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.
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…..........
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.
After a hard days slaving over esoteric and scientific texts in search of the secrets and equations of the universe I sometimes like to do stuff with my hands, so herewith, with apologies to HP Lovecraft and Eric von Daniken, a lighearted sculpture called 'Flying Sorcery', Fimo Elder Gods, Milliput Obelisk, Saucer in wood.
Maybe we should regard the Elder Gods as Lovecraft's personified premonitions about the powers that await us as we develop as a sentient race, such premonitions certainly scared the hell out of him, but perhaps we should regard them as challenges which we must confront eventually.
Lovecraft’s ‘Elder Gods’ have dangerous Promethean and Luciferian types of knowledge, knowledge with which we could easily destroy ourselves: - Direct power over the mind and the brain itself, power over the core processes of biology, the power of creating life and physical immortality, the understanding of the strange and secret geometries of the universe at both the cosmic and quantum levels, and the power to manipulate them, the powers of chaos and of creation itself
In response to requests for clarification of the previous post I append a brief extract from the forthcomming Esotericon:
Crowley joined the Golden Dawn and learned its system and accepted Mather’s teachings, but soon the considerably younger, richer, and more egocentric and aggressive Crowley broke with it. He published the core text underlying the entire system as his own work titled Liber 777. It seems that he merely added a small number of columns to the scholarly masterpiece that Mathers had spent years assembling and had kindly lent him. Crowley also slandered Mathers as an alcoholic in the introduction, an accusation not corroborated by anyone else who knew him, and Mathers by now moved in a circle of voluble literary figures.
Crowley added sex and drugs to the repertoire of techniques that the mystic or magician could use to attain altered states of consciousness, although these techniques had plenty of precedents in Shamanism and Tantra, but he never added any magical theory or attempted to tamper with the underlying PPM (Platonic Pagan-Monotheist) metaphysics. In the end he created a middlebrow misogynistic Victorian neo-satanism by simply replacing the solar based monotheism of PPM with a solar Satanism of the beast 666 by reversing all the usual ideas.
Thus he replaced the doctrine of Original Sin with his doctrine of True Will, he substituted Self Indulgence for Self Sacrifice, and he replaced Christ with the Crowned and Conquering Spoiled Brat of the Aeon of Horus. His theory of three Aeons, of Isis, Osiris, and Horus derived from Victorian anthropological fantasies about an ancient matriarchal female dominated Aeon which later research has thoroughly discredited. It would seem that until very recently the more brutal and bullying male has pretty much had his own way for all of history and pre-history. Nevertheless Crowley seems to have enjoyed himself, mainly at the expense of others, and his ideas continue to appeal to those who like him, grew up in a Christian household and then rebelled.
Having recieved initiation into the most august of western esotericism's linneages on my birthday at full moon in the year of my second saturn return, I feel imbued with sufficient MacGregorian zeal and fire to avenge the theft of Liber 777 by bringing the middlebrow victorian misogynist neo-satanism of the aeon of the crowned and conquering spoilt brat to a belated close in its 108th year. The TW belief has never given good results in my view, and I have opposed it throughout my career. Later in the year I shall take the opportunity afforded by a visit to Loch Ness to close the relevant demon gate, doing my bit to make 2012 a year of seminal changes, hopefully for the better.
The Esotericon & Portals of Chaos project proceeds apace with the first 13 items of artwork and the initial chapter nearing completion.
To prevent further imposture and mistaken identity I may exhibit the above item, fashiond by my own hand, upon request to serious enquirers to confirm my identity, the grain structure visible even at this resolution should prove more difficult to forge than any signature or fingerprint.
Stokastikos.
I remain unconvinced by the possible sniff of the Higgs at Cern. If they have found that they can make something fleeting which decays into a couple of Z bosons or into top and antitop quarks this would seem to prove no more than that such configurations have a slight stability. It doesn't mean that such things give other particles mass. General Relativity provides a pretty good explanation of the existence of mass already in terms of spacetime curvature. I still think we would do better to geometricate the quanta rather than quantise gravity, it would only require 3D time. I remain prepared to eat the relevant pages of the Apophenion if wrong, and I'll up the bet by adding the relevant pages of the Octavo also.
Herewith my seasonal gift, a recipie for Solstice Cake, it has already undergone field trials at Eisteddfod without casualties.
Mix together 7 oz margarine, 12 oz muscovado light sugar, 3 eggs, 1lb wholemeal self raising flour, 5 fl oz buttermilk, 14 oz of a mix of sultanas, raisins, and currants. Bake for 3.5 hrs at gas mk 1.
Adorn with marzipan symbols of the elements using 3D versions of the tatwas. Paint with vegetable based food colourings. Pierce each quarter repeatedly with a cocktail stick and pour in appropriate liquors to each quarter.
Serve with the red tetrahedron orientated south, (or north in the southern hemisphere, in which case you may have to switch water and air also).
A merry Mithrasmass, Solstice, Saturnalia, Peak-Oil, Eurocrisis, or whatever you celebrate.
Pete.
Two groups have always understood the principle that you can only have one government per currency.
The Synarchist faction of the european political class have always sought to forge a non-democratic oilgarchical United Synarchy of Europe for their own advantage, and they have used the single currency to try and force political union in through the back door whilst pretending otherwise.
Euroskeptics have of course understood this as well, and they have fought an uphill battle to expose the Synarchist agenda which devolves from the thinking of Yves saint D'Alveydre who wanted government by a shadowy unelected cabal of 'people who know best' that controlled all aspects of the life of the populace. (see Wizards Against Tyranny paper on this site)
The european union does not exist for the benefit of the european people, it exists for the benefit of a section of the european political class that would prefer to enjoy the delights of self-perpetuating arbitary power without the occasional inconvenience of facing an electorate.
The current financial crisis has come a little too early for comfort for the Synarchists, it has become all too apparent that any nation which trades its political freedom for financial gain will end up loosing both. Neither Greece nor Italy now has a properly elected government, each now has a junta of EU approved eurocrats in charge and years of political slavery and austerity ahead unless they have the guts to default.
The British have for centuries understood that the strength of europe lay in its diversity and for centuries British foreign policy has centered on denying anyone hegemony on the continent, not Phillip of Spain, not Napoleon, not Hitler, and now not Merkozy in cahoots with all those unelected Euro-Mandarins whose names and faces and roles hardly anyone knows.
Finally after some decades of appeasement we (apart from a few illiberal dimocrats) have finally had the guts to say no. This will hurt for a while as the whole corrupt rotten synarchist edifice of the EU crumbles, but a few points off gross domestic product for a while seems a small price to pay for the freedom to run our own country. We probably won't now have to trudge wearily down to Dover with our longbows or muskets yet again, thank goodness.
Thanks for your messages.
Herewith some further and rather more metaphysical thoughts on the previous paper.
Local Indefiniteness
*
*
*
Wave Real ************************* Omnality
*
*
*
Non-Locality
The ‘Bell Axis’ of Local Indefiniteness – Non-Locality formed the theoretical basis of basic Chaos magic theory which adopted a best of both worlds approach and assumed that local events had a degree of inherent randomness about them and that some form of what Einstein disparagingly referred to as ‘spooky action at a distance’ remained possible as well.
However it did contain a weakness, the spooky action at a distance should have remained restricted to phenomena previously entangled by physical contact, thus restricting it to what you might call the Principle of Contagion in classical magical terminology and rendering any magical link dependant on this mechanism subject to quantum decoherence. The adoption of Cramer’s transactional interpretation of entanglement did however permit some exciting developments in the technology of retroactive enchantment.
The adoption of this paradigm on the basis of circumstantial magical evidence, the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradox, and Bell’s resulting theorem even before its experimental confirmation in the Clauser and Aspect experiments now seems justified.
Pusey’s theorem awaits experimental confirmation, yet several lines of positive conjectural evidence seem to converge upon it. Some form of ‘Omnalistic’ communication between all quantum states, whether entangled or not, could supply the constraints necessary to eliminate the embarrassing hypotheses of Multiple Universes and the Multiverse. These arise because we have as yet discovered no mechanism to limit the wave functions of individual quanta and the wave functions of the universe to the single forms of manifestation that we observe. Thus some theorists have assumed that all possible manifestations must actually occur, despite that we cannot observe them. An Omnality mechanism could rid us of the nonsense of 10^500 or more unobservable universes existing in parallel to the one that we observe. It would also eliminate the horizon problem in the unlikely event that we inhabit an expanding universe, for it would impose a bias in favour of local physical laws applying everywhere, as seems apparent at the limits of observation.
The pragmatic magical Principle of Similitude (Like Affects Like) also lends support to the idea of Quantum Omnality, as does its more modern manifestation in Morphic Field theory. However an acceptance of a quantum-omnalistic interpretation of the principle of similitude by magicians would lead to a considerable tightening of the meaning of ‘similar’, LEADING PERHAPS, WHERE POSSIBLE, TO A PREFERENCE FOR MATERIAL MANIPULATIONS RATHER THAN SYMBOLIC OR MENTAL ONES, for simple results magic.
Now the Heisenberg style uncertainties/indeterminacies stem ultimately from the principle of Complementarity, in which the quanta can manifest as either particles or waves and it makes no sense to say that a quanta ‘is’ one or the other, rather the more a quanta manifests in one form the less it manifests in the other, dependent on context or experimental set up. Thus we can view the Pusey Axis of Wave Reality – Omnality as indicative of the effects of quanta in various circumstances.
Much of the excitement in the physics community about Pusey’s theorem currently centers on the idea that it could prove that quantum wave functions have some sort of reality in themselves rather than just some sort of epistemological reality which makes them merely strange mathematical tricks of description that just happen to give useful predictions. Many physicists have adopted this position simply because the apparent alternative of Omnality, non-local communication even between non-entangled states, seems an even more crazy idea.
However a Heisenbergian/Complementarist perspective of an inverse proportionality to the expression of these properties would seem to imply a universe where both forms of such apparent craziness can manifest.
From a magical perspective ‘real’ wave functions would correspond to something that we have given the name Aether (and various other names over the centuries). A realm of shadowy possibilities of what might and what might not occur, and what might have and might not have occurred.
From a physics perspective the ascription of some form of physical reality to wave functions would demand the reality of some sort of realm to accommodate them. Three-Dimensional Time would do nicely, and largely pass unobserved as a kind of pseudo-space of unobservable stochastic hidden variables which we can to some extent model with so called imaginary numbers.
It seems suggestive that the Pauli Spin Matrices (used to model quantum spins) resemble Hamilton’s quaternion algebra. This uses the imaginary numbers i, j, and k as variants on the basic imaginary number ‘i’ used sucessfully for the time dimension in the 4D Minkowski spacetime metric of 3D space and 1D time.
Thus if wave functions have a physical reality then 3 time dimensions of i, j, and k can perhaps accommodate them. These extra dimensions would not require the compactification required to explain the un-observervability of extra spatial dimensions. They would have exactly the same ‘size’ as ‘ordinary’ time. Indeed the phenomena we call ordinary time would merely consist of a remembered or expected line of particle events picked out and lined up by us in the solid matrix of 3D wavefunction time.
The apparent material (particle) universe then appears as an interference pattern that both subtends and coalesces out of a very much larger aetheric (wave) universe.
Thus, if you like mysticism, it constitutes a huge illusion, but the only one we can have.
Heisenberg, Bell, Pusey & Co.
Purveyors of Quality Paradigms to the Discerning Magi.
Thought experiment.
1) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relationships show, and experiment confirms, that the measurability (and almost certainly the objective existence) of such pairs of qualities as ‘Position & Momentum’, or ‘Energy & Time’, lie in a relationship of inverse proportionality to each other rather than in a simple either-or relationship. Thus more certainty or definiteness in one quality implies less in the other, depending on context or experimental set up.
2) Bell’s Theorem shows, and experiment confirms, that EITHER ‘Local Indefiniteness’, OR ‘Non-Locality’ applies, so either phenomena can exist in indefinite states or entangled phenomena can communicate non-locally, (faster than light).
(It does not rule out the possibility that EITHER Local Hidden Variables OR Non-Local Hidden Variables may exist.)
3) Pusey’s recent Theorem shows, (although we await experimental confirmation), that EITHER Wave Functions Have Physical Reality, OR All Quantum States (including non-entangled ones) Can Communicate, (‘Omnality’)
The physical reality of wave functions contradicts the widely held Copenhagen Interpretation that they consist merely of abstract mathematical formalisms that merely happen to give useful probabilistic descriptions. Communication between even non-entangled states might possibly explain the ubiquity of physical laws in the entire universe, and the so called ‘morphic field’ effect.
4) The application of a Heisenberg style inverse proportionality in place of the ‘either-or’ possibilities of Bell and Pusey yields the following schemata. A further hypothesis of Three Dimensional Reversible Time could reconcile ‘Local Indefiniteness’, Non-Locality, ‘Wave Reality’ and ‘Omnality’, by providing stochastic local and non-local hidden variables.
Local Indefiniteness
*
*
*
Wave Real ************************* Omnality
*
*
*
Non-Locality
Organised Chaos
Imagine that you wished to establish a magical order so that people could come together to practise and explore a new type of magic.
You would need people to take on various administrative and organisational responsibilities.
You would need to establish a system of magical progress and attainment in this new type of magic.
At the beginning you would have insufficient human resources to accomplish this at a stroke so you would have to make a compromise: -
To establish a structure you would have to give out positions that represented both administrative and magical roles and responsibilities, somehow fudged together.
Thus your organisation would begin as a de-facto Oligarchy and the means by which people acquired various grades and responsibilities would remain far from transparent.
Eventually the organisation would require reform as it began to suffer the strains of members becoming disaffected with the obviously fudged grade structure that it needed to get it started.
The required reforms would simply separate administrative from magical positions and give proper definition and credibility to each, thus: -
A) Administrative positions would become subject to periodic democratic election, thus giving them a Proper Mandate. (Even though where electorates remain small and friendly one would expect most elections to pass unopposed).
M) Magical grades would become subject to peer review, with at least some independent review from someone in a distant temple, and grade awards would depend on the completion of an agreed program of work at minimum, plus other work of choice. This would restore to such traditional grade terms as Initiate, Adept, and Magus, a Proper Recognition of Merit and Accomplishment.
Reform always brings some pain and sacrifice and some hard work, but complacency kills eventually.
Any order which does not move onto Phase 2 of organisational structure will remain hamstrung by the Oligarchical fudges used to create it, and suffer from disaffections amongst its members which keep it small and fractious.
Peter J Carroll.
Review. Imaginal Reality, Voidcraft, volumes 1 and 2. Aaron B. Daniels. Aeon Books.
Over 400 pages of tight print, plus illustrations by Laura M. Daniels.
When this curious bundle of surprises arrived I felt thricely intrigued to note that I had apparently already written a back cover pump for it, as had an IOT Pact Magus who pronounced it ‘the finest book on contemporary existential magic he had ever read’.
I do recall that Professor Daniels had sometime ago emailed me a draft of it and that I had opined that it looked like ‘a full cerebral download’ and that as such, it probably needed to appear as two books, which it now does. However he does seem to have extensively re-written it as well.
Nevertheless my comment of ‘Full Cerebral Download’ still stands. Here we have in these two volumes, a huge rambling tome that seemingly touches on just about everything remotely connected to the Professor’s thoughts on philosophy, psychology, biography, magic, imagination, and occulture. Expect an uneven and challenging read, as this opus lurches wildly across a whole spectrum of disciplines, you may also need a dictionary to hand.
After a bit of a struggle with volume one, I found a reading method that suited. I treated these books as a ‘Late Night Philosophy Rant with a Friend’. I think you need to read a bit, stop, marshal your objections, and argue back for a while, and then read some more, rather than just plough through it doggedly.
Except where they have the temerity to assert and defend some sort of positive position on ethics, ontology, or metaphysics, most philosophers have become the askers of awkward questions and the keepers of useful sarcasms. They tend to wield the razor of destructive analysis more than they use the trowel of construction. Daniels comes pretty close to cutting himself with the razor of existentialism and he has some pretty cutting things to say about the pretensions, evasions, and delusions of magic and spirituality and the whole occult, esoteric, and new-age scene.
The whole meaningless-meaningful duality seems to vex him mightily. Existentialism can wield the razor of over-mighty intellect with enough sullen violence to nihilisticaly extirpate the meaning from anything, and he presents us with visions of void-ness and emptiness. He quips that his students call him Dr. Downer.
However he offers his own antidote; in the absence of given meanings we need to become the meaning makers ourselves. We also need to experience the moment of the here and now, (presumably, temporarily without the encumbrance of the mighty analytical intellect or the second-hand meaning structures that our commercialised cultures offer). The ideas and symbols and glamour of magic provide a language in which we can construct our own meanings and identities, (except where commercially provided of course).
All this comes pretty close to the Chaos Magic perspective of treating belief as a tool rather than as an end in itself, and indeed the whole corpus of Voidcraft makes numerous references to Chaos Magic.
If philosophers have become the keepers of useful sarcasms then perhaps we can liken psychologists to people trying to map a very cluttered and complicated building in pitch darkness by daubing faintly luminous coloured paints around. It all looks superficially convincing but that merely shows that the impossibly complex mind will tend to reflect any structure or model you care to impose on it.
The Imaginal Psychology that Daniels advocates, teaches and practices clinically seems to incorporate this perspective; it appears to have grown out of the Jungian approach towards a more sort of ‘multimind’ position or polycentric view of the self(s). That all sounds like good Chaoism to me.
I got two thirds of the way through the second volume to find that the last third of it consisted of a vast glossary. Despite that I’d found it hard going I had a feeling of aw, shucks, its finished, just as I’d felt myself(s) getting engrossed in the process of argument and agreement with it. However even the glossary, (itself larger than some books of mine), provided a great deal to chew on.
Pete Carroll.
I note with satisfaction that the UK courts have just ruled that the Diocese of Plymouth cannot claim that its priests acted as self-employed consultants and thus itself escape the legal consequences of their despicable actions over the last 60 years at least.
When the whole vast topic of child abuse began to surface within the catholic church I felt a certain satisfaction that the truth had finally come to light and that the myth of occultist abuse of children, started by fundamentalists in the USA, has finally become discredited as a baseless excuse for a literal 'witchunt'.
I went to a vaguely church of england school and to a vaguely church of england affilliated scout group, most of the weddings and funerals I have attended seemed vaguely church of england too. Vague seems the operative word here, it all seemed rather silly and harmless and its practitioners defended its mumbo-jumbo in vague and evasive terms, generally preferring to emphasise its ethics instead.
I had no experience of catholicism untill I spent a couple of terms teaching in a catholic school circum 1980. I had assumed it resembled anglicanism but with more bells and smells. I actually found it rather nasty, the whole school seemed to run on physical violence and metaphysical fears and threats. Since then I've travelled more widely in catholic countries and formed an even lower opinion of it.
I can now well appreciate Richard Dawkins classification of catholicism as the world's second worst religion. The current pope spent a decade as the head of the inquisition to his predecessor. It beggars belief that he did not take a leading role in the child abuse cover up.
When you look at the iconography and the behaviour of catholics the underlying emotive dualities of that faith become all too apparent. Its emotive appeal depends on a mixture of the dualities of 'sentimentality and cruelty', 'guilt and self-righteousness', plus 'sexual inhibition and sexual machismo'.
Just look at all those sickly sentimental virgin and child images juxtaposed with the pornographically cruel depictions of the crucifixtion. The whole catholic guilt trip goes hand in hand with self-righteousness. Self righteousness (rather than innocence) provides the actual emotive duality with guilt.
Combine cruelty with self righteousness and you explain the horrors of the Inquisition. Combine cruelty with guilt and you explain their fascination with mortification of the flesh. Combine guilt with sentimentality and you explain their self-pity. Combine sentimentality with self-righteousness and you explain their false piety. Then when you start adding in the sexual inhibition-machismo vector as well you get even nastier combinations. They do say that catholics make the 'best' whores and nuns and rapists, and their priests make the 'best' child abusers. Ugh.
The EU Synarchy, conceived with malignant intent and in economic ignorance, by elements of the european political class, now looks headed for precisely the disaster that UKIP, half the UK Conservative party, and other weird eccentrics predicted for it.
All conceivable short term futures for europe look pretty bad now, but the sooner countries extricate themselves from this nonsensical project the less they will suffer.
Some time ago I transferred the liquid assets of all my companies to a non-eurozone bank.
On a lighter note I attended the late samhain meet of a certain magical order for an invigorating weekend of rituals varying from the deadly serious to the intriguingly surreal. How satisfying to see it all still going strong some thirty years down the line.
Semester 2 of Arcanorium College's 6th glorious year officially begins today, www.arcanoriumcollege.com
I'm now working with the new lightweight style ash wood pocket wands, the metal ones were making holes in my clothing.
The Greek government's threat to offer its people a referendum on the euro-bailout package before the finalisation of that package may yet lead to another glorious Thermopylae moment. If they say NO to the empire they will take heavy casualties but secure their freedom, and probably bring the whole empire down eventually.
On a lighter note I present my Samhain Eisteddfod poem here publicly, as its on a secular rather than an internal metaphysical topic. So celebrate this halloween with a poem about the most comprehensively dead person of my knowledge, an ancestor from some 34,000 years ago.
Paviland Man, some thoughts upon Europe’s oldest tomb.
Pavilander, what took you in your prime
Those thirty thousand years ago?
Was that mighty mammoth skull
Laid to rest with you by friends
Some token of your final fearsome prey?
So how on earth did you bring to ground
Eleven tons of muscle and tusk
With flint headed spears?
Or did you heave great boulders down
From the top of the cliffs
Or stampede them over it
With blazing fire torches
Whatever, it must have took cunning and guts.
For such a fine send off
You must have had love or respect
Precious grave goods and offerings of ochre
And what was that for, that blood of the earth
For strength in the next world
Or a token of honour in this one?
I’d guess you would have had children
By your age in those ancient times.
Though over a thousand lifetimes
Separates you from us currently here
You may live in our blood and our genes
But your language we can never know
Yet your tools and your ornaments and tomb
Say to us plainly and clearly
That you must have had thoughts just like ours.
Your friends they gave you the best plot
A high vaulted cave of a million years, facing the sun
Proud and bleak it stands in the bare cliff face
It has seen the seas draw back and turn into plains
And watched the seas return again
Though dolmens and barrows may crumble
Or be stripped of their turf and their stones
That cave survived the glaciers the floods and the storms
The invention of farming left it untouched
Kingdoms came and went, unnoticed
Our feeble buildings do not last like caves do
Our empires rise and fall again to dust,
Let us hope our last archaeologist
Returns you to your resting place
When this fragile civilisation crumbles - like the rest.