chaotopia

This is a truly superb and ground-breaking book. And very well-written - it's hard to believe that someone who isn't a many-times published writer could deliver such an immensely readable text. He throws us into the deep end right at the start, with an account of his creeping into a field in the dead of night to make a crop circle, part of his ritual process for dealing with the darkness of life he encounters on a daily basis.  Callender writes about his own life, and the snags and traumas that led him into this unusual profession. He also writes of the cultural blankness surrounding our death rituals in 'Western' culture, the ways we try and purge the humanity out of the grieving process. It's 'undertaker, by the way, not 'funeral director'; the latter, as he shows, is another distancing phrase.  He relates vividly many of the emotionally fraught situations his profession gets and got him into. Many of them emerge into deep connection with the bereaved....

I’m leaving Fakebook, deleting my Meta account. These words about how and why I'm doing so are slightly premature - it’ll actually be a few days more before my final post on there.  But I want to go on about it a bit because I want as many of my friends as possible to see the posts. And the way FB's algorithm scrambles the timeline does make it a bit like dealing with a dementia sufferer.  I'm going to miss some of you. And some features of this (really rather crappy) platform. I have to admit I’ve gained from using Fakebook over the last 15 years or so. I’ve recontacted old friends, I’ve advertised courses and events and shown support for things I approve of. I’ve had some laughs, enjoyed some amusing memes.  But I’m going to have a good old moan before I pack my bags. In the hope that maybe some of it will motivate you my friends to make the effort, to move onto a more civilized platform and join me on Bluesky.  So what’s wrong with FB? - Stupid algorithm rather th...

Back in 2016 we in the IOT decided we needed to publish something that showed the substance of our magical lives, the actual stuff we got up to. We published a collection of essays, reports and ideas and called it Chaos Streams #1. (In case you don’t already have a copy, it’s available here ). It was very well received, people obviously wanted to read stuff about what magicians do.  We always planned to follow it up, and that long awaited issue 2 is with us now. Click on the graphic to go to where you can get a copy. Within those covers is a good mix of items, and writers who hail from UK, Italy, Scandinavia, Poland, Ukraine and Australasia.  There are reports of magical practice, including ancestor work, sacred places in Kyiv, group Enochian skrying, the magic of dyslexia, pieces on the magics of art, Baphomet, bees, Goetia, our semi-open London group CYN, pilgrimage, working with Choronzon; reflections on the magical path; guides to magical techniques, including the uses of ...

Readers of my various writings will almost certainly be the kind of people who are familiar with Julian’s work. Over the decades, he has successfully cultivated a clear, engaging and approachable style of writing about esoteric topics, shuffled together in inspiring new ways. This book is no exception.  It is a book whose time has come. Although psychedelics are still illegal in many countries, including the stupid and backward UK, many people use them. (As David Nutt's 2009 report on the objective harmfulness of a range of recreational drugs showed, mushrooms are massively less dangerous than alcohol. Of course, Prof Nutt was sacked for revealing actual truths about drugs; truth was considered to be 'sending the wrong message').  People use psychedelics for a variety of reasons and goals, and this book is about inward-focused practice, the eyes-closed, music-on-headphones kind of trip. Julian sets the scene, discussing the venue, the construction and use of playlists, and,...

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...