chaotopia

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...

A book about the magical life done by IOT members . Also contains my History of Chaos Magic as an intro. Go here  and buy one, for the astonishing price of £8. Or an e-version for almost nothing.

https://psychedelicpress.co.uk/products/acid-drops-by-andy-roberts I opened this book to a promising start - a Chaos Sigil, wound with ergotized cereal stalks... This is a clue to what is to follow. The narrative plunges rapidly into Andy's first acid trip - a quite spectacularly 'bad' one. This is another clue - to Roberts's honesty. He is not trying to paint a pastel-rosy illusion of psychedelia but is interested in the whole thing, warts and all. Later in the book, he debunks a few popular misconceptions which have become 'acid myths' - such as Francis Crick being on LSD when he conceived the structure of DNA, the idea that anyone seriously considered putting acid in water supplies and the peculiar role of the chemical hydrazine hydrate in the Operation Julie acid raids. Early in the text we have a well-informed overview of the illegalization of psychedelics, complete with a confession from a major War on Some Drugs player that the information distr...

This blog started off as a review of Tyr issue 4, and that review arose out of discussions about the (unfortunate) appearance of White Nationalism in Germanic esotericist writings. So the post expanded into an argument that White Nationalism is by no means typical of the Northern mysteries. Tyr: Myth, Culture, Tradition. Issue 4.  Edited by Joshua Buckley and Michael Moynihan Volume 4, 2014, ISSN 1538-9413, ISBN-13: 978-0-9720292-4-7, 6" x 9" perfectbound, illustrated, 430 pages. Tyr is an extraordinary publication, unlike any other. On the back cover of each edition the journal's mission is outlined: 'TYR celebrates the traditional myths, culture and social institutions of pre-Christian, pre-Modern Europe. It includes in-depth original articles, interviews, translations of essential works by radical traditionalist thinks, as well as extensive reviews of books, films, music, and the arts.' An answer is given to the question 'What does it mean to be a ...

Wilhelm Reich - Biologist, by James E. Strick, Harvard University Press, 2015. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wilhelm-Reich-Biologist-James-Strick/dp/0674736095 I came of sexual age in the 1960s, when the so-called Sexual Revolution was already well underway. Widespread, reliable contraception had finally detached the sex act from the raw biology of reproduction. Young people were becoming much freer with their explorations of sex; long before I ever had sex with anyone else, I, in common with nearly all my contemporaries, embraced the zeitgeist - the idea of sexual freedom - in a spirit of hopeful anticipation. A few years later, reading Wilhelm Reich, my friends and I were digging back into the foundations of the Sexual Revolution, a phrase coined by Reich, a movement he hoped would arise and dissolve the bonds of locked-in sexual-emotional energy and lead to a better world. Reich was the erratic visionary who had looked forward to an era we were now living in. He wrote in Function of ...