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Saturday and off to Glastonbury for the Book of Baphomet book launch. Decided to go a bit early and inspect glasto itself, it has rather a lot of mystical supermarkets and galleries, catering it would seem, largely to the tourist and pilgrimage trade, I can hardly imagine the local hippys and pagans managing to consume a fraction of the merchandise on offer. Some of the stuff on offer seemed totally OTT to a mage that just carries but a simple self-made wooden pocket wand. Just how much extra belief can you invest in a two foot long silver chased bar of machined quartz encrusted with half a pound of exotic semi-precious stones?
Anyway, I acquired a copy of Phil Bakers book on Austin Osman Spare http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/austin-osman-spare-2/ having read such glowing reviews of it on Arcanorium College www.arcanoriumcollege.com , and indeed it makes for a very informative read, it seems stylishly written and deeply researched, and really gives the flavour of the brilliant crazy old rogue and wizard, and his life and times. It also clears up certain misconceptions that have crept into more popular accounts of his life and work.
The Book of Baphomet book launch went well, Julian Vayne and Nikki Wyrd played their promo videos and then spoke about their work and book and I gave a bit of background to the development of the Baphomet concept since Levi. The guests included the extraordinary Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule with whom I spent some time, rather like Genesis P Orridge he sports a weird riotous fairground sort of appearance yet beneath the showmanship lies a serious alternative philosopher, we have exchanged publications and established lines of communication.
Thence to Druidry Grove on Sunday for some rather quieter reflective ritual work, and the usual philosophical salon with the Proff.
Refreshingly, during the entire 11 hours of these events nobody at all even mentioned the Olympics once.
In case they had done so I came prepared with my hound's results across Llangenith sands, she would have won the 100m rather easily, and almost reached a seagul before it lifted off, must discourage such behaviour.
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Firstly a number of interesting items from some of my friends and colleagues: -
Dave Lee’s new novel, The Road to Thule. A rollicking tale of futuristic post apocalypse Wodenist society replete with strange science and sorcery, plenty of sex and violence, surprising storyline, fascinating characters, all in all; a book in a genre all of its own, you don’t come across anything like this very often. Niche critical acclaim already calls for a prequel and a sequel. Lets hope Dave obliges.
Dave has also blogged an interesting essay on a recent talk he gave: -
http://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.co.uk/
Nikki Wyrd and Julian Vane have just released The Book of Baphomet
http://theblogofbaphomet.com/2012/07/17/the-book-of-baphomet-on-sale-now/
I had the privilege of reading the draft of this astonishing work, hence on the back cover it says:
“An excellent read, consisting as it does of such a wealth of
information, research, anecdote, experience and vision” - Peter J Carroll.
I might also add that it also contains some remarkable work by its authors with sex magic and heroic chemognosis, so obtain a copy now, perchance it should become banned.
Secondly, EPOCH, The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, proceeds well, it should eventually consist of about 50 large images on cards which the magician can use for cartomancy, but which we have primarily designed as altarpieces as foci for Evocation and Invocation, plus a book containing three Grimoires for Elemental, Planetary and Stellar magic, this last appears as an updated Necronomicon. Matt Kabryn and I, assisted by the Staff and Alumni of Arcanorium College, should have this ready in about a year. I’m making statues of the entities involved for use in ritual work, and to assist the graphics effort. Attached see Hastur.
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Jose Manuel Barroso, head of some apparently important part of the hydra like EU Totalitarian Synarchy has just said that 'Britain will reduce(?) itself to the level of Norway or Switzerland if it leaves the EU'.
Is that a threat or a promise?
Just think about it for a moment........
Hurrah, oh yes, please yes, bring it on Jose!
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With reference to the previous post about the Higgs, my thanks for all the supportive emails from fellow skeptics. The Hyperbole in the upmaket press about the 'discovery' of 'The God Particle' has wildly exceeded even the over-egging that CERN gave their meagre result. Apparently the title 'God Particle' arose from a publishers decision to reject the title for a book about the hunt for it provisionally titled 'The Goddamn Particle'. So now it enters the popular imagination and the rickety cannon of scientific orthodoxy as a given, along with that other huge leap of questionable asumptions that constitute the standard big bang inflationary expanding and now accelerating expanding universe/multiverse? hypotheses.
We now have a very messy and questionable result which the particle jockeys will undoubtedly use to justify much more funding and which will keep the theorists writing speculative papers.
On a lighter note, since nobody can quite decide whether to attribute the entire idea to Peter Higgs or whether the idea that a boson should exist as a consequence of a mass-giving field represents a group effort, we should perhaps consider calling the 125GeV signal 'The Europarticle'.
The Europarticle, like its monetary equivalent, seems based upon dubious theory, it has cost a fortune and kept vast numbers of people busy collaborating on it, and it shows every indication of falling apart very quickly, plus it has failed to create unity (between quantum and relativistic models).
Based on the energies involved and its apparently bosonic characteristics, I'd like to enter my best guess for posterity, think the elusive once in a trillion 125GeV signal probably represents just a couple of Z bosons stuck together momentarily.
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Higgs or Not?
Today’s announcement from CERN does not send me scuttling off to eat the relevant pages of The Apophenion and The Octavo as I promised to do if the Higgs mechanism proves correct.
The CERN announcement, like many before it, seems to have a whiff of desperation about it, almost as if they need to justify their activities and maintain the excitement before the impending particle physics conference in Melbourne and another lengthy shutdown of the LHC.
The search for the Higgs boson has led to one of the most expensive and messiest series of experiments in history.
They appear to have evidence of some sort of a particle with an energy around 125GeV. However this particle only appears once every few trillion collisions and we can only infer its fleeting existence from its decay products as it only lasts for a vanishingly short time. This particle could well consist of a composite entity like a top-antitop meson rather than a truly new fundamental particle.
I have severe reservations about the Higgs Mechanism for many reasons: -
1) The Higgs Mechanism evolved to explain the surprisingly large masses of the W and Z bosons of the weak interaction compared to the mass of the photon which theoretically has a zero mass even though it carries momentum and energy. Theorists have attempted to extend the Higgs mechanism to explain the masses of all other particles with mass. The Higgs boson does not in itself confer the property of mass upon other particles. According to the theory of the Higgs mechanism, particles acquire mass through interacting with the Higgs field, their mass then simply represents the extent to which they couple with the field. The Higgs boson itself doesn’t normally manifest in nature, supposedly it only appears fleetingly when we supply enough energy to the omnipresent Higgs field for one to pop into existence.
2) We already have a most excellent theory of mass called General Relativity, this describes mass as spacetime curvature. Most importantly it includes both the inertial and gravitational components of mass. In Newtonian theory these two components just appear as co-incidentally identical. In General Relativity their fundamental equivalence forms the cornerstone of the theory itself. The Sat Nav system validates GR on a daily basis; it simply wouldn’t work properly if it didn’t account for the curvature of spacetime around this planet.
3) The Higgs mechanism can only perhaps explain the inertial component of mass, but not only does it fail to explain gravity but it ignores the fundamental equivalence principle of GR. In a Higgs based universe gravity would have to have some other mechanism, presumably the emission and absorption of so called ‘virtual’ gravitons. This would then require that mass carrying particles mysteriously coupled with the Higgs field and the graviton field in EXACTLY the same way, despite that the apparently massless photons remain subject to gravity.
4) Basically the attempt by particle physicists to explain mass and gravity with the same sort of Gauge Force model they use for electromagnetic interactions seems highly questionable, and the Higgs mechanism remains very far from proved.
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You may well wonder why I bother with all this physics stuff, well as I explain in my books, my current Magical Theory also makes certain predictions about the structure of spacetime and particle physics in terms of a 3D time metric, and if these become falsified I'll have to build another magical theoretical framework.