Forthcoming Book. Interview with a Wizard – Ian Blumberg interviews Peter J Carroll with 365 questions.
This book covers just about everything from anthropology to xenobiology, taking extensive detours through chaos magic, the ice war, sex magic, biography, extreme travel, the knights of chaos, conventional and alternative physics, and an extraordinary lifetime of unusual ideas and experiences. A substantial appendix also presents hypersphere cosmology both in an easily visualisable and understandable form, and with its full mathematics.
Mandrake of Oxford will let us know when it comes out.
Meanwhile in the USA, Weisers have scheduled the release of the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut for May.
Chaos Wokeism.
Chaos Magic began amongst the occultists of the tail end of the Hippy subculture of the Baby Boomer generation. The Punks and the Goths soon embraced it. Then the Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, Thelemites, Darksiders, Satanists, Thule-ists, and Ultra-Rightists all took inspirations from it. Now things seem to have come full circle with the advent of Chaos-Wokeism as exemplified by the recent works of Professor Patricia MacCormack – a Chaos Magician who embraces full spectrum radical socio-political-sexual-ecological philosophy with gothic panache. Try googling her.
The Eight-Rayed Snowflake of Chaos rises!
You know that you have created a technology and a paradigm shift rather than a cult or a religion when so many diverse rebel subcultures adopt ideas and practices from its toolkit.
Entropy. Further cosmological musings.
Most physicists believe that the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, must apply to the entire universe. As they interpret most of the processes going on in the universe as entropy increasing processes they figure that if the universe began with some sort of expansion from a big bang, then it must have increased its entropy continuously since then and that it will end in a state of complete entropy, the so called heat-death of the universe.
Hypersphere Cosmology models the universe as a vorticitating hypersphere, finite and unbounded in both space and time, that does not expand. This hyperspherical universe has spatial and temporal horizons but no beginning or ending in space or time for observers within it. Thus, the overall entropy of the universe should remain constant despite local fluctuations and its obvious tendency to increase hereabouts where we live at the expense of a burning star.
Several processes maintain this cosmic equilibrium: -
1) Proton to Neutron conversion via the weak force interaction. Inside stars, gravity effectively forces Electrons to combine with Protons creating Neutrons. Protons then combine with Neutrons and other Protons to create elements heavier than hydrogen. Up to the creation of Iron nuclei, this process liberates energy in the form of photons and neutrinos. The creation of elements heavier than Iron during the gravitational collapse of heavy stars stores energy in the newly created elements themselves.
2) The gravitational collapse of very heavy stars can result in the creation of neutron-only matter or ‘neutronium’ and/or further collapse to form black holes containing hyperspheres vorticitating at lightspeed.
3) Neutron to Proton conversion via the weak force interaction. Free Neutrons quickly decay back into Protons and Electrons emitting energy and antineutrinos in the process. Bound Neutrons in heavier elements do so more slowly in radioactive decay.
4) Stars can explode in various ways and return matter to space. According to Hypersphere Cosmology, the hyperspheres inside of black holes return matter and energy to space not only by Hawking Radiation but more so by the overspin effect of the cosmic hypersphere on their lightspeed vorticitation.
Just which of the above general processes above increases entropy and which of them decreases it, remains an open question.
Every major process in the universe seems reversible given enough time. Energy moves back and forth between Kinetic and Gravitational manifestations and between its manifestations as Proton-Electron pairs and Neutrons.
Hypersphere Cosmology Prediction.
The so-called ‘Cosmic Dark Ages’ did not occur. According to conventional LCDM big bang cosmology, a gap should exist between the CMBR and the light from the ‘earliest’ stars and galaxies. Hypersphere cosmology predicts that galaxies with redshifts all the way to CMBR levels will exist. The James Webb space telescope may hopefully prove capable of observing this.
Book Review.
‘The Weirdest People in the World’, by (Professor) Joseph Henrich.
This book first came out in 2020 and somehow slipped under my radar, now it has appeared as a thick Penguin paperback. I found it fascinating and deeply thought provoking.
In Liber Kaos I outlined the Aeonic progression that appears to have occurred from Animism and Shamanism to Paganism to Monotheism and then to Atheism. Henrich draws upon a wealth of anthropological, historical, and sociological data to show precisely how this progression occurred.
Many modern Neo-Pagans and Magicians find monotheism unattractive and wonder how Christianity managed to supplant Animisms and Paganisms almost everywhere in the world that it encountered them, and how it won the Cultural Darwinism race. Henrich shows precisely how it did this, and how Christianity inadvertently eventually shot itself in the foot in the process and opened the door to Atheism.
The western church expanded extraordinary efforts in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages to break the hold of extended family clans and tribes on society. It did this because it wanted the church itself to supplant the social dominance of such clans and tribes and it gradually acquired immense influence, power, and wealth by doing so. To accomplish this the church campaigned with extraordinary aggressiveness against anyone marrying any person with whom they had any family relationship. First cousin marriage became ferociously anathemised and at times nobody could marry anyone related even to the seventh degree. Divorce, monogamy, remarriage, adoption, and the whole concept of illegitimacy and inheritance became very hotly contested issues. This caused many hereditary wealth and power structures to eventually fail and many inheritances to fall to the church. Before the Reformation, the church owned one third of all land in England.
The roots of Christian restrictions on sexual activity all derive from this period. The doctrines of hell and damnation grew largely to reenforce such restrictions.
Within centuries this caused a massive shift in the psychology of the west. It stimulated individualism and voluntary association as it eroded traditional loyalties to extended family clans and tribes. The growth of Individualism eventually spawned Protestant Christianity, mass literacy, and the Industrial Revolution and a European continent full of WEIRD people. Gradually the Weird new individualism began to erode the power of the religion that had birthed it.
WEIRD because as it began in western Europe, most of the original weirds were White, and they became Educated, Individualistic, Rich (by historical comparison), and Democratic by inclination due to their rejection of hereditary and clannish authority. WEIRD because very few people had thought outside the box of extended family clan for the whole of human history.
Weird ways of thought and life have become exported to many parts of the world over the last few centuries, often by imperial force and missionary work, but sometimes they became adopted to force modernisation, as in Japan. In China, Mao’s cultural revolution primarily sought to destroy ancestral family clan structures and the way of thinking that went with it.
Weird and non-weird peoples usually have great difficulty understanding or even tolerating each other’s strange seeming loyalties, religions, gods, moralities, laws, and sexual and social mores.
I have always felt a distrust of the sociological and psychological maxim that ‘People Are The Same Everywhere’. It certainly didn’t gel with my experiences of world travel. Henrich’s book shows how cultural evolution can make such a massive difference to the way people think and behave that it almost seems to change what we think of as their ‘human nature’.
A very illustrious historian of my acquaintance cautions against reading too much into such an overarching big idea hypothesis which may depend on highly selective evidence, and which has yet to make much academic impact, but I found it a very thought provoking read.