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New Year’s Address 2017
Literary News.
1) Penumbra Livros have just published Liber Null and Psychonaut in Brazil in Portuguese. My hardback sample copies arrived as a surprise present on xmas eve, it all looks very well done with the diagrams beautifully reproduced. Although I cannot read the text, the emails I’ve had from the translators indicate their fluency in English, so I guess the translation will have come out equally well done.
http://www.penumbralivros.com.br/nossos-livros/liber-null-psiconauta-peter-carroll/
2) I have just read the latest draft of ‘My Years of Magical Thinking’ by Lionel Balgrave Snell, aka Ramsey Dukes, aka Dr Wunlita Suzuki (and no end of other aliases) who must surely rank as the finest metamagical theoretician currently, or perhaps ever, incarnate. In this masterly summary and exposition of a lifetime of magical thought, Lionel muses deeply on the relationships between art, science, magic, and religion. You may not find much of immediate practical use in this tome but it certainly expands and contextualises the magical way of thinking as a distinct and increasingly relevant way of relating to perceived reality. Lionel told me he had tried to write about magic for the general reader in this latest book. He may achieve that, in places he digresses into magical thinking strategies in the dark arts of politics and marketing, yet I will always regard him as ‘The Thinking Magician’s Magician’, the wizard who looks into the ideas behind the ideas, and as such he may well go down in history as the 20th & 21st century’s version of Paracelsus.
I found his idea of the symmetry between scientific ‘falsifiability’ and religious ‘non-believability’ stimulating, and wondered if that symmetry might extend to ‘improbability’ in magic and ‘dislikability’ in art. Each discipline need to find the appropriate level of such things and ‘modern’ art seems to have tried to enhance its exclusivity by going heavy on the dislikability.
Hopefully Lionel will publish MYOMT sometime in this coming year.
3) A Robert Anton Wilson Biography by Gabriel Kennedy may perhaps appear this year. http://www.rawillumination.net/2016/04/propanon-man-behind-new-raw-bio.html
I have passed on a few reminiscences from my meetings with Bob; and some contacts to those who knew him for the project. RAW had a very seminal impact on the lineage of ideas from which much of Chaos Magic took its inspiration. RAW did apparently join the IOT Pact along with William Burroughs and Dr Richard Alan Miller towards the end of their lives but I understand that in Bob’s case this probably meant a largely honorary position.
Magical News.
The ancients happily invoked various gods and goddesses for technical and political advice, how to catch game, when or whether to wage war and son on.
In the dreary monotheist aeons, humanity seems to have scaled back its expectations and merely contented itself with creating deities to advise on quotidian matters of personal and social morality and emotional wellbeing.
All this will change this coming months when psychonauts from Arcanorium College get down to the serious business of invoking the Elder Gods of the Necronomicon Mythos to ask some questions of a more serious nature concerning technical matters about life, the universe, and everything.
On Wednesday I shall present a challenge to the assembled philosophers and metaphysicians of The Salon in this city: - the idea that Neoplatonism perhaps needs replacing as the default spiritual/metaphysical idea of the west.
Politics
2017 shapes up to become the year when neo-liberal economics and social liberalism go into reverse. The neo-liberal economics forged in the Thatcher-Reagan years seem to have eventually delivered economic decadence. Free-trade has hollowed out the manufacturing capacity of developed nations and left their economies dependent on service industries and property investment. Only the very rich in developed economies and some of the poor in developing economies have really prospered from this.
In developed nations, social liberalism has similarly promoted social decadence. Multiculturalism and minority ‘rights’ have eroded social cohesion. The nanny states have increasingly replaced responsibilities with ‘rights’, and the inevitable backlash approaches.
‘Globalisation’ has failed rather badly because uncontrolled market forces act mainly to the benefit of those few people able to exploit them. The EU has failed to benefit the majority of its citizens and this coming year will probably see it unravel further.
A Europe predicated upon the exclusion of Russia has never made much sense anyway. Donald Trump’s desire to seek a rapprochement with Russia could well show Europe the way. All three blocs have far more to worry about in the shape of Chinese geo-political ambitions and Islamic militancy.
Of the four major blocs in the world, Europe seems the weakest player as this year’s round opens. Whilst it still has a large but sluggish economy it remains militarily weak and unwilling. The EU experiment has failed miserably and needs replacing with practical trade and defence treaties because the attempt to impose political union by mega-bureaucracy has failed.
Global warming becomes ever more alarming. Despite what they say, the world’s politicians seem determined to avoid an economic downturn by reducing fossil fuel use, and instead they have pinned their hopes on technical solutions evolving without enormous investments.
That seems like a huge gamble, we desperately need massive improvements in renewable energy technologies, efficient solar plants, massive wind and tidal power projects, better battery storage facilities and so on.
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Hypersphere Mechanics.
Hypersphere Mechanics proceeds apace; if it doesn’t get falsified then a book explaining the behaviour of both the entire universe and fundamental particles using the same principle may eventually emerge.
See the latest here http://vixra.org/abs/1612.0069 at the home of rebel scientific publication.
Every quantum has a spinning hypersphere in its heart.
I don’t know where this will all lead; it began with a youthful intuition, when looking up at the stars having just learned about atoms. Hermes Trismegistus’ assertion of ‘As Above, So Below’ added encouragement when I started to read Hermetics.
So far it has generated the result that the universe has no temporal boundaries, merely a temporal horizon, so it must have already spawned almost unimaginably advanced intelligences of almost unimaginable age. Quantum effects may permit communication….. and they may also explain the strange and erratic phenomena of magic.
A caterpillar inflicted moderate damage to the middle sized of the three mandrakes; I wonder if it got stoned whilst doing so, I repositioned it outside in the garden, having a moral rule against destroying higher life forms to save lower ones. Slugs and snails go into adjoining woodland. This rule of course allows me to eat anything.
When someone said that “90% of science fiction was crap” the Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon replied “90% of everything is crap”. This has become known as ‘Sturgeon’s Law’. It seems generally true, just look at most architecture, most books, most music, most of what appears on television, most of the things politicians say, most of the uninhabitable planets in the galaxy.
However it also seems a pretty hard law to live up to as it means achieving an average of two hours and twenty four minutes of personal excellence every day, a tough call.
Review. The Dr Strange film.
I had both eagerly awaited this and dreaded what Hollywood might do with it. The Dr Strange comics played some part stimulating my youthful interest in magic. As expected the film uses a vast amount of CGI to depict the effects of magic but these occur mainly in astral and mirror worlds or the dark dimension, so ordinary reality does not get too non-believably distorted. The ‘Energy Paradigm’, as they call it in magical circles, remains hotly disputed with many including myself preferring the ‘Information Paradigm’ in which magical ‘energy’ appears only as an imaginative metaphor for effects which do not actually depend on ‘energy’ at all.
The scriptwriting and storyline seemed both sufficiently similar yet interestingly different enough to the Marvel Comic stories to prove engaging, look out for some Lovecraftian touches to the plot. Plus it looked pretty damn good in 3D.
I don’t know why the Eye of Agamotto appeared as green though.
P.S. For the wizard in your life get the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, order soon for xmas. http://www.esotericon.org/
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By the grace of Azathoth and partly thanks to a wearying dose of flu that left me idly playing with algebra under the duvet, something coherent seems to have come through on the Quantum Hypersphere front. See it here http://vixra.org/abs/1611.0133 at the home of rebel scientific publishing.
Basically it shows that we can recover the basic fundamental equation of quantum physics by treating quanta as hyperspheres, (‘magnified’ by the Uncertainty/Indeterminacy Principle), that ‘rotate’ in exactly the same way as the entire vorticitating hyperspherical universe, thus revealing a deep and unsuspected* symmetry between the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Everything spins. Spin and Spacetime mutually uphold each other, and matter and energy arise from their interaction.
(*Well actually I intuited that at age 14 having learned about atoms and then staring at the stars. Now half a century down the line some maths finally emerges.)
At Arcanorium College www.arcanoriumcollege.com we prepare for a second expedition into the Necronomicon realm of the Elder Gods to seek the Gods of the Future and whatever eldritch secrets they may choose to impart. The preparations will take a month or so; so time to build instruments and amass sanity points ready for January. Courageous Psychonauts may apply.
A family holiday in Crete in October proved fascinating. The island probably inspired Plato to write of Atlantis. The Minoans seem to have had a very agreeable bronze age culture, they worshipped a goddess whose name we do not know and who probably didn’t hold a pair of snakes (it seems that the British archaeologist Arthur Evans reconstructed 2 figurines doing that because he thought they looked more pagan that way, but all the other goddess statues have outstretched arms) The Minoan culture seemed fairly peaceful, the cities didn’t have walls and we haven’t found much weaponry. There doesn’t seem much evidence of sacrifice except votive offerings of cute little bronze and pottery animals. Cretan ‘bullfighting’ didn’t involve killing the bull, just a display of bravery by getting yourself tossed over its back. Bronze axeheads feature everywhere as both ceremonial and actual tools but these look far more like tree felling axes than battleaxes and tree felling must have featured as a very significant activity for an agricultural society on a heavily wooded island. Minoan culture, like the mythical culture of Atlantis, came to an abrupt end ~1,240BC, probably due to catastrophic earthquakes and/or the explosion of the Santorini volcano and subsequent tsunami.
The three Mandragora Autumnalis that came as seeds from a wizard in Greece have sprouted on cue at Samhain again for their 4th year. They don’t seem to like the British climate, they grow only very slowly and now resemble small parsnips, and they haven’t flowered yet, but this year they have a space in the greenhouse rather than the kitchen window.
Happy new POTUS to all my American correspondents. A Clinton victory would have meant more of the same which doesn’t work. The parallels with the Brexit result seem worth noting, both phenomena depended heavily on the issue of Globalisation. We haven’t managed Globalisation at all well, and now the furious people have elected politicians who say that they will manage it. The religious right have inconsequential influence in the UK but they can hardly claim a victory in the person of Trump. Sovereignty proved a significant issue in Britain; we didn’t want to become swallowed up in the failing superstate of the EU. However as Archdruid Greer USA points out, the sovereignty of the states in the face of an overbearing and out of touch federal government played a part in Trump’s victory too.
I don’t imagine that as a businessman Trump will start any wars that do not have a good expectation of making a profit. An alliance with the Russians against the common enemy of civilisation in the Middle East seems like a good idea. If I held the presidency of Mexico I’d build that wall myself to prevent the vast exchange of drugs for guns that has so badly scarred my own society.
Trump’s climate change policies do however give cause for alarm.
Nevertheless he likes Britain and he has already bought parts of Scotland, and he likes our dear old Nigel Farage.
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The autumnal solstice passes, the best weather seems over for the year, the days get shorter and gloomier and a chill invades the air. Somehow, personal spring equinox resolutions to eat a protein only diet and to exercise furiously seem to fade now, slobbery and warmth beckon. As a species we have not given ourselves the luxury of fattening up and hibernating till the climate improves, the bills still need paying. Still, at least we have midwinter socialisation and feasting and commerce to look forward to.
Yet we do now have artificial lighting and spectacles, and stored carbohydrates seem to stimulate the brain, do the best discoveries occur in the dismal darkness of winter?
A number of interesting developments have occurred: -
Turdcrete, a composite sculptural material of my own devising consisting of roughly equal volumes of Portland cement and sieved fibrous compost, plus a small amount of water (handle it with rubber gloves) has proved an excellent craftworking material, see above examples. It handles like clay and sets like weak concrete and it looks like baked earth. I gave an autumnal course in its use to local enthusiasts and the professional potter amongst them became very enthusiastic about its possibilities.
Both pieces contain soft iron scrap wire. The Giacometti style figure also has a lump of lead in the base as well. The cauldron piece got stolen from the semi-public workspace. How thrilling, I have never offered artwork for sale but someone has actually stolen a piece (easily replaced), validated as an artist at last!
According to Weiser’s recent royalty statements, Liber Null and Liber Kaos have together clocked up sales of over sixty thousand, although as Gordon kindly points out these act as primers for the more difficult and challenging aficionado material in The Apophenion and The Octavo and The EPOCH.
http://runesoup.com/2015/04/chaos-magic-fracking-the-spirit-world/
Since rather publicly disowning the shambles that the Ineffectualists Of Transgression* have descended into since my retirement from them, I have received an invitation from apparently the next level of the Illuminati, well they seem to have an awesome amount of academic and intellectual firepower going for them. They say that if you search long and hard enough for the Illuminati you will eventually find yourself in it.
(*Contrary to the impression that some may have gained from the recent crop of Blog of Baphomet blogs, real magic barely concerns itself with the trivial phenomena of XI0 and chemognosis.)
The quest to understand the microcosm, has taken an interesting turn;
Perhaps we can unite the Azathothian quantum Gnosis with the Yog-Sothian cosmological Gnosis; -
See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301197960_Quantum_Entanglement_on_a_Hypersphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsuk%E2%80%93Ulam_theorem
If fundamental particles do have the same hyperspherical nature as the universe itself on the macro scale, then the Borsuk-Ulam theorem may have much to offer. If mapping from n to n-1 dimensions creates the apparent phenomenon of quantum entanglement and superposition then we can probably do a lot with the idea of fundamental particles as quantum hyperspheres (as both 3-spheres in space and 3-spheres in time), despite the illusion that we inhabit a mere 3D space and 1D time metric on casual inspection, (and which can appear gravitationally/geometrically flat if you accept the crazy phlogiston riddled expansion hypothesis).
Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.
Or
Whatever is below is similar to that which is above. Through this the marvels of the work of one thing are procured and perfected.
As Hermes Trismegistus wrote on the Emerald Tablet
We might just get some tech or magic out of this eventually.
Lastly, I remain provisionally impressed with our new UK Prime Minister. Britain has usually done well under Queens; Elizabeth 1, Victoria, and Thatcher all left this Sceptered Isle a better place than they found it. Will Theresa May prove our new Gloriana? These days all political careers tend to end in failure, but she has made a sensible and resolute start.
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Two young men both tried to move scraps of paper with their minds, one failed, he became a notable physicist and a bit of a philosopher and he became harshly dismissive of parapsychology, although he did develop a fondness for the utterly bizarre Everett-Wheeler (10500+) multiple universe hypothesis. The other one felt an unexpected breeze suddenly move his scrap of paper, ‘that will do’ he decided, he became a notable wizard and a bit of a philosopher but he became too sceptical to become an acceptable scientist. Oddly they shared a surname.
Emergent phenomena arise when systems exhibit properties and behaviours that their component parts do not seem to exhibit on their own. ‘Weakly Emergent’ phenomena like the bulk behaviour of many solids do seem in principle reducible to the properties of the atoms which compose them.
However ‘Strongly Emergent’ phenomena like living organisms, the weather, and economic behaviour do not seem similarly reducible, epistemologically or ontologically, to the behaviour of their component parts at lower levels. Something about the complexity of these systems allows them to exhibit properties that do not seem to come from anywhere except from the very complexity of their structures.
Even if we eventually discover a ‘theory of everything’ consisting of a small handful of equations which describe all the fundamental processes of the universe, the existence of grasshoppers or the Mona-Lisa would probably not appear as inevitable consequence of them.
At the time of writing we do have a Core Theory, see picture above, most of the symbols in it act as shorthand for rather more complicated entire equations. It can tell us precisely what a wave/particle will probably do under certain circumstances. However it offers no clue as to which way time will flow, the reasons for the vales of fundamental constants, or much of a clue as to what forms of complexity could emerge from it, rather like the hypothesis of causality it has far better explanatory power when used backwards. Plus it only works in weak gravity situations and the Higgs part of it looks a bit dodgy. The supreme achievement of the Core Theory lies in its revelation of the enormity of what we didn’t even realise we don’t know, it has massively expanded our awareness of our ignorance.
According to Science, consciousness arises as an emergent phenomenon from matter. As biological complexity and the processing power of nervous systems becomes selected for, then the process of ‘consciousness’ gradually develops. Even if we cannot precisely specify what we mean by ‘consciousness’ we can appreciate some kind of a quantitative and probably a qualitative difference between the behaviour of ourselves and our fellows and say, rocks for example. Dogs and many other animals quite plainly exhibit something of what we recognise as consciousness as well.
A phenomenon such as consciousness plainly resists a complete reduction to the functions of the component parts of the systems which give rise to it, such as the nerve cells, the chemistry of those cells, and the particle physics underlying the chemistry. Rather the incredibly complicated arrangement of matter in a brain supports behaviour which does not seem present in its component parts.
Or does it? The philosophy of Panpsychism attempts to explain the existence of consciousness by describing it as a fundamental attribute of all matter. Thus even individual subatomic particles must have it to some degree. Well individual particles do exhibit indeterminate and thus unpredictable behaviour and they seem capable of simple communication with each other by quantum entanglement, and emergent properties arise all the way up the scale, the properties of water for example do not seem entirely defined by those of its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but they at least have the freedom to exhibit such behaviour.
The tired debate about Free Will versus Determinism usually becomes bogged down by the assumptions that matter can only behave deterministically or randomly, neither of which satisfies any criterion of free will, and so free will must either arise from something immaterial or ‘spiritual’, or prove illusory. However if consciousness arises as an emergent property of matter, then so can free will. Beyond a certain level of complexity an organism (and perhaps even a machine) will start to self-generate behaviour that does not always causally depend on its component parts, or on its inputs, or on pure randomness either.
According to many Religions, matter arises as an emergent phenomenon from consciousness. Thus some immaterial but conscious deity or other simply wishes or imagines the material universe into manifestation. Just how such deities achieved consciousness in the first place they do not say. However the material universe then seems to exhibit emergent properties and to manifest phenomena not apparently intended by deities, creating multiple failures of omnipotence and omniscience, and awkward questions about theodicy (deities permitting bad stuff).
Some religions (like many of those of the classical civilisations) had the fallible gods co-evolve with matter from a more primeval chaotic state and then muck around with it or fight over it for a while before humans appeared or got created.
The superiority of ‘mind’ over matter really seems to have taken metaphysical hold with the advent of Platonism and Neo-Platonism. The late classical thinkers became so obsessed with the very idea of ideas that they came to regard them as more fundamental than the phenomena they related to. From this point on, the interface of late classical thinking and Hebraic monotheism led to the doctrines of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Kabala, in which ‘The Prime Consciousness’ or something of that ilk, gives rise to a series of descending thoughts and emanations which eventually result in this miserable flawed material world. Such doctrines have formed a strong thread in religion and mysticism ever since.
Today the old Pagan view appears somewhat more realistic than the top-down Monotheist view. Matter plainly tends to evolve complexity and to manifest emergent properties, and these emergent properties act rather like gods, controlling the very substances from which they emerged, to create waves and turbulence in water, to make forests out of dirt, water, air, and sunlight, and to make animals and self-aware creatures out of bits chewed off plants and/or bits chewed off other animals.
Some theorists suspect that once an emergent behaviour has developed it may set some sort of a pattern for similar behaviour to emerge in similar systems. Here we enter controversial and occult but potentially testable territory populated with ideas about Morphic Fields and the possible weak quantum entanglement of all similar phenomena and/or the ontological rather than the epistemological reality of wave-functions as in the PBR theorem.
In an odd way such ideas about Morphic Fields and the non-local effects of information begin to resemble the old Neo-Platonic ideas about discarnate Ideals or ‘Forms’, but with a crucial difference: - In the modern information theory, matter and information co-evolve, information requires embodiment, it requires matter to process it, to emit it, to receive it, and to decode it.
This implies both limitations and extensions to our ideas about the esoteric possibilities of information. Completely discarnate sentient ‘Spirits’ of deities, or of the deceased, or of events which have ceased to exist seem unlikely within the new paradigm. On the other hand, information about such things can persist in living minds (and evolve there) and possibly have effects beyond them if information can have the sort of non-local effects suggested by quantum and morphic field theories.
Non-locality in space either effectively means ‘instantaneously’ regardless of distance and lightspeed, or it means the effective cancellation of distance by the exchange of information backwards in time.
Non-locality in time does seem to occur in some quantum experiments; the present can seemingly modify the past and seemingly modify the future without actually ‘touching’ it in the classical sense. Of course the annals of the magical and the occult lie littered with such claims, most of them dubious and/or explained in terms of an antique ‘spirit’ hypothesis.
Nevertheless temporal non-locality leads to the opening of a very large can of worms which could include retroactive enchantment and divination of the future on a probabilistic basis, and maybe ‘talking’ not with the dead but maybe with the previously alive. Plus the correction to the gravity part of the Core Theory for high gravity as suggested by Hypersphere Cosmology leads to the intriguing speculation that a positively curved vorticitating universe finite and unbounded in both space and time ‘always’ has consciousness in it.
If something like a Core Theory Equation does govern the basic mechanics of the universe then the magic lies in the Emergence of improbable events yet it will always give the appearance of having happened naturally, if somewhat improbably. That will do.
Yes, I have just read this https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/0525954821
It contains much to stimulate and to argue with.
Finally, let us hope that Comrade Jeremy Corbyn wins the UK Labour party leadership resoundingly. He would make a splendid leader of the opposition, a proper democratic government needs a lunatic opposition from which it can borrow the very occasional sensible idea.
And, post-finally, Grammar Schools, I had the good fortune to go to one from an upper working class home, later I taught in one and in quite a number of secondary modern schools during 5 years at the chalkface. If you want a comprehensive school to have mixed sexes and mixed ability and a wide range of academic and vocational subjects then it has to become pretty large. The largeness usually screws it up, the staff don't know each other personally, the staff don't know the pupils personally, instead of an educational community you get a dysfunctional educational factory. Inevitably the kids get heavily streamed anyway within the school. Because large schools don't work very well we should concentrate on making them smaller, to allow this they would need to become more selective. To allow for social mobility we should have much more mobility between schools that have specialisms but a smaller size. I never worked in a school with more than 4-form entry that didn't seem like a mediocre shambles blighted by disruptive behaviour.