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After the exuberance of the last few posts, some rather negative stuff: -
Conspiracy Theory has become something of the half-thinking person’s alternative religion these days. The set of beliefs has gradually achieved some sort of canonical form these days, expect the inclusion of Zionism, Nazism, the Rothschilds, the JSK assassination, the CIA and MK Ultra, then add Area 51, Flying Saucers, Climate Change and Vaccination denial, weird interpretations of 9/11, and the British Royal Family to taste.
Conspiracy theories tend to appeal to the extreme right and the extreme left and to the paranoid and the self-important. Some people also delight in thinking they know something that others don’t, although the internet now contains so much of this stuff in the public domain that anyone can fill their heads with it without actually encountering anything to question or falsify any of it. You can google yourself into complete and comprehensive ‘self-consistent’ sets of mutually supportive delusions by a simple process of selective attention.
Some people seem to prefer the idea that the chaos of the world lies under the control of something, even if malignant. What about the filthy rich nuclear armed nazi reptile pervert house of Windsor/Rothschild ruling the world from a bunker beneath Stonehenge? Obvious innit!
In practise Conspiracies have a fractal form. Conspiracies operate between nations and within nations, within workplaces and social groups and within families. We also have conspiracies inside our own heads, with some of our thoughts and fears and desires at odds with others.
Conspiracies exist all right, but Snafu’s, screw-ups, misunderstandings, mistakes, fortuitous accidents, and stupidity generally set the fairly random and unpredictable course of human life and history.
Conspiracy Theory always retrodicts; it has no predictive power. It should not form any part of so called ‘esoteric knowledge’ at all.
Thus I find Ray Sherwin’s latest book ‘VITRIOL’ a dismal disappointment. He goes whole hog on uncritical Conspiracy Theory, and it becomes a tiresome and predictable read in which the author commits literary and intellectual suicide at length. Then he further sours the mix with rants against former friends with whom he developed business disputes, and with scientifically illiterate neurotic rants about health issues. He once wrote a couple of reasonable books on magic, this latest offering will probably depress the market for them.
The Spanish translator of the E-Epoch just pointed out that we had mistakenly attributed the authorship of ‘The Imitation of Christ’ not to Ignatius Loyola but rather to Thessalonius Loyola. (Ray’s old magical moniker). Maybe that or the Fuerteventura sun and isolation have gone to his head.
And now for another negative: Necromancy.
The damned arte has reared its rotting head again, so herewith a counterblast from the annals of Esoteric Quality Control, new on this site.
http://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/173-necromancy-and-magic
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With some exhuberance I post a picture of my victorious MP. Unlike a lot of them she once had a real job, as you can see from her magnificent lifeguard's shoulders.
I felt no need to actually vote for her or to sit up for the foregone conclusion of a result. The Sun and the bookies as usual called it right. The bookies had them neck and neck towards the finish, but bear in mind they offer odds based partly on their appraisal of the chances but partly on the money that actually gets placed, so you have to allow for the sort of people who actually go to the bookies, sample bias as we mathematicians call it.
So we have a sensible result for the UK, despite the simmering tartan romanticism north of the border, and we have avoided the dread Lab/SNP coalition of entropy.
I voted Green as promised in my electoral Pact with my eldest, a magical gesture for the future.
And now for a little light physics: -
Galaxies
March 15, 2014
Fifteen Old, Massive Galaxies Found in the Early Universe --"They Shouldn't Even Exist"
http://earthsky.org/science-wire/a-young-galaxy-in-the-local-universe
RELEASE DATE: SEP 27, 2014
A young galaxy in the local universe?
The nearby dwarf galaxy DDO 68 – only 39 million light-years away – looks young. But its nearness to us in space suggests it’s not as young as it looks.
Hypersphere Cosmology confidently predicts that astronomers will eventually discover galaxies of all ages at all distances, bright new ones are just easier to find at extreme distances. The Universe recycles everything.
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Confessions of a Right Wing Hippy.
Daughter, didn’t you recently tell me you had concluded that the dread Loch Ness Monster was actually a STURGEON? I quipped.
Dad, have you always been a Right Wing Hippy? Retorted my eldest, who has recently become a Doctor of Biological Sciences.
These quips arose during intense negotiations for an Emergency Electoral Pact between us in advance of this week’s UK general election.
In the end we both solemnly swore to vote Green on wizard’s honour and scientist’s honour. So that’s one less vote for the Conservatives in a constituency where it won’t make any difference, one less vote for the SNP where it won’t make any difference either, but two votes to add to the Green national total as a magical act of protest and long term enchantment for the future.
(Mind you, the Green’s policy of unrestricted population movement within Europe still seems profoundly ecologically unsound to me, but I guess they just put that in as a sop to the youth vote.) Nevertheless trying to conserve the environment satisfies my conservative instincts.
I think my moment of conversion to right wing hippiedom came on witnessing the ‘New-Age Convoy’ at Stonehenge. Children with matted hair and brown stumps for teeth, un-roadworthy vehicles full agricultural diesel stolen from farmers, surly feral men armed with machetes, scabby looking women selling themselves in benders, heroin on open sale, green hedgerows ripped down in failed attempts to light fires, human and dog excrement everywhere. Hawkwind still played well however. Peace and Love requires organisation and self-discipline you know man.
The overall level of human happiness seems more or less independent of ‘progress’ for the simple reason that anything ‘new’ or ‘progressive’ usually has as many downsides as upsides to it, most of them unforeseen. I find novelty profoundly interesting but not an unqualified good in itself. Science tends to improve over time, but architecture tends to get worse for example.
Politically I prefer a system that errs on the side of Liberty rather than Equality. (Fraternity has little effect beyond the 150 or so people that anyone can properly know). When it comes to Equality; equality of opportunity trumps enforced equality of outcome (socialism). I broadly support the Darwinian aims of STUB, stop the underclass breeding, or at least stop subsidising the feckless to do so. Yet I endeavour to practise benign capitalism as the most agreeable option available to me in current circumstances.
Like my daughter, most people seem to regard me as a mass of confusing contradictions. I would describe them as fertile juxtapositions. My appearance does not match my professional status and my opinions as a whole do not fall into any conventional category. I have left wing opinions about some matters, right wing opinions about others, conservative attitudes to some phenomena, liberal attitudes to others, and I currently hold some positions which have such a minority following that they don’t even have a category yet.
Whilst I have intense religious feelings I don’t believe in anything much except science, and a fair bit of that seems wrong; I suppose I merely respect the efficacy of scientific method in principle, although it often fails. Most ‘facts’ have fairly short half-lives. Official cosmology currently looks like a mistaken mess and as Richard Feynman said, ‘nobody understands quantum physics’ yet.
I respect the efficacy of magical method as well, despite its even higher failure rate. I value enchantment over divination on the basis of reasonably coherent quantum-theoretical reasons and personal experience. I dismiss the existence of ‘spirits’ as conventionally defined, and consider drugs and necromancy of limited or negligible value in magic.
In short, I Reject Herd Mentality.
Opinions shouldn’t come in exclusive boxed sets. (Prejudice by any other name.)
I value the antinomian perspective; we never really understand an idea until we also understand the conditions under which it ceases to apply.
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Beltane passed with a splendid evening at Grove with a number of celebrity guests. The assembled magical firepower easily held off the rain for the evenings Beltane fire.
The pond at Chateaux Chaos now teems with tens of thousands of toadpoles, gazing into it reminds me of those schoolboy experiments examining semen under a microscope.
To mark the season I've started on a full size classical goddess statue of Flora/Chloris for the gardens. See above a practise version of a head. For this I've used Jemsonite, a water based ceramic-acrylic material over a polystyrene hat display stand and some cloth flowers. I have acquired a lifesize fibreglass shop mannequin which I shall attempt to cover with Jemsonite to give a white marble effect. The Jemsonite mixes to a paste more suitable for architectural moulding than handworking, and it sets like stone in about 5 minutes, so you have to get it on very quickly, then you can set about it with serious abrasives to give a stone finish suitable for outdoor use.
The Hypersphere Cosmology paper now has publication in the viXra Online Scientific Journal, the home of papers too far out to pass the censors on arXiv.
http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0167
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Toadmass has passed at Chateaux Chaos with seemingly fewer visitors this year, they have left their strings of spawn adorning the weeds. However we have had a better year for Newts, most evenings we see half a dozen or so paddling amongst the reeds conducting their elaborate courtships, they tend to stay longer in the water than the grumpy toads who cannot wait to crawl back to dank solitude beneath their stones.
Above see a Puck/Pan figure fashioned to add a bit of classical grandeur to a garden, I do so abhor those mass produced garish garden gnomes, even the humorously rude ones. I made him starting with plasterer’s steel mesh which I overlaid with ‘Turdcrete’ an experimental clay-like mixture of finely sieved fibrous sheep’s wool and bracken compost, Portland cement, and black cement pigment, (handle with surgical gloves), he’s verdigrissed to a faux-bronze finish with matte pale green patio paint. Et in Arcadia Ego. ' A brief paean follows: -
The Great God Pan is Dead, Yet Again and Again and Again
The human godbeast comes and it goes, Et in Arcadia Ego
Pangenitor, Panphage, All Begetter, All Destroyer
The omnipresent reality of sex and death.
Rejected by the otherworldly philosophers
Lost by the citified Neoplatonist abstractors
Yet still sacred to the Pagans – the country folk.
The Hidden God, the Soul of the Wildwood
Faunus, Sylvanus, The Horned God, The Christian’s Devil
Herne, Cernunnos, Pan, Panic! – Witches!
Mahomet – Baphomet, God of Mistaken Identity
But full marks for Androgynous Deity.
Pan- the great All of life
Pan – Panpsychism, the magic forests live,
The world and the stars have life of a kind, but slower….
In the Romantic’s dreams of Arcadian idyll,
And to Neopagans’ delight
The Great God Pan Lives Yet!
- Always in our Genes and our Loins and our Hearts
Mind in body, body in mind, body and mind entwined.
As partly beasts, and partly gods we live.
Io Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan!
Project Pan-Epoch. Matt Kaybryn and I hope to release an e-read version of The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos in most of the worlds major languages within the foreseeable future. We already have volunteers for Polish, Spanish, Greek, and Portugese translations. If you would like to offer another please contact me at