at Lydney on a promontory they call Ludd’s Island.
This temple probably functioned to invoke the healing powers of Nodens, it contained numerous votive offerings of models of body parts and some exquisite bronze models of hounds which the ancients venerated as agents of healing for their ability to lick their own wounds free of infection. The temple also appears to have included an Incubatio; a place in which to take ritual sleep, for perhaps prophetic or healing purposes.
Few images of Nodens have survived so I have given him an Asclepius style staff with serpent for his medical powers and the appearance of a grave and learned elder wizard. I do not intend to stray any closer to self-portraiture than this, and incidentally my normally shaggy hound did actually look like this two summers ago when the groomer gave her an all over haircut.
Nodens does however have a complex theometry. The hound may also symbolise an association with hunting, some mythologies associate him with the sea as well, and he has etymological and mythological associations in the Irish myths with Nuada , king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Welsh king Lludd (Nudd) Llaw Eraint from the Mabinogion.
Both these figures lost a hand in battle and acquired a magical replacement made in Silver which enabled them to regain their kingships. Perhaps this relates to some sort of wounded-healer myth, or to a magical healing hand.
Nodens appears briefly in the Lovecraft Mythos as a sea god who can command Nightgaunts and who opposes Nyarlathotep, perhaps this relates to his powers to dispel nightmares.
Summer is Coming.
George Martin’s marvellously entertaining Game of Thrones series takes part of its inspiration from the 15th century English Wars of the Roses. The fictional land of Westeros vaguely resembles Britain and the great wall in the north of it has echoes of Hadrian ’s Wall.
The English Wars of the Roses arose as a dynastic conflict for the English throne between feudal lords with their own private armies who fell to fighting each other in large part because of the loss of their holdings in France following the English defeats in the Hundred Years War, as the French gradually consolidated their kingdom and eventually threw the English out.
The Game of Thrones has a different trigger for war, the advent of a decades long winter which creates a resource conflict. This scenario resembles the 17th century wars which raged across Europe and notably included the Thirty Years War which sucked in all the European powers, and the English Civil War era which also involved Scotland and Ireland.
Historians sometimes call these extensive and very bloody 17th century wars ‘The Wars of Religion’. However wars between Catholics and Protestants had simmered since the various reformations for some time before, and continued long afterwards. The major outbreaks of war in the 17th century also involved conflicts between the Great Houses and Monarchies of Europe which often led to alliances and rivalries which cut quite across religious lines and led to the most bloody and destructive wars in European history, far in excess of the destruction achieved in WW1 and WW2.
A period of Global Cooling leading to massive crop failures coincided with the disastrous wars of the 17th century and the armies of the time ravaged the lands, plundering food and resources and committing genocide as they went. Central Europe suffered appalling devastation and the English Civil War seems very far from civil, as half starving armies requisitioned and devoured all resources in their path and executed anyone standing in their way.
This period of Global Cooling, sometimes called The Little Ice Age probably had an anthropogenic origin. The European invasion of the Americas initiated a massive population crash there of perhaps 90% of the indigenous peoples, mainly through diseases imported by the Europeans. This led to a vast reforestation of previously cultivated areas and the sudden CO2 uptake crashed the climate.
As someone once said of the French Revolution, 'there's nothing more political than the price of a loaf of bread', and the more closely one examines the wars of the 17th century the more they look like a resource conflict with religion serving only to justify aggression. Political and religious opinions of course harden during resource conflicts but they do not initiate them. Any alien anthropologist examining WW2 would probably describe the whole event as simply an inter-tribal dispute about oil resources. Germany and Japan would probably not have developed extreme ideologies and gone to war if they had had access to copious supplies of cheap oil, as did their main adversaries America, Britain, and Russia.
The current situation in the Middle East, and to some extent in the whole Islamic world, derives from problems of resources. Most of the countries involved now have very high populations but not the industrial or agricultural resources to maintain them comfortably, particularly in the face of climate change.
Syria suffered severe droughts which destroyed much of its agriculture and livestock just before the civil war broke out there, now it suffers from a baroque conflict involving at least three major factions and interference from foreign powers, now including Turkey apparently bombing all three factions. Political and religious opinions have hardened into extremism, mass deaths of adversaries have become the unstated aim of the combatants, and it all begins to resemble the 17th century all over again, except that the drying of the area rather than the freezing of the area seems the underlying cause.
If we cannot as a species get Global Warming under control we can expect far more of this.
Beware the Long Summer.
Global Psi Attack on Shell Arctic Drilling.
The Shell Oil Company now starts to move its drilling equipment to the Arctic for another attempt at drilling, despite widespread condemnation of this act from all the major conservation and ecology groups. Humanity should immediately begin to curtail burning fossil fuels, and invest in renewable alternatives rather than devastate the planets remaining wildernesses.
The environmental damage looks set to become severe, particularly if this reckless venture 'succeeds' and many other drilling operations begin as a result of it.
The Knights of Chaos will conjure for the failure of this expedition on Midnight 26th July.
More...
Nodens
So we appear to have a cowardly fudge of a ‘temporary fix’ for the Greek Euro-Crisis which pleases nobody and which will not address the underlying problem that a currency union between widely different economies cannot work, unless of course the Eurozone does as Francoise Hollande suggests and creates a Eurozone Government.
The spectacularly incompetent President of France perhaps merely provokes or teases with this suggestion, or perhaps he speaks out of exasperation or fear.
It becomes increasingly clear that a Eurozone Government would effectively mean The Fourth Reich with added Synarchy.
Hollande’s more robust French ancestors would have put him to the guillotine for treason as a quisling.
German loan sharks now effectively run the Greek economy and will do so until the Greeks rebel, default, and reclaim their economic sovereignty by reissuing their own currency.
Part of the motivation of the whole EU venture lay in trying to ameliorate or comfortably accommodate the rising industrial power of Germany within Europe. This has plainly failed now since the Germans realised that the Euro would prove more useful to them than Panzers.
In 1939 Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, mainly to gain control of the huge Skoda motor works. In 2000 they simply bought it without firing a shot.
I have an enduring memory of West Berlin prior to the fall of the wall. West Berlin had supposedly filled up with creative-alternative-bohemian types living lives subsidised by a government determined to keep the difficult to live in enclave fully populated. I had sat up till 4am in an all-night café having a punishing philosophical, metaphysical, and magical debate with my host. We set off for his flat and came to a pedestrian crossing on a totally deserted street with no sight or sound of a vehicle for half a mile in either direction. The pedestrian sign showed red; my creative-alternative-bohemian host stood to attention on the pavement. ‘Shall we go?’ I asked. Any sane Englishman would have simply crossed the completely empty street. Nein, iz Verboten! He replied sharply.
I seriously do not want to live in a Europe that runs on such an authoritarian mind-set.
Below see the preliminary work on the Hound of Nodens. The Celtic God Nodens comes next on my list of Druidical study, contemplation, statuary, and visitation (he had a substantial temple in this area, just across the Severn River). Archaeologists discovered bronze deerhounds in his temple ruins, these may relate to the healing function usually attributed to him. He may also have attributions as a God of the sea, hunting, and dreaming. I currently plan to depict him standing with his hound and holding an Asclepius style serpent staff and perhaps with a silver hand for his connection to Welsh and Irish Myth.
Meanwhile the lifesize mannequin for Hercules has arrived along with fresh supplies of Jemsonite but I’ll probably wait for the re-glazing completion on the large greenhouse and build him in there.
The Hypersphere Cosmology thesis seems to have achieved self-consistency and has so far resisted falsification, see http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0167
Thus Necronomicon Mythos work of an Azathothian and Hasturian nature continues with a view to obtaining some clarification about the three dimensional time hypothesis.
OXI!
The people who invented Democracy in the first place have just set us all a brave example in saying NO! to the EU-Synarchy.
Let us hope and conjure that this Thermopylae moment marks the beginning of the end of the whole rotten corrupt undemocratic EU through which the Germans have, for a third time, attempted to establish hegemony for their own benefit.
I used to really enjoy holidaying in Greece before it entered the Euro. After that it rapidly became rather expensive to do so. Taverna meals which used to cost about the same as English pub lunches suddenly cost as much as German restaurants.
I do not think the Greece should feel any shame or embarrassment about it debt, after all its creditors shoveled money at it in a greedy attempt to gain profit and control.
If Greece declares itself bankrupt and defaults and reissues its own currency and starts again it will experience temporary hardships caused by lack of imports, however it will quickly recover due to a tourist boom and an export boom.
Instead of technically defaulting it could recreate the Drachma at 1:1 with the Euro, and pay off all its debts instantly before allowing any other use of the Drachma, and then either deliberately devalue it or let it quickly find its realistic exchange rate at maybe 10:1. In effect the Greece would have played back in reverse the trick the EU played on it.
Any other strategy looks like penury and servitude to German financiers forever,
Solstice
As the Prof has rescheduled the Summer Solstice till this Sunday (a Druid of his calibre can do that sort of thing you know), I’ve basically had a week of Solstice starting with midsummer Highland Games and Ceilidh in the hills above Loch Ness, putting the final touches to the sculpture of Flora, and preparing to hail the new official midsummer formally in a certain private circle of standing stones.
My part in the highland games came down to participation in three demented events that probably originated from military activities designed to break up medieval infantry formations, shot, hammer, and caber. The shot consisted of a stone larger than my head, the hammer of an eight inch iron ball on a hawser. I think that on one of my throws I managed not to come last despite throwing myself twice to the ground as well during the attempts. I had taken the liberty of a trying a couple of practise tosses with a couple of the cabers on the rack, and it seemed do-able. However when we got to the event the MC swept the cabers off the rack, ‘just the ladies ones and the practise ones’ he said, and it turned out that the real deal consisted of the rack itself, an intimidating twelve foot long, hundred pound plus spar. Nobody actually managed to toss it right over and nobody died. ‘The caber wins again’ pronounced the MC. Legend has it that someone in the village once accomplished it. They breed ‘em madly tough in the highlands, competition standard caber apparently involves 19 foot 175 pound cabers and men the size of bears.
As well as the delights of a family reunion I also enjoyed the sight of a rare Pine Marten foraging just outside the window of the croft, and the museum of Pictish art, weird stuff carved on stone that we still cannot decipher as their hieroglyphics or heraldry or religion.
Then back to my garage to complete Cloris-Flora the Greek-Roman Goddess of Gardens. In the absence of a block of white marble and the time and skill to work it, I started with a shop mannequin, concreted her onto a slab of bathstone, and then built up her headdress and accessories and surface detail with Jemsonite, a weatherproof sort of plaster like material, and then finished her with white masonry paint.
Meanwhile on Arcanorium College efforts to penetrate the Neconomicon Mythos of the Elder Gods by a team of intrepid psychonauts proceeds apace, we seem to have revitalised the old magical arte of Ars Notoria in this quest.
Charlie Brewster
Along with a number of other survivors of the magical revival, I have for the last few decades wondered what became of Charlie Brewster, Frater Choronzon 333.
He cut an extraordinary figure amongst the London Illuminati of the seventies and eighties.
I met him after he got out of jail over a misunderstanding about a credit card. Whilst in jail he took a course in electrical wiring and somehow blagged his way into working as a wireman for Reuters. He moved into a squat near to mine in Deptford sometime after we met at Stoke Newington Sorcerers, (an experimental magic group based in Giles’s flat that included Gerald Suster). I distinctly remember he scrounged a door from a local derelict cinema for his squat which bore the legend ‘Projection Room’, nice.
Ah what we got up to in those days, whole spit roast goat party on the adjoining wasteground, pitched street battles with the gypsies and the national front, crazy metaphysical speleological expeditions to invoke Gwyn ap Nudd in the depths of welsh caves, some inadvisable experiments with deadly nightshade. All the usual follies of youth.
Then I set off for India and Australia for a couple of years, came back to Yorkshire for a couple more years, went to India for another year and finally wound up in Bristol and started my business.
In the meantime Charlie had a spectacular trajectory. From a Reuters wireman he blagged his way upwards till he apparently became one of their top technicians, by, he claimed, going to work in a very posh suit and carrying a combination lock pigskin briefcase (containing his soldering iron). He ended up buying a mansion, performance cars and motorcycles (his huge frame cutting a dash in what looked like a Dune stillsuit). At the height of the curve he funded extravagant OTO events, had a craftsman start building him a pearwood Enochian chess set, drank vintage Laphroaig single malt from pint mugs with his joints, had a bizarre scheme going dealing futures on the Chicago stock exchange (inadvisably), and his own electronics company. Plus he acquired an enormous Tibetan Thunderbolt-Axe for magical purposes.
He created some interesting magical writings; see below.
http://freespace.virgin.net/ecliptica.ww/book/contents.htm
Finally it all crashed bigtime, he went down owing some very impressive sums, and he retreated to obscurity in Wales and cut himself off from everyone he had known in London, including me. (Under pressure from his longsuffering wife I suspect). I had only a couple of brief notes from him thereafter mentioning some maths teaching and heart problems.
Then today I found this obituary today whilst googling for an image of him.
I count knowing Charlie Brewster as one of the great blasts of my early life.
http://www.art-science.com/Xmas2014/index.html
DEATH OF CHARLIE BREWSTER
...on 13th December 2013. Charlie was one of Ken's most important friends. They first met at Reuters in 1978, a firm that grossly underused their talents, which in Charlie's case, were very great indeed. Ken would say that Charlie could do the sort of Higher Maths in his head that would take Ken a week with a pencil. More than that, Charlie & Jane were tremendously helpful to Ken when he lost his 1st wife Jane in an accident. We attended his funeral in Wales on January 6th. Our best wishes to Jane & his children, Emily, Victoria & Demian, not forgetting step-children Bethan & Dominic plus spouses & grandchildren.