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Published: 03 March 2025

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Marblog 2025

We seem to inhabit a period of generally enhanced strangeness worldwide, climate change, political instability, and internet driven disinformation, extremism, and insanity, a void in quantum ontology, and a crisis in cosmology. We live in interesting times.
With reference to the Crisis in Cosmology, I found myself laughing out loud at the latest item of Phlogiston seriously proposed to patch the rapidly sinking LCDM-Big Bang theory.
The marvellous James Web Space Telescope has recently discovered gigantic black holes far too close in time to the supposed big bang: - 

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17480 

The authors of the paper propose to explain this massive discrepancy with an already creaking theory by invoking yet another form of dark matter, this time ‘Strongly Self-Interacting Dark Matter’.

Phlogiston Symbol

(Note - The idea of Phlogiston arose to ‘explain’ combustion. Substances such as wood seemed to lose weight on burning and some theorists came to believe this occurred because of Phlogiston escaping as flame and heat. However the discovery that burning metals actually increased in weight led to problems and even to the idea that forms of Phlogiston with negative-weight must therefore exist.) (See also the idea of Dark Energy = Antigravity!)

The Equations of Magic.

Ever since the publication of the seminal equations of magic (Liber Kaos), debate has raged about the effects of multiple conjurations for the same effect, either in group workings or through subsequent conjurations by the same magician. Consider the main equation: -

 PM = P + (1-P)M1/P

Where P = natural probability of event. PM = probability of event occurring with magical encouragement. M = amount of magic brought to bear on it (a formula exists to qualify this but not to precisely quantify it, ongoing discussions with magical theorists may yet clarify various issues here).

This model assumes that all individual conjurations act separately. Group workings can serve to inspire individuals to peak performance, but as with firing squads, protocol demands that we do not enquire about whose shot counted most.

Nothing improves on the single highest effect achieved. In other words all conjurations affect only the natural probability P, they do not affect Pm values created by other conjurations. If they did then we would presumably face the situation where someone's lousy conjuration would reduce the effect of someone else's excellent conjuration for the same effect.

Prediction - As AI improves, human creative writing will become wilder and more extreme, and we will see a sort of arms race. Presently AI tends to produce bland, sensible, and grammatically conventional prose, and rather dull and formulaic poetry and novels. When we start training it on socially controversial, sexually explicit, politically incorrect, consensus rejected, and wildly imaginative material it will throw imitations of it back at us, and creatives will feel the need to get weirder still. Look at what photography did to painting. 

Weird Time(s)

This strange paper about time symmetry seems well worth some study and contemplation: -

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-87323-x

It makes a case for the seemingly highly contra-intuitive idea that whilst we can expect entropy to increase in the future in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, we cannot extrapolate backwards and expect the universe to exhibit less entropy in the past.

The authors make a strong case for the idea that any observer should expect entropy to increase in both time directions from any moment of observation.

On a quantum level this makes the past as indeterminate as the future, with interesting implications for retroactive enchantment.

On a cosmological level it challenges the hypothesis that the universe must have evolved from a very low entropy state and perhaps the whole idea of counterfactual definiteness.

On the other hand it does seem broadly supportive of both Hypersphere Cosmology in which the overall entropy of the universe remains constant, and of the hypothesis of 3D time in which any moment of observation has multiple past and future probabilities. 

Truth? – Many seem outraged by the self-contradictory Chaoist assertion that ‘Nothing ‘is’ True’, and some even baulk at its more robust V-Prime expression as ‘Nothing has Ultimate Truth’.
Yet it always proves productive to contemplate the conditions under which an apparent truth could become an apparent lie, or vice-versa.

Look at some of what has arisen from the questioning of apparent truths: - 

Impossibility of action at a distance – Newtonian Gravity

Fixed and absolute space and time – Special Relativity

Flat Euclidian spacetime – General Relativity

Counterfactual definiteness – Quantum Mechanics

Neo-Platonic occultism – Chaos Magic

Expanding universe – Hypersphere Cosmology
 

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Published: 03 February 2025

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Feblog 2025
Chaos Magic at 50.

As I turned 72 in January it occurred to me that Chaos Magic really began fifty years ago in a squat in insalubrious Deptford, London, where certain insights emerged during intense study, furious practice, wild experimentation, and meetings with remarkable and/or dubious people.

Chaos Magic basically said: - Make spells by any Analogical Process you like. Invoke or Evoke anything you can Imagine. Use any kind of Gnosis that works for you. Select Beliefs for their Utility. Treat Divination as the Imagination of Possibilities. Magic modifies Probability. Specify precisely what Illumination you seek.

As such it represents a radical breakaway from the Authority of Antiquity.

Most occultists except die-hard pseudo-traditionalists use Chaos Magic these days whether they acknowledge it or not.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of Liber Null & Psychonaut, Liber Kaos, and follow on books such as Psybermagick, The Apophenion, The Octavo, and EPOCH, have entered circulation in English and many major European languages; they have become the most widely quoted books in the bibliographies of all modern magic books and academic papers on contemporary magic.

Now in celebration of fifty years of Chaos Magic, herewith a link to the digital sample for This Is Chaos – Embracing the future of Chaos Magic. 

https://www.calameo.com/red-wheel_weiser-books/read/00557097424108bb33625

https://www.calameo.com/red-wheel_weiser-books/read/00557097424108bb33625

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Published: 08 January 2025

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Janblog 2025.

Reflections on the Future.

Optimism seems in short supply as we begin the second quarter of the 21st century. Economic growth flatlines in Europe, unsurprisingly perhaps as Europe has 10% of the world’s population, 30% of the world’s economy, and an astounding 60% of the world’s social spending. Meanwhile the developing world now competes furiously for resources, manufacturing opportunities, or migration opportunities. Authoritarian governments control most of the world’s countries and liberal democracies drift towards the right of the political spectrum as social democracy seems to falter as an ideology. America under Trump seems likely to curtail imports and immigration and to row back on hyper liberal wokeism. Globally we have quite a lot of wars in progress and a growing consensus that we should tool up for more.

COP 29 proved a copout with humanity’s politicians collectively deciding on token mitigation of climate change instead of significant reductions in CO2 emissions.

The benefits of Artificial Intelligence in scientific research seem likely to become dwarfed by the effects of Artificial Stupidity in warfare, surveillance capitalism, and general political surveillance, persuasion, and control, and in psycho-toxic forms of ‘entertainment’.

Do we have any reasons to feel cheerful?

Well I just got round to reading this over the festive season: -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-End-World-Generation-Sustainable/dp/1784745006

This relentlessly upbeat book by a data scientist certainly paints an optimistic picture of the future although perhaps by heavily selecting just the data sets that confirm that. Critics from the doom lobby have accused the author of bolstering the Trump-Musk-Farage axis of eco-gnomic thought and ideology.

If I chose to believe the book it would certainly reduce my reluctance to campaign for Reform UK whose current manifesto seems sound on most issues - but utterly crazy and irresponsible on environmental matters.

We ‘live in interesting times’ as the ancient Chinese curse goes. Happy New Year.

Necronomicon Mythos Sorcery Simulation Game System.

The following basic rule structure works well as a single player quest, as a multiplayer game for many participants - adjustable for cooperative or competitive play, or as a board game, or you can simply play it with pencil and paper and a single D6 dice.

Herewith the basic rule system: -

Necronomicon Mythos RPG Sorcery Simulation.

1) All Sorcerers get this double sided rule sheet on which to record their Sanity, Vitality, and Magic powers, and treasures wrested from the Elder Gods, plus a pen and a six sided dice.

Sorcerers each have 8 points which they can divide between their powers of Sanity, Vitality, and Magic. If any of these factors drop to zero, they die. (They may reincarnate i.e. take a new sheet and start again having lost all treasures and acolytes).

At each turn Sorcerers may: (i) -Move ONE power point between their powers in preparation for a challenge. (But not Treasures)

(ii) - Challenge Cultists for an Acolyte, or challenge an Elder God for its Treasure which can increase their Sanity, Vitality or Magic, but this involves the risk of the loss of these powers also. All challenges to Cultists or an Elder God involve 3 sequential dice throws, against Sanity, Vitality, and Magic. Sorcerer’s Power + Treasure + Dice Throw vs Adversaries Power. The Sorcerer has to beat the adversary’s highest⁺ power to gain that treasure. However, if the Sorcerer loses the throw on ANY power, then the Sorcerer loses 1 or 2 points of that power. Sorcerers may sacrifice a previously captured Treasure with the appropriate power or sacrifice an Acolyte in place of any lost power point(s).

2) The Elder Gods & Cultists each have a magnificent display board showing their Image, Treasure, Sanity, Vitality, Magic, and the costs of failing a challenge to them, distributed around the temple. 

NAME            Sanity  Vitality  Magic      Treasure                      Reward           Failure                               

                                                                                                                             on any power

Cultist                (  various 5⁺4 2  )      Sacrificial Acolyte@        Absorb Loses         -1

Shub-Niggurath 3          5⁺          4       Orgone Accumulator*     +1 Vitality             -1

Cthulhu               5⁺         4          3      Jewel of Clarity*               +1 Sanity               -1

Nyarlathotep      3           4          5⁺      Necronomicon*                +1 Magic               -1

Hastur                4           6⁺         5      Sigilium Vigorum             +2 Vitality              -2

Yog Sothoth        6⁺         4          5       All Seeing Eye                  +2 Sanity                -2

Azathoth             5          4           6⁺      Hand of Power                 +2 Magic               -2

Cosmic Indifference 6         7           8⁺      Innominandum          +3 Magic               -3

@ = At a conference a Sorcerer may gift an Acolyte to another Sorcerer.

* =  At a conference Sorcerers may confer this treasure upon another Sorcerer and keep it.

The Immoderator will call the beginning of each round of challenges, call for conferences when appropriate, and after a number of rounds invoke Mortality after which Sorcerers must lose one point of power of their choice at the beginning of each succeeding round. Victory – Let’s see who survives and how many treasures they won.

Cultists        Sanity Vitality Magic         Cultists         Sanity Vitality Magic

New-Agers       5⁺          4         2                 Odinists            2           5⁺        4

Kabbalists        5⁺         2          4                Hermetics         4           2         5⁺

Thelemites        4          5⁺         2                Gnostics            2           4         5⁺

A Sorcerer may acquire and use any number of Acolytes, but only one of each of the other Treasures.

Herewith eight display boards for playing it with a large group of participants wandering around a space.

Herewith a boardgame type adaptation devised by Max, a correspondent and play tester.

Notes on the Game System. As a simulation it obviously involves a fair bit of simplification and abstraction to model a lifetimes career in Sorcery in a game lasting about an hour. Nevertheless it does embody a number of real-world sorcery principles: -

Sorcerers should avoid risking their own powers of sanity, vitality, and magic when seeking treasures to augment them. Seek to throw the dice as little as possible by picking fights you cannot lose. Sorcerers should reconfigure their powers appropriately before mounting challenges, and sacrifice acolytes and treasures rather than their own powers in most circumstances, and build up sanity and vitality before building up magic.

For a more cooperative game allow for more frequent conferences and gifting or trading of acolytes and treasures. For a more competitive game allow sorcerers to attack each other at any turn instead of mounting a challenge. In this case, both throw dice and add them to their power points and treasures for each power. Defeat on any factor leads to the loss of an appropriate treasure, or an acolyte, to the winner, or the destruction of an appropriate power point, at the losers discretion.

Applying mortality before move 12 makes for a desperate and difficult game.

Does the Inominandum  imply a Nameless Horror or a Nameless Wonder? Some might call it both or the power of Chaos.

Geometricating the Quanta.

Since Einstein we have understood gravity as spacetime curvature, rather than as a ‘force’.

Matter (and energy) tells spacetime how to curve; Spacetime tells matter how to move.

From this Geometric insight we can abstract an Algebra and put the numbers in and give ourselves considerable explanatory and predictive power.

At the heart of Einstein’s Special and General Relativity theories lay beautifully simple and elegant ideas of enormous effectiveness. Lightspeed simply represents the ratio of space to time in spacetime, and hence also the ratio between mass and energy,  and gravity = spacetime curvature = acceleration.

To explain gravity and much of the large scale behaviour of the universe we need only the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time familiar to Newton, plus the idea that mass/energy equates to the curvature of those space/time dimensions.

(Hypersphere Cosmology just follows on from Relativity by considering the full effects of the spacetime curvatures of the universe in terms of Einstein’s original idea of a gravitationally closed static universe; before he caved in to peer pressure to think of it as expanding.)

Quantum physics recognizes three fundamental forces – the strong nuclear force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force. To a rough approximation these three forces respectively account for how the bits in the nuclei of atoms stick together, how those bits in the nuclei can swap themselves around to create different types of atoms, and how the electrons orbiting atoms give rise to chemistry, magnetism and the emission and absorption of light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

Quantum physics also recognizes four classes of fundamental ‘matter’ particles, the leptons made up of neutrinos and electrons, and the hadrons made up of down type quarks and up type quarks, all of which can appear in particle or antiparticle form and in one of three generations although such antiparticles and the higher generations of particles do not naturally appear frequently in this part of the universe. Plus quantum physics also posits several classes of ‘energy’ exchanging particles such as the photons of light and electromagnetic radiation, weak force bosons that mainly mediate quark rearrangements, gluons and mesons to hold quarks together, and maybe Higgs bosons to explain some aspects of mass.

However quantum physics does not present a geometric view of particle physics that we can express algebraically and simply put the numbers in. Rather in its latest iteration of Quantum Field Theory, ‘particles’  or quanta now consist of excitations and waves in underlying omnipresent fields. Instead of particles described by numbers we have events described by operators. In some areas this gives usefully predictive results, in others it doesn’t.

Furthermore, in quantum physics, one or more of the following classical principles of Causality, Reality, or Locality, often seem not to apply. Quanta can seem to do things without a cause, quanta can seem to have existed in indefinite states between doing things, quantum behavior can seem to violate lightspeed by acting instantly, or perhaps retroactively.

Nevertheless, because three out of the four apparently fundamental ‘forces’ do submit to some sort of description in quantum physics terms, a lot of effort has gone into trying to ‘Quantize Gravity’ and describe it as a quantum field with the hypothetical graviton particle as the characteristic excitation of that field. This enterprise has so far failed so spectacularly that perhaps we should consider ‘Geometricating the Quanta’ instead.

Geometricating the Quanta would mean developing a description of quantum phenomena that we could visualize in terms of shapes or ‘things’ in motion; we cannot currently do this with the abstract mathematical relationships of quantum field theory.

Visualization of quantum phenomena becomes difficult without ascribing some sort of physical causality, reality, and locality to them, yet by relaxing the conventional constraints on just one of the dimensions of spacetime we can imagine how quanta can seemingly violate causality, reality, and locality to some extent, but without entirely abandoning these concepts.

The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics implies that whilst ‘in flight’ between interactions (or measurements), quanta appear to exist in indefinite wavelike states precisely because any quantum interaction involves a two-way quantum handshake forth and back across time and the final and the initial states do not become definite until the transaction becomes complete. Causality thus survives but in a weaker sense, cause and effect remain linked but in any order. A quantum has no definite and ‘real’ particle like state whilst in flight and between interactions, we can perhaps regard it as fluctuating at very high speed as the quantum handshake sorts itself out*. Locality only appears to fail because quantum waves can propagate backwards in time at ‘reverse lightspeed’ to modify the initial conditions.

*Esoteric and magical ideas can perhaps stimulate a breakthrough here. The Transactional Interpretation implies that quantum handshakes take place in some kind of ‘pseudo-time’ orthogonal to observed time and thus appear instantaneous to us. Two more dimensions of time which we could quantify by using imaginary numbers to designate their unobservability, would effectively add a plane of pseudo-space to our description of physical reality. This pseudo-space could accommodate quantum superposition and also provide sufficient degrees of freedom to model all the varieties and qualities of the quanta as rotations in a 3S 3T spacetime. We should not forget that any wave consists of a spacetime translation and a rotation involving at least one ignored or unobservable dimension, and all quanta have wave functions.

It remains a hell of a jigsaw puzzle to solve, but if it proves doable then it would confirm the ‘simple’ esoteric hypothesis that a realm of possibility, call it an astral plane if you like, lies somehow at right angles to our perceived material reality. It would also set some realistic constraints on what we could expect of it and eliminate the nonsense of the many-(particle like)-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

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Published: 04 December 2024

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Decblog

Trump wins decisively, against the expectations of the pollsters and against an opponent who had the support of most of Hollywood and who outspent him by a factor of three. The bookies however consistently had him in the lead at odds of 4/6. Maybe, as with Brexit and the Scottish Secession votes, many who intended to take the tougher and least publicly acceptable option chose not to say so to pollsters.

(The pundits and the bookies didn’t appear to favor Brexit but the bookies adjusted their odds on the basis of just the value of bets placed. However a later analysis showed that a relatively small number of idiots had placed huge bets in the hope of making a quick profit from an expected Remain result whilst a much larger number of people had placed smaller bets on Leave out of hope, and wishful or magical thinking – and it worked.)

Perhaps we should not get too ‘Gary Latchman’ about Trump as a master of Chaos Magic but he certainly seems to understand the relativity and indeterminacy of truth, and the power of both positive and negative forms of thinking, rhetoric, and belief to create real effects.

Trump’s decisive victory has dispelled the hysterical threat of civil unrest or even civil war in the event of an indecisive result. No wonder then, that he kept implying that such a threat existed.

How much of a revolution Trump will accomplish in the next four years? Disgruntled or power hungry members of the middle and upper classes lead all revolutions by appealing to their fellow malcontents and to the great mass of the little people.

On the bright side we can expect a rollback of the hyper-liberal wokeism of identity politics, critical race theory, intersectionality, minority rights, political correctness, cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and mental health obsession that has so distorted free speech and academic debate in the USA and has seeped across the Atlantic to contaminate the UK. That philosophy developed as a weapon used by one faction against another in the bloated and overpopulated intellectual and managerial classes. Now they will find it used against them.

On the darkside we can expect a rollback on Environmentalism in favor of anything that creates more consumption, production, growth, ‘wealth’, and more global climate and ecological catastrophes.

On the grey side, there seems little chance that Trump will Make America Great Again if ‘great’ means a return to the global economic, technological, military, and cultural dominance that America enjoyed in the post WW2 decades. America distinguished itself then by doing things differently. Doing the same things again won’t work. Maybe under Trump, America will try some blend of Neoconservatism but with Chinese style Non-Interventionism in its international relations, prioritizing transactional business over principles.

Project Krakatoa – Global Warming vs Nuclear Winter.

COP29 ended with no substantive agreements at all about dealing with global warming, apart from resolving to aspire to sending some money for mitigation to developing nations. Most of this money probably won’t get paid. Most of the major players did not even bother to attend in person. Humanity has effectively decided to continue burning fossil fuels for as long as it makes short term economic sense and to live with the consequences whilst trying to avoid paying for them.

The amount of carbon humanity has already added to the Earth’s atmosphere will inevitably cause increasingly serious cumulative warming for centuries to come and, collectively, humanity remains determined to continue adding to it.

No scheme of carbon capture currently seems remotely feasible or affordable at the required scale. The political will to endure the immense immediate costs of decarbonising our economies through gigantic investments in renewables and nuclear power does not yet exist.

Don’t worry though, we already have the technology to avert total global catastrophe. When global warming becomes intolerable we can start detonating nuclear weapons in remote areas to throw up enough dust into the atmosphere to cause any required degree of global dimming. We know this works because major volcanic eruptions always cause global dimming and a drop in temperature for a while.

A couple of two hundred megaton blasts every year should do the trick, one in the northern hemisphere, maybe in a remote part of Siberia or Alaska, and another in the southern hemisphere, maybe on some little used Pacific islands or in the empty middle of Australia. This will hardly make a dent in the world’s existing nuclear arsenal.

Okay so we will have to endure a certain amount of dust and radioactive pollution but hopefully this will kill less people than the collapse of agriculture and mass starvation and all the wars that will result from that.

Galaxies at Redshift 18.6!

Just as Hypersphere Cosmology passes 380,000 reads https://specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology

The James Webb Space Telescope finds galaxies far too close to the supposed big-bang and thus the standard LCDM cosmology model seems in terminal difficulties.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13640

Bimaternal Mice   https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(18)30441-7

Having read a few sci-fi novels and feminist tracts in the past I have long wondered about the possibility of fusing two unfertilised eggs to make more female people. It seems that Chinese scientists actually got over halfway there a few years ago and made viable female mice out of two mouse ova. Such proof of principle means that doing this with humans now becomes feasible. (It doesn’t work with two sperms because neither contains the additional cellular machinery to make a viable embryo.)  

Would all-female high-tech societies out-compete other societies eventually? Perhaps they would because of greater cooperativeness, better and less destructive behaviour, greater conscientiousness, and more patient military drone operation.

Maybe in a century or two, if we still have any sort of civilisation, we may have a women only planet.

Dean Radin Interview. https://youtu.be/7OGJSULpwVc?si=5CmM9PPB6yir3bUp

The result here seems somewhat shambolic, Dean promises further extracts from our long audio skype in later episodes.

Mandrakes Circe has blossomed early, whilst Boris and Igor have taken their time this season, so maybe they will not achieve cross pollination between them. We have few insects in the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos at this time of year but I have a tiny paintbrush on standby.

Robert Anton Wilson biography!

The definitive biography of the life and times and astonishing ideas of this towering countercultural giant has arrived. I feel honoured to have made a small contribution to it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chapel-Perilous-Thought-Crimes-Robert/dp/B0DK45VLTQ?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE#

EPOCH news.

Mandrake of Oxford recently sent me slimline versions of the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos card deck, and a more sensibly sized edition of the great Triple Grimoire itself.

I have to say that they both handle much more easily than the first edition and all the colour plates look great in the new format. Matt and I did get a bit carried away with the format of the first edition, not realising that the resulting 2kg package would create logistical and carriage cost nightmares.

I’ll let you know when they become available from Mandrake.

Have a splendid Festive Season.