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Mayblog 2022
Operation Unthinkable.
With Nazi tyranny defeated, Winston Churchill commissioned a study into the feasibility of driving Russian tyranny out of Eastern Europe as WW2 drew to a close. Churchill’s generals concluded that ‘Operation Unthinkable’ didn’t look feasible at the time, at least not without massive American support and widespread use of WMDs. Consequently, Eastern Europe seemed condemned to suffer under Russian tyranny for some while.
The Russian system of tyranny derives from the feudalism of the Middle Ages. In the disastrous Russian Revolution, the fiefdoms of the feudal Tzars became the fiefdoms of a middle class led urban political party waving a communist banner. Tyranny and corruption continued as normal under different overlords, democracy never got a look in. Tyranny and corruption meant that Russia, and the satellite states it annexed, never prospered economically despite the huge natural resources and populations available. Far too much became spent on militarism and the state apparatus of repression that maintained the regime. When the Soviet System finally imploded towards the end of the 1980s, Russia missed its chance to join the community of civilised democratic European nations. Instead, the thuggish Vladimir Putin managed to completely recreate feudalism with himself as monarch and dictator and a whole new class of oligarchs and kleptocrats as his henchmen and barons.
Operation Unthinkable now seems distinctly possible. If the free world can remain firm against Putin’s threats, and if it can bear the consequences of comprehensively sanctioning Russia, and if it can keep supplying the heroic Ukrainians with ever better weaponry, then Russia will retreat in defeat.
If you have any psi-skills at all, consider contributing to the ongoing efforts of the free world’s wizards and witches to unseat the Russian tyrant: -
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
The people of Russia and Belarus may yet depose their dictatorships and the struggle against tyranny in Europe will have finally succeeded after many bloody centuries.
That will just leave China as the world’s main sponsor of tyranny.
I recently found this book on the history of China fascinating: -
China has the world’s oldest more or less continuous civilisation. It has undergone many cataclysmic implosions and changes of regime over the millennia, but it has always rebuilt itself on exactly the same Bronze Age political principles with which it continues to govern itself to this day. In this system, most of the power lies with The Emperor and The Imperial Bureaucracy. Aristocracy did not feature strongly; lords, barons, and rich merchants did not hold much power. The gentry of Chinese society consisted mainly of Mandarins, upward social mobility mainly lay through bureaucratic service.
The system has always depended on a massive effort of information gathering and information control to achieve taxation and regulation, and hence behaviour control.
The Chinese Mandarin or Scribal Class has persisted for thousands of years, and it has always cravenly collaborated to provide a Bureaucracy to whichever warlord or political manipulator became Emperor of China. The Scribal Class simply morphed into a Party Organization that provided Bureaucratic collaboration to communist emperors and now provides it to post-communist emperors.
The advent of modern electronic information technology has immensely strengthened the hand of the Chinese bureaucratic tyranny. It can now maintain real time surveillance on all its citizen’s movements, contacts, and behaviour, and it eagerly exports this technology to any regime that wants to use it. Cell-phone monitoring and facial recognition technology along with complete state control of the media have provided the Chinese dictatorship with more resources for thought control than George Orwell dreamed of in his seminal and prescient novel ‘1984’.
Information technology itself seems to lead us towards a future where the major conflicts will occur between democracies with relatively free information architectures and tyrannies with repressive information architectures.
Bosonics.
Plainly, quite a lot of things in Quantum Field Theory do not add up very well. Not only does the whole field of Quantum Chromodynamics concerning quarks and gluons look conceptually tortuous and a mathematical mess, but even Quantum Electrodynamics which concerns electromagnetic and weak forces and particles now comes into question. In particular we currently have calculated results for the mass of the W Boson and the g-2 spin of the Muon that do not match the experimentally measured values.
It rather looks like the calculations have missed the contributions made by the presence of extra particles that we have not yet recognised. Within the 3-dimensional time model under development here at Arcanorium College, the full suite of weak force interacting bosons could consist of: -
The putative X17 Boson may have already appeared in the decay of Beryllium 8.
Mesonics.
In a similar vein, the 3-dimensional time model suggests an additional meson type particle and field intermediating the inter-nucleon forces, this putative ‘Y’ Boson may also play a part. It could if produced, decay into any possible particle-antiparticle pair, rather as the supposed Higgs Boson does, yet unlike the Higgs it would not confer mass on other particles.
Magical Books.
The proofs and the cover designs for the following two titles have arrived: -
Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J Carroll. Classic Edition with upgrades and additions, from publishers Red-Wheel Weisers.
Interview with a Wizard- Ian Blumberg-Enge interviews Peter J Carroll. 365 Questions on magical, esoteric, biographic, scientific, and other topics, with an extended appendix on the hyperspherical universe, from publishers Mandrake of Oxford.
Images and full details will appear here within weeks, as soon as publication occurs.
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Aprblog 2022
Putin’s War
Marxism will go down in history as a profound tragedy because it allowed autarchy to survive industrialisation. Industrialisation generally and gradually brought democracy in its wake except where the dictatorship of the proletariat triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably meant dictatorship by elements of the middle classes. Tsars became replaced by Commie-Tsars in both Russia and China; authoritarianism and repression continued under new management, democracy did not get a look in. Marxism survives now only in North Korea and in half-hearted form in a few third world tinpot dictatorships.
Having found that Marxist economics simply could not compete with the economies of democratic states, both China and Russia eventually abandoned it in favour of crony-capitalism and nationalism whilst preserving the machinery of dictatorship. In effect they reinvented a form of neo-feudalism or fascism. The poor in both Russia and China lead very impoverished lives compared to people in democratic industrial societies. The autocrats in charge of the Chinese and Russian dictatorships live in fear of their own people and rely on repression, militarism, and war or threat of war to maintain their positions. They attain their positions through naked power struggle and then must maintain it to survive. They cannot retire, their only way out lies in a box.
Putin has launched a vicious war in Ukraine to strengthen his grip over his own politically fragile and economically weak country and in this he seems to have catastrophically underestimated how much resistance he would face from his intended victims and from the free world.
A month ago, I requested that the world’s magicians conjure to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’.
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
My thanks for the excellent response. Remember that for best results in magic we need to Divine Short and Enchant Long, so keep those spells and rituals coming and widen the definition of ‘closest’ to include more of Putin’s diminishing group of supporters.
Europe will only become free of oppression and war when the Russian autocracy falls, and Russia becomes a democracy. The unpopular dictatorship of Belarus will not survive without support from Russian autocracy. The fall of Putin’s regime will contribute greatly to this. President Biden has shown statesmanship and a grasp of political reality in encouraging revolt against Putin.
Quasars
The last piece of the Hypersphere Cosmology jigsaw puzzle finally fell into place. The observed distribution of quasars has always been interpreted strong evidence for galactic evolution following a big bang origin for this observed universe. Most of the observed quasars seem extremely distant and hence we see light from them that left them billions of years ago. Hence theorists concluded that quasar behaviour mainly arose during the early development of galaxies.
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that we inhabit a universe finite and unbounded in time and space and that we will observe galaxies at all stages of evolution spread across all of time and space.
Why then do we observe quasar galaxies mainly at very great distances?
We can only observe a quasar if the beam coming out of one of the poles of its black hole happens to point directly towards us, and as galaxies lie randomly orientated in space this becomes a very unlikely occurrence. However, the small positive curvature of the hypersphere of the universe increases the probability of a quasar beam becoming ‘tilted’ in our direction and the probability increases exponentially with distance.
See the full paper here: -
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/350-quasar-distribution
The Occultaris parts 1 & 2. The secrets of the universe.
Many years ago, it became apparent that cosmologists had made a serious mistake in interpreting cosmological redshift as recession velocity and creating a hypothetical big bang. Whilst I worked on the problem the big bang the theory became ever more baroque with the addition of hypothetical dark energy and dark matter and cosmic inflation. A more elegant solution in the form of Hypersphere Cosmology gradually emerged. Two key insights allowed its development, firstly that a small positive spacetime curvature in the form of a deceleration A, where 2GM/L2 = A, would redshift light traveling across a hyperspherical universe in proportion to distance, and secondly that the (generally ignored) Godel metric W = 2sqrt(piGp) describes the inside of any hypersphere including the universe itself and the inside of a black hole in the reference frame of an internal observer. This rather than the Schwarzschild metric for the interior of a black hole in the reference frame of an exterial observer provides the key to a stable non-expanding universe and black holes which do not contain singularities. All this constitutes The Occultaris part one, which radically revises our entire metaphysical and ontological view of the universe, our place within it, and the probability of highly intelligent life having developed elsewhere in a universe without temporal boundaries.
The Occultaris part two remains a work in progress. It aims to clarify the awesome theoretical and conceptual confusion in our understanding of the quantum realm underlying reality.
Whatever mechanisms account for the phenomena of magic in this universe probably have their origins in the properties and behaviour of the quanta.
The current official Quantum Field Theory implies twenty six fundamental fields, twelve quarks, eight gluons, an irreconcilable wave particle duality, virtual particles with seemingly arbitrary properties, non-locality, and an underling spacetime metric which contradicts relativity. Moreover, a lot of the maths looks like a mere descriptive formalism that gives no clue as to the underlying ontology, and the ‘maths’ of quarks and gluons looks very dodgy and has little predictive power. The standard model also requires a Higg’s Boson to satisfy parts of its abstract mathematical scheme and at vast expense some unconvincing evidence has been manufactured for this but not everybody seems persuaded of its reality. The standard model of Quantum Field Theory does not include gravity, and the whole edifice looks like a phlogiston rich ad hoc mess. Where did it perhaps start to go wrong?
Perhaps the photon does NOT constitute the quantum of the electromagnetic field. In support of this heretical and blasphemous idea note that: -
1) Photons do not carry electromagnetic charges, nor do they cause changes in the electromagnetic charges of the particles they interact with. They merely carry spin and momentum and transfer these between the particles they interact with.
2) Photons do become exchanged between electromagnetically charged particles and we can cause their emission by manipulating charged particles and measure their absorption by the movement of charged particles, but all matter particles except neutrinos carry charges anyway if we include neutrons as carrying both positive and negative charges simultaneously, and neutrinos travel at lightspeed anyway, so we should not expect them to exchange photons in any easily observable way.
3) Photons interact equally strongly with protons and neutrons but less strongly with electrons which carry the same magnitude of charge as protons.
4) Maxwell’s equations describe electric and magnetic fields adequately but combining them to create moving electromagnetic waves does not actually yield the observed properties of photons whose energy depends on their frequency rather than on the intensity of the waves.
5) Neither electric or magnetic fields deflect photons despite that photons supposedly consist of oscillating electric and magnetic fields.
6) Spin-spin forces between particles have profound effects that effectively constitute another fundamental force in nature. Electrons form strongly bonded spin-antispin pairs in atomic orbitals and in semiconductor Cooper pairs. Nucleons also pair up very strongly in atomic nuclei and this contributes greatly to the nuclear binding energy.
If we consider photons as particle-antiparticle pairs that consist of and carry only units of spin and momentum in a Transactional Exchange, then we can explain not only their behaviour but also the Entanglement they create between matter particles. Moreover, the Graviton appears naturally as a consequence of this scheme. Photons increase the field between matter particles and give rise to exclusively repulsive effects, both emitter and absorber recoil. Gravitons create a diminution of the spin fields between particles to create exclusively attractive effects. Gravitons must have a much lower energy threshold for their creation than Photons, yet their very ease of creation allows them to dominate the large scale structure of the cosmos and creates a web of universal entanglement.
Lithonian Flotilla.
This year’s first visit to our hideaway on a remote Welsh shore provided an opportunity to reopen the Lithonian spaceship yards after the Memsahib found another scrap of ceramic insulation block washed up on the beach. The addition of a few vape components, bits of defunct electric razors and assorted metal scraps has led to the eighth vessel in the flotilla. Lithonian aesthetics decree that only stone and metal go into these vessels. We bin all the damn washed up plastic we can find and carry.
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Putin’s War.
We interrupt the usual monthly flow of these blogs with an emergency appeal.
Following positive feedback from around the world - This following message is released for circulation by any available means. Circulate to all possible sympathisers and allies in all esoteric traditions.
Knights of Chaos Ukraine Campaign 2022.
The KoC calls upon all magicians everywhere to join in magical attacks to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
We wish to see him disobeyed and restrained or assassinated by his own people.
To this end we call upon volunteers to circulate intelligence about, and images of, those believed to have close connections to Putin for use as Magical Links.
We call upon volunteers to create and circulate rituals and spell procedures for individual and synchronised workings.
We call upon volunteers to launch magical attacks to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’ on an irregular psi-warfare basis using a variety of techniques at unpredictable times and from many locations.
We bestow an honorary knighthood of chaos on all volunteers for the duration of the campaign.
Stokastikos, Acting Marshal KoC, Chancellor of Arcanorium College.
This war in Ukraine was started by One Man who does not enjoy the unqualified support of his associates or his country’s population. He appears to have become deluded, and the situation may deteriorate even further if he is not stopped. We seem to have a clear case here where intervention against a single individual can make a world of difference.
Conjure individually and/or involve friends, allies, and associates for larger workings. Spread the message.
The BBC has very helpfully provided details and images of some of Putin’s inner circle: -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60573261
UPDATE. My thanks to all magicians from around the world who have volunteered, we seem to have raised a great many wands to the cause of stopping Putin.
Putin is losing this idiotic war due to the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians and the support from much of the rest of the world. He cannot possibly hope to conquer Ukraine now and it becomes increasingly crucial that his own people turn against him and prevent him from worsening the humanitarian catastrophe that he has engineered.
Thus, continue conjuring repeatedly to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
Since the fall of the Soviet empire the Russian state has become a presidential dictatorship under Putin. Without even the ideology of communism to justify it, the Russian state apparatus has concocted a bizarre ‘anti-fascist’ narrative to sustain itself. Yet it has adopted all the characteristics of the fascism it claims to oppose: - presidential dictatorship, crony capitalism, militarism, repression, the subjugation of the individual to the state, and a leadership that has placed itself above the law. Repression indicates weakness not strength.
Undermine Putin and the fall of this Last Czar may yet lead to a democracy in Russia.
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Marblog 2022
Putin’s War.
One might have expected the nation that gifted the world the Kalashnikov and the rocket propelled grenade would have realised that the military balance currently heavily favours the defensive rather than the offensive, particularly if the defenders have strong motivation, good communications kit, hand portable anti-aircraft weapons, foreign support, and cities or broken terrain to work from. Have the lessons of Afghanistan not been learned?
So why has Putin invaded Ukraine with inadequate forces to hold it?
Either Putin has become deluded and will go down in history as the last Czar after losing this war, or he has some other concealed stratagem in mind. Remember that he used to play geopolitical chess viciously but logically.
KoC recommendation: - conjure for Putin’s closest people to turn against him.
<Following positive feedback - This following message released for circulation by any available means.>
Knights of Chaos Ukraine Campaign 2022.
The KoC calls upon all magicians everywhere to join in magical attacks to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
We wish to see him disobeyed and restrained or assassinated by his own people.
To this end we call upon volunteers to circulate intelligence about, and images of, those believed to have close connections to Putin for use as Magical Links.
We call upon volunteers to create and circulate rituals and spell procedures for individual and synchronised workings.
We call upon volunteers to launch magical attacks to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’ on an irregular psi-warfare basis using a variety of techniques at unpredictable times and from many locations.
We bestow an honorary knighthood of chaos on all volunteers for the duration of the campaign.
Stokastikos, Acting Marshal KoC, Chancellor of Arcanorium College.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60573261
Definitions of Magic. Some thoughts from a recent academic exchange: -
Aleister Crowley defined Magic as: -
‘The science and art of causing change in conformity with will.’
Dion Fortune defined it as: -
‘The science and art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with will.’
I have increasingly come to regard or define Magic as: -
'The Use of Imaginary Concepts to Create Real Effects.’
I define it thus because ‘will’ seems merely a product of imagination. Summoning so called ‘willpower’ or motivation fundamentally depends on engaging the imagination or adopting the products of someone else’s imagination. To restrict Magic to merely ‘changing consciousness’ limits it to psychology and mysticism whilst ignoring its parapsychological potential for direct interface with physical reality.
Such a broad description as 'The Use of Imaginary Concepts to Create Real Effects’, implies that both religion and science also rely on a certain amount of magic. Religions depend almost entirely on imaginary concepts and a lot of the concepts in science seem more epistemological than ontological. Plus of course a great deal of what goes on in politics, art, advertising, romance, and the other arts of persuasion also depend on the use of imaginary concepts.
In chaos magic we openly acknowledge that 'gods' and 'spirits' exist as imaginary concepts that we create and invoke to create real effects in ourselves and in the world. The blasphemy gets worse, self and identity also consist of largely imaginary concepts as well.
Algebrology
Numerology often gets a bad press from the righteously rationalistic, and probably for good reason, numbers have no innate metaphysical properties in themselves. Yet numbers can show the relationships between phenomena, and indeed a considerable amount of highly reliable ‘straight’ science developed from numerological analysis; corelation does not prove causation, but it can often reveal it.
Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, the purely phenomenological observation that ‘The ratio of the square of an object's orbital period with the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit is the same for all objects orbiting the same primary’, eventually led Newton towards a more mechanistic description of planetary motion, which Einstein later improved upon.
The Dirac large number hypothesis: the purely phenomenological observation that the vast numbers 1040, (1040)3/2, (1040)2 and (1040)3 all seem to relate quantum scale phenomena to cosmological phenomena, appears as either a fantastical coincidence at this particular epoch of the universe, or as strongly suggestive of a universe hyperspherical in space and time.
Numerical ‘coincidences’ always seem worth investigating, but only if they also have ‘Dimensional Equivalence’, herein lies the weakness of numerology as a system of divination.
Numbers, the letters of the alphabet, dates of birth, and favourable or unfavourable events, do not really equate with each other, such equations do not make any more sense than asking how many seconds make a kilogram.
Algebra on the other hand demands that both sides of an equation relate to the same stuff. Newton’s celebrated force = mass times acceleration has the same ‘dimensions’ of mass times length divided by time squared on each side and Einstein’s awesome E = mc2 has ml2t-2 on both sides. So, does this mean that any dimensionally equivalent equation accurately reflects reality? No, the numerical arithmetic must work as well, and even then, we need further reality checks. However, the technique of seeking algebraic coincidences does offer a powerful form of ‘divination’ into how the universe works. Such Algebrology suggested many of the relationships in Hypersphere Cosmology, and the arithmetic seems to work within the limits of observational measurement, but it remains open to confirmation or falsification.
Herewith another item of Algebrology, this time in the quantum domain, if we give quanta the theoretical size assigned to them by Einstein Cartan theory and the intrinsic rotation theoretically assigned to all matter by Godel, we can recover the easily measurable Planck-Einstein relationship E = hf. An interesting coincidence or something more?
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/347-algebrology
The Hellgate Chronicles. Have arrived!
‘The complete collected works of The Hon. Hugo C St J L'Estrange.
His satirical spoof "The Satanist's Diary" was published as a regular column in The Aquarian Arrow between 1978 and 1992. It won many friends and admirers for its wry comments on human nature, the occult, New Age, and current affairs.
This is the first full collected addition. It includes some previously unpublished material plus colour illustrations and an appendix by Lionel Snell.’ –
- as it says on the Amazon and the Barnes and Noble sites advertising it.
I finally grasp this long awaited hellish tome in my withered old claws and cackle hideously over its ghastly existential paradoxes and vicious social commentary. Any mortal that suspects an evil satanic conspiracy runs the world will run screaming from the unspeakable revelations within its pages. I have to say that I’m enjoying it immensely and rationing it out to myself at a couple of Hugo’s articles per day. This richly hilarious fare was written to be devoured in instalments, and the entire collection seems best read in a similar way. A fuller review will thus follow in the next blog here.
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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.