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Marblog 2024
Sortilege
Elective Democracy increasingly displays all its weaknesses in the face of pressure and finance from powerful interest groups and propaganda from powerful media. It encourages the formation and dominance of political parties and it spawns career politicians more intent upon re-election than good governance.
The classical Athenian Greeks rejected it for precisely such reasons.
About half of the world holds elections this year. In many cases such elections simply enable de-facto dictatorships to shuffle their cronies and weed out dissent. Yet in countries with supposedly free elections, the choice of candidates usually remains effectively determined by non-representative cliques, factions, political parties, and the media.
Thus, we now face the unedifying prospect of national elections in the UK and USA in which most voters would probably tick a ‘Neither of the Above’ box if it existed but will otherwise vote only to deny power to whoever they consider the worst alternative.
The vulnerability of Elective Democracy to abuse by self-interested cliques and oligarchs and career politicians led the classical Athenian Greeks to choose Sortition Democracy instead.
In an ideal Sortition system, representatives become selected at random by some sort of lottery to form a government. They serve for a fixed period as a public duty and cannot seek re-selection. Such a system would create parliaments that proportionally reflected all adult age groups, social classes, ethnicities, and genders within a society.
Such parliaments would ideally debate openly but vote by secret ballot. At a stroke this would break the stranglehold of political parties and eliminate most forms of corruption and lobbying by self-interested pressure groups. We could pay the members of a Sortition Parliament well to turn up for debates and votes and have an independent judiciary to eliminate any last vestiges of corruption. Sortition selected representatives would have no other motivation in debate or in voting than their own consciences and the long term benefits to society.
A Sortition Parliament could have half of its members replaced every few years so that it does not have to restart with completely inexperienced members after a complete sortition. It could call upon any number of experts to advise it and it would have a civil service to do so as well.
A Sortition Parliament would of course contain a small percentage of liars, idiots, self-deluded narcissists, criminals, and psychopaths, but far less than the current elective system throws up.
We should not give power to those who seek it.
We could perhaps trial the Sortition system in the UK by replacing the House of Lords with a randomly selected second chamber that has absolute power of veto over the first. It would act as a Citizen’s Jury that acts as a check and balance to the flaws and abuses that become increasingly apparent in elective systems.
Religiophobia.
There seems zero evidence that any religion has ever caused a net improvement in human behaviour. Every bit of charity and compassion promoted by any religion seems more than cancelled by the oppression it has self-righteously enforced.
In our theoretically secular societies, it seems perfectly acceptable to loathe political philosophies like fascism or communism which have very grim and ghastly track records, yet rather bizarrely it becomes increasingly taboo to discriminate between religious philosophies, no matter how bad their recent track records.
So now we have the peculiar spectacle of secular British politicians trying to make capital (and votes) out of accusing each other of phobias against religious philosophies that neither side has any genuine sympathy with.
Richard Dawkins famously described Roman Catholicism as the world’s second worst religion. Should we hate all religions equally or do some seem currently more despicable than others? Surely the more patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, intolerant, anti-liberal humanistic, and anti-rational ones deserve all the derision, criticism, and discrimination we can heap upon them.
This is Chaos. The Draft Manuscript has Landed!
The publisher has received all the written contributions to the Chaos Anthology and responded with a resounding Huzzah! There will now follow a period of editorial work to arrange it all in suitable form and sort out the illustrations, footnotes, and citations, hopefully it will appear sometime later this year.
Contributors include Ronald Hutton, Peter J Carroll, Jaq D Hawkins, Jozef Karika, Julian Vayne, Jacob Sipes, Aidan Watcher, Ivy Corvus, Dave Lee, Lionel Snell, Mariana Pinzon, Carl Abrahamson, Sinobu Kurono, and Sanhre Daffowt.
FSW8 ‘Magic’.
I have always had a fascination with designing and building board games. Analysing and trying to model historical, real world, and fantasy scenarios seems a productive way of stimulating strategic, tactical, imaginative, critical, and counter-factual thinking.
What rules do the actions of a system imply? What systems will emerge from a set of rules?
People keep asking me why I don’t write novels as well as books on magic and physics. Well, I tend to read, and I would naturally write, plot driven novels of ideas rather than character and drama driven stories. So boardgames have become my novels of ideas, my ‘what-if’ stories, and they also allow for endless experimentation with alternative rules and multiple possible endings.
For years I have experimented with modelling magic in a boardgame. It seems that any game system of ‘magic on its own’ can only lead to some kind of quest scenario where you use magic just to gain more magical ability, either cooperatively or competitively. In most game systems, magic or psi works as a ‘rule breaker’ in the sense that it acts as a combat modifier or a mobility modifier or that it distorts the probability of what would normally happen in some other way.
That seems reasonable enough because in the modern view, Magic - whether in enchantment or divination, consists of the art and science of modifying probabilities. (In divination it modifies the probability of guessing the right answer.)
The latest add-on to Frontier Space Warfare, the Psi Weapon Tournament Rules reflects this view. Factions may invest in various Psi facilities and wand like markers denote their presence on the board. Most act as production, combat, or mobility modifiers, but one has a function perhaps unique in game systems.
The power of Prescience allows a vessel or a flotilla of vessels to launch an attack in which, if it fails, the player can cancel it completely and restore the situation before the attack, but at the cost of the loss of the Psi weapon used. It may seem odd to call this Prescience, but this effectively models prescience because it gives a player the ability to explore what would happen if they did something, and then of either going for it or of avoiding doing it.
Herewith the Aquarian faction with a complete set of all 8 Psi weapons. The ones which have a non-local effect remain on the Aquarian homeworld, the expeditionary flotilla on one of its smaller systems carries the local effect combat and mobility modifying Psi weapons.
The Psi weapon tournament rules appear in the FSW8 rules appear in the games section and below.
Psychopath’s Chess
With his attempted conquest of Ukraine bogged down into an attritional stalemate and a contest of endurance with the West, Vladimir Putin must surely have dreamed of opening up a second front to distract the attention, resolve, money, and resources of the West.
Putin has cultivated an alliance with the Iranian government, based on little more than the dictatorial and pariah status of both regimes. Iran sponsors, trains, and arms both Gazan Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. It seems unlikely that either would have gone to war without Iranian approval, and most likely that they both went to war on Iranian instructions.
Putin likes sending messages by dramatic and violent means. Hamas launched its attack on 7th October, Putin’s birthday. He probably considers it a very worthwhile pawn sacrifice.
Amphibia
Climate change continues to confuse the wildlife, we have had an unseasonable period of exceptional rainfall, frosts, and warm days; some plants have flowered alarmingly early. During the unsettled weather of the last weeks, frogs and newts have appeared only fleetingly in the pond at Chateaux Chaos and then disappeared again. Nevertheless, we have healthy looking clumps of both frogspawn and toad spawn. Let us hope that the ferocious dragonfly larvae do not scoff the lot when they emerge, as they did last year.
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Febblog 2024.
(Note that a Janblog 2024 does not appear, not because nothing happened but because too much did, what with seasonal festivities in Scotland, family gatherings, an abundance of birthdays (why did so many of the people I know get born at this time of year?), the demands of coordinating 15 others in the creation of the This is Chaos anthology, the writing of Interview with a Wizard 2, embarking on a course of silversmithing, masses of magical correspondence, and surprising responses from some quantum and cosmological physicists.)
Well, the year has ostensibly started very badly with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East in which none of the protagonists seem to have a realistic exit strategy, Humanity seemingly committed to burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels until Climate Catastrophe overwhelms industrial civilisation itself, Elections looming in the UK and the USA that do not look likely to produce results that inspire widespread optimism, The UK seemingly tacitly committed to both maintaining a permanent housing crisis and the long-term-idiotic policy of importing ever more people to shore up its dodgy economy.
On the positive side The Dark Energy Survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02929
Came out as a preprint on January 5th. This resumes the data on 1,500 new type 1a Supernovae, some with redshifts exceeding Z =1.
Conventional cosmologists will interpret the raw data in terms of Flat Universe Theory in an attempt to confirm their ideas about so-called Dark Energy driving an apparent accelerating expansion of the universe.
As soon as the raw data becomes released upon acceptance of a paper, it will go into the algorithms of Hypersphere Cosmology to refine the measurement of the Antipode Distance in its model of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe that appears to us in stereographic projection because of its small overall positive curvature.
Dark Energy Survey data should hopefully confirm not the presence of Dark Energy in the conventional LCDM or wCDM models but the Curvature of the Universe within the HC model.
This paper shows the processing of older type 1a supernovae within the HC model.
This graph following shows the resulting antipode length results for the above data with estimated errors shown for apparent magnitude (blue) shown as + (red) and – (green). Horizontal scale redshift, vertical scale distance (metres).
Plainly two of the supernovae apparent magnitudes do not fit well, but despite the difficulties of apparent magnitude measurement all the rest give a reasonable fit to an Antipode distance of ~1.23 e26 metres or almost exactly 13 billion light years or 4 giga-parsecs.
I confidently expect the forthcoming DES data at higher redshift will confirm and refine this.
Brian Cox Horizons Tour – A twenty first century space odyssey.
We went to this in Bristol recently and enjoyed it immensely. How refreshing to discover just how widespread interest in Cosmology has become. Cox lectured to a big packed venue in front of a screen full of spectacular images from near and deep space and out to the limits of observation from space based telescopes. Whilst I have multiple issues with many of the conventional interpretations of the images and data that he presented, and particular doubts about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, I particularly liked the second half where he became more speculative and philosophical about life the universe and everything, and our beautiful planet, let us hope that the 99% unicellular slime hypothesis does not apply to the trillions of planets potentially capable of supporting life.
Under Construction
An Apophenia Ring in 1.5mm 925 Silver – Sawing the shank out of a sheet of silver seemed easy enough, bending it into a circle proved tough going, cutting out the Apophenia symbol with little files took many hours, soldering them together took mere minutes. I may later add a Chrysoberyl or Alexandrite cabochon in the circular part of the symbol which invokes the esoteric inspirations of Ouranos and Venus, with touches of Mercury and the Moon.
Herewith a rather delightful sci-fi image of Apophenia, I don’t know anything about the site it appears on.
https://www.apophenium.com/p/welcome-to-apophenium
Hopefully Apophenia, the goddess and muse of strange connections and the imagination will assist with the project below: -
A Quantum Ontology – Can we have such a thing?
Thought and language remain heavily structured by the preconception that phenomena (must?) consist of ‘something doing something’, yet we can only observe the doing and hypothesise (perhaps erroneously) about any underlying being.
Can we conceptualise something fundamental as exhibiting both doing and being?
Or do fundamental phenomena consist only of their doing and have no sort of substructure?
If fundamental phenomenon have no substructure, then does causality not apply any further?
If, as according to quantum field theory, a near infinite number of quantum harmonic oscillators pervades all of space, and all fields, waves, and particles consist of excitations of these oscillators, does that make such oscillators truly fundamental? If so, what oscillates? Spacetime itself?
Does our model of cosmology influence our quantum epistemology?
IF the Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics can model bosons (energy wave/particles such as the photons of light) as closed loops of particle-antiparticle in spacetime -
And IF the Wave Structure of Matter of Milo Wolff https://www.spaceandmotion.com/Wolff-Wave-Structure-Matter.htm can model fermions (matter wave/particles such as electrons) as the points from which outgoing waves subtend wavelike fields to the extremities of the universe and at which such waves reconverge in inverted form, AND the universe has a hyperspherical geometry; -
THEN – Could all quanta (or the spinorial twists that compose them) consist of closed loops in spacetime? This would at least sidestep the problem of fundamental phenomena and causality, as such phenomena would then appear as the causes of themselves – at least within our common 3+1 dimensional reference frame.
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Decblog 2023.
Seasonal Greetings! - Well why not, the weather (to the extent that we can rely on it these days of climate disruption) usually becomes dismal in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, our gardens look like blasted wastelands, the deciduous trees look mournful, the golden leaves of autumn have turned to mush and mud beneath our feet. The squirrels have given up on the last pickings of this year’s unusually abundant hawthorn berries. The news seems worse than usual.
So, eat, drink, and be merry, because we do not have the physiological adaptations to hibernate it all away. Happy Mithrasmass, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Hogmanay, or whatever you celebrate your survival of another year and your intentions for the future with.
For a bit of cheer, I send my seasonal greeting cards, Firstly, Aurora Borealis as seen recently from the hills surrounding Loch Ness. Those charged solar particles certainly do make gorgeous ionisation patterns in our atmosphere. We approach a solar maximum in the coming year, so expect unpredictability, mayhem, and ‘interesting times’. Secondly, the Mandragora Autumnalis in the greenhouses of Chateaus Chaos brighten the winter world with an unseasonal burst of green, Boris (centre) seems particularly ebullient in his new individual pot.
Esoteric News: -
The Dean Radin & Pete Carroll Rap.
Recently I came into email contact with Dean Radin, a pre-eminent figure in Parapsychology in America and a notable figure in RENSEP, https://www.rensep.org/about/about-rensep/
We had an extended exchange of ideas, herewith by mutual agreement, the fruits of our deliberations, a substantial read : -
https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/381-the-dean-radin-pete-carroll-rap
ADDENDUM - HEREWITH THE EXPERIMENT https://www.magicktest.com/
Interview with a Wizard 2. (Or something like that.) Sanhre Daffowt and I approach the halfway mark on another mega Q & A adventure, we may have the finished item ready for the publisher by end 2024.
Chaos Magic Anthology.
Fifteen contributors now labour at this endeavour. From what they have chosen to write about from their various works and researches and experiences, I think we can expect astonishing result.
Geopolitics. We only get to hear what the various news and propaganda media tell us. Currently, it seems that 37m Ukrainians slog it out with 144m Russians with potentially massive geopolitical consequences, probably 500,000 casualties so far, some very valuable lebensraum at stake, and Putin very clearly in the wrong. Yet this story has become largely eclipsed by the story of ~3m Palestinians slogging it out with 7m Israelis over territory worth very little, with nothing much at stake geopolitically, and neither side seeming entirely in the right or wrong. Do the media find morally ambiguous conflict and polarised opinion more marketable?
Instability in eastern Europe will not end until the neo-feudal gangster regime in Russia eats itself, and the Russian people and foreign allies turn against it. Keep the conjurations coming:
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
Science News. The JWST continues to provide confirmation of the Hypersphere Cosmology assertion that: - The universe will appear homogenous and isotropic on the large scale at all points in space AND time (once we have allowed for cosmological gravitational redshift and hyperspherical lensing).
The universe seems full of mature galaxies and galaxies at all stages in their life cycles at all observable distances. This profoundly contradicts the currently official LCDM Big-Bang hypothesis.
Bronze Craft. In addition to a daily program of resistance exercise, an elderly wizard also requires handicraft distractions to survive the rigours of perpetual literary endeavours and scientific and magical research. Herewith some recent creations in Bronze, a couple of Stokastikos signet rings. They look a very rough, but the beauty of the metal itself compensates, and things will improve with practise.
.
I cheated a bit here by using Prometheus Bronze Clay, a pesky and recalcitrant material which you can shape by hand and then fire with a gas blowtorch in a kitchen or shed, rather than converting an outhouse into a foundry with furnace, crucibles, and moulds.
Have a great festive season.
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Novblog 2023
Obituary. Ray Sherwin.
I understand from friends that Ray Sherwin died in Las Palmas (Canary Islands) this June past.
I shall remember fondly the year that my wife and I spent in his village of East Morton. We kicked around a lot of the ideas that would become part of Chaos Magic, Ray introduced me to Chris Bray of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and a number of people who would become leading figures in the Chaoist revolution. We had some splendid times trying out new rituals with friends in his attic, and up in the woods around Sunnydale Reservoir.
Ray did not wear his modest literary scholarship lightly, yet his pomposity and arrogance had an amusing and endearing quality to it which brightened many an evening spent in the Busfield Arms in Morton. I considered his attitude towards his longsuffering first Polish wife Marlena rather Neanderthal, even by 1980s Yorkshire standards, my wife considered it appalling. Marlena eventually left him but soon afterwards she suffered a catastrophic stroke.
Ray contributed directly to Chaos Magic mainly by turning his Thelemic fanzine into a Chaoist one called Chaos International and in showing me how to make an edition of Liber Null on a tabletop scale in the days before it became cheap and easy to self-publish books.
Ray’s written contribution to the annals of Chaos Magic remained rather modest at just two small volumes, The Book of Results and The Theatre of Magic. He also seems mainly responsible for a small 25 page book by ‘Paula Pagani’ called The Cardinal Rites of Chaos which details the seasonal rituals of a short lived group he assembled in Morton after I had left. The grandly titled ‘Cardinal Rites’ seem most charitably described as Discordian amateur dramatics.
Yet after he retired with a new younger wife to a small villa in the Canary Islands, Ray published two regrettable diatribes, Vitriol and Ouroboros, both full of conspiracy theory nonsense and invective against his former friends and colleagues and the IOT, despite that I had urged him to desist and check his sources. We never communicated again after he published them.
I rather suspected that he had lost his critical faculties, and friends have confirmed that both Ray and his wife had sunk deeply into alcoholism, poverty, and conspiracy theory, and that their young daughter had become their carer. Having watched my own father drink himself to death decades ago, I concluded that alcoholism results from a Failure of Imagination; failure to realise what it does to you, and failure to imagine doing something else instead.
So, a rather tragic and sad ending to a life, but thanks Ray for that entertaining and highly productive year in East Morton.
For a further commentary on Ray, Vitriol, and Ouroboros see: -
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/226-two-reviews
Retroactive Enchantment!
“Our Gedankenexperiment thus draws a metrological advantage from effective retrocausation founded in entangled states. While PCTC simulations do not allow you to go back and alter your past, they do allow you to create a better tomorrow by fixing yesterday’s problems today. “
Nonclassical Advantage in Metrology Established via Quantum Simulations of Hypothetical Closed Timelike Curves. Available from:
Does Science become more mystical?
Have a look at this! Io Baphomet! Neo-Panpsychism? Morphic Fields Strike again!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120
Chaos Magic Anthology
One of my publishers has invited me to assemble a team to write an Anthology about Chaos Magic. I have already rounded up many of the veterans from the old guard and some of the more prominent figures from the new generations of Chaoists. We may have space for just one more to join our illustrious lineup, so let me know if you think of contributors I may have missed.
In other news: - The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch look set to appear in Spanish.
Samhain. An Eisteddfod Poem.
Summer ends
The veil descends
Darkness begins
A time of fear
Illness, cold, and want
And thus,
A time to laugh at death
Yet the dead still live
Whilst still remembered
Fondly or otherwise.
Leaves fall
Like discarded ideas
I put them in
The compost bin.
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Octblog 2023
Poem.
Having recently answered more or less the same question from four different interviewers I put the question and the answer (of sorts) into a brief ditty for the Solstice Eisteddfod at Grove.
Tell me O Sorcerer-Scientist
How does a purely physical mind
Affect the material world?
Well physical theories
Have metaphysics all of their own
Classical physics has cause and effect
Events have definite causes
Realism rules, and thus;
Things always exist as definite states.
Relativity just adds locality
So nothing goes faster than light
And everything consists of particles.
Democritus at least got that bit right.
But we have two physical theories
The quantum one seems rather weird,
It contradicts all the above
Events have probabilities,
Unobserved events remain indefinite,
Entanglement works instantly in time
And oblivious to distance,
And everything consists of waves.
Dirac and De Broglie intuited that.
Both theories seem true
From a particular point of view.
We can only measure the particle reality
We can only imagine the wave reality
If our epistemology reflects ontology
Reality needs both
To do anything at all
So how does a physical brain
Interact with a material world?
Classically, or Weirdly as well?
Can experiments tell
What theories work best?
Therein lies our quest!
Antimatter down.
Observation of anti-hydrogen made in particle accelerators has recently shown that it falls downwards as expected, and not up. If it had fallen upwards in response to gravity the physics community would have reacted with shock and horror rather than levity, and all sorts of paradoxes would have arisen. Both mater and antimatter react identically to gravity, but that still leaves conventional cosmology with the headache of trying to explain why a big bang did not produce equal amounts of both.
I suspect the answer to the question of why the universe seems matter dominated has nothing to do with the supposed big bang and everything to do with the chiral asymmetry of the weak force arising from the Majorana Fermion nature of the Neutrino, i.e., it consists of a single type of particle that can either spin clockwise or anticlockwise with respect to its direction of propagation and that alone determines whether we categorise it as matter or antimatter. Furthermore, various particle’s spins in higher dimensional spacetime account for their electromagnetic and nuclear charges and our attribution of matter or antimatter status to them. Work continues on this idea.
JWST.
The James Webb Space Telescope went up primarily to investigate the unexpectedly vast number of galaxies at extreme distances that the Hubble Space Telescope first caught faint glimpses of. The big bang hypothesis predicts or at least heavily implies that galaxies like our own fully formed one should not exist at extreme distances in space and time because they will not have had time to form since a big bang.
It becomes increasingly clear from the JWST data that galaxies just like our own seem to exist everywhere out to the present limits of observation. Hypersphere Cosmology predicts that the universe will appear isotropic and homogenous on the very large scale at all points in space and time. It will look the same everywhere and everywhen, once we have factored in the redshift and the gravitational lensing arising from a small overall spacetime curvature.
Meanwhile the LCDM big bang theorists strive to add yet another ad hoc patch to their creaking model, by modifying their hypotheses about galaxy formation.
Resisting AI in Magic.
I have just written a somewhat critical appraisal of a forthcoming book on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Magic, I have read a book on magic written almost entirely by AI, and I have also watched a colleague getting AI to create sundry invocations and incantations online in seconds.
Herewith my verdict: -
AIs scour the internet for material created by humans and then attempt to compound a grammatically correct mash up from what looks like the most the most popular or readily available material. AI does not seem capable of creativity or of differentiating between popularity and quality.
Consequently, what it produces seems lumpen, verbose, predictable, generic, derivative, and uninspired. Don’t expect it to come up with anything surprising, memorable, or quotable yet. It has no spark or bite to it. It currently seems best suited to composing dull advertising copy for dishwashers or creating rather run of the mill travel brochures.
AI generated material makes magic look ridiculously easy to do, and this will lead some to engage with it in a far too casual manner, and to get poor or negligible results. Internet-itis (decreasing attention span) will follow, leaving enthusiasts to drift from one passing fad to another. Never underestimate the value of the work that goes into designing your own spells and rituals and entities for yourself and launching them with Gnostic levels of mental intensity.
It seems likely that some of the magic pages of the internet will fill up with a blizzard of mediocre and formulaic AI generated imagery, text, and rituals, which will rapidly turn off all but the most dim-witted dabblers. The fightback against AI generated magic text and imagery will soon follow.
Arcanorium College may institute new protocols for the submission of Batchelor of Magic Theses. We may eventually require that candidates write them under examination conditions inside Faraday cages with quill pens, but presently AI generated material looks fairly easy to spot.
New Book (eventually)
Following the publication of ‘Interview with a Wizard’, I established contact with another writer (this time a practising Chaos Magician) who wanted to conduct a further interview. This second interview has mushroomed into another mega-inquisition with the simple ground rule that he cannot ask a question already asked in the first interview.
As we recently passed question one hundred and seventy, I enquired of Mandrake, the publishers of Interview with a Wizard, if a second long-form interview book would interest them. I got a very enthusiastic yes to that. So, when have done another hundred and seventy or so in another year or more, we will submit it for publication. Watch this space for ‘Interview with a Wizard 2’ or similar title.
Chaos Magic in Japan.
My colleagues in Japan (who I have yet to meet in person) have requested that I place two articles here which they will later use in a Japanese book on introductory Chaos Magic. As the discussion of magical and metaphysical concepts can present difficulties when conducted across a cultural and linguistic divide, I have kept this as simple as possible.
Utilizing the Chaosphere, its application, and the underlying theory.
The Chaosphere consists of a three dimensional representation of the Eight Rayed Star of Chaos.
The Eight Rayed Star of Chaos has manifold scientific-metaphysical, psychological, and magical meanings. It can support the imagination of many symmetries and dualities.
Herewith one from recent Chaoist research for my Japanese colleagues: -
In basic science the eight arrows can represent the four axes of ordinary three dimensional space and one dimensional time. These represent our degrees of physical freedom in a universe with a simple Newtonian metaphysic.
In advanced Quantum-Relativistic Hypersphere science the eight arrows can each represent the degrees of freedom in our universe of curved three dimensional space and curved three dimensional time. (We can usually ignore the curvature ‘dimensions’ of space and time on the human scale, but it does affect the spacetime topology of the entire universe and the likelihood of alien intelligences existing). In this representation, all of the eight axes lie orthogonal (at right angles) to each other, implying the full higher dimensionality of the universe.
Three dimensional time provides the key to understanding the quantum-probabilistic nature of our partly chaotic physical reality, and of how magic works.
In psychological terms, the Eight Rays represent the eight major impulses that we as biological organisms have evolved: Sex/Death, Fear/Desire, Love/Hate, Solar Ego/Magical Self.
In magical terms the Eight Rays represent the Eight Magics that derive from the human condition and which we can equate symbolically to Pagan Deities and their symbolic planets and colours.
Sex Magic – The Moon – Purple. Attraction, the inspirations of sexual desire and ecstasy.
Death Magic – Saturn – Black. The motivation that awareness of mortality brings.
Fear Magic – Orange – Mercury. Intellect, quick thinking, inventiveness, cleverness.
Desire Magic – Blue – Jupiter. Acquisition of wealth, power, status.
Love Magic – Green – Venus. Empathy, attachment, loyalty.
War Magic – Red – Mars. Vitality, aggression, competitiveness, combat.
Ego Magic- Yellow – Sun. Charisma, radiance, persuasiveness.
Pure Magic- Octarine- Ouranos. Magical research, esoteric and antinomian knowledge.
Chaos Magicians can place a Chaosphere on their altars to affirm their commitment to developing all of the powers and abilities latent within themselves.
A Chaosphere symbolises the random creative powers of the universe and of humans. The central orb represent the formless personal Kia or life force and the arrows represent its many possibilities of direction. The magician can impale various spells on the spikes.
Concentration upon the Chaosphere in thinking meditation can lead to new insights into the structure of reality and the human experience. Concentration on the Chaosphere in ‘no-mind’ meditation can lead to resonance with, and inspiration from, transpersonal and extraterrestrial sources of Chaoist insight and enlightenment.
How do you perceive Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction?
People who cultivate many personal contacts and who remain open to new ideas and opportunities usually have better luck than others who do not. This seems more important than simply thinking positively and wishing for good luck.
The world has a lot of randomness in it, some of it can affect us negatively, some of it can affect us positively, but we can look for positive opportunities in whatever happens to us.
The subconscious and unconscious parts of our minds have a strong effect on what we do, and they can also have a direct magical effect on reality. If we keep thinking conscious positive thoughts these thoughts will gradually become part of the subconscious and unconscious mind. This can take a lot of time, but magical techniques offer some shortcuts.
Magical Spells, Rituals, and Invocations can achieve much deeper and quicker alterations to the subconscious mind than simply trying to think positive conscious thoughts for long periods.
Subconscious and unconscious desires have more powerful effects than conscious desires. Conscious desires tend to get mixed up with other thoughts and doubts, particularly if you keep consciously thinking about them.
Magicians should aim to concentrate their positive thinking into Spells, Rituals, and Invocations and then not consciously think about them afterwards and let their subconscious and unconscious minds create the magical effects.
Mandrakes.
In the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos, ‘Boris’, one of the three Mandragora Autumnalis plants, has sprung from the underworld as the equinox passes and we enter autumn. Perhaps we shall see some mandrake seed pods later. The project to repopulate southwest England with them has fallen far behind schedule.