Posts

Far Out In America, by Wolf-Dieter Storl

Image
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
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rune Poems: A Reawakened Tradition

Image
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
Post a Comment
Read more

‘Looks like a felony’ - a review of Blotter: the untold story of an acid medium

Image
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
Post a Comment
Read more

SNORRI: The Afterlife Adventures of Snorri Sturluson, by Christopher A. Smith

Image
 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
Post a Comment
Read more

A CHAOTIC ONLINE ENTITY

Image
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. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Egregore against weapons of mass destruction

Image
WABRI EGREGORE POWER This series of open workings is an experiment in using social media to empower a helper spirit. It’s a product of group mind, so it’s an egregore entity. This is the original sigil for the entity WABRI, the function of which is to make sure that weapons of mass destruction are never used.  BACKGROUND The original spell - ‘From SNAFU to FUBAR - Five Spanners in the War-Machine’ - was done at a public Discordian event in 2018, Catch-23. Since then, we’ve been developing it to become more effective. Over 50 magical practitioners have been involved so far.  The sigil above is the original one, the simplest, which you are encouraged to use as a starting point. In this latest stage of the workings, you are invited to put your own magic into it, to help it become a true egregore entity - something much more effective than a servitor. This process of open magical work started at my book launch on 9/12/23. Here are some of the other sigils that were made at that event, all
Post a Comment
Read more

C-Star vs E-Star: a quick rundown

Image
This is a short piece from 2022, that used to be on the now-defunct chaosmagick.com site. For the last few years I’ve been aware of Dugin’s Eurasianist star glyph, via pictures of Russian nationalists standing in front of what looked a bit like a chaos star, the familiar eight arrows radiating out from the centre, though minus a circle and forming a square shape.  My chaos friends and I were a bit concerned about this similarity, because some people don’t look closely at things, and online reputation is a volatile thing. However, it wasn’t until recent months that the issue suddenly seemed to be all over social media. On top of this, a chaos magician friend in Sweden mentioned that there is a public perception over there of our beloved chaos star being associated with the political far right. So what is this Eurasianist star? It’s an invention of Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist who supports far right positions. His thinking is complex and (deliberately) confusing - a stew of ide
Post a Comment
Read more