chaotopia

This graphic is from my Exploring Meditation groups (and would also have been projected at Occulture Retreat 2024 but for computer problems).  

Storl’s memoir is of a highly resourceful wanderer, and covers the period usually referred to as ‘the 60s’... Storl’s memoir gives some childhood background but mainly covers the years from the mid-1960s to 1970s, the period usually referred to as ‘the 60s’. It’s the tale of a highly resourceful wanderer. He’s a man who is good at surviving with no money, has great social skills and loves the natural world to the extent he’d rather sleep in a tree than in a student dormitory.    Storl’s love of the living world is one of his main themes. He takes the cutting down of trees personally, and as a paper boy he shoots out streetlights with an airgun because of the insects dying on them. His account of the horror of having to kill and dissect frogs reminds me of my own days as a biology student, cutting the tongues out of limpets to look at a distribution on a beach, partaking in the destruction of life just to learn a minor survey technique.    His love of the world goes even further, into r

This is not a review but a plug, because I have two poems in this volume. The book is in two sections - ‘The Older Rune Poems’ and ‘The Reawakened Tradition’. Most of our knowledge of the meanings of the runes comes from the mediaeval rune-poems, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and Norwegian. The first section has original language versions and new translations of all of those, of the very brief Abecedarium Nordmannicum and of a previously little-known Early Modern Swedish rune poem.  This section starts with an essay by P. D. Brown, in which he presents the rune-poem tradition from the viewpoint of a poet. He tells us that the poems were tools “to make the mind more generally agile, more adept at making connections, thinking ‘laterally’ and more imaginatively” about what the runes in are. The old rune-poems themselves are given with learned notes about the language and meanings.  The second part contains an introduction by P. D. Brown. He writes: ‘A rune poem mingles and blends the fruits of t

Blotter: the untold story of an acid medium by Erik Davis The book consists of a lengthy essay by Erik Davis on the history and art of blotters and a lot of images of blotter art. Some of them are accompanied by short reflections on a particular blotter, some experiential and some more art-theoretical.  I like Erik’s prose, which is often somewhat trippy to read, his gonzo juxtaposition of well-digested academic ideas with street demotic, so I was delighted when he invited me to contribute a short piece for this book. This was an account of a trip I had on a Tetragrammaton blotter in 1983. I wrote about being given that blotter at a crucial point in the development of one of the two magical groups I was working with at the time.  The blotter illustrations themselves are interesting and often beautiful to look at. The material is very USA-centred, and British commentator Mike Jay (p187) picks up precisely my thoughts on many of the designs: most of the cultural references are American

 Snorri Sturluson, 12th-13th century Icelander, is the main person responsible for writing down and thereby preserving much of the pre-Christian oral myths of the Scandinavian peoples. As author of two extraordinary books on Icelandic Magic (see  HERE and HERE ) Chris Smith is well-qualified for this playful meditation on the Norse myths, expanding the ideas and events within that corpus. The tale imagines Snorri’s journey after his assassination, meeting the Gods, Elves, Dwarves, Etins and Vanes of the Norse myths, who set him right about some of the things he heard in his life in Midgard.  Myths aren’t necessarily meant to be consistent, but it’s instructive, and fun, to elaborate the ancient literature with a view to how it can all fit together. Others have attempted this, such as Viktor Rydberg, but the latter’s work takes us on a ‘Rydberg trip’, way outside of the original material. Chris Smith sticks much more closely to the originals, and fills in some of the ‘gaps’ that all my

This piece is a visually-rich resource for my forthcoming article on the magic of egregore entities, to be published in the Weiser anthology This Is Chaos . It also serves as a resource for a forthcoming booklet on Egregores and Memetics .  KEANU REEVES IS JOHN MASTODON  In 2023 after Eldritch Musk had owned Twitter for a few months, he started suspending accounts that he felt threatened by.  One of these accounts was one that had the name tag @joinmastodon, promoting the anarchist-leaning federated social media platform Mastodon. This tag was misread by a social media columnist as @johnmastodon.  The error was corrected later, but by then it was too late. People had already produced John Mastodon memes; something had sprung into life on the Internet.  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon The rest is history, written by devoted followers. Here are a few more of the memes they made. I couldn't find the original source of all of them; the links I give are where I found them.