chaotopia

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

 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

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. 

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