Chaotopia in the Spring

CHAOTOPIA Newsletter
Spring 2022

Welcome to Chaotopia, and a thoroughly inspiring and sensually-delicious Beltane to you all!

Thanks to you new subscribers, and to all of you who read this.

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

The first two of the following events are starting very soon - the 9th and the 4th of May respectively.

The final course in my series Qabalistic Pathworkings, The Supernals will launch on Monday 9/5/22 - 27/6/22, at 19.00 BST and run for 8 sessions. The first one will be 1.5 hours, the rest 1 hour.
Plus Discord forum, and access to course videos throughout the course.
£65, with concessions - please enquire.

To enrol for this live course, you need to have attended the first two parts - Journey to Tiphareth and The Magickal Triangle, in their live MWCB versions, OR if you missed those, you can now enrol for both courses at my Chaotopia School of Magic, combined as Qabalistic Pathworkings Parts 1 & 2.

If you've done Part 1, Journey to Tiphareth, but not Part 2, The Magickal Triangle, you can enrol separately for the latter.
If you're out of pocket because of the offers involved, please email me and I'll compensate you.

with VIKTOR WYND

New two-course Introduction to Chaos Magic: Part 1, Spells and Sigils.
We need Chaos Magick more than ever since the explosion of magickal thinking that has followed the lockdowns. People are getting into magick without a critical perspective, resulting in the current rash of deranged theories about what is happening. Chaos Magick provides multiple perspectives, a beacon of magickal sanity in a world gone mad.

Join this course and learn about belief as a technique, about the use of extraordinary states of consciousness (gnosis) and discuss theories old and new as to what makes magic work.

But mainly come along to make spells using powerful sigils, in this two-part workshop with me. We’ll talk about what we need to do a spell then explore a variety of approaches to making sigils - including graphic mashups, mantras and the idea of the artwork as hypersigil.

This mini-course consists of two two-hour sessions, 4th & 11th May, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm. £50

Part 2: Servitors and Spirits will run in October 2022, but if you want to be sure of enrolling for both Chaos Magic courses, you can book now.
In this second introductory Chaos Magick course we’ll be working with spirits. We’ll be starting by assembling helper spirits tailored to your own requirements - what chaos magicians call servitors. Then we’ll explore spirits that exist ‘out there’ in the collective mind, which we can invoke, or ‘call into ourselves’. This includes Gods and Goddesses, ‘culture heroes’ and even characters from fiction and popular culture whose powers are useful to us. Join me in choosing a deity or character which we’ll then invoke!

We’ll take a peek at the theory behind such magic and we’ll continue exploring simple but powerful techniques for entering appropriate extraordinary states of consciousness.

This mini-course consists of two two-hour sessions.

OCT 05TH 2022 - OCTOBER 12, 2022
Oct 5th 2022 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Oct 12th 2022 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
£50

Introduction to Energy Magic part 1 will run in November 2022 but tickets are now on sale.
Do you know how to project healing energy from your hands? Over the years of my coaching Connected Breathwork my clients and I had numerous experiences of sensed energy, and I developed techniques for raising and directing that energy.

You can raise and entrain sensed energy, also known as chi, prana and athm, for healing and for other magical operations. In this course we’ll practice breath patterns for raising energy and techniques for deploying it outside your body, such as energy portals, and the group energy patterns known as Chaotrons.

This course will be followed next year by Part 2, which will consist of explorations of internal sensed energy practices and energy alchemy.

NOV 09TH 2022 - NOVEMBER 16, 2022
Nov 9th 2022 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Nov 16th 2022 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
£50

PUBLICATIONS, INTERVIEWS, BLOGS

A plug for this book, which includes two of my poems, on my blog.

The very interesting Phil Farber in conversation with Discordia's Diamond Jim.

This film was initially rejected by the KLF then they changed their minds. Haven't seen it yet, but it looks like a fun film

PSYCHEDELIA

The psychedelic scene's very own philosopher Peter Sjostedt-Hughes is interviewed about psychedelics and metaphysics, pointing out that: "If psychedelics are used for therapy, and if such #psychedelic therapy involves metaphysical perceptions, it would be odd if metaphysics were not used to analyse those experiences."

Some more from Peter Sjostedt-Hughes, this time with the redoubtable Rupert Sheldrake, talking about how everything is sentient.

Fascinating bit of religious-cultural history, well worth a read.

If you've ever done a magickal training scheme, such as the exercises in Crowley's Magick or the IOT's Liber MMM, you will have noticed how much visualization there is in it. In recent years I've met a small number of people who just cannot visualize. This isn't a case of 'Oh I find it difficult to do the more complicated visualisations' but not being able to create pictures in the mind's eye at all. Some people I know, including some students of mine, are in that situation, and are developing strategies and workarounds for dealing with it. I hope that this awareness will penetrate our magickal literary culture so that we can include other kinds of exercises in our magickal training texts.

This is a sequence of 18 tweets by @SmaragdinaVisio. Not many Twitter users have mastered the art of expressing profound ideas in the medium, and this is one of a tiny number I've seen. Do read it - it is a quite extraordinary piece, with some nice illustrations too. He starts:

'What I have learned about the spiritual path. It proceeds in spirals or twists and turns. You make progress by falling through a door backwards. It’s never, ever predictable, or what you expect or want. You control nothing, because you are nothing; it’s just not about us at all.'

He is coming at the magickal/ spiritual path from a direction not a million degrees from that of Peter Kingsley, author of a number of interesting books, the latest of which is:

The contents are not what you might expect from the gorgeous, uplifting cover design. Kingsley has some very interesting and important things to say about how Western culture has its own built-in lineage of spiritual attainment, which has been not only neglected but actually crippled from very near its inception, but his delivery has always struck me as dismissive of everyone else's inner work except a couple of Sufis and some American First Nation wise people. This book is no exception, and I found his constant self-inflation a bit tedious, though eventually worth getting through. I mention this book because that Tweet sequence above says much the same thing as Kingsley's book but with more grace, lightness of touch and respect for other practitioners.

Do find time to visit the British Museum's World of Stonehenge exhibition. It's possibly the best exhibition I've been to there, and was better than I expected, having found the Vikings exhibition of a few yeas ago rather disappointing. As the title hints this is not just about Stonehenge archaeology (of which there won't be much left if that stoopid road tunnel happens) but a contextualisation of Stonehenge in the ebbs and flows of Neolithic Europe - the settling of the 'Beaker People' with their entoptically-patterned pots in the British Isles, the introduction of metalwork and the shifts in culture that eventually left Stonehenge derelict.

One of the items that really spoke to me was a stone battle-axe that had been buried with a high-status man in the Kyffhäuser. The axe was already 2,500 years old when it was buried. The sheer timescale of memory here is staggering - what could it have been like to have such a deep connection to the past?

Furthest thing ever seen (and apparently over twice as old as the universe)

'A galaxy called HD1 may be the most distant object astronomers have ever spotted ... HD1 is about 33.4 billion light years away, more than a billion light years further than the previous most distant object ever spotted, a galaxy called GN-z11. Such a distance is possible, despite the age of the universe being only about 13.8 billion years, because of the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.'

Looks like the Standard Model is in more trouble then we thought...

Occasionally I include this section, when something really important is happening in my home town. This is a campaign to save a music venue unique in the North, Sheffield's Leadmill. I saw the divine Arthur Lee there, amongst other nights out, and it doesn't get any better than that. And some soulless bean counters are trying to close it down.

VIDEOS, MUSIC, ART

There can’t really be too many artworks interpreting Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, because it’s unreadable in any linear sense - but nonetheless worthwhile as I realised when I listed to a recording of passages from it it an an interesting state of consciousness many years ago. This film, extracts bits of relative linearity from the text but preserves its dream like quality, by showing the puns as ambiguous emotional responses in the action of the film. Highly recommended, rather lovely and funny too.

Here's something very odd. I was never a big Floyd fan, always preferred US West Coast sounds back in the day, though they did do some great tracks. Anyway, this is a complete departure from their normal style, a really avant-garde soundtrack for a film.

Final thought for the day: