Blog (249)
May 2020
Something extraordinary came out of the bubonic plague of 1665-6. Isaac Newton retreated to the family farm and developed the equations of gravitation. Hopefully, this current lockdown may lead to some interesting innovations.
With a provisionally credible and currently unfalsified model of the Yog-Sothian hyperspherical geometry of the cosmos awaiting confirmation: -
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
Thought returns to the microcosm of the quanta, the realm of the blind mad god Azathoth.
At present we have a model encompassing a considerable number of types of quanta each of which may have its own type of field and each of which can behave as both a point particle and as an extended wave and which can apparently exist in several contradictory states at once and which can apparently have instantaneous connections at any distances. We have mathematical recipes for some of these phenomena, but the maths involves un-visualisable concepts and abstract dimensionalities and some of the phenomena remain apparently completely random.
How in hell does the tiny stuff apparently underlying the whole of reality really work?
The following musings consist of hand-waving arguments, intuitions, guesses, and speculations, the supporting maths may follow later.
Firstly, Fields. According to quantum field theory, every quantum consists of an excitation of a quantum field that extends throughout all of space. This implies that maybe four or perhaps twenty-four different kinds of fields pervade all of space. Do the quanta subtend these fields around themselves or should we regard the fields as more fundamental and the quanta as mere disturbances in them? If, as in General Relativity, mass-energy tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells mass-energy how to move, then they both represent aspects of the same phenomena. Any particle of mass appears as a curvature that extends throughout all of space, it merely appears to have a solid boundary around it because of short range electrostatic effects. So perhaps quanta and fields represent aspects of the same phenomena and we should regard neither as separate nor more fundamental.
Gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves always appear to propagate at the speed of light, in accordance with the idea that such waves represent moving disturbances in such fields originating in the accelerations of objects carrying mass or electric charge. However static masses and electric charges give every appearance of exerting instantaneous effects over any distance although the forces do decline by the inverse square of distance where Euclidian geometry applies. Arguments over whether static fields exert instantaneous or lightspeed effect continue but seemingly instantaneous effects do appear in the non-local models of some interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Thus, the daunting Particle-Wave Duality of most interpretations of quantum physics perhaps needs extending to an even more daunting Particle-Wave-Field Triality before we can make any real sense of it.
The Field component of reality probably does not need four or twenty-four components, it probably consists of a single Field with a somewhat greater than 3-space, 1-time dimensionality. A Field with a symmetrical 3-space, 3-time dimensionality with both 3d space and 3d time curved to form a hypersphere might do the trick. A 3s3t spacetime metric appears to offer just exactly enough degrees of freedom to account for the manifestation of all the quanta observed so far. (It predicts an additional Duon boson only, and it denies that the Higgs mechanism applies to this universe and that we have really detected a Higgs boson.)
See https://www.specularium.org/3d-time for some preliminary speculations.
In addition to having probability lying at right angles to ‘ordinary’ time in an orthogonal plane of imaginary time (in an observer’s frame of reference) we probably need to accept the two-way nature of time that most of the physics and some of the magic suggests. This does not seem restricted to the realm of the ultra-small as the following example illustrates: -
We can easily observe back-reflection when looking at a widow with low light or darkness behind the window. We can see a reflection of ourselves and our surroundings in the window as some of the light hitting it reflects off the front surface of the glass, whilst some of it goes through the glass (as others can see us from the other side of it). Now the amount of light which becomes reflected back off the front surface depends on the thickness of the glass!
This seems deeply weird. How do light quanta anticipate the thickness of the glass before deciding whether to bounce off it or to go through it? The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics seems to offer an explanation. In this interpretation, the forward wave function of each quantum of light goes through the glass and it also reflects off the glass as well in search of an electron in someone’s eyeball or in the scenery to act as a receiver. Potential receiving electrons send a confirmation wave BACKWARDS IN TIME down the wave path to the electron which emitted the light quantum in the first place. The thicker the glass the more trouble the forward and backwards waves have, so a handshake between forward and backward waves along the air only reflection path becomes more likely. The handshake results in the collapse of the completed wave function and the effective exchange of a ‘particle’ of energy between emitting and receiving electrons. The wave functions act like a mysterious type of aether which acts across time to feel out possible futures.
From some perspectives the light quantum or photon exists only as a wave/anti-wave exchanged between electrons, but what about the electrons themselves and everything else we think of as ‘matter-particles’? Matter quanta also exhibit wavelike qualities too, and perhaps in a six dimensional vorticitating hyperspherical universe they may consist of overlapping wave/anti-waves that go right round the universe with the endpoints representing particles and the antiparticles they may rotate into at their antipode points.
I have a few thoughts on this which I have not fully explicated or incorporated into hypersphere cosmology yet, but it goes a bit like this: -
In Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, we can view a 'photon' as an exchange of retarded and advanced waves between electrons.
In some senses we can consider photons as the endpoints of standing waves.
'Matter' particles also have wavelike properties as de Broglie showed.
Milo Wolff takes this a step further with his Wave Structure of Matter and has matter particles as the points where inward and outward standing waves converge, but he has the inward waves reflected from the entire universe.
In Hypersphere Cosmology every point in the universe has an antipode point.
Thus every 'matter particle' may consist of the endpoint of a standing wave that goes right round the universe with an 'anti-matter particle' at the other end of it.
Thus, the universe could have an overall matter-antimatter balance with the two kept well out of each other's way.
Perhaps we should regard The Field, in which quanta exist as wavelike or particle-like excitations or which quanta subtend around themselves, not as something which fills spacetime but as spacetime itself.
Lockdown has achieved some remarkable results: - Reduced fossil fuel use and carbon emissions, zero economic growth, wildlife thriving, men growing their hair back to a proper hippy length, fewer people buying pointless stuff and junk, everybody devising new forms of self-entertainment and looking out for their friends and relatives, the professional classes home educating their offspring better than schools, people having time to reflect on who and what really matters to them in this life.
Perhaps after this pandemic finally ends, we should institute some form of annual three-month public holiday every year.
Historically we have tended to favour oats for high performance creatures like racehorses, gladiators, and highlanders. It seems a good move to base most of one’s carbohydrate intake upon the proteinaceous and roughage rich foods of oat porridge and oatcakes.
So, herewith in response to the overwhelming acclaim for savoury Tuna-Porridge in the previous blog, a sweet dish to complement it: -
Oat Cuisine Recipe Number 2 of 8,127, (a large sack of oats lasts a long lockdown). Place a cupful of oats in a saucepan, add dried mixed fruit, glace cherries, any nuts or bits of fruit available, a teaspoonful of powdered ginger and/or mixed spice, a splash of dark rum and a little water. Warm with stirring until it forms a thick paste. The nutritious result usually tastes like a delicious hot fruit-cake puree.
Another beach detritus sci-fi spacehulk: - The Orbital Space Monitor ‘Misanthropy’.
The Misanthropy has a bad attitude. It fires upon anything that approaches the abandoned star system it has guarded for several millennia - a sort of metaphor for social isolation.
The base consist of the end of a charred aluminium drinks can recovered from a beach fire pit. The spacehulk’s body consists of a rare sea worn volcanic bolide of iron rich vesicated basalt. A few drops of Araldite hold it all together.
Magic works in Practise but not in Theory
Magic works in Practise but not in Theory.
I vaguely remember making this statement to Gordon White during a rather peculiar interview. We had found a large table in an empty waterfront pub and set up a microphone and recording apparatus. During the course of the prolonged interview the pub filled up with besuited office types and even the table we occupied became crowded with rather bemused clerical and administrative workers taking frequent sidelong glances at us and pretending not to listen as we ploughed on with the strange metaphysics and barely believable biography. As the general hubbub around us rose we had to speak louder and louder.
The quote keeps getting fed back to me by correspondents and it deserves further analysis; the principle seems to crop up everywhere you look.
Newton’s formulae for Gravity work well in Practise, allowing us to calculate planetary orbits, spacecraft trajectories, and the behaviour of cannonballs and falling apples. However, the Theory that the formulae imply doesn’t really make sense as it means instantaneous force at ANY distance. Neither Newton nor anyone else really liked this. The later addition of the idea of a ‘gravitational field’ doesn’t really make the problem go away. Einstein’s new General Relativistic description of gravity as spacetime curvature dispensed with forces and gave even more accurate Practical astronomical predictions, but it also leads to the unresolved Theoretical catastrophe of spacetime singularities. Work continues, hypersphere cosmology might do it.
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
Quantum physics presents another example. The formulae of quantum mechanics give outstanding Practical results, allowing us to build electronic devices and lasers, however, despite the efficacy of the pragmatically derived formulae, humanity does not have a coherent and generally agreed Theory of how quanta do their stuff. Many consider that quantum field theory has only epistemological value, it describes merely our limited knowledge about quanta; it doesn’t, or cannot in its current form, describe them directly. Work and controversy continue.
Religion provides perhaps the most spectacular example of something that works in Practise but not in Theory. Billions of people find the Practise of their religion perfectly satisfactory, yet the Theory behind every religion remains completely self-contradictory and nonsensical. Paradoxically, only psychological Theories of religion (rather than theological ones) can make any sense of the phenomena, but you cannot make religions out of these, or can you?
As far as we can tell from archaeology, the Practise of Magic has continued since the dawn of human sentience, yet it remains a Practise in search of a Theory.
Underlying the Practise lies the reality that intent and imagination can make things happen. Exactly how this works has remained the subject of thousands of years of Theoretical debate.
The early Shamans modelled the effect as arising from the ‘spirits’ of animals and natural forces. Pagan magicians attributed the effect to the intercession of the gods and goddesses of their pantheons. Monotheist magicians attributed it to their god or to various of his angels, devils, and demons. Those three magical paradigms all also flirted with necromancy at times and invoked the supposed powers of the dead.
Materialist philosophies stimulated a new flowering of magical theory. Everything from magnetism to the supposed luminiferous ether supporting electromagnetic radiation became co-opted as a model or an analogy for the mechanism of magic. The discipline of parapsychology attempted to render magical effects objectifiable and repeatable but in doing so it removed most of the conditions under which they can manifest and it achieved little more than trivial probability distortions which tended to decline as the experimental setup itself drained motivation away. Magicians should remain thankful for the failure of parapsychology; they cannot convict us for it now.
Some magicians remain content with the ‘bare’ theory that intent and imagination can make things happen and do not overly concern themselves with the ‘how’. Others take a variety of views of entities and egregores and ‘spirits’ with some arguing for their separate independent existence and some arguing that purely mental constructs of such phenomena (tulpas) would have indistinguishable effects anyway.
‘Nobody understands quantum physics’ as Richard Feynman, one of our most noted quantum physicists, wryly observed. Nobody understands how magic works either, at present we just have formulae and recipes for making desired results more likely.
Quantum physics continues to offer the prospect of some sort of mechanism for the implementation of magical intent, perhaps they both work for similar reasons, perhaps not, but if they do, then the Theoretical elucidation of either may throw some light on the other and leads to improvements in the Practise of both.
Presently, a combination of the Psi-ontological realism of the PBR theorem with Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of QM seems to offer some promise although it remains unclear how intention interfaces with this.
Lockdown on a remote shore has involved some inconveniences but also some unexpected freedoms, like day long reading sessions and no showers for a month in order to conserve resources for cooking, (an old soldier once told me that you only ever need to wash armpits groin and feet, the rest takes care of itself - and so far so good).
With limited resources, culinary innovations can occur, I proudly present Tuna-Porridge, - breakfast of champions. Soak some oats for a few minutes in a small amount of water, add a tin of drained tuna flakes, season with chili sauce and whatever savoury herbs and spices you have. Heat with continuous stirring till it goes into a thick paste. Awesomely nutritious and filling and it tastes delicious. It would also make a great pie, pasty or flan filling.
The lack of a fully equipped shed at first seemed a concern, but beachcombing combined a little improvisation led to these: -
The Ankh topped Pyramid of Shub-Niggurath, plus a tetrahedron which doubles as a simplified Pentachoron.
The Elder Goddess Shub-Niggurath represents the Cosmic Biota. The Egyptian Ankh symbolises Life. The entire edifice signifies ‘The Intent of Life’, (A spell for hope in these dark times as Death stalks the land).
The Ankh-like iron bolt came from an ancient wooden shipwreck and needed a lot of tar removing from it. The pumice like stone may consist of volcanic pumice or lightweight composite building material wreckage that got washed in by the tide, grinding it away against a flat rock gave the pyramids their facets.
April Fool's Day
April Fool’s Day.
We have made fools of ourselves by expecting globalisation, urbanisation, population and economic growth, mass travel, and questionable techniques of intensive agriculture and the handling of domesticated and wild animals to have no severe epidemiological consequences.
How much of this behaviour will we resume after this virus crisis ends? Most of it probably, more fool us.
However, some may take the opportunity of enforced confined leisure to rethink just what and who in this life really matters to them. Will some become content to work less and to waste less?
It does seem that the severity of the symptoms of this virus can depend on the size of the infecting dose. If so, then social distancing makes more sense than ever, and we must doubly applaud the heroism of frontline medical and essential service personnel.
I have not wasted my time in lockdown, so now to celebrate this day, Hypersphere Cosmology (5), a self-consistent version at last? Please falsify it if you can, I welcome feedback and argument.
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
This will surely make a great fool of someone, either me or the majority of the world’s cosmologists.
Keep conjuring for sunshine, in the literal, the metaphorical, and the metaphysical sense.
Replacing the LCDM-Big Bang Theory
Replacing the Big Bang Theory.
The Big Bang Theory has dominated the scientific cosmology of humanity for the last half century, it has become the official scientific creation myth.
The so called Standard Model, or LCDM (Lambda-Cold Dark Matter) has the observable universe erupting from an infinitesimally small point of almost infinite density and temperature and then expanding to what we can currently observe over a 13.8 billion year period, driven by a mysterious inflation field and then by a mysterious dark energy (Lambda), and modified by a mysterious form of dark matter (CDM).
Most lay people seem to accept this with a vague sense of wonder and a shrug, well it sounds crazy, but the scientists assure us of its truth, in fact, they often become irritatingly insistent and almost religious about it.
Philosophically the theory sounds very unattractive and nihilistic for it implies that the universe began with a cataclysm and will end eventually in another or merely fade away to a diffuse entropic mist.
Several Philosophers have commented that the cosmologists who built this theory have taken such gross liberties with the scientific method that it does not constitute a proper scientific theory at all now. They have let unconfirmed hypotheses run away with themselves and forced the observational data to fit them, despite that this has led to a ridiculous proliferation of unconfirmed sub-hypotheses which merely render the whole edifice less falsifiable, not more accurate.
The LCDM-Big Bang theory has entered a crisis phase, it becomes increasingly difficult to fit the observational data into the model without first distorting it through a prism of assumptions which then become part of the theory. The theory has become path-dependent, having taken a wrong turning a long while ago when cosmological redshift became interpreted as recession velocity in a metric expansion of spacetime.
It seems analogous to what would happen if a complex quantitative theory of chemistry had developed on the old basis of earth, air, fire, water, and phlogiston, yes you probably could erect a theory based on this rather than on atoms and elements, but it would become ever more complicated and grotesque and full of sub hypotheses about the phlogisticated forms of fiery-air that have negative-earth. A similar thing happened in solar system astronomy centuries ago, in an attempt to preserve the earth-centric Ptolemaic system in the face of new observations, astronomers ended up creating a baroque system of Epicycles containing ever more circles within circles until the heliocentric model replaced the whole edifice at a stroke.
A seminal breakthrough has recently occurred in Hypersphere Cosmology. The apparently excessively fast rotation of galaxies turns out not to arise from the presence of a mysterious and otherwise undetectable substance dubbed ‘dark matter’ which has by now become woven into the fabric of the fraying tapestry of the LCDM model. Rather, this excess rotation arises from the same mechanism which prevents the collapse of the hypersphere of the universe.
v(r) = vi(r) + wr
Where v(r) means the rotation velocity of a galaxy at radius r.
And vi means the rotation velocity of a galaxy at radius r expected from the observed distribution of the ordinary matter within it.
And w means an angular velocity peculiar to each galaxy, which when multiplied by the radius r and added to vi gives the observed rotation.
This comes from the work of Roy Gomel and Tomer Zimmerman 2019
https://www.galaxyrotationcurves.com/
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201908.0046/v1
It struck me that the w factor equals an angular velocity component posited for any dust like cloud of gravitationally bound matter in the work of Kurt Gödel 1949.
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.21.447
w = 2 sqrt (pi G d)
Where for a galaxy, the density d needs to include the entire ordinary mass of the galaxy and the entire volume of the spherical gas halo around it.
Thus, finally;
The Galactic Rotation Equation: -
v(r) = vi(r) + 2 sqrt (pi G d) r
This equation works well for the closer galaxies where we can actually observe their gas halos.
Example calculation here: - https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/290-rotation-of-the-triangulum-m33-galaxy
Gödel acquired immortal fame for his Incompleteness Theorem (and his profound eccentricity). Now perhaps his largely ignored 1949 paper which derives angular velocities from Einstein’s Field Equations of Relativity will also find its place in history.
This elegant solution solves the problem of galactic rotation curves without invoking a mysterious ‘dark matter’ or by modifying Newtonian or Relativistic dynamics.
With all the main principles and equations in place and in alignment with observational data now, (The Hypersphere Equation, The Hypersphere Vorticitation Equation, The Redshift-Distance Equation, The Hyperspherical Lensing Equation, and the Galactic Rotation Equation, and so on), the LCDM-Big Bang Theory now looks finished and due for replacement by a Hypersphere Cosmology. This looks simpler and more philosophically satisfying and it has greater predictive power. Academically respectable looking papers will have to get past the peer reviewers and censors who guard the gates of prestigious journals. This may take a while.
Cosmologists can then spend the following decades exploring the consequences of the new paradigm. As it contains an element of Gödel that may include some form of time travel or retro-causation.
My thanks to those who have followed these threads over the years, indulged the many speculations and mistakes, and got in touch with encouragement, mathematics, and corrections. The wastepaper basket remains the theorists most powerful tool as Einstein observed.
Einstein appeared to have lost the argument with Lemaitre and retracted his Cosmological Constant, describing it as his greatest blunder, and he accepted the expansion hypothesis instead.
Nearly a century of increasing baroque cosmological nonsense resulted from this as theorists attempted to force an interpretation of every new item of observational data into the expansion paradigm.
If Einstein had looked more closely at Gödel’s metric, he might have realised that between them they had got the basics right - the first time.
Incidentally, the cracks in the LCDM-BB model just became fatal wounds: -
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0906-9
(The data from the Planck satellite now strongly indicates a closed spherical universe.)
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.081803
(Insufficient matter-antimatter asymmetry exists for the universe to have arisen from a Big Bang.)
A considerable number of mopping up operations remain until LCDM-Big Bang theory unconditionally surrenders to a Hypersphere Cosmology. Yet we have arrived at the beginning of the end and can start reinterpreting all the awkward interpretations of observational data that disfigure the LCDM-BB model and build a better one.
I hope to participate in that process but also to devote time to making better sense of the current mess of interpretations of Quantum Theory. Hypersphere mechanics and three-dimensional time may have a part to play here. May Azathoth grant me the time and the inspiration.
Few things seem to bring more relaxation, refreshment and relief from the rigours of the library, the conjuratorium, the laboratory, and the scriptorium than some hours spent in the shed of Chateaux Chaos.
This emerges in celebration of the completion of the project: -
It has the look and feel of calcedony yet it consists of [NH-(CH2)5-CO]n just four elements, mainly gases, polymerised to make what we commonly call Nylon. As a sculptural material it has interesting properties, translucent and rather like a heavy hardwood but without the grain, it absorbs surface dyes quite readily. Apparently, you can also melt and cast it at some risk, I may give that a go.
This wand bears the sigils and notae of The Hypersphere, Apophenia, and Yog-Sothoth on its facing facets. (Consult the EPOCH for details).
Religion usually proves useless in the face of plague, however I did notice that an enterprisig church had placed in the entrance to its graveyard, an honesty box, a pile of shovels, and a big notice saying 'Dig Your Own - £50'
Conjure for clear skies, sunshine, and hot weather. It may help with the situation. With the aircraft contrails mostly gone now it should become easier.
Februlog
Februlog.
Esoteric Horticulture.
Finally, eight years after the planting of her seed, Circe, the largest of the three Mandrakes at Chateaux Chaos, has given birth. See the fruit of her labour below.
These somewhat antinomian plants (Mandragora Autumnalis), prefer to flower in autumn and to produce fruit in spring. During summer they shrivel back to their huge humanoid bifurcated taproots. Perhaps they do this to avoid insect pests or desiccation during the hotter months in their native Mediterranean lands.
I don’t think they like it here on this chilly island, but I’ll distribute the seeds amongst some Druids with instructions for their nurture.
Alternative Physics.
Below see a couple of graphs based on the observational data of a substantial number of Type 1A supernovae at various Redshifts. We can measure Redshifts with great precision but Apparent Magnitudes, particularly of transient events, much less precisely.
The blue line shows Apparent Distance at various Redshifts. Here I derive Apparent Distances from observed Apparent Magnitudes by converting Apparent Magnitudes to Fluxes and then applying the inverse square principle (taking the Magnitude of a Type IA supernova at 10 parsecs with negligible redshift as a baseline).
Clearly, any luminous object with a high Redshift will have a ridiculously vast Apparent Distance as the graph curves upwards. Herein lies the basic peculiarity that led to the hypothesis of ‘Dark Energy’ powering an apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
The orange line shows Actual Distances against Redshifts. Here I derive Actual Distances from Apparent Distance by applying a Hyperspherical Lensing Formula based on the principle that we observe the Hyperspherical Universe in Stereographic Projection because of it positive spacetime curvature.
The derivation of this Hyperspherical Lensing Equation appears in section 7 here: -
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
In this graph redshift 1 corresponds to half antipode distance and the distances to far supernovae become much more reasonable. The graph shows that the universe will have an antipode distance very close to 13 BLY.
The Universe does not expand, let alone does it have an accelerating expansion, so called ‘dark energy’ does not exist.
Great! The universe remains eternal, we can abandon the philosophical burdens of an apocalyptic beginning or ending to it.
Also see this https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/290-rotation-of-the-triangulum-m33-galaxy
Perhaps the final end of so called Dark Matter.
Magic/Culture/Politics
Identity and Individualism in the Pandaemonaeon.
A wandering Scholar dropped in for an evening last week. Forced to compete in an oversubscribed tournament profession with zero security of contract he seemed underpaid and underemployed. A Professor did recently mournfully describe to me how a vast new exploited Academic Proletariat had arisen.
I suppose this class of Scholars must account for the tsunami of usually rather inconsequential esoteric papers which now appear daily on Google’s Academia.com. It boasts 114,376,069 Scholars and counting.
We had a lively discussion till late about many matters Magical, Cultural and Political, touching on everything from the weird phenomenon of Professor Patricia MacCormac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_MacCormack to Populism, a world going apparently mad, and my part in this.
All this behoved me to check my predictions for this era.
The Psychohistoric Mechanism of the Aeons, discovered in 1988 and published soon after in my Liber Kaos, predicted the Pandaemonaeon - an era characterised by the ascendancy of Scientific and Magical Thinking and the nadir of Art and Religion. It seems to have come upon us rather quickly, assisted by globalisation and the internet.
Mind you, I didn’t say that everyone would necessarily like the Pandaemonaeon. On a broad raft of criteria some sociologists conclude that quality of life peaked in the technically developed world somewhere around the 1970’s and that dissatisfaction has risen since. Most people have more stuff, but they don’t seem to get any more satisfaction from it and their lives have become ever more frantic, complicated, and insecure.
Religion has largely ceased to engage with transcendental concepts. Theology (which always meant politics in the broadest sense) has now become overtly political, and religion now acts as little more than a social group identity badge. Religion no longer tells us a story about our inner self(s), it merely tells us which groups we belong to or despise.
Since humanity achieved the wealth and the technical ability to produce Art to any required degree of beauty and brilliance, Modern Art has abandoned any quest for meaning or spiritual uplift and now celebrates the empty rubbish of those whose talents remain limited to self-promotion, on the contra-intuitive principle that it must contain something worthwhile because of the price tag, even if we lack the wit to see it. Modern Art no longer tells us a story about human aspiration, at its best it merely illustrates human folly as artists become the keepers of useful sarcasms, along with our philosophers. Only the amateur and commercial art which does not attempt to mimic modern art seems to have anything interesting to say.
Science now tells us the dominant story about ourselves. We exist as randomly evolved mortal animals with unusually large brains, on an unremarkable planet in a stupendously vast universe. Deal with it.
Whilst I question the current official scientific creation myth (the Big Bang hypothesis), I do accept the above and I find the scientific story both liberating and exhilarating. I consist of the totality of what I do. I have no mysterious ‘real self’ or inner ‘being’ to worry about, but a lot of people seem to think they must have such a thing and today imagine that they express it through Identity and Individualism.
Yet the demands of individualism begin to outstrip supply in a demand-based consumer economy, and it becomes increasingly difficult to become a genuine eccentric as all eccentricities become Identity brands in a hyperconnected society.
The State has taken over so many of the legal and financial functions of the Family that few people now identify strongly with their Familial or Tribal status beyond what remains of it in the nuclear family.
Regional identities now seem quaint and faintly ridiculous in an era of mass travel and mass communication. Sports teams supposedly representing ‘our’ cities now draw most of their managers and players from distant cities and continents.
In an era in which we think we know so much, Nationalism and Patriotism have become unfashionable because few people particularly like their own governments or the way they run the country, they just despise other countries more, so they do not usually wish to define their Identity by it.
(The European Union has failed to raise any vision of a European Identity beyond that of an unloved common bureaucracy.)
Nobody really believes in anything about themselves. We have become Lost in the Cosmos, with no metaphors for self, we just have choices of individualism and identity, and mass exposure to everyone else’s assigned or chosen identity.
Individualism in the age of Identity centres on trying to control how others regard you, not on how you regard yourself(s).
We must suspect those who preach their Identity loudest harbour the most doubts.
In this Pandaemonaeon, Identity/Individualism has become the Religion of the age because it has become fragile and mutable.
We now find ourselves passing laws to prevent anyone criticising anyone else’s Identity.
Such laws represent the official theology of the religion of Identity.
The UK police now seemingly devote more resources to investigating everything on the spectrum from ‘hate crime’ to ‘mild disdain crime’ whilst theft, fraud, and violence frequently seem to go un-investigated.
In the new religion of identity, the cult of celebrity provides a rolling pantheon of minor deities that we adulate for a time and then discard or crucify with guilty pleasure.
The culture wars that rage within our societies, the polarisation of opinions, the rise of currently fashionable forms of victimhood and mental illness, the usually secret and officially sinful pleasures of despising other people’s identities may all find their roots in the paradoxical relationship of Identity to Individualism and the increasing fragility of both.
Today we expect all of an individual’s opinions to conform to a recognisable identity.
Extreme left, hard left, centre left, centre right. hard right, extreme right. Social liberal, social conservative. Economic liberal, economic conservative. Racist, culturalist, cultural-relativist, multiculturalist, anti-racist. Rights-based moralist, responsibility-based moralist. Social Darwinist, socialist. Theocrat, militant atheist. World destroying kapitalist, extinction rebellionist. Carnivore, vegan.
Express an opinion that someone considers to fall within any of these categories and they expect you to hold all the opinions that they think necessarily go with it. Of course, none but extremely right-on woke-ists or those right-off the other end of the scale hold opinions of such imagined coherence. Hitler practised vegetarianism for example.
The ascendancy of Magic in the Pandaemonaeon often passes completely unacknowledged unless you realise that the bottom line of magical thinking comes down to: -
‘Thinking Makes It So’.
This may seem a completely deluded idea, but if handled skilfully it has enormous power.
Positive thinking can lead to extraordinary achievement, if you believe you can do something you increase your chances of accomplishing it. Negative thinking has similarly powerful effects, you can sabotage any venture with it. Placebos which we expect to work often have effects as great as treatments based on rational theories, and so do Nocebos. Curses and supposed pollutants which rationally should not have effects, can have quite damaging ones.
Thinking that you have helpful spirits on your side often gives you an edge over those who don’t, particularly for those who made such spirits deliberately and magically.
Labelling phenomena by their supposed ‘essences’ makes it easier to agree or disagree with others or to persuade others about them.
The bullshit believed about any product tends to make it sell better than its objective properties. This applies to all commodities, - religions, scientific hypotheses, political parties, celebrities, and individuals.
We live in an era where commercial, political, and personal ‘fake news’ and propaganda dominate communication. We generally prefer this now because in conditions of massive information overload, most simplifications become welcome in themselves or afford us the pleasure of contradicting them.
The magical ‘Thinking Which Makes It So’ requires considerable skill and experience. Not everyone can write persuasive propaganda or advertising copy or even convince themselves of something without practise and help.
The pandaemonaeonic magician can hold mutually contradictory opinions and beliefs on a situational basis for pleasure and profit. Free from the illusion of unitary Identity and the struggle to maintain and defend one, the magician remains inwardly aloof in a fortress of supreme arrogance built upon the meta-belief that beliefs and actions shape reality.
The effects can seem parapsychological.
Celebrations!
Celebrations!
There seems much to celebrate this year: -
Esoteric Horticulture
Herewith for a Christmas card, a picture of The Three Witches of Chateaux Chaos.
These three Mandragora Autumnalis have taken seven years from seed to finally all flower at once for Solstice. They usually sprout around Samhain, last year the largest one produced a single flower for the Solstice season, this year they have produced more than twenty between them. They don’t seem to enjoy the British climate and would probably prefer their native Greece. Telepathic communication with them gradually develops, they request water and baby-bio when they want it. We don’t have many pollinating insects at this time of year, so I’ll do the sex for them with a tiny paintbrush. Hopefully by Beltane I’ll have seeds to distribute to my Druid friends.
Dynasty
Our eldest daughter up in the Highlands has this year produced a third grandchild for us, this time a boy. They plan to feed him oats and venison and have him learn Gallic; I hope he doesn’t end up voting SNP.
Politics
We have a splendid and epochal General Election Result, the British always do the right thing and vote Conservative in a crisis. Now we can finally extricate our country from the ghastly undemocratic synarchy of the EU political project.
Well done Boris you loveable old rogue. Well done Jeremy Corbyn, the finest leader of the opposition the Conservatives could hope for, it just seems a pity you probably won’t lead the opposition to the next heroic defeat of the lunatic left. Well done Jo Swinson for exposing the illiberal dimocrats as hectoring busybodies and splitting the traitors vote. Above all thanks to Nigel Farage who made independence possible and did the right thing in the final battle. We should elevate him to the highest echelons of the peerage, for no man hath done more for his country, perhaps Marquis or even Duke of Dover?
Null points for Nicola the Loch Ness Sturgeon, you can still play the Oppressed Scot card to screw more subsidy from Westminster, but you no longer face the terrifying prospect of another Indyref which you would loose because the Scots would now face a choice between a UK that gives them a big say and a big subsidy and an EU which would offer them neither.
When I first joined the fight under the UKIP flag many years ago this outcome seemed a very remote possibility, but somehow the British have finally managed it, conquered their fears and thrown off the shackles. I hope it will prove an example to other nations who will follow and that the EU will eventually revert to a simple group of freely trading friends as originally advertised. We taught the modern world democracy, and now we have shown how to maintain it.
Alternative Physics
This summer’s breakthrough in Hypersphere Cosmology leaves only dark matter to eliminate. The newly discovered mechanisms and equations of the Distance-Redshift relationship and Hyperspherical Lensing have eliminated the expansion hypothesis and dark energy entirely. The Big Bang hypothesis itself will not last much longer.
See https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology and look at how much attention its getting.
Work on the hypothesis of Three Dimensional Time has taken second place to HC for a while but evidence seems to pile up in support of one of its main predictions, the existence of a Duon Boson: -
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
“PREDICTION: - This model describes the photon as consisting of a particle that carries a superposition of plus and minus one units of electric charge spin, and the Z boson as a particle that carries a superposition of plus and minus three units of electric charge spin. A third boson of this type should exist which carries a superposition of plus and minus two units of electric charge spin. This boson may have already appeared in the anomalous decay of Beryllium 8, and it seems to have a mass-energy of about 17MeV.”
Try googling ‘X17 Boson’ and see all the excitement.
This strengthens my conviction that the Higg’s Boson does not actually exist, the Higg’s mechanism does not apply, and the miniscule 125GeV blip on the graphs from CERN probably merely consists of a fleeting ZZ diboson.
Lastly
The Arcanorium College website will close at the end of January 2020. For more than a decade it has provided a fertile and productive forum for the exchange of magical ideas. However, it has fallen prey to the vices of the internet, zero length attention spans and a relentless demand for novelty for which it does not cater. Plus, Chaos Magic seems to have become a victim of its own success, it has become the prime esoteric paradigm of western magical thought and you can find hundreds of books and websites about it.
Don’t forget to treat the Wizard in your life to a copy of The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, for this festive season or the dark nights ahead.
https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/the-epoch
Have a good one. Pete.
Breaking News! A visiting friendly giant with mathematical skills just put all the type 1A supernovae data through a massive calculation for me and herewith the result: -
It works for ALL data points. Appropriately enough the giant himself comes from the Antipodes (Australia).
Nov Blog
Election Address.
The address for the 12th December UK General Election follows near the end of this blogpost.
In the meantime, herewith a couple of more important matters of Cosmic and Global Significance: -
Progress continues with the quest to replace the current apocalyptic scientific creation myth with a more realistic and more philosophically satisfying model.
The Hyperspherical Lensing Equation
Derives from a Stereoscopic Projection of the 3D surface of a Glome into Euclidian 3D space.
When multiplied by the Actual Distance to a far distant luminous body it gives its Apparent Distance as measured by its flux. Perlmutter’s paper confirms this up to Z = 1. The equation predicts that as redshift Z rises towards infinity at antipode then so will the apparent distance as the flux decreases towards zero and the absolute magnitude climbs towards infinity.
New. When multiplied by the Actual Diameter of a far distant luminous body it gives its Apparent Angular Diameter. Conventional Expanding Acceleration theory predicts a minimum apparent angular diameter at Z = 1.25 and then an increase, in some cases a continual increase in others to a maximum followed by a decrease. The equation predicts a minimum at Z = 1 and then a continual increase climbing towards infinity as Z climbs towards infinity at antipode. Observations currently seem scant and technically difficult. Hopefully confirmation will emerge eventually.
Both calculations depend on using the Redshift-Distance Equation
A combination of the Redshift-Distance Equation with the Hyperspherical Lensing Equation applied to find Actual Distance d as a fraction of Antipode Distance for any distant luminous object yields a constant antipode distance L of almost exactly 13 BLY. Hypersphere Cosmology looks increasingly likely to replace the Big-Bang theory.
Just published 2019-11-4: the universe is closed.
https://m.phys.org/news/2019-11-planck-space-observatory-universe-sphere.html
"Planck evidence for a closed Universe and a possible crisis for cosmology"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0906-9
A miraculous cure for Climate Change, and the salvation of civilisation?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191021111826.htm
I have often wondered why we haven’t thrown much more effort into developing an ‘Artificial Photosynthesis’ that could sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and produce fuel, particularly ethanol which could replace most liquid fossil fuels very easily. Now it looks like a team has done it, and with catalysts that work even in dull sunlight.
Election Address.
We seem to approach the decisive battle of the Brexit war.
For the better part of a decade I have participated in the struggle for Britain to regain its Independence, and to regain control of its legal system and its borders, and its overseas trade arrangements.
I have also persistently maintained the hope that the Political Project of the EU would collapse through the eventual revolt of the nations ensnared within it.
For centuries Britain has resisted the attempts by the Papacy, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Napoleon, the Hohenzollerns, and most recently Hitler, to impose hegemony on the continent of Europe.
Since WW2 a cabal of politicians and businesspeople has conspired to build a European Super-state based on French inspired ideas about political Synarchy and German ideas about social discipline and financial-industrial might. Democracy has of course become side-lined within this structure. It has only a sham-parliament that cannot initiate legislation, or raise or spend taxes, nor does it have much oversight or scrutiny over the EU’s unelected shadowy executive branches and their vast bureaucracies. Big business revels in the EU because it co-opts big business to define a regulatory culture which favours big business. The political classes revel in the EU because it provides a gravy train from which they never face democratic deselection.
Only Germany has profited from this enterprise. The other nations of Europe would have done better staying out, but they now feel trapped financially.
The desperate argument that - “at least the European Union has prevented its member states from going to war with each other as they did so frequently in the past” - appears completely vacuous today. No two Democracies have ever declared war on each other, and besides, modern military technology would make it economically unviable. The nations of Europe no longer go to war with each other because they have become democracies and no possible profit lies in it. Yet the EU becomes increasingly dismissive of democracy within itself.
The argument that the nations of Europe must become a single political entity to stand up to the military or economic might of other super-powers sounds superficially convincing. However offensive military might has become increasingly impotent and useless for technical reasons and small wealthy nations can now easily render invasions catastrophic for any aggressor. Small nations tend to become wealthier than large ones. Only one large nation on earth has a high per capita income, whilst many smaller nations do.
The various arguments that the EU forces certain standards of environmentalism and social policy upon us which we would otherwise lack seem doubly disingenuous. Why should we pay the EU for the non-privilege of outsourcing our own democratic decisions on such matters?
Globalisation has not favoured the UK. Manufacturing has become outsourced and capital has become invested offshore rather than in British enterprises. Immigration and multiculturalism have driven down wages and eroded social cohesion. A large proportion of the UK population now subsists hopelessly in a low wage service economy. Continued membership of the EU will soon result in the erosion of the UK as a major financial centre.
Only by freeing itself from the EU can the UK devise its own responses to globalisation.
Thus, I urge my UK readers to vote for whatever will Get Brexit Done.
If Brexit fails, Britain will end up ruled from Berlin via Brussels.
The real negotiations over trade with the EU will take place only after we have left. Any deals made before leaving can only hamstring the UK’s negotiating position.
Voting for UKIP or the Brexit Party now becomes probably unnecessary. They have done their job well, but few voters want Nigel Farage in Westminster, although he deserves a Peerage for his Services to the Realm.
The Remain inspired vote seems split between the ambiguous policy of the Labour party and the unambiguous policy of the Liberal Democrats, whilst a terror of Corbynist-Trotskyite-Marxism chills most voters.
Let us hope that the Brexit party and the leftover rabble in UKIP do not split the Leave inspired vote.
And lastly; Drugs & Magic.
Crowley defined Magick as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”.
Dion Fortune defined Magic as “the art of causing changes to take place in consciousness in accordance with will”.
After a long career I edge towards defining Magic as “the art and science of causing change to occur in consciousness and in reality, by the exercise of imagination”
(I do a lot of results magic, I didn’t get born rich, and I think Will only arises from sustained imagination.)
So, what point lies in using drugs in magic one may ask? Crowley used rather a lot; Fortune appears never to have bothered. I tried them but eventually dismissed them as a waste of time.
Yet if you look at The Blog of Baphomet and the stuff coming out of various ‘Psychedelic Institutes’, you might get the impression that hallucinogens and euphoria inducing substances hold the key to mystical enlightenment, magical powers, and mental health.
The ancient Greeks thought that when they first discovered how to make wine. It remains as false now as it did then.
Hallucinogens, disinhibitory substances, and euphoriants send the imagination into overdrive.
This state of overdrive might feel ‘magical’ but it proves illusory and transient and it fails to compare to what a carefully trained imagination can achieve.
Rarely does this overdrive create anything useful, more commonly it just leads to obsessive fixation on whatever drifts into attention, addled by a general loss of control of attention.
Thus, drugs prove utterly useless and counterproductive for any kind of active intent-based results magic, and in divination they tend to yield extravagant nonsense by the bucketload, unfiltered by critical thought.
Do drugs provide inspiration? Well perhaps they can stir up the otherwise unimaginative, but very few of humanities masterpieces seem to have arisen from their use. (I discount mad religions from the list of human masterpieces.)
Can drugs offer Enlightenment? I have to laugh here. I know a number of people who have taken hundreds of doses of psychoactive substances and they all have exactly the same human failings they started with, plus in most cases, additional problems and delusions.
Any new psychoactive drug that a culture discovers seems to go through three phases:
At first it seems amazing and mind opening to an elite few.
Then it becomes passé as many become familiar with it out of curiosity.
Thirdly it becomes widely abused, and by some strange sort of morphic field mechanism it no longer seems amazing and mind opening to anyone, and it just does damage.
Thus, such substances should remain firmly illegal. The elite will always manage to obtain them whilst they remain interesting.
You cannot solve Spiritual, Psychiatric, or Psychological problems with drugs (or scalpels).
Massive Upgrade to Hypersphere Cosmology https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
Samhain Blog
Arte & Magic
Herewith a Wendfire Chalice for inauguration at Samhain.
At the Midsummer Solstice make a Wendfire of nine woods well dried, Silver Birch, Yew, Oak, Wild Cherry, Ash, Apple, Hawthorn, Hazel, and Holly. Finely sieve the resulting ash.
By the mixing of four parts of a bracken and sheepswool compost, and four parts of Portland Cement, with one part of Wendfire Ash and a modicum of water, make a pliable clay like material.
Fashion this clay by thine own hand into a Chalice. Do this by degrees, for the wet material will not support much weight till it hath hardened for several nights.
Build the base over the stub of a candle, and at the end excavate it. The Chalice then inverted may serve as a Candlestick also.
Physics
The previous two blogs, Augblog and Augblog2 between them kill off both the expansion hypothesis and the accelerating expansion hypothesis of the current scientific creation myth.
This universe does not suffer from a recession velocity or from an infestation of dark energy.
Instead the glorious vision of a Hypersphere arises from the ashes of the phlogiston-riddled corpse of the Lambda-CDM Big Bang theory.
We present a brief poem to mark the passing of a paradigm.
Magic & Mind
Chaos Magic initiated a revolution and a complete paradigm shift in esoteric thought when it abandoned the Platonism and Neo-Platonism that had underlain most magical thinking for the last two millennia. Put simply, Phenomena do not have Essences, we merely imagine that they do as a sort of mental shortcut, but it rapidly leads to nonsense. Phenomena have associated quantum wavefunctions and these can better explain occult and parapsychological effects.
Yet Chaos Magic retained much of the old psychological lore which found its way in various forms into twentieth century psychology. Thus, the ideas of ‘self’ or ‘selves’, the subconscious or unconscious mind(s), mental archetypes, and even the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness became retained, along with the general model of the mind having ‘strange depths’.
Now along comes this extraordinary and perhaps revolutionary book
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/285465/the-mind-is-flat/9780241208779.html
I challenge anyone interested in Magical Thinking and Esoteric theory to read it and if they find it persuasive, to try using its ideas as experimental beliefs. I suspect that the ideas in it may further the revolution that Chaos Magic initiated.
According to the book, our awesome (and usually unacknowledged) powers of Imagination arise from the very shallowness of our minds, not from the imaginary ‘depths’ of our minds.
We Imagine rather than Perceive most of what we call reality.
We do not have a subconscious at all, the entire mind remains ‘subconscious’ and available to an alarmingly miniscule focus of attention.
Memory works entirely on the neural connections that our imaginations have formed between our imagined experiences.
Now the Chaoist insight that the mind tends to provide some confirmation for any map we project onto it should perhaps suggest caution here, yet this book makes strong case that the topology of the mind does not resemble an iceberg with the conscious tip poking out of the water and the rest submerged, but rather it functions like a vast labyrinth of interconnected tunnels that reconfigures itself as a tiny spark of awareness runs around it.
AUGBLOG2
The above provides the Geometry and Physical Principle for the Algebraic formulation of Hyperspherical Lensing shown in the previous Augblog.
Hypersphere Cosmology seems to evolve towards the exact inverse of the LCDM- BB theory, both seem to fit most of the major observations but in radically different ways. In HC the universe does not expand, rather it explains redshift and brightness decease in terms of a small positive curvature which leads to time dilation and hence a redshift dependant on distance and a lensing effect which dims distant light sources instead of an accelerating expansion driven by dark energy as in LCDM.
In HC the small positive spacetime curvature appears as an acceleration which accounts for the anomalous galactic rotation curves without recourse to dark energy.
HC predicts an antipode which will appear as apparently redshifted and dimmed to unobservability. This contrasts with LCDM which predicts an initial BB singularity of apparently unlimited brightness.
Observations alone may prove insufficient to distinguish between the two models as they both account for the same phenomena, albeit in radically different ways. However, the HC model does contain less Phlogiston, instead of singularity, dark energy and dark matter it has the mechanism of positive spacetime curvature.
The evidence concerning cosmic evolution remains debatable, some of it seems to fit with LCDM-BB, some does not. In particular we seem to observe structures that look far too huge and developed at vast distances for them to have evolved in the early history of expansion. HC asserts that the universe will look broadly homogenous and isotropic at all points in space and time.
More...
JULBLOG
JULBLOG.
Politics.
Io Bojo! Boris Johnston becomes our new leader, in our darkest hour for some time.
If we fail to separate this Nation from the EU decisively and soon, we shall become assimilated into the undemocratic bureaucratic EU synarchy forever.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man?
Let us hope so, Boris has studied Churchill and written a book about him.
Boris will need to make some bold strokes fast. A deal with Nigel Farage and a general election in which the conservative constituency parties have deselected all the remain traitors could just alter the parliamentary arithmetic in time for a clean break with the ghastly political project of the EU by Halloween.
Boris, Trump, and Brexit all form part of the great culture war which rages partly in response to globalisation.
For the last few decades the political consensus of the west has moved increasingly towards cultural leftism and economic rightism. Hyper-liberal political correctness and economic inequality have grown to offensive levels and the peasants have started to revolt.
The fightback to a rather more cultural rightness and a rather more economic leftness has begun. It won’t go as far as full National Socialism unless it becomes thwarted.
Your average Revolting Peasant in the west wants less multiculturism and more effort expended on its own culture. It doesn’t want LGBT behaviour actively promoted as normal and acceptable to its schoolchildren. It doesn’t want the absurdities of political correctness enforced by law and punishment.
Your average Revolting Peasant in the west doesn’t want the deregulated capitalism that outsources its manufacturing to the lowest bidder, migrant or third world, and then offers downmarket service work instead of proper employment.
Your average Revolting Peasant would prefer to celebrate the history of the Nation rather than have liberal cultural lefties continually try to find the worst in it to recruit supporters through a sense of fake victimhood.
The UK Labour and Illiberal Dimocrat parties seem dominated by a clique of cultural ultra-leftists. The UK Conservative party still nurses too many vested interests in deregulated capitalism.
At the Brexit vote more than half the electorate basically said this country has become fairly shite and we don’t like the way it’s going.
With Brexit we can Make Britain Pretty Good Again.
Physics. Corrections and updates to Hypersphere Cosmology: -
GM/L2 = c2/2L = A/2. v2 = 2dA/2 = dA. In the Pioneer Anomaly, measured decelleration = A/2.
p - photon momentum.
HC now becomes fully compatible with both SR and GR. The effects of Acceleration and Gravity become exactly Equivalent.
Magic.
Retirement from trading has brought me time and leisure, so I thought to fashion the ultimate swiss-army multitool of a magical instrument:
Herewith the Mk127 Purba. Pearwood grown in my own gardens (sadly the wind took the tree over a while ago). Sigils of the Elder Gods on one end, Sigils of the Eight Colours of Magic in the middle, Sigils of the conjurations of Enchantment, Divination, Evocation, and Invocation on the other, Chaos Star to follow.
Junblog
Some recent correspondences seem to have led to some thoughts perhaps worth noting for posterity in an extended ramble: -
Hippy or Punk?
I spent my formative years on the late hippy scene, 1974-1980. Subcultural trends in the UK tended to run on social class, the hippies mostly came from the upper middle and middle classes (I came from the upper working class but going to university promoted me to lower middle class). Hippy-ism had a strong mystical component and a relaxed attitude to material success because the economy had plenty of slack in it at the time. The Punk movement came later, mostly from the upper working class and the middle working class, and it seemed angrier and more violent, partly because of social and political conditions at the time, views had become polarised and economic life had become more competitive. Thank Margaret Thatcher.
The antinomianism of Chaos Magic did attract a fair bit of interest from the Punk generation, though - they liked its rebelliousness.
Looking back, I now realise that the part of traditional occultism I rejected in forging Chaos Magic comes down to one main thing - Neoplatonism, and I rejected that because of my scientific education. I don't find the theory of earth, air, fire, and water useful, and I don't believe that gods and entities exist independently of the human mind, however I do believe in the psychological and parapsychological power of intent and imagination. Thus, we can make gods and demons to assist and serve us. I attempted to supplant the Neoplatonic-Pagan-Monotheism which had underpinned occult thinking for two millennia with a Quantum-Neo-Paganism.
Chaos magic also developed by defining itself as against Crowley and Thelema. We can do better I proclaimed, (but few of them did).
I would agree with the observation, that you need to keep your feet on the ground with a well-crafted Solar persona whilst pursuing the Ouranian quest. I never gave up on the day career and 'normal' life; or on the weird quest either. I think that benefited both.
Conservative or Radical?
The enlightenment and radicalism of the age become the oppression and conservatism of the next age.
Now history happens so fast, and people live so long, that this can happen twice in a single lifetime.
(Social liberalism and political correctness went toxic and authoritarian in my own lifetime, vociferous minorities now seem to set the culture war agenda.)
They used to say that human progress happens one funeral at a time.
Today your ideas can die before you do.
Consequently, I have given up following fashions in ideas and in science, art, and morality.
Does that make me a conservative or a radical?
‘Orthodox Chaoism’ now dominates all magical thinking in the westernised world, its influence seems pervasive, the remaining pockets of Neoplatonism seem untenable. I don’t deserve all the credit for this, I saw the way the wind blew and simply hoisted more sail and puffed into it. I don’t feel the need to promote or defend Chaos Magic further although I use it constantly. According to Aeonic Theory it will remain the prime esoteric paradigm until something of a yet barely imagined transcendentalist way of thinking supersedes it. (Some form of mystical ecology might do just that.)
For the remaining part of this incarnation I have two esoteric quests, to replace the conventional cosmological model of a big-bang origin for this universe with something more credible that better fits the unadulterated observational data (like Hypersphere Cosmology, in progress), and also to make some sense of the quantum and particle domain underlying reality, using perhaps 3D time (progress slow, I may not live long enough to finish this).
I find the apocalypticism of the current scientific creation myth as metaphysically unsatisfactory as the apparent lack of an underlying reality in the quantum domain.
I seem to have become an esoteric conservative and a scientific radical, with leanings towards social conservatism as I observe the increasing social decay in my environment. Whilst the upper echelons and intelligentsia of western societies could usually cope with some indulgences in recreational sex and drugs, the effect on the lower orders and the ignorati appears increasingly catastrophic.
Racist or Culturalist?
Humans tend to adopt the culture that nurtures them because our high intelligence also brings with it a hyper-suggestibility. We tend to end up believing what we do rather than doing what we believe. Politicians and priests have always known this, make people do something or make people use some form of thought-speak and their beliefs will follow sheepishly behind.
Personally, I do make value judgements about cultures; some religions and polities do seem to spawn quite ghastly, ignorant, and inhuman behaviour, irrespective of the ethnicities involved.
So does the following assertion count as racist or culturalist?
Yes, I have encountered many people who find working for German bosses odious - one of the reasons I think we should exit the EU before we all end up working for them!
Alternative Physics.
The further we investigate the recent history of cosmology the more apparent it becomes that the baroque mess of the currently dominant Lambda-CDM model has its roots in assumptions made back around AD 1930. Today it has become difficult to even find observational data that hasn’t undergone deformation by the expansion hypothesis before presentation.
A extract of Hypersphere Cosmology in progress follows, Section 9 which shows an upgrade to the hyperspherical lensing which eliminates dark energy (Lambda).
Junblog
Some recent correspondences seem to have led to some thoughts perhaps worth noting for posterity in an extended ramble: -
Hippy or Punk?
I spent my formative years on the late hippy scene, 1974-1980. Subcultural trends in the UK tended to run on social class, the hippies mostly came from the upper middle and middle classes (I came from the upper working class but going to university promoted me to lower middle class). Hippy-ism had a strong mystical component and a relaxed attitude to material success because the economy had plenty of slack in it at the time. The Punk movement came later, mostly from the upper working class and the middle working class, and it seemed angrier and more violent, partly because of social and political conditions at the time, views had become polarised and economic life had become more competitive. Thank Margaret Thatcher.
The antinomianism of Chaos Magic did attract a fair bit of interest from the Punk generation, though - they liked its rebelliousness.
Looking back, I now realise that the part of traditional occultism I rejected in forging Chaos Magic comes down to one main thing - Neoplatonism, and I rejected that because of my scientific education. I don't find the theory of earth, air, fire, and water useful, and I don't believe that gods and entities exist independently of the human mind, however I do believe in the psychological and parapsychological power of intent and imagination. Thus, we can make gods and demons to assist and serve us. I attempted to supplant the Neoplatonic-Pagan-Monotheism which had underpinned occult thinking for two millennia with a Quantum-Neo-Paganism.
Chaos magic also developed by defining itself as against Crowley and Thelema. We can do better I proclaimed, (but few of them did).
I would agree with the observation, that you need to keep your feet on the ground with a well-crafted Solar persona whilst pursuing the Ouranian quest. I never gave up on the day career and 'normal' life; or on the weird quest either. I think that benefited both.
Conservative or Radical?
The enlightenment and radicalism of the age become the oppression and conservatism of the next age.
Now history happens so fast, and people live so long, that this can happen twice in a single lifetime.
(Social liberalism and political correctness went toxic and authoritarian in my own lifetime, vociferous minorities now seem to set the culture war agenda.)
They used to say that human progress happens one funeral at a time.
Today your ideas can die before you do.
Consequently, I have given up following fashions in ideas and in science, art, and morality.
Does that make me a conservative or a radical?
‘Orthodox Chaoism’ now dominates all magical thinking in the westernised world, its influence seems pervasive, the remaining pockets of Neoplatonism seem untenable. I don’t deserve all the credit for this, I saw the way the wind blew and simply hoisted more sail and puffed into it. I don’t feel the need to promote or defend Chaos Magic further although I use it constantly. According to Aeonic Theory it will remain the prime esoteric paradigm until something of a yet barely imagined transcendentalist way of thinking supersedes it. (Some form of mystical ecology might do just that.)
For the remaining part of this incarnation I have two esoteric quests, to replace the conventional cosmological model of a big-bang origin for this universe with something more credible that better fits the unadulterated observational data (like Hypersphere Cosmology, in progress), and also to make some sense of the quantum and particle domain underlying reality, using perhaps 3D time (progress slow, I may not live long enough to finish this).
I find the apocalypticism of the current scientific creation myth as metaphysically unsatisfactory as the apparent lack of an underlying reality in the quantum domain.
I seem to have become an esoteric conservative and a scientific radical, with leanings towards social conservatism as I observe the increasing social decay in my environment. Whilst the upper echelons and intelligentsia of western societies could usually cope with some indulgences in recreational sex and drugs, the effect on the lower orders and the ignorati appears increasingly catastrophic.
Racist or Culturalist?
Humans tend to adopt the culture that nurtures them because our high intelligence also brings with it a hyper-suggestibility. We tend to end up believing what we do rather than doing what we believe. Politicians and priests have always known this, make people do something or make people use some form of thought-speak and their beliefs will follow sheepishly behind.
Personally, I do make value judgements about cultures; some religions and polities do seem to spawn quite ghastly, ignorant, and inhuman behaviour, irrespective of the ethnicities involved.
So does the following assertion count as racist or culturalist?
Yes, I have encountered many people who find working for German bosses odious - one of the reasons I think we should exit the EU before we all end up working for them!
Alternative Physics.
The further we investigate the recent history of cosmology the more apparent it becomes that the baroque mess of the currently dominant Lambda-CDM model has its roots in assumptions made back around AD 1930. Today it has become difficult to even find observational data that hasn’t undergone deformation by the expansion hypothesis before presentation.
A extract of Hypersphere Cosmology in progress follows, Section 9 which shows an upgrade to the hyperspherical lensing which eliminates dark energy (Lambda).
Mayblog
Politics.
Several pundits predicted that having made the mistake of allowing the British people a referendum on EU membership and losing it, the UK Political Establishment would find some way of not actually allowing Brexit to happen.
So far, they have succeeded in this by presenting either a very bad Not-Really-Leave-At-All-Deal, or an allegedly catastrophic No-Deal departure as the only possible options.
However, their own rules have now caught up with them and we now face another round of elections to the EU’s sham-parliament, a body which neither raises nor spends taxes and which cannot initiate legislation, it can only rubber stamp the diktats of the unelected EU commission and its self-selected bureaucrats.
Voting in elections has something of a magical gesture about it, as the likelihood of any individual vote affecting the outcome remains vanishingly small, yet it nevertheless registers as an act that projects intent.
Thus, I shall ‘Tell Them Again!’ and vote for the Brexit Party because: -
I prefer Democracy to the unelected autocracy and malignant synarchy of the EU.
I prefer British Common Law and the presumption of innocence to the dodgy continental version.
I prefer that Britain adopts its own response to the multiple crises arising from Globalisation rather than accept the diktats of Brussels and Berlin.
I prefer that Britain distances itself from the institutionalised corruption of an EU whose accounts have invariably failed to pass audit. In the UK, people would have gone to jail for this, in the EU they get gold-plated pensions instead.
‘No-Deal and F* Off’ will certainly bring temporary hardships, but freedom always has its short-term costs.
Reluctant-Remainers should also seriously consider voting for the Brexit Party because a very large cohort of MEPs opposed to the Political side of the EU project seems likely to become elected across the whole EU. Just possibly this could lead to the EU reverting to its original function as a body for economic cooperation and nothing more. In which case ‘Remaining’ might well prove acceptable to almost everyone.
Either way we should not remain part of the Malignant Political Monstrosity that the EU has mutated into.
Cosmology
Collaboration with my Gama-Ray Astronomer friend has provided a very lively debate about many aspects of Hypersphere Cosmology. Currently we mainly explore the hyperspherical lensing that creates the optical illusion of an accelerating expansion of the universe and gives rise to the dodgy phlogiston hypothesis of dark energy. The previous blog on The Hyperspherical Lensing of a Glome in Azimuthal Projection may not give a sufficiently accurate projection and may soon receive a trigonometric upgrade.
Meanwhile the physical principles and equation that gets rid of the underlying mistaken assumption that the universe expands at all (and hence came from a singularity and a big bang), have undergone a simplification and a clarification. See below for a description of cosmological redshift (the main evidence for the expansion hypothesis) in terms of the small positive spacetime curvature of a Glome type hypersphere removing energy from photons in transit.
Global Warming.
Do I worry about this? Not at all. By the end of this century only a few hundred thousand humans will remain, and they won’t have any technology left after crop failures lead to a general collapse of civilisation. The planet will reforest itself nicely within a few centuries.
Maillard Reaction Alchemical Furnace – or - Pizza Oven
Not an ideal survivalist structure, nor a particularly efficient method of cooking, but the woodsmoke does impart a delightful tang.
Brick tunnel built over half a plastic barrel (remove barrel before bricking up ends!!!) old Victorian waterpipe as chimney, door in cast concrete.