chaotopia

‘The book contains correspondence between myself and the Elder Murat Yagan. The Elder Murat Yagan was one of the last remaining custodians of the traditional culture and practices of the Abkhazian people. These previously restricted practices are better known in the West as "The Yoga of the Caucuses". The book also describes the experiences of a small London based community that were committed to the work of G I Gurdjieff and J G Bennett. There is additional material on the art of dreaming, healing practices and the activation of the Nests (energy centres) that improve health and develop reserve human abilities. The cover photo was taken in the earlier part of the last century. The image presented was the theme and topic of one of my final letters to the Elder Murat Yagan. That letter is included in this book.’ As you my readers may have noticed, I don’t generally write bad reviews. This is because I don’t review things if I don’t think they’ve any value, though I occasionall...

  If you’re interested in the history of psychedelics you’ll probably have read Lee and Shlain’s Acid Dreams and Stevens’ Storming Heaven for the American experience, and Andy Roberts’ Albion Dreaming and Acid Drops for the UK history, but I bet you’ve not read much about acid in South America. Or China, or Pakistan, or Israel.  In this collection we get a massive broadening of history.  I heard about the book via UK's excellent acid historian Andy Roberts, who told me my name was in it, in an article about acid and anarchism in the 1970s. This was something I wrote in 2015 for a local history website about the Broomhall area of Sheffield, where I lived in the early 1970s. For six months I was a member of a commune, in a 3-bedroom terraced house, with people who were active in the UK anarchist scene. Many of whom were keen on LSD, which we had a plentiful supply of.  So I had to buy the book. It was a very odd feeling to re-read quotes from my article in which ou...

This novel starts out with the protagonist having a very hard time. He is skint and mentally ill. He gets a new psychiatrist who is involved in radical experimentation with psychedelic medicines. Some of which will be familiar, and others not. The story engages with one of the biggest issues in psychedelic healing, or any kind of mental therapy - to what society are we returning these ‘healed’ people, and how much of their distress was down to what is happening in the world, the shitstorm of the Neoliberal Empire? And further, might a 'healee' actually be a person who has something other people do not? Might the healing be ‘just’ a side-effect, not the most important part of the transformation? If healing is the icing on the cake, what is the cake?  Another issue in the tale is the old dream, simply articulated in the lines of Country Joe and the Fish’s classic track ‘Bass Strings’, that if we only took enough acid often enough, we’d never come down. It did seem like this was r...

This is one of my ‘more a plug than a review’ pieces. Jakub is a friend, and he has created a ground-breaking website for magic, aimed at people with aphantasia If you pick up a book on magic that’s got self-training exercises or almost any magic spell in it, you’ll almost certainly be invited to visualise. I never thought twice about this bias in the literature until I met people who can’t. This is a spectrum thing - some people can visualise if they try hard, some just cannot. And there are those who are hyperphantasic, who get rich imagery when others get little or none, like continuously when listening to music.  So someone who is aphantasic and yet passionately wants to study and practise magic has to make their own path forward, which is what Jakub has done. His work also covers dynamic meditation, for those who find static postures difficult for health reasons. The Rune-Flow website consists of 3 sections. In Jakub’s own words:  In the Daily Life section, you will find...

This graphic is from my Exploring Meditation groups (and would also have been projected at Occulture Retreat 2024 but for computer problems).  

Storl’s memoir is of a highly resourceful wanderer, and covers the period usually referred to as ‘the 60s’... Storl’s memoir gives some childhood background but mainly covers the years from the mid-1960s to 1970s, the period usually referred to as ‘the 60s’. It’s the tale of a highly resourceful wanderer. He’s a man who is good at surviving with no money, has great social skills and loves the natural world to the extent he’d rather sleep in a tree than in a student dormitory.    Storl’s love of the living world is one of his main themes. He takes the cutting down of trees personally, and as a paper boy he shoots out streetlights with an airgun because of the insects dying on them. His account of the horror of having to kill and dissect frogs reminds me of my own days as a biology student, cutting the tongues out of limpets to look at a distribution on a beach, partaking in the destruction of life just to learn a minor survey technique.    His love of the world goes e...

This is not a review but a plug, because I have two poems in this volume. The book is in two sections - ‘The Older Rune Poems’ and ‘The Reawakened Tradition’. Most of our knowledge of the meanings of the runes comes from the mediaeval rune-poems, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and Norwegian. The first section has original language versions and new translations of all of those, of the very brief Abecedarium Nordmannicum and of a previously little-known Early Modern Swedish rune poem.  This section starts with an essay by P. D. Brown, in which he presents the rune-poem tradition from the viewpoint of a poet. He tells us that the poems were tools “to make the mind more generally agile, more adept at making connections, thinking ‘laterally’ and more imaginatively” about what the runes in are. The old rune-poems themselves are given with learned notes about the language and meanings.  The second part contains an introduction by P. D. Brown. He writes: ‘A rune poem mingles and blends the fr...