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The Perfect Cosmological Principle
The Perfect Cosmological Principle.
Copernicus overturned the Ptolemaic astronomical assumption that the earth lay at the centre of the universe, and did, like the other planets of the solar system, orbit the sun. Newton considered that the stars also consisted of distant suns similar to our own, because they emitted the same sort of light.
Long after the death of Copernicus we began to speak of The Copernican Principle which states that the earth, or indeed the solar system, does not occupy any sort of special or privileged position within the universe.
With the development of telescopes able to collect light and other forms of radiation from galaxies enormously distant from the Milky Way galaxy in which our solar system resides, it became apparent that the universe appeared more or less isotropic (the same in every direction) and homogenous (made of the same material with the same sort of distribution everywhere).
This led to the assertion of the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks more or less the same everywhere on the large scale. To see this homogeneity you have to look on the scale not of galaxies, but on the scale where the clusters of galaxies and the voids between then begin to look like a fairly uniform sponge cake.
Now the contemporary conventional Cosmological Principle does have one imperfection, most cosmologists currently believe the universe has Anisotropy in Time. They interpret the galactic redshifts and the cosmic microwave background radiation and the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium, to mean that the universe must have expanded from a much smaller and denser version in the distant past. Thus they hypothesise that about 13.4 billion years ago the universe erupted out of a tiny, probably subatomic sized, condition of almost infinite density and that ever since it has continued to expand and cool and increase in entropy, exhibiting large scale homogeneity at all stages as it does so.
A Perfect Cosmological Principle on the other hand states that the universe will have the same large scale general characteristics not just everywhere, but also everywhen; it has always looked and will always look like it does now on the large scale, giving it spatial and temporal isotropy.
As the expanding-universe hypothesis began to take hold, the Perfect Cosmological Principle became associated with various steady-state theories which attempted to reconcile the idea of expansion with spatial and temporal isotropy. Inevitably this led to awkward ‘fixes’ like the hypothesis of continuous spontaneous creation of matter to fill the expanding space, and gradually the idea got dropped.
However the Perfect Cosmological Principle has recently re-appeared in the Multiverse hypothesis. Partly because current theory cannot address what happened before the big bang, partly because it cannot address how the extraordinary starting conditions of the big bang with its staggering density and miniscule entropy arose, and partly because it cannot address the question of how the universe comes to have its particular fundamental constants; theorists have hypothesizes that all possible universes must exist. Just ‘where’ or indeed ‘when’ these other universes exist and what separates them from this one remains an open question but the presumption exists that universes can maybe multiply by creating black holes or singularities that somehow burst out as new ‘white holes’ or big bangs ‘elsewhere’ to create new universes with perhaps a different set of physical laws and constants.
Thus in some ways the Multiverse hypothesis restores the Perfect Cosmological Principle, as a sufficiently vast multiverse consisting of zillions of universes would presumably exhibit spatial and temporal homogeneity and isotropy on an unimaginably vast scale.
The multiverse idea does begin to look like an unnecessarily extravagant hypothesis, particularly when a simpler one exists to solve many of the questions to which it supposedly supplies an answer.
Consider the Vorticitating Hypersphere Cosmology (VHC) as elucidated in The Apophenion and The Octavo. In this we inhabit a universe which has finite and unbounded extent in space and time and complete spatial and temporal homogeneity and isotropy. Thus it contains all of the space and time which exists and this space and time curves back round on itself under the influence of all the gravity (spacetime curvature) of all the mass and energy within it.
In VHCosmology the universe does not expand, the redshift of distant galaxies arises purely from the spacetime curvature of the hypersphere and remains proportional to distance.
In VHCosmology the apparent acceleration of the apparent expansion of the universe arises as an optical illusion caused by the large scale lensing effect of the small spacetime curvature of the hypersphere of the universe.
In VHCosmology the CMBR consists of trans-antipodal light in thermodynamic equilibrium with the interstellar medium, and thus it represents the universe’s overall (rather chilly) constant temperature.
In VHCosmology the entropy of the universe remains constant on the large scale because neutrinos act as their own antiparticles and so do neutrons according to the supplementary HD8* hypothesis of 3-dimensional time which describes the quanta. Thus the universe has no single lowest energy state into which it can decay and neutronium annihilates to energy rather than imploding into singularities.
In VHCosmology the cosmic hydrogen-helium ratio merely represents an equilibrium established an un-specifiable time ago by the mechanisms of stellar nucleosynthesis and neutron annihilation.
In VHCosmology the universe does not have a beginning or an end, it just goes round and round in its own spacetime without the constraint of having to do exactly the same things in detail each time. The universe did not come from nothingness, we have no reason to consider nothingness as somehow more fundamental than something-ness. On the contrary, everything we can observe has become created from something else.
Phew. So why spend 20 years working on this unpopular set of ideas which may yet become falsified?
Well, the quest to develop a mechanism to explain magic led to questions about the conventional view of one-dimensional, one directional time. This led to a quest to interpret quantum physics in a 3-dimensional time framework which resulted in the HD8 hypothesis, and this in turn led to a questioning of conventional standard cosmology.
Finally the quantum and cosmological hypotheses came together in one single simple equation:
W = (2piGM/Vh)^1/2
This describes the ‘spins’ of all the hyperspherical fundamental quantum particles which make up the universe and the spin (vorticitation) of the entire hyperspherical universe.
Does that look like a Perfect Cosmological Principle? I dunno, but it reminds me of what Hermes Trismegistus said, ‘As above, so below’. Plus geometricating the quanta seems like a better idea than trying to quantize gravity.
So having reconciled my scientific beliefs with my magical beliefs without doing fatal damage to either, I feel that I can proceed with the magic.
Peter J Carroll.
Arcanorium
As you may know, I hold the chair in The Department of Sorcery and Alternative Science at Arcanorium College, www.arcanoriumcollege.comand also act as the Chancellor of the college.
Thus on behalf of the Staff, I proudly announce the program for the forthcoming first semester of our 6th year. Membership of the College entitles participants to access to all courses, the common rooms and bar, and the extensive library, plus our ever more vast archives. If you want to participate in the creation of magic in the 21st century and to find out where it came from and where it may go, you have come to the right place.
Arcanorium College Year 6, 2011 - 2012.
Semester 1, September 19th - October 28th.
Lecturer: Hyperritual, Course: Automagica Theoretica.
In this six-week course we will consider a theory of automagic devices from the perspective of automatic machines. There will be reading assignments and much reflection and discussion. We will attempt to sort out some models by which we can construct automagic devices either individually or as part of future courses (Automagica Practica) in the Dept of Magical Computing / Magical Computer Lab.
Lecturer: Al, Course: Seventeenth Century Magic.
This course takes an in-depth look at the 17thC magical worldview and its principles and practitioners and their magical workings, and it will involve practical work with various forms of Geomancy both traditional and modern.
Another review
Reviews by Shade Oroboros
The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm by Peter J. Carroll,
Mandrake 2008, 160 pages, illustrated,
footnoted and indexed.
In the wide wonderful world of Chaos Magick, it is kind of a big event when Peter Carroll writes a new book. This one does of course have many magical elements, but it is actually devoted to addressing profoundly fundamental issues: the nature of existence, time and space, the structure of the universe and the (un?)reality of the Self. The man has clearly been thinking vary hard about stuff, specifically Relativity, Quantum Theory and Chaos. On the way he discards the very notion of ‘being’ in favor of Panpsychism, trashes the concept of any individual ‘consciousness’ by redefining ‘mind’ as a verb rather than a noun, proposes a new personal pantheism, reexamines causality in magical terms, and completely blows off the current theories of the Big Bang theory of the universe in favor of a new physics model of Vorticitating Hyperspherical Spacetime.
I am nowhere near doing justice to his thesis, and definitely lack the math skills to grok his appended equations. But as far as I can follow his thought, it seems to make more sense than many other theories, largely works for me, and is well worth some very serious consideration. I have the lurking feeling this all this is important.
Apophenia, by the way, is the goddess of finding unsuspected meaning, patterns and connections.
More bits...
Back to school and college for many of us now that we get to the end of the holiday season, you can almost feel the psychic groan, not that we have had much of a summer in the UK, mainly cool and wet due to the climate disruption methinks.
The global financial mess will hopefully depress some of the excess economic activity which gives rise to this
I’ve spent a lot of time walking and surfing and reading in Wales and composing more poetry (it will appear here after Eisteddfod use).
Gaddhafi still isn’t dead; some considered it a bit extreme to call for that, but after what we have now seen of the inside of his regime it seems like an even better idea, and the sooner the better.
Arcanorium College now tools up for Semester 1 of its 6th glorious year.
As I explained long ago I didn’t set up the PJ Carroll facebook page, nor do I know who did, nor can I anymore interact with it because I’m refusing to give them a mobile number to confirm my existence.
Nevertheless I’ve transferred a couple of questions from it to here as they caught my interest: -
Xara Allen
peter can i ask what your thoughts are on kundalini and chakras. ive resisted that belief system so far having discounted it as just another model and not one that im asthetically or culturally attracted to so why bother with it... but ive been reading a fair bit of S Mace as he seems to ascribe some objective physiological basis to it....wondered wat your thoughts were tis all....?
The various oriental systems of chackras and meridians contradict each other in detail and you won’t find much corresponding to any of them on dissection. ‘Fake’ acupuncture, where the therapist puts the needles in at arbitrary points has equally beneficial effects to ‘real’ acupuncture apparently.
Some modern methods of sports training urge the trainee to put all their mental attention into the muscle groups used in their particular event. Similar practices occur in martial arts where the practitioner visualizes ‘chi’ flowing to the striking or defending parts, or even outside the body entirely.
I tend to take the view that all such systems depend on simply drawing the attention of the practitioner or recipient to the areas of the body requiring attention and that the attention itself has a real and sometimes magical effect. Thus any system of representing the body in the mind by some sort of analogy will probably work, including such patently novel systems such as the kabbalistic middle pillar exercises. For simplicities sake I tend to prefer the Gnostic Pentagram or Gnostic Chaosphere practices which use just 5 ‘chackras’ with a simple vowel sound vibrated to each
I've a question regarding Apophenion, p. 82. You write in the first paragraph "This strongly suggests that when enchanting a future perception on 'memory' of it having occured, rather than visualising a chain of events leading to its occurence." - Isn't this contradictory to what you write in the first chapters about "being" and "doing" (pp. 18-). I understand on p. 82 the suggestion to put a state into your spell rather than a process. I know, here it isn't the point, but in the whole of your book, especially when regarding the first chapters with this passage, it seems contradictory. Would you be so kind to explain?
Firstly let me say that I find no evidence of ‘being’ anywhere in reality except in our imaginations. Everything moves, everything changes from moment to moment even if our sluggish perception suggests otherwise.
If we assume from the quantum perspective that many possible futures exist in some sort of shadowy wavelike form then forming an image of one future favored version now may well encourage the future to manifest in that form eventually. You might merely call that making a plan or a wish, however some experiments indicate that the observer’s choice of what to observe has a tendency to make reality follow suit.
Pete.
Looting
The British riots have come and gone for the moment, and at last the politicians and the media have tired of punditry and explanationism and blame assignment. Finally now that the punitive sentencing process has gone into well publicized overdrive we get the one statistic they dared not release in the immediate aftermath of the event and which I’ve eagerly awaited, - an estimate of the numbers involved.
Scotland Yard puts it at 30,000. One must balance that figure against the natural tendency of the police to want to both understate the extent of a breakdown of the law and order they get paid to maintain and perhaps a tendency to overstate it in the face of proposed police spending cuts. Nevertheless in the context of several thousand arrests it sounds like a reasonable lower estimate. I had guessed about 50,000, although I saw nothing of it directly whilst on holiday in Wales.
Compared to the poll tax riot which seems to have involved about 250,000 this seems like peanuts, yet its effect seems to have disturbed the national psyche far more, and I think it has done so because of the lack any easily understandable political motive for the riots.
However, as someone once said of the French Revolution, ‘there’s nothing more political than the price of a loaf of bread’, and to pretend that anything that happens in society lacks a political dimension or a power relationship of some sort seems naïve.
I suspect that a great many people fairly well understand the causes of these riots but keep the guilty secret to themselves because they would personally rather remain enmeshed in the problem rather than consider the alternatives.
The crisis in the financial systems and the riots share a common cause, the failure of the policy of economic growth and consumerism.
Yes, I have just committed the ultimate blasphemy, I don’t think our society should strive for more economic growth or more consumption, despite what just about all politicians say.
The majority of people now have about twice as much stuff as they had 40 years ago, yet they seem no happier or more content at all, in fact one could argue that the relentless pursuit of ever more consumables has led to a drop in the quality of life. Some sociologists argue that quality of life peaked in the UK around the mid seventies.
For the last few decades we have imported debt and manufactures and labor from abroad to maintain a growth in consumerism. This has had the grim effects of creating an unsustainable debt mountain, an unwanted underclass of unskilled people with no work in basic manufacturing, and arguably a far less cohesive society riven by multicultural, multi-identity, and wealth ghetto-isation. What does it mean to be British these days? It seems to mean having a long and glorious past which we are increasingly taught to feel ashamed of; and no vision for the future beyond an even larger TV screen, at an ever cheaper price. Most of the people who stole televisions had access to at least one already; they merely obeyed social norms in obtaining another as cheaply as possible. The underclass may have started the riots but the middle classes seem to have joined in the looting, the rich have already got richer these last few decades by more subtle forms of looting.
The solution seems simple, cease striving for growth, stop working for consumables we don’t really need, put our own people back to work making the stuff we do need even if that makes it a bit more expensive. Share out what we do have a bit more equitably, and concentrate more on quality of life and leisure pursuits.
Hopefully this will also lead to less looting of this planet’s rapidly diminishing resources.
Further thoughts
Well that stirred up a reply or two, herewith my response....
There are perhaps 100m people on this planet in various conflict zones who could reasonably claim asylum here, and there are perhaps 1bn who would like to move here as economic migrants given the chance.
These small islands already have one of the highest population densities on the planet. We cannot feed ourselves from the available land and I see massive encroachment and building work in progress on much of our remaining green spaces and farmland. I also notice massive soil erosion in many of our heritage sites and we have apparently such insurmountable waste disposal problems now that we have to ship it abroad.
I cannot therefore support further immigration. I have no racist or ethnic agenda, I just don't think we should let anymore people in, from any category, on a permanent basis, although I'm not opposed to a certain amount of tourism and some short -term work permits, plus immigration of partners in the case of genuine marriage or civil partnership. It would seem humanitarian to let political refugees in, but we simply don't have the facilities, rather we should consider arming them and giving them all affordable possible fire support to democratise their homelands.
I do not agree with the principle that we may need some 'indespensible' specialists, surely we can fill any conceivable vacancy from our existing 67 odd million, if not we should adjust our education system and our ridiculous benefits system accordingly. We already have substantial unemployment. Plus imported labour tends to depress real wages, to the capitalist's delight.
Further importation of skilled people will only exacerbate skill shortages and inequalities in developing nations. Poland for example has in the last decade lost 1m of its most dynamic people, who are predicted never to return.
As a small scale entreprenneur let me assure you that the free movement of capital is largely illusory, no significant amount of capital ever moves internationally without political approval, the same applies to labour, try getting a job in France, friends of mine have tried and failed.
I think the current EU financial crisis demonstrates that you cannot 'Globalise' divergent systems sucessfully even on a European wide basis.
Afterthought
On returning from my weeks surfing trip and family holiday I note that the previous post on Knights of Chaos seems to have attracted a lot of attention, almost as much as the Designer Religion article of some time ago. I wonder if this has arisen partly because of the activities of that nutter in Norway who claimed alleigance to some sort of Knights Templar organisation?
I have to say that his actions seem insane to me. If you feel intensely about immigration or population growth elsewhere, why massacre your 'own' people to make your point known?
I met a of facinating historian and a political scientists whilst away. The historian, with the crusades as her speciality, opined that the Templars almost certainly had no serious or interesting heresies, the Pope and the French king merely needed the wealth of an order which had ceased to have any real function after the failure of the crusading effort. It would seem that the mere innuendo of heresy has given them an attractive glamour for many anti-catholic groups including occultists and fringe freemasons. However it seems that the Templars themselves remained devout and pious dupes till the grim end.
The political scientist opined that in the UK and many other places immigration and population remain 'The Elephants in the Room' which no mainstream politicial will address. The centre left does not want to appear racist, the centre right continues to want to stimulate capitalism with cheap labour and population growth, and neither side wants to risk the unpopularity of saying to people limit your family because the planet cannot support a whole lot more people, or much more consumption and economic growth either.
Since debate on these subjects has become a concensus taboo for mainstream politicians, it comes as no surprise that extreem opinions ferment on the sidelines, unmoderated by engagement in mainstream debate.
Personally, I'd describe the UK as full to capacity already and I don't think we should allow any more permanent residents, whatever their creed, ethnicity, or supposedly indispensible skills. Sixty seven million seems more than enough for this pocket handkerchief sized little group of islands, another ten or twenty million will not make anything better in the long run, and sucking in capable people from elsewhere just denudes their country of origin of its skill base.
Knights
With reference to the previous post, it all gets worse and worse for Rupert, one wonders how much he will have to pay Rebecca to keep himself out of jail?
Anyway, to more important matters; THE KNIGHTS OF CHAOS.
Rapacious short term interests despoil our planet, we have massacred the fish and filled the oceans with filth, we have cut down the forests and degraded the land, we have exterminated many thousands of species; we have embarked on a massive combustion of fossil fuels that threatens a fatal climatic catastrophe for the remaining species, including ours.
Whilst a broad scientific consensus accepts that current policies will lead to planet-wide ecological disaster later in this century, most people choose to turn a blind eye, whilst short term vested interests in politico-economic; commercial-industrial; and religious organizations continue to promote ever more indiscriminate growth in consumption and population
Many pagan, esoteric, new-age and alternativist organizations have now committed to the cause of saving this planet’s biosphere from the ravages of climate catastrophe, overpopulation, overconsumption, , and the general degradation of the environment, which will lead inexorably to the collapse of the biosphere and the end of civilization during this current century if humanity does not change its ways. Some work with publicity and persuasion, some work with other forms of information warfare, some work with consciousness raising or prayer. We applaud all their efforts.
However one niche in the resistance array seems neglected. The world’s Wizards and Sorcerers have yet to make a coherent contribution to the cause of saving the biosphere and civilization. Perhaps they feel a bit embarrassed about this because their Magician forebears largely initiated the whole scientific revolution; the technological offshoots of which have provided humanity with so many opportunities to act with such power and myopic stupidity.
Nevertheless, it now seems imperative for us to act. History shows that a small handful of Wizards has often had an effect out of all proportion to their numbers; we can change the future if we want to. Never underestimate the power of metaphysics and parapsychology, for all cultural paradigms and beliefs and ideals, and all thoughts and ideas depend on them.
We thus extend a planet-wide invitation to anyone with magical abilities or the suspicion that they might have them, (we all do actually, most people just don’t realize this) to join us in the next campaign of The Knights of Chaos (First Earth Batallion). We will use direct psi-attack on a number of political, corporate, and religious targets for the purposes of neutralization or behavior change, doing nothing illegal (or indeed believable), by the standards of westernized societies.
We have in place a Grimoire resuming a suitable god-form and an array of eight servitors with groundsleves from previous preliminary campaigns, plus a number of ‘kills’ in the bag from those campaigns, but we need to do much more. The primary techniques employed come from the traditions of Chaos Magic, i.e. gloves off, believe in what works on a practical level, nothing sacred, everything possible…….
The Knights and Dames of Chaos and Applicants to the Order will commence another campaign at www.arcanoriumcollege.comstarting on 26th July 2011. (This site levies a small registration fee to maintain itself and to discourage frivolous activity and dilettantes.)
Now seems a good time for all Wizards, Sorcerers, and Magicians of the world to come down from their Ivory Towers and cease conjuring for personal wealth and power or arcane knowledge and interesting incubi or succubi, or you may not have much of a planet left on which to enjoy them.
We have naught to offer in the short term but blood, sweat, and tears, severe a challenge to your skills, a sense of comradeship, the satisfaction of knowing that you did your bit, and maybe a few titles and medals*.
Alternatively just wait till you’re sitting in the ruins of civilization contemplating the last tin of canned food whilst your kids ask ‘Why didn’t you do something back then!?’
Stokastikos 127, The Acting Marshall, Knights of Chaos.
(*Above see a Battle Honour Ring of the Knights forged by our Adeptus Mechanicus)
News of the Screws
I note with great joy the enormously deserved death of the News of the World 'newspaper'.
Gerald Suster (he was a friend and colleague) thou art avenged at last, see:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/gerald-suster-728836.html
This disgracefull arse-rag of a paper has, with its constant mixture of lies, traductions, set ups, invasions of privacy and hypocritical purience, provided a stain on the traditions of journalism and an insult to the intelligence of the British public for far too long, may it, and all the scum who have knowingly colluded in its lies, rot in hell for eternity, good riddance.
Pete.
Another Octavo Review
More...
Thoughts
A brief essay on the origins of some contemporary esoteric ideas.
Over a recent lunch, Professor Ronald Hutton surmised to me that H.P. Lovecraft’s idea of the Necronomicon probably arises from the Arabic Gayat al Hakim manuscript which later appeared in Latin as the Picatrix Grimoire.
The Gayat al Hakim/Picatrix itself shows the strong influence of Egyptian magic and Neo-Platonic and Hermetic magic and leads to conceptions of Planetary Theurgy, which later appear explicitly in the medieval and renaissance grimoires.
The whole idea of a dread grimoire having as its author ‘Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab’, fits in rather well with the Gayat or its derivatives having inspired H.P.Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos stories, or at least his idea of the Necronomicon.
Planetary magic or at least planetary religion seems to have begun in Hellenic classical cultures when the ancient Greeks and Romans identified some of their gods and goddesses with the planets of the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon, although the beginnings of this idea appear in the Babylonian culture.
As the classical religions fell to creeping monotheism, the idea of planetary powers or spirits survived in Gnosticism, reappearing as Archons, entities attributed to the various planets which the aspiring Gnostic had to master to achieve spiritual progress. Some Gnostics viewed the Archons as malignant or obstructive spirits standing in the way of the ascent of the adept back to godhood. In the medieval grimoires we also see the idea of some of the planetary intelligences and spirits having malignant characteristics, and such ideas may well have also fed into the Necronomicon mythos, after all the title itself implies a book of ‘dead names’, or at least those of long forgotten gods.
Eventually, ideas from Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Classical Paganism, Late Classical ‘Pagan Monotheism’, and Gnosticism, The Medieval and Renaissance Grimoires and a late form of Kabala, (together with a dash of spiritualism and colonial orientalism), all come together in the late 19th century to form a grand synthesis that we could call “The Standard Model of Magic’ forged by the adepts of the Golden Dawn (mainly MacGregor Mathers it seems).
From this synthesis comes most of the magical theory and technology on which various people built such traditions as Thelema, Wicca, Neo-Paganism, Neo-Druidry, Chaos Magic, and indeed most of the esoteric components of the New-Age movement, in the second ‘occult revival’ beginning in the last three decades of the 20th century.
In contra-distinction to the prevailing but declining monotheism and the increasingly dominant mechanistic-materialistic scientific world views of the late 19th and 20th centuries, this new esoterics began to view its ‘deities’ not as almighty cosmic creators but as archetypal ‘god-forms’ representing human scale abilities and aspirations, and ‘spirits’ as fundamentally arising from the activities of ourselves and living organisms and natural phenomena, rather than as the authors of such phenomena. Thus magic became again the art and science of theurgy; making ‘spirits’ and ‘godforms’, (or your own subconscious archetypes and parapsychological abilities), perform on demand.
Thus Invocation, Evocation, Divination, Enchantment, and planned Illumination came to replace the religious practices of worshipful prayer or prayerful supplication, and semi-mechanistic parapsychological models of apparently magical phenomena came to augment the developing ‘hard’ scientific paradigm.
The basic techniques came down to ritual enactment, the drawing of various mystical signs and symbols, incantation, visualization, and altered states of consciousness by various physiological means, to which Crowley of course added sex and drugs.
Chaos Magic then added an additional battery of consciousness altering techniques from many sources, and the theory that sacredness, sanctity, and meaning depend entirely on operator choice, rather than on historical or spiritual precedent, thus defining belief as a tool rather than as an end in itself.
Perhaps the most significant development of the second magical revival lay in the realization that you could use any symbolism you liked, ancient or modern or imaginary, and write your own rituals and incantations, and that these would have magical effects so long as you used the appropriate practical techniques, altered states of consciousness, and sleights of mind. This development lay implied in the great synthesis that the adepts of the Golden Dawn created, although they attempted to disguise the fact by attributing their creations to certain ‘secret chiefs’. It became fully explicit only in the second magical revival under the aegis of Chaos Magic where practical techniques assumed primary importance and the symbolic representations of antiquity became regarded as mere window dressings of choice.
Rather than adopt any particular ancient or antique pantheon Chaos Magic built a simple color coded psychocosm based on magical intent;
Blue for works of wealth and power. (~Jupiter)
Orange for works of intellect and quickness. (~Mercury)
Green for works of love and friendship. (~Venus)
Red for works of vitality and aggression. (~Mars)
Black for works of death. (~Saturn)
Silver or Purple for works of Sex. (~Moon)
Yellow for works of Ego and Extraversion (~Sun)
Octarine for works of Pure Magic Research & Quest. (~Uranus)
This scheme functions rather like the modified tree of life kabala that the GD originated except that the spheres do not lie in an hierarchy, but rather in a round table of equality with the possibility of combining archetypes for less straightforward entities, for example the newly revived goddess Eris might appear as having Red-Purple characteristics which we can use to structure an Invocation. Odin for another example; does not equate well with any single sphere derived from classical-kabalistic considerations.
At Arcanorium College, www.arcanoriumcollege.com, an international internet based adventure; we have an ongoing project to create what we have provisionally called The Portals of Chaos, a graphic grimoire. This will consist of a set of CG images on moveable cards which the magician can use for Invocation, Evocation, Enchantment and Illumination as well as just for Divination.
It will bear little resemblance to a conventional Tarot for it will have the above 8 major god forms and their associated planetary ‘spirits’ and intelligences’ as well as 28 god and goddess forms representing ‘mixed’ attributes corresponding to various personality types, assorted deities from many pagan pantheons, and various magical intents.
Plus it will probably have a number of ‘random’ event cards for the anticipation of such in divination or the imposition of such in enchantment.
Also we have chosen the big five entities from the Necronomicon; Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Yog-Sothoth to represent various cosmic scale phenomena such as panspsychic panspermia, higher dimensionality, eldritch knowledge from morphic fields, and so on.
So, if we aim to create A Worke of Magical Arte, with useful practical applications, then perhaps we continue in a very ancient tradition. All Grimoires then appear as objectively 'fake' including the imaginary ones like the fabled Necronomicon, because the deities and monsters in them derive from cobbled together bits of our own psychology and mythology, which nevertheless can have a real psychological and parapsychological power for us.
Perhaps then we should regard Grimoires in general as 'workes of arte', as convenient analogical impositions, rather than as objective maps of the incredible complexity of the cartography of our own psychology.
In the composition of The Portals we aim to give it all we have got, including superb computer assisted graphic design, in the hope that it will actually improve upon the Picatrix and the Necronomicon ideas, whilst acknowledging them as precursors in an historical tradition of artistic magical thinking........
Plus also magical cup Mk 2. After a fortnight's intense metaphysical struggle it came to me that a Magical Cup should function as a device to stimulate the imagination, rather than to impose a structure on perception, thus its new stochastic design.
Smokin
Smokin
Having campaigned so ferociously for punitive taxation on tobacco, anti-smoking propaganda, and legal bans on its public use, the British Medical Association should express little surprise that they now have an epidemic of obesity and alcohol abuse to deal with.
British pubs close at the rate of about 200 per week now, and those watering holes which remain have become markedly less agreeable as people cease to pace their drinking and their tempers with cigarettes, and just keep pouring the drinks down. Personally I feel much more comfortable walking home though a street full of smokers than a street full of drunks.
How come the great magus himself rarely appears without a lighted cigarette or an electronic one in the places where they ban the real thing, many people ask.
I cite historical evidence. Adolph Hitler, a teetotal, vegetarian, non-smoker, dead at 54 and reviled for eternity. Winston Churchill, a cigar chomping, brandy swilling carnivore who insisted on the right to smoke before and after meals, between courses, and also during courses if desired. He lived till almost 90 and will remain a hero forever. He also got a Nobel Prize for literature, which is more than we can say for the author of that demented rant Mein Kampf.
Just remember that the majority of the best stuff you ever read was composed by people meditating on their texts over a pipe or a cigar or a cigarette.
Whenever some self-righteous pot-bellied anti-smoking nazi casts a disapproving glance in my direction I smile back, confident in the knowledge that I could almost certainly outrun or out-swim him over any distance.
Teenagers will always want to experiment with forbidden things. Thus it seems rather silly that we have created a situation where a packet of cigs now costs more than some hard drugs or enough cheap booze to hospitalise yourself.
Yesterday the BMA asked the UK government to impose a total ban on smoking in cars; the law will hopefully not pass. Smokers have a 2 yard advantage in an emergency stop because they’re more alert than ordinary mortals. Rather we should make smoking, or at least nicotine chewing gum, compulsory for drivers.
Hail to the Sun
Herewith my Summer Solstice Eisteddfood poem, despite that it consists of a poem by a scientist (groan), it recieved polite to moderately enthusiastic applause, the climate skeptic did not attend the event, so I can at least claim victory by default.
Hail to the Sun
The following figures are all very true, except for the last one,
The last ones a guess, and I’m hoping it’s wrong.
This Midsummer twenty eleven, world population hits seven billion
Around the globe we burn, each and every second
Three hundred tonnes of fossilised fuel, every single second.
Last year we sent to the skies
A whole thirty gigatonnes of C O Two,
So about a millions years worth of sunlight stored
Goes up in smoke each year now, and it’s rising,
The temperature’s gone up by one degree
The weather gets odder, new records set with every passing season
Two degrees spells disaster, four of them bring catastrophe
And at six degrees it’s another global climate apocalypse.
Welcome to another mass extinction event, and this time it’s ours.
Of our seven billion, a billion eat poorly already,
The green revolution runs out with the oil.
We could burn up the gas and the coal and the shale
Concrete the fields and fight for the food and the water,
Despoil all the oceans for the last of the fish.
World population, just one lifetime hence, perhaps fifteen billion,
More likely methinks, just a few hundred thousand,
Scratching a living in the caves and the ruins.
Yet enough sunlight falls daily to power the world as it is
Hail to the Sun; let us seek the wisdom to use it.
Mathers
The theory and practice of magic seems to have undergone two major periods of revolution and revival in the last couple of centuries, the first began towards the end of the nineteenth century and the second began in the last third of the twentieth century.
Of course esoteric and occult endeavors always continue behind the façade of mainstream culture, but in the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the last few of decades of the twentieth, revolutions in magical theory occurred which led to huge changes in practice.
The intellectual lineage of modern magical thought seems to begin with Eliphas Levi who provided us with two basic insights, firstly that we might find correspondences between seemingly unrelated symbolic systems. Specifically he managed to find or forge correspondences between Kabala and Tarot, and between various ‘god forms’ such as ancient nature deities like Pan and the Horned God and the Templar’s Baphomet and the Christian Devil or Lucifer.
Secondly Levi started a breakout from the ‘Spiritist’ paradigm, which had previously dominated esoteric thought, with his idea of an ‘Astral Light’ as the medium of magical effects. Whilst his musings on the subject remain sketchy, they did at least introduce the idea of some kind of potentially understandable ‘mechanism’ for magic that didn’t depend on the capricious whim of mysterious ‘spirits’.
After Levi the most influential Mage of recent times arises, a man whose influence on Magic equals Darwin’s influence on Biology, Marx’s influence on Politics, and Freud’s influence on Psychology, and I don’t mean Aleister Crowley, I mean Samuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers.
The synthesis that Mathers achieved would come to dominate western magical thought for the 20th century, yet he remains an elusive figure, he wrote a great deal, but he wrote little or nothing about himself. He appears as the leading light in the formation and leadership of the Magical Order of the Golden Dawn and the probable author of the great majority of its papers and rituals and practices.
We need to realize that at the time Mathers worked on translating manuscripts and setting up the Golden Dawn, popular western esotericism consisted largely of tawdry Spiritualism, the faux orientalism of Theosophy, and a few remnants of Rosicrucian ideas supported within fringe freemasonry.
Mathers set to work in the British Museum reading room and translated medieval and rennaissance grimoires and books on kabala into English, at a time when such texts remained the province of specialized academics only. He worked with a fringe Masonic group, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, with whose members Eliphas Levi had had some contact, and by combining some of their ideas with the fruits of his own scholarship and imagination he seems to have conjured up the whole Golden Dawn system pretty much by himself.
Now as with Darwin’s Origin of Species, or Marx’s Das Kapital, or for that matter Newton’s Principia Mathematica, few people in the respective fields nowadays read the extremely longwinded original texts. Yet everyone in those fields understands the fundamental and seminal ideas.
Mathers attempted an omniscient eclecticism in which he sought to bring together all esoteric knowledge under an umbrella decorated with a late form of kabala, motifs from late classical paganism and ‘pagan-monotheism’, hermeticism, Egyptology, renaissance magic, rosicrucianism and freemasonry. Despite that it didn’t all dovetail neatly together he just kept adding more and more; alchemy, enochiana, goetia, even bits of orientalism like tattwas and chackras, and semi-spiritualistic things like astral travel. He effectively created a fairly accessible encyclopedia of esoterics, and an order to teach it.
So where does the great breakthrough lie in all that?
I think it lies precisely in the insight that the magician can and should use ideas from all those kinds of traditions because they all have their uses in structuring the quest for perception, will, imagination, psychic ability, genius and alternative wisdom that the magician pursues.
Whilst this idea seems standard enough now, it would have seemed revolutionary at the time.
Mathers did of course employ the hierarchical gambit, and pretended to deliver his knowledge from ‘hidden chiefs’, following the model of theosophy. Whilst this tactic facilitated the formation of his order it proved a poor long term strategy and led to an eventual calling of his bluff and to schism.
All of Aliester Crowley’s ideas about magic came directly from Mathers. Crowley merely added sex and drugs and a near-psychopathic personality to the mix. Crowley seems to have virtually worshipped Mathers for a while, but after a time the rich, loud and wild young Crowley and the quieter more reclusive older Mathers fell out terminally, probably because Crowley wanted to usurp the top dog position and take over the whole system, which in many ways he did eventually.
All of the western esoteric traditions of the twentieth century have borrowed from the encyclopedic corpus that Mathers brought to light and developed. They all consist of ‘revivals’ and most of them didn’t need to look further back than Mathers to find plenty of material to re-clothe the bare bones of lost or non-existent historical traditions.
Chaos magic didn’t even bother to pretend to antique historical precedent; it simply worked forward from the Golden Dawn through Crowley and Austin Spare and added some unashamedly modern ideas as well.
Of Mathers the man, scholarship has uncovered surprisingly little so far.
Samuel Liddell(or Liddel) "MacGregor" Mathers (January 8 or 11, 1854 – November 5 or 20, 1918)
Doubt remains about his exact dates of birth and death, and nobody has attempted a biography of him yet, although many have made references to parts of his astonishing career, for he met with many famous or later to become famous people.
It seems that he rarely had much money and that he did a bit of part time soldiering and quite a bit of boxing. The few photographs of him show a tall athletic handsome man. He apparently displayed many eccentricities including vegetarianism and styling himself a Scottish laird. He enjoyed a lifelong marriage to Moina who he met in the British Museum, they appeared devoted and she kept fragments of his order going for a decade after his death. Her assertion, in a letter to Annie Horniman, that their marriage remained unconsummated and celibate sounds suspiciously like a ruse to ingratiate herself with Annie, a very rich spinster who financially supported the order for a time. However the marriage produced no children.
Mathers could apparently read an astonishing variety of modern and ancient languages, yet he never seems to have had any sort of proper profession, apart from Magus of course………
Someone should write his biography. If you have any leads to unpublished material please email them to me and I will endeavor to pass them on to someone who might just do so.
Oops, a biography does exist, as someone just pointed out, http://www.scribd.com/doc/13033799/Ithell-Colquhoun-Sword-of-Wisdom- interesting stuff.
The theory and practice of magic seems to have undergone two major periods of revolution and revival in the last couple of centuries, the first began towards the end of the nineteenth century and the second began in the last third of the twentieth century.
Of course esoteric and occult endeavors always continue behind the façade of mainstream culture, but in the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the last few of decades of the twentieth, revolutions in magical theory occurred which led to huge changes in practice.
The intellectual lineage of modern magical thought seems to begin with Eliphas Levi who provided us with two basic insights, firstly that we might find correspondences between seemingly unrelated symbolic systems. Specifically he managed to find or forge correspondences between Kabala and Tarot, and between various ‘god forms’ such as ancient nature deities like Pan and the Horned God and the Templar’s Baphomet and the Christian Devil or Lucifer.
Secondly Levi started a breakout from the ‘Spiritist’ paradigm, which had previously dominated esoteric thought, with his idea of an ‘Astral Light’ as the medium of magical effects. Whilst his musings on the subject remain sketchy, they did at least introduce the idea of some kind of potentially understandable ‘mechanism’ for magic that didn’t depend on the capricious whim of mysterious ‘spirits’.
After Levi the most influential Mage of recent times arises, a man whose influence on Magic equals Darwin’s influence on Biology, Marx’s influence on Politics, and Freud’s influence on Psychology, and I don’t mean Aleister Crowley, I mean Samuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers.
The synthesis that Mathers achieved would come to dominate western magical thought for the 20th century, yet he remains an elusive figure, he wrote a great deal, but he wrote little or nothing about himself. He appears as the leading light in the formation and leadership of the Magical Order of the Golden Dawn and the probable author of the great majority of its papers and rituals and practices.
We need to realize that at the time Mathers worked on translating manuscripts and setting up the Golden Dawn, popular western esotericism consisted largely of tawdry Spiritualism, the faux orientalism of Theosophy, and a few remnants of Rosicrucian ideas supported within fringe freemasonry.
Mathers set to work in the British Museum reading room and translated medieval and rennaissance grimoires and books on kabala into English, at a time when such texts remained the province of specialized academics only. He worked with a fringe Masonic group, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, with whose members Eliphas Levi had had some contact, and by combining some of their ideas with the fruits of his own scholarship and imagination he seems to have conjured up the whole Golden Dawn system pretty much by himself.
Now as with Darwin’s Origin of Species, or Marx’s Das Kapital, or for that matter Newton’s Principia Mathematica, few people in the respective fields nowadays read the extremely longwinded original texts. Yet everyone in those fields understands the fundamental and seminal ideas.
Mathers attempted an omniscient eclecticism in which he sought to bring together all esoteric knowledge under an umbrella decorated with a late form of kabala, motifs from late classical paganism and ‘pagan-monotheism’, hermeticism, Egyptology, renaissance magic, rosicrucianism and freemasonry. Despite that it didn’t all dovetail neatly together he just kept adding more and more; alchemy, enochiana, goetia, even bits of orientalism like tattwas and chackras, and semi-spiritualistic things like astral travel. He effectively created a fairly accessible encyclopedia of esoterics, and an order to teach it.
So where does the great breakthrough lie in all that?
I think it lies precisely in the insight that the magician can and should use ideas from all those kinds of traditions because they all have their uses in structuring the quest for perception, will, imagination, psychic ability, genius and alternative wisdom that the magician pursues.
Whilst this idea seems standard enough now, it would have seemed revolutionary at the time.
Mathers did of course employ the hierarchical gambit, and pretended to deliver his knowledge from ‘hidden chiefs’, following the model of theosophy. Whilst this tactic facilitated the formation of his order it proved a poor long term strategy and led to an eventual calling of his bluff and to schism.
All of Aliester Crowley’s ideas about magic came directly from Mathers. Crowley merely added sex and drugs and a near-psychopathic personality to the mix. Crowley seems to have virtually worshipped Mathers for a while, but after a time the rich, loud and wild young Crowley and the quieter more reclusive older Mathers fell out terminally, probably because Crowley wanted to usurp the top dog position and take over the whole system, which in many ways he did eventually.
All of the western esoteric traditions of the twentieth century have borrowed from the encyclopedic corpus that Mathers brought to light and developed. They all consist of ‘revivals’ and most of them didn’t need to look further back than Mathers to find plenty of material to re-clothe the bare bones of lost or non-existent historical traditions.
Chaos magic didn’t even bother to pretend to antique historical precedent; it simply worked forward from the Golden Dawn through Crowley and Austin Spare and added some unashamedly modern ideas as well.
Of Mathers the man, scholarship has uncovered surprisingly little so far.
Samuel Liddell(or Liddel) "MacGregor" Mathers (January 8 or 11, 1854 – November 5 or 20, 1918)
Doubt remains about his exact dates of birth and death, and nobody has attempted a biography of him yet, although many have made references to parts of his astonishing career, for he met with many famous or later to become famous people.
It seems that he rarely had much money and that he did a bit of part time soldiering and quite a bit of boxing. The few photographs of him show a tall athletic handsome man. He apparently displayed many eccentricities including vegetarianism and styling himself a Scottish laird. He enjoyed a lifelong marriage to Moina who he met in the British Museum, they appeared devoted and she kept fragments of his order going for a decade after his death. Her assertion, in a letter to Annie Horniman, that their marriage remained unconsummated and celibate sounds suspiciously like a ruse to ingratiate herself with Annie, a very rich spinster who financially supported the order for a time. However the marriage produced no children.
Mathers could apparently read an astonishing variety of modern and ancient languages, yet he never seems to have had any sort of proper profession, apart from Magus of course………
Someone should write his biography. If you have any leads to unpublished material please email them to me and I will endeavor to pass them on to someone who might just do so.
Oops, a biography does exist, as someone just pointed out, http://www.scribd.com/doc/13033799/Ithell-Colquhoun-Sword-of-Wisdom- interesting stuff.