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Free Trial Membership for two weeks.
Arcanorium College has Staff and Senior Members drawn from Adepts in the Magical Arts from all over the world, all of them have distinguished themselves by their publications and their leadership in significant magical orders.
Arcanorium College has recently decided on an experimental change to its Modus Operandi. Instead of the usual six week semesters it has decided to try a rolling program of ongoing workshops and forums without time limits. However the vast archive resource of past courses remains open for study and research.
The range of archive topics currently embraces Sorcery, Divination, Tantra, Runes, Neurolinguistic Programming, Chaos Magic, Thelema, Enchantment and Results Magic, Alternative Physics, the History and Culture of Magic, and Magical Software Design.
Members may attend as many of the ongoing working groups as they wish.
The College also features an extensive Library of Archives with links to many rare tomes, Common Room areas for news, debates, and socialization, and workshop facilities with online magical tools which remain open at all times.
Membership follows quickly after registration. The College does not accept members under 18 years of age. The College levies a modest registration fee which covers expenses and the cost of maintaining the online facilities and which discourages frivolous applicants. Arcanorium College works not to make a profit, but to provide a forum for the pursuit of The Great Work of Magic.
The Chancellor, Peter J Carroll, BSc, BM, KoC, may grant a free two week trial membership to suitable applicants. Apply by email to pete’at’specularium.org but replace ‘at’ with @.
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Happy nine hundred and fiftieth birthday Dr Who. I cannot remember where I was when I heard of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember watching the first episode of Dr Who and the first event now seems so trivial in cultural and historical terms compared to the second.
If birth or accomplishment makes you an Eccentric Upper Middle Class Brit then you have indeed won first prize in the human race; and you become part of civilisation’s vanguard, and its protection.
I was so glad that the series made that perfectly clear to me, it set the course of my life.
The Doctor seemed like the best bits of all our wizards and scientists from Dee and Bacon to Newton, Maxwell, Mathers, and perhaps even a touch of Dirac, all rolled into one.
Armed only with good manners, superior knowledge, and an electronic screwdriver (magic wand?) the good Doctor sees off the Nazi Daleks and all manner of nasty cosmic riff-raff and catastrophe without unseemly violence. He carries nothing as inelegant and American as a gun.
I didn’t really buy into the comic superheroes apart from perhaps Dr Strange - we had a better and more quirky UK version, THE Doctor.
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Halloween, rather like Christmas, seems an essentially modern and rather American innovation. Trick or Treat seems to follow the Sicilian-American business model of extortion with menaces. The Christian church of course had All Hallows Eve, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers. The Christians probably instituted this to replace various Pagan ‘Samhain’ type death festivals in which surplus livestock got slaughtered before winter.
However I grew up in Britain and for me the season seems always associated with ‘Guy Fawkes’ or ‘Bonfire’ or ‘Fireworks’ Night, initially instituted to celebrate the failure of a catholic plot to destroy a protestant parliament with a load of gunpowder barrels on the fifth of November 1605 and retained as a general celebration of British identity as anti-catholic and anti-papist etc, although for reasons of social harmonisation and political correctness this has become somewhat bowdlerised over the centuries into a mere firework festival, except amongst the protestants of Northern Ireland who still take it really seriously.
I spent my mid teens compounding rocket propellants and bangs from weedkiller and recycled fireworks, nobody bothered much about such pyrotechnic enthusiasms in those days. For me like many of my contemporaries it formed the basis of an interest in chemistry. Today one could easily end up interrogated by MI5 for such hobbies.
Despite my distaste for Catholicism, famously described by Richard Dawkins as ‘the world’s second worst religion’, and my enjoyment of fireworks, I’m refraining from incinerating an effigy of the pope on Guy Fawkes Night this year. For the first time in a while we seem to have a pope with some post medieval ideals, unlike the two mad old fools who preceded him, I feel guardedly optimistic.
Incidentally he used to work as a chemist, as did Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel and I.
Funny old business chemistry, it teaches you to think scientifically but unlike biology which has ‘life’ as its field of study and physics which has the entire universe to ponder, chemistry seems a bit bereft of higher philosophical implications, no wonder so many chemists abandon their trade and go on to more interesting activities like politics or esoterics.
I couldn’t help noticing that in upgrading his coat of arms to mark his ascension from cardinal to pope, Francis has replaced a five pointed star with an eight pointed one.
In other news, these mandrakes http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=133&Itemid=137 which I had unearthed because they had lost all their leaves, started to sprout again so I replanted them a week or so ago, now they all have a fine crown of new foliage, and will maybe flower in time for xmas.
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So Peter Higgs (along with Belgian Francois Englert) gets a Nobel Prize for predicting the Higgs Boson. At least dear old Peter Higgs will probably have passed away by the time the Higgs Mechanism becomes discarded as yet another blind alley in the annals of theoretical physics.
This prize for the Higgs really goes as a consolation prize to the LHC effort at CERN, the largest and most expensive instrument ever made by humanity, which has so far failed to find anything to significantly advance our knowledge.
The expense, the hype, and the self justificatory overstatement of results have reached epic, indeed almost Euroscale dimensions.
The Higgs mechanism was devised initially to explain the unexpectedly high masses of the W and Z bosons and was then extended to explain the origin of mass itself.
However as the theoretical Higgs field does not couple to the gluons (or whatever) that give things like protons and neutrons about 99% of their mass then it doesn’t explain a lot really, it creates a bigger problem than it solves.
If the particles which supposedly do couple to the Higgs field all have different coupling constants which the theory cannot predict, then the theory has no predictive power.
If the General Relativistic equivalence of the gravitational and inertial components of mass holds, and it seems to hold to a very large number of decimal places, then plainly the Higgs Mechanism seems in conflict with it.
The astonishingly weak and elusive 125GeV signal from the LHC could arise from any number of things, it seems highly premature to ascribe it to the particle manifestation of a field which supposedly gives some but not all other particles a mass, particularly as we already have an excellent and unfalsified description of mass as spacetime curvature in General Relativity.
I guess that the masses of the W and Z bosons have rather high values because they constitute rather ‘awkward’ or ‘stressed’ arrangements of spacetime, and I suspect that this has something to do with various types of spin arrangement in extra temporal dimensions.
I shall most certainly not eat the relevant pages of The Octavo until I see better evidence for the Higgs Mechanism!
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The EU has taken its first Political Prisoners, elected Greek politicians from the Golden Dawn party.
(Incidentally there seems no connection whatever between the Greek Golden Dawn and the old British esoteric order of the same name.)
No matter how distasteful we may find the opinions of the far right Greek Golden Dawn we must accept that their views arise in direct reaction to the economic and migration policies of the EU which have royally stuffed the Greeks.
Theoretically the EU would supposedly bring nothing but economic benefit and harmony. In practise it has brought the exact opposite.
The Greeks should have quit the EU when the latrine first intersected with the windmill back in 2008.
In fact all counties except Germany should quit the EU, only they profit from it by using a currency grossly undervalued for their economy.
The freedom to form anything other than an 'approved' political party will eventually disappear if the faceless bureaucrats of the EU have their way.