chaotopia

It's got quite a range of offerings, not all of which were to my taste; but of course that's how it is with anthologies. Personal takes on the history of CM from Pete Carroll and Jaq Hawkins, some good articles full of basic practical hints, and just for variety, one of those pieces which tell you how you  must  do magic.  Lionel Snell is of course represented, with a great piece,  Virtual Reality, Cybermagick and the Future of Chaos , resuming one of the main themes of his work over the last 50 years - VR. He is the man who invented Johnstone's Paradox, the idea that, if it's ever going to be actually possible to upload human-level consciousness into computers, then the odds are we are already living in such an emulation. This theory is now claimed without attribution by shameless plunderers of Lionel's originality. The essay ends with this computer analogy, symbolizing coding as magic, and the consensus world as the desktop: 'The moral of m...

This is an unusual book. Toby Chappell, whose background includes academic studies in philosophy and linguistics, introduces arcane ideas from semiotics into the field of magic, but doesn’t leave it at that. The subtitle of the book - ‘Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils’ - tells us that the book is intended, as all decent books on magic do, to improve our magical practice. When Chappell gets on to the analyses of magical spells, it becomes clear that we are in the hands of an experienced magician. The author’s other writings include his book Infernal Geometry and the Left Hand Path. The early sections of the book where he introduces the semiotics of Pierce and Saussure, amongst other writers, were hard going for me; I find abstract thought goes in one ear and out the other until I manage to connect it to actual concrete experience. This difficulty is no reflection on Chappell’s skills in expounding these obscure ideas, and I feel like I understand them a little...

CRAB AND BEES MATTER OF BRITAIN by Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith. Peakrill Press This is a thoroughly hallucinatory book. It starts like this: It was all snakes. Nothing was straight.  From the opening sentences we plunge into a world of myth, where stories that maybe resemble those in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century book History of the Kings of Britain , or tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table intertwine with near-contemporary linear-world characters and events. Echoes of the Flood that inundated many places at the end of the last Ice Age bump up against contemporary tales, Harold Wilson going to Scilly to die. This book confuses the centuries and mashes up the millennia, showing us how myth might grow from overheard inaccurate pub conversations. And it’s all spiced with the pungent intellectual delight of playful false etymology.  It’s a rich cosmology. ‘The wind, the warmth, the water and the soil moved in circles, tangling with the stories in cir...

The book was given me by my friend Anwen who runs Airy Fairy, Sheffield's premier pagan bookshop, meeting place and cafe. It was written by her friend Jamie and features a Freya painting modelled on Anwen on the front cover.  So this is a book that came out of a community that overlaps my own local magical one, and I wanted to give it a thorough review.  And it is well worth the effort. It's an unusual and, in its own way, groundbreaking book.  But it’s taken me years to do. First the book went missing when I was moving house two years ago. Then… well, enough of excuses. The review is finally here.  Anglo-Saxon Paganism consists of essays about the history and myths of the Anglo-Saxon world plus the author’s own versions of the mythic tales. The book is a rich offering, with nice attention to history and useful timelines to contextualize the origins of AS culture. I’m going to dive into the bits of the text I particularly engaged with before discussing the book’s sh...

As you probably know, Carl Abrahamsson is editor of The Fenris Wolf , the occasional occultural journal which has been blending magic(k), avant garde art and psychotherapy since 1989. Abrahamsson is a ferociously productive writer, whose output is nigh-impossible to keep up with with—essays, talks, films, books and more. He describes his approach as ‘anthropological’; he often frames occultural things as aspects of a more universal human quality or other.   In one of these essays, ‘The Magic of Dreams’, he tells us the overall frame of his magical life:  ‘The key to a good life was (and is) simply to control your own time, and never flex away too much from the insight that Time is a currency strongly linked to our perception of freedom. True Will needs to be merged with Time, that’s a solid formula for successful magic.’ I can relate to that a lot. Being able to control one’s own time is the polar opposite of the corporate work nightmare that we are supposed to accept as norma...

‘The book contains correspondence between myself and the Elder Murat Yagan. The Elder Murat Yagan was one of the last remaining custodians of the traditional culture and practices of the Abkhazian people. These previously restricted practices are better known in the West as "The Yoga of the Caucuses". The book also describes the experiences of a small London based community that were committed to the work of G I Gurdjieff and J G Bennett. There is additional material on the art of dreaming, healing practices and the activation of the Nests (energy centres) that improve health and develop reserve human abilities. The cover photo was taken in the earlier part of the last century. The image presented was the theme and topic of one of my final letters to the Elder Murat Yagan. That letter is included in this book.’ As you my readers may have noticed, I don’t generally write bad reviews. This is because I don’t review things if I don’t think they’ve any value, though I occasionall...