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Published: 30 October 2023

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Novblog 2023

Obituary. Ray Sherwin.

I understand from friends that Ray Sherwin died in Las Palmas (Canary Islands) this June past.

I shall remember fondly the year that my wife and I spent in his village of East Morton. We kicked around a lot of the ideas that would become part of Chaos Magic, Ray introduced me to Chris Bray of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and a number of people who would become leading figures in the Chaoist revolution. We had some splendid times trying out new rituals with friends in his attic, and up in the woods around Sunnydale Reservoir.

Ray did not wear his modest literary scholarship lightly, yet his pomposity and arrogance had an amusing and endearing quality to it which brightened many an evening spent in the Busfield Arms in Morton. I considered his attitude towards his longsuffering first Polish wife Marlena rather Neanderthal, even by 1980s Yorkshire standards, my wife considered it appalling. Marlena eventually left him but soon afterwards she suffered a catastrophic stroke.

Ray contributed directly to Chaos Magic mainly by turning his Thelemic fanzine into a Chaoist one called Chaos International and in showing me how to make an edition of Liber Null on a tabletop scale in the days before it became cheap and easy to self-publish books.

Ray’s written contribution to the annals of Chaos Magic remained rather modest at just two small volumes, The Book of Results and The Theatre of Magic. He also seems mainly responsible for a small 25 page book by ‘Paula Pagani’ called The Cardinal Rites of Chaos which details the seasonal rituals of a short lived group he assembled in Morton after I had left. The grandly titled ‘Cardinal Rites’ seem most charitably described as Discordian amateur dramatics.

Yet after he retired with a new younger wife to a small villa in the Canary Islands, Ray published two regrettable diatribes, Vitriol and Ouroboros, both full of conspiracy theory nonsense and invective against his former friends and colleagues and the IOT, despite that I had urged him to desist and check his sources. We never communicated again after he published them.

I rather suspected that he had lost his critical faculties, and friends have confirmed that both Ray and his wife had sunk deeply into alcoholism, poverty, and conspiracy theory, and that their young daughter had become their carer. Having watched my own father drink himself to death decades ago, I concluded that alcoholism results from a Failure of Imagination; failure to realise what it does to you, and failure to imagine doing something else instead.

So, a rather tragic and sad ending to a life, but thanks Ray for that entertaining and highly productive year in East Morton.

For a further commentary on Ray, Vitriol, and Ouroboros see: -

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/226-two-reviews

Retroactive Enchantment!

“Our Gedankenexperiment thus draws a metrological advantage from effective retrocausation founded in entangled states. While PCTC simulations do not allow you to go back and alter your past, they do allow you to create a better tomorrow by fixing yesterday’s problems today. “
Nonclassical Advantage in Metrology Established via Quantum Simulations of Hypothetical Closed Timelike Curves. Available from:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374681474_Nonclassical_Advantage_in_Metrology_Established_via_Quantum_Simulations_of_Hypothetical_Closed_Timelike_Curves

Does Science become more mystical?

Have a look at this! Io Baphomet! Neo-Panpsychism? Morphic Fields Strike again!

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

Chaos Magic Anthology

One of my publishers has invited me to assemble a team to write an Anthology about Chaos Magic. I have already rounded up many of the veterans from the old guard and some of the more prominent figures from the new generations of Chaoists. We may have space for just one more to join our illustrious lineup, so let me know if you think of contributors I may have missed.

In other news: - The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch look set to appear in Spanish.

Samhain.  An Eisteddfod Poem.

Summer ends

The veil descends

Darkness begins

A time of fear

Illness, cold, and want

And thus,

A time to laugh at death

Yet the dead still live

Whilst still remembered

Fondly or otherwise.

Leaves fall

Like discarded ideas

I put them in

The compost bin.

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Published: 08 October 2023

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Octblog 2023

Poem.

Having recently answered more or less the same question from four different interviewers I put the question and the answer (of sorts) into a brief ditty for the Solstice Eisteddfod at Grove.

Tell me O Sorcerer-Scientist

How does a purely physical mind

Affect the material world?

Well physical theories

Have metaphysics all of their own

Classical physics has cause and effect

Events have definite causes

Realism rules, and thus;

Things always exist as definite states.

Relativity just adds locality

So nothing goes faster than light

And everything consists of particles.

Democritus at least got that bit right.

But we have two physical theories

The quantum one seems rather weird,

It contradicts all the above

Events have probabilities,

Unobserved events remain indefinite,

Entanglement works instantly in time

And oblivious to distance,

And everything consists of waves.

Dirac and De Broglie intuited that.

Both theories seem true

From a particular point of view.

We can only measure the particle reality

We can only imagine the wave reality

If our epistemology reflects ontology

Reality needs both

To do anything at all

So how does a physical brain

Interact with a material world?

Classically, or Weirdly as well?

Can experiments tell

What theories work best?                       

Therein lies our quest!                                                            

Antimatter down.

Observation of anti-hydrogen made in particle accelerators has recently shown that it falls downwards as expected, and not up. If it had fallen upwards in response to gravity the physics community would have reacted with shock and horror rather than levity, and all sorts of paradoxes would have arisen. Both mater and antimatter react identically to gravity, but that still leaves conventional cosmology with the headache of trying to explain why a big bang did not produce equal amounts of both.

I suspect the answer to the question of why the universe seems matter dominated has nothing to do with the supposed big bang and everything to do with the chiral asymmetry of the weak force arising from the Majorana Fermion nature of the Neutrino, i.e., it consists of a single type of particle that can either spin clockwise or anticlockwise with respect to its direction of propagation and that alone determines whether we categorise it as matter or antimatter. Furthermore, various particle’s spins in higher dimensional spacetime account for their electromagnetic and nuclear charges and our attribution of matter or antimatter status to them. Work continues on this idea.

JWST.

The James Webb Space Telescope went up primarily to investigate the unexpectedly vast number of galaxies at extreme distances that the Hubble Space Telescope first caught faint glimpses of. The big bang hypothesis predicts or at least heavily implies that galaxies like our own fully formed one should not exist at extreme distances in space and time because they will not have had time to form since a big bang.

It becomes increasingly clear from the JWST data that galaxies just like our own seem to exist everywhere out to the present limits of observation. Hypersphere Cosmology predicts that the universe will appear isotropic and homogenous on the very large scale at all points in space and time. It will look the same everywhere and everywhen, once we have factored in the redshift and the gravitational lensing arising from a small overall spacetime curvature.

Meanwhile the LCDM big bang theorists strive to add yet another ad hoc patch to their creaking model, by modifying their hypotheses about galaxy formation.

Resisting AI in Magic.

I have just written a somewhat critical appraisal of a forthcoming book on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Magic, I have read a book on magic written almost entirely by AI, and I have also watched a colleague getting AI to create sundry invocations and incantations online in seconds.

Herewith my verdict: -

AIs scour the internet for material created by humans and then attempt to compound a grammatically correct mash up from what looks like the most the most popular or readily available material. AI does not seem capable of creativity or of differentiating between popularity and quality.

Consequently, what it produces seems lumpen, verbose, predictable, generic, derivative, and uninspired. Don’t expect it to come up with anything surprising, memorable, or quotable yet. It has no spark or bite to it. It currently seems best suited to composing dull advertising copy for dishwashers or creating rather run of the mill travel brochures.

AI generated material makes magic look ridiculously easy to do, and this will lead some to engage with it in a far too casual manner, and to get poor or negligible results. Internet-itis (decreasing attention span) will follow, leaving enthusiasts to drift from one passing fad to another. Never underestimate the value of the work that goes into designing your own spells and rituals and entities for yourself and launching them with Gnostic levels of mental intensity.

It seems likely that some of the magic pages of the internet will fill up with a blizzard of mediocre and formulaic AI generated imagery, text, and rituals, which will rapidly turn off all but the most dim-witted dabblers. The fightback against AI generated magic text and imagery will soon follow.

Arcanorium College may institute new protocols for the submission of Batchelor of Magic Theses. We may eventually require that candidates write them under examination conditions inside Faraday cages with quill pens, but presently AI generated material looks fairly easy to spot.

New Book (eventually)

Following the publication of ‘Interview with a Wizard’, I established contact with another writer (this time a practising Chaos Magician) who wanted to conduct a further interview. This second interview has mushroomed into another mega-inquisition with the simple ground rule that he cannot ask a question already asked in the first interview.

As we recently passed question one hundred and seventy, I enquired of Mandrake, the publishers of Interview with a Wizard, if a second long-form interview book would interest them. I got a very enthusiastic yes to that. So, when have done another hundred and seventy or so in another year or more, we will submit it for publication. Watch this space for ‘Interview with a Wizard 2’ or similar title.

Chaos Magic in Japan.

My colleagues in Japan (who I have yet to meet in person) have requested that I place two articles here which they will later use in a Japanese book on introductory Chaos Magic. As the discussion of magical and metaphysical concepts can present difficulties when conducted across a cultural and linguistic divide, I have kept this as simple as possible.

Utilizing the Chaosphere, its application, and the underlying theory.

The Chaosphere consists of a three dimensional representation of the Eight Rayed Star of Chaos.

The Eight Rayed Star of Chaos has manifold scientific-metaphysical, psychological, and magical meanings. It can support the imagination of many symmetries and dualities.

Herewith one from recent Chaoist research for my Japanese colleagues: -

In basic science the eight arrows can represent the four axes of ordinary three dimensional space and one dimensional time. These represent our degrees of physical freedom in a universe with a simple Newtonian metaphysic.

In advanced Quantum-Relativistic Hypersphere science the eight arrows can each represent the degrees of freedom in our universe of curved three dimensional space and curved three dimensional time. (We can usually ignore the curvature ‘dimensions’ of space and time on the human scale, but it does affect the spacetime topology of the entire universe and the likelihood of alien intelligences existing). In this representation, all of the eight axes lie orthogonal (at right angles) to each other, implying the full higher dimensionality of the universe.    

Three dimensional time provides the key to understanding the quantum-probabilistic nature of our partly chaotic physical reality, and of how magic works.

In psychological terms, the Eight Rays represent the eight major impulses that we as biological organisms have evolved: Sex/Death, Fear/Desire, Love/Hate, Solar Ego/Magical Self.

In magical terms the Eight Rays represent the Eight Magics that derive from the human condition and which we can equate symbolically to Pagan Deities and their symbolic planets and colours.

Sex Magic – The Moon – Purple. Attraction, the inspirations of sexual desire and ecstasy.

Death Magic – Saturn – Black. The motivation that awareness of mortality brings.

Fear Magic – Orange – Mercury. Intellect, quick thinking, inventiveness, cleverness.

Desire Magic – Blue – Jupiter. Acquisition of wealth, power, status.

Love Magic – Green – Venus. Empathy, attachment, loyalty.

War Magic – Red – Mars. Vitality, aggression, competitiveness, combat.

Ego Magic- Yellow – Sun. Charisma, radiance, persuasiveness.

Pure Magic- Octarine- Ouranos. Magical research, esoteric and antinomian knowledge.

Chaos Magicians can place a Chaosphere on their altars to affirm their commitment to developing all of the powers and abilities latent within themselves.

A Chaosphere symbolises the random creative powers of the universe and of humans. The central orb represent the formless personal Kia or life force and the arrows represent its many possibilities of direction. The magician can impale various spells on the spikes.

Concentration upon the Chaosphere in thinking meditation can lead to new insights into the structure of reality and the human experience. Concentration on the Chaosphere in ‘no-mind’ meditation can lead to resonance with, and inspiration from, transpersonal and extraterrestrial sources of Chaoist insight and enlightenment.

How do you perceive Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction?

People who cultivate many personal contacts and who remain open to new ideas and opportunities usually have better luck than others who do not. This seems more important than simply thinking positively and wishing for good luck.

The world has a lot of randomness in it, some of it can affect us negatively, some of it can affect us positively, but we can look for positive opportunities in whatever happens to us.

The subconscious and unconscious parts of our minds have a strong effect on what we do, and they can also have a direct magical effect on reality. If we keep thinking conscious positive thoughts these thoughts will gradually become part of the subconscious and unconscious mind. This can take a lot of time, but magical techniques offer some shortcuts.

Magical Spells, Rituals, and Invocations can achieve much deeper and quicker alterations to the subconscious mind than simply trying to think positive conscious thoughts for long periods.

Subconscious and unconscious desires have more powerful effects than conscious desires. Conscious desires tend to get mixed up with other thoughts and doubts, particularly if you keep consciously thinking about them.

Magicians should aim to concentrate their positive thinking into Spells, Rituals, and Invocations and then not consciously think about them afterwards and let their subconscious and unconscious minds create the magical effects.

Mandrakes.

In the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos, ‘Boris’, one of the three Mandragora Autumnalis plants, has sprung from the underworld as the equinox passes and we enter autumn. Perhaps we shall see some mandrake seed pods later. The project to repopulate southwest England with them has fallen far behind schedule.

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Published: 05 September 2023

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Septblog 2023

Conspiracy Theory.

Illuminati update No 23. We note substantial incursions into the terrestrial noosphere at this time. These seem to originate from adolescent space lizards using the popular but frowned upon ‘Mayhem and Havoc’ Role Playing Game System here on Earth.

The three rules seem simple enough.

1) Pick a fairly primitive planet with only level three sentience, the sort of place where the inhabitants still believe in things like gods, money, nations, or the big bang hypothesis.

2) Select one or more inhabitants as avatars and see who can wreak the most mayhem and havoc.

3) Don’t tell your parents.

We currently seem to have six major players or teams of players in action experimenting with the following game challenges here on Earth: -

A) Reduce the most powerful nation to a laughingstock or to a civil war by using a single avatar that can only bluster bombastically and tell ridiculous lies.

B) Elevate the second most powerful nation to the top position regardless of internal and collateral damage, use a committee of avatars if required.

C) Use the third most militarily powerful nation to initiate major wars, and if possible worldwide war, using only a single misanthropic psychopath as avatar.

D) Using multiple avatars ensure that the planet’s potentially greatest alliance of nations descends into a corrupt ineffectual bureaucratic squabbling shambles.

E) Set the planet on fire, burn all the combustible deposits, wreck the climate, decimate agriculture and the population, use any number of avatars.

F) Pick a handful of major or minor religions or philosophies and see how much division, strife, and murder you can create with them, use multiple avatars.

All conspiracy theories, no matter how apparently absurd, reveal something about our responses to the order-chaos-disorder, and weirdness going on in our worlds. They usually do this by metaphor or analogy that displaces blame elsewhere because people do not wish to acknowledge or confront the more probable causes.

Hardline Christians started a Satanic Ritual Abuse scare some decades ago. Negligible real evidence of abuse ever appeared, but a tsunami of real evidence of abuse eventually emerged  concerning, - you guessed it -  Hardline Christians - both within the catholic church and within many protestant sects.

The professional and managerial classes in the USA have severely degraded the prospects of the children of the blue collar class, so we have a conspiracy about powerful satanic child abusers controlled by lizards.

When we perceive the rich and powerful screwing the poor more than usual, Antisemitism often rears its head, despite that Jews make up only a small proportion of the rich and powerful anywhere, and control only one government in a tiny nation.

When a culture war breaks out between factions of the professional and managerial classes, and they start demonising each other and trying to displace each other, we should consider the extent to which those classes have become severely overcrowded.

The popularity of lizard symbolism for demonic or hellishly immoral agents or agencies tells us something about ourselves and the primitive reptilian circuits that lurk in all our hindbrains.

A Fascinating Thesis. I have just received a PhD thesis from Vasilis Meletiadis  of Bristol University, ‘The History of Chaos Magic 1976 – 2000’. He has conducted lengthy interviews with many of us that he writes about, and exhaustive research into the cultural milieu in which Chaos Magic arose. As a rather non-musical, and non-party person myself, I had not realised the huge extent of the overlap between Chaos Magic and the more extreme end of alternative popular music and clubbing culture, nor quite how dark the UK manifestation of Chaos appeared compared to its American cousin Discordianism. Nor quite the extent to which its spread depended on amateur ‘zines’, and the extent to which the advent of the internet changed its method of spread and its structure and practices.

Overall, the thesis seems fair, balanced, and exceptionally well researched and written. Historically it will probably take first place as the definitive history. As soon as it becomes published and in the public domain, I will provide a link to it.

I hope to see a similarly definitive academic history of chaos magic 2000 – 2024 emerge sometime from someone.    

Parapsychology. Dr Dean Radin has a very high profile in the world of parapsychology, having presided over the Parapsychology Association for a number of years, written a number of notable books on parapsychology, presented many lectures on it, and worked with many experiments into it.

We finally got to talk at length and discussed such topics as the desirability (or not) of proving the existence of parapsychology to the satisfaction of scientists, the equations of magic, public belief in magic, Sheldrake’s experiments, the potential weaponization of psi, quantum physics and psi and the possible implications of the Tsirelson Bound, the measurement/observer problem, and the trade-offs involved between the magic friendliness and science friendliness of psi experiments – this last topic remaining a subject of ongoing discussions.

Citation 14/08/2023. Now in about its fifteenth year of operation, Arcanorium College proudly confers the degree of Batchelor of Magic upon a second alumnus!

https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic

The course makes awesome demands upon the perseverance and dedication of applicants. Many come forward but few make the grade.

Global Warming. Whilst continental Europe has combusted, we have had a meteorologically lousy August here in the UK, - unseasonably dull, chilly, and often wet, plus one of my autumnal mandrakes (Boris) has woken up at least 8 weeks early and started to push forth leaf shoots, whilst Igor and Circe continue to slumber awhile.

My Sci-fi hobby.

The news that many hundreds of UK schools and public buildings will soon collapse if we don’t spend fifty or more billion pounds on them prompted research into precisely what material the hulls of the Lithonian and Skaron fleets consist of. Its apparently AAC, aerated autoclaved concrete - lightweight, cheap, not very strong, widely used for substandard dodgy building, and occasionally by sculptors. The massive demolition projects that will have to follow will likely ensure that plenty of the stuff ends up floating in Welsh watercourses and ultimately on the beach fronting the spaceship yards.

Herewith the new Lithonian Anti-Matter Dreadnought and its counterpart in the rival Skaron fleet. Both societies have created a single ultimate ‘deterrent’ in the form of a bomb with about a metric ton of antimatter in it – enough to trash a planet or an entire sector of space: -

As this seems to evolve towards an interplanetary game scenario with reaction thrust propelled ships rather than an interstellar one with warp drives, work has begun on a board/backdrop for interplanetary manoeuvring: -

On the larger map, silver washers show the last eight  moves of the two planets in their orbits and the movement of a red ship from the red planet to intercept the green planet. One of the smaller maps shows the gravity well around the green planet and a ship launched from it to intercept the red ship in low orbit.

Obliterating the rival civilisation counts as only a minor victory, forcing its surrender counts as a major victory. Several varieties of a draw remain possible, some worse than others….the game basically models a nuclear standoff.

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Published: 01 August 2023

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Augblog 2023

Weird Physics. Herewith a result from evoking Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth simultaneously in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos; the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics integrated with Hypersphere Cosmology.

The idea seems crazy, perhaps crazy enough to prove useful.

At the very least it may lend particle attraction a visualisable mechanism, confirm the conservation of the spins or whatever underlying fundamental quanta and the suspected immortality of the Proton, it may also partially resolve Loschmidt’s Paradox concerning the emergence of irreversible processes (such as entropy) from seemingly reversible processes - because particle attraction does not simply equate to time reversed particle repulsion.

For a fuller exegesis of the hypothesis see: -

https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/376-tiqm-and-hypersphere-cosmology

Arcanorium College Department of Magic Update.

The Batchelor of Magic Syllabus has some updates including additional page references for the new Classic Editions of Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos.

https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic

Sortition.

Elective Democracy seems increasingly beset with problems the classical Greeks identified two millennia ago, plus a few more of modern origin.

Political Parties rather than individual Elected Representatives now dominate the political landscape. This has led to increasing groupthink and polarisation. It has also made it much easier for minority interest lobby groups to exert disproportionate effects on party policy by making donations or skilful use of the media.

Increasingly intrusive media have now completely eroded the personal privacy of anyone entering politics.

Increasingly powerful media now seek to influence opinion rather than to reflect it and disinformation and propaganda now proliferate unchecked.

The pressure to conform to all party policies acts as a severe disincentive to people of integrity becoming professional politicians.

Election pressure frequently forces party policy in the direction of short term popularity rather than the long term interest.

The Classical Greeks recognised the corrupting potential of electing representatives, and they had a ready solution which they regarded as the genuine form of  ‘Democracy’ – (rule by the people), they simply delegated the task randomly by lot amongst the people. That only included freeborn male citizens, a limitation we would not consider today.

A government selected randomly by lot would consist of 50% women and a proportional representation of all social classes and adult ages.

If it voted by secret ballot on any issue it chose to debate, it should prove corruption resistant. Paying delegated representatives a very generous salary and pension for turning up to debates and voting, and having severe penalties for any form of corruption or undisclosed interest should act as an additional incentive to integrity.

Because it remains vanishingly unlikely to become reselected it will likely choose to act in the best longer term interests of society.

A Sortition Democracy would eliminate political parties at a stroke. Few people really like political parties, fewer still actually belong to them, most people vote negatively to merely keep out the parties they most dislike.

The Greeks recognised that elective democracy lay vulnerable to oligarchy and the main political parties themselves have emerged as the oligarchs of political power.

Of course, a sortition government will contain five percent idiots and a percentage or two of selfish and evil people, but that seems a great improvement on what the current system produces.

Perhaps we could try out sortition to select the UK House of Lords for starters, and then think about extending it to reform the House of Commons.

My Sci-Fi hobby.

Down at our retreat on a remote shore in Wales, a rather dismal July and poor surf has occasioned the reopening of the spaceship yards.

Herewith the completed Detritus Squadron of the Skaron fleet (so named because a kind of Scrap-Dalek aesthetic seems to have inspired their design). Only stone from the beach, glue and leftover metal fitments go into their construction as the arms race between Lithonia and Skaron escalates to the point where I shall have to start work on the game rules and backstory.