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Discordianism seemed a major influence amongst the people I worked with from the mid-nineteen seventies till the mid- nineteen nineties and it still seems to have a big appeal for some Chaos magicians, but what at one time seemed a source of liberation, inspiration and innovation seems to have subsequently developed into a serious flaw.
This short Wiki entry summarises Discordianism fairly concisely: -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism
We used a bit of Discordianism when it seemed fashionable in the early days but it got out of hand later. I think our misunderstanding of it led to a lot of problems. Discordianism does two things. Firstly and mainly it pokes sacrilegious and in-defferent fun at religions and power structures. Secondly it allows a group to poke a bit of fun at itself and to make light of its own pretensions. Unfortunately the second facility of self-parody eventually proved self-destructive.
A little self-parody can give a ritual or a hierarchy a bit of an edge, but an excess of it will undermine both eventually.
The Discordian approach led to people styling themselves things like Sorror Preposterous, groups called things like Temple Misanthropy, me getting called His Pestilence Pope Pete The First of the Zero Degree, Banishing by laughter, and spoof, surrealist, and neo-Dadaist rituals like the Eris Rite which invoked bizarre and unpredictable consequences.
Discordianism promotes a humorous lack of deference towards organised religion, monotheism, patriarchy, sexual prudery, and religious and political power structures and conspiracies.
To do this it exploits ‘Camp’ and ‘Transgressive’ themes, both by using them to parody what it seeks to provoke in-deference to, and also by using such themes to establish its own alternative subcultural cult, or in-group, or fashion as ‘A joke masquerading as a religion or a religion masquerading as a joke’.
‘Camp’ means useless or ineffectual in a way that seems vaguely humorous or self-parodying. A Goddess who provokes creative disorder may have some value, but invoking a Goddess who merely screws things up, like Pratchett’s ‘Anoia’, seems either a parody of religion or an invocation of useless ineffectuality, or worse; an excuse for it.
Chaos magic already had a fairly ‘Transgressive’ attitude to organised religions and towards Thelema and Crowleyanity, and it partly defined itself by its opposition to these things. In adopting the god-form of Baphomet it had followed Eliphas Levi’s blasphemous conception of a supreme deity. However transgression easily goes stale, particularly among the converted for who it becomes merely a tired in-joke, and it can descend into little more than a compulsion to annoy outsiders.
My Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos included many antinomian themes but little or no Discordianism. However Discordian practices had gradually tended to come to the fore amongst the groups I worked with and probably contributed much to the problems that developed. These days I have ceased to recommend experimentation with the Eris Rite.
The book Psybermagick that I wrote in the middle of my career whilst on extended sabbatical seems the most heavily influenced by the Discordian perspective, although it also contained the seeds of later research in other directions.
My last three books, The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch contain only minor references and appendices about Discordianism, as Apophenia began to assume far more importance for me than Eris.
Discordianism basically served to attack the old aeon paradigms. I think we should avoid it as a model for the coming Pandaemonaeon.
Discordianism seems dead or dying, having served its purpose. Any new serious currents and orders seem unlikely to use it again.
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The Shell Oil Company now starts to move its drilling equipment to the Arctic for another attempt at drilling, despite widespread condemnation of this act from all the major conservation and ecology groups. Humanity should immediately begin to curtail burning fossil fuels, and invest in renewable alternatives rather than devastate the planets remaining wildernesses.
The environmental damage looks set to become severe, particularly if this reckless venture 'succeeds' and many other drilling operations begin as a result of it.
The Knights of Chaos will conjure for the failure of this expedition on Midnight 26th July.
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Nodens.
Herewith Nodens and his Hound, a study in faux bronze (milliput over iron and copper) made as part of my continuing druidical studies of the ancient pagan Gods and Goddesses of my area.
Nodens had a large temple by Romano-Celtic standards; just over the River Severn at Lydney on a promontory they call Ludd’s Island.
This temple probably functioned to invoke the healing powers of Nodens, it contained numerous votive offerings of models of body parts and some exquisite bronze models of hounds which the ancients venerated as agents of healing for their ability to lick their own wounds free of infection. The temple also appears to have included an Incubatio; a place in which to take ritual sleep, for perhaps prophetic or healing purposes.
Few images of Nodens have survived so I have given him an Asclepius style staff with serpent for his medical powers and the appearance of a grave and learned elder wizard. I do not intend to stray any closer to self-portraiture than this, and incidentally my normally shaggy hound did actually look like this two summers ago when the groomer gave her an all over haircut.
Nodens does however have a complex theometry. The hound may also symbolise an association with hunting, some mythologies associate him with the sea as well, and he has etymological and mythological associations in the Irish myths with Nuada , king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Welsh king Lludd (Nudd) Llaw Eraint from the Mabinogion.
Both these figures lost a hand in battle and acquired a magical replacement made in Silver which enabled them to regain their kingships. Perhaps this relates to some sort of wounded-healer myth, or to a magical healing hand.
Nodens appears briefly in the Lovecraft Mythos as a sea god who can command Nightgaunts and who opposes Nyarlathotep, perhaps this relates to his powers to dispel nightmares.
Summer is Coming.
George Martin’s marvellously entertaining Game of Thrones series takes part of its inspiration from the 15th century English Wars of the Roses. The fictional land of Westeros vaguely resembles Britain and the great wall in the north of it has echoes of Hadrian ’s Wall.
The English Wars of the Roses arose as a dynastic conflict for the English throne between feudal lords with their own private armies who fell to fighting each other in large part because of the loss of their holdings in France following the English defeats in the Hundred Years War, as the French gradually consolidated their kingdom and eventually threw the English out.
The Game of Thrones has a different trigger for war, the advent of a decades long winter which creates a resource conflict. This scenario resembles the 17th century wars which raged across Europe and notably included the Thirty Years War which sucked in all the European powers, and the English Civil War era which also involved Scotland and Ireland.
Historians sometimes call these extensive and very bloody 17th century wars ‘The Wars of Religion’. However wars between Catholics and Protestants had simmered since the various reformations for some time before, and continued long afterwards. The major outbreaks of war in the 17th century also involved conflicts between the Great Houses and Monarchies of Europe which often led to alliances and rivalries which cut quite across religious lines and led to the most bloody and destructive wars in European history, far in excess of the destruction achieved in WW1 and WW2.
A period of Global Cooling leading to massive crop failures coincided with the disastrous wars of the 17th century and the armies of the time ravaged the lands, plundering food and resources and committing genocide as they went. Central Europe suffered appalling devastation and the English Civil War seems very far from civil, as half starving armies requisitioned and devoured all resources in their path and executed anyone standing in their way.
This period of Global Cooling, sometimes called The Little Ice Age probably had an anthropogenic origin. The European invasion of the Americas initiated a massive population crash there of perhaps 90% of the indigenous peoples, mainly through diseases imported by the Europeans. This led to a vast reforestation of previously cultivated areas and the sudden CO2 uptake crashed the climate.
As someone once said of the French Revolution, 'there's nothing more political than the price of a loaf of bread', and the more closely one examines the wars of the 17th century the more they look like a resource conflict with religion serving only to justify aggression. Political and religious opinions of course harden during resource conflicts but they do not initiate them. Any alien anthropologist examining WW2 would probably describe the whole event as simply an inter-tribal dispute about oil resources. Germany and Japan would probably not have developed extreme ideologies and gone to war if they had had access to copious supplies of cheap oil, as did their main adversaries America, Britain, and Russia.
The current situation in the Middle East, and to some extent in the whole Islamic world, derives from problems of resources. Most of the countries involved now have very high populations but not the industrial or agricultural resources to maintain them comfortably, particularly in the face of climate change.
Syria suffered severe droughts which destroyed much of its agriculture and livestock just before the civil war broke out there, now it suffers from a baroque conflict involving at least three major factions and interference from foreign powers, now including Turkey apparently bombing all three factions. Political and religious opinions have hardened into extremism, mass deaths of adversaries have become the unstated aim of the combatants, and it all begins to resemble the 17th century all over again, except that the drying of the area rather than the freezing of the area seems the underlying cause.
If we cannot as a species get Global Warming under control we can expect far more of this.
Beware the Long Summer.
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The people who invented Democracy in the first place have just set us all a brave example in saying NO! to the EU-Synarchy.
Let us hope and conjure that this Thermopylae moment marks the beginning of the end of the whole rotten corrupt undemocratic EU through which the Germans have, for a third time, attempted to establish hegemony for their own benefit.
I used to really enjoy holidaying in Greece before it entered the Euro. After that it rapidly became rather expensive to do so. Taverna meals which used to cost about the same as English pub lunches suddenly cost as much as German restaurants.
I do not think the Greece should feel any shame or embarrassment about it debt, after all its creditors shoveled money at it in a greedy attempt to gain profit and control.
If Greece declares itself bankrupt and defaults and reissues its own currency and starts again it will experience temporary hardships caused by lack of imports, however it will quickly recover due to a tourist boom and an export boom.
Instead of technically defaulting it could recreate the Drachma at 1:1 with the Euro, and pay off all its debts instantly before allowing any other use of the Drachma, and then either deliberately devalue it or let it quickly find its realistic exchange rate at maybe 10:1. In effect the Greece would have played back in reverse the trick the EU played on it.
Any other strategy looks like penury and servitude to German financiers forever,
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So we appear to have a cowardly fudge of a ‘temporary fix’ for the Greek Euro-Crisis which pleases nobody and which will not address the underlying problem that a currency union between widely different economies cannot work, unless of course the Eurozone does as Francoise Hollande suggests and creates a Eurozone Government.
The spectacularly incompetent President of France perhaps merely provokes or teases with this suggestion, or perhaps he speaks out of exasperation or fear.
It becomes increasingly clear that a Eurozone Government would effectively mean The Fourth Reich with added Synarchy.
Hollande’s more robust French ancestors would have put him to the guillotine for treason as a quisling.
German loan sharks now effectively run the Greek economy and will do so until the Greeks rebel, default, and reclaim their economic sovereignty by reissuing their own currency.
Part of the motivation of the whole EU venture lay in trying to ameliorate or comfortably accommodate the rising industrial power of Germany within Europe. This has plainly failed now since the Germans realised that the Euro would prove more useful to them than Panzers.
In 1939 Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, mainly to gain control of the huge Skoda motor works. In 2000 they simply bought it without firing a shot.
I have an enduring memory of West Berlin prior to the fall of the wall. West Berlin had supposedly filled up with creative-alternative-bohemian types living lives subsidised by a government determined to keep the difficult to live in enclave fully populated. I had sat up till 4am in an all-night café having a punishing philosophical, metaphysical, and magical debate with my host. We set off for his flat and came to a pedestrian crossing on a totally deserted street with no sight or sound of a vehicle for half a mile in either direction. The pedestrian sign showed red; my creative-alternative-bohemian host stood to attention on the pavement. ‘Shall we go?’ I asked. Any sane Englishman would have simply crossed the completely empty street. Nein, iz Verboten! He replied sharply.
I seriously do not want to live in a Europe that runs on such an authoritarian mind-set.
Below see the preliminary work on the Hound of Nodens. The Celtic God Nodens comes next on my list of Druidical study, contemplation, statuary, and visitation (he had a substantial temple in this area, just across the Severn River). Archaeologists discovered bronze deerhounds in his temple ruins, these may relate to the healing function usually attributed to him. He may also have attributions as a God of the sea, hunting, and dreaming. I currently plan to depict him standing with his hound and holding an Asclepius style serpent staff and perhaps with a silver hand for his connection to Welsh and Irish Myth.
Meanwhile the lifesize mannequin for Hercules has arrived along with fresh supplies of Jemsonite but I’ll probably wait for the re-glazing completion on the large greenhouse and build him in there.
The Hypersphere Cosmology thesis seems to have achieved self-consistency and has so far resisted falsification, see http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0167
Thus Necronomicon Mythos work of an Azathothian and Hasturian nature continues with a view to obtaining some clarification about the three dimensional time hypothesis.
