chaotopia

EPOCH - Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, by Peter J. Carroll and Matt Kaybrin, pub. Arcanorium College.  http://www.esotericon.org/ This book has taken me some months to review. Partly because of its sheer size and scale, but also because it represents in some ways a summation of Peter Carroll's total contribution to magical practice and history. So it really made me think about what was important and what wasn't about this man's extraordinary work. I've known Pete Carroll since 1979, from meetings in the Sorcerer's Apprentice coffee mornings in Leeds. I was one of the founder members of the first IOT group in West Yorkshire, begun in 1980 and centred on the village of East Morton, where Ray Sherwin had a house, and where Pete Carroll lived for a while. So we go back a long way, and his work, particularly Liber Null , has often inspired me. Not only that, but nothing has yet come along to replace Chaos Magic as the forefront magical current; its history is the h...

Like most bibliophiles, I have a massive pile of books to read, some of which richly deserve  reviewing. I might just be catching up... This review seemed historically appropriate, since the 70th anniversary of the first ever LSD trip happened just the other day. Albion Dreaming: A popular history of LSD in Britain, by Andy Roberts http://www.amazon.co.uk/Albion-Dreaming-popular-history-Britain/dp/1905736274 I met Andy Roberts at the Breaking Convention conference in 2011, where I was delivering a talk on psychedelics in magic. He thrust this book into my hands, and I'm glad he did. A number of worthwhile books have been written about the US experience of LSD; Roberts's goal for the book is to give a British perspective on the rise of acid. From the blurb: ''Albion Dreaming' traces the drug's complex history from its arrival in Britain during 1952 through its use in psychotherapy, the secret military experiments at Porton Down and the British hippie mov...

IMAGINAL REALITY (Volume One: Journey to the Voids. Volume Two: Voidcraft) by Aaron B. Daniels, Ph.D. with Laura M. Daniels, M.Ac. http://www.amazon.com/Imaginal-Reality-1-Journey-Voids/dp/1904658490 I have taken my time to review this book because it has given me so much to think about. Jaded habitué of the magical scene that I am, I am seldom impressed by anything I read these days, but this did it. There are three main ideas that stand out for me: The Eight Voids that surround our experience of selfhood; the centrality of the structure of moment to moment experience - the 'structure of the now'; and the idea that magic is something much more universal than magicians normally give it credit for. The declared philosophical attitude of the book is described as existentialist, nihilist and mystical. This sounds like a funny mixture, but it works very well in discussing the limits of what we actually know. The starting point of what we know is what the author refers to as the ...

The Book of Baphomet by Nikki Wyrd and Julian Vayne http://mandrake.uk.net/book-of-baphomet-2/ If you've heard this particular god-name, then you've very likely asked: What is Baphomet? Which of the many answers to that question you find the most appealing may depend on whether you identify as a Thelemite, a Satanist, a Chaos Magician. Or even a Templar.  This book seems to have set out to cover all those bases, and a few you're unlikely to have thought of. And it does a very good job indeed. The Book of Baphomet erupts with ideas and this review would become much too long if I mentioned a third of them, but the biggest theme is perhaps: Considerations of human life on the biggest scale and the smallest. The big questions: Nature. Wilderness. Responsibility. The nature of our identification with affinity groups and the question of what community means, within our species and including others. Rich ideas of blending 'nature' with human technology such as control sys...

 We arrive at about 10.30, get a drink and stand in the street with about twelve other people. Suddenly there are 100 people here, standing alongside the road, cars passing every few seconds. The many dogs start a chain reaction of barking. There's a tangible buildup of excitement. I'm wondering how the road is going to be blocked, because it's clearly going to take place right in the road, when we all step forward into the road and take command of it. Wow. This display of people power is in response to a team of 8 men in white trousers and very fine brocade jackets marching down the road and into the centre of what is a now a circle. A fiddle starts up, and straightwaway a basset hound standing at the front of the crowd joins in with some howls. The crowd roars with laughter. The next team is a women's dance troupe called Lizzie Dripping, announced as 'from Sheffield'. This underlines the fact that we are indeed not in Sheffield, but in Grenosi...

Reality, by Peter Kingsley www.peterkingsley.org/Reality.html A book the size of a housebrick-and-a-half, called 'Reality: now there's an author who's not lacking in confidence. In a nutshell? A 550 page commentary on two pre-Socratic 'philosophers', Parmenides and Empedocles, rooted in a passionate critique of the origins of so much of our culture and its limitations; origins that Kingsley claim lay in a hatchet-job done by Plato on the pre-Socratic mystical traditions. This book was a roller coaster ride for me. Right from the start, it got on my tits, with its attitude of 'your life is a pile of shit because you are not enlightened', the same superior cosmic style that I reacted to so negatively when I first encountered mysticism in my teens. ...Even though I find the idea of a radical deconstruction – no, scratch that, a radical rejection – of normal reality absolutely irresistible. In the language of this book, I still linger at the three-ways...