chaotopia

It's evening, and very warm at Budapest airport. We get on the minibus shuttle - it's for Ozora Artists. Here's I'm an artist - I'm going to speak on 'Psychedelics and Magical Energy' at this gigantic psytrance festival. I have to admit my previous exposure to psytrance - two parties in the late 1990s/early noughties -was not encouraging. Naively, I was expecting 'psytrance' to mean 'psychedelic trance', but no-one was interested in psychedelics at all, only in pills and coke and squabbling over nitrous oxide hits. So I hesitated when I was invited to speak at Ozora, but not for long, because it did sound like something better than that. And it was. I meditate on the long, winding drive, and it's exceptional. I'm in a bliss of trusting to a guidance that took me through each moment of experience, a silent knowing that was there in some of my teenage acid experiences but which I'd mostly lost since. I feel as though I've co...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/THUG-Two-Tales-Po%C3%A9sie-Noire/dp/1733597964/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Jonathan+Jones&qid=1563987582&s=gateway&sr=8-4 I was ready when the parcel fell through the door. It came with a bullet-hole in the wrapper. I opened it. The hole was on the front cover, just below and to the right of the head of a shadow. The shadow that mostly fills the rain-glossed pavement of the darkened street. Stalking prey in the urban night, the shadow looks down... The background is the bleak existentialism of New York cop noir, with its jazz, its hard liquor and harder drugs, its seedy clubs where the opportunity for deadly violence is ever-present. So elegantly. With so much fucking style. The car, radio Night voices and soft bebop, A blood requiem And this world is invaded by an ancient goddess and her cult of sacred murder. Skin, luminous dark, Axe like nothing of this world, Those still, ancient eyes. Like nothing I'd seen, Exotic beyond foreign, ...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Rune-Gild-Reawakening-Gild-1980-2018/dp/0999724541 A version of this book was first published in 2007 but this volume is really quite a new thing. A lot has happened since then. This volume is still principally a history of Edred Thorsson's own re-creation and involvement with the Gild, as should be the case, but it also honours those who have contributed to the Rune-Gild in the last few decades, including myself, by way of declaring an interest. This is 'volume 3 of a much larger project', which will start with a history of the Rune-Gild in ancient times and continue via the Rune-Masters of the late mediaeval and early modern period. Also, as evidenced by the substantial changes in this over the 2007 edition, it is not a final version but an 'ongoing chronicle'. Few esoteric organizations have as much interest in chronicling their own history. I am one of nature's archivists, so I like this. I think it's important ...

The Private Unmentionable Gargoyle and Other Stories by Hubert Tsarko (Publish & Print. Pontypridd, Dave Lewis 2018) https://amzn.to/2CxQVbU This is Hubert Tsarko's first collection of short stories, consisting of tales from the early 1980s and later set in rural France, Greece and Spain. The first story sets the scene. It's told in first person, with the author leaving his bedsit in Leeds for France in 1980, somewhat down with his life and wanting something new. He is already commenting about how travelling changed him when - 'with so much exposure to the real world my personality was changing and I was now less inclined to do what people told me.' Hubert, aka John and I go back to the Leeds magical scene in the late 1970s, and I travelled with him for just one summer, in 1982. He is better known as a poet, but he has also been writing short stories for as long as I've known him. He writes engagingly of that first homesickness, that lonely, uncomfortab...

Last November at Occulture Berlin I gave a talk, the video of it is here . The sound is a bit quiet and there are no pictures after a bit, so here is the text. Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia! Some of you will have come across that call and response. What's it about? Where and when did all that stuff start? What has it got to do with magic, or the present state of the world? And what has it got to do with our intimations of immortality? These questions are what this talk is about. Imagine, for a moment, it's around 1960, and some artists who are perhaps beginning to realise themselves as magicians start a prank. The prank results in millions of people waking up to the malleable nature of consensus reality, how it is shaped by desire and news and illusions. These people start using this insight to feed into their own practices, of magic and other things that aren't called magic but have a lot in common. These people grow a subculture of magic that you can get behind ...

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!