Blog (237)
Flat Universe
Flat Universe?
Ah, the Scottish Highlands in spring, what a delight to see the still snow-capped Cairngorms, the sun kissed daffodils around the low roads, and my second granddaughter for the first time. What a surprise also to see The Flat Earth shop in Inverness and all the flat earth graffiti on the surrounding road signs; some people up there seem to take this as seriously as the Loch Ness Monster, and Dour Protestant sects by the bucket load.
Whilst I admire eccentricity and non-conformity, Flat-Earthism does seem rather vulnerable to immediate falsification. You may laugh but remember that almost the entire scientific community still subscribes to Flat Universe theory – the idea that exact Euclidian geometry applies to the whole universe thus giving it an overall zero curvature, a big bang beginning and a catastrophic ending.
You might think that the pervasive superstition of an explosively expanding universe suggests a negative curvature but by miraculous coincidence all the supposed mass within it supplies a positive curvature (gravity) just capable of arresting the supposed expansion given infinite time.
In centuries to come our descendants will laugh at Flat-Universism as heartily as we now laugh at Flat-Earthism. The cracks of its impending falsification have already appeared where you would most expect them – in the ‘crank’ scientific papers written by people such as myself.
The hypothesis of Hypersphere Cosmology for example: -
http://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
shows that the universe has an observable positive curvature which we can see in the residual Pioneer deceleration, the retardation of the frequency of light when it traverses cosmic distances, and the diminution of type 1A supernovae luminosity due to cosmic hyperspherical lensing. Moreover, the hypothesis also explains the anomalous galactic rotation curves without dark matter and provides the only scenario in which Mach’s Principle of the origin of inertial mass can apply.
http://vixra.org/abs/1710.0066
All these parts of the hypothesis come with rigorous supporting mathematics.
Does any of this matter to us tiny humans on this quaint little planet in the suburbs of one unexceptional galaxy among billions?
Well it matters intensely to me because our views of the universe underlie our metaphysics and philosophies and religions and theories of magic, and thus what we believe about reality and thus how we live.
The big bang hypothesis with its big crunch or entropic fade-out ending seems a horrible sort of monotheistic style apocalyptic scenario from which humanity can never escape except to the imaginary transcendental realms of some great sky-fairy or other. This doesn’t encourage people to value this life or to look after this planet.
On the other hand, the Hypersphere Universe has no beginning and no ending, it has finite but unbounded extent in space and time – meaning that you can never fall off the ‘edge(s)’ of it in any dimension. Humanity could survive for effectively unlimited time if it proves clever enough to move to fresh habitats as stellar and galactic events render old ones unusable. Plus, the universe having effectively unlimited age will most certainly contain intelligences far older than our own that may eventually decide that we have become worth communicating with.
Meanwhile the extended Apophenia working on Arcanorium College continues to produce a splendid burst of inspiration and creativity in many fields.
For me it has led to the evolution of the structure of Square Rigger Chess as a sort of distraction activity (soon to appear on the games pages) whilst making some progress with the Quantum Hypersphere hypothesis. It has become clear that the phenomena of individual quanta depend on the phenomenon of the entire universe; as Hermes Trismegistus quipped – As Above, So Below.
Imagine a perfectly spherical planet with no land, just an entire surface of water. Drop a rock into it and circular waves spread out, eventually these waves will converge on the other side of the planet and get higher as the circles get smaller, finally producing a spike in the water as the inverse of the hole in the water that the rock made.
Three dimensional spherical waves in a hypersphere will do something analogous in a hypersphere. An antiparticle will appear at the antipode.
That an antiparticle appears at the antipode may seem a little odd. However, consider this – if you travel to the other side of this planet you end up upside-down with respect to your starting orientation, you have rotated 180 degrees. If instead of simply moving across a slightly curved plane to a terrestrial antipode, a particle moved right across/around the curved hyperspherical universe it would become rotated through all dimensions of space and time to become its mirror image antiparticle.
This all seems to fit in with Milo Woolf's ideas on particles as spherical standing waves, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the hypersphere cosmology idea of antipodal particles having opposite matter/antimatter sign.
De Broglie hypothesised that matter quanta have the wave/particle duality that energy quanta exhibit, and indeed we can now demonstrate quantum entanglement, superposition, and tunnelling with matter quanta such as electrons. As the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics seems the only one capable of providing a physical-principle model for these phenomena then presumably the phenomenon of moving matter particles must also arise as a transaction process in which advanced waves move backwards in time.
Thus, the wave function of any quantum stretches all the way around the universe to its antipode point at about 14 billion light years away.
So, a photon, an electron, a proton, a ball bearing, this planet, you and I, all consist of interreference patterns that manifest as particles out of wave functions that extend right around the entire universe.
Om.
Springblog
Springblog
I feel thrilled to announce the spring arrival of a second Granddaughter. Mother, baby, and husband all doing great, they put this down to the hypno-birthing techniques they used, plus I guess an oat-fed hardy Highland lifestyle helps.
Life up there certainly has some big upsides, you can wander around the miniature city of Inverness without having to watch your back, and random people will strike up pleasant conversations with you and none of them seem mad or demand anything of you. Plus, you can actually observe people walking around or sitting down without the aid of mobile phones.
In a further celebration of spring all three ponds have started to fill with amphibia, frogs and toads in the mature ones and just frogs so far in the new one. Just in time for the spring equinox I finished and hung Sol Invictus on a south facing wall and readied the Moon for a propitious hanging date. These consist of ‘turdcrete’ (sheepswool and bracken compost with Portland cement) over steel wire frames, acrylic finish.
Have you noticed the appalling deterioration of political and social debate in the years since the development of the internet and social media? Debate seems to have descended into the hurling of insults, recycled soundbites and abstract memes. The words ‘fascist’ or 'phobic' seem to have become items of punctuation, and applied liberally to anyone the speaker fears to even enter debate with and would therefore rather no-platform to preserve the safe space inside their head which has become so fragile due to the abandonment of critical thinking. It seems that in this age of mass-alienation and too much information, so many people seek the identity and solace of niche-herd-minds and preformed opinions.
Perhaps that constitutes the secular substitute for religion these days. We used to value the principle of trying to see the others’ point of view, at least in secular matters, but if opinion and identity become a religion, that option goes.
Correspondents inform me that even the esoteric social media platforms have degenerated into factional invective these days.
As an antidote to all this Arcanorium College proudly announces that we will shortly conduct a Philosophy of Magic course, a leisurely debate over some months.
We shall conduct this as always, as men and women of letters.
Feblog
My IT guy has eliminated the cryptocurrency mining franchise which had apparently taken up residence on this site and also he has upgraded the template, so bear with me whilst I learn it anew.
Firstly, wow, what a device, see this link https;//ldrt.ch/tks127
And now, a random rambling cornucopia of bits upon reaching pensionable age: -
Old age doesn’t seem so bad when you consider the alternative, over the hill seems preferable to under it.
I gazed upon the star Aldebaran having discovered that due to its distance at 65 light years, the light I perceived (and hence became quantum entangled with) set off on my zeroth birthday. I hope that I have not inadvertently just invented yet another useless form of natal astrology.
Nevertheless, I do hope against all sense and reason to survive to see my Uranus return (84 years), much remains to do, sorting the cosmology problem took 20 years, quantum hyperspheres remain a daunting quest. We still lack a tight theory of the magical link.
A festive interlude in the Scottish Highlands visiting the expanding clan proved a delight. A six-mile hike to the top of Plodda falls through icy and beautiful terrain culminated in a magnificent view and a splendid experience of vertigo, and afterwards so as not to show weakness in front of the Scots we did a sub-zero outdoor barbeque.
Fort George on the Moray Firth provides examples of one of the largest Georgian artillery fortress in the world and the bizarre bonkers-ness of regimental life. It even has a cemetery for regimental mascots and officers dogs. Highland battledress seems designed to convince any enemy of the dangerous madness of the wearer. The fortress seemed awesomely overbuilt just to supress any unlikely further Jacobite uprisings after Culloden, perhaps it also serves to interdict the passage of monsters to the Ness. Thirteen-inch bore mortars seem a bit excessive for use against tartan-clad swordsmen; I think they actually threw depth charges.
A post festive trip to Barcelona brightened up the end of January; we did the inevitable tourist sights. The Modernista Sagrada Familia cathedral looks brilliant from a distance or as a monochrome scale model. Close up however it looks laughably kitsch and tacky. Catholic cathedrals usually have a dignified exterior and reserve all their gaudy sentimental and macabre religious tat for the inside. Unfortunately, here they have put it all over the outside as well, making it look like a castle in a religious Disneyland. Because they have used modern materials it probably will not last a century judging by the deterioration of the Park Gueli structures by the same architect.
The early Picassos impress with their superb draughtsmanship and eclecticism of styles. The late ones suggest a profound diminution of eyesight and mind.
A side pilgrimage to the Salvador Dali theatre/museum/shrine at Figueres proved the high point of the holiday, a day in the dreamscapes of the high priest of Pareidolia; hallucination and imagination and the subconscious running in splendid magnificent riot.
Do I worry about the POTUS? Not much. Politics has always consisted of a shitstorm of spin, misinformation, propaganda, and fake news. Technology has merely accelerated this and made it more obvious. Trump hasn’t actually done anything too terrible yet despite playing a mixture of madman strategy and dumbman strategy that has thoroughly confused his adversaries. We only used to find out about the downsides and clay feet of our glorious leaders long afterwards, now we get it in realtime. At least North Korea and South Korea seem to have made friends at last, loudmouth madman strategy can work you know.
Whilst away I read a copy of Dan Brown’s ‘Origin’, I got for xmas. This lively story revolves around the discovery of a bit of science that could overturn most of the world’s major religions.
I won’t spoil it for you except to say look out for the bits on Chaos and the Chaos symbol itself in the text.
The discovery didn’t turn out as I’d expected from the cosmological hints in the story, nevertheless it certainly would throw a spanner in the works of most creation myths if it pans out.
This led me to muse upon a discovery that would undermine ALL creation stories and myths, including the scientific creation myth, and I realised that we may have it already: -
WHAT IF THE UNIVERSE HAS NO ORIGIN?
That probably sounds crazy within almost everyone’s current thought processes, we remain accustomed to phenomena having a beginning and an ending, although they merely change from one state to another, but if we rephrase it as -
WHAT IF REALITY HAS NO ORIGIN?
Then it perhaps becomes easier to contemplate
It lies here -
http://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
Awaiting confirmation or falsification.
And in other news, asked to explain my aparently incomprehensible political position I came up with this:-
Entropolitics.
Inequality has come in for fashionable criticism recently, but do we really have too much of it or do we not have enough of it?
On one hand many of us spend much of our lives life trying to gain financial, social, and intellectual advantages over our fellow humans and to pass such advantages primarily to our offspring, and secondarily to our tribes of family, friends, and nation. We applaud ambition.
On the other hand, we tend to demand reciprocity from those who achieve wealth and power, and we find satisfaction in forcibly redistributing it through taxes and revolutions.
Yet wealth and power seem like heat in thermodynamics, they only do useful work when unevenly distributed.
Life itself, and lively societies, require entropy gradients.
Temporarily dominant individuals, polities and empires have created or sponsored most of our culture, science, art, religion and magic.
Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, The Roman & Chinese Empires, The Islamic Empire, Renaissance and post renaissance Europe, The British Empire, The post WW2 American Empire, and now perhaps the New Chinese Empire. (Non – exhaustive list, I just picked some of the big players). A lot of people had, and will have, fun, liberation and enlightenment in building up and in attacking these structures.
Useful work occurs as wealth and power accumulate and then dissipate, as social friction, upheavals, revolution, and war occur.
Inequalities of wealth and power, empires and patronage, and the initiatives to tear such things down, have led to all the advances of our species.
As a Chaoist I do not have to have a set of opinions that conforms to other people’s standards of consistency.
Have you noticed how boring and dull equality gets? Strife seems so much more stimulating.
I reject the EU on the basis that it seeks to create economic and moral uniformity from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Urals.
Have you heard much interesting news from Denmark, Sweden, Norway or New Zealand recently?
Do you think that redistributive social welfare policies lead to the unnatural survival of feckless fools and apparent failures, and a resulting drop in collective fitness, or a useful broadening of genetic diversity?
Do you think that all cultures, societies, religions, and moral philosophies have equal value?
Alternatively, do you think some cultures, societies, religions, and moral philosophies have outlived their initial usefulness and gone bad and now need destroying?
Yes, I feel simultaneously conservative and radical. Inequality seems worth both striving for and against, depending on context and personal circumstance.
A healthy polity encourages both the accumulation and the dissipation of wealth and power.
Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, Decadence.
The Zeitgeist revolves, hopefully in an upward spiral. Western civilisation currently seems currently on the cusp between Decadence and a New Chaos.
In the developed world we have sorted out the Discord and Confusion with many revolutions and a massive dose of Bureaucracy only to find that Decadence doesn’t seem all that satisfactory either.
Hail Eris!
Plus Also ::: I may yet collaborate on another book which we shall definitely NOT call '50 Shades of Gnosis'.
This will deal with a huge variety of methods of achieving altered states of mind, belief, and magic. (None of them involving chemognosis because that never lived up to the hype and I never met a wizard who made a success of it.)
Approaching Solstice
Advertisement. THE EPOCH
For the Sorcerer in your life only one gift can possibly suffice this festive season of Winter Solstice, Christmas, Mithrasmas, Saturnalia, or whatever you celebrate.
The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, or the EPOCH as those in the know call it.
This book may well cast a strange and unusual perspective on most conventional views of magic, science, and religion.
It comes as a magnificent outsize 216-page hardcover Triple Grimoire with over 60 full colour illustrations accompanied by a deck of 54 large cards suitable for Divination or for use as Altar Icons in Enchantment, Evocation, Invocation, and Illumination.
The three Grimoires inside resume Elemental, Planetary, and Stellar Magic.
The Elemental and Planetary Grimoires present traditional forms of magic updated in the light of the innovative chaos magic metaphysics developed in the last several decades that now form the cutting edge of 21st century magical thought.
However, the Stellar Magic Grimoire provides something else entirely – the first coherent incarnation of The Necronomicon that a sorcerer can use effectively to access the knowledge and power of the Elder Gods.
So, no need for any further desperate searching in ancient libraries or in the dread tales recounted by the half mad, at last we have a functioning Necronomicon.
This awesome book could easily keep a magician busy for many years; it contains a great deal to explore and to work with. It represents the final Magnum Opus of a Grandmaster of the magical arts and sciences, assisted by staff and members of his esoteric Arcanorium College.
In 1978, the author as a young magician published the paradigm shattering Liber Null (Book Zero) which revolutionised magical theory and practise. Copies of the first edition of that book now sell for several hundred pounds each, and subsequent commercial editions in many languages have sold about 100,000 copies.
Only one edition of The Epoch exists. The author, who does not rely on writing for his fortune, decided to self-publish at cost for posterity, a single sumptuous edition that restructures the mould of magic in the light of a lifetime’s discovery.
He intends to spend the rest of his current incarnation delving more deeply into the religious, biological, psychological, cosmological and quantum insights and equations that the Necronomicon entities have begun to provide.
A limited number of copies remain; the author would like to see them in use.
http://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/the-epoch
Thought Provocation & Entertainment. Cyber Eugenics.
A number of commentators have expressed concern at the tendency of people to end up in information echo chambers by using only internet news and opinion making media that reflect back to them their own proclivities and preconceptions, thus simply amplifying and reinforcing them. The internet, which many hoped would function to bring people together, seems to have had the effect of driving them towards self-referential cliques.
However, the internet may have started to have an even more insidious effect: -
If humans exhibited the same genetic diversity as domestic dogs then we would have people ranging in height from one foot (30cm) high to thirty feet (9 metres) high.
Wolves, the genetic ancestors of domestic dogs, (and who can still interbreed with them), show much less genetic diversity because they remain under intense selection pressure. Only wild wolves that remain within a limited genetic envelope of size, colour and behaviour tend to survive, outliers tend not to survive to breed. The uniformity of individuals within a species gives a good indication of how much selection pressure that species faces. All emperor penguins look virtually identical; they face terrible survival challenges in Antarctica.
Struggling desperate politicians and businessmen all tend to look the same. Don’t trust anyone in a suit. The successful ones tend to dress as they please.
Domestic dogs on the other hand have become relieved of many selection pressures by us. We have bred them for characteristics that would have compromised their survival and reproduction in the wild. We have bred some for excessive fierceness, some for excessive docility and friendliness, some for excessive hairiness or even baldness, some for huge size, some for miniature size, and some for specialised abilities of more use to us than them. Most breeds would die out if we returned them to the wild.
Humans have done this to dogs just by selective breeding. We have selected dogs with slightly more of certain characteristics that we wanted and then just kept breeding them together until the offspring exhibited those characteristics to a great degree.
Selective breeding of dogs (and of various other domesticated animals such as sheep, pigs, and cows) has accomplished extraordinary things, far more than genetic engineers usually fantasise about when contemplating directly interfering with DNA.
We bred cows down from Aurochs, ferocious beasts that looked like bison on steroids.
What about selectively breeding humans, do we stand poised to do it, or have we already started?
British aristocrats famously bred for beauty rather than brains for several recent centuries and now so frequently have the good looks and the dim wits to prove it.
The internet seems poised to have a profound impact on human eugenics because an ever-increasing proportion of young people now use the internet as a matchmaking service.
Whereas previously people had to compromise with whoever they could find in their town or village as a reasonably suitable mate, today’s young can, and 60% frequently do, use a computer to match themselves with someone of near identical social status, attitudes, abilities and characteristics from within a wide geographical radius. The dating algorithms in particular tend to match like to like.
The increasing incidence of full-blown autism may well arise simply because marginally autistic people now have a far greater chance of hooking up with each other in a more mobile and connected world.
Human ingenuity has increasingly relieved humanity of most of its traditional selection pressures. In many parts of the world, war, disease and want now eliminate very few people from the gene pool and the stupid and the feckless survive easily and reproduce in most fully domesticated nations.
Of course, selective breeding always remains subject to a certain amount of ‘recession towards the mean’. Two geniuses will not necessarily birth a third, but will more probably birth someone with well above average intelligence. Yet any characteristic will, if selected for over several generations, become much more pronounced.
So, in the absence of selection pressures and in the presence of computer assisted mate selection can we look forward to the human species becoming as diversely specialised as the canine species?
Can we look forward to a self-sorting Genetic Caste and Class System in which cliques of specialised people breed only within their own groups? Alternatively, will humans still find a strange frisson in ‘unsuitable’ partners? Perhaps we should consider writing a bit of that into the dating algorithms that seem to have acquired such an astonishing power over our species.
People keep on at me to write a science fiction novel, unfortunately, I haven’t the time to elaborate a ‘what if’ into a fully characterised folk opera, but help yourself.
Alternative Science. Hyperspherical Lensing Revisited.
Having received a number of requests for clarification I present the following.
The Hypersphere Cosmology papers on this site overturn the popular misinterpretations of the astronomical data that suggest that the universe has expanded and now undergoes an accelerating expansion due to a mysterious dark energy. The observed redshifts of type 1A Quasars and their apparent magnitudes provide two different measurements of their distances from us, and a mismatch exists between these measurements.
This mismatch finds an alternative explanation in terms of the hypothesis of Hyperspherical Lensing.
In this, the small positive spacetime curvature of the hypersphere of the universe slightly magnifies objects at less than half the antipode distance from an observer and progressively diminishes objects further away than this.
(Cosmological Redshift continues to provide an accurate measure of distance.)
The yellow line on the graph shows the curvature of the universe from the observer at the origin, to the antipode at about 14 bn light yr. The blue line shows the observers theoretical straight sightline.
(d means the distance as a fraction of the antipode distance.)
The pale green lensing line Lh = 1/(1 + sqrt(d - d^2) - d), represents the difference between the theoretical sightline and the actual hyperspherical geodesic that light follows to the observer, expressed as the amount of the visual field of the observer that an object will appear spread out over. Only objects at the half antipode distance will appear at their correct size. Closer objects will appear compressed; further away objects will appear progressively more distended. Note that in theory the antipode point itself would appear spread out around the entire sphere of the limits of the observer’s observation.
The darker green lensing line Lh = 1 + sqrt(d - d^2) – d, represents the resulting distortions to apparent magnitude, with objects closer than 7bn light yr appearing slightly brighter than they should and objects beyond that distance becoming progressively dimmer.
Astrophysicists can make use of either form of the lensing equation, depending on context.
Apophenia 2
Herewith some Apophenia Votive Figurines posing as garden sprites, the middle one in black milliput over wire served to make a two part plaster mould for the other two cast from molten tin, without excessive collateral damage to the kitchen. The solid tin versions weigh in at over half a pound each. Lead free solder provides a convenient source of 98% tin. The plaster mould did not survive beyond the second casting.
With Immanent Neo-Pagan Deities, portable physical representations always come in handy for evocation or invocation. These figurines will feature in a forthcoming Grove event and in the next project at Arcanorium College.
Apophenia 2 Course, Arcanorium College January 2018
An Invocation of the Goddess Apophenia, She of the peculiar connections between various phenomena/perceptions/concepts/ideas and other phenomena/perceptions/concepts/ideas that ordinary mortals do not commonly perceive. This in support of assorted personal projects/quests/questions, and the execution and/or resolution thereof.
Caveat Emptor: -This may lead to inspiration, genius insight, mistake, or plain craziness.
Metaphysics exists as metaphor for the physical.
(Welcome to Chaos Magic – Post-Neoplatonic Esotericism in the raw.)
Metaphor provides the mechanism by which the mind relates to, and controls, physical reality.
We shall experiment with classical esoteric symbolism, Ars Combinatoria, Zairja, Cut Ups, Chaotic Torsion Pendulums, experimental investments of belief, non-chemognostic methods of hallucination induction, various mechanical, psychological and magical techniques for superposing ideas and concepts and mystical intuitions.
Participants will have to make and do a lot of stuff; and may anticipate finishing the course in a somewhat different state of brain to that in which they entered it.
Mach's Principle
Mach’s Principle
The three Mandrakes (Mandragora Autumnalis) have exploded into leaf with great enthusiasm in just a week, herewith a picture of the one called Milady, as under the soil she sits with the thighs of her two main roots elegantly crossed.
I do not intend to eat her, when she gets old enough I hope to open a conversation with her.
I have divided my time between horticulture, sculpture (attempting to cast Apophenia in metal, pics to follow when finished), and physical/metaphysical calculations from a Lengian perspective.
Mach’s Principle has hung around on the periphery of our understanding of the universe for 100 years. Qualitatively stated it says that the inertia of any mass arises somehow from the presence of EVERYTHING in the entire universe. It sounds intuitively physically right and metaphysically holistic.
Yet nobody seems to have managed to formulate it quantitatively and mathematically so far.
The dominant Lambda-CDM cosmological model appears as the main problem, if we interpret the cosmological data to mean an expanding universe then the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass seems likely to have varied with time, yet cosmological observations of the deep past seem to rule this out.
However, within Hypersphere Cosmology, (an alternative interpretation of the cosmological data that we have), Mach’s Principle becomes relatively easy to quantify with a simple equation.
The equation appears here in this paper http://vixra.org/abs/1710.0066
Together with some further thoughts upon the nature of time and space.
The equation has lurked within Hypersphere Cosmology for a decade or more, and now seems blindingly obvious, like the discovery of an Unknown Known, and in many ways, it more or less completes the theory of Hypersphere Cosmology, opening the way for an exploration of the quantum aspects of Hypersphere Mechanics in general.
Unknown Knowns – perhaps what you get when you start talking to Mandrakes, Apophenia, and Yog-Sothoth.
Addendum 9/10/17, on further musing this begins to look like a complete armageddon equation for both the standard models of cosmology and particle physics; because not only does it get rid of such pesky theoretical artifacts such as an intial singularity, inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, but it also seems to get rid of the dubious idea of virtual bosons, and the Higgs Mechanism, so that miniscule blip on the di-photon channel at 125 GeV probably doesn't mean a Higgs Boson at all if (inertial) mass arises by the mechanism the equation indicates.
MOND(H)
MOND(H)
We had a pleasant time down at the surf cabin in Wales and met a pair of talkative ravens whilst walking the sea cliffs, and we also saw an adder and some seals. However due to a lack of good surf and a surfeit of rain I found time to call Leng and rewrite Newton’s Laws.
The basic principle of such invocations seems deceptively simple, firstly absorb all human knowledge on a subject of interest and then ask if anything in the universe has anything to add or any corrections to make. One would not want to ask stupid questions or one to which respondents could not reply in comprehensible terms.
The revised laws actually form a logical prequel to Hypersphere Cosmology and render it much more intuitively comprehensible.
In particular they show how a small positive spacetime curvature to the entire universe appears as an acceleration that decreases linear motion but increases the effect of gravity sufficiently to account for a couple of glaring anomalies in conventional cosmological models, and overturn the standard view of material reality.
The resulting paper appears here: -
http://vixra.org/abs/1709.0112
At the home of cutting edge physics, download the PDF and see what you think.
Newton’s third law about every action having an equal and opposite reaction remains unaddressed, however a symmetry of sorts between kinetic and gravitational energy suggests itself, and the universe may possess exactly equal and opposite amounts of each. 1 = 1, or 0 = 1 – 1, from zero cometh a duality?
As Samhain approaches the 3 mandragora autumnalis roots slumbering in my study have developed tiny buds in request for repotting for the winter. They did well in the greenhouse last year and doubled in size, perhaps they will flower and fruit for the first time this coming solstice.
Two Reviews
Two book reviews.
The older generation of Chaos Magicians now begin to write their memoirs and histories and their magnum opuses. Heck hasn’t time flown since 1977 when Chaos Magic began to kick off.
I have recently received two such books, one rather good and the other abysmal; The Chaonomicon by Jaq D Hawkins, and Ouroboros by Ray Sherwin respectively.
Review. The Chaonomicon – Quintessential Chaos for the Serious Magician.
190 pages. £13.99.
By Pete Carroll.
Jaq D Hawkins’ Chaonomicon gives a fair sketch of the general history of Chaos Magic without going into excessive detail about the personalities and the inevitable personal squabbles involved. She shows the history and genesis of many of the ideas that came together to create a new way of thinking about magic and new ways of doing it.
The book contains a particularly good analysis of the historic and current functions of the Gods and Goddesses of Chaos, and the relationship between the Chaoism that began in the UK and the Discordianism that began in the USA.
Jaq also includes a chapter on the Chaos Sciences that developed at the same time as Chaos Magic and a fair bit on the life of Austin Osman Spare, artist and freestyle magician, and his techniques.
The Chaonomicon also describes many of the basic techniques of Chaos Magic in simple terms free from occult obscurantism, so readers new to the subject can find much to try out experimentally. Experienced modern magicians and esotericists working in non-dogmatic traditions may well think – yes, I already think and practise in such a paradigm. That perhaps stands as the real tribute to the Chaos Magic. What began as a revolutionary break with ancient, pre-modern, and 1880s received magical wisdom, has for many, become The New Chaos of the Normal.
An Order, The Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros formed to create and disseminate the ideas of Chaos Magic. The creative phase lasted for about five years. The dissemination phase continues and has resulted in the production of hundreds of books and manuscripts that have rendered the original Order irrelevant and now largely defunct.
The advent of Chaos Magic has had about the same effect on magical thinking as relativity and quantum physics has had upon classical science. Not everyone understands such things yet, it but those who do have a better model of reality and Jaq’s book makes Chaos Magic much more accessible.
Review. Ouroboros – A Grimoire – Ray Sherwin
By Pete Carroll.
About 100 pages of very large type and largely irrelevant pictures, overall content equivalent to a single small magazine. £25 (!!!)
The cover of Ouroboros by Ray Sherwin shows a worm eating his own tail and that very aptly describes what Ray has done in this sad, thin, and overpriced book.
If you thought Ray’s previous rant VITRIOL ill-advised and ill-informed you will find this latest offering even worse.
It hardly constitutes a Grimoire for it does not really say much about how to do magic or what sort of magic to do. It has a bit about sigils that fails to clarify his personal approach to them, and rather a lot of ‘mystical poetry’ steeped in paradoxical statements and personal idiosyncrasy. Overall, Ray has seemingly fallen into the lazy trap of declaring his every act an act of magic and of not actually doing any magic at all.
I shared with Ray (previously a scientologist, then a dogmatic thelemite), a set of ideas for a new approach to magic. He later shared with me an idea for a natural products business that he picked up in Cairo. In his typically lazy style, he did not bother to run very far with either of these ideas himself. He declined to contribute to the Chaos current when it adopted a bit of necessary structure as it went international. He did not bother to upgrade his business model when market conditions changed, and he fell out with all his former business and esoteric associates.
Ray never quite understood the full implications of the paradigm shift from the Platonic Pagan-Monotheist model to the new Quantum Neo-Pagan metaphysic, nor the compromises with culture we would have to adopt to disseminate the new paradigm. As Lionel Snell points out so well in MYOMT, magic usually follows on from changes in the scientific paradigm, and Chaos Magic represents the esoteric response to the quantum and relativistic revolution of the 20th century. Unfortunately, Ray never bothered to appraise himself of any scientific knowledge at all.
Now retired, he languishes in a small villa in the sun in the middle of nowhere, with too much time on his hands and too much time spent on the internet whilst he chews the sour grapes of regret and envy. Having nothing much to say about magic he has descended to scandal mongering, conspiracy theory, and spitting bile about old friends and associates that he lost.
In the absence of any genuine scandal to report, he has sunk to the new low of using material from the paranoid internet rants of a former occultist who has formed a cult of two persons (just himself and his girlfriend) who believe themselves heroic and persecuted campaigners against an imaginary tsunami of satanic ritual abuse. Yes that hoary old discredited chestnut, SRA.
Ray uncritically repeats nonsense from this former occultist; I had to laugh about the dog rape anecdote. This comes from a potty-mouthed fantasist who makes such a strained effort to appear weird and sinister that he just ends up looking foolish and seedy. Sure, frisky dogs will hump anything from people’s legs to the furniture, but according to veterinarians, a dog could not possibly rape a human unless several people restrained and positioned the victim and assisted the dog. Ray you have had your leg pulled.
Ray also adopts this former occultist’s technique of saying that he has knowledge of heinous crimes without actually providing any evidence, references, names, dates, or places. He just tries innuendo and recycled rumour. This technique derives from the worst traditions of lazy Lunchtime O’Booze gutter ‘journalism’. If you have evidence Ray take it to the police, do not hide behind innuendo to protect yourself from derision, or perhaps you fear libel?
Positive thinking works pretty well but negative thinking unfortunately works even better. Start nurturing regret and envy into paranoia and hatred and they manifest like, well, err, bad magic, and this fill-space offering from Ray does not even rise to the level of lousy magic.
Necronomicon Mythos Simulation
The second expedition to the Necronomicon Mythos by Psychonauts of Arcanorium College continues to produce strange and unanticipated results.
From Hastur I received the following inspiration to complete a task that has bugged me all my life, to make some sort of simulation or boardgame that models the magical quest itself.
I have made many games in the course of a lifetime that model various real and imaginary scenarios, with the underlying thought that if you can identify the mechanisms underlying any system then you can perhaps understand the dynamics of it, and perhaps do it better in the game of ‘real’ life. Strategy Games certainly seem to sharpen the mind, and may bring us some focus on the Human Condition.
Yet most of the games involving magic that I have collected or read the rules of seem unsatisfactory. Magic typically appears only as a combat modifier in battle games, rarely as the focus of an activity or a quest in itself.
In this Hasturian inspired simulation the Elder Gods and their Knowledge and Power stand as metaphors for the abilities we humans seek in the quest for personal and species survival. They represent abilities we need to survive the future, not ghastly eldritch cosmic adversaries bent on our destruction, although with careless use they could have that effect.
Hastur may appear as an empty yellow robed void, countless aeons old, a well of cosmic indifferentism, yet it seems to take an occasional whimsical interest in promising species, perhaps to allay its existential angst awhile.
The concepts of the simulation may seem cruel and cynical; individual questors inevitably die although they may achieve much before senescence and mortality take hold. The numbers used to represent various factors all come from my calculations in an attempt to render the simulation realistic.
Oddly, the whole thing begins to look strangely autobiographical although several treasures still elude me. My own mistakes and that of others have become obvious during the course of many runs of the simulation. The virtues of maintaining a high Sanity, particularly in the early stages of a quest, become all too apparent.
See the Rules and some experimental board and pieces design in the Games section.
Build it, try it, and send feedback and questions.
Junblog
Junblog
Just a quickie here as a general election looms.
I do not like the British Conservative Party, nevertheless I always vote for them in parliamentary elections regardless of their candidates or their policies.
I do this because I have a long memory and because I look at what political parties actually do rather than what they say, (all politicians speak with forked tongues).
Every Labour government we have had in the UK since WW2 has left office leaving the country bankrupt. The following Conservative governments have then had to put the economy back together again.
It does seem rather important that that we have a government in a strong enough position to face down the EU by the end of next week and make a success of Brexit.
We do not have a housing crisis in the UK, we have an unsustainable population crisis on this small island with 300K people migrating here each year, but few will openly acknowledge this.
We do not have a funding crisis in the NHS. The UK lies rather high up the international scale of health funding but rather low on the international scale of healthcare delivery. The discrepancy arises from poor organisation. The NHS has far too many pen pushers, administrators and keyboard jockeys, and not enough people on the front line, but few will openly acknowledge this.
The EU gives back to the UK a proportion of the money it takes; however, it gives proportionately more to Scotland which it deems more deserving than say Wales or Cornwall. This fact underlies the stance of the SNP which doesn’t actually want either full independence from the UK and full fiscal responsibility for Scotland, or government from Brussels either, but few will openly acknowledge this.
Anyway, enough of such ephemeral matters, now to eternity: -
The probability space of any quanta in terms of 3-dimensional time comes out at the temporal volume of Gh^2/mc^7 according to my most recent calculation. The precise meaning of this remains to emerge but suffice to say that if no requirement exists for a spherically symmetric distribution then a single quantum could stretch right across the universe in some sense, as in the Transactional Interpretation.
Magic news, the great and good (well those of them that I know) have given their seal of approval to Lionel Snell’s masterful magnum opus ‘My Years Of Magical Thinking’.
On Arcanorium the results of the Shub-Niggurath working continue to come in and we prepare to approach the Necronomicon Mythos entity Hastur on matters of personal, species, and supra-species survival and change.
Update 9/6/17. Ooops, not a good election result, Brexit may now get messier, however on the bright side comrade Corbyn will not now reduce the nation to bankruptcy and Scottish Independence looks kicked into touch for some while.
More...
Mayday
A fairly recently attended ritual featuring rattles and drums has inspired the construction of the Quadrophonic Asson shown here. This stimulates auditory apophenia and hallucination whilst for example invoking and questioning certain of the Elder Gods about matters of existentialism, spacetime, quantum geometry and other matters, as part of the Arcanorium College Necronomicon project.
It consists of a gourd grown in the gardens and hollowed out and desiccated with salt, before hardening within and without with a generous application of araldite. The gourd head contains metal discs, plastic balls, quartzite crystals and sand to give a fairly full spectrum of sound and a certain amount of piezoelectric effect.
The handle consists of hard driftwood found on my Welsh beach retreat and it has a stethoscope fitted so that each ear receives the sound through the air and through the tubes to provide a wall of sound effect. Note that the tube from the stethoscope should go into an open-ended cavity bored right through the handle rather than into a simple pit in the wood.
See also a miniature stroboscope made by a friend, this contains a tricolour LED in which all three colours fire simultaneously, an a-stable multivibrator and a NE5555 chip and it gives a 50:50 mark space ratio, use through closed eyelids only. Used in conjunction with the Quadrophonic Asson it enables the psychonaut to enter psychedelic space quickly and without neurotoxins.
The three dimensional time pages of this site will soon receive an upgrade. Three forms of mathematics seem available to describe quantum phenomena as hyperspheres, Clifford rotations, Quaternion or possibly Octonion algebra, and the Hopf Fibration notation. Other mathematicians now collaborate on this; let us see what emerges.
The Esotericon site went down as the artist neglected to renew it due to the pressures of a Master’s degree. This created a temporary panic that The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos might have gone out of print, and prices reached U$ 1,600.00 on the net for a while. Nevertheless, it remains available at http://www.arcanoriumcollege.com/shop/ and my IT people will soon add some of the graphics salvaged from the old Esotericon site to these pages.
The Mandrakes (autumnalis variety) have finally gone to sleep for the summer after a good year in the greenhouses. Rich in atropine they provide a natural antidote to organophosphate nerve gases, another reason to treasure them in these troubled times of North Korean missile tests, although just how much you need to use remains uncertain.
The pond at Chateaux Chaos now has another magnificent toadpole fleet many thousands strong, these will not go on what would probably prove a suicide mission to the local community pond we built this year; it needs to develop more algal resources and weed cover first.
The worldwide marches for science last week give some hope that humans may use their precious resource of reason a little less sparingly. I love science, it makes life so much more interesting although not necessarily better, and it so often gets it wrong, diesel car anyone? Lambda-CDM big bang theory anyone? Phlogiston? Global warming?
As Lionel points out in MYOMT http://www.specularium.org/blog/item/217-my-years-of-magical-thinking-review we probably enter a new a phase of Magical Thinking where the power of belief and intent and post-truth thought will dominate over evidence-based thinking and the pace of science will slow rather than reach some sort of Kurzwellian singularity. It happened before in the first few centuries AD. Already we seem to have hit a brick wall of diminishing returns in many fields, we have abandoned supersonic passenger flight, crewed spaceflight, and any ideas of building a Larger Hadron Fiasco.
Powell observed that all political careers end in failure. Perhaps this occurs because they try to outlive their success. We can probably forget about UKIP now, as Nigel appears to have done, job well done and finished. Let us hope that Mrs May secures a landslide in the UK before taking on the EU. A win for Marine le Pen would certainly make Brexit negotiations easier by further undermining the failing EU in advance. Unfortunately, the French will probably bottle out in fear of their German masters and elect the Synarchist Europhile Macron instead.
Spring Equinox 2017
I hope that you have all acquired, and started to read twice, and thoroughly study MYOMT by Lionel Snell as mentioned in the previous blog. Nobody henceforth gets into the Illuminati without having done so.
Finally, the season turns, the first toads have come to the pond at Chateaux Chaos and laid their astonishingly long strings of potential successors, and a solitary newt has appeared awaiting a mate. In the greenhouse, the three Greek Autumnalis Mandrakes have produced their best ever foliage but it will not last much longer and they have not yet flowered in their first five years. Thus, the plan to reintroduce them to the wild in the entire southwest of England will plainly take a century or two unless I resort to some genetic engineering.
The Spring Equinox Druidical Neo-Pagan Easter/Ostara ritual went off delightfully. I could see no point in celebrating the season of fertility by some ghastly sacrificial crucifixion of the son of some Middle Eastern deity who got promoted to monotheistic position around 700BC. Therefore, we made eggshells full of wishes and spells and affirmations (mainly in chocolate) and invoked the god of the sun and the goddess of spring in many guises, and superbly personified by some of our members, to consecrate our ‘plantings’ for harvest at autumn.
The arse end of winter seemed dominated for me by the dislocation of my shoulder a few weeks ago, occasioned by the over exuberance of our dopey giant sheepdog tugging me down a flight of slimy stone steps in the churchyard. The pain and shock seemed quite astonishing, for a moment, I felt a sort of ‘out of body experience’, a sort of superposition of the experience of standing at the top of the stone steps, lying at the bottom of it, and leaping up again shouting F*** innumerable times. My eldest up in Scotland caught a twinge of it at the exact moment according to a later call.
A neurophysiologist at grove later explained this as a peculiarity of the fight-flight-freeze sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system, but I dunno, it seemed very weird at the time. I can well appreciate why the inquisition used dislocation via the rack or the strapado as a method of torture.
At A&E they asked me to evaluate my agony on a scale of 1-10. I could still imagine blowtorches and molten lead as more painful so I opted for 8, probably a mistake, but nevertheless four medics eventually knocked me out in the end and wrenched it back in. On the bright side, I have partially mastered the awkward arts of left hand pickaxe, mattock, shovel, and sledgehammer, without too much collateral damage, round at the Memsahib’s community garden construction project. Yet at 64 this comes as an intimation of mortality and human frailness. I shall avoid surfing until at least midsummer. Whilst drowning reportedly seems a good way to go, I still have another 2 books to write, a further 3? grandchildren to welcome, New Zealand to visit, and a Michelangelo grade sculpture to make.
Meanwhile on Arcanorium College we explore the experimental belief that extra-terrestrial intelligences may know stuff that we don’t yet quite understand.
As Robert Anton Wilson said, ‘Magic is what you use when you have exhausted the possibilities of common sense’.
Thus we scroll through all human knowledge on various topics such as consciousness, biology, ontology/epistemology, philosophy, spacetime cosmology, and quantum physics and then ask the Lovecraftian Necronomicon Mythos Elder Gods for the next bits, on the justifiable assumption that something in the universe probably already knows. Whilst I have historically taken a dim view of ‘channelling’ this does seem to have generated some very provocative feedback.
Scotland has seen an export boom in the wake of the post-Brexit currency correction. The policy of the Loch Ness Sturgeon and the SNP of quitting Britain and joining the EU looks increasingly like an absurd posture. Scotland would implode economically without UK handouts and they know it, and they know they won’t get them from the EU now. The Scots just want a bit more autonomy and more subsidies.
Jean Claude Junker threatens Brexit Britain with the sort of spiteful punishing EU exit conditions that surely confirm that no country in its right mind would have ever contemplated joining this failed synarchic superstate if it had known its real agenda. Only fear holds it together now.
I recommend that we threaten to use the RAF and our missile arsenal to completely flatten the corrupt shite-hole of Brussels (having of course given a humanitarian warning to evacuate it first).
Only the French have the capacity to retaliate but I suspect they would like to see the end of it too. Only the Germans and the Euro-Political class have profited from the EU.
‘Belgium’ remains a term of vilest abuse in most of the civilised cultures of the galaxy according to Douglas Adams, one can now see why.
My Years of Magical Thinking - Review.
My Years of Magical Thinking by Lionel Snell.
A Review.
If you look up ‘Magical Thinking’ on the internet, the first several dozen entries take a uniformly negative view of it. Scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists tend to regard Magical Thinking as something foolish, childish, or primitive, whilst religious commentators tend to regard it rather negatively as some misguided precursor to proper religion.
However Lionel makes a very strong case for Magical Thinking as a very necessary way of understanding the world and of interacting with it. He also demonstrates that we all use the magical style of thinking, and use it effectively, far more often than we realise, although we do tend to call it by other names, and shy away from fully exploiting it.
Until the advent of this book nobody had managed to properly and inclusively define Magical Thinking. ‘Magical Thinking’ seemed like something you sort of hopefully acquired by osmosis through studying and practicing magic. Unlike ‘Scientific Methods & Principles’ which we can state and teach explicitly, the magical style of thinking remained ill-defined until this seminal book.
So many magical books seem unsatisfactory and this book shows us why. So many of the older and newer magical books failed to encompass real magical thinking and ended up as confusing and confused tomes of either bad science or poor religion or dodgy art, or mixtures thereof.
Perhaps only a thinker such as Lionel, fluent in science, art, magic and religion, and with the keen analytical mind of a mathematician, could have precisely identified what ‘Magical Method & Principles’ actually consist of, precisely how they differ from the methods and principles of science, art, and religion, and how they provide a distinctive and powerful way of interacting with reality.
I had gradually come to assimilate and appreciate some of the methods and principles of magic over the course of a career but to see the whole lot and more, the entire philosophy of it, all in one place, came as a revelation.
I refuse to try and summarise the book here, you must read it yourself, preferably at least twice. Lionel’s exposition of the relationships between art, religion, science, and magic has tremendous depth and subtlety and explanatory power. Most fascinatingly he argues that magical thinking naturally follows on from scientific thinking in a cyclic fashion, rather than acting as some distant precursor for it.
Nobody should attempt to write another book of magic or about magic, until they have thoroughly studied and understood this one.
This book looks like a game-changer.
Pete Carroll.
Visions
2017 seems to have begun with Visions and with fading Visions.
Perhaps we should speak of Imaginations rather than Visions, because Inspirations do not necessarily come in visual form.
MAGIC
My esoteric year began on Stokastimass, January 8th with an Invocation to The Morrigan, Goddess of Love, War, and Death, (Venus, Mars, Saturn) the Celtic equivalent of Ishtar/Eris. Does she really exist? WELL SHE DOES NOW! (Subject of course to suitable results from the various spells cast by the 15 participants physically present at the rite.)
In terms of the EPOCH chaobala scheme it would seem that many of the polytheistic deities outside of the traditional Greco-Roman pantheon actually correspond to tri-planetary aspects (or more) of the human psychocosm, and that does imply a rather large number of them. Indeed, it can probably accommodate just about any deity/goddess/god form in a way that traditional neo-platonistic kabala, hermeticism or gnosticsm cannot easily do. If I had another lifetime to spare, I would attempt to adumbrate the whole lot. Celtic, Mayan, Polynesian, etc., etc., etc.
An Invocation of Nyarlathotep coordinated via internet by participants on several continents via Arcanorium College on January 21st produced some astonishing results. For me the insight that Imagination not Will shall prevail in the pandaemonaeon of post-truth, para-rational politics, and information overload in religions, sciences, arts, and esoterics, came to the fore. Other participants received inspirations about where contemporary magi should direct their imaginations next.
POLITICS
We have just seen a newly re-visioned Tungsten Theresa launch herself and her nation, Elizabeth the First Style, against the insipid tyranny of the EU. I hope it works. The EU never really had a strong positive vision of itself. It failed to forge a European identity that captured its people’s imaginations. We just got a vast bureaucracy that works lousily and a malfunctioning currency. Thus, regional identities, idiosyncrasies and economic needs have reasserted themselves; the Germans will probably end up with an EU consisting of just East Germany and West Germany. The grandiose project to resuscitate the Holy Roman Empire seems doomed for the nth time.
Theresa May has the awesomely good fortune to have Jeremy Corbyn as her main domestic opponent. Corbyn has failed to grasp that the British appreciation of fairness depends on reciprocity rather than equality, and thus he remains mired in a vision of faux 1970’s student Marxism. The British do not actually mind if people become rich, so long as they spread it around and pay taxes. Nobody knows what vision the Illiberal Dimocrats have, and neither do they. UKIP at least had visions of what it vehemently did not want, blue UKIP did not want loss of sovereignty, and red UKIP did not want uncontrolled immigration and the outsourcing of manufacturing. Whilst I worked for them, I considered myself Purple UKIP, a bit of both. They have probably done their job now. Give Nigel Farage an Hereditary Peerage. Pelt Nicola Sturgeon with crap in the stocks for treason, her position makes no sense beyond faux tartan sectarian troublemaking.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic Donald Trump has assumed the office of POTUS with a visionary acceptance speech. Instinctively (as a businessperson) I tend to trust businesspeople over politicians because businesspeople always calculate costs, whereas with politicians, ideological insanity so often prevails.
Although Trump obviously belongs to the American financial elite, he can see clearly that current policies have screwed the less elite, who form his customer and employee and supporter base, and like any sensible businessperson, he wishes to redress the balance. As Henry Ford once observed, you need to enable your staff to buy your own products. Your average American now has to buy cheap imports from China. This does not seem sustainable.
Of course, all the privileged Hollywood luvvies and rich liberals have predictably come out against Trump yet it seems likely that Trump will only roll back those items of the ‘Liberal Agenda’ that have begun to fail socially and economically: -
The neo-liberal economics of uncontrolled free trade need questioning.
The neo-con-liberal idea that a western style democracy must fit all sizes and that we must therefore use military might to impose it seems in severe need of a cost-benefit analysis.
The liberal social agenda of rights rather than responsibilities needs a rethink.
The big-government politically correct health and safety nanny state, and the hyper-regulation that seem in danger of infantilising whole populations needs sweeping away.
The economic migration, which fuelled developing economies, now needs reconsideration.
The so-called positive discrimination in favour of minorities and multiculturalism need re-examination.
Culturalism needs reasserting. The liberal idea that we should respect other people’s beliefs and cultures has become perfidious, particularly when those others exhibit either no respect or envious hatred of ours. Any multiculturalism that supports the suppression of women or the primacy of theocratic principles does not deserve any respect or toleration.
Worldwide we seem to progress towards a fresh model of CAPITALIST NATIONALISM with variable degrees of mixed economy. In this, States encourage indigenous private enterprise, provide varying degrees of social security, and ‘negotiate’ bilateral economic, security, and dominance arrangements with other States. Both Russia and China belatedly came to successfully pursue this policy just as Europe and America had mistakenly relaxed it and opened their borders to uncontrolled capital, manufacturing, and population movements.
A new western world order seems in the making and it seems appropriate that Britain as the most senior of modern democracies should have led the way towards a new settlement. In Britain, we have, after centuries of struggle, pragmatically cobbled together a peculiarly sophisticated yet largely unwritten constitutional arrangement. In this we have evolved a stable balance between monarchy, parliamentary democracy, judiciary, labour and capital, that allows us to change our rulers and our political direction with minimal casualties. In Britain the membership and influence of extreme right and extreme left political groups remains negligible. On the continent things begin to look nasty.
The EU tried to impose a polity upon Europe using an insipid ideology and a mega-bureaucracy, and it looks like it will now go down very messily and perhaps bloodily into history’s wastepaper basket.
MAGIC again
Jake Stratton Kent has unfortunately written yet another book on magic for the aeonically challenged. He began his career with so-called English Kabala, supposing that the letters of the English alphabet and their modern ordering somehow embodied intrinsic thelemic esoteric secrets rather than just representing an accidental historic mash up that has evolved from many roots. Sure, you can submit any alphabet to Kabbalistic procedures to create a bit of lateral thinking and apophenia, however random kabbalas work just as well as supposedly sacred ones in this respect.
After English Kabala failed to provoke enlightenment, JSK reinvented himself as the UKs Grimoire-ologist in chief, and the results seem similarly weak. Our understanding of magic has moved on from the late medieval and early modern periods and thus a regurgitation of ideas from those times in ‘Pandemonium: A Discordant Concordance of Diverse Spirit Catalogues by Jake Stratton-Kent’ adds nothing to our understanding of magic in theory or practice, although it will look suitably gothic to the gullible on a bookshelf.
I wish JSK a long life, hopefully within decades he may stumble upon late 20th century magic and then perhaps 21st century magic some decades after that, and perhaps eventually he will write ‘Pandaemonaeon, a Chaobala for Modern Times’, which may well regurgitate The EPOCH, a mere century after its publication.
SPECULATIVE SCIENCE
The Hopf Fibration probably represents the trajectories of material within a vorticitating hypersphere such as this universe, and it possibly relates to the modes of fundamental particle behaviour.
This means I shall now probably have to master quaternion and perhaps octonion algebra, groan. However, on the bright side another mathematician has joined me in the quest.
See http://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/216-hopf-fibrations