Aprblog 2025.

The Butlerian Jihad.

Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction novel ‘Dune’ dates back to the 1960s. In it he refers to a Butlerian Jihad in which humanity had previously destroyed all thinking machines and robots, which freed him up to write an engaging series of sci-fi novels featuring human characters as the main protagonists. Major blockbuster films eventually followed.

During my 1970s college days those who read Dune and those who read Lord of the Rings for fantasy entertainment and identification formed different cliques. I favoured Dune, and a liberal dash of Michael Moorcock as well, Tolkien felt rather like a moralistic pseudo medieval atavism to me.

Fantasy usually depends on simplifying mechanisms to differentiate the actions of heroes and villains from the glorious mess of the mundane human condition. Tolkien just used straight feudalism with a bit of magic thrown in, Moorcock used feudalism in places but with post-modernist, sci-fi, and magical touches. Frank Herbert used force-shield technology in place of elite armour and castles, and resource and transport scarcity, to create an interstellar aristocracy as the focus of his drama.

Frank Herbert’s son Brian attempted to elaborate on the theme of the Butlerian Jihad in some Dune prequels after his father’s death, but they never seemed to achieve the same acclaim. Frank had never really specified humanity’s ancient problem with thinking machines. In the books the Jihad against them had acquired the status of a myth in which they became described as some sort of spiritual abomination. Brian Herbert merely had them as thinking machines that had developed  sentience and a taste for domination, an all too common sci-fi trope.

Nevertheless, Frank Herbert’s original vision of thinking machines as a ‘spiritual abomination’ seems the more prescient. It seems far more likely that we will enable them to enhance our own stupidities and delusions rather than enable them to become sentient and to attempt to dominate us militarily.

It starts with - do you want your spellings corrected?

Then - do you want your grammar corrected?

Then - do you want your ideas improved, added to, and enhanced?

Then - do you want it all made maximally persuasive?

Lastly - do you want it disseminated by automated target selection?

I have recently received spoof scientific papers that look superficially convincing – no surprise perhaps as AI large language models have apparently now eaten the entire internet replete with research posted only yesterday. At present they can concoct coherent physics word salads but not the math to go with it.

I have seen esoteric writings, rituals, and meditations composed for any tradition and done in the style of almost any published author, living or dead.

If you want to know how it’s done and to easily do it yourself, try this book for which I have written (personally) a cautionary foreword. (readable in the look inside facility).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Magical-AI-Grimoire-Shadows-Contemporary-ebook/dp/B0DD5RZSGB

The advent of the internet has had a massive impact on the whole occult/esoteric/magical field.

Pre-internet, a typical practitioner went to bookshops and worked with fellow practitioners met through adverts for covens, temples, and groves placed in those bookshops, or in cheap fanzines created by enthusiasts, or by word of mouth. Creating books involved a long struggle with literary and practical research, laborious typing and editing, and then persuading a publisher to invest in the result.

If we had not invented Chaos Magic back in the 1970s and 80s, then something like it would probably have eventually evolved just because of the development of the internet.

Today, all published knowledge of all traditions lays at our fingertips, we have an eclectic tsunami of esoterics at our disposal, and the costs of self-publishing have become fairly trivial.

The existence of Chaos Magic has at least provided many with a framework to deal with it.

But now, a typical practitioner works alone onscreen. Research has become ridiculously easy; any published information lies only a few keystrokes away. Many practitioners attempt spells, divinations, rituals and meditations and socialisation, and write and publish books without ever leaving their chairs.

Yet this newly evolved form of engagement with occult/esoteric/magical ideas and practices has some severe downsides: -   

Attention spans have declined disastrously in the face of information overload. Fewer people seem inclined to persist with anything that doesn’t give instant results and gratification.

Internet websites and many recent books lie awash with rituals tested only once or less.

Many practitioners get no thoughtful face to face critical feedback from their peers at all. They just get into slanging matches on forums or find micro-niches of mutual affirmation.

The internet and AI seem to have ended up delivering a toxic mixture of dependency, trivialisation, grandiose delusions, effortless dilettantism, and social isolation back to us.

Chaos Magic has always advocated an eclectic approach to paradigm, belief, and symbol selection, but also dedication and persistence with the chosen ideas and techniques at least until tangible results emerge.

I think we need to initiate a real Butlerian Jihad ASAP.

Meet real people and conspire with them!

Boycott AI generated products and services!

Rage against the machines!

Demand the clear labelling of ‘AI Free’ items!

BrainMark Certified!

Another two nails in the coffin of LCDM Big-Bang Theory: -

Heavy elements spectroscopically detected in a galaxy at z = 14.3,  seemingly making it older than the universe itself!

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/this-precocious-galaxy-is-surprisingly-mature-for-its-age

Dark Energy - the whole dubious bit of phlogiston conjured up to ‘explain’ the apparent discrepancies between the redshifts and the apparent magnitudes of distant cosmological bodies now seems in doubt or in need of even more bits of supplementary phlogiston.  

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm&ogbl#inbox/FMfcgzQZTprHTnPghLqdkCFqvpbsjksv

Hypersphere Cosmology begins to look like one of the few remaining credible alternatives.

Spring Equinox Eisteddfod Poem, composed after an amazing day near Gibraltar.

Eagles are not masters of the air

With low power to weight they cannot flap their wings

For long before they tire.

They must soar and glide with the winds

And rise upon thermals and updrafts.

Wide waters offer them a fearsome threat

No thermals, no updrafts, just unforgiving winds

And nowhere they can land

Yet cross them they must, to find their prey and mates

When Africa becomes too hot or when Europe becomes too cold.

So they choose the Pillars of Hercules just eight miles wide

Betwixt the rock of Gibraltar and the mountain of Jebel Musa.

Where Europe almost kisses Africa

You can see a thousand eagles in a day

And as many Kites and Vultures too

Climate and geography force a spectacle

That belies their solitary nature

In spring they come from all over Africa

And circle above the Moroccan mountain

Gaining precious height for the terror ahead

Then, taking their chances with the treacherous winds

They glide for the opposite shore

Trading height for distance

Struggling against the sea winds

Trading direction for altitude

Till, exhausted, they may reach the blessed shore

Get past the mobbing gulls

And soar skyward again

Where the sea winds meet the mountains.

April Fool’s Politics - UK Woes.

Britain has shafted itself over the last few decades by taking the easy way out on too many issues and we now have an economy based on Low Wages, High Immigration, De-Industrialisation, Massive Benefits, Low Productivity, Low Investment, Absurd Property Prices, and Decaying Infrastructure & Public Services.

These problems all interrelate, but trying to do anything about any of them will probably prove an election-loser to any party that tries.

Impending Book –Dean Radin has just written The Science of Magic – I have read the manuscript and written a pump for it – every scientist and magician should read this book.