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Quest Conference.
On March 12th I shall speak at the Quest Conference in Bristol UK on ‘The History and Development of Chaos Magic’, so that gives me free rein to meander through the terrain of autobiography, history, philosophy and practice. I shall exhibit some instruments and bring along some books, including some Epochs, in case anyone wants to see one of these extraordinary tomes.
http://www.magicalquest.co.uk/conference.html
You can get tickets by post (Marion Green does not do things electronically) and probably at the door by prior arrangement. (email me about this if you need to).
Review.
I have just finished reading Gordon White’s new book ‘Star Ships – A Prehistory of the Spirits’. This struck me as the modern equivalent of that seminal and much celebrated book ‘The Golden Bough’ by Sir James George Frazer. It has a very heavyweight bibliography of anthropological books and papers, and Gordon has certainly done his academic homework.
However whilst Frazer traces the development of ideas from magic to religion to science, Gordon White explores the development of magical ideas from Paleolithic times through historical times to the present day whilst emphasising the continuing importance of pre-historical star lore, entheogen use, and of certain ancient archetypal spirits to the contemporary magician. He considers the end of the last ice age a seminal event in magical and cultural history and he suspects that flood myths in general may devolve from this event, and that the flooding of the vast shallows between Southeast Asia and Australia may have an ‘Atlantis’ type significance. He also discusses Gobekli Tepe, the mysterious temple complex recently unearthed in Turkey; that may date back twelve thousand years, in considerable detail. It would seem that this astonishing structure upsets the conventional ‘agriculture makes cities and then cities make cathedrals’ model because here a pre-agricultural society seems to have built a ‘cathedral’, perhaps a star-lore cathedral.
His thesis seems intriguing and provocative although a little tenuous, speculative and questionable in places, it will certainly stimulate debate and further research for years to come. I enjoyed reading it. Gordon puts in some light touches and flourishes even when dealing with the most academic of materials.
Related Review.
Julian Vayne writes upon the nature of ‘Spirits’ in BoB.
Hmm… well Religion asserts that spirits exist; Science asserts that they do not. Natural Philosophy and Magic need not take some half-assed compromise or evasive-agnostic position; we could instead go for Radical Materialism.
The Radical position asserts that no mind-body or spirit-matter duality exists, the universe consists of entirely ‘material’ stuff but this stuff does a range of amazing things, it has a wave-particle duality, quantum weirdness, non-local and a-temporal effects, parapsychological effects and all, and probably more. ‘Mind’ consists of what brains do. Spirits thus exist inside minds, but this doesn’t mean that they cannot have psychological, parapsychological and other effects beyond the brains which support them. The universe almost certainly contains lots of minds besides ours.
Entheogens don’t contain spirits; they merely contain material chemicals that help some brains to personify ideas by turning up the amplitude on those parts of our brains which have evolved something of a propensity to do that anyway. I can do it without them, and I prefer to do so, because ‘entheogens’ also add a lot of random confusion and damage.
Referendum.
Independence Day June 23rd.
Let us vote like Lions, not as frightened mice.
We can secure our freedom from the EU-Synarchy - if we have the courage.
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February Blog.
The POTUS campaign. (President Of The United States)
The popularity of the presidential candidates Trump and Sanders seems like the inevitable symptom of the relative decline of America. Since American industry and the American military have ceased to dominate the planet, America’s real economic growth has stalled, but America’s professional class has continued to take more at the expense of America’s waged class.
Thus the American political consensus has started to unravel and voters begin to entertain far from mainstream candidates.
Trump and Sanders each have a different approach to this problem from opposite ends of the political spectrum. However in the first case regaining industrial and military supremacy seems unfeasible, and in the second case socialism would come at the price of huge social upheaval against vested interests.
Militarism will no longer work in the context of a world awash with cheap geo-politically defensive weaponry and asymmetric warfare, unless you want to make liberal use of WMDs.
Socialism does not seem compatible with the present demand-economy structure.
America needs to look to the health of its manufacturing base and to apportion its wealth accordingly. It also probably needs to adjust to a lower growth model across the board.
The EU Referendum.
David Cameron seems like a brilliant tactician and he seems unlikely to lose the forthcoming EU Referendum, but will he have to change sides to win it? He would probably like to remain part of a completely redesigned European organisation but he knows that he won’t get that.
Problematically for Dave he has to make a show of renegotiating the UK membership to assuage those members of his own party who stand to benefit from the EU’s favouritism towards the interests of big business (against small business) and the political class (against the people).
The reform proposals on the table look cosmetic and paltry and will rapidly become completely ridden over if we capitulate and agree to stay in.
Fear of the unknown may induce some to want to remain in, so the out campaign should focus heavily on visions for an Independent Britain.
The greatest unknown however surrounds what will happen if we decide to remain in. What new nonsensical burdens will the EU impose? What further loss of control of our own affairs shall we suffer? Those of us old enough to remember the first referendum on the Common Market now seem at the forefront of the out campaign – we saw how voting for one thing brought quite another.
If Britain leaves the EU now we could bring down the whole rotten structure, liberate the nations of Europe and restore democracy.
The EU Synarchy remains well aware of this and thus it has a massive incentive to lie, as indeed it did about the ultimate agenda of the Common Market.
As a sort of metaphor for the EU consider the virtues of ABOLISHING BELGIUM.
‘Belgium’ functions as the ultimate adjective of vilest abuse in almost all the languages of the cosmos according to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and deservedly so when you consider the history and the current state of the place.
Belgium has always functioned as a sort of awkward weak buffer zone between the west and east Franks (roughly the French and Germanic language groups). Its existence has facilitated most of the bloodiest wars of history. Most Belgians don’t even want Belgium to exist; half would prefer to join the Netherlands and the other half would like to join France. Nobody can recall any famous Belgians because any who become famous usually prefer to imply that they came from somewhere else.
As a sort of unloved ‘in-between place’ with no coherent identity of its own, Belgium suffers from a brief but appalling colonial history, chronic maladministration, and far too many unassimilated immigrants from other cultures. It has become a haven for crime and corruption and the dodgy arms trade, despite its viciously heavy handed policing at low levels. (Don’t go on holiday there unless you intend to behave very obediently and quietly.). Its national monument seems to consist of a boy urinating into a fountain. No wonder the Synarchists behind the EU decided to use Brussels as a facade for their activities, this rotten heart of Europe provides the anonymity from which they and their German paymasters can piss all over the rest of us.
The EU, I loathe it, it looks totally BEL***M!
Because they modelled it on that damn place!
Anyway, despite the trials of February in the northern hemisphere (Peak Suicide and Peak Misery Month, worsened by Lousy Weather, and for many, also by Valentine’s Day, plus we attempt a Saturn working on Arcanorium College.) I do have some uplift for you: -
Welcome to the Specularium Game Theory pages, see the site header bar.
Materiel on Napoleonic 'Chess', Assymetric Combat Polygons, The Astronomicon, and more, to follow.
I’ve had a fascination with games, particularly board games, since my earliest times and have played hundreds and designed dozens more of them. We all have mental models of our universes inside our heads. Sometimes the effort of actually laying the geography out and formally abstracting the rules and the uncertainties pays unexpected dividends.
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I have become a grandfather for the first time, with my eldest daughter and her husband creating a delightful daughter a couple of weeks ago, mother, baby, and husband all doing fine. As my eldest has become an SNP convert in her adopted homeland, my granddaughter bears a suitably grand Scots-Norse name.
This sort of immortality plus a modicum of literary immortality will do nicely; no other form of immortality actually seems desirable if you think carefully about it.
And now to technical advances in esoterics: The picture shows the new Epoch Planetary Pocket Wand, currently loaded with the Horus Lamen, plus the other Martial Lamens for Athena, Choronzon, Thor, Mars, Eris, Loki, and Ishtar arraigned around it as we conduct a series of invigorating Martial workings for January in Arcanorium College. The whole set of Planetary and Bi-planetary Lamens consist of plywood carpentry biscuits pointed up and painted and ensigilised. The Lamens serve both as wand loads and as movable symbols for use on an Astronomicon board.
Wizards often tend to fashion and to discard wands, both Longstaffs and pocket sized Purbas, throughout their careers, both to assist practice and to mark the development of their ideas. This one probably qualifies as about my Mk 11 Purba, although in some sense it also qualifies as Marques 11 – 47 all in one go, due to its versatility. Carrying a pocket wand began as an exercise in Chaos Monasticism, but it has become a constant practise, reminding the wizard that the calling, the duty, and the opportunity, remain ever present.
The festive and birthday period brought this remarkable book: -
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heirs-Forgotten-Kingdoms-Gerard-Russell/dp/1471114716
Most religions have something running from unease to downright rejection towards the Theory of Evolution, but perhaps much more than the simple inconsistencies between scriptural depictions and scientific ideas about the origin of species underlies this.
The book traces the origins and survival of many of the religious and mystical ideas from India through the Middle East to Europe. As most serious scholars have understood for decades now, religions get cobbled together from the memes of previous religions, they don’t spring miraculously into existence out of nothing, and having cobbled themselves together from fragments they continue to evolve and develop, whilst pretending that they haven’t.
Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian Empire, went into decline, although it still has a tiny following. However Judaism seems to have adopted some Zoroastrian ideas fairly early on in its development and these later fed into Christianity. The Pythagorean philosophies from classical times continue to influence some minority sects in the Middle East. Mithraism has left at least one very distinctive and surprising mark on European culture. (I won’t spoil it for you, read the book.)
Emotive Religion. Theology looks like the attempt to psychoanalyse Deities from the characteristics they display in scripture and in lore and perhaps in ‘revelation’. We try to second guess or interpret their supposed wishes by such activity, usually to some sort of advantage to ourselves.
Mythology and the History of Religion tend to tell us more about how our human psychology expresses itself in various situations than about the Deities themselves.
Theurgy describes the attempts of magicians to call, conjure, and even coerce, various spirits and deities, on the assumption that such phenomena have some sort of independent metaphysical reality. It seems like an extreme extension of prayer.
Theometry on the other hand implies taking the measure of Deities, including noting how our projections of them has evolved, and also making them to order, on the assumption that such phenomena arise from our own psychology and may also serve as vehicles for liberating our more unusual abilities. This seems more like proper magic.
Rational argument has only a limited role in establishing or destroying faith in Deities. Emotive and peer pressure forces have a far greater effect, and all religions employ both although the emotive hooks used by religions or sects within religions can change and evolve with time.
A previous blog discusses the emotive tone of what Richard Dawkins called ‘The World’s Second Worst Religion’ the one that has relied heavily on ‘Guilt and Self-Righteousness’ duality: -
http://www.specularium.org/blog/item/34-abuse
That perhaps now shows signs of improvement under a new Pontiff.
However if you tried to devise the most ghastly and most destructive possible emotive tone for a religion or sect, then a duality of ‘Self-Pity and Mercilessness’ would fit the specification perfectly and result in The World’s Worst Religion.
Robo-Stogie. The benefits of nicotine seem substantial. Chain-smoking through self-administered Mensa IQ tests seems to add ten percent to my score. Nicotine also gives you at least a couple of yards advantage in an emergency brake whilst driving. (Although for reasons of absent mindedness, apophenia, impulsiveness, ecology, and a preference for exercise, I have always declined to drive.) Nevertheless after fifty years of tobacco enjoyment my dentist said it wasn’t doing my teeth any good, so I went over to Vapes. These seem absolutely brill, cheap to run, thousands of exotic flavours to choose from, no danger of setting your bed on fire, little sign of use or offense to others if you don’t exhale quickly, and probably no personal or collateral damage, assuming that propylene glycol remains as harmless as it seems.
Many thanks for all the emails appreciative of the neo-classical statuary. The next project may consist of designing some ornate bronze rams for the prows of our Trident nuclear submarines. Comrade Commissar Corbyn has come up with the cunning wheeze of disarming them but keeping them to create employment. So if they cannot carry effective weapon systems they should at least carry aesthetically pleasing ones, in a Corinthian or Athenian style perhaps?
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Winter Solstice 2015.
The year ends on several hopeful notes. The Paris Climate Conference has at least resulted in an agreement about the reality of anthropic climate change and the need to prevent it, so two cheers for that. However we should have had a result like this a decade or more ago and effective measures in place by now. Whether or not the recommended measures become implemented and whether or not they can save global civilisation remain open questions. This planet already has a human population level lying terrifyingly in excess of long term sustainability levels even at current rates of resource destruction.
If we wish to avoid a 21st century characterised by resource conflicts, environmental degradation, constant wars and extremist political and religious ideas, we had better fix our climate changing behaviour and our population and consumption levels, because at present the figures for the future simply don’t add up………….to anything except disaster.
The British people should will finally get a referendum on the EU, this coming year or the next, another cheer for that.
UKIP has fulfilled its function, it has forced the other parties to offer a referendum, and now, win or lose, UKIP seems to have little further use. It only ever had one worthwhile policy and everything else seemed like buffoonery. Yet I feel justified in having worked for them in their early years, for now we get to answer the question that most of the political class didn’t want to even ask us: -
Do we wish to remain part of the creeping synarchist totalitarianism of a corrupt, mega-bureaucratic and undemocratic EU that favours only the political class and big business; or do we prefer freedom and democracy?
Any nation that trades its political independence for economic gain will end up losing both, as so many of the smaller nations in the EU have already discovered.
The EU stands built on bluff, fear, lies, and deceit and faux-internationalism. We would lose nothing and regain much by leaving, and Brexit may well bring down the whole rotten edifice.
On a more festive note I have made two seasonal gifts for my fellow humans, firstly a lifesize statue of Hercules who will go on extended loan to some semi-public gardens around here to celebrate the several years of backbreaking toil we have put into renovating it.
Secondly, after two decades of mental toil the Hypersphere Cosmology hypothesis has probably reached its final form, see the recently updated version here: -
http://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
and full paper here: - http://vixra.org/abs/1601.0026
My thanks to all those physicists, both orthodox and alternative, who have exchanged so many emails, criticisms, observations, and related ideas on this subject. The hypothesis now seems reasonably robust and anti-fragile, but please do try to break it if you can, or if not then try challenging your commanding professor with it.
Historical accident has led to the current dominance of the Lambda CDM Big Bang theory. Perhaps if we had discovered the CMBR before we discovered the Cosmological Redshift then Einstein might have stuck with his Riemannian Hypersphere model of the universe with a cosmological constant, and looked a bit further into the properties of the hypersphere to find that he could have stabilised it with a cosmological constant supplied by a 4-rotation (rather than a Gödelian 3-rotation), and that the positive curvature of the hypersphere would itself create a cosmological redshift without any expansion at all. All other observations could then have become interpreted within such a framework to yield a theory such as this.
It may not turn out as the final answer in cosmology but it certainly seems less wrong than the current official model. If nobody manages to falsify it, I shall devote my remaining years of theoretical endeavour to modelling quantum fundamentals and particle physics in terms of three dimensional time, plus of course the related and more difficult matter of a general theory of magic.
At Grove last night many spoke of the Winter Solstice as marking the end of the year, and how much they looked forward to the return of the Sun (despite that so far we have had the mildest winter here for thousands of years). The great megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge, Maes Howe, and Newgrange all plainly align to the Midwinter Solstice, despite that Druid-revivalists tend to look to Stonehenge at the Summer Solstice, and that the megaliths originate from pre-druidical cultures anyway.
But what the heck, all cultures in temperate latitudes seem to evolve some excuse for an end/beginning of year party. The Christians, having no clue about the actual birthday of their saviour decided to slot it in on 25th December to try and supplant Pagan festivals at that season, Mithras’ birthday in particular fell on 25th December. However by this date the sunrise and sunset have started to perceptibly march north again bringing hope of summer and rebirth and all that sort of thing.
Personally I like to consider Winter Solstice as the end of the year, a time to look back on events and then to look forward to Xmas as a celebration of Family and Friends and Commerce, (oops that should have read ‘The Bounty of the Earth’), and then again to celebrate New Year……..sort of Look Back, Look Now, Look Forward.
All the best for the festive season. Pete Carroll.
Addendum 29/12/15. Contrary to widespread rumour, the destruction of Boleskine House (The dread Kaaba of Crowleyanity) and my seasonal visit to Inverness remain not even coincidental. I did indeed visit my eldest in the surrounding highlands over the xmas period, however I arrived there on xmas eve, as my airline booking clearly demonstrates, to find the place already burnt down a day in advance of my visit.
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A pre-solstice blog.
A bit of an interregnum prevails before the festive season. The Knights of Chaos have launched their conjuration in support of the Climate Change Conference in Paris. The festive gifts and cards await dispatch, the Solstice Grove and Eisteddfod loom, and later my clan will gather in the Scottish Highlands this year.
On Arcanorium we prepare to invoke Venus in her many forms, as the first of a sustained series of planetary style workings based on the EPOCH. This seems particularly apposite for the season of love and goodwill towards all creatures.
A new Hypersphere Cosmology 2 paper awaits the attention of my artist and IT friend before it appears here and on viXra.
Whilst waiting for the paint and the sigils to dry on the 54 Lamens of a new Epoch Astronomicon and for the composites to harden on the new lifesize Hercules statue for the gardens, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth provoke further musings upon the hypothesis of 3D time……
This very long term 3D time project seeks to complement the Hypersphere Cosmology thesis which now nears completion, and to make some conceptual improvements and revisions to the Standard Model of particle physics and to quantum fundamentals which currently look very messy, full of seemingly arbitrary constants and short on unifying principles.
The Standard Model predicts that a Higgs Mechanism accounts for some of the mass of mass bearing particles and that the presence of a ‘Higgs Field’ to endow such particles with mass implies that a Higgs particle (the Higgs Boson) will exist. However this flies directly in the face of General Relativity which describes mass as arising from/as spacetime curvature. The General relativistic description works very well indeed although it may require a tweak or two at very high intensities and at very long distances as suggested in Hypersphere Cosmology. The Higgs idea also flies in the face of the hypothesis of 3D time which seeks to geometricate the quanta rather than to quantise gravity.
Plus adding a Higgs Field to the standard Lambda CDM cosmology model looks like creating an even worse mess.
The purported Higgs Mechanism does not seem to even half quantise the inertial or gravitational manifestations of mass, for the Higgs field or boson would have a different coupling constant for each type of particle that it supposedly confers mass upon.
Thus I have volunteered to eat the relevant pages of The Octavo in the event of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Why have I not done so then?
Because I don’t think that little blip in the data at 126GeV indicates a Higgs Boson or a Higgs Mechanism at all, I remain completely unconvinced.
After spending many billions of euros on building the largest most expensive scientific instrument in human history and failing to get anything spectacular or decisive out of a series of exceptionally messy experiments designed by huge Euro- committees, CERN felt under intense pressure to announce something; even if it meant highly selecting the data and then torturing the remaining data statistically till it yielded the appearance of a significant result.
The graph shown here gives a plot of selected proton collisions at various energies which produced a pair of detected gamma ray photons which may have come from a Higgs Boson which itself remains undetectable because it decays almost instantly after its creation.
Note that pairs of gamma ray photons get produced at a large range of energies, the apparent slight peak of them at around 126GeV apparently indicates something of immense significance, the other small anomaly at around 138GeV gets ignored.
Other experiments seem to show slight blips in the numbers of pairs of Z bosons at roughly similar energies.
Despite that the CERN team assert that they have 99.999% confidence that they have found something slightly anomalous at around 126GeV that might correspond to a Higgs Boson, and that the popular science press confidently proclaims the existence of what they have dubbed ‘The God Particle’, the internet and the scientific journals remain alive with dissent.
See this from a worried statistician http://tonyohagan.co.uk/academic/pdf/HiggsBoson.pdf
If the CERN team had conducted similar experiments and statistical analyses with the aim of disproving the existence of significant evidence for a Higgs Boson at these energies they would have succeeded. It remains a theoretical construct in my view, and probably a fallacious one at that.
Why do I care?
I love Science. If the Higgs turns out as a fudge created by a huge committee then many will interpret it as institutional fraud on a vast scale which will have a very detrimental effect on the perception and funding of science.
I love Metaphysics. The quest for the underlying structure and functioning of this mysterious universe never loses its fascination.
I love Magic. A largely dismissive attitude to magic generally prevails and this suits me fine as I therefore cannot get arrested for it. However any general theory of magic will probably require 3D time.