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Published: 01 July 2014

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St George's day will probably pass more or less unnoticed as usual, since our phyrric victory in WW2 and our loss of empire and superpower status we haven't really done patriotism with any enthusiasm.

Our Illiberal Dimocrats want a fully elected House of Lords, the hereditary principle seems indefensible as does the automatic inclusion of the bishops of what has become a marginal religion. The other parties want to retain the right to appoint lords to the 'upper' house to preserve their influence there.

I have a far more radical idea. If democracy works through a system of checks and balances then what we actually need is a non-democratic check on democracy itself. The monarchy no longer really provides this. Thus we should have a RANDOMLY SELECTED upper house. A few hundred people picked at random off the electoral rolls with absolute power of veto over parliament. After all we trust this principle in our courts of law, twelve citizens at random for the jury, to moderate the power of the judiciary.

Such an upper house would contain a representative selection of all age and income groups and sexes by virtue of its randomness.

Let us hope that Francois Hollande wins in France. His policies display the usual economic illiteracy of socialism but they do have the virtue that they will hasten the breakup of the single currency and hopefully the entire cursed European Union.

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Published: 01 July 2014

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With the Esotericon now moving at a fair pace towards its final shape, and the accompanying Portals of Chaos Deck half done, we have finally accepted the challenge of fully entering the Mythos of the Elder Gods using the tools and perspectives of Ritual Chaos Magic in the hope of recovering a proper Necronomicon for its final chapter. An instrument for recovering dangerous knowledge from the depths of the entire panpsychic universe.

We note with some amusement that the first spell in our first book, Liber Null , actually read I wish to obtain the Necronomicon , given as a lighthearted example of how to use the Austin Spare sigil making technique, as the whole Necronomicon idea seemed a bit fanciful at the time, now however, a quarter of a century down the line it seems that the spell may have actually done something, so, 'conjure long' as they say.

After 40 years of slaving over a hot pentacle we hope to have enough sanity points to carry this venture through, the lore clues seem to develop with our investigations, see below: -

Lovecraft's original handrawn form of the Elder Sign may possibly indicate a bind rune of:
Algiz, a somewhat mysterious rune variously interpreted over history as Elk, Elk-God (Horned God?) Protection, or Life.
Ansuz, The Aesir (Gods) but both reversed and mirror imaged, somehow oddly appropriate.
Laguz, Lake or Ocean, reversed.

Derleth's description of the Elder Sign as 'a distorted five pointed star' may actually prove strangely compatible with this in a sense, for if we represent the Lovecraft sign with 10 lines then it becomes topologicaly foldable into both a pentagram inscribed within a pentagon, and also into the more or less topologicaly isomorphic figure of the pentachoron which constitutes the first regular 4 dimensional hypersolid. (Imagine it in 3 dimensions as a tetrahedron with 4 additional edges meeting at a fifth point in its centre, a strangely distorted five pointed star indeed when viewed in only 2 or 3 dimensions.)

Thus we can perhaps regard the Lovecraft Elder Sign as an unfolded pentagram-pentagon and/or an unfolded pentachoron. In the aether a folded antenna usually works about the same as a flat one.

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Published: 01 July 2014

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Published: 01 July 2014

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Civil Marriage

I don’t think the government has thought far enough outside the box on the issue of marriage.

We need to take the sex and the religion out of partnership contracts.

In a secular society it seems ridiculous that some religions still retain the right to authorise legally binding contracts. After all, religious christenings or namings and funerals no longer count as legal registrations of births or deaths.

Marriage constitutes a legal partnership contract for the purposes of child custody, inheritance, and next of kin rights, thus it seems ridiculous to allow the functionaries of some religious and secular groups but not others to authorise such contracts. I doubt that my Archdruid or my Pact Bishop would get a license to dispense legally binding contracts of handfasting or marriage, so why should any other religious or humanist organisation?

If people want to seal a partnership with a contract then it should remain a purely legal matter. They can always have any sort of religious or secular celebration that they can persuade anyone to participate in, before or afterwards. If some religions want to decline to have some types of celebration then that’s their choice, and their loss of revenue.

Plus the terms of contract require re-examination and greater flexibility. My widowed mother cannot marry her partner because both have children and property, and if either dies their property lies open to claim from the other or the other’s adult children. Pre-nuptial contracts have no force in law in the UK.

My mother also lost her inheritance when her widowed father re-married; the courts over-ruled his will assigning his property to his own children on the death of his new wife.

Also there was the celebrated case of two sisters who had been lifelong companions and when one died the other had to sell their house because she couldn’t inherit the other half of the house without paying death duties. If they had been two unrelated women they could have had a legal partnership and the right to inherit each others property.