chaotopia

Yesterday morning's Grenoside Sword Dancers' Boxing Day dance, in the road outside the Old Harrow, Grenoside village, greeting the Unconquered Sun. This is a very old tradition, not a re-enactment. It has been kept alive continuously, but now they need new members. If you are interested in dancing this two-centuries' old dance and can get to the Sheffield area of an evening, get in touch with them at  http://www.grenosword.f9.co.uk/ . Here's a short sequence where they are weaving through the swords.

Available from https://psychedelicpress.co.uk/collections/psychedelic-press-journals The stated theme of issue 22 is the integration phase that happens after a psychedelic experience, the delicate protocols of coming back to the world. The articles 'all play with this theme in various ways'. PPJ in general plays with themes as a way of structuring the vast surge of psychedelic writing that is emerging at the moment, in science, literature and other areas. And it does this very well; I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in psychedelics and the culture and issues around them. It has an immensely readable mix of academic-type discourse, trip reports, poetry and history. This issue has two outright trip reports. Julian Vayne writes this issue's My First Trip, in which he tells a hair-raising tale of taking 4 times as much LSD as he intended to, how he dealt with a rather intense metaphor that erupted into the trip, and what he thought about it all afterward...

http://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/hubert-tsarko/composting-for-all/paperback/product-23298672.html This is less an objective reviewer's review and more a plug for a friend's book. But my friend John, the man behind Hubert Tsarko, really is a decent poet, and worth a look if you value mysterious wordcraft. John has been growing as a poet for the thirty-odd years I've known him. This is his first collection, which goes to show what a long time poets take to mature. I travelled with him back in our youth, through the South of France, picking grapes and drinking their pressed fermented product, talking about writing and occasionally doing some. On our way to castrate maize in Riscle (the title of one of the poems in this collection), in the wake of an ill-advised Mercury invocation intended to speed up the hitch-hiking, we got our lift, with a man who stole our bags and papers. On the table in the café he left us a plastic diary, which I took up and used a...

Getting Higher - The manual of psychedelic ceremony Julian Vayne, https://psychedelicpress.co.uk/products/getting-higher-psychedelic-julian-vayne This is a unique book, which I have been waiting for the likes of for some time. My first adult-life experiences of events that I framed as magical happened in my late teens, under the influence of acid. It wasn't until my mind-20s that I embarked on daily study and practice. This was in the late 1970s, and the world of magical writing - the serious sort rather than the various New Age dilutions - was dominated by the works of Crowley. I found Crowley's work interesting partly because he saw no basic problem in using psychoactive substances in the course of magical work. Most other magical writers seemed to shrivel up in horror at the mere thought. However, Crowley was ultimately a disappointment to me in this area, as in a few others. He had used mescaline, one of what I thought of as the most interesting class of drugs, t...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Years-Magical-Thinking-Lionel-Snell/dp/0904311244 Lionel Snell is without doubt one of the great magical thinkers of the last half-century. This book is somewhat different to his other books, because he is offering his arguments to the wider public beyond the magical ghetto. It is a concerted defence of magical thinking - but as one of four basic types of thinking, four basic human ways of apprehending our worlds. This four-directions model is not new - Snell's first book, SSOTBME, from 1974, laid out this model of human apprehension, but I must confess I never got that it was supposed to be a normal mode of thinking; somehow I assumed he was smuggling it in to complete his picture, and that it was still a fringe thing. Thinking back, I am puzzled at how I misread that idea, but it no doubt has to do with the fact that my own approach to magical thinking has often emphasized the fringe-y, even freakish nature of such thinking - the freakiness of whic...