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Sunday, 08 December 2013 13:57

FTM

Free Trial Membership for two weeks.

Arcanorium College has Staff and Senior Members drawn from Adepts in the Magical Arts from all over the world, all of them have distinguished themselves by their publications and their leadership in significant magical orders.

Arcanorium College has recently decided on an experimental change to its Modus Operandi. Instead of the usual six week semesters it has decided to try a rolling program of ongoing workshops and forums without time limits. However the vast archive resource of past courses remains open for study and research.

The range of archive topics currently embraces Sorcery, Divination, Tantra, Runes, Neurolinguistic Programming, Chaos Magic, Thelema, Enchantment and Results Magic, Alternative Physics, the History and Culture of Magic, and Magical Software Design.

Members may attend as many of the ongoing working groups as they wish.

The College also features an extensive Library of Archives with links to many rare tomes, Common Room areas for news, debates, and socialization, and workshop facilities with online magical tools which remain open at all times.

Membership follows quickly after registration. The College does not accept members under 18 years of age. The College levies a modest registration fee which covers expenses and the cost of maintaining the online facilities and which discourages frivolous applicants. Arcanorium College works not to make a profit, but to provide a forum for the pursuit of The Great Work of Magic.

The Chancellor, Peter J Carroll, BSc, BM, KoC, may grant a free two week trial membership to suitable applicants. Apply by email to pete’at’specularium.org but replace ‘at’ with @.

Write a note about your interests and intentions, in support of your application. Include the email you wish to use for membership, the user name you wish to use, and a password of 8 characters.

 

Arcanorium College conducts its discourse to the highest standards of civility and will delete any trial members who abuse the privilege of membership.

Saturday, 23 November 2013 13:56

Who

Happy nine hundred and fiftieth birthday Dr Who. I cannot remember where I was when I heard of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember watching the first episode of Dr Who and the first event now seems so trivial in cultural and historical terms compared to the second.

If birth or accomplishment makes you an Eccentric Upper Middle Class Brit then you have indeed won first prize in the human race; and you become part of civilisation’s vanguard, and its protection.

I was so glad that the series made that perfectly clear to me, it set the course of my life.

The Doctor seemed like the best bits of all our wizards and scientists from Dee and Bacon to Newton, Maxwell, Mathers, and perhaps even a touch of Dirac, all rolled into one.

Armed only with good manners, superior knowledge, and an electronic screwdriver (magic wand?) the good Doctor sees off the Nazi Daleks and all manner of nasty cosmic riff-raff and catastrophe without unseemly violence. He carries nothing as inelegant and American as a gun.

I didn’t really buy into the comic superheroes apart from perhaps Dr Strange - we had a better and more quirky UK version, THE Doctor.

Thursday, 31 October 2013 13:56

Halloween

Halloween, rather like Christmas, seems an essentially modern and rather American innovation. Trick or Treat seems to follow the Sicilian-American business model of extortion with menaces. The Christian church of course had All Hallows Eve, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers. The Christians probably instituted this to replace various Pagan ‘Samhain’ type death festivals in which surplus livestock got slaughtered before winter.

However I grew up in Britain and for me the season seems always associated with ‘Guy Fawkes’ or ‘Bonfire’ or ‘Fireworks’ Night, initially instituted to celebrate the failure of a catholic plot to destroy a protestant parliament with a load of gunpowder barrels on the fifth of November 1605 and retained as a general celebration of British identity as anti-catholic and anti-papist etc, although for reasons of social harmonisation and political correctness this has become somewhat bowdlerised over the centuries into a mere firework festival, except amongst the protestants of Northern Ireland who still take it really seriously.

I spent my mid teens compounding rocket propellants and bangs from weedkiller and recycled fireworks, nobody bothered much about such pyrotechnic enthusiasms in those days. For me like many of my contemporaries it formed the basis of an interest in chemistry. Today one could easily end up interrogated by MI5 for such hobbies.

Despite my distaste for Catholicism, famously described by Richard Dawkins as ‘the world’s second worst religion’, and my enjoyment of fireworks, I’m refraining from incinerating an effigy of the pope on Guy Fawkes Night this year. For the first time in a while we seem to have a pope with some post medieval ideals, unlike the two  mad old fools who preceded him, I feel guardedly optimistic.

Incidentally he used to work as a chemist, as did Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel and I.

Funny old business chemistry, it teaches you to think scientifically but unlike biology which has ‘life’ as its field of study and physics which has the entire universe to ponder, chemistry seems a bit bereft of higher philosophical implications, no wonder so many chemists abandon their trade and go on to more interesting activities like politics or esoterics.

I couldn’t help noticing that in upgrading his coat of arms to mark his ascension from cardinal to pope, Francis has replaced a five pointed star with an eight pointed one.

In other news, these mandrakes http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=133&Itemid=137 which I had unearthed because they had lost all their leaves, started to sprout again so I replanted them a week or so ago, now they all have a fine crown of new foliage, and will maybe flower in time for xmas.

Tuesday, 08 October 2013 13:56

Higgs?

So Peter Higgs (along with Belgian Francois Englert) gets a Nobel Prize for predicting the Higgs Boson. At least dear old Peter Higgs will probably have passed away by the time the Higgs Mechanism becomes discarded as yet another blind alley in the annals of theoretical physics.

This prize for the Higgs really goes as a consolation prize to the LHC effort at CERN, the largest and most expensive instrument ever made by humanity, which has so far failed to find anything to significantly advance our knowledge.

The expense, the hype, and the self justificatory overstatement of results have reached epic, indeed almost Euroscale dimensions.

The Higgs mechanism was devised initially to explain the unexpectedly high masses of the W and Z bosons and was then extended to explain the origin of mass itself.

However as the theoretical Higgs field does not couple to the gluons (or whatever) that give things like protons and neutrons about 99% of their mass then it doesn’t explain a lot really, it creates a bigger problem than it solves.

If the particles which supposedly do couple to the Higgs field all have different coupling constants which the theory cannot predict, then the theory has no predictive power.

If the General Relativistic equivalence of the gravitational and inertial components of mass holds, and it seems to hold to a very large number of decimal places, then plainly the Higgs Mechanism seems in conflict with it.

The astonishingly weak and elusive 125GeV signal from the LHC could arise from any number of things, it seems highly premature to ascribe it to the particle manifestation of a field which supposedly gives some but not all other particles a mass, particularly as we already have an excellent and unfalsified description of mass as spacetime curvature in General Relativity.

I guess that the masses of the W and Z bosons have rather high values because they constitute rather ‘awkward’ or ‘stressed’ arrangements of spacetime, and I suspect that this has something to do with various types of spin arrangement in extra temporal dimensions.

I shall most certainly not eat the relevant pages of The Octavo until I see better evidence for the Higgs Mechanism!

Wednesday, 02 October 2013 13:55

Euroshambles

The EU has taken its first Political Prisoners, elected Greek politicians from the Golden Dawn party.

(Incidentally there seems no connection whatever between the Greek Golden Dawn and the old British esoteric order of the same name.)

No matter how distasteful we may find the opinions of the far right Greek Golden Dawn we must accept that their views arise in direct reaction to the economic and migration policies of the EU which have royally stuffed the Greeks.

Theoretically the EU would supposedly bring nothing but economic benefit and harmony. In practise it has brought the exact opposite.

The Greeks should have quit the EU when the latrine first intersected with the windmill back in 2008.

In fact all counties except Germany should quit the EU, only they profit from it by using a currency grossly undervalued for their economy.

The freedom to form anything other than an 'approved' political party will eventually disappear if the faceless bureaucrats of the EU have their way.

Wednesday, 25 September 2013 13:55

AC Yr 8

Arcanorium College, the world's foremost Cyber-Academy for the magical arts, begins its eighth glorious year on September 30th, 2013.

Semester 1 will include:

Chaos Monasticism by Nikki Wyrd, a chance to sharpen up your magical practise.

A Knights of Chaos campaign by the Knights and Dames of Chaos, to attempt to remedy various serious global problems by direct acts of sorcery.

This may appear demented, yet we have achieved some remarkable successes in our previous three campaigns. Volunteers may join us initialy as Squires; the Marshals, Knights, and Dames of the order will provide instruction in the construction and use of wands, sigils, and servitors.

Arcanorium College also celebrates its eighth year with the launch of its Batchelor of Magic Degree course. The BM Degree course includes wide ranging study, the submission of dissertations and creative projects, and project leadership work.

Saturday, 14 September 2013 13:54

Bits

Just a few odds and ends that have caught my attention this last week or so: -

The mandrakes I unearthed about 2 months ago, these ones

http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=133

have all produced little white and purple sprouts at the top after their visit to the Midsummer Druidry Grove and a rest on my altar, it seems a rather odd thing for them to do in September, my Royal Horticultural Society consultant recommends repotting them now, any further suggestions?

Herman van Rompuy, the nonentity holding the apparent presidency of the euro-shambles has asked the EU Audit Commission not to make the appalling inadequacies of EU accounting so public because it may lead to further erosion of confidence in the EU.

The EU stands underpinned by a malignant but bumbling synarchist conspiracy between elements of the European political class and big business. Any notion of government by the people and for the people never entered into their calculations, and it seems they cannot even do their calculations anyway. To hell with the whole rotten enterprise.

It looks like we will have to wait till 2015 for the LHC to fire up again and attempt to confirm the discovery of the ‘Higgs Boson’. I doubt very much that the weak signal obtained around 125 GeV represents a particle from a field that gives many other particles their mass, I just don’t buy the Higgs Mechanism. GR explains mass more elegantly.

The new particle may consist of something like this in HD8 notation:-

Spin          Colour         Electrocharge*          Generation

+1              +1                     +3                            +3?

-1                -1                      -3                              -2?

 

In other words, something like a spin zero meson, but one whose particle and antiparticle components cannot exist separately because their internal colour plus electrocharges do not add up to 3 or 0. Such a meson like particle does however obey this condition overall, perhaps conferring fleeting stability, and it could break up into virtually anything, as observed.

 

(* Electrocharge 3 = the charge on the electron, a more useful notation methinks.)

 

I note that this paper of a year ago has now achieved over 40,000 hits:-

 

http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=104&Itemid=137

 

That seems to have put the cat amongst the pigeons.

 

 

Pete.

Saturday, 27 July 2013 13:54

A Fistful of Wands

A Fistful of Wands.

To celebrate the completion of the Esotericon text I took the three wands used in the creation of the Elemental, Planetary and Stellar Grimoires out for a photoshot in the gardens. Whilst the temple at Chateaux Chaos contains a fine selection of staff length wands for all purposes these pocket wands have proved particularly portable and versatile.

Matt Kabryn, the artist who creates the accompanying Portals deck, and the illustrations and the general presentation of EPOCH, the forthcoming Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, will visit from NZ soon and we shall finalise the whole thing for publication, hopefully towards the end of this year. Just a few images await completion now.

This epic project has taken about 3 years, thousands of email exchanges between the planets antipodes and the resources of a department of Arcanorium College.

Part of the text concerns the replacement of the PPM (Platonic-Pagan-Monotheist) esoteric metaphysical paradigm which has dominated the last two millennia with a QNP (Quantum-Neo-Pagan) esoteric metaphysical paradigm.

Theoretically this QNP paradigm could lead to a rapprochement between religion and science and between one religion and another, but only if both science and religion abandoned some of their more grandiose and unfulfilled conceits and pretentions.

EPOCH will probably appear in electronic and perhaps i-phone app form in due course, but we have concentrated on creating it as a physical book and as a work of art, for we have only limited confidence in the ability of our civilisation to sustain electronic media for the next half century…………….

….............you might like to have a look at this, or perhaps you wouldn’t………

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7459/pdf/499401a.pdf

Because of human induced global warming the methane may soon start bubbling up from Antarctica in earnest causing planetary climatic catastrophe.

 

Forget about fracking or any other form of fossil fuel use, we should have shut down the oil and coal and gas industries and stopped burning the stuff completely by about yesterday.

Sunday, 09 June 2013 13:54

Mandrakes & Time

Herewith a clutch of Mandrakes grown in the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos. A colleague from Greece, the wizard Xarisal, sent some seeds, two of which we germinated and which grew well but without flowering for the first year, however in this their second year they produced some leaves and then shed them so we unearthed the roots and dried them. Rather oddly 2 seed have produced 3 roots.

They have come at a useful time as my daughters and their friends approach the age at which reproduction becomes a consideration. We used to have a dried mandrake on a thong which we lent out to friends who hoped to become pregnant, it seemed to work astonishingly well but it got lent on subsequently and somehow lost. These days with late pregnancies, sometimes after many years on oral contraceptives, fertility can present a problem, but with a mandrake root around the lady’s neck things seemed to progress sort of ‘first shot first cycle’.

Maybe the mandragorine alkaloids diffuse into the skin, or maybe it works by suggestion, or maybe it works by magic, it certainly seems worth a try before IVF.

________________________

As a follow up to the previous post, have a look at this book: -

Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe .Lee Smolin

So far I’ve only had time for the reviews.

Time doesn’t really exist for physicists who believe in determinism because the past and future remain singular and fixed. Only the second law of thermodynamics suggests some sort of time going in one direction, all other physical laws and equations seem completely time symmetric.

In recent conjurations Yog-Sothoth and Hastur have intimated that Entropy does not in itself lead to the reality of time, but Probability does. As space consists of a volume with some places in it unoccupied by particles, so does time consist of a volume with places in it where some particulate events don’t happen.

Addendum in response to enquiry: Cogitating still upon the above, perhaps this may clarify: -

We get used to the idea of some parts of space not containing particles, but what about some parts of the VOLUME of time not containing particles/events either, ie stuff that didn't happen, we need some stuff not to happen to allow probability, however the whole volume of space and the whole volume of time lie full of wave functions perhaps?

Tuesday, 09 July 2013 13:54

Instruments & Review

Herewith the Necronomicom Wand and Pentachoron instruments used to earth the forthcoming Chaos Necronomicon section of EPOCH, the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos.

The Wand consists of a length of 45 thousand year old Kauri wood from New Zealand, despite its antiquity it worked fairly easily, the geological processes which preserved it simply slowly dried it out, without fossilisation.

For practical work with the Necronomicon the magician will need to fashion such instruments, however very ancient timber does not form a necessary requirement, a prototype fashioned in a modern piece of Ash wood served well enough for most of the work, however as extra sigils came through an upgrade to a Mk2 as shown seemed essential and the surprise gift of a length of Kauri from a fellow wizard in NZ provided an unmissable opportunity.

A red glass sphere works well enough for the Pentachoron, translucent rubies of such size rarely occur in nature.

 

  

-----------------------------------

Book Review

Farewell to Reality –How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth. Author: Jim Baggott. Pub: Constable and Roberts £12.99 paperback.

Anyone handing out research grants and anyone reading or writing about the bleeding edge of cosmology or particle physics should read this book. Theoretical physics has got itself into a frightful mess by using exotic maths to develop ideas about speculative physical principles that we have very little hope of ever testing, and which despite the lack of any experimental or observational evidence get presented more or less as ‘facts’ on which to build further theoretical edifices.

Supersymmetry, String Theory, and Brane-Theory have all failed to deliver testable predictions. The Higgs Mechanism remains highly questionable, if every class of particle couples to the Higgs field with a different and unpredictable value then it doesn’t really explain anything.

None of the attempts to forge a quantum gravity theory have yielded anything of use.

The Cosmic Inflation required to prop up the Big Bang Hypothesis has incalculably weird consequences and no comprehensible mechanism behind it, and the subsidiary patches to BB of dark energy and dark matter seem to exist nowhere except as corrections to previous assumptions.

Multiverse theory in which black holes supposedly spawn new universes with different physical constants remains untestable In Principle and exists only because we haven’t found any constraints on the existing physical constants here and our physics breaks down inside black holes, if they exist, which by no means remains certain.

Baggott does not go quite as far as questioning BB itself, but to rescue physics from fruitless mathematically hypercharged metaphysics we probably need to question that assumption also, particularly as some contradicting evidence exists. Baggott mentions Pratchett’s Discworld in passing and quips that his novels will probably outlast many cosmological theories currently regarded more or less as facts.

Page 12 of 18
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