chaotopia

From: https://www.burningissue.net/ For months I've flicked through this publication, loving the pictures, and reading the odd bit. So I only just finished reading the whole thing. This is an idler's read, in the best sense - that reading it is to be taken slowly, for pleasure, both to appreciate the artwork and the humour and also to dive deep into the so-called 'think pieces'. The mag opens with an advert for a very expensive bottle of whisky. From Jura, of course! And 23 years old! Then a summation of how much money has so far been burned, as far as the editors can tell: £7,254,885 at time of going to press. Then there's the record of all known money burns - this includes the US retreat from Saigon burn of a million bucks, and a curious bit of Nigerian money sorcery that cost the client £1.5m in burned notes. That's before we get to the KLF - we have a historical arc here, and the KLF were doing something new. With an account of the 23-years-after pub...

This is the talk part of a working I presented at Manifestations, the IOT+friends event in October in Sheffield. A very kind person with much better tech skills than me (and who has chosen anonymity) has kindly improved the sound!

Jason Louv - John Dee and the Empire of Angels; Enochian Magic and the Roots of the Modern World. Back in the 1980s, I and a few friends worked the Enochian System of John Dee and Edward Kelly (see my Tales of Magic, episodes 17-21, soon to appear on https://iotbis.wordpress.com/author/iotbis/). It is a system of staggering detail and complexity. Not to mention the distortions and baggage introduced by MacGregor Mathers, which have made it hard to know where to start. One of my co-workers once said: It would take a whole Enochian University working for a hundred years to work out what all the potentials of this system are. And that was just the technical, magical aspects; we had little idea then of exactly how important Dee's work was in creating the world we live in now. Louv's book makes a compelling case for the angels that Dee and Kelly channelled having a profound influence on both the British and American empires. And that's just for starters. This is a rich, ...

https://arcanaeuropamedia.com/blogs/arcana-blog/stephen-edred-flowers-on-the-northern-dawn Stephen Edred Flowers is of course better known in the esoteric world as Edred Thorsson, highly productive author of books on esoteric runology and leader of the Rune Gild. Dr. Flowers has done an enormous amount towards getting the practice of Germanic magic on a sound historical and spiritual footing, partly by making use of the mainstream academy's research into runes, language and culture in the pursuit of initiation. So it is not hard to get the impression that before he did that, there was academic runology and occultizoid nincompoopery and ne'er the twain did meet, that nothing much of interest happened in the world of Germanic magic between the millennium-old suppression of the ancient ways and the recent runic revival. But of course it is not as simple as that, as Dr Flowers points out in this excellent book. In the wake of the cultural destruction of the ancient world there ...

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/8505792-amorphous-albion I'll start with a declaration of interest: Ben is one of the founders of Festival 23, so I got to know about this book on the Discordian grapevine. But it shouldn't stay in that particular community (or echo-chamber). It's too good for that, and it's needed out there! Amorphous Albion is an heroic tale set in an impoverished future England in which a group of magical people called the Hove Space Programme take on, against overwhelming odds, a militaristic government, themselves lackeys of evil Illuminati-figures. This dystopia is underpinned with magic - on both sides. We are in the realm of earth energies as materiel, magical concepts as strategy. We are also in a ream of shameless fantasy and a glorification of freak lifestyle: heroes that survive a battle check to see if they can still roll a joint. (Yes, it's 'freak', not 'hippie'. The latter words always stank of newspaper-ink. Welcome to ...

Psychedelic Press Journal, Issue #23.  https://psychedelicpress.co.uk/products/psychedelic-press-xxiii Nikki Wyrd writes a beautiful intro to a superb collection of historical, poetic, magical and fantastical offerings. The contents are carefully framed between the opening item, the first published account of mescaline intoxication, by Havelock Ellis in 1898 and a mescaline trip record by Discordianism founder Gregory Hill. Next up is John Constable on '23 and Me'. John is a man whose work proves that one man's vision can change the world for thousands of people, resulting in an extraordinary injection of wisdom about death, celebration and magic into counterculture. He tells a story which takes in his early connections with the Discordian world via Ken Campbell, his life-changing acid-soaked night with the spirit of the Goose, and some very sound advice on living magically. Ben Graham's 'Is This For Real?' is a great survey of the Discordian scene and the...