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Published: 10 April 2024

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Aprblog 2024

Hate crime

I love Scotland but I HATE the Scottish National Party for its hypocrisy, its economic and geopolitical illiteracy or wilful misrepresentations, its lousy management of Scotland, its culture of anti-British resentment, and its compulsive Wokeism. I hope it gets trashed at the next General Election. Under their current leader they can no longer even play the ethnic tartan romanticism card.

If they can get away with it, the next step taken against free speech by the SNP will likely include the criminalisation of any thought-speak that might offend a newly created ‘protected group’ - career politicians such as themselves.

Nicola Sturgeon always struck me as a duplicitous career politician for whom Scottish Independence merely provided a flag of convenience for her own advancement. The same goes for Alex Salmond although he also seems to have been motivated by the possibilities of some slap and tickle as well. Let’s hope they’re both eventually tried for treason. Technically we retain the death penalty for treason, although we have commuted it for mere murder.

I have blood and treasure in the Highlands. I will let you know if I need crowdfunding or special forces to secure my escape if arrested for hate crime on my next trip to Inverness.

Trans-Antipodal light and the CMBR

The sixth equation of Hypersphere Cosmology

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/322-equation-6

shows how light become redshifted or frequency reduced as it travels across the universe by the universe’s small positive curvature which acts as an omnidirectional deceleration A.

It shows that light coming directly from the antipode point of any observer will lose all of its frequency and become unobservable: -

f_o  = f_e (1-(d/L))   where f_{o =} observed frequency, f_e = expected frequency, d = astronomical distance and L= antipode distance.

However, due to the counter-factual indefiniteness of the frequency of a photon in flight, an observer can still receive  photons from trans-antipodal sources so long as such photons undergo some form of interaction enroute, perhaps reflection or absorption and re-emission, in which case the  mechanism works re-iteratively: -

f_o  = f_e (1-(d₁/L)) (1-(d₂/L)) (1-(d₃/L)) etc,   where d₁, d₂, d₃, etc, represent the distances travelled between interactions.

Clearly, if   d₁ + d₂ + d₃, etc > L  then light can still reach an observer without its frequency reducing completely to zero.

The CMBR represents the light from incandescent hydrogen at around 3,000 Kelvin downshifted by a factor of about 1100 to just 2.7 Kelvin, and it comprises a dominant proportion of the photon count of the entire extra-galactic background light (EBL) spectrum.

Now assuming that starlight does ‘bounce around’ occasionally in the course of epic journeys including perhaps multiple trans-antipodal journeys, then we can perhaps expect ordinary starlight to reach thermodynamic equilibrium with the background temperature of the universe and supply the relatively intense Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation that we observe.

Thelemic Symposium, September 2024

https://www.visible-college.org/symposium

Don’t expect me to attend. Chaos has already won the argument with Thelema methinks: -  

https://theblogofbaphomet.com/2014/04/15/exploring-thelema-and-chaos-magick-with-pete-and-sef-part-1/    (part 1 of 10, the other nine lie scattered forward in the same archives)

and there seems little point in trying to further promote the paradigm change to those determined to cling to the shreds of Crowleyanity.

Just a few published comments from some of the key speakers indicates the regressive flavour: -

Chaos Magic comes in for criticism for its ‘Extreme Relativism’. Ha ha, well once you have realised the relativism of anything you can never go back to absolutism about it with any shred of intellectual honesty.

Chaos Magic comes in for criticism for its ‘Lack of Initiatory Knowledge’. Ha ha again, does this mean the non-secrets of the sex magic of the Argentum Astrum and the Ordo Templi Orientalis, or does it also include the contrived Apophenia of ad-hoc Kabalas? Chaos Magic has no secret initiatory knowledge because we published it all.

Magic(k) has been redefined as ‘The art, science, and culture of experiencing truth’. Truth eh? Please do tell, otherwise we can only interpret ‘experiencing truth’ as the misuse of Gnosis to manufacture transcendentalist beliefs, the usual old religious tactic. Aiwass, the supposed bringer of ‘The Book of the Law’ seems just another of the masks of Nyarlathotep, the archetype identified by H. P. Lovecraft as underlying all manipulatory and exploitative cults. This archetype consists not of any kind of truth, but rather of a bag of tricks.

And again – ‘Chaos magick is not an enlightenment tradition and its affiliation with the tenets of post-modernism has rendered it narcissistic and egocentric in many respects. It doesn’t admit the Absolute, and therefore it doesn’t have the means to entertain even the concept of enlightenment.’

Indeed it doesn’t. Whenever you meet anyone claiming enlightenment ask them precisely what they have enlightenment about.

My Final Frontiers

At 71 I have a fair chance of living another decade, or maybe two, or just possibly three. The years seem to pass with increasing speed, yet I have more time free from mundane matters, but will it prove enough to find answers to the two big remaining questions about existence that remain for me? : -

1) Can we have a Quantum Ontology?

2) Do we need a Quantum Model of Minding and Parapsychology?

1) Hypersphere Cosmology arose from a dissatisfaction with the conventional LCDM Big-Bang model of the universe. The conventional model depends on rather too many concepts that may prove purely Epistemological – concepts that explain cosmological observations in terms of phenomena that may not actually exist, for example singularities, inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. Hypersphere Cosmology attempts to present a more Ontological model in which the stuff that we have a high confidence of actually existing, actually interacts on slightly different principles.

The development of Hypersphere Cosmology seemingly involved a two decade diversion from the two great remaining existential questions, yet it brought with it a change of metaphysical perspective to finite but unbounded time (and space) which itself has implications for esoteric philosophy and probably for Quantum Ontology as well.

So, what would, or should, a Quantum Ontology look like?

Well, it would have to model all the observable types and all the observable behaviours of the quanta that we have discovered and predict the existence of others if they exist. However, we already know that the ‘things’ apparently underlying reality do not seem to behave like ‘things’ at all. Or as Niels Bohr put it, "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. To a reasonable approximation we can conceptualise atoms as miniature cannon balls. Yet we cannot describe the quanta inside of all atoms and the quanta of energy (including light) that fly between atoms Classically -  as always having definite masses, positions, momentums, spins, and causal relationships in three dimensional space and one-way one-dimensional time.

Ontology conventionally implies a Classical style Epistemology that seems suficiently convincing that we can regard it as a description of what actually exists or happens. Yet no attempt to describe quanta in such purely Classical terms can yield a viable Quantum Ontology.

We do however have extensive and extraordinarily complicated Quantum Epistemologies expressed largely in mathematics that do not readily translate into words or mental images. These epistemologies give better predictions in some areas than others: - Quantum Mechanics can give accurate but probability based predictions of the wave/particle behaviour  of quanta, and these imply that we have to abandon one or more of the principles of causality, locality, or of quanta existing definite states between interactions or measurements. Quantum Electrodynamics  gives a serviceable description of the behaviour of light and matter, but it introduces the questionable idea of virtual particles. Quantum Chromodynamics more or less describes much of what happens when we try to smash nuclear particles, but the theory of Quarks remains a horrendously complicated mess with poor predictive power. Quantum Field Theory attempts to encompass all of the above – with limited success, and with questionable mathematics in its renormalisation procedures, and at the price of positing up to 20+ novel fields that permeate the entire universe. No Quantum Epistemology yet convincingly includes gravity, and none seems likely to do so under the current set of assumptions.

I suspect that quantum theories in general have taken a wrong turn and/or missed something crucial. Hypersphere Cosmology developed from the insights that cosmological redshift does not necessarily imply cosmological expansion, and that the Godel’s exact solution to the equations of General Relativity deserves more attention than it got.

So, what might our conventional Quantum Epistemology have misinterpreted or missed?

Many Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics strive towards Ontological goals, they seek to create a visualisable picture of what really goes on at the quantum level. For me, the least extravagant and most economical interpretations involve temporal reversibility and three dimensional time.

All the equations of physics except those involving entropy look reversible and will work equally well forwards or backwards in time. The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics explicitly uses this idea to explain how individual quanta can interfere with themselves and how quantum entanglement could work. This scenario preserves causality and locality but in weakened forms. Causes and effects remain correlated, but we cannot regard either as the ‘true cause’ of the other. The lightspeed limit remains, but effects can also propagate at ‘reverse lightspeed’ when going backwards in time, creating simultaneity in entanglement. However, in this interpretation quanta remain in indefinite wavelike states until they interact probabilistically in an interaction that builds up ‘extra-temporarily’.

The ‘extra-temporality’ of the wave function collapse to particle mode suggests extra time dimensions. The sine functions of the fields and amplitudes associated with quanta suggests rotations in extra dimensions, and extra time dimensions may well act as pseudo-spatial ones that allow more to happen at a given instant of what we recognise as ordinary time.

Hypersphere Cosmology suggests that we should perhaps not regard quanta as point particles of zero size which exhibit wavelengths and frequencies, but as hyperspheres of exceedingly small size that can have spins in spatial and pseudo-spatial time dimensions. If so, the vorticitation of matter quanta around the cosmic hypersphere means that they flip between matter and anti-matter on a 13 billion year cycle.

Yet any final TOE, Theory of Everything, may well prove useless at explaining or predicting the emergence of complex structure. The total spins and electric charge and nuclear charges of the cosmos almost certainly all add up to zero. The total mass-energy of the universe may well equal zero as well if we enter gravity with a negative sign. Time may become understood as the negative of Space. The Entropy and the Information content of the universe may well also summate to a constant zero. If so, the final theory of everything simply becomes: -

                                                                                                                                    1 – 1 = 0

                                                                   Or as some dualistic mystics have put it,    0 = 2

Yet such a TOE would give us no clue even as to the (random?) symmetry breakages that underlie the apparent existence of hydrogen, neutrinos, and light in space and time, although we can very roughly account for most of the rest of the observed material phenomena in the universe after that.

2) Anomalies show us that we do not know everything. Occult phenomena always point towards something we do not understand. Some argue that ‘consciousness’ remains the most mysterious and anomalous phenomenon of which we have consciousness in the known universe. Some argue that consciousness always implies consciousness of something, and that consciousness must consist of a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’, and we should regard it as an intermittent activity of the brain, in much the same way as we can say that we do not ‘have a mind’ as such, but rather a brain that (sometimes) does minding.

Panpsychists assert the non-anomalous nature of consciousness by claiming that all matter from atoms to plants, animals, mountains, planets, and stars has consciousness, on the basis that they can perceive or intuit some minding behaviour in these phenomena.

Either way, consciousness or minding behaviour must have some sort of quantum basis if it depends on the activity of matter, but can the classical behaviour of quanta in bulk entirely explain it, or do we need to invoke the specifically quantum phenomena of indeterminacy,  superposition, entanglement, and non-locality as well?

Can Indeterminacy guarantee ‘free will’ if we choose to claim agency for the random components of our thoughts and actions?

Can Superposition account for indecision or overlapping contradictory thoughts?

Can Entanglement explain why minding or consciousness does not subjectively feel to have a single point source for most of the time, and perhaps explain Apophenia and Sympathetic Magic as well?

Can Non-Locality account for psi effects at a distance?

Some argue that the above quantum phenomena operate on the wrong scale to have any effect on minding behaviour and that the classical behaviour of quanta in bulk can explain it, and that no case for psi exists to answer. Yet I remain fascinated by the anomalies I have experienced and those that others have recorded.

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Published: 09 March 2024

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Marblog 2024

Sortilege

Elective Democracy increasingly displays all its weaknesses in the face of pressure and finance from powerful interest groups and propaganda from powerful media. It encourages the formation and dominance of political parties and it spawns career politicians more intent upon re-election than good governance.

The classical Athenian Greeks rejected it for precisely such reasons.

About half of the world holds elections this year. In many cases such elections simply enable de-facto dictatorships to shuffle their cronies and weed out dissent. Yet in countries with supposedly free elections, the choice of candidates usually remains effectively determined by non-representative cliques, factions, political parties, and the media.

Thus, we now face the unedifying prospect of national elections in the UK and USA in which most voters would probably tick a ‘Neither of the Above’ box if it existed but will otherwise vote only to deny power to whoever they consider the worst alternative.

The vulnerability of Elective Democracy to abuse by self-interested cliques and oligarchs and career politicians led the classical Athenian Greeks to choose Sortition Democracy instead.

In an ideal Sortition system, representatives become selected at random by some sort of lottery to form a government. They serve for a fixed period as a public duty and cannot seek re-selection. Such a system would create parliaments that proportionally reflected all adult age groups, social classes, ethnicities, and genders within a society.

Such parliaments would ideally debate openly but vote by secret ballot. At a stroke this would break the stranglehold of political parties and eliminate most forms of corruption and lobbying by self-interested pressure groups. We could pay the members of a Sortition Parliament well to turn up for debates and votes and have an independent judiciary to eliminate any last vestiges of corruption. Sortition selected representatives would have no other motivation in debate or in voting than their own consciences and the long term benefits to society.

A Sortition Parliament could have half of its members replaced every few years so that it does not have to restart with completely inexperienced members after a complete sortition. It could call upon any number of experts to advise it and it would have a civil service to do so as well.

A Sortition Parliament would of course contain a small percentage of liars, idiots, self-deluded narcissists, criminals, and psychopaths, but far less than the current elective system throws up.

We should not give power to those who seek it.

We could perhaps trial the Sortition system in the UK by replacing the House of Lords with a randomly selected second chamber that has absolute power of veto over the first. It would act as a Citizen’s Jury that acts as a check and balance to the flaws and abuses that become increasingly apparent in  elective systems.

Religiophobia.

There seems zero evidence that any religion has ever caused a net improvement in human behaviour. Every bit of charity and compassion promoted by any religion seems more than cancelled by the oppression it has self-righteously enforced.

In our theoretically secular societies, it seems perfectly acceptable to loathe political philosophies like fascism or communism which have very grim and ghastly track records, yet rather bizarrely it becomes increasingly taboo to discriminate between religious philosophies, no matter how bad their recent track records.

So now we have the peculiar spectacle of secular British politicians trying to make capital (and votes) out of accusing each other of phobias against religious philosophies that neither side has any genuine sympathy with.

Richard Dawkins famously described Roman Catholicism as the world’s second worst religion. Should we hate all religions equally or do some seem currently more despicable than others? Surely the more patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, intolerant, anti-liberal humanistic, and anti-rational ones deserve all the derision, criticism, and discrimination we can heap upon them.

This is Chaos. The Draft Manuscript has Landed!

The publisher has received all the written contributions to the Chaos Anthology and responded with a resounding Huzzah! There will now follow a period of editorial work to arrange it all in suitable form and sort out the illustrations, footnotes, and citations, hopefully it will appear sometime later this year.

Contributors include Ronald Hutton, Peter J Carroll, Jaq D Hawkins, Jozef Karika, Julian Vayne, Jacob Sipes, Aidan Watcher, Ivy Corvus, Dave Lee, Lionel Snell, Mariana Pinzon, Carl Abrahamson, Sinobu Kurono, and Sanhre Daffowt.

FSW8 ‘Magic’.

I have always had a fascination with designing and building board games. Analysing and trying to model historical, real world, and fantasy scenarios seems a productive way of stimulating strategic, tactical, imaginative, critical, and counter-factual thinking.

What rules do the actions of a system imply? What systems will emerge from a set of rules?

People keep asking me why I don’t write novels as well as books on magic and physics. Well, I tend to read, and I would naturally write, plot driven novels of ideas rather than character and drama driven stories. So boardgames have become my novels of ideas, my ‘what-if’ stories, and they also allow for endless experimentation with alternative rules and multiple possible endings.

For years I have experimented with modelling magic in a boardgame. It seems that any game system of ‘magic on its own’ can only lead to some kind of quest scenario where you use magic just to gain more magical ability, either cooperatively or competitively. In most game systems, magic or psi works as a ‘rule breaker’ in the sense that it acts as a combat modifier or a mobility modifier or that it distorts the probability of what would normally happen in some other way.

That seems reasonable enough because in the modern view, Magic - whether in enchantment or divination, consists of the art and science of modifying probabilities. (In divination it modifies the probability of guessing the right answer.)

The latest add-on to Frontier Space Warfare, the Psi Weapon Tournament Rules reflects this view. Factions may invest in various Psi facilities and wand like markers denote their presence on the board. Most act as production, combat, or mobility modifiers, but one has a function perhaps unique in game systems.

The power of Prescience allows a vessel or a flotilla of vessels to launch an attack in which, if it fails, the player can cancel it completely and restore the situation before the attack, but at the cost of the loss of the Psi weapon used. It may seem odd to call this Prescience, but this effectively models prescience because it gives a player the ability to explore what would happen if they did something, and then of either going for it or of avoiding doing it.

Herewith the Aquarian faction with a complete set of all 8 Psi weapons. The ones which have a non-local effect remain on the Aquarian homeworld, the expeditionary flotilla on one of its smaller systems carries the local effect combat and mobility modifying Psi weapons.

The Psi weapon tournament rules appear in the FSW8 rules appear in the games section and below.

 Psychopath’s Chess

With his attempted conquest of Ukraine bogged down into an attritional stalemate and a contest of endurance with the West, Vladimir Putin must surely have dreamed of opening up a second front to distract the attention, resolve, money, and resources of the West.

Putin has cultivated an alliance with the Iranian government, based on little more than the dictatorial and pariah status of both regimes. Iran sponsors, trains, and arms both Gazan Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. It seems unlikely that either would have gone to war without Iranian approval, and most likely that they both went to war on Iranian instructions.

Putin likes sending messages by dramatic and violent means. Hamas launched its attack on 7^th October, Putin’s birthday. He probably considers it a very worthwhile pawn sacrifice.

Amphibia

Climate change continues to confuse the wildlife, we have had an unseasonable period of exceptional rainfall, frosts, and warm days; some plants have flowered alarmingly early. During the unsettled weather of the last weeks, frogs and newts have appeared only fleetingly in the pond at Chateaux Chaos and then disappeared again. Nevertheless, we have healthy looking clumps of both frogspawn and toad spawn. Let us hope that the ferocious dragonfly larvae do not scoff the lot when they emerge, as they did last year.

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Published: 09 February 2024

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Febblog 2024.

(Note that a Janblog 2024 does not appear, not because nothing happened but because too much did, what with seasonal festivities in Scotland, family gatherings, an abundance of birthdays (why did so many of the people I know get born at this time of year?), the demands of coordinating 15 others in the creation of the This is Chaos anthology, the writing of Interview with a Wizard 2, embarking on a course of silversmithing, masses of magical correspondence, and surprising responses from some quantum and cosmological physicists.)

Well, the year has ostensibly started very badly with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East in which none of the protagonists seem to have a realistic exit strategy, Humanity seemingly committed to burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels until Climate Catastrophe overwhelms industrial civilisation itself, Elections looming in the UK and the USA that do not look likely to produce results that inspire widespread optimism, The UK seemingly tacitly committed to both maintaining a permanent housing crisis and the long-term-idiotic policy of importing ever more people to shore up its dodgy economy.

On the positive side The Dark Energy Survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02929

Came out as a preprint on January 5^th. This resumes the data on 1,500 new type 1a Supernovae, some with redshifts exceeding Z =1.

Conventional cosmologists will interpret the raw data in terms of Flat Universe Theory in an attempt to confirm their ideas about so-called Dark Energy driving an apparent accelerating expansion of the universe.

As soon as the raw data becomes released upon acceptance of a paper, it will go into the algorithms of Hypersphere Cosmology to refine the measurement of the Antipode Distance in its model of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe that appears to us in stereographic projection because of its small overall positive curvature.

Dark Energy Survey data should hopefully confirm not the presence of Dark Energy in the conventional LCDM or wCDM models but the Curvature of the Universe within the HC model.

This paper shows the processing of older type 1a supernovae within the HC model.

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology/item/270-type-1a-supernovae-and-hypersphere-cosmology

This graph following shows the resulting antipode length results for the above data with estimated errors shown for apparent magnitude (blue) shown as + (red) and – (green). Horizontal scale redshift, vertical scale distance (metres).

Plainly two of the supernovae apparent magnitudes do not fit well, but despite the difficulties of apparent magnitude measurement all the rest give a reasonable fit to an Antipode distance of ~1.23 e26 metres or almost exactly 13 billion light years or 4 giga-parsecs.

I confidently expect the forthcoming DES data at higher redshift will confirm and refine this.

Brian Cox Horizons Tour – A twenty first century space odyssey.

https://briancoxlive.co.uk/

We went to this in Bristol recently and enjoyed it immensely. How refreshing to discover just how widespread interest in Cosmology has become. Cox lectured to a big packed venue in front of a screen full of spectacular images from near and deep space and out to the limits of observation from space based telescopes. Whilst I have  multiple issues with many of the conventional interpretations of the images and data that he presented, and particular doubts about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, I particularly liked the second half where he became more speculative and philosophical about life the universe and everything, and our beautiful planet, let us hope that the 99% unicellular slime hypothesis does not apply to the trillions of planets potentially capable of supporting life.

Under Construction

An Apophenia Ring in 1.5mm 925 Silver – Sawing the shank out of a sheet of silver seemed easy enough, bending it into a circle proved tough going, cutting out the Apophenia symbol with little files took many hours, soldering them together took mere minutes. I may later add a Chrysoberyl or Alexandrite cabochon in the circular part of the symbol which invokes the esoteric inspirations of Ouranos and Venus, with touches of Mercury and the Moon.

Herewith a rather delightful sci-fi image of Apophenia, I don’t know anything about the site it appears on.

https://www.apophenium.com/p/welcome-to-apophenium

Hopefully Apophenia, the goddess and muse of strange connections and the imagination will assist with the project below: -

A Quantum Ontology – Can we have such a thing?

Thought and language remain heavily structured by the preconception that phenomena (must?) consist of ‘something doing something’, yet we can only observe the doing and hypothesise (perhaps erroneously) about any underlying being.

Can we conceptualise something fundamental as exhibiting both doing and being?

Or do fundamental phenomena consist only of their doing and have no sort of substructure?

If  fundamental phenomenon have no substructure, then does causality not apply any further?

If, as according to quantum field theory, a near infinite number of quantum harmonic oscillators pervades all of space, and all fields, waves, and particles consist of excitations of these oscillators, does that make such oscillators truly fundamental? If so, what oscillates? Spacetime itself?

Does our model of cosmology influence our quantum epistemology?

IF the Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics can model bosons (energy wave/particles such as the photons of light) as closed loops of particle-antiparticle in spacetime -  

And IF the Wave Structure of Matter of Milo Wolff https://www.spaceandmotion.com/Wolff-Wave-Structure-Matter.htm can model fermions (matter wave/particles such as electrons) as the points from which outgoing waves subtend wavelike fields to the extremities of the universe and at which such waves reconverge in inverted form, AND the universe has a hyperspherical geometry; -

THEN – Could all quanta (or the spinorial twists that compose them) consist of closed loops in spacetime? This would at least sidestep the problem of fundamental phenomena and causality, as such phenomena would then appear as the causes of themselves – at least within our common 3+1 dimensional reference frame.

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Published: 08 December 2023

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Decblog 2023.

Seasonal Greetings! - Well why not, the weather (to the extent that we can rely on it these days of climate disruption) usually becomes dismal in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, our gardens look like blasted wastelands, the deciduous trees look mournful, the golden leaves of autumn have turned to mush and mud beneath our feet. The squirrels have given up on the last pickings of this year’s unusually abundant hawthorn berries. The news seems worse than usual.

So, eat, drink, and be merry, because we do not have the physiological adaptations to hibernate it all away. Happy Mithrasmass, Christmas, Winter Solstice, Hogmanay, or whatever you celebrate your survival of another year and your intentions for the future with.

For a bit of cheer, I send my seasonal greeting cards, Firstly, Aurora Borealis as seen recently from the hills surrounding Loch Ness. Those charged solar particles certainly do make gorgeous ionisation patterns in our atmosphere. We approach a solar maximum in the coming year, so expect unpredictability, mayhem, and ‘interesting times’. Secondly, the Mandragora Autumnalis in the greenhouses of Chateaus Chaos brighten the winter world with an unseasonal burst of green, Boris (centre) seems particularly ebullient in his new individual pot.

Esoteric News: -                                                                                                                

The Dean Radin & Pete Carroll Rap.

Recently I came into email contact with Dean Radin, a pre-eminent figure in Parapsychology in America and a notable figure in RENSEP, https://www.rensep.org/about/about-rensep/

We had an extended exchange of ideas, herewith by mutual agreement, the fruits of our deliberations, a substantial read : -

https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/381-the-dean-radin-pete-carroll-rap

ADDENDUM - HEREWITH THE EXPERIMENT https://www.magicktest.com/

Interview with a Wizard 2. (Or something like that.) Sanhre Daffowt and I approach the halfway mark on another mega Q & A adventure, we may have the finished item ready for the publisher by end 2024.

Chaos Magic Anthology.

Fifteen contributors now labour at this endeavour. From what they have chosen to write about from their various works and researches and experiences, I think we can expect astonishing result.

Geopolitics.  We only get to hear what the various news and propaganda media tell us. Currently, it seems that 37m Ukrainians slog it out with 144m Russians with potentially massive geopolitical consequences, probably 500,000 casualties so far, some very valuable lebensraum at stake, and Putin very clearly in the wrong. Yet this story has become largely eclipsed by the story of ~3m Palestinians slogging it out with 7m Israelis over territory worth very little, with nothing much at stake geopolitically, and neither side seeming entirely in the right or wrong. Do the media find morally ambiguous conflict and polarised opinion more marketable?

Instability in eastern Europe will not end until the neo-feudal gangster regime in Russia eats itself, and the Russian people and foreign allies turn against it. Keep the conjurations coming:

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Science News. The JWST continues to provide confirmation of the Hypersphere Cosmology assertion that: - The universe will appear homogenous and isotropic on the large scale at all points in space AND time (once we have allowed for cosmological gravitational redshift and hyperspherical lensing).

See https://www.sci.news/astronomy/webb-massive-galaxies-early-universe-11680.html#:~:text=Astronomers%20using%20the%20NASA%2FESA,years%20after%20the%20Big%20Bang.

The universe seems full of mature galaxies and galaxies at all stages in their life cycles at all observable distances. This profoundly contradicts the currently official LCDM Big-Bang hypothesis.

Bronze Craft. In addition to a daily program of resistance exercise, an elderly wizard also requires handicraft distractions to survive the rigours of perpetual literary endeavours and scientific and magical research. Herewith some recent creations in Bronze, a couple of Stokastikos signet rings.  They look a very rough, but the beauty of the metal itself compensates, and things will improve with practise.

.

I cheated a bit here by using Prometheus Bronze Clay, a pesky and recalcitrant material which you can shape by hand and then fire with a gas blowtorch in a kitchen or shed, rather than converting an outhouse into a foundry with furnace, crucibles, and moulds.

Have a great festive season.