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Published: 19 September 2014

Hits: 14418

Autumn Equinox and my three Mandrakes have again sprouted leaves after a dormant summer; I guess I must have the Autumnalis variety. They certainly take their time; I may just get some flowers and seeds this year. Milady, the largest one who looks like she reclines cross-legged on a couch, has achieved the size of a modest parsnip in 3 years. My cunning plan to re-seed all the hedgerows of southwest Albion with the m may take centuries.

Walking over the peaks in the north of the Lake District earlier in the week I could see Scotland and wondered if I would ever see it again.

But Scotland just said YES to common sense, despite the juvenile element to the vote. The canny Scots will get devolution and even more of our money and they will retain British citizenship, and I won’t have to send food parcels to my eldest in the highlands.

Cameron will probably get re-elected now, and hopefully buoyed by his success he will grant us all a referendum on the EU……. and loose it.

Divorcing Britain to get closer into bed with the damned EU always looked like the Achilles heel of the argument for Scottish Independence.

The Wizardry section of this site now contains a new piece called The Neoplatonic Chocolate Screwdriver. Ever since I picked up my first books on magic and esoterics forty years ago I’ve had issues with certain dubious parts of the corpus like astrology and the essences of the elements. My experiences of Neo-Druidry have served to crystallise my thoughts on the subject further, I love the overall ambience of Druidry but the Neoplatonism in it leaves me cold. 

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Published: 10 September 2014

Hits: 14756

Scotland, bonnie Scotland, adopted home of my firstborn. Please take the new Devo Max option and vote No to the foolish romantic notion of a hasty divorce in favour of that damned European Union. Stay and we can go Independent together.

If the hotheads of the Yes campaign loose expect a few brawls and some vandalism, but if they win expect massive disinvestment and refugees migrating south.

In other news: -

Hypersphere Cosmologyachieves 150 thousand+ hits from all over the planet!

Do keep me informed of your debates with the timid tenured guardians of cosmological orthodoxy, I hope to outlive the big bang theory.

http://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology

Epic Fail. IOT Pastgrandmagus Fails First Grade of Druidry!

Oops, well at least it’s useful to know just how high they set the bar these days.

I shall nevertheless remain a Bard and continue at Grove, and with my studies, differences of opinion over Neoplatonist metaphysics notwithstanding.

Insanesburys. Sandwich and a juice? That’s £4.19 Sir, mind you, if you have a packet of crisps with it, it will only cost you £3. Okay thanks mate, ring in a notional packet of crisps as well then. Sorry Sir, but you will actually have to take the crisps as well; shall I get them for you? Err thanks, do you fancy them yourself. Sorry Sir but I’m not allowed to accept them. No wonder we have an obesity crisis, even amongst the pigeons in the park.

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Published: 10 August 2014

Hits: 14810

Natural Philosophy.

On Saturday night I attended with friends the open-air Robert Plant concert at Glastonbury Abbey. This event seemed a thousand miles away from the big annual Glastonbury pop festival, no mud, few twentysomethings, mainly nine thousand senior folk with their own portable chairs, picnic tables, hampers and champers, and sometimes their kids.

The Maestro gave a spellbinding performance, the elder god of rock looks like Odin now but he still sings like Apollo. He covered a number of old Led Zeppelin songs but gave them all an upgrade with fresh twists and subtleties and some new ethnic inputs from his band which included a very talented guy from the Cameroons. By the end of it he had all of us oldies up out of our portable chairs.  A master of his craft finessing his career.

I note that the Hypersphere Cosmology in a Nutshell paper here has already notched up eighty thousand reads. A new more powerful equation has replaced the redshift equation given in The Octavo. Either the world’s physicists must have started passing the joke around to all their mates or they have started scribbling furiously on their blackboards.

I suspect that the flurry of interest may have arisen because of the ‘axis of evil’ that the WMAP probe recently revealed as an embarrassing anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation could bear interpretation as some sort of rotation of the entire universe.

To forestall the possible headline ‘Mad Occultist Cracks Secret of Universe’ I’m redefining myself as a Natural Philosopher. Natural Philosophy was what we used to have before science and magic parted company after Newton. Somewhat paradoxically Newton himself researched alchemy and esoterics and science and maths with equal vigour, but we only tend to remember the old sorcerer-scientist for his science and maths. Me, I like to look at the bigger picture too.

So I’ve decided to try and pass the Bardic Review and apply to become an Ovate.

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Published: 28 July 2014

Hits: 15715

Welcome to the upgraded Specularium website, Anti-Social Media at its best, you cannot post replies here but you can email and initiate a discussion of serious ideas.

Those wishing to initiate serious discussions about esoterics and science, art, magic, politics, and religion in general may care to participate in Arcanorium College. Debate here proceeds according to the highest standards of civility and intellectual discourse, to maintain this we levy a minor subscription which frees us from spam, incivility, and nutters, yet we do allow a probationary free membership for a couple of weeks.

I haven’t the time for internet social media. I prefer the more measured and thoughtful interaction that Arcanorium College offers. www.arcanoriumcollege.com.

This Specularium site has 3 major sections and a blog. Many have wondered why a wizard chooses to devote so much effort to scientific speculations, a recent item in a debate on the Blog of Baphomet clarifies this issue: -

‘Wizards of old had to have a detailed working knowledge of religion, for religion formed the cultural and intellectual backdrop to their times and they would have fallen foul of it, or appeared stupid, without such knowledge. Today’s wizards need to familiarise themselves with science for exactly the same reasons.’

Plus any sort of esoteric or magical hypothesis implies some sort of Rebel Physics, some sort of extra component to reality that requires explication or refutation, and which may lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the profoundly peculiar reality in which we find ourselves incarnate. When you look at the sharp end of physics in the quantum and cosmological domains the standard conventional models look full of holes and contradictions and unresolved questions, leaving many metaphysical assumptions open to potentially fascinating debate. The Path of Knowledge needs to encompass all that we can know, including the contra-intuitive and the peculiar and the esoteric. Much of what now passes for science previously lay in the domain of wizard’s speculations. Let the titanic struggle continue!

Anyway, on a more mundane note, a few observations about Book Zero.

My contacts inform me that Ray Sherwin recently sold a handwritten manuscript of Psychonaut to an unnamed American collector for an undisclosed sum. Plus Ray, with whom I exchange approximately biennial emails, informs me that he has recently retired to the sun with a nice little villa in Fuerteventura.

Methinks these events may have a connection, if so, well done Ray, enjoy the proceeds. The manuscript in question had long ago faded from my attention. The natural products business idea I borrowed from you has made me millions, even though you in your inimitably laid back style didn’t go all the way with it yourself.

I do however wonder exactly which manuscript this concerns. Before departing for a couple of years in India and Australia I left a first Liber Null manuscript with the Morton wizard and eventually received a single copy of Liber Null with a White Cover whilst in Australia. This proved invaluable in setting up the Church of Chaos down under for the duration of my stay, the eight of us did tremendous work in the basement of the self-styled Lord Vegtam’s apartments. Ian Johnstone, do you still live?

On the way back I rewrote Liber Null in the foothills of the Himalayas and this manuscript became the basis of the Red Cover version of Liber Null which Ray and I made about 400 copies of and sold mainly to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Leeds during my 2 years in Yorkshire at Ray’s village in East Morton. We collated and glued the books together in Ray’s kitchen. This red version became the text adopted by Weisers and eventually rolled into a single book along with Psychonaut which I wrote on my return to the UK. I had thought that I'd given the Psychonaut manuscript to The Sorcerer's Apprentice for their initial Brown Covered A4 edition.

Ray always seemed vague and evasive about just how many White Cover Liber Null’s he made. The one I had eventually got lost or given away sometime after I moved to Bristol. I never saw another, rumour has it that only either 2 or 5 got made.  So this little tome, whimsically titled Book Zero, that sunk a hundred paradigms and launched a hundred more, actually came out in a sort of ‘zero’ edition limited to perhaps 2 or 5 copies. Does anyone know what became of them? 

Anyway in the longer term, having recently acquired sachet making machinery, in a few decades my executors will market my ashes, attractively packaged in 10g sachets, partly for the pleasure of esotericists of an essentialist persuasion, partly for use in occult art and science, and partly to offset the rapacious death duties on my estate. Prices on application, (probably in Chinese Yuan/Renminbi) when the time comes.

Supplemental : A correspondent just sent me a pic of a White Cover Liber Null. It bears the number 50 of 100 and contains what looks like a brief message from the author and a signatorial squiggle, neither from me methinks. What did the mouse do when the cat went off to the Himalayas?