http://www.tom-holland.org/books/in-the-shadow-of-the-sword/
Advance Warning of Possible Bombshell Detonation, see above.
This book apparently completely overturns the historical asssumption that Islam and the Koran had a clear cut and well documented birth. Apparently according to this book, nothing was actually written down till 200 years after the event, and the Islamics have doctored it continually ever since then. The definitive version of the Koran apparently dates only from a 1924 Cairo edition! Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists don't come close to the impact this may have.
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With the Esotericon now moving at a fair pace towards its final shape, and the accompanying Portals of Chaos Deck half done, we have finally accepted the challenge of fully entering the Mythos of the Elder Gods using the tools and perspectives of Ritual Chaos Magic in the hope of recovering a proper Necronomicon for its final chapter. An instrument for recovering dangerous knowledge from the depths of the entire panpsychic universe.
We note with some amusement that the first spell in our first book, Liber Null , actually read I wish to obtain the Necronomicon , given as a lighthearted example of how to use the Austin Spare sigil making technique, as the whole Necronomicon idea seemed a bit fanciful at the time, now however, a quarter of a century down the line it seems that the spell may have actually done something, so, 'conjure long' as they say.
After 40 years of slaving over a hot pentacle we hope to have enough sanity points to carry this venture through, the lore clues seem to develop with our investigations, see below: -
Lovecraft's original handrawn form of the Elder Sign may possibly indicate a bind rune of:
Algiz, a somewhat mysterious rune variously interpreted over history as Elk, Elk-God (Horned God?) Protection, or Life.
Ansuz, The Aesir (Gods) but both reversed and mirror imaged, somehow oddly appropriate.
Laguz, Lake or Ocean, reversed.
Derleth's description of the Elder Sign as 'a distorted five pointed star' may actually prove strangely compatible with this in a sense, for if we represent the Lovecraft sign with 10 lines then it becomes topologicaly foldable into both a pentagram inscribed within a pentagon, and also into the more or less topologicaly isomorphic figure of the pentachoron which constitutes the first regular 4 dimensional hypersolid. (Imagine it in 3 dimensions as a tetrahedron with 4 additional edges meeting at a fifth point in its centre, a strangely distorted five pointed star indeed when viewed in only 2 or 3 dimensions.)
Thus we can perhaps regard the Lovecraft Elder Sign as an unfolded pentagram-pentagon and/or an unfolded pentachoron. In the aether a folded antenna usually works about the same as a flat one.
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Just how the Shia in particular react to all this remains to be seen.
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Civil Marriage
I don’t think the government has thought far enough outside the box on the issue of marriage.
We need to take the sex and the religion out of partnership contracts.
In a secular society it seems ridiculous that some religions still retain the right to authorise legally binding contracts. After all, religious christenings or namings and funerals no longer count as legal registrations of births or deaths.
Marriage constitutes a legal partnership contract for the purposes of child custody, inheritance, and next of kin rights, thus it seems ridiculous to allow the functionaries of some religious and secular groups but not others to authorise such contracts. I doubt that my Archdruid or my Pact Bishop would get a license to dispense legally binding contracts of handfasting or marriage, so why should any other religious or humanist organisation?
If people want to seal a partnership with a contract then it should remain a purely legal matter. They can always have any sort of religious or secular celebration that they can persuade anyone to participate in, before or afterwards. If some religions want to decline to have some types of celebration then that’s their choice, and their loss of revenue.
Plus the terms of contract require re-examination and greater flexibility. My widowed mother cannot marry her partner because both have children and property, and if either dies their property lies open to claim from the other or the other’s adult children. Pre-nuptial contracts have no force in law in the UK.
My mother also lost her inheritance when her widowed father re-married; the courts over-ruled his will assigning his property to his own children on the death of his new wife.
Also there was the celebrated case of two sisters who had been lifelong companions and when one died the other had to sell their house because she couldn’t inherit the other half of the house without paying death duties. If they had been two unrelated women they could have had a legal partnership and the right to inherit each others property.
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A weekend in Scotland.
Firstly we go to Inverness for a Kilt fitting for the impending wedding of my eldest.
‘Take the Flower of Scotland Tartan’ the tailor said, ‘it’will gie nae offence’. I’d forgotten that the stuff is basically jealously guarded battle dress and we don’t want any Glasgow kisses exchanged at the reception. Plus most will carry dirks in their socks, although as a man of peace I shall have but a discreet pocket wand in mine.
Then to lunch on the shores of Loch Ness, the winds raise white topped waves on the dark and deeply forbidding waters but we see no monsters, maybe they don’t work at weekends.
Thence to Boleskine House, the sacred Kibla of Thelema. Its size surprises, AC must have inherited a massive shedload of money for such a plush holiday home.
I had equipped myself with a fresh Pentachoron, an instrument variously miss-described as an eye in a triangle, the distorted five pointed star with burning eye of the elder sign, and the shining trapezohedroid. It will at least force any demon to appear in its true form. Taking a reading with it from the house I discover that Aiwass = Nyarlathotep.
The Nyarlathotep phenomena, as mentioned by Lovecraft, occurs when the Elder Gods interface with humans who tend to channel rather garbled versions of what they have to offer. The communication gets filtered through a fog of the recipients own prejudices and subconscious desires and often leads to megalomania and cult formation. The Elder Gods themselves consist of what we can imagine as the ‘morphic field’ of the knowledge possessed by the countless numbers of races of more advanced intelligent aliens in the universe. A taste of this knowledge often tempts people to indulge in violent power crazed fantasies rather than try to understand the dangerous technologies implied. Thus despite, or perhaps because of, the spittle flecked fury of the third chapter of The Book of the Law, details of the fabled ‘war machine’ do not emerge.
The next day we take a look at Castle Urquart, a romantic looking and once imposing but now ruined fortress on a promontory by the shores of the Loch. Two chemicals explain so much of our history, calcium hydroxide and potassium nitrate, and the evidence lies in piles of mortared stone and gunpowder shattered masonry.
Thence to Culloden battlefield on Drunmossie Moor, a cold and dour wet place to die after five hundred miles of marching, but as the father of my prospective son in law observed, it was a good thing we lost, it brought to an end the fifteenth century style thuggery and warlordism of the clan system. Plus I suppose it also prepared the ground for the delightful sanitised romantic revival of all things tartan a century later. Comte de Glenstrae and all…..........
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Following some email exchanges I present some further thoughts on the Hyperspin Eight Dimensional hypothesis of fundamental particles. Fundamental particle physics strikes me as important for several reasons, firstly because our current incomplete understanding of the subject may conceal knowledge that may enable us to develop new technologies such as starships. Secondly because we cannot hope to understand cosmology completely until we have understood the universe at the quantum level as well. Thirdly because one would expect to find evidence for the metaphysics implied by magic showing up at the basal levels of reality. In this case, evidence for the existence of three dimensional time, and a small overall positive spacetime curvature.
Some supplementary thoughts to the original HD8 paper on this site:
1) The Euclidian spatial axes s1, s2, s3 used to denote particle spins do not imply any sort of preferential or global system of coordinates. They denote directions orthogonal to the direction of the curvature axes s4 and t4. (The same goes for the three temporal axes t1, t2, t3.)
2) The direction of curvature axes s4 and t4 corresponds to locally defined gravitational/acceleration gradients (equivalence principle). All particle interactions imply an acceleration of some kind, and its direction defines the curvature axes.
3) Field effects do not depend on the exchange of so called ‘virtual’ bosons. All ‘field’ effects depend on various types of spacetime curvature induced by particle spins in various dimensions. Thus for example electrostatic and magnetic fields arise from exotic forms of spacetime curvature, not from the exchange of virtual photons. They can have repulsive or attractive effects depending on whether the spins match or not.
4) Real bosons arise only from the acceleration of fermions and they only have repulsive effects. (For example the mutual recoil of electrons exchanging real photons.)
5) Current descriptions of nuclear forces do not make much sense. The hypothesis of unobservable Quarks and Gluons used to explain the activities of the observable Hadrons (Baryons and Mesons) does not give a convincing description of what holds atomic nuclei together if we persist in regarding virtual gluons and virtual mesons as the carriers of the strong nuclear and residual nuclear forces.
Although protons mutually repel and no atomic nucleus can consist of just multiple protons, the exchange of virtual colour-anticolour Mesons between Protons and Neutrons supposedly allows atomic nuclei to form. However by this mechanism we would expect Neutron clusters of arbitrarily large number to form as well; and they plainly don’t, except under extreme stellar gravitational collapse compression.
6) Plainly the colour force has no effect outside of Hadrons apart from its gravitational/inertial spacetime effects of adding mass. Its severe range limitation in space perhaps reflects the entirely temporal nature of its component spins. Moreover the colour force (conventionally modelled as a SU3 symmetry) appears to have the same symmetry as the electromagnetic force (conventionally modelled as SU1 symmetry) if we regard the charge on the electron as -3 rather than -1, for then both electromagnetic and colour charges only manifest as plus or minus 3 in Fermions and W Bosons, and plus and minus one combined in Mesons and Photons, (and plus and minus three in Z Bosons).
7) Some form of charge polarisation leading to the sort of electrostatic attraction observed between charged and neutral objects may well explain the residual nuclear force binding Protons to Neutrons. Deep Inelastic Scattering of Baryons shows that they behave as if they had a definite size and some internal structure which we describe as Quarks. Now using the quark model, Protons have within them electromagnetic charges of +2, +2, and -1 whilst Neutrons have charges of +2, -1 and -1. If we try various polarisation arrangements of these charges and try pairing them up for attractive or repulsive effects we find the following:
N – N. Repulsive effects dominate.
P – P. Repulsive effects dominate even more strongly*.
P – N. Attractive effects dominate.
8) Conclusions.
a) Electrostatic fields bind Protons to Neutrons in atomic nuclei, not the exchange of virtual Mesons. Real Mesons arise from violent Baryon accelerations only.
b) Virtual Gluon exchange does not bind Quarks together into Baryons or Mesons. The existence of such Hadrons arises from the stability of only plus or minus 3 colour spins in Baryons or plus and minus colour spins in Mesons.
c) Real Gluons would only arise from impossibly energetic Hadron accelerations; the Gluon hypothesis thus appears superfluous.
d) Predictions:
(i) HD8 does not exclude a ‘Duon’ Boson having plus and minus two electromagnetic spins and presumably a mass below that of the Z Boson, nor does it exclude Mesons with plus and minus two colour spins, although these may have huge masses and low stabilities. It does however exclude the Higgs Boson, if Yog-Sothoth does not deceive me.
(ii) Protonium will not exist in collapsed stars*.
(iii) Gravitational fields arise from spacetime curvature not from the exchange of virtual Gravitons. Real Gravitons in quantities detectable as gravity waves would only arise from the acceleration of very large masses.