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CHAOTOPIA Newsletter
December 2019

BLOGS, WRITINGS, MINI-REVIEWS

Above - that was me talking at Occulture Berlin. And below is what I was talking about. Some time over the winter, Occulture will be putting up recordings of the talks on YouTube.

On my blog, a review of Would You Know Yet More? The Runa Interviews with Edred Thorsson

The Runa-Eormensyl blog has its Fore-Yule Moon issue with a guest editor - artist Dawid Rudzinski, who issues a Call to Arms against the spiritual deadness and toxicity of this culture.

My blog also has a review of John Higgs's Welcome to the Future: Adventures in the 21st Century.

Lots of Higgs action this issue: Mr H has brought out another book, William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever. This is a great little (79 small pages) book, packing some immensely significant ideas into such a slender volume. Blake is a spiritual teacher who inspired me as soon as I read his lines, and one of the few I've never been able to find serious fault with. Higgs picks up on his concept of imagination as something with which you actually participate with the world, participate with the process of creation.
He also shows how broad Blake's appeal is, how he crosses so many barriers within our society. I was reminded of a stirring moment at Festival 23 in 2016, on the final night, when two of the artists there had set fire to a cross constructed of bookshelves filled with self-help books. It was a sort of general purpose gnostic moment, everyone getting high on this chaotic artistic statement, when it suddenly became something else. A woman a few people away from me started singing ''Jerusalem', and it was taken up like an ecstatic flame rippling through the crowd. It felt so good to belt out these words to that rousing tune, a song so long thought of as the preserve of racist thugs. Instead, this was a bunch of people who were very far from that end of the political spectrum, singing our hearts out about how we love England. I doubt mine were the only eyes that teared up.

My friend John Short aka Hubert Tsarko's poetry keeps getting better. Two love poems, carefully nuanced with an edge of whimsy, grace the Winter 2019 issue of Rat's Ass Review.

Nigel Pennick is a very productive author, and a fine artist too. See below for his ceramic plaque Solar Bindrune, and you can check out some of his books here.

PSYCHEDELIA and MAGICK

I shall continue to plug Psychedelic Press Journal from time to time, because every issue is a good one. PPJ #28 (cover above) has a nicely groundbreaking article about a connection I'd never really come across between the worlds of occultism and psychoactive drugs. Jake Winchester's Solanaceous Fumigations in 19th Century London tells us that those hallucinatory spirit visions of 19th century magic owe more than a little to the burning of solanum-family plants. These contain tropanes such as scopolamine, and are responsible for actual hallucinations. We are not talking about the visionary overlays more typical of psychedelics but full-on perceptions of stuff that isn't usually there. This of course is perfect if you want to conjure spirits to visible appearance, but extremely risky because your will is acutely confused and your body chronically weakened; it seems that some of the people using these suffumigations suffered in both physical and mental health.
Two lots of memories of the Albion Fayres are included, by Marilyn Langley and John Power, both of whom were deep inside the organization of these events. And for sheer weirdness, I can recommend Will Rowlandson's review/ sequel to Erik Davis’s High Weirdness.

From the same publishers, a brilliant article on the Celtic Otherworld and psychoactives. Fans of The Secret Commonwealth must read this.

From the Discordian end of the psychedelic scene, check out Evohuasca and Discordianism: Sticking together and sticking apart, Cate Kneale's witty lampoon of an academic talking about a psychedelic cult (9 minutes).

Looking on to February at Treadwells, Julian Vayne 'devotes a day to sharing ideas and practices on how to attune to spirits of place and to atmospheres of locales both in the wild and in the city. The workshop will unpack the inner and outer techniques one can use to move one's consciousness beyond the mundane so as to connect with the living realities which inhabit our world, unseen, uncanny and sacred.'

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE TODAY

Kasina is the really hardcore end of meditation. You stare at a candle flame or its after-image until you A) gain extraordinary magical powers and/or B) go crazy. It's beyond extreme sports, more like the Fight Club of the esoteric world. Read an account of how one man kind of fell to pieces and then realised a new level of contact with his HGA.

MUSIC AND VIDEOS

If you want a quick exposition of morphic fields by the originator of the idea – Rupert Shedlrake - try this

MORE MUSIC AND TV

The richness of old paintings: someone who looked closely at Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights saw the above musical score written out on someone's bottom.
And realised it as a delightful piece of music.

Finally had a chance to watch the recent BBC TV serialization of H G Wells’s War of the Worlds.
I first read this in comic book version when I was about 11. The adaptations I’ve seen since didn’t really generate the frisson of terror the original story did, but this version did. The way these beings just turn up while England is doing business as usual in the early 1900s and bring about the end of a whole way of life is done brilliantly, condensed into the iconic image of one of the Martian death-machines rearing over a village church.

After the horror of the invasion the timeline fragments into the memories of one of the characters, who has lived through the aftermath of the occupation. There will be more spoilers below, but I imagine you’ve already guessed that it gets pretty grim.

I wondered at the prevailing grimness; dystopias and their close relatives, occupied-zone stories, are usually allegorical, reflecting some facet of our current world. This grimness is telling us something.

So what is the allegory?
In the action, we see beings with great military power taking a whole world, their rapacity destroying in moments a way of life built up over years. Ah, that’s easy – that’s what the far-right governments currently running the West are doing; the Martians = neoliberal capitalism. I don’t want to labour the allegory, but even the theme of refugees – English refugees struggling to get on boats! – is woven unto the story.

What lesson can we take away from this?
What wins the day is the discovery of a weapon that exists in the lowest places, in dirt and sickness. Maybe we too can discover in the depths a family of (word)viruses that will break and shatter the neoliberal invasion.

The above sigil is part of a first round of enchantments to make driven grouse shooting illegal in the UK. The advantages of such a ban are many; these are a few:

- End the deliberate mismanagement of moorland ecosystems, where trees are not allowed to grow, in order to keep these 'glorified chicken runs' going.
- One thing this means is that that water that would in a healthy ecosystem be sequestered in moorland biomass ends up flooding our cities, so a ban would protect against flooding.
- Another is that we are losing a carbon sink.
- Current legislation protects endangered bird species such as hen harriers, but gamekeepers routinely kill them illegally, to protect their posh chickens. If the whole industry was illegal, then that would be one less reason to kill these beautiful birds.
- British people tend to get quite uppity about animal cruelty; this is not a noble sport, but a massacre of birds bred to be dim enough for these people to hunt.
Another result of such a ban would be to annoy super-privileged people. Somehow, I can't bring myself to feel at all bad about pissing off some Chinless Charlies.

The only relevant argument against such a ban is that we are told it would put people out of jobs. This is a very poor argument, because in fact eco-tourism of similar environments has been shown to generate far more jobs than this weird enclave does. And in fact much of the money that goes into preserving these absurd enclaves of privilege is from subsidies - in other words, the taxpayer is subsidizing this destructive industry.

We are just starting on this. The industry has many weak points which can be attacked - all the things mentioned above and others. If you're interested, then look into it and start your own magical projects.

Reports may be forthcoming as things get under way.