October Chaotopia Newsletter

CHAOTOPIA Newsletter
October 2021

Welcome to the October Chaotopia newsletter. Thanks to all of you who've subscribed recently, and to all of you who read this. This one's taken a little longer to get out, partly because of being busy with amazing magical events and partly because we had covid. We're both double-vaccinated, so it was a very mild version, a bit like a bad cold for a week.

One of the amazing events was Blame Blake, which was like a one-day micro-festival, a Tiny Festival 23. It was a day of poetry, drama, music, drawing and magic. I did my first ever performance poem, We Are All In Chapel Perilous, in Priest of Chaos hat and vitki trousers, see below.

It was one of those events where you get the impression that it was for many of the people there a nexus, a locale in eternity or in gnostic time, orthogonal time, which we'll revisit again and again in memory.

John Higgs is the man who triggered this event, with his book William Blake vs The World, which I reviewed here.

All my main links including signups and archive of this newsletter:

The website is published, and is still being developed in places. This page is finished, check out the pictures, incense, YouTube and so on!

EVENTS

Together with Magic, Witchcraft Chaos and Beyond's Anwen Fryer, I'm doing an online 4-hour workshop version of Introduction to Rune-Magic. We've run this before, and it's been very well received. You can book from the link below, which also has tickets for Anwen's Crystal Magic workshop.

I'm doing an online mini-course on Viktor Wynd's Last Tuesday Society: Introduction to Chaos Magic.
We need Chaos Magick more than ever since the explosion of magickal thinking that has followed the lockdowns. People are getting into magical thinking without a critical perspective, resulting in the current rash of deranged conspiracy drivel. Chaos Magick provides multiple perspectives, a beacon of magickal sanity in a world gone mad.

My first-stage Qabalistic pathworking course Journey to Tiphareth is now available on Chaotopia School of Magic. Only £25 for 25 videos and 7 pdf handouts! This course is based on the live version I ran for MWCB last year. The second stage course - The Magickal Triangle - will be on my Chaotopia School later this year.

BLOGS and SUCHLIKE
The IOT British Isles blog has this by Soror Brigantia:

Gyrus on North!: The Rise and Fall fo the Polar Cosmos - an interview.

I've always been fascinated by the magical topic of Aeonics, the idea that there are cycles in our large-scale affairs that have a cosmic patterning to them. Crowley showed how we are emerging from the Aeon of Osiris into the Aeon of Horus. Pete Carroll added another, rather postmodern PanDaemonAeon.

There's a strong political element to Aeonics. Myths about where we came from before written history are used to underpin ideologies, to justify oppressive societies.

Gyrus's book North is dense with scholarship, a journey of the author's in studying a cosmology he thought was founded in genuine history, only to find it dissolve into thin air as soon as you get away from Western culture. The resultant text is a resource for deconstructing the aeonic myths that insist that our historical origins are always and unavoidably hierarchical.

23 AND A BIT

Was William Blake a Discordian?’ asks Ben Graham. Brilliant question, because what are the words to Jerusalem about if not immanentizing the eschaton, bringing heaven to earth and making a much better world? You can sign up for Ben's newsletter here.

Our local magical art shop and community resource Airy Fairy was burgled, the amount lost being just too low to claim on the insurance. So there's a crowdfunder here to help out. Be generous - Anwen gives a lot to our scene!

Jimmy Cauty's mindblowing ESTATE, easily the art installation of the year, is now in Middlesborough. Great joy for you folks!

PSYCHEDELIA

James Penner's second piece on Rosemary Woodruff Leary for @Chacruna_Inst .

Thought this had to go into this section: A memoir I only recently heard of, by Rose Simpson of the Incredible String Band. I'm putting it here partly because the String Band were one of my two fave bands for steering my mind through acid trips in my youth (the other being the Grateful Dead).
This is an excellent piece of prose, beautifully written, way above most other rock-and-dope memoirs, told from the viewpoint of a woman who has thought through the business of 60s sexist assumptions. Astonishing fact of the day - Rose Simpson was once Lady Mayoress of Aberystwyth.

I haven't looked at a trip manual for years. This came into my orbit so I read it.
I think in general this type of thing is getting better. There's a lot of sensible advice in here, without it being too wimpy. You might not agree with everything they write - I'm not sure about the importance of avoiding meat and fish before a trip - but in general this is a balanced text, and open to further development.

TINFOIL HAT WATCH

In the park near my home we've been seeing anti-vax and 'plandemic' type stickers. I saw a guy, maybe 20 years old, looking like a sporty type, covering the children's playground gate with them, so I challenged the anti-vax thing. He rapidly went ballistic, waving his arms, yelling and freaking out, so I left him to it. The stickers didn't last long - when I went back they'd all been torn off or scribbled over. A nice healthy discourse around that idiocy in this part of town.
I noted that the provider of these images is an org called White Rose. They took this name from a 1940s anti-Nazi group, so they're doing the Poison Nice Guy move.

The piece linked to below is the best theoretical approach to understanding the conspiracy pandemic I've yet seen. Snowden talks about the REAL conspiracies, exactly the kind of things that conspiracists don't like to talk about because they're too real. They'd rather talk about the imaginary gryphon in the room than fifteen very real elephants.

James Hind is an investigator of the so-called 'Satan Hunter' cultists who kidnap children. A number of these QAnon-influenced psychos are currently going through the UK legal system and some are getting locked away for years, which is good news for the rest of humanity. Some of you might recognise the name of the particular abusive creep Hind focuses on in this issue of his blog.

This is suitably weird, and I learned about from Erik Davis on Twitter. Roger's Bacon informs us in a data-driven piece of Cults in Decline - yes, they've actually been on the wane since a peak in the 1970s.

CULTURE

'With both agriculture and monumental construction much older than what was thought before, we should likely rethink the origins of urban life as well. How old might settlements of hundreds or thousands of people be? How frequently did such civilizations arise, only to fall and be forgotten? I strongly suspect they might be not thousands, but tens of thousands of years older than we believed previously.'

Usually, old films about the future social impact of computers got it so badly wrong. This one... well, check it out!

@incunabula shows us how 'European civilization is built on ham and cheese, which allowed protein to be stored throughout the icy winters. Without this, urban societies in most of central Europe would simply not have been possible. This is also why we have hardback books. Here's why.'
Fascinating Twitter stream.

VIDEOS, ART

CJ Stone celebrates on his blog the darkly brilliant, terribly entertaining 1972 film The Ruling Class. Read it, follow the link, watch the film. You'll probably feel like you need a shower after being that close to the nobility.

A very strange and atmospheric short (13min) film, The Cunning Man, about death, magic and resurrection.

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