chaotopia

I was invited to write the following piece by one of the editors at Hilaritas Press, as an Afterword for their new collection of RAW short pieces, Maybe Magic . I was delighted to do so.  He disliked it because I made some fairly critical comments about Elon Musk. Neither was he happy that I'd mentioned 'climate crisis'.  Quote: 'I'm far from convinced that there is a climate crisis'.  Well, judging by pretty much everyone I've ever met on the Discordian scene, I'd assumed anyone handling RAW's legacy would be fairly politically Left, and on board with proper climate science. That editor himself mentioned that he expected their potential readership would be Left-leaning; but it appears that doesn't apply to their editorial policy.  One of their other editors then got in touch and said they might still use it if I removed all references to 'Musk and friends'. Having got to that point, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be published by cli...

Gavin Fox sent me this book over a year ago, and it’s taken me that long to understand how to think about it. The intriguing title was a stumbling-block: the term ‘Necromancer’ is fairly straightforward, but I’ve never met one before. If I don’t count an acquaintance who used to like robbing sea-damaged graveyards in the Scottish islands. And my own experience of working with the dead is quite limited - a year as part of a Valgaldr group who explored Northern magic graveyard work, which evolved into my current ancestor practice.  So I’ve never come across anyone who articulated it as their main spiritual / magical path.  And then there’s the ‘Accelerated’; I’ve only come across this term (in the context of Accelerationist thinking) in largely negative contexts - Nick Land and other hyper-capitalists who want to ignore the environmental costs of unrestrained business growth. (Admittedly, Land had some neat ideas - the neologism ‘hyperstition’, which is a genuinely useful magica...

In the mid-to-late1970s English Thelemic magician Jim Lees, together with the group he’d gathered around him, started having interesting synchronicities around Crowley’s Liber Al . Particularly the verses that seemed to foretell the discovery of a Qabalah which used the English alphabet. I learned of this work via Ray Sherwin, who was sufficiently impressed with their discoveries to hand over to them the running of his Thelemic magazine The New Equinox. (I never really understood why this transaction happened, because Lees’ group immediately changed the mag’s name to British Journal of Magick. But I guess just having the ‘Equinox’ brand was important.)  They used that imprint to publish their numerological findings, and I tried out their ‘English Qabalah’ on my own magical word-hoard. For anyone who has never developed a fascination with gematria, let me say that it’s astonishingly moreish, once you get the taste for it - the patterns that emerge have a quality of instant gratific...

I missed this book when it first came out. As soon as I heard of it, the title grabbed me; I would have loved such a book when I was 19 and living in an anarchist commune house in Sheffield! At that time I was trying to find my way through the apparent powerlessness of anarchists and leftists to drive positive changes, stumbling towards some sort of esoteric approach via Situationism.  Most of the book is a rundown of symbolism and language in anarchism, showing the debts anarchism has to esoteric literature. And not only anarchism, check this contents listing: Lagalisse asks the big question in this slim volume: How can our resistance to oppression become more effective? And for me the most interesting subsidiary question she addresses is: Can dualistic materialists work alongside people whose activism is founded in religious faith or magical perspectives? Right at the start there’s an account of a conversation which opens up that question. At a meeting with Zapatistas in 2006, o...

This is perhaps the most personal of all the books I’ve read about psychedelics in the last fifty years. And it’s almost certainly the most extreme.  These qualities are not unrelated - Williams is coming from a heart deeply broken by the horrors of history, a feeling that will be all too familiar to most of us: ‘The wounds of history, of genocide, colonization, ecological devastation, and violence don’t heal on their own. Actions and intentions are needed to make that happen. … I ask for help.’ - and, similarly familiar, a terrible disappointment with the defeat of progressive forces in society:  ‘Occupy was a brief moment in time when we could collectively set aside what divided us in favour of a utopian spirit that permeated our spaces. Then Occupy was defeated. The new reality was impossible student loans; call-out culture; Abilify and Adderall; trigger warnings; PTSD; GoFundMes; safe spaces; paying rent in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York; Tinder; and MFA or Die. I...

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....