Blog

Details

Published: 15 June 2016

Hits: 14601

EU Referendum, 1 week to Independence Day!

A vote to ‘remain’ means giving up most of the power of our hard-won democratic votes forever, for after that, voting would become basically pointless.

Britain sends just one appointed representative out of 28 to the almighty European Commission which already decides about half of our laws and will soon decide on most of the rest. Voting for the sham ‘European Parliament’ has no effect whatsoever, as it has no actual power.

So a vote to remain means permanently devaluing all our votes to just one twenty-eighth of their current value.

If we remain in we basically surrender our country to Brussels and Germany and we will not succeed if we press for reform, they have already made that abundantly clear.

The economic arguments cut both ways, nobody really knows, but plainly Britain can survive and prosper independently.

The EU has anyway proved a terrible economic screw up for most of its members, with low growth and high unemployment driving hundreds of thousands to our shores. Britain thankfully never joined the euro.

Vote for Independence on June 23^rd.

Vote Leave. 

Details

Published: 16 May 2016

Hits: 18798

Any half decent wizard can survive even under the most trying circumstances; however we do generally flourish better under conditions of religious, economic and political liberty. I could tell you plenty of horror stories from colleagues in Islamic theocracies and in the remnants of the Soviet Union, without of course naming those involved.

Magic attracts those with a penchant for self-reliance and free thought, many of us in the west have our own businesses for example, and most of us have our own personal and highly unorthodox moral and social values. Magicians value individuality and eccentricity above most other things. We do not accept the consensus view and the received wisdom; we want to experiment for ourselves, whatever the cost. We appreciate a modicum of freedom.

Over the last few decades a threat has started to grow against many of the freedoms that we have enjoyed in Europe since the fall of the last crop of totalitarianisms. I speak of the EUROPEAN UNION, and you may laugh, but I have looked deeply into this and uncovered the philosophy that underlies the EU. I have found out where it comes from, and I regret to inform you, Fratres et Sorrores, that, as with Theosophy & Fascism, the fault lies with ourselves, yes us occultists and wizards again. It all began with a French occultist Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1824-1909).

D’Alveydre devised Synarchy.

Many of us in the goldfish bowl of Anglo-Saxon wizardry will probably never have heard of Saint Yves d’Alvedre, but he remains a seminal figure in French esoterics. As grandmaster of the Martinist Order he mixed it with Blavatsky, Theodore Reuss, Eliphas Levi, Papus, and all the rest of them. I strongly suggest that you source the history and the connections and the ideas, because this man’s ideas about Synarchy have finally started to happen for real and we have a potential war situation. If we do not wake up to events soon, then things may get very nasty.

I will not go into the history here; the web offers plenty of starting references for that tangled tale. I will however briefly outline what Synarchy means so that you can see for yourselves the challenge that we face and the probable consequences of inaction.

 Synarchy literally means Joint Rule. D’Alveydre used the term to imply several things in particular:

1) Synarchy implies Government by an Enlightened Elite. The Elite themselves of course decide on what Enlightened means, naturally it means those who agree with them.

2) Synarchy implies the opposite of Anarchy. Whereas in Anarchy the state should have minimal controls over individuals, in Synarchy the state has maximal control over every aspect of individual’s lives. Zero freedom in all spheres.

3) Synarchy comes neither from the Right or the Left; rather it consists of the Totalitarianism of the Centre.

Already in the post-communist states of Russia and China we see the adoption of the Non-Democratic Mixed Economy as the preferred model. The Euro-Synarchists appear to want to follow suit.

D’Alveydre proposed that a secret society of The Elite should take over the three main instruments of social control, the Political, the Economic, and the Religious institutions.

He and his followers envisaged taking over first France and then creating a Federal European Union, and then perhaps One World Government. They wanted to create a classless but Profoundly Hierarchical state, or mega-state, run by Elite Technocrats of neither the right nor of the left, but simply The People Who Know Best, and that this Elite should seek to control every single aspect of the lives of the populace.

D’Alveydre delved deeply into the crackpot mystical utopianism and freemasonry of the late nineteenth century and considered that his inspirations came from The Mystical Adepts of Agartha. So we have another Black Hat Illuminati sponsored project here I’m afraid, another dystopian conspiracy to put certain cliques who know what’s best for us into power.

Now French society has always suffered from domination by Elite Cliques. Ever since the revolution France has led the world in elitism and corruption. They replaced an elite and corrupt aristocracy with another clique, and just carried on with added enthusiasm, for now even peasants could in principle get a foothold on the elevator of the meritocracy of those colluding with the political class.

D’Alveydre’s ideas failed to really take off for some decades, because two world wars got in the way and France came under intense American pressure to become more democratic at the end of each one. Yet Synarchic ideas continued to spread throughout many of the elite French academies. The USSR and Russia of course provides an almost perfect example of a Synarchic state apart from the personality cultism associated with Lenin and Stalin, and now Putin. (Synarchs usually prefer the faceless anonymity of the technocrat) During WW2 French Synarchists collaborated with the German occupying forces in Occupied France and in Vichy France on the principle that they wanted to preserve their apparatus of state.

However with the advent of the European Union the Synarchist Conspiracy took its chance and grasped at it with all of its tentacles. It started to cleverly persuade most of the European Political Class that it had the perfect formula to perpetuate and aggrandise the Political Class itself, without reference to the tiresome niceties of democracy.

The Synarchist Eurocrats of the EU have largely circumvented democracy and now work on putting themselves beyond the reach of law. The real power in the EU lies not in its elected sham parliament but in the unelected Commission and in the vast bureaucracy and array of Quangos attached to it. The Commission provides the perfect home for members of the Political Class who would either rather not risk submitting themselves to democratic selection or for those who have failed in that selection. Once a person has become accepted into the Eurocracy they cannot easily become removed from it, no proper de-selection processes exist. We cannot vote them out, and they strive for increasing immunity from prosecution. Once inside, they become the arbiters of whom else they will admit or exclude. The Synarchists have almost completed step one of their agenda and taken over the political apparatus.

The Synarchist Eurocrats have created the most prolific Law-Mill in the history of the world. The sheer volume of laws and regulations staggers belief and seems to go beyond all sense and reason until you recognise that it constitutes step two of the Synarchist agenda in action, take control of the economy in minute detail. To do this, simply gradually make everything illegal, pass arbitrary regulations just for the sake of having them, pass regulations that nobody can comply with properly, and then apply them selectively.

Do this and you have effectively legalised what medieval monarchs dreamed of, you have legally given yourself the freedom of Arbitrary Rule.

The Synarchist Eurocrats seem to have upgraded d’Alveyde’s third step of taking over the Religious powers of their domains because they have ended up with a huge domain with too many religions in it. Thus they seem to have decided to create a new religion whose morality and dogma have legal precedence over all of the religions within that domain. They call this new religion Social Democracy and we should recognise it as a religion despite that it never advertises itself as such. Social Democracy permits slight shades of opinion but no real dissent. (Neither of the left nor of the right, remember?) You will never enter the Eurocracy if you do not basically agree with it. Like all religious ideals it remains forever unattainable because of its inherent paradoxes, socialism remains incompatible with real democratic freedom. Like all religions it has its own Thought-Speak, in this case mainly what we identify as Political Correctness. Like most religions it seeks to restrict the activities of competing religions. In this it has acted with considerable subtlety. Yes, you can have complete religious freedom, but we will increasingly take away your freedom to observe or to promote any of the customs of your religion. You can believe what you like, but you have to behave exactly as we tell you.

Some wizards and occultists may gloat over such aggressively irreligious secularism; however, as we have learnt from both fascist and communist totalitarianisms, your turn for persecution will come eventually as the Synarchy gets into its stride.

Europe became the cradle of so much of the world’s art, culture, science, and politics precisely because it has usually existed in a highly divided state. Various nations have tried many different social and political experiments and nations have struggled against nations, religiously, politically, economically, and militarily. The modern world arose almost entirely out of that crucible of struggle and experiment. Geography accounts for much of this. Europe contained enough mountains and rivers and forests to make hegemony difficult and to allow experiments to take place.

Technology (nearly all of it invented in Europe) has now broken down those barriers and a new form of hegemony now threatens to radically reduce the diversity of the entire continent.

Welcome to The USE, The United Synarchy of Europe.

Does Synarchisn exist as a hard conspiracy or merely as a pervasive soft consensus amongst the political class? The answer to this question will probably tell us whether to expect a Europe that merely becomes amorphously boring, dull, mildly oppressive, and fairly unproductive for a while until it breaks up acrimoniously or violently, or whether it will descend into full-scale Orwellian totalitarianism.

I leave it to the historians and the conspiracy theorists to find out the details and the philosophical lineages of the guilty. History suggests that it probably exists in both forms simultaneously at the time of writing. Most of those who act out of self-interest in the service of the Synarchy have probably never even heard of it as a formal concept. The status quo just seems to move in that direction and they move with it because it pays them to do so. However I cannot believe that Eurocratic Synarchy has evolved entirely by screw-up. Some element of conspiracy appears necessary to explain the contra-logical economics, the contra-liberal politics, and the covertly aggressive secularism of the EU.

We know that d’Alveydre formally enunciated the principles of Synarchy and we can now see them coming to fruition. We know that d’Alveydre had enormous influence in French Freemasonry and esoterics and in the French elite academies. Can we track the intellectual lineages of his followers and challenge them before they achieve complete hegemony and plunge Europe into totalitarianism?

If this all seems a little paranoid, then try reading the proposed ‘European Constitution’.

This astoundingly pompous, ambiguous and incredibly lengthy document ultimately reduces to a single terrifying sentence that perfectly reveals the agenda of Synarchy.

“The Government of the EU can take Any and All powers that It deems necessary.”

Of course nobody in their right mind (outside of the Political Class itself) would ever sign up to such an agreement presented in such stark terms. Any proper constitution should both Define and Limit what a government can do. The EU constitution basically gives the EU government carte blanche. Thus the actual document dissembles and waffles for hundreds of pages in a ponderous legalistic attempt to disguise what it actually means. It actually means quite simply that: -

“The Government of the EU can take Any and All powers that It deems necessary.”

Perhaps we should look further into the record of the author of this Synarchist Manifesto, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, ex-President of France. Even a cursory analysis throws up much that appears disquieting.

As Churchill so astutely observed; “The only thing worse than Democracy is every other system that we have ever tried.”

Above all we must not follow the examples set by Russia and China or feel compelled by difficult world economic conditions or fear of social unrest to allow our freedoms to disappear by stealth.

‘The EU Constitution’ got formally rejected in referendums in France and in Holland and it would have got rejected by the British, so the Eurocrats simply retitled it and persuaded the Political Class they they could simply sign it off as The Lisbon Treaty without any democratic consultation.

Thus we do effectively have a European Union Constitution in place, a vastly long document that simply reduces to a single horrifying sentence: -

“The Government of the EU can take Any and All powers that It deems necessary.”

The ‘Remain in the EU’ argument now runs along the line that the EU has evolved into a terrible mess, but Britain must remain in it and try to reform it because the alternative of leaving it seems even worse.

This cowardly and defeatist argument does not actually work. Things will most likely become much worse if Britain remains in.

In refusing to meaningfully renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership the EU has already flatly stated its refusal to reform, it remains hell bent on forming a Synarchist Superstate.

Britain can only change the EU by leaving it now. This will hasten its collapse, other nations will soon follow, and Europe will become liberated from the EU.

A Europe of free nations will then undoubtedly agree to some modest and sensible trading arrangements.

If Britain hadn’t joined the EU it certainly wouldn’t try to enter it now.

With the possible exception of the Germans, the great majority of the people of the EU would not have let the EU project go ahead if they had known of its real agenda, and they will now vote to get out if they get the chance.

Those who give up their political freedom for economic gain will end up losing both, as the Greeks, the Irish, the Spanish, and the Portuguese have already found out, and the French have just begun to realise.

If the grandiose and megalomaniac EU project continues it will become ever more undemocratic, centralised, bureaucratic, synarchic, inefficient, corrupt, and oppressive. It serves only the interests of a large section of Big Business and The Political Class.

The EU Synarchists intend to remove the Political Freedom, the Economic Freedom, and the Freedom of Thought from everyone else, and to create a ‘Totalitarianism of the Centre’.

Details

Published: 29 April 2016

Hits: 18447

Beltane approaches, and what passes for spring in these Isles sort of comes and goes, sunny one day, glacial the next. Something has munched the leaves of the mandrakes in the greenhouse so they have come back indoors. Toadmass passed rather quietly this year without the usual raucous late night shagathon, but a few thousand toadpoles now cruise the waters in the grounds of Chateaux Chaos.

We have just had ‘Mercury Month’ on Arcanorium College and I chose to invoke the Mercurial-Ouranian archetype as exemplified by Thoth, in the EPOCH.

What follows derives in part from that.

Okay then, fingers on buzzers, your starter for ten thousand fawning acolytes: - define precisely what enlightenments come from sex and drugs. (No references to those mega-frauds Rajneesh and Castaneda permitted, and please go easy on the Crowley.)

From an early stage I decided upon a Macgregor Mathers rather than an Aleister Crowley type role. The sex and drugs ‘revolutions’ had already become a bit passé to serious thinkers by the late nineteen eighties anyway. However they did play a significant role in the whole ‘magical-revival-counter-cultural-new-age-neopagan’ subcultural meme that developed from the late sixties onwards.

Like most cultural developments in the UK, this tended to proceed in a top-down fashion with those from more wealthy and educated backgrounds getting into it first as the postwar economy gradually began to take off and people felt they had the freedom to experiment with non-mainstream identities.

Now that all social classes of western society have access to drugs and sexual freedoms and esoteric ideas, mind-altering (as opposed to mood-changing) drugs have tended to go out of fashion from the top down, and perhaps because of a perceived lack of slack in tightening economies, the willingness, and leisure to experiment with esoteric and magical ideas and identities seems to have decreased from its former popularity.

We probably passed peak esoteric booksales some years ago, and the participants at esoteric festivals and meetings seem generally well past their formative years these days.

If young people can tear themselves away from online social media and entertainment and career anxiety at all these days, they tend to do so only to engage in single-issue causes such as animal rights, vegetarianism, rainforests, or some form of anti-fascism; depending on whatever gets defined as the fascism of the month. Plus a few will always want to actually adopt the current fascism.

So what forms of magic and esoterics can the future hold?

What can the magical-esoteric paradigm bring to the table?

I like to think that it brings ‘The Promethean Quest of Will and Imagination’.

Firstly to Imagination.

Various esoteric practices such as divination, sortilege, visualisation, contemplative meditation, and invocation act to increase the imagination. Mind altering drugs can also do this and their new widespread availability played a part in the last magical revival

Imagination runs on a spectrum from Apophenia, the ability to perceive useful hidden connections between phenomena that others haven’t yet spotted, to Pareidolia, the ability to perceive connections between phenomena that will always remain questionable, to Superstition, the ability to perceive non-existent connections between phenomena, for example between the malignant forces in conspiracy theories, or between astrological charts and personality. (If astrology had any predictive power, then humans would have adopted strong taboos against mating during January and February so as to prevent the birth of those invariably evil Scorpios.)

‘Occult’ thinking at its best seeks out the hidden connections between phenomena and as such it has started new religions, undermined existing religions, initiated new sciences, and undermined old sciences. At its worst it merely creates nonsense when it fails to fractionate the crud of Superstition from the Pareidolic raw material and then to distil from it the elixir of Apophenia and to test it against reality. Nothing has Ultimate Truth, and All Things Remain Possible. However we should not waste time on ideas that simultaneously exhibit unfalsifiability and dysfunctionality.

Mind altering drugs merely lower the resistance of the synaptic connections between brain cells, allowing nervous impulses to cascade wildly through the brain stimulating unusual connections, a few of which may prove interesting, but most of which prove useless or merely entertaining. Now that so-called entheogens have become commonplace the slimy ruse of distributing them and supervising their use to gain a bit of importance and some power and influence over the users has worn a bit thin, particularly as most people now regard them as merely Smurfogenic and more likely to lead to visions of those little blue people from the television series than to enlightenment.

And secondly to Will.

‘Magical Thinking’ primarily means a belief in the power of intent. Intent works best when the magician believes in its power but also does everything else possible to bring about the desired result rather than just relying upon the capricious and rather erratic parapsychological power of intent alone. The trick here lies in regarding the ‘everything else possible’ as a series of additional magical acts, necessary to the accomplishment of something difficult or improbable.

Mind altering drugs may have some ability to stimulate the Imagination but they seriously undermine the Will. It remains pretty well impossible to maintain focus on casting a spell or an enchantment or even to remain focussed on a simple intent whilst under their influence, and chronic use tends to erode the capacity for memory and willed intention long-term.

Thus the establishment had little to fear from the ideas of the hippy counterculture for the very drugs which stimulated those ideas also undermined the capacity to make them work. Turn on, tune in, drop out, - and screw up.

Sex can stimulate both the Will and the Imagination. We all arrive on earth equipped with a biological instinct to resist death on a moment to moment basis and on a longer term basis by procreation. This instinct easily gets displaced, subverted, or perverted, or even inverted, because we have such enormous suggestibility and imagination. People will do almost anything from going to war, to wearing horribly uncomfortable and expensive clothing, to extreme physical or mental exertions, to acquiring vast power, wealth, and fame, to starving themselves dangerously thin, to building ridiculously large muscles, and many lesser variants on such activities; all to basically demonstrate their reproductive fitness or something symbolic or subconsciously representative of it.

The Sex & Death instinct thus underlies so much of our motivation, including most of the Fear & Desire, Love & Hate, and Identity & Magic dualities. Sigmund Freud understood this but then went on to build a huge speculative and unscientific edifice upon his basic insight.

‘Sex Magic’ consists of much more, and much less, than meets the eye: -

On the simplest level orgasm creates ‘Gnosis’. Concentrating on some spell or sigil or divinatory question or source of inspiration at the moment of orgasm can serve to inflame the mind with it and create some extraordinary results.

On a slightly more complicated level, sexuality can empower almost any activity and working in a sexually charged atmosphere tends to enhance performance and motivation. Actual sexual activity of course works, but so does mere sexual tension (so called polarity work), or even unrequited attraction.

End of story. Anyone claiming anything more just wants to sell you something.

The sex and drugs revolutions have become assimilated into the general cultural background and the residual search for ever more peculiar forms of sexual expression and ever more exotic and obscure hallucinogens seems unlikely to throw up any further illuminating surprises. So what forms of magic may the esotericists of the 21^st century get into?

The new perception of scarcity, particularly with reference to accommodation and economic opportunities for the young, should incentivise Results Magic. That means magic to bring about tangible effects like academic success, career advancement, business start-ups, property acquisition, and high ability mate acquisition. The wizards of the next few decades will probably have to achieve measurable success in the world to get taken seriously. Mere mysticism won’t cut it any more.

The quality of life in the developed world has not increased over the last several decades because the increasingly frantic pace of life in which everything speeds up year on year has negated the benefits of the material and technical improvements which have caused that acceleration. The magicians of the 21^st century perhaps need to explore the slow aesthetic, to consume culture in a more discriminating fashion, to make things carefully by hand, to write more slowly and carefully, to spend time just staring at the sky once again. I do not use a mobile phone; it might spoil my long walks.

The new perception of the perilous state of the planetary climate and ecology should provide plenty of scope for magicians to try their skills for higher causes. We need to divine for the identities and motives of the climatological and ecocidal planet wreckers, and enchant for their behaviour change or demise.   

The new perception of science beginning to dabble with the actual fundamentals of existence in biology, neuroscience, cosmology, and the quantum domain, behoves the contemporary wizard to remain abreast or ahead of such developments, as wizards always did in the past. As we pointed out in the EPOCH, somewhere in the vast curved spacetime of the universe the knowledge we seek almost certainly already exists, and by Stellar Magic we can perhaps avoid blind alleys, phlogiston theories, and disastrous misapplications with existential consequences.

The majority of magicians and esotericists now seem to spend more time interacting with each other online rather than face to face in Moots, Covens, and Orders. This has tended to widen debate but also to often reduce it to a mere cacophony of abusively conflicting opinions as the costs of such behaviour become as negligible as the benefits.

Both online and in real world meetings, Better Discipline and More Research & Development seem desirable.

Addendum

I don't do social media and my Specularium site does not use a reply facility although I do receive emails sent to it.

However people have drawn my attention to the activities of Nathaniel Harris as he has started up again on the social media.

Nathaniel Harris joined a section of the UK IOT well after I retired about 20 years ago. When he first moved to the same city as me about 6 years ago we had a brief pub lunch at which he convinced me that he had become paranoid and deluded. Since then I have exchanged a few emails with him in the hope of trying to talk some sense into him, and to get him to moderate his writing and online ranting, but to little avail. 

It seems to me that some members of the UK IOT played a lot of silly cult and personal games involving the fragile Nathaniel and that he subsequently developed a huge paranoid conspiracy theory involving bizarre criminal accusations. The authorities can find no substance in any of this, but Social Services have denied him custody of his own child and also that of the custody of his current girlfriend's child. The Police have been to see him about his bizarre behaviour and he has been taken in for psychiatric observation.

He certainly seems to have made an unfortunate mess of his life and to have developed a bizarre conspiracy theory to excuse and 'explain' that to himself. In particular I suspect that his now much regretted gay affair with Peter Mastin has led him to rationalize that Mastin must have acted as some great satanic mastermind.

If you want to see the full nonsense then read Nathaniel Harris' website in full, it all adds up to a depressing cacophony of paranoia in which he ends up accusing just about anyone he ever knew or even just read about.

I feel rather glad that I retired when I did whilst it still remained fun, ideas driven, and full of high achieving people. I would not have admitted Nathaniel or several others who now form the circular firing squad around the wreckage of the UK IOT section.  

Details

Published: 15 April 2016

Hits: 19281

A Ramble

The following consists of a write up of the notes I made for an hours lecture entitled ‘A Magical Quest’ for the Bristol Quest Conference. 12/3/16.

I usually speak by expanding upon a list of main points I have made, so herewith the notes rendered into proper sentences with a few digressions and expansions.

It consists of part Autobiography & History, part Philosophy and Practice.

Getting born 1953 made me aged 18 in 1971, just as the whole countercultural thing began to kick off bigtime in the UK.

I got taught religion (Anglican Christianity) in school as truth, and I also got taught science which basically implied that the bible consisted of nonsense. I gave my daft old RI teacher as hard a time of it as I could, getting caned by the headmaster only once on that score.

Science represented power and knowledge to me; I very much admired Dr Who, the wizard scientist, since watching the very first memorable episode aged 11. (JFK got assassinated on that day and I don’t remember any of that at all.) Chemistry rather than physics attracted me in secondary school largely because they taught atomic theory there first; and partly because of an adolescent love of explosives, rockets, and pyrotechnics. (I still have all my fingers and eyes, some of my contemporaries lost a few.)

Going up to London University, I found life easy, we had full employment, dole, student grants, cheap housing, and Cheap Paperback Books! We also had women at Goldsmiths teacher training college, art-rock music, acid and dope, the last of which I didn’t enjoy much, so I do remember the seventies. Oh happy days, London had the air of a slightly down at heel place full of amazing second-hand bookshops and eccentric people.

A massive alternative movement developed, it seemed easy to drop out, and easy and attractive to reject the values of our parental generation.

At university I rapidly became bored with chemistry, we just seemed to go over the same old stuff we had learnt at school but in excruciatingly tedious detail, so I started to read magic instead.

I never had any career advice apart from playing at home the Careers boardgame which introduced the then revolutionary idea of having multiple careers in a lifetime. At grammar school they assumed you would either become a clerk or go to university and think of something whilst there. I gradually decided I wanted to become a wizard, when and if I ever grew up, that would provide me with an excuse to research and experience zillions of things.

Reading books like Paul Huson’s ‘Mastering Witchcraft’ proved a revelation and an inspiration, you could actually ‘DIY’ this stuff yourself, make your own wand and try out some spells!

Eliphas Levi’s books ‘The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic’ and ‘The History of Magic’ proved further eye openers. Levi’s vision of magic had a fairly scientific perspective and he asserted the primacy of the will and imagination of the magician, following the ideas of Schopenhauer rather than basing them on the old traditional Neoplatonic model.

Then I went on to read and experiment with Crowley, the whole Golden Dawn corpus, and much else.

After university I did a couple of years schoolteaching science in London, as you did then if you had only a pass degree and a love of short working hours and long paid holidays.

The London Illuminati circa 1974 – ’78 proved interesting company. They mostly consisted of public school drop outs with interests in esoterics and writing and included such luminaries as the brilliant and delightful Lionel Snell, the dour but clever Stephen Skinner, the gentleman and scholar/drunk and yob Gerald Suster, and the gifted but maniacal Charly Brewster. With some of them as members Stoke Newington Sorcerers briefly flourished.

Austin Osman Spare became a major influence, he had developed a stripped down system of magic based on accessing the subconscious mind to uncover the will and imagination and parapsychological abilities. Importantly for me he hadn’t presented himself as an almighty magus for emulation like Aleister Crowley, I already had severe doubts about thelemic theory and the religion of crowleyanity.

Before leaving London I wrote Liber Null – Book Zero, it consisted of a mix of Experience, Lore, Theory, and Aspiration.

What can you do with Magic, how can you do Magic, what does the word ‘Spirit’ actually mean, what does ‘Spirituality’ mean? Liber Null represents my first stab at these questions.

I then set off overland to India and Australia with my girlfriend for a couple of years. Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan offered hard travelling, heat and dust and filthy food and lodgings and some dangerous natives. Arriving exhausted and underweight in India we felt immensely relieved to find beer and bananas on sale and a generally welcoming atmosphere.

I spent a lot of time reading English translations of Tibetan esoteric writings in the library at Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills. These have many interesting parallels with old western magical practise and philosophy, plus some strangely modern touches – like imaginary god-forms. 

Indian spiritual traditions did not impress. The Gurus and Holy men all seemed like scoundrels; yoga seemed like a performance art for beggars. Religion as practiced looked like a family party with extravagantly baroque décor, iconography, and mythology. Indian society seemed to have very limited concepts of compassion or equality, except for cows of course.

Thence to Goa, but we rapidly tired of the stoned hippy beach scene. Instead we got together with some other travellers and built a boat and sailed it down coast as far as Cochin where a typhoon wrecked it; and almost us as well, scotching the madcap scheme to take it round the cape to Sri Lanka.

Thence to Australia direct as you couldn’t enter Burma then. I blagged my way into a job building dodgy fibreglass catamarans for a firm that specialised in cutting corners and we founded the Church of Chaos with a bunch of white natives. This did not outlive our stay but it provided a vehicle for plenty of experimental ritual and a bit of public performance art.

Thence we went back via Indonesia Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, to India, where I rewrote Liber Null, and eventually to Yorkshire, for no better reason than I knew Ray Sherwin there.

A very active magical scene based around The Sorcerer’s Apprentice bookstore and Ray Sherwin’s house in East Morton occupied me for two years and we both did stints as supply teachers.

I re-published Liber Null – the red edition, and wrote Psychonaut, and our working group started adopting the term Chaos Magic.

James Gleick published ‘Chaos, The Making of a New Science’, and we formally adopted the eight rayed star of Chaos, a symbol borrowed from the fantasy author Michael Moorcock.

Chaos Magic defined itself partly by its opposition to Thelema, many of the early Chaoists had come from Thelema, we used magical techniques and ideas pinched from all over, but with a distaste for Crowley worship and the theory of True Will. (Original Sin?) The IOT formally formed itself as a magical order in this period.

Thence back to India for another year, mainly to see Nepal, and thence to Bristol, for no better reasons than an acquired distaste for Yorkshire and the fact that my girlfriend had friends with a couch to spare there.

After another stint of supply teaching we started a natural products business in a tiny lockup shop, and then a family.

By then in the mid 80’s, Chaos magic had become the flavour of the Aeon in the world of off-white magic. Weiser in the USA publishes Liber Null & Psychonaut.

I form a Bristol IOT temple and Chaos International magazine gets published by fellow enthusiasts

Ralph Tegtmeier, an esoteric seminar organiser, invites me to lecture in the German speaking world with him as translator and organiser.

Things go well and we decide to try and form a wider order, The IOT Pact.

Personally I do all this to meet interesting people and as a spur to developing my ideas. I have tended to find just one serious collaborator to work with at a time for a period of a year to five or more years.

Things really take off over the next 5-6 years; temples spring up in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, USA, and London. We have big annual meetings in Austrian Castles.

I write Liber Kaos. I regard this as the more thoughtful and demanding of my first two books, but the cover and appearance the publishers chose for it never seemed appropriate to its contents.

I present myself as a knowledgeable practitioner and theorist of magic, not as a cult figure, and the order seems to grow and thrive on the basis of autonomous temples and a semi-democratic annual general meeting in some splendid German or Austrian castle.

These proved a splendidly productive but exhausting few years, the ideas of planetary magic, Aeonics, Ouranian Barbaric, the Equations of Magic, and liber KKK all come from this period.

Then the Ice Magic catastrophe occured. Ralph Tegtmeier under the influence of martial arts guru Helmut Barrat, tries to set up an authoritarian cult like structure and subvert the orders membership.

Eventually after a somewhat Pyrrhic victory in which Ralph and his supporters get forced out, I decide retire for an indefinite period. I have a growing family and business to attend to as well as some challenging theoretical problems in the quantum and cosmological domains to deal with. I leave the IOT Pact to develop as it wills.

I write Psybermagick as a bit of a knockabout of criticism of what I rejected and a list of things I thought worth looking into.

Then after some 15 years Maybelogic tempts me back into the public domain. Robert Anton Wilson’s friends and relatives launch an online seminar service to raise some funds for the old guy’s terminal care. It turns out as a surprisingly interesting and productive idea, and after it has fulfilled its purpose I create Arcanorium College online. The stimulus this provides inspires me to write The Apophenion and The Octavo, and feel like I get getting a second wind after my long sabbatical spent in thought.

After a titanic struggle the principles and the maths of Hypersphere Cosmology come together into a coherent whole, and it suddenly achieves widespread attention clocking up over 300K reads and a lot of correspondence. The quantum domain however remains unfinished business…….

I go back and have a look at the UK IOT Pact, but find myself not pleased with what it devolved into. The IOT began with wild iconoclasm and creativity but these didn’t seem sustainable and it seems to have failed to settle down and develop a longer program of sustainable productive works. They say that any esoteric movement tends to end up with either commercialism or a police raid. In other words, once the initial creativity has gone it either tends to settle down into something formulaic and marketable or it continues to get wilder or sillier till something regrettable happens.

I recently joined the Bristol Druid Grove. The Neoplatonist style material in the official OBOD teachings do not greatly interest me, but the civilised people involved and the monthly rituals and activities do.

OBOD probably has settled down these days and seems to concentrate on preserving what it provides, a fairly broad umbrella for people interested in a wide variety of esoteric ideas.

I recently wrote The EPOCH, my summary of what I find interesting in Neo-paganism and Magic, and where it may evolve to in the future. It consists of 3 grimoires, Elementary, Planetary, and Stellar – or Futurological. It comes with a set of elemental, planetary, and stellar icons on large cards. We did not intend these primarily for use in tarot style divination, although they will serve for this. Rather we intended them primarily as altar icons for use in works of invocation, evocation, and illumination. Matt Kaybryn and I worked on it daily for a full four years.

As I near business retirement age I think I may have some provisional answers to my questions of what do ‘Spirit’ and ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Magic’ mean for me.

I have adopted a species of Radical Materialism: -

The Radical position asserts that no mind-body or spirit-matter duality exists, the universe consists of entirely ‘material’ stuff but this stuff does a range of amazing things, it has a wave-particle duality, quantum weirdness, non-local and a-temporal effects, parapsychological effects and all, and probably more. ‘Mind’ consists of what brains do. Spirits thus exist inside minds, but this doesn’t mean that they cannot have psychological, parapsychological and other effects beyond the brains which support them. The universe almost certainly contains lots of minds besides ours.

I think this can explain most religious and magical phenomena.

Spirituality just means the way you live your life, courageously, inquisitively, and with compassion…..or not, some people acquire very unpleasant ‘spiritualities’ but everyone has one.

Lastly, a little ditty to mark the beginning of the EU Referendum Campaign

Who do you think you are kidding Mrs Merkel

If you think we’re on the run

We are the folk who will make you think again

We are the folk who will stop your little game

Mrs Merkel ain’t you heard

We will not surrender

On June the Twenty Third!

So who do you think you are kidding Mrs Merkel

If you think Old England’s done

P.S. Obama wants the UK to remain in the EU mainly because that will allow the Americans to stitch-up the whole of Europe in one go with their TTIP trade deal which remains highly secretive and controversial and almost certainly in their interests rather than ours. Try googling TTIP to see the problem.