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St George’s Day again and hardly anyone notices, we gave the world Newton, Darwin, and Democracy, plus nearly all of its games and sports, but now British Identity seems to mean little more than A Glorious Past and No Future. The EU State Religion of Political Correctness becomes increasingly enshrined in law and hence as morality, because most people sheepishly believe as commanded. Thus any discussion of why British Identity has no future becomes both futile and illegal. Nevertheless even some economists begin to wonder now if this pocket handkerchief of an island can accomodate any more people on it.
Despite a posh education, neither of my kids seems to know the first thing about the history of this sceptered isle. Well I suppose even if we have lost pre-eminence in just about everything else, Britain still punches well above its weight in Hollywood, dodgy financial services, arms manufacture, and of course Wizardry, Magic and Esoterics, although having said that I’m delighted to invite an American colleague to lecture in our next Semester on Arcanorium: -
Semester 5 Arcanorium College. http://www.arcanoriumcollege.com/
Semester 5. 29th April - 7th June
Fra. Alloy. Into the Dreamlands: Lovecraftian Sleep & Dream Work
Pete. Apophenia 2: Theory and Practise.
Alloy’s Summary: A course on how to explore the Lovecraftian Dreamlands and Mythos Dream Magic. Class will include a variety of techniques for controlling and using the Dreamlands symbol set for dream/sleep and dream-related magic. A familiarity (ideally, fluency) in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is STRONGLY recommended (links to free versions of all of the reading are available under the College of Mythos Studies sub-forum).
Week One: Dream Journals Week
Two & Three: The Map & The Journey
Week Four: Enemies & Allies – Obtaining Servitors, Wards, and Guides
Week Five: The Work of the Silver Key – Rituals in Dreamspace
Week Six: Great Cthulhu -The Sleeping God
My Summary: As Apophenia's Eighth Birthday falls within this Semester on May 26th I intend to provide an opportunity for participants to do an Apophenia working for inspiration and genius in chosen personal projects, an opportunity to debate the text of the Apophenion book, and also to hold a birthday celebration for the muse Herself.
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Plus my Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos have now come out as e-books in Italian thanks to the magnificent translation work of a certain bilingual Arcanorian, so it has received expert translation. Unfortunately I cannot read this beautiful language but I may well try singing a few of my rituals in err, sort of ‘Opera Mode’. (In Private!)
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Judgement Day, a review, but first its Frogmass!
Spring officially began this last weekend by Chaoist reckoning, for that’s when the pond at Chateaux Chaos filled with frogs. We have about 50 this year for the start of a 24/7 two week non-stop party and shagfest. The ‘music’ gets rather loud in the evenings. They have come in a variety of colours from whitish-yellow through greens and browns to a few that look a bit burgundy.
Let us hope we don’t get a late freeze, the climate seems oddly disturbed; we have just had the coldest Easter in a very long while.
The Science of Discworld 4, Judgement Day, has just appeared, I love this book although I suspect many liberal arts based Pratchett fans may find the extended science sections from Prof Ian Stewart (Maths and Physics) and Dr Jack Cohen (Biology) a bit of a challenge. Pratchett himself weaves an amusingly quirky tale that basically allows the two scientists to let rip with some of the more extraordinary recent developments in our understanding of reality, and an exploration of their strange philosophical implications.
I note with pleasure that the Big Bang hypothesis and the Higgs Boson get treated with a robust scepticism, as do many topics in cosmology and quantum physics. I began to wonder if the morphic fields of The Apophenion and The Octavo have found some resonance in the memesphere.
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Margaret Thatcher 1925 – 2013. Our fearless leader passeth…….
I stood to attention and sang Land of Hope and Glory on hearing the news on the radio.
She rescued this country from its slide into a penurious socialist dystopia under the dictatorship of the union barons.
She took back the Falklands and toppled a vile murderous dictatorship, for which the people of Argentina should remain eternally grateful.
She faced down the Soviet Empire and helped to free the peoples of Eastern Europe.
She restored a spirit of enterprise to Britain, I remain forever grateful for the opportunity to participate in that.
Okay, so She did make a few mistakes, the poll tax proved a mean and fatal miscalculation, but Her intuitions about Europe proved correct, what a ghastly shambles that now looks.
Appropriately Her funeral will take place at St Paul’s Cathedral, Britain’s temple to its heroes; Nelson, Wellington, Jellico, Montgomery, they all lie there.
Perhaps I’ll go and line the route in case some protesting Marxists require my attentions.
Pete.
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So at vast expense we now have a rather higher resolution map of the CMBR, the cosmic microwave background radiation, than that already provided by the COBE and W-MAP observations, but still no new real surprises. The false colour map shown vastly exaggerates the minute temperature differences in the CMBR comming in from all parts of the sky, basically it all has a temperature around 2.7 degrees K, give or take a smidgin.
The assertion that this new data further 'confirms' the Big Bang hypothesis rings a bit hollow, (cosmologists seem rarely right but seldom in doubt), it has led to further tweaking of their creaky model with adjustments to the dark matter, dark energy, and inflation parameters. These three fudge factors have become essential to maintain the BB hypothesis, however all three have rather arbitary properties designed to fit the BB interpretations of the observations, and we can find no other evidence for their existence and their supposed properties remain suggestive of Phlogiston, a mysterious invisible substance which temporarily stabilises wrong ideas.
On the other hand if the CMBR consists of trans-antipodal radiation from stars that has become redshifted by the small positive curvature of spacetime and reached thermodynamic quilibrium with the intergalactic medium in a universe that consists of a vorticitating hypersphere, finite and unbounded in space and time, and not expanding; then all the Phlogiston dissapears.
PS, I just found another review of The Octavo, http://runesoup.com/2011/01/the-octavo-a-definitive-review/ wherein lies my book length exigesis of the above paragraph, replete with the maths. Thankyou Gordon.
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Habemus Papem, We have another Pope, Francis the 1st. We send our not entirely cordial greetings from Our Pestilence, Pete the 1st, Pontiff of Chaos.
Well they do say young cardinals elect old popes, watch your step mate, take on the Vatican Curia and you may go the way of John-Paul the 1st.
The stygian Vatican stables may prove un-cleanable after the efforts of your predecessor Herr Rottweiller to keep the lid on the filth that accumulated under the nose of his intellectually challenged predecessor, JP2.
A bunch of old men crazed by decades of struggle to maintain celibacy, contra-rational beliefs, and power can still be dangerous you know.
They say you’re a conservative on birth control but that you have a social conscience. A peculiar paradox lurks there. Proliferating population plainly promotes pernicious poverty, but on the other hand poverty does wonders for religion, hence the centre of gravity of Catholicism moves steadily to the poorer global south, whilst it atrophies in the richer industrialised parts of the world.
As the balance of voting power has swung away from the Italian cardinals, we may well interpret the results of the conclave as something of a slap in the face to them, and all the scandals, intrigues, and extravagances they have presided over; from the cardinals in the third world.
They say you took the name Francis in honour of St Francis, patron of Italy, poverty, charity and being nice to animals. (One might never have guessed this by looking at his fabulously opulent basilica in Assisi with its corpulent friars in their expensively tailored habits, free of birdshit.)
Yet you’re a Jesuit not a Franciscan, one of ‘God’s Marines’ as they say in the trade, so we guess not to expect much theological reform or ecumenical effort, but perhaps an attempt to instil some discipline and austerity and some evangelical fighting spirit in the Clergy.
Concerning the credibility of your doctrines you may as well acknowledge that practically none of your congregation in the developed world takes any notice of your doctrines on birth control and sooner or later they will start ignoring it en-masse elsewhere too, although much suffering may ensue in the interim, so you may as well pre-empt this with a bold humanitarian reform now.
We trust that a number of spells placed in and around your new premises by KoC agents last October will prove helpful. Interesting art collection you have there by the way, some of the classical material looked great, but you could flog the ghastly medieval stuff for charity perhaps.