Marblog 2024
Sortilege
Elective Democracy increasingly displays all its weaknesses in the face of pressure and finance from powerful interest groups and propaganda from powerful media. It encourages the formation and dominance of political parties and it spawns career politicians more intent upon re-election than good governance.
The classical Athenian Greeks rejected it for precisely such reasons.
About half of the world holds elections this year. In many cases such elections simply enable de-facto dictatorships to shuffle their cronies and weed out dissent. Yet in countries with supposedly free elections, the choice of candidates usually remains effectively determined by non-representative cliques, factions, political parties, and the media.
Thus, we now face the unedifying prospect of national elections in the UK and USA in which most voters would probably tick a ‘Neither of the Above’ box if it existed but will otherwise vote only to deny power to whoever they consider the worst alternative.
The vulnerability of Elective Democracy to abuse by self-interested cliques and oligarchs and career politicians led the classical Athenian Greeks to choose Sortition Democracy instead.
In an ideal Sortition system, representatives become selected at random by some sort of lottery to form a government. They serve for a fixed period as a public duty and cannot seek re-selection. Such a system would create parliaments that proportionally reflected all adult age groups, social classes, ethnicities, and genders within a society.
Such parliaments would ideally debate openly but vote by secret ballot. At a stroke this would break the stranglehold of political parties and eliminate most forms of corruption and lobbying by self-interested pressure groups. We could pay the members of a Sortition Parliament well to turn up for debates and votes and have an independent judiciary to eliminate any last vestiges of corruption. Sortition selected representatives would have no other motivation in debate or in voting than their own consciences and the long term benefits to society.
A Sortition Parliament could have half of its members replaced every few years so that it does not have to restart with completely inexperienced members after a complete sortition. It could call upon any number of experts to advise it and it would have a civil service to do so as well.
A Sortition Parliament would of course contain a small percentage of liars, idiots, self-deluded narcissists, criminals, and psychopaths, but far less than the current elective system throws up.
We should not give power to those who seek it.
We could perhaps trial the Sortition system in the UK by replacing the House of Lords with a randomly selected second chamber that has absolute power of veto over the first. It would act as a Citizen’s Jury that acts as a check and balance to the flaws and abuses that become increasingly apparent in elective systems.
Religiophobia.
There seems zero evidence that any religion has ever caused a net improvement in human behaviour. Every bit of charity and compassion promoted by any religion seems more than cancelled by the oppression it has self-righteously enforced.
In our theoretically secular societies, it seems perfectly acceptable to loathe political philosophies like fascism or communism which have very grim and ghastly track records, yet rather bizarrely it becomes increasingly taboo to discriminate between religious philosophies, no matter how bad their recent track records.
So now we have the peculiar spectacle of secular British politicians trying to make capital (and votes) out of accusing each other of phobias against religious philosophies that neither side has any genuine sympathy with.
Richard Dawkins famously described Roman Catholicism as the world’s second worst religion. Should we hate all religions equally or do some seem currently more despicable than others? Surely the more patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, intolerant, anti-liberal humanistic, and anti-rational ones deserve all the derision, criticism, and discrimination we can heap upon them.
This is Chaos. The Draft Manuscript has Landed!
The publisher has received all the written contributions to the Chaos Anthology and responded with a resounding Huzzah! There will now follow a period of editorial work to arrange it all in suitable form and sort out the illustrations, footnotes, and citations, hopefully it will appear sometime later this year.
Contributors include Ronald Hutton, Peter J Carroll, Jaq D Hawkins, Jozef Karika, Julian Vayne, Jacob Sipes, Aidan Watcher, Ivy Corvus, Dave Lee, Lionel Snell, Mariana Pinzon, Carl Abrahamson, Sinobu Kurono, and Sanhre Daffowt.
FSW8 ‘Magic’.
I have always had a fascination with designing and building board games. Analysing and trying to model historical, real world, and fantasy scenarios seems a productive way of stimulating strategic, tactical, imaginative, critical, and counter-factual thinking.
What rules do the actions of a system imply? What systems will emerge from a set of rules?
People keep asking me why I don’t write novels as well as books on magic and physics. Well, I tend to read, and I would naturally write, plot driven novels of ideas rather than character and drama driven stories. So boardgames have become my novels of ideas, my ‘what-if’ stories, and they also allow for endless experimentation with alternative rules and multiple possible endings.
For years I have experimented with modelling magic in a boardgame. It seems that any game system of ‘magic on its own’ can only lead to some kind of quest scenario where you use magic just to gain more magical ability, either cooperatively or competitively. In most game systems, magic or psi works as a ‘rule breaker’ in the sense that it acts as a combat modifier or a mobility modifier or that it distorts the probability of what would normally happen in some other way.
That seems reasonable enough because in the modern view, Magic - whether in enchantment or divination, consists of the art and science of modifying probabilities. (In divination it modifies the probability of guessing the right answer.)
The latest add-on to Frontier Space Warfare, the Psi Weapon Tournament Rules reflects this view. Factions may invest in various Psi facilities and wand like markers denote their presence on the board. Most act as production, combat, or mobility modifiers, but one has a function perhaps unique in game systems.
The power of Prescience allows a vessel or a flotilla of vessels to launch an attack in which, if it fails, the player can cancel it completely and restore the situation before the attack, but at the cost of the loss of the Psi weapon used. It may seem odd to call this Prescience, but this effectively models prescience because it gives a player the ability to explore what would happen if they did something, and then of either going for it or of avoiding doing it.
Herewith the Aquarian faction with a complete set of all 8 Psi weapons. The ones which have a non-local effect remain on the Aquarian homeworld, the expeditionary flotilla on one of its smaller systems carries the local effect combat and mobility modifying Psi weapons.
The Psi weapon tournament rules appear in the FSW8 rules appear in the games section and below.
Psychopath’s Chess
With his attempted conquest of Ukraine bogged down into an attritional stalemate and a contest of endurance with the West, Vladimir Putin must surely have dreamed of opening up a second front to distract the attention, resolve, money, and resources of the West.
Putin has cultivated an alliance with the Iranian government, based on little more than the dictatorial and pariah status of both regimes. Iran sponsors, trains, and arms both Gazan Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. It seems unlikely that either would have gone to war without Iranian approval, and most likely that they both went to war on Iranian instructions.
Putin likes sending messages by dramatic and violent means. Hamas launched its attack on 7th October, Putin’s birthday. He probably considers it a very worthwhile pawn sacrifice.
Amphibia
Climate change continues to confuse the wildlife, we have had an unseasonable period of exceptional rainfall, frosts, and warm days; some plants have flowered alarmingly early. During the unsettled weather of the last weeks, frogs and newts have appeared only fleetingly in the pond at Chateaux Chaos and then disappeared again. Nevertheless, we have healthy looking clumps of both frogspawn and toad spawn. Let us hope that the ferocious dragonfly larvae do not scoff the lot when they emerge, as they did last year.
Febblog 2024.
(Note that a Janblog 2024 does not appear, not because nothing happened but because too much did, what with seasonal festivities in Scotland, family gatherings, an abundance of birthdays (why did so many of the people I know get born at this time of year?), the demands of coordinating 15 others in the creation of the This is Chaos anthology, the writing of Interview with a Wizard 2, embarking on a course of silversmithing, masses of magical correspondence, and surprising responses from some quantum and cosmological physicists.)
Well, the year has ostensibly started very badly with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East in which none of the protagonists seem to have a realistic exit strategy, Humanity seemingly committed to burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels until Climate Catastrophe overwhelms industrial civilisation itself, Elections looming in the UK and the USA that do not look likely to produce results that inspire widespread optimism, The UK seemingly tacitly committed to both maintaining a permanent housing crisis and the long-term-idiotic policy of importing ever more people to shore up its dodgy economy.
On the positive side The Dark Energy Survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02929
Came out as a preprint on January 5th. This resumes the data on 1,500 new type 1a Supernovae, some with redshifts exceeding Z =1.
Conventional cosmologists will interpret the raw data in terms of Flat Universe Theory in an attempt to confirm their ideas about so-called Dark Energy driving an apparent accelerating expansion of the universe.
As soon as the raw data becomes released upon acceptance of a paper, it will go into the algorithms of Hypersphere Cosmology to refine the measurement of the Antipode Distance in its model of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe that appears to us in stereographic projection because of its small overall positive curvature.
Dark Energy Survey data should hopefully confirm not the presence of Dark Energy in the conventional LCDM or wCDM models but the Curvature of the Universe within the HC model.
This paper shows the processing of older type 1a supernovae within the HC model.
This graph following shows the resulting antipode length results for the above data with estimated errors shown for apparent magnitude (blue) shown as + (red) and – (green). Horizontal scale redshift, vertical scale distance (metres).
Plainly two of the supernovae apparent magnitudes do not fit well, but despite the difficulties of apparent magnitude measurement all the rest give a reasonable fit to an Antipode distance of ~1.23 e26 metres or almost exactly 13 billion light years or 4 giga-parsecs.
I confidently expect the forthcoming DES data at higher redshift will confirm and refine this.
Brian Cox Horizons Tour – A twenty first century space odyssey.
We went to this in Bristol recently and enjoyed it immensely. How refreshing to discover just how widespread interest in Cosmology has become. Cox lectured to a big packed venue in front of a screen full of spectacular images from near and deep space and out to the limits of observation from space based telescopes. Whilst I have multiple issues with many of the conventional interpretations of the images and data that he presented, and particular doubts about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, I particularly liked the second half where he became more speculative and philosophical about life the universe and everything, and our beautiful planet, let us hope that the 99% unicellular slime hypothesis does not apply to the trillions of planets potentially capable of supporting life.
Under Construction
An Apophenia Ring in 1.5mm 925 Silver – Sawing the shank out of a sheet of silver seemed easy enough, bending it into a circle proved tough going, cutting out the Apophenia symbol with little files took many hours, soldering them together took mere minutes. I may later add a Chrysoberyl or Alexandrite cabochon in the circular part of the symbol which invokes the esoteric inspirations of Ouranos and Venus, with touches of Mercury and the Moon.
Herewith a rather delightful sci-fi image of Apophenia, I don’t know anything about the site it appears on.
https://www.apophenium.com/p/welcome-to-apophenium
Hopefully Apophenia, the goddess and muse of strange connections and the imagination will assist with the project below: -
A Quantum Ontology – Can we have such a thing?
Thought and language remain heavily structured by the preconception that phenomena (must?) consist of ‘something doing something’, yet we can only observe the doing and hypothesise (perhaps erroneously) about any underlying being.
Can we conceptualise something fundamental as exhibiting both doing and being?
Or do fundamental phenomena consist only of their doing and have no sort of substructure?
If fundamental phenomenon have no substructure, then does causality not apply any further?
If, as according to quantum field theory, a near infinite number of quantum harmonic oscillators pervades all of space, and all fields, waves, and particles consist of excitations of these oscillators, does that make such oscillators truly fundamental? If so, what oscillates? Spacetime itself?
Does our model of cosmology influence our quantum epistemology?
IF the Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics can model bosons (energy wave/particles such as the photons of light) as closed loops of particle-antiparticle in spacetime -
And IF the Wave Structure of Matter of Milo Wolff https://www.spaceandmotion.com/Wolff-Wave-Structure-Matter.htm can model fermions (matter wave/particles such as electrons) as the points from which outgoing waves subtend wavelike fields to the extremities of the universe and at which such waves reconverge in inverted form, AND the universe has a hyperspherical geometry; -
THEN – Could all quanta (or the spinorial twists that compose them) consist of closed loops in spacetime? This would at least sidestep the problem of fundamental phenomena and causality, as such phenomena would then appear as the causes of themselves – at least within our common 3+1 dimensional reference frame.
Decblog 2023.
Seasonal Greetings! - Well why not, the weather (to the extent that we can rely on it these days of climate disruption) usually becomes dismal in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, our gardens look like blasted wastelands, the deciduous trees look mournful, the golden leaves of autumn have turned to mush and mud beneath our feet. The squirrels have given up on the last pickings of this year’s unusually abundant hawthorn berries. The news seems worse than usual.
So, eat, drink, and be merry, because we do not have the physiological adaptations to hibernate it all away. Happy Mithrasmass, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Hogmanay, or whatever you celebrate your survival of another year and your intentions for the future with.
For a bit of cheer, I send my seasonal greeting cards, Firstly, Aurora Borealis as seen recently from the hills surrounding Loch Ness. Those charged solar particles certainly do make gorgeous ionisation patterns in our atmosphere. We approach a solar maximum in the coming year, so expect unpredictability, mayhem, and ‘interesting times’. Secondly, the Mandragora Autumnalis in the greenhouses of Chateaus Chaos brighten the winter world with an unseasonal burst of green, Boris (centre) seems particularly ebullient in his new individual pot.
Esoteric News: -
The Dean Radin & Pete Carroll Rap.
Recently I came into email contact with Dean Radin, a pre-eminent figure in Parapsychology in America and a notable figure in RENSEP, https://www.rensep.org/about/about-rensep/
We had an extended exchange of ideas, herewith by mutual agreement, the fruits of our deliberations, a substantial read : -
https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/381-the-dean-radin-pete-carroll-rap
ADDENDUM - HEREWITH THE EXPERIMENT https://www.magicktest.com/
Interview with a Wizard 2. (Or something like that.) Sanhre Daffowt and I approach the halfway mark on another mega Q & A adventure, we may have the finished item ready for the publisher by end 2024.
Chaos Magic Anthology.
Fifteen contributors now labour at this endeavour. From what they have chosen to write about from their various works and researches and experiences, I think we can expect astonishing result.
Geopolitics. We only get to hear what the various news and propaganda media tell us. Currently, it seems that 37m Ukrainians slog it out with 144m Russians with potentially massive geopolitical consequences, probably 500,000 casualties so far, some very valuable lebensraum at stake, and Putin very clearly in the wrong. Yet this story has become largely eclipsed by the story of ~3m Palestinians slogging it out with 7m Israelis over territory worth very little, with nothing much at stake geopolitically, and neither side seeming entirely in the right or wrong. Do the media find morally ambiguous conflict and polarised opinion more marketable?
Instability in eastern Europe will not end until the neo-feudal gangster regime in Russia eats itself, and the Russian people and foreign allies turn against it. Keep the conjurations coming:
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
Science News. The JWST continues to provide confirmation of the Hypersphere Cosmology assertion that: - The universe will appear homogenous and isotropic on the large scale at all points in space AND time (once we have allowed for cosmological gravitational redshift and hyperspherical lensing).
The universe seems full of mature galaxies and galaxies at all stages in their life cycles at all observable distances. This profoundly contradicts the currently official LCDM Big-Bang hypothesis.
Bronze Craft. In addition to a daily program of resistance exercise, an elderly wizard also requires handicraft distractions to survive the rigours of perpetual literary endeavours and scientific and magical research. Herewith some recent creations in Bronze, a couple of Stokastikos signet rings. They look a very rough, but the beauty of the metal itself compensates, and things will improve with practise.
.
I cheated a bit here by using Prometheus Bronze Clay, a pesky and recalcitrant material which you can shape by hand and then fire with a gas blowtorch in a kitchen or shed, rather than converting an outhouse into a foundry with furnace, crucibles, and moulds.
Have a great festive season.
Novblog 2023
Obituary. Ray Sherwin.
I understand from friends that Ray Sherwin died in Las Palmas (Canary Islands) this June past.
I shall remember fondly the year that my wife and I spent in his village of East Morton. We kicked around a lot of the ideas that would become part of Chaos Magic, Ray introduced me to Chris Bray of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and a number of people who would become leading figures in the Chaoist revolution. We had some splendid times trying out new rituals with friends in his attic, and up in the woods around Sunnydale Reservoir.
Ray did not wear his modest literary scholarship lightly, yet his pomposity and arrogance had an amusing and endearing quality to it which brightened many an evening spent in the Busfield Arms in Morton. I considered his attitude towards his longsuffering first Polish wife Marlena rather Neanderthal, even by 1980s Yorkshire standards, my wife considered it appalling. Marlena eventually left him but soon afterwards she suffered a catastrophic stroke.
Ray contributed directly to Chaos Magic mainly by turning his Thelemic fanzine into a Chaoist one called Chaos International and in showing me how to make an edition of Liber Null on a tabletop scale in the days before it became cheap and easy to self-publish books.
Ray’s written contribution to the annals of Chaos Magic remained rather modest at just two small volumes, The Book of Results and The Theatre of Magic. He also seems mainly responsible for a small 25 page book by ‘Paula Pagani’ called The Cardinal Rites of Chaos which details the seasonal rituals of a short lived group he assembled in Morton after I had left. The grandly titled ‘Cardinal Rites’ seem most charitably described as Discordian amateur dramatics.
Yet after he retired with a new younger wife to a small villa in the Canary Islands, Ray published two regrettable diatribes, Vitriol and Ouroboros, both full of conspiracy theory nonsense and invective against his former friends and colleagues and the IOT, despite that I had urged him to desist and check his sources. We never communicated again after he published them.
I rather suspected that he had lost his critical faculties, and friends have confirmed that both Ray and his wife had sunk deeply into alcoholism, poverty, and conspiracy theory, and that their young daughter had become their carer. Having watched my own father drink himself to death decades ago, I concluded that alcoholism results from a Failure of Imagination; failure to realise what it does to you, and failure to imagine doing something else instead.
So, a rather tragic and sad ending to a life, but thanks Ray for that entertaining and highly productive year in East Morton.
For a further commentary on Ray, Vitriol, and Ouroboros see: -
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/226-two-reviews
Retroactive Enchantment!
“Our Gedankenexperiment thus draws a metrological advantage from effective retrocausation founded in entangled states. While PCTC simulations do not allow you to go back and alter your past, they do allow you to create a better tomorrow by fixing yesterday’s problems today. “
Nonclassical Advantage in Metrology Established via Quantum Simulations of Hypothetical Closed Timelike Curves. Available from:
Does Science become more mystical?
Have a look at this! Io Baphomet! Neo-Panpsychism? Morphic Fields Strike again!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120
Chaos Magic Anthology
One of my publishers has invited me to assemble a team to write an Anthology about Chaos Magic. I have already rounded up many of the veterans from the old guard and some of the more prominent figures from the new generations of Chaoists. We may have space for just one more to join our illustrious lineup, so let me know if you think of contributors I may have missed.
In other news: - The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch look set to appear in Spanish.
Samhain. An Eisteddfod Poem.
Summer ends
The veil descends
Darkness begins
A time of fear
Illness, cold, and want
And thus,
A time to laugh at death
Yet the dead still live
Whilst still remembered
Fondly or otherwise.
Leaves fall
Like discarded ideas
I put them in
The compost bin.
Octblog 2023
Poem.
Having recently answered more or less the same question from four different interviewers I put the question and the answer (of sorts) into a brief ditty for the Solstice Eisteddfod at Grove.
Tell me O Sorcerer-Scientist
How does a purely physical mind
Affect the material world?
Well physical theories
Have metaphysics all of their own
Classical physics has cause and effect
Events have definite causes
Realism rules, and thus;
Things always exist as definite states.
Relativity just adds locality
So nothing goes faster than light
And everything consists of particles.
Democritus at least got that bit right.
But we have two physical theories
The quantum one seems rather weird,
It contradicts all the above
Events have probabilities,
Unobserved events remain indefinite,
Entanglement works instantly in time
And oblivious to distance,
And everything consists of waves.
Dirac and De Broglie intuited that.
Both theories seem true
From a particular point of view.
We can only measure the particle reality
We can only imagine the wave reality
If our epistemology reflects ontology
Reality needs both
To do anything at all
So how does a physical brain
Interact with a material world?
Classically, or Weirdly as well?
Can experiments tell
What theories work best?
Therein lies our quest!
Antimatter down.
Observation of anti-hydrogen made in particle accelerators has recently shown that it falls downwards as expected, and not up. If it had fallen upwards in response to gravity the physics community would have reacted with shock and horror rather than levity, and all sorts of paradoxes would have arisen. Both mater and antimatter react identically to gravity, but that still leaves conventional cosmology with the headache of trying to explain why a big bang did not produce equal amounts of both.
I suspect the answer to the question of why the universe seems matter dominated has nothing to do with the supposed big bang and everything to do with the chiral asymmetry of the weak force arising from the Majorana Fermion nature of the Neutrino, i.e., it consists of a single type of particle that can either spin clockwise or anticlockwise with respect to its direction of propagation and that alone determines whether we categorise it as matter or antimatter. Furthermore, various particle’s spins in higher dimensional spacetime account for their electromagnetic and nuclear charges and our attribution of matter or antimatter status to them. Work continues on this idea.
JWST.
The James Webb Space Telescope went up primarily to investigate the unexpectedly vast number of galaxies at extreme distances that the Hubble Space Telescope first caught faint glimpses of. The big bang hypothesis predicts or at least heavily implies that galaxies like our own fully formed one should not exist at extreme distances in space and time because they will not have had time to form since a big bang.
It becomes increasingly clear from the JWST data that galaxies just like our own seem to exist everywhere out to the present limits of observation. Hypersphere Cosmology predicts that the universe will appear isotropic and homogenous on the very large scale at all points in space and time. It will look the same everywhere and everywhen, once we have factored in the redshift and the gravitational lensing arising from a small overall spacetime curvature.
Meanwhile the LCDM big bang theorists strive to add yet another ad hoc patch to their creaking model, by modifying their hypotheses about galaxy formation.
Resisting AI in Magic.
I have just written a somewhat critical appraisal of a forthcoming book on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Magic, I have read a book on magic written almost entirely by AI, and I have also watched a colleague getting AI to create sundry invocations and incantations online in seconds.
Herewith my verdict: -
AIs scour the internet for material created by humans and then attempt to compound a grammatically correct mash up from what looks like the most the most popular or readily available material. AI does not seem capable of creativity or of differentiating between popularity and quality.
Consequently, what it produces seems lumpen, verbose, predictable, generic, derivative, and uninspired. Don’t expect it to come up with anything surprising, memorable, or quotable yet. It has no spark or bite to it. It currently seems best suited to composing dull advertising copy for dishwashers or creating rather run of the mill travel brochures.
AI generated material makes magic look ridiculously easy to do, and this will lead some to engage with it in a far too casual manner, and to get poor or negligible results. Internet-itis (decreasing attention span) will follow, leaving enthusiasts to drift from one passing fad to another. Never underestimate the value of the work that goes into designing your own spells and rituals and entities for yourself and launching them with Gnostic levels of mental intensity.
It seems likely that some of the magic pages of the internet will fill up with a blizzard of mediocre and formulaic AI generated imagery, text, and rituals, which will rapidly turn off all but the most dim-witted dabblers. The fightback against AI generated magic text and imagery will soon follow.
Arcanorium College may institute new protocols for the submission of Batchelor of Magic Theses. We may eventually require that candidates write them under examination conditions inside Faraday cages with quill pens, but presently AI generated material looks fairly easy to spot.
New Book (eventually)
Following the publication of ‘Interview with a Wizard’, I established contact with another writer (this time a practising Chaos Magician) who wanted to conduct a further interview. This second interview has mushroomed into another mega-inquisition with the simple ground rule that he cannot ask a question already asked in the first interview.
As we recently passed question one hundred and seventy, I enquired of Mandrake, the publishers of Interview with a Wizard, if a second long-form interview book would interest them. I got a very enthusiastic yes to that. So, when have done another hundred and seventy or so in another year or more, we will submit it for publication. Watch this space for ‘Interview with a Wizard 2’ or similar title.
Chaos Magic in Japan.
My colleagues in Japan (who I have yet to meet in person) have requested that I place two articles here which they will later use in a Japanese book on introductory Chaos Magic. As the discussion of magical and metaphysical concepts can present difficulties when conducted across a cultural and linguistic divide, I have kept this as simple as possible.
Utilizing the Chaosphere, its application, and the underlying theory.
The Chaosphere consists of a three dimensional representation of the Eight Rayed Star of Chaos.
The Eight Rayed Star of Chaos has manifold scientific-metaphysical, psychological, and magical meanings. It can support the imagination of many symmetries and dualities.
Herewith one from recent Chaoist research for my Japanese colleagues: -
In basic science the eight arrows can represent the four axes of ordinary three dimensional space and one dimensional time. These represent our degrees of physical freedom in a universe with a simple Newtonian metaphysic.
In advanced Quantum-Relativistic Hypersphere science the eight arrows can each represent the degrees of freedom in our universe of curved three dimensional space and curved three dimensional time. (We can usually ignore the curvature ‘dimensions’ of space and time on the human scale, but it does affect the spacetime topology of the entire universe and the likelihood of alien intelligences existing). In this representation, all of the eight axes lie orthogonal (at right angles) to each other, implying the full higher dimensionality of the universe.
Three dimensional time provides the key to understanding the quantum-probabilistic nature of our partly chaotic physical reality, and of how magic works.
In psychological terms, the Eight Rays represent the eight major impulses that we as biological organisms have evolved: Sex/Death, Fear/Desire, Love/Hate, Solar Ego/Magical Self.
In magical terms the Eight Rays represent the Eight Magics that derive from the human condition and which we can equate symbolically to Pagan Deities and their symbolic planets and colours.
Sex Magic – The Moon – Purple. Attraction, the inspirations of sexual desire and ecstasy.
Death Magic – Saturn – Black. The motivation that awareness of mortality brings.
Fear Magic – Orange – Mercury. Intellect, quick thinking, inventiveness, cleverness.
Desire Magic – Blue – Jupiter. Acquisition of wealth, power, status.
Love Magic – Green – Venus. Empathy, attachment, loyalty.
War Magic – Red – Mars. Vitality, aggression, competitiveness, combat.
Ego Magic- Yellow – Sun. Charisma, radiance, persuasiveness.
Pure Magic- Octarine- Ouranos. Magical research, esoteric and antinomian knowledge.
Chaos Magicians can place a Chaosphere on their altars to affirm their commitment to developing all of the powers and abilities latent within themselves.
A Chaosphere symbolises the random creative powers of the universe and of humans. The central orb represent the formless personal Kia or life force and the arrows represent its many possibilities of direction. The magician can impale various spells on the spikes.
Concentration upon the Chaosphere in thinking meditation can lead to new insights into the structure of reality and the human experience. Concentration on the Chaosphere in ‘no-mind’ meditation can lead to resonance with, and inspiration from, transpersonal and extraterrestrial sources of Chaoist insight and enlightenment.
How do you perceive Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction?
People who cultivate many personal contacts and who remain open to new ideas and opportunities usually have better luck than others who do not. This seems more important than simply thinking positively and wishing for good luck.
The world has a lot of randomness in it, some of it can affect us negatively, some of it can affect us positively, but we can look for positive opportunities in whatever happens to us.
The subconscious and unconscious parts of our minds have a strong effect on what we do, and they can also have a direct magical effect on reality. If we keep thinking conscious positive thoughts these thoughts will gradually become part of the subconscious and unconscious mind. This can take a lot of time, but magical techniques offer some shortcuts.
Magical Spells, Rituals, and Invocations can achieve much deeper and quicker alterations to the subconscious mind than simply trying to think positive conscious thoughts for long periods.
Subconscious and unconscious desires have more powerful effects than conscious desires. Conscious desires tend to get mixed up with other thoughts and doubts, particularly if you keep consciously thinking about them.
Magicians should aim to concentrate their positive thinking into Spells, Rituals, and Invocations and then not consciously think about them afterwards and let their subconscious and unconscious minds create the magical effects.
Mandrakes.
In the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos, ‘Boris’, one of the three Mandragora Autumnalis plants, has sprung from the underworld as the equinox passes and we enter autumn. Perhaps we shall see some mandrake seed pods later. The project to repopulate southwest England with them has fallen far behind schedule.
Septblog 2023
Conspiracy Theory.
Illuminati update No 23. We note substantial incursions into the terrestrial noosphere at this time. These seem to originate from adolescent space lizards using the popular but frowned upon ‘Mayhem and Havoc’ Role Playing Game System here on Earth.
The three rules seem simple enough.
1) Pick a fairly primitive planet with only level three sentience, the sort of place where the inhabitants still believe in things like gods, money, nations, or the big bang hypothesis.
2) Select one or more inhabitants as avatars and see who can wreak the most mayhem and havoc.
3) Don’t tell your parents.
We currently seem to have six major players or teams of players in action experimenting with the following game challenges here on Earth: -
A) Reduce the most powerful nation to a laughingstock or to a civil war by using a single avatar that can only bluster bombastically and tell ridiculous lies.
B) Elevate the second most powerful nation to the top position regardless of internal and collateral damage, use a committee of avatars if required.
C) Use the third most militarily powerful nation to initiate major wars, and if possible worldwide war, using only a single misanthropic psychopath as avatar.
D) Using multiple avatars ensure that the planet’s potentially greatest alliance of nations descends into a corrupt ineffectual bureaucratic squabbling shambles.
E) Set the planet on fire, burn all the combustible deposits, wreck the climate, decimate agriculture and the population, use any number of avatars.
F) Pick a handful of major or minor religions or philosophies and see how much division, strife, and murder you can create with them, use multiple avatars.
All conspiracy theories, no matter how apparently absurd, reveal something about our responses to the order-chaos-disorder, and weirdness going on in our worlds. They usually do this by metaphor or analogy that displaces blame elsewhere because people do not wish to acknowledge or confront the more probable causes.
Hardline Christians started a Satanic Ritual Abuse scare some decades ago. Negligible real evidence of abuse ever appeared, but a tsunami of real evidence of abuse eventually emerged concerning, - you guessed it - Hardline Christians - both within the catholic church and within many protestant sects.
The professional and managerial classes in the USA have severely degraded the prospects of the children of the blue collar class, so we have a conspiracy about powerful satanic child abusers controlled by lizards.
When we perceive the rich and powerful screwing the poor more than usual, Antisemitism often rears its head, despite that Jews make up only a small proportion of the rich and powerful anywhere, and control only one government in a tiny nation.
When a culture war breaks out between factions of the professional and managerial classes, and they start demonising each other and trying to displace each other, we should consider the extent to which those classes have become severely overcrowded.
The popularity of lizard symbolism for demonic or hellishly immoral agents or agencies tells us something about ourselves and the primitive reptilian circuits that lurk in all our hindbrains.
A Fascinating Thesis. I have just received a PhD thesis from Vasilis Meletiadis of Bristol University, ‘The History of Chaos Magic 1976 – 2000’. He has conducted lengthy interviews with many of us that he writes about, and exhaustive research into the cultural milieu in which Chaos Magic arose. As a rather non-musical, and non-party person myself, I had not realised the huge extent of the overlap between Chaos Magic and the more extreme end of alternative popular music and clubbing culture, nor quite how dark the UK manifestation of Chaos appeared compared to its American cousin Discordianism. Nor quite the extent to which its spread depended on amateur ‘zines’, and the extent to which the advent of the internet changed its method of spread and its structure and practices.
Overall, the thesis seems fair, balanced, and exceptionally well researched and written. Historically it will probably take first place as the definitive history. As soon as it becomes published and in the public domain, I will provide a link to it.
I hope to see a similarly definitive academic history of chaos magic 2000 – 2024 emerge sometime from someone.
Parapsychology. Dr Dean Radin has a very high profile in the world of parapsychology, having presided over the Parapsychology Association for a number of years, written a number of notable books on parapsychology, presented many lectures on it, and worked with many experiments into it.
We finally got to talk at length and discussed such topics as the desirability (or not) of proving the existence of parapsychology to the satisfaction of scientists, the equations of magic, public belief in magic, Sheldrake’s experiments, the potential weaponization of psi, quantum physics and psi and the possible implications of the Tsirelson Bound, the measurement/observer problem, and the trade-offs involved between the magic friendliness and science friendliness of psi experiments – this last topic remaining a subject of ongoing discussions.
Citation 14/08/2023. Now in about its fifteenth year of operation, Arcanorium College proudly confers the degree of Batchelor of Magic upon a second alumnus!
https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic
The course makes awesome demands upon the perseverance and dedication of applicants. Many come forward but few make the grade.
Global Warming. Whilst continental Europe has combusted, we have had a meteorologically lousy August here in the UK, - unseasonably dull, chilly, and often wet, plus one of my autumnal mandrakes (Boris) has woken up at least 8 weeks early and started to push forth leaf shoots, whilst Igor and Circe continue to slumber awhile.
My Sci-fi hobby.
The news that many hundreds of UK schools and public buildings will soon collapse if we don’t spend fifty or more billion pounds on them prompted research into precisely what material the hulls of the Lithonian and Skaron fleets consist of. Its apparently AAC, aerated autoclaved concrete - lightweight, cheap, not very strong, widely used for substandard dodgy building, and occasionally by sculptors. The massive demolition projects that will have to follow will likely ensure that plenty of the stuff ends up floating in Welsh watercourses and ultimately on the beach fronting the spaceship yards.
Herewith the new Lithonian Anti-Matter Dreadnought and its counterpart in the rival Skaron fleet. Both societies have created a single ultimate ‘deterrent’ in the form of a bomb with about a metric ton of antimatter in it – enough to trash a planet or an entire sector of space: -
As this seems to evolve towards an interplanetary game scenario with reaction thrust propelled ships rather than an interstellar one with warp drives, work has begun on a board/backdrop for interplanetary manoeuvring: -
On the larger map, silver washers show the last eight moves of the two planets in their orbits and the movement of a red ship from the red planet to intercept the green planet. One of the smaller maps shows the gravity well around the green planet and a ship launched from it to intercept the red ship in low orbit.
Obliterating the rival civilisation counts as only a minor victory, forcing its surrender counts as a major victory. Several varieties of a draw remain possible, some worse than others….the game basically models a nuclear standoff.
Augblog 2023
Weird Physics. Herewith a result from evoking Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth simultaneously in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos; the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics integrated with Hypersphere Cosmology.
The idea seems crazy, perhaps crazy enough to prove useful.
At the very least it may lend particle attraction a visualisable mechanism, confirm the conservation of the spins or whatever underlying fundamental quanta and the suspected immortality of the Proton, it may also partially resolve Loschmidt’s Paradox concerning the emergence of irreversible processes (such as entropy) from seemingly reversible processes - because particle attraction does not simply equate to time reversed particle repulsion.
For a fuller exegesis of the hypothesis see: -
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/376-tiqm-and-hypersphere-cosmology
Arcanorium College Department of Magic Update.
The Batchelor of Magic Syllabus has some updates including additional page references for the new Classic Editions of Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos.
https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic
Sortition.
Elective Democracy seems increasingly beset with problems the classical Greeks identified two millennia ago, plus a few more of modern origin.
Political Parties rather than individual Elected Representatives now dominate the political landscape. This has led to increasing groupthink and polarisation. It has also made it much easier for minority interest lobby groups to exert disproportionate effects on party policy by making donations or skilful use of the media.
Increasingly intrusive media have now completely eroded the personal privacy of anyone entering politics.
Increasingly powerful media now seek to influence opinion rather than to reflect it and disinformation and propaganda now proliferate unchecked.
The pressure to conform to all party policies acts as a severe disincentive to people of integrity becoming professional politicians.
Election pressure frequently forces party policy in the direction of short term popularity rather than the long term interest.
The Classical Greeks recognised the corrupting potential of electing representatives, and they had a ready solution which they regarded as the genuine form of ‘Democracy’ – (rule by the people), they simply delegated the task randomly by lot amongst the people. That only included freeborn male citizens, a limitation we would not consider today.
A government selected randomly by lot would consist of 50% women and a proportional representation of all social classes and adult ages.
If it voted by secret ballot on any issue it chose to debate, it should prove corruption resistant. Paying delegated representatives a very generous salary and pension for turning up to debates and voting, and having severe penalties for any form of corruption or undisclosed interest should act as an additional incentive to integrity.
Because it remains vanishingly unlikely to become reselected it will likely choose to act in the best longer term interests of society.
A Sortition Democracy would eliminate political parties at a stroke. Few people really like political parties, fewer still actually belong to them, most people vote negatively to merely keep out the parties they most dislike.
The Greeks recognised that elective democracy lay vulnerable to oligarchy and the main political parties themselves have emerged as the oligarchs of political power.
Of course, a sortition government will contain five percent idiots and a percentage or two of selfish and evil people, but that seems a great improvement on what the current system produces.
Perhaps we could try out sortition to select the UK House of Lords for starters, and then think about extending it to reform the House of Commons.
My Sci-Fi hobby.
Down at our retreat on a remote shore in Wales, a rather dismal July and poor surf has occasioned the reopening of the spaceship yards.
Herewith the completed Detritus Squadron of the Skaron fleet (so named because a kind of Scrap-Dalek aesthetic seems to have inspired their design). Only stone from the beach, glue and leftover metal fitments go into their construction as the arms race between Lithonia and Skaron escalates to the point where I shall have to start work on the game rules and backstory.
Julblog 2023
Liber Kaos, Chaos Magic for the Pandaemonaeon. The New Classic Edition.
First published by Weisers in 1992, this grimoire of magical theory, practise, and philosophy develops and expands the paradigm shift from the old ‘ancient wisdom’ approach to magic to something far more irreligious, powerful, and scientific. It builds upon the insights developed in the seminal first book of Chaos Magic – Liber Null & Psychonaut (~1980-7) through a decade of further intensive research and experiment, and now this updated edition comes with the benefit of a further two decades of work and contemplation.
Herewith the astonishing list of contents: -
Those unfamiliar with the concept of the Pandaemonaeon may choose to read these prophetic words: - https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/156-pandaemonaeon
Herewith a link to the availability of the book and some sample pages.
https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/liber-kaos
Knights of Chaos. Ukraine campaign.
A message from the Acting Marshal.
Most battles and wars begin with someone’s expectation of quick victory by manoeuvre, but most become settled by grim attrition. The war in Ukraine shows no exception to this.
On March 3rd, 2022, the KoC called upon the free world’s magical community to: -
‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him.’
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
Speculation surrounds the split between Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary army and Putin, yet there seems little doubt that the split has substantially weakened Putin’s political, military, and diplomatic position. We shall not have lasting peace in Europe until both Putin and dictatorship become rejected by Russians.
My thanks to the many who have already raised their wands and cast spells and sigils.
We ‘Enchant Long’ in this protracted struggle, and now as tide of war may begin to turn decisively, we need to redouble our efforts. KEEP THOSE CONJURATIONS COMING!
Book Review.
https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Mindset-Champions-Daniel-Domaradzki/dp/B0C6VWRGDC/
Crowley’s dictum that magic consists of the raising of the whole person to the power of infinity seems often ignored by the magical community. Crowley appears to have explored all forms of debauchery to extreme levels but he also free climbed Beachy Head and performed quite astonishing feats of physical endurance, self-discipline, and concentration. For those who think they may need a bit more of the latter (and particularly for those who don’t) this book provides an invigorating challenge to become stronger and more focussed.
Personally, I have always considered physical and mental strength and resilience an invaluable support in the development of magical power and knowledge, so I have gladly taken a few tips from Daniel as we discussed the application of magical and esoteric techniques to strength training in which he works professionally. Techniques from both traditions appear in the book.
Expect a boot camp of a book, written simply and directly with no compromises offered or excuses accepted.
Junblog 2023
Travelogue, archaeology, cuisine, etc.
The month of May proved a splendid time for a visit to the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The hillsides around Loch Ness blaze with great lush thickets of vibrant yellow gorse, the midges have not yet erupted from the bogs and ditches to make hillwalking hellish when the breezes drop. The Scottish secessionist movement has thankfully imploded under scandal and infighting. Our kids and grandkids thrive. The Scots Steak Pies* remain the pinnacle of British cuisine. I had a splendid time.
(*The ubiquitous Cornish Pasties remain a severe downside to my life in the Southwest. Bakeries seem to serve little else here except these artless greasy pastries filled with ghastly shovelfuls of swede, turnip, and mean gristle, whereas the noble Scots Steak Pie contains nothing but generous portions of bovine muscle tissue in fine gravy.)
On the slopes above the Ness, I came across a rare patch of about twenty False Morels, Gyromitra esculenta: -
These strange fungi resemble something between blowtorched spaghetti and mummified brains. They can kill you if you eat them, they can also kill you if you merely try cooking them, as they then give off methyl hydrazine gas.
Mainland Orkney seemed even more heavily livestock farmed than when we visited it half a century ago. Barely a tree or hedge remains anywhere, just endless rolling slopes of fenced grassland and sad stinking barns full of livestock kept mainly indoors to fatten whilst machines plant, harvest, and fertilise the grass for them. (I had better check on the ethical sourcing of those pies.)
All the wildlife clings to the Orcadian coast, we saw plenty of seals and a splendid variety of seabirds. As I went beachcombing in heavy boots, three layers of clothing, woolly hat, and gloves against the chilly conditions, our three hardy oat-fed highland grandchildren stripped off and hurled themselves into the icy north sea to frolic in the waves, laughing at us soft Sassenachs.
Fairly recent archaeological discoveries on the Ness of Brodgar between the small stone circle of the Stones of Stenness and the huge stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar have led to some interesting speculations. The historian Neil Oliver has presented some rather grandiose ideas about their significance. Do the neolithic remains on the Ness of Brodgar imply that Orcadian neolithic culture predates and inspired the culture that built Stonehenge? Do these remains imply that a Neolithic Theocracy dominated Orkney and built the stone huts and stone circles as a centre of religious cult activities?
I rather doubt this. The stone huts do not seem that large or temple-like when you get close up. They probably built in stone because wood had become increasingly scarce. Neolithic cultures consumed huge amounts of wood for cooking and heating, tool hafting, and roof building. The small lathe and hide Neolithic boats could not have transported significant quantities of timber from mainland Scotland once supplies had become exhausted on Orkney. Orcadian civilisation appears to have gone into severe decline until the development of bigger boats in the iron age.
The Ring of Brodgar seems singularly unsuitable for religious or cultish rituals, or even as a ceremonial meeting place. It has a diameter of 340 feet, you cannot even shout across it in a slight breeze, and it does not seem to have any features in its centre. The ring seems more like an example of Clan Power Bling to me. It seems more likely that some local warlord had it built as a statement of authority, control, and ownership of the land and the people. The stone huts contained very few items that looked like they could have had a religious function, but they did hold a number of finely worked stone mace heads for cracking skulls and intimidating people.
Appeal
I had a very enjoyable and fascinating day at Joanna William’s Fire Iron Art forge and studio at Bristol Docks after receiving a voucher for a day’s blacksmithing experience for my birthday.
See Joanna here at work in her forge and studio: -
Joanna guided me through the basics of the blacksmith’s craft showing me how to heat iron in the forge and then shape it with hammer, anvil, vices, and tongs. Herewith my apprentice pieces made on the day, a selection of useful hooks and hangers with a pleasingly rugged antique aesthetic.
Towards the end of the day Joanna indulged my request to try and hand forge some esoteric instruments and she expertly guided me through the process. Herewith three forged iron Pocket Wands which can also serve to delineate Triangles of Arte in works of evocation.
I had a great day at the forge, and I commend the experience to anyone interested in developing their creative craft skills.
I have since seem Joanna exhibiting her own creations at various sculpture and craft events and her skill and dedication, and artistry never ceases to amaze. One day I hope to commission her to create splendid wrought iron gates for my home.
However, disaster has struck Joanna’s enterprise. A night-time arson attack on adjoining buildings in the Underfall Yard at Bristol Docks has also pretty much destroyed her forge and studio.
Here is a link to the crowdfunding appeal to help Joanna restore her facilities and continue to practise and teach the skills of blacksmithing and artistry in iron.
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/fireironartblacksmith?utm_term=pWbX8gyJx
Please give what you can towards restoring her forge and studio after the tragic fire.
The CMBR
Hypersphere Cosmology has successfully explained most the data from which orthodox cosmology has cobbled together the conventional concordance model of LCDM Big Bang Theory and replaced it with a simpler and more elegant model that has no singularities, inflation, expansion, dark matter, or dark energy.
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation alone remains not rigorously reinterpreted within Hypersphere Cosmology.
Within the LCDM model the CMBR consists of relic radiation from a period about a third of a million years after a Big Bang when the primeval fireball had expanded and cooled to a mere 3,0000 Kelvin and deionised to become transparent to light. Subsequent ‘expansion of space’ or the separation of gravitationally bound structures within the universe has supposedly stretched out and redshifted the wavelength of the 3,000K light to a wavelength corresponding to 2.70 Kelvin. We can make out a fairly credible mathematical case for this but at the price of assuming that the contents of the entire or observable universe once occupied an infinitely or insanely small volume at unrealistic temperature and density.
As Hypersphere Cosmology can provide an alternative interpretation for all the rest of the cosmological observational data without using the hypotheses of a big bang or an expanding universe then it requires an explanation of the CMBR to complete its case for a new paradigm.
Some cosmologists continue to wonder of the CMBR may arise from the redshifting of starlight from distant sources to the point where it thermalises into equilibrium with cold dust and gas in intergalactic space. In other words, the thin intergalactic medium has a basic temperature of only 2.70 K and once starlight has become redshifted to a corresponding temperature it continues to bounce around at relatively short ranges and remains at that wavelength, in thermodynamic equilibrium with the medium.
A couple of fairly recent papers explore this idea further.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2197/1/012026/meta
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/478/1/283/4975800
Alternatively, Hypersphere Cosmology can perhaps supply a mechanism. As any gravitationally bound structure in the universe will rotate by hyperspherical vorticitation to its antipode position within the universe every 13 billion years, and any light emitted will also tend to reconverge in highly redshifted form on its antipode position in the same period, then the CMBR we observe may consist of light emitted from our own and nearby galaxies reconverging here 13 billion years later.
A redshift of 3.0000 K starlight by a factor of z = 1100 suggests that it may have come from a region of space about 1/1000 of the size of the universe. This corresponds roughly to the local group of gravitationally bound galaxies - our Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, and a swarm of smaller ones. The power output of the local group roughly matches the power input of the CMBR; however, the photon count seems badly off.
All collaboration on this topic welcome.
My Sci-Fi Hobby.
The winter storms have washed up more insulation blocks on the shores of the Welsh hideaway that conceal the spaceship yards of Lithonia and other empires. Plus, over winter I have collected spent vape accessories, old electric razor components, discarded nitrous cylinders, and small bits of metallic scrap and junk from all over.
The Lithonian empire now faces a challenge from these dark dreadnoughts.
In time this may lead to a vast boardgame on the beach with a scale of a yard to ten light years, or perhaps to a novel about Artificially Intelligent ship-minds and their motivations as a metaphor for the great existential and political questions.
Mayblog 2023 (comes a little early due to impending cable works)
The Mandrakes of Chateaux Chaos.
With Igor and Boris having thrown their leaves for the coming summer and the huge communal pot looking very overcrowded it seems a good time to repot all three of them separately. Circe has retained some of her foliage till now, strange behaviour for Mandragora officinalis, but perhaps she finally attempts to adapt to the chilly British climate. They don’t really like it here and have taken eight years to achieve a collective mass of about a kilogram from seeds sent from Thessaly in Greece.
Magic.
It seems that a whole new academic industry has sprung up studying the recent history of western esoterics. History as they say, starts yesterday, but in practise, most academics today prefer to let events settle for a decade or so before they start writing about them. This allows for events which may have appeared confusing at the time to have become even more confusing in recollection, some possible consequences to have emerged, and for the interviewing of some of the surviving guilty. I get quite a number of academics asking for interviews these days and seem to have become an historical figure in my own lifetime. Herewith an interesting offering from one of the leading lights in the field. It discusses the somewhat paradoxical aims the IOT set itself and it presents multiple perspectives on ‘The Ice War’. I once got a round of applause at one of the early big IOT meetings by proclaiming the IOT Pact as ‘A Cult for those who don’t want to join a Cult’. Just how that played out in practise remains a subject of considerable controversy and ongoing debate. The following paper provides a substantial read.
Not Magic.
This years ‘Breaking Convention’ has come and gone with predictable and dreary results - a bunch of would be scientists and shamans reinforcing a collective neurological/psychological based compromise to use their arts to merely restore acceptable normalities rather than to explore the extremities of human potential.
How much has the western esoteric tradition neutered and emasculated itself since the heady Promethean idealism of the magical revival of the late twentieth century?
Does anyone else find the current fashion for reinterpreting/downgrading esoterics into mere ‘therapy’ rather disheartening? Today the esoteric scene seems pervaded by those who merely proffer psychological therapies with new-age twists, (new-age rhymes with sewage), or they bleat on endlessly about their mental health as somehow emblematic of their spirituality.
Whatever happened to the quest for weird knowledge and strange occult powers?
(I guess few people realised just how much hard work it would take to achieve any real strange knowledge or any useful magical powers.)
Psychedelics largely failed to enlighten. Now we have a new wave of psychedelic gurus pushing their products as mere remedies for depression or trauma. The new theory runs that such substances randomly shake up many of the patterns that have become fixed in the brain and can allow for a normalising restructuring. Electroconvulsive therapy supposedly worked by exactly the same mechanism.
Physics.
Mach’s Principle remains an intriguing cosmic concept. Ernst Mach (popularly remembered for his work on the speed of sound and shock waves) first seems to have informally suggested the idea although Einstein formally attributed it to him as Mach’s Principle.
Broady stated, it asserts that the properties of the parts of the universe depend upon the properties of the whole of it. That sounds intuitively right to the holistically minded, but theorists have struggled to give it mathematical form and rigour. Einstein took some inspiration from it, but he failed to fully incorporate it into his relativistic cosmology.
Let us see how well Hypersphere Cosmology incorporates Mach’s Principle. Herewith the Wikipedia list of 11 of the more popular interpretations of the principle with annotations concerning the Hypersphere Cosmology model.
Mach0: The universe, as represented by the average motion of distant galaxies, does not appear to rotate relative to local inertial frames.
Agree. Although Godel’s theory asserts that ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density’, w = 2sqrt(piGp), it can do so about randomly orientated Hopf Fibration axes within a hypersphere giving the universe an average or overall angular velocity and angular momentum of zero.
Mach1: Newton's gravitational constant G is a dynamical field.
Agree. G = Lc2/2M, where L = antipode length, M = mass of universe. The value of the gravitational constant depends on the antipode length of the universe, lightspeed, and the mass of the universe. A universe of a different size or mass would have a different value of G.
Mach2: An isolated body in otherwise empty space has no inertia.
Unfalsifiable but probably true. See Mach 7.
Mach3: Local inertial frames are affected by the cosmic motion and distribution of matter.
Agree. See Hypersphere Cosmology equations: -
6) The gravitational mass of the entire universe removes energy from photons in transit. (Redshift)
7) Individual inertial masses arise from the gravitational mass of the entire universe.
8) The gravitational mass of the entire universe slows matter in transit. (Pioneer Anomaly)
10) The gravitational mass of the entire universe reduces linear accelerations and increases orbital velocities.
11 – 15) The mass and size of the entire universe controls the proton-electron mass.
Mach4: The universe is spatially closed.
Agree. It consists of a Hypersphere L = 2GM/c2 within a Black Hole r = 2GM/c2.
The conventional interpretation mistakes the Antipode length for the Hubble length.
Mach5: The total energy, angular and linear momentum of the universe are zero.
Agree. Energy = Motion. The opposed centripetal and centrifugal accelerations A = c2/L, match on the cosmic macroscale, and probably also on the quantum microscale, we could probably mathematically summate the totality of all the multidimensional spins and all the motions that give rise to all the forces and particles within the universe to zero. 0 = +1&-1.
Mach6: Inertial mass is affected by the global distribution of matter.
Agree. mi = 2GMmg/Lc2 the inertial mass of anything within the universe depends on the mass and size of the universe which also control the c2/G ratio.
Mach7: If you take away all matter, there is no more space.
Unfalsifiable but probably true. At least it explains what lies outside of the closed universe – nothing – not even space.
Mach8: 4πpGT^2 is a definite number, of order unity, where p is the mean density of matter in the universe, and T is the Hubble time. (I don’t know who put in the pi or why.)
Agree. As p = M/2pi2r3 and T-2 = pi2r3/c2, then 4pipGT-2 = 4piMGpi2r2/2pi2r3c2
= 2piGM/rc2 ~ 1.
Mach9: The theory contains no absolute elements.
Agree. The ‘fundamental’ constants G, c, M, L, and A all depend upon each other.
Mach10: Overall rigid rotations and translations of a system are unobservable.
Unfalsifiable but probably true.
It would seem that Mach’s Principle can only apply if the universe consists of a Hypersphere of constant size.
Black Holes and Hyperspheres.
How much spacetime does the universe contain? Conventional LCDM Big Bang Cosmology asserts that the observable universe has a radius of about 13.8 bnlyr, but that due to its apparent expansion since a hypothetical big bang it may now extend to perhaps 95 bnlyr and it may have the potential to expand into spacetime indefinitely.
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the entire universe consists of a finite but unbounded Hypersphere, closed in both space and time with an Antipode length of only13 bnlyr. This still makes it awesomely huge, but considerably smaller than the observable LCDM universe and certainly not even potentially spatially infinite. Such a Hypersphere will exist within a Black Hole with a radius equal to the Hypersphere’s Antipode length, as shown below.
.
Physicists commonly assume that if matter collapses under its own gravity to form a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 2GM/c2 then it will continue to collapse until the matter forms a zero size singularity inside that Schwarzschild radius. The Penrose – Hawking Singularity Theorems assert this, but only on the basis that they cannot conceive of anything that would stop it.
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that matter will cease to collapse within a black hole when all the matter has collapsed to half the Schwarzschild diameter because at this point a Hypersphere will form within the Black Hole. Such hyperspheres will have a rotational velocity of lightspeed and will resist further compression which would push their rotational velocity past lightspeed.
If the Schwarzschild radius r and the Hypersphere antipode length L both equal 2GM/c2, then L = r, or L = d/2, where d means Black Hole diameter. See A).
If we inhabit a universe that consists of the inside of a Black Hole and a Hypersphere has formed within it, then the optical horizon conventional cosmologists estimate to lie at ~13.4 bnlyr, and which Hypersphere Cosmology estimates to lie at almost exactly 13 bnlyr, represents the universe’s antipode distance not its radius.
If so, then the Hypersphere Cosmology universe has considerably less volume and a considerably higher density than conventional cosmology currently asserts. No surprise then that the Hubble Deep Field contains such an astonishing number of galaxies.
Furthermore, a Black Hole of any mass within the universe should contain a Hypersphere.
Breaking News
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/522/2/1736/7035603
The occurrence of greater numbers of quasars at long cosmic distances has become interpreted as evidence for the evolution of galaxies since a big bang, on the basis that younger (more distant) galaxies would have plenty of gas surrounding their central black holes, this gas would become sucked in to give rise to the quasar effect, and then when it had become exhausted the quasar activity would cease.
It now seems that quasar activity arises from the collision of galaxies driving gas towards their central black holes.
In which case, quasar distribution ceases to provide supporting evidence for the big bang hypothesis!!!
Spring at last.
The few Ravens that we have up in the Scots Pines on the nearby hill have started making funny noises; less raucous crawking, more gentle cooing, hopefully they’re making more Ravens.
As the autumnal Mandrakes at Chateaux Chaos spring into inactivity by shedding their foliage and going to sleep for summer, the pond receives an influx of amphibian guests, toads, frogs, and newts. Herewith a menage a trois of frogs. I later saw six males clamped onto that female. The following day I saw her pale and dead at the bottom of the pond. She has left a mass of spawn, but her tadpoles will face the dragonfly larvae lurking in the depths.
Counterfactual Indefiniteness.
Einstein famously asked if the Moon continues to exist when nobody looks at it.
I can now answer this with a (heavily qualified*) Not Necessarily.
An interesting example of this strangeness cropped up during some collaboration with a terrestrial correspondent upon Hypersphere Cosmology.
If cosmological redshift depends only on distance, then it has to remain indeterminate until measured.
See the graph below in which observed frequency (blue) decreases with distance travelled across the universe. This leads to an asymptotically increasing redshift of wavelength (red).
Note that as frequency decreases directly with distance travelled fo = fe (1-(d/L)) see: -
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/322-equation-6
We cannot define what frequency a photon ‘would have’ at any point on a journey between two points, we can only calculate and confirm by measurement what frequency the photon has when we actually observe it. This means that the ‘counter-factual’ - the frequency that we do not observe, cannot have a definite but unknown value.
To take a simple example with rough figures: -
In Hypersphere Cosmology the antipode to any observer in the universe lies almost exactly 4 Gigaparsecs away, (1.23 E26 metres, 13 billion light years).
Imagine two distant galaxies ‘A’ at 2 Gigaparsecs, and ‘B’ at 1 Gigaparsec distant from an observer, with both laying roughly in the same direction. Light from A will have lost half of its frequency when it arrives at the observer. Light from B will have lost a quarter of its frequency when it arrives at the observer. This all accords with calculation and observation.
If we stopped the light from A at B, then we would find that it had lost a quarter of its frequency.
But what about the light from A as it flies unobserved past B? We cannot assign any value to its frequency that remains commensurate with the loss of a quarter of its frequency per Gigaparsec and a half of its frequency over 2 Gigaparsecs!
Plainly we have a quantum effect at play here. The frequency does not become defined until we stop the light and measure it, or equivalently it hits something and acquires a definite value.
Of all the interpretations of quantum mechanics, only Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation seems to offer a ‘reasonable’ or visualisable account of how this can happen. In this interpretation, retro causal advanced waves have to complete a quantum handshake across spacetime in any emission-absorption event before it acquires a definite value.
If, as in standard cosmology, the cosmological redshift arises from recession velocity in an expanding universe, then it can have a classical explanation that preserves the idea of a definite state of the unmeasured light at any point along its path.
I suspect that recession velocity and hence the expanding universe model became selected precisely because it preserved a classical description for cosmological redshift.
The orthodox standard cosmological model, the LCDM Big Bang theory, remains purely classical and relativistic. Hypersphere Cosmology, at least in respect to cosmological redshift, incorporates both General Relativistic and Quantum Mechanical perspectives.
Counterfactual Indefiniteness has interesting metaphysical implications. Does the mind have a definite state when it does nothing for example? Anyone for Zen?
*We can assume that the Moon may continue to exist in some definite form when we don’t look at it, but only because of the zillions of quanta there interacting with each other and with the rest of the universe tend to keep it in a fairly definite form on the macroscopic scale.
Nyarlathotep – Aiwass.
It now seems generally accepted that the alien entity Nyarlathotep posing as Aiwass inspired Aleister Crowley to write the abominable Book of the Law and to found a cult based on slavish obedience to its spittle flecked rantings. Many other messiahs, prophets, ideologues, and demagogues seem to have drunk from the same source in search of power. Nyarlathotep also finds amusement in provoking sentient creatures to explore all manner of antinomian scientific, technical, and political extremes. It expects us to either learn from our mistakes or to destroy ourselves, and it remains indifferent to the outcome, as H P Lovecraft realised.
The universe contains countless sentient species, some will transcend themselves, some will auto-destruct. Nyarlathotep enjoys stirring them to do either, it wears many masks. Sometimes it takes an occultist to see through the metaphors within the metaphors.
AC fell for it. HPL saw through it.
Politics.
Despite the diplomatic niceties, President-Dictator Xi of China has visited Putin in Moscow with the air of a man inspecting the goods on offer in a fire sale. Plainly he sees no prospect of Putin winning the war and will not send him any armaments. Plainly Xi looks forward to heavily discounted fuel from Russia. Xi probably contemplates the prospect of exporting the full panoply of the technology of repression to Russia. Plainly he must now contemplate what sort of new regime in Russia he will soon find himself dealing with.
Putin runs out of friends, only fear motivates his remaining associates. Keep those conjurations coming: - https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
Scottish Independence RIP. The election of Humza Yousaf as SNP leader probably represents the final nail in the coffin of the secessionist movement. Hurrah! The Scottish secessionist movement stands revealed as an economically illiterate project led by careerist political incompetents, and now even the ethnic tartan romanticism has gone.
ChatGPT.
Despite occasional outbreaks of Artificial Stupidity, ChatGPT can apparently compose poems and essays that can fool university professors. It only seems a matter of time and computational power before we iron out the issues of humour and nuance.
I intend to feed an AI with all my works, let it absorb my style and ideas, and then sit back and enjoy all the books I haven't had time to write, and collect the royalties.
The royalties will fund an immortal AI version of myself to comfort my relatives and engage my readers after I die.
But until further notice these blogs will continue to originate from the Meatware version of myselves.
Marblog 2023
Matt Kaybryn - call off the search, my thanks to all. Matt telephoned me from his mountain fastness in a faraway land and we have sorted the issue. Mandrake of Oxford will henceforth distribute The EPOCH in its huge altar sized collector’s edition form, and also bring out this entire triple grimoire (including The Necronomicon) in a smaller more portable edition.
Dark Matter? – A solid disc like a gramophone record rotates with the same angular velocity at any distance from its centre. The planets of the solar system on the other hand rotate about the sun in a Keplerian fashion with an inner planet like Mercury orbiting the Sun in a much shorter period than an outer planet like Neptune. Weirdly, the stars in a galaxy rotate around the centre of it more like a solid disc rotates than a planetary system rotates. Neither Newton’s laws of gravitation nor the refinement of them in Einstein’s basic general relativity can account for this. Plus, clusters of galaxies do not seem to rotate as these theories predict, plus, large structures in the universe seem to have evolved more quickly than such theories predict if the universe went through a big bang.
Such discrepancies between theory and observation have led to the hypothesis that the universe must contain a lot of invisible matter to supply the apparently missing gravitational forces. Such ‘dark matter’ cannot consist of the same stuff that makes up us, this planet, the moon and mars, the sun, and everything else that we can observe. It apparently does almost nothing except add extra gravity and because it cannot absorb or emit light, we can never see it. To fix the mismatch between theory and observation the universe would have to contain about five times as much dark matter as the ordinary matter that we observe. Yet its existence has entered into the standard concordance LCDM model of cosmology as a ‘fact’ and some science fiction and fantasy writers, and esoteric speculators have played with the idea.
I become equally annoyed when magicians invoke dark matter to patch up their paradigms.
Over the last few decades physicists have conducted ingenious and exhaustive experiments to catch and identify particles of this dark matter which supposedly dominates the matter of the universe. All such experiments have failed to find any dark matter.
Rather than add a vast extra amount of hypothetical matter to the universe some theorists have attempted to tweak our theories of how gravity works to resolve the discrepancies, but these modified gravity theories all seem to depend on adding some ad hoc fudge factor to the equations to align them with observations.
Yet a simple and comprehensive resolution occurs if we merely add in an old exact solution to the field equations of general relativity found by Kurt Gödel back in 1949.
w = 2sqrt(piGp), angular velocity equals twice the square root of pi times G times density.
This adds an additional angular velocity w to any form of rotation.
thus:-
v(r) = vi(r) + 2sqrt(piGp) r
Where the velocity at any radius v(r) equals the velocity expected from the usual inertial and gravitational considerations vi(r) plus a Gödelian contribution which for a galaxy derives from the radius of the entire spherical gas halo and the overall density of the disc and gas halo. This gives an excellent result for the nearby Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies where we can now observe their surrounding gas halos.
We expect a suitable accounting for the probable distribution of ordinary matter within galactic clusters will also show a result in accordance with this correction.
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology/item/319-equation-9
Hypersphere cosmology denies that a big bang occurred, so it does not require dark matter to resolve the apparently anomalous rates of star, galaxy, and megastructure formation that standard theory implies.
The State of the Nation – That treasonous wee krankie traitor, the Loch Ness Sturgeon, has quit her post rather than face the increasing likelihood of failure. I always suspected that for her, Scottish independence merely provided a means of advancing a personal political career. She must have realised that had she ever become the leader of a breakaway Scotland she would have ended up with her head on a pike within six months as its economy imploded and a refugee crisis ensued. She played a long game of making incessant demands on the Union that she dared not break. She kept quiet about Alex Salmond’s behaviour until it became politic to turn against him. When Scotland exhibited an outbreak of royalism on the Queen’s death she bizarrely proclaimed that Scotland would keep the monarchy. She did a grubby deal with the Greens to stay in power and paid the price of having to foist the deeply unpopular wokeist gender recognition act upon the Scottish people. Sturgeon’s only legacy remains a Scotland more divided within itself.
I love Scotland, I have family married into a clan up there, my grandchildren consider themselves Scots, I have invested much in the place. Thankfully the tide of secession now seems to recede.
Brexit. The wails of the ‘Remoaners’ have grown a little lounder and from the other side we hear some stirrings of ‘Bregret’.
Brexit has proved expensive, as anticipated. Freedom always has costs, but nations that give up political freedom for economic gain always end up losing both. The corrupt and undemocratic synarchic shambles of the EU took decades to construct, as did Britain’s half-assed relationship to it. It will take a while to sort the mess out, particularly with the damn French making a nuisance of themselves out of pique and spite. Let us hold our nerve.
Theory of Mind and AI.
According to conventional theory, as we develop from infants we gradually learn to attribute ‘mind’ to other phenomena in our environment (mainly people) which do not behave in an entirely mechanical and predictable way. We develop a ‘Theory of Mind’ which attributes agency and intentions to mainly living things. We come to recognise that the immediate and longer term behaviour of people may not match, as it does for most inanimate objects.
The idea of Theory of Mind’ usually implies that after an infant recognises that it has a mind it starts to recognise that other people have minds too. However, it seems more likely that we only realise that we have a mind after we have conceptualised its presence in others. Full sentience implies self-awareness and self-consciousness, the ability to think about thinking (and emoting).
Some degree of failure to adopt the socially approved form of Theory of Mind often seems associated with autism. Autistic people tend to take other peoples behaviour at face value without accounting for what they might actually have intend. They also sometimes exhibit apparent difficulties with self-knowledge and with assessing their own social impacts.
Current machine learning and AI programs display a high degree of what we might call autism in humans. Although they can perform well defined tasks with astonishing accuracy, this comes at the price of their not ‘knowing’ that they do so. They often create Artificial Stupidity when given more open ended or less tightly constrained tasks like making up conversation or telling you what they ‘think’ about.
It seems that the development of fully sentient AI probably depends on using machine learning to develop a Theory of Mind within a machine, by first analysing the anomalies and peculiarities in human behaviour to discern the intents, and then to turn the resulting Theory of Mind upon itself and examine and perhaps modify its own programmed intents.
The Chaoist theory of the Multi-Self also suggests that self-consciousness depends not on a singular self but on various selves within monitoring each other. Any truly sentient AI will probably require many semi-autonomous sub-programs.
Perhaps we should take care what sort of data we bring potentially sentient AIs up on. A bad upbringing can have unfortunate consequences.
No Big Bang
The latest analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed six new fully formed galaxies as big as our own Milky Way. These galaxies lay at a vast distance away that puts them very close in time to the supposed Big Bang event.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2
Most astrophysicists consider it impossible that such huge galaxies could have formed so quickly after a big bang.
This it seems ever more likely that the universe has the same large scale structure at all points of space AND time – exactly as Hypersphere Cosmology predicts.
Putin’s War
We will only get a lasting peace in Europe when the crony-capitalist oligarchic dictatorship in Russia falls and becomes replaced with a free democracy.
The real history of Europe (and its gift to humanity) consists of a centuries long struggle against absolute monarchs, oligarchs, autocrats, emperors, and dictators. The remaining one has to go.
Putin now knows that he cannot win and that he cannot survive if he loses.
To reduce the devastation and the humanitarian costs, Turn His People Against Him.
Feblog 2023
Matt Kaybryn. Does anyone have any contact with this artist who seems to have completely disappeared off-scene and off-net? If he still lives, I would really like him to contact me to discuss future publications of the EPOCH artwork.
Cosmology - JWST update. At the time of writing, the James Webb Space Telescope has astonished conventional cosmologists by revealing huge numbers of apparently ‘young’ and ‘old’ galaxies at very high redshifts. According to conventional theory this means that we now see them at vast distances in space and time as they would have looked just a few hundred million years after the hypothesised big bang event 13.8 billion years ago.
At the very least these new observations will lead to a severe revision of the theories about how fast galaxies can come into existence and develop after a purported big bang.
If the JWST can find stars and galaxies even closer to the CMBR horizon, then the LCDM big bang hypothesis will die.
Hypersphere Cosmology predicts with increasing confidence that we inhabit a finite and unbounded non-expanding universe, homogenous and isotropic in space AND time on the large scale. It only appears to expand, and at an increasing rate, because conventional LCDM theory fails to acknowledge the gravitational origin of cosmological redshift in a universe with a small positive curvature which leads to a redshift dependent only on distance, and an overall hyperspherical cosmic lensing which dims distant objects and creates the optical illusion of an accelerating expansion.
The CMBR arises from highly redshifted galactic light from near antipode distance, and this creates an effective horizon that we cannot see beyond.
FSW Update.
Frontier Space War has remained a work in progress intermittently for the last 50 years. It consists of related game ideas for modelling interstellar conflict at the level of individual spacecraft and surface forces.
In the FSW universe, spacecraft can warp jump from one star system to an adjacent one between points of equal gravitational potential and they can also manoeuvre in system to engage enemy ships or surface units.
The latest innovations to this simulation system appear in the scenario shown below: -
Spatial Topology – The board represents a three dimensional volume of space with five factions (empires, corporations, polities, alien races, neo-feudal great houses?) within it, each having borders with the other four, note the identification of opposite corners of the board by the placing of halved areas in the corners. The territories of the five factions thus have a topological relationship equivalent to a pentachoron.
The use of discs to represent star systems and the touching of discs to represent permitted jump routes allows for a clearer and less ambiguous positioning of pieces than point like stars joined by lines.
The use of metal pieces throughout allows for a vertical aesthetic (they have a pleasing weight and don’t easily fall over). The pieces consist of nuts and bolts, ball bearings, woodscrews, masonry and plaster anchors, and plumbing fittings, with 2 part epoxy resin glue where appropriate.
Art - As the project begins to take on its mature form I have blinged it up with high end metallic spray paints.
Rule structures continue to evolve in several directions. For simpler play, combat proceeds using Risk like protocols with polyhedral dice, D20 for fortresses/manufactories, D12 & D10 for capital ships, D8 for cruisers and carriers, D6 & D4 for destroyers, frigates, fighters, and forts. More complex play depends on the use of Asymmetric Combat Polygons, secretly selected tactics, plus also diplomacy and simultaneous moves on written orders in the afficionado versions.
Ethical note: Nobody gets killed in FSW. As animals cannot survive the stresses of interstellar warship manoeuvring, backed-up AIs and droids crew all the vessels. Civilians merely become informed of new laws and taxes as planetary ownership changes.
Alternative Physics. The Quantum Chromo-Dynamics model of how the nuclei of atoms work looks increasingly like a mess of questionable suppositions and dodgy mathematics that have little explanatory or predictive power. In response to the extensive zoo of meson and baryon particles that arise from smashing nuclear particles together at high energies the quark-gluon QCD model evolved. In this model protons and neutrons both consist of three quarks each and gluon exchanges hold them together. Each of the two major types of quark has to have a fractional electric charge of one third or two thirds, and to come in one of three possible ‘colours’ which represents another abstract property, plus it has to come in one of three possible ‘flavours’ which differ only in their masses. Additionally, each variety of quark has its own fundamental field, and an antiparticle with an anti-charge and an anti-colour, although not an anti-mass. This deceptively ingenious scheme does have the virtue that it can qualitatively describe all baryons like the proton and the neutron and all the heavier baryons that we can create for fleeting moments in particle colliders as quark triplets and all the fleeting mesons as quark-antiquark doublets.
However, quark theory doesn’t add up without the additional assumption that the three ‘valence’ quarks which supposedly make up a baryon each have a surrounding cloud of ‘virtual’ ‘sea quarks’ with seemingly arbitrary properties to fix the maths.
Yet individual quarks (virtual or sea) and gluons remain undetectable, and far too few things really add up quantitatively in QCD. Murray Gell-Mann who largely devised the model did sometimes wonder if quarks and gluons only existed as mere explanatory devices of our own creation.
The model of baryons as quark triplets demands that something like colour-anti-colour gluons must hold them together. This leads to the supposition that attractive proton-proton and neutron-neutron forces exist.
Yet apart from hydrogen which has only a single proton in its nucleus, all clusters of nucleons in all atomic nuclei have to consist of a mixture of protons and neutrons. Poly-proton nuclei without neutrons do not exist. Heavy nuclei require that the number of neutrons exceeds that of protons to overcome the mounting electric charges and forces which tend to push protons apart. Thus, it seems that a proton-neutron attraction remains the only significant force required to bind atomic nuclei together if we discard the quark hypothesis. The relatively simple exchange of charged Pions can account for this. (The gravitational forces and the chiral spin alignment forces between nucleons remain orders of magnitude weaker.)
What then could explain the whole zoo of transient exotic baryons and mesons that our particle smashers can create? Why do orthodox theorists think in terms of ‘coloured’ and ‘flavoured’ down, up, strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks, plus all their antiparticles and meson and baryon combinations and eight varieties of colour-anti-colour quarks, and twenty six separate fundamental fields of which each of these particles constitutes an excitation?
It would seem far more economical to explore the hypothesis that only a single fundamental field, that of spacetime itself, actually exists, but that it has more dimensions than commonly supposed and that it can support quantised spinorial rotations in various of its dimensions. And that these spinorial rotations remain conserved in all particle interactions. In this case only a single type of stable fundamental baryon really exists – the proton, (or if it spinorialy rotates in the opposite direction the - anti-proton). The neutron then just consists of a proton with an added opposite electrical spinorial rotation. All ‘higher’ versions of baryons simply consist of excited states with exotic extra spinorial rotations. Neutrinos play a big part in the universe but only because they carry away leftover spinorial spins and anti-spins from nuclear interactions. The ubiquitous nature of attractive gravity arises because any and all distortions in an elastic medium will tend to attract each other weakly regardless of their relative direction of ‘twist’.
This line of speculation has a manifold motivations: - both quantum mechanics (particularly in its Transactional interpretation) and certain esoteric phenomena seem to demand extra-temporal dimensionality in the universe. Gravity remains impossible to integrate with current quantum field theory. Quantum field theory looks like it has gone down a mathematically intractable blind alley, particularly with the overenthusiastic application of SU3 symmetries. Such triplicities as exist may well arise from the three dimensionality of time.
Entertainment. Only Prince Harry seems to have realised the real function of royalty in a constitutional monarchy – to act as highly paid entertainers in a family soap opera. Let us hope he turns up for his father’s coronation bash and does something ‘interesting’. I don’t watch either of them, but here in the UK we have two popular soap operas: Eastenders, a proletarian soap opera, and Westenders, an aristocratic one. Eastenders does not have much of an export market, so well done Harry for creating one for Westenders. Marrying a professional actress has obviously helped.
Actual War. I guess the main question for the western alliance has now become ‘How quickly do we want Putin’s forces in Ukraine defeated?’
A rapid defeat would prove easy to accomplish and economically cheaper, but it increases the slight possibility of the use of WMDs, and it increases the chances that Putin could manage a retreat into an even more repressive neo-feudal Fortress Russia which might effectively become a client state of totalitarian China.
A slower defeat may prove more costly in humanitarian and economic terms, but it would reduce the chances of WMD use, inflict even greater damage on the Russian economy and the standing of Putin and his cronies, and increase the chances of a regime change, hopefully towards something more democratic.
Keep up the good work https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
Janblog 2023.
The Predator Mindset - Review
Acting as Chancellor of the world’s premier online magical training facility at Arcanorium College does keep me in touch with the evolving esoteric zeitgeist, and sometimes an aspiring alumnus will come up with something interesting and provocative in their own research.
I have always thought that physical and mental fitness aids the quest for magical abilities, yet Daniel Domaradzki has looked at it the other way round - How about using Chaos Magic for Strength Training, Bodybuilding, and the development of Mental Resilience?
We have exchanged ideas on magical techniques and physical/mental techniques for some time. Whilst at 70 years of age I merely want to stay in about the same shape as 50 years ago, he trains athletes and competitors professionally.
Daniel has just released a book infused with all the fire and fury that I would expect from a promising young Mage – The Predator Mindset.
This book basically sneaks the magical techniques into mental resilience training without using magical terminology – it functions as a book of magic for the non-magician, yet it may inspire some to explore the esoteric arts more deeply.
The book reads well - short and direct and loaded with effective ideas and practises, and by slipping in the magical concepts in psychological terms it won't put off those who reject such ideas. I think a lot of people who call themselves magicians could and should also learn something from what it says. I have seen some laughable examples of wannabe magicians living hopelessly ineffectual lifestyles. I suspect that the approach he suggests may well prove appropriate for the challenging times ahead. No more hippy-dippy magical mysticism! Go for the Jugular! The Triumph of the Will and the Imagination!
Available here: -
https://primexaos.com/product/the-predator-mindset-mental-toughness-in-practice/
French Books
Eliphas Levi crossed the English Channel ( or La Manche as he would have called it) in the middle of the nineteenth century and met the British magicians and occultists of the day. His writings afterwards became translated into English, and they had a profound influence on Mathers and the Golden Dawn and later upon Aleister Crowley.
In the twentieth century, few if any exchanges seem to have occurred between Francophone and Anglophone magical traditions. Although Levi did become republished during the magical revival in the UK during the last third of the century, nobody here had much of an idea about what, if anything, went on in French magic. We generally lived under the assumption that French alternative thinkers had become entirely preoccupied with politics and philosophy.
Anglo-Germanic collaboration in magical matters occurred intermittently through the twentieth century despite interruptions due to wars. Crowley’s OTO grew from a Germanic neo-masonic organisation, and I like to think that my own crossing of the North Sea in the 1990s to Germania and the subsequent publication of my books there did much to promote Anglo-German magical collaboration. Yet whenever we had pan-European meetings the question often arose – where are the French magicians?
Well perhaps we shall soon find out, a French publisher - Alliance-Magique - has just released Liber Null & Psychonaut with Liber Kaos to follow. I look forward to seeing what French speakers make of them.
Vive l’Alliance! Vive La Revolution! Vive Le Chaos!
Threescore Years and Ten.
A ramble upon becoming seventy years of age.
I distinctly remember a question posed in 1967 by my English master at school - Old Bill, a clever and charismatic old cove who had taken it upon himself to provoke his charges to actually think. “How old will you boys be in the year 2000 - and what will you be doing?”
Blimey, forty seven! That’s nearly dead, isn’t it? Older than my dad? It seemed so unimaginably far away, that I couldn’t guess what might become of me.
“What are you here for boys?”, he also asked rhetorically, and then he answered, - “You are here to be made into clerks!” (It was an old style grammar school). He had a talent for provocation. It worked; none of us became clerks to my knowledge. He also told me that I would never write because my essays were an illiterate and opinionated mess. Nice move Bill.
Now looking back from the perspective of the traditional finish line, it all seems to have gone so quickly and with increasing speed. Back in my fifties and sixties I sometimes wondered if I would live for precisely 84 years, the orbital period of Ouranos which featured so prominently in my natal chart and my later magical career, however I now begin to doubt the usefulness of this belief, it seems as useless as a belief in immortality. Uncertainty seems a better motivator. I still have an active mother of 92 with a serious golfing habit.
‘Threescore years and ten’ does today sound like the finishing line from a previous generation, only a few of my contemporaries have died so far, yet I do feel myself at the beginning of getting old now, everything still functions, but stamina has started to decline, recovery time from exertions has lengthened. On the bright side, excessive algebra has brought with it Mentat eyebrows; plus, the thickening of fingernails into proper wizard’s talons suitable for light engineering works and handling hot metal braziers has proved useful.
Though now it all seems to have passed so quickly, my world has changed drastically in seventy years. I grew up in the long shadows cast by WW2 which had indirectly brought my parents together and brought nuclear power and weapons, radar, computers, jet engines, and liquid fuelled rockets into action perhaps twenty years before they would otherwise have appeared. The post-war period also marked the end of the British empire and the relative decline of Britain during a worldwide boom in population and industrial and agricultural production. I remember ‘the sixties’, a cultural period which for my social class in the UK ran from about 1968 into the 1980s, as one of intense optimism despite the cold war. We hippies had more freedom and opportunities than our parents and we would change the world for the better.
Yet so much went wrong, the drugs did not deliver the advertised enlightenment, the economic slack disappeared from the system. Much of the developing world got into a mess as Islam failed to decide on whether it wanted to live in the twenty first or the eleventh century, and the climatic, ecological, and political consequences of a carbon fuelled growth boom and globalisation became increasingly apparent. Our science and technology have so far failed to realise our dreams of space travel.
A lot of the optimism of the late twentieth century seems to have evaporated as the costs of ‘progress’ have risen. Few from the more recent generations can probably look forward to the easy material increments enjoyed by the post-war baby-boomers. So much of the modern art and architecture that has arisen in my lifetime seems destined for demolition and forgetting. The same probably applies to a lot of the current notions at the bleeding edge of science in cosmology and in the quantum realm.
The process of dissociating magic from religion has advanced well during my lifetime and magic can now stand on its own theories and vocabulary and practices without reference to theological concepts. Yet as Chaos Magic shows, you can still throw religious ideas in at whim for a bit of colour and fun if they offer beliefs of convenience and utility. Humans obviously create gods, goddesses, and spirits in their own image, not the other way around.
The old political systems consisting of various conflicted mixtures of monarchy-aristocracy-democracy seem to give way to conflicted mixtures of oligarchy-synarchy-democracy as communication technology ramps up. Synarchy has crept up on us. The Chinese Communist Party has achieved absolute synarchy over 1.4 billion of us. The EU strives for synarchy over a further 0.4 billion despite democratic resistance. Russia has become an absolute oligarchy. In the USA democracy still contends with oligarchy. Communism failed miserably everywhere, but socialism landed western Europe with the biggest welfare bills in recorded history, and a resulting decline in Christianity.
I have seen social and moral fashions come and go, and huge shifts in what we are officially required to think and what we are officially forbidden to think. Multiculturalism failed and became replaced by multi-ethnic and multi-racial monoculturalism as an ideal. The Romans had worked that out millennia ago. The wokeist fashion for promoting every possible alternative to the traditional family and every possible consensual sexual deviancy appears to have passed its peak as the social consequences mount. Opportunities for women in westernised societies do seem to have improved in my lifetime because late and post-industrial societies co-opted them into both production and consumption, yet Feminism looks as much a symptom as a cause of this. Imperialism has become anathemised except where it occurred so long ago that we can celebrate it as advancing civilisation.
Lessons from life so far? The cultivation of health and wealth creates more time in which to do what matters to you, – and time remains the ultimate resource. Pick a lifetime partner with a very similar level of intelligence but with a significantly different personality so that you can compensate for each other’s weak points. The social capital of friendship counts for at least as much if not more than financial capital. Give your children every last bit of your accumulated wisdom and let them sort out the mess of contradictions. Don’t expect self-consistency from anyone, particularly yourself(s).
Things left to do?
Despite spectacular advances in science and magic, much of humanity still lives under the scourge of religion and the scourge of tyrannical regimes. I will redouble my modest efforts to undermine both. Religion and Tyranny both depend upon fragile beliefs.
Although we now have in Hypersphere Cosmology a more accurate map of the cosmos, we still haven’t got starships. I will continue looking into the equations.
Magical Theories and Quantum Theories do not yet have comprehensive descriptive or predictive powers, nor do we know if, or how, they relate to each other. Either way, both require further research and substantial upgrades. This may all take longer than I have left.
Yet at the end, to believe: -
That your descendants prosper,
That your deeds and ideas may outlive you awhile,
That your enemies all lay neutralised or dead,
- That seems enough.