Chaotopia Newsletter

CHAOTOPIA Newsletter
October 2022

Welcome back to Chaotopia! Thank you and many greetings to new subscribers, and those who have been patient this Summer - I haven't send any newsletters out since the Spring, because I wasn't running any new courses over that time and I've been busy with my new book and the first stages of moving home.

It's been too long and complicated a season to sum it up in some pithy comment. I'll let the newsletter speak for itself.

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

EVENTS

with VIKTOR WYND

Introduction to Chaos Magic: Part 2: Servitors and Spirits
This is a stand-alone course, not dependent on having done part 1, which was Spells & 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 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, 5th & 12th October 2022, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm. £50

Introduction to Energy Magic part 1
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

CHAOTOPIA SCHOOL OF MAGIC

We now have these courses on offer:

THE MAGICKAL TRIANGLE

And our popular free course MAGICAL SELF-CARE

INTERVIEWS, ARTICLES, WEBSITES

Bernhardt Reicher interviewed me for his Magieschule Bernhard Reicher.
Short interview, just 8 minutes, on the topic of 'Your Favourite Childhood Story'.

The European Rune-Gild has a rather lovely new website, which illustrates the variety of art, writings and magic being created by Gild members, especially in Europe.

A tiny piece for Chaosmagick.com, picking apart the confusion between the good old chaos star and the Russian imperialist symbol the Eurasian star, which has superficial similarities and is said to be putting people who aren't Russian imperialists off chaos magic. Chaosmagick.com are putting out some interesting novel chaos magic material, check them out!

23 AND A BIT

It's time for a reminder about Alan Moore's novel Jerusalem, a few years old now but something so large takes a while to permeate into culture. Ben Graham's review (also a few years old) comes from a poet who is aware of the mythical dimensions of Moore's giant book, and how unusual a novel it is.

Julian Vayne interviews Jonathan Harris, the Money Burning Guy, for his series My Magical Thing. It's always a delight to hear from either of these mages, very enjoyable to see them together. And of course there are no prizes for guessing what Jonathan's Magical Thing is. And it is a sentient being, not really a 'thing', and everything is subjugated to it.

Podcast 23's Diamond Jim is getting some very interesting interviewees. Here he is with Douglas Rushkoff, one of whose topics is meta-communication with people whose views you despise.

PSYCHEDELIA

Peter Sjostedt-H is always with reading on topics such as these: Psychedelic Consciousness: "The question, therefore, is whether psychedelic experiences are conditioned by one’s culture or whether they decondition one from one’s culture into a transcendent state."

Some very interesting thoughts in this piece by Sam S.B. Shonkoff. For instance: '...we must note that the very project of identifying a foundational mystical or religious experience derives from a distinctively modern European discourse. These formulations invariably reflect the Protestant privileging of personal faith and feelings over collective norms and narratives, as well as the highly individualistic textures of modern subjectivity more generally. (Yes, even “ego dissolution” locates the self at the epicenter of the mystical drama!)'

Ayahuasca: faith in spirits changes to faith in molecules?

There's some new and potentially very important research coming out on the effects of psychedelics on the gut-brain axis. Those tantalising connections - gut biome and how psychedelics act on inflammatory conditions - are just the tip of the iceberg. 'Might it be possible to heal the gut through the mind, and vice versa?'

Psychedelic Press are moving away from print and have a new Substack newsletter. Here's Mike Jay reflecting on the Lotos Eaters. 'In this world drugs are no longer, like the lotos, the talisman and sacrament of an alternative way of living: they become yet another costly commodity, tools that we use to meet the escalating demands of productivity'

Doing research for my new book of old and new writings, I found what seems to be most or all of the late Alistair Livingstone's 1980s anarcho-punk zine Encyclopaedia of Ecstasy. Dive in, those of you who remember, or would experience a bizarre mix of subcultures!

MAGIC(K)

It's not often the mainstream media transmit anything decent about runes, but here's the BBC doing just that - a 48-min audio piece called The Ancient Algorithm, by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough. There's even a bit about the esoteric side, a good review of the history, and talks with contemporary artists and craftspeople who are using runes.

If you've never read or heard Lionel Snell talking about magical thinking, then check this out. Rather than magical thinking being a bizarre mutant specialism, Lionel shows that Magic is one of our four basic ways of apprehending the world, together with Art, Science and Religion.

Recently learned of this blog Liber Noodles by Acrux. Interesting topics, as you can see, check it out!

A short, four-minute video sketch by Kenneth Anger, "Brush of Baphomet", focusing on Aleister Crowley’s paintings. Soundtrack is by Morton Subotnick, "Silver Apples of the Moon".

CULTURE & HOPE

Don't be too quick to believe generalists with enormous narratives. Darshana Narayan finds the work of Yuval Noah Harari very lacking. '...he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors.'

But then there’s Rutger Bregman’s HumanKind. This is a book which attacks head on the popular motion that we humans are unregenerate villains. Bregman supplies many examples of how this narrative has come to dominate the view we have of ourselves, and how in turn many of these supposed truths are based on flawed research, misinterpretation and downright lies and fraud.

VIDEOS, MUSIC, ART

Rock stars do covers of John Cage including Jello Biafra, David Byrne, Debbie Harry and John Cale. Includes a solo vocal work by Joey Ramone singing Cage with lyrics by James Joyce. What's not to like.

I discovered Lovecraft in my early teens, and have been occasionally visualizing Kadath for over 50 years. I went off him a few times - a bout of literary snobbishness when I was trying to be grown up, a revulsion for his grotesque racism in a number of stories - but I come back year after year to the sheer precision of his evocation of utter cosmic alienness, otherness, on our own planet.

Kadath, the vastly pre-human city on the Antarctic plateau, is the centre of the weirdness, or one of them, a mythic mandala which takes the insignificance that Scientism presents us with and personalizes it, makes concrete the stuff of cultural nightmare.

A great reading of Lovecraft's best story, with great music.

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