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Apophenia’s Official Birthday.
On this little rock circling a nondescript star in an unfashionable spiral arm of our galaxy Apophenia’s Official Birthday happens tomorrow, Thursday 26th of May.
At least in the northern hemisphere this means that spring has truly sprung, my pond hosts newts, the grounds of Chateaux Chaos sprout all kinds of green stuff with obscure Latin names known only to the Memsahib. Clumsy maybugs batter the windows like poorly designed toy helicopters.
I intend to celebrate with copious doses of theobromine, I may go on a chocolate only ‘fast’ just for the day, followed by an invocation with a view to discovering what to do with The Eye of Agamotto, plus any other peculiar inspirations that She, Apophenia, suggests.
I predict that the world will not end tomorrow, although it seems an auspicious day for doing or thinking something paradigm challenging.
Accordingly, after ritual, I’m packing robes (of various colours) and wands and amulets for a long weekend at various esoteric events, in contradistinction to my usual reclusive behaviour.
A merry and discombobulating Apophenia-mass to all.
Pete.
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ISBN 978 1 84854 041 5
550+ pages, now in paperback 14.99.
The book makes for light and easy reading and has plenty of pictures. It advances the thesis that England has led the world in magic for millennia, and still does. In support of this idea the book points to England as the centre for Iron Age Celtic Druidry, and latterly of Theosophy, The Golden Dawn, Neo-Wicca and Neo- Paganism, Neo-Druidry, and Chaos Magic. Most of the significant figures and movements between the original Druids and modern times get a mention or a potted history, Bacon, Dee, Newton, Barrat and so on, plus of course we get a bit on more modern figures such as Gerald Gardiner, Aliester Crowley, Dion Fortune et al.
Plus the reader will also get a whirlwind introduction to practical runes, ogham, astrology, tarot, and alchemy. Plus the book also gives lots of references about places to visit, things to do, and organizations to contact. Whew.
Pete Carroll.
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Eye of Agomotto
To prepare this most puissant magical amulet let the sorcerer first study the career of The Sorcerer Supreme, the mythical Dr Steven Strange.
Then let the sorcerer travel to some far and remote peninsula in the old Celtic lands, there perhaps to find some ancient fool conducting a fire sale of lapidary items at a Craft Fayre, and purchase from him a large star ruby mislabeled as a garnet, despite its giveaway hexagonal columnar structure, for a mere five pounds fifty without haggling.
Then let the sorcerer find an unwanted and unused bench mounted electric grinder going for a mere twenty five pounds at a shop of worthy charity, and again purchase it without haggling.
Then under auspicious stars let the sorcerer grind the ruby to a cabochon over many nights, sacrificing the electric grinder to the Great Work in the process, chanting (without blasphemy) throughout.
Then let the sorcerer take an old watch that has died, and file its casing of adamantine steel down to accommodate the gem, finally burnishing the casing to the color of bronze in a fire of ancient hydrocarbon gases, and then hammer in the jewel.
The metaphysical preparations can then begin. (Details to follow eventually, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Agamotto for an interesting selection of magical properties that the sorcerer just might succeed to some degree in associating it with.)
Now that’s what I call Chaos Magic, the investment of meaning and effort into something that appeals to will and imagination, with due contempt for the conventions of dull common sense and myopic logic.
I strongly suspect that most published Grimoires got written retroactively, after a certain amount of literary research and practical experiment; they probably didn’t get delivered as finished items by deities and demons. Thus we should interpret them merely as general guides to the sort of stuff worth trying out.
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Went to a community meeting this evening, largely to oppose the off-license sale of alcohol to the local teenage yobbery till 11pm. The local yobbery has a pretty grim effect here and plenty of drugs anyway, and they'd probably create less of a problem if stoned rather than drunk.
Anyway the foyer of the primary school exhibits a massive display of childrens rights material, including such gems as 'you have the right to think or believe anything you like so long as it does not offend anyone else'. So presumably they don't have the right to think anything that might offend anyone else.
The school had the fences and windows and bars and electronic locks of a medium security fortress or prison, which says a lot in itself, after all, the rights material did not explicity deny the right of children to burn their school down.
Then on the back of the community questionaire lay an invitation to complete the diversity survey about ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, on the basis of which the local council can presumably discount any survey it wants that fails to include sufficient transgender persons for example. Finally it included a box to tick if you didn't want to complete the survey, so I ticked that as well as all the relevant boxes on the basis that I didn't actually want to complete it, but had done it so that the inclusiveness survey would at least include one person who didn't want to include themself in an inclusiveness survey, or perhaps to create some sort of Barber of Seville type paradox for some bureaucrat somewhere.
Does our society sink towards some sort of politicaly correct dystopian maddness, or do I just become a grumpy old git?
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Animageos - the visual equivalent of anonymous, pronounced An-imar-gus , and meaning not having your image in the public domain, rather like Banksy.
In these times of omnipresent CCTV and 'Lookist' culture where appearances and hype and public personality triumph so frequently over substance and sanity, preserving your animaginity (visual anonymity) and not permitting the theft of your soul by photography seems like an excellent policy.
By some strange serendipity I just came across a passage in Pratchet's Going Postal where he explains the view of time taken by the race of Golem's (who more or less have immortality). They consider time to have a doughnut shape and if you wait long enough it all comes round again, but you can take different decisions each time it does. Ha, that rather neatly summarises much of what the previous post strived to express. However the chances of anything remotely resembling humans, let alone any of us personally, still existing 22 billion years hence does seem rather remote, so we don't have to worry about what we'll do 'next' time. Discworld on the other hand has a rather shorter temporal 'diameter' of a mere 6,500 years though, according to calculations shown in The Octavo.
Pete.