Chaotopia in July

CHAOTOPIA Newsletter
July 2021

Welcome to Chaotopia! 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 website is still a building site. Hopefully it will be fixed within the month.

EVENTS

Blame Blake has been rescheduled, what with the extended lockdown, to Bank Holiday Monday 30th August 2021. This is going to be a fantastic day out, buy tickets soon because they are selling very fast.
Before it happens, I shall review the book that originally prompted it - John Higgs's William Blake Vs The World.

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, and is the necessary prelude to the second-stage course out this September - The Magickal Triangle, which will take us to Chesed.

My online workshops and courses with Viktor Wynd resume on 5th September with Sigil Magic.
Learn how to make and use powerful sigils. Starting with Austin Spare’s introduction of free-form sigilization, we’ll explore a variety of approaches to making sigils - using words, images, graphic mashups, automated sigil generators and the idea of the artwork as hypersigil.

We’ll also cover the audial equivalent - mantras, and talk about how to get the best phrasing of your intentions. We’ll take a peek at the theory behind such magic and you’ll learn a few simple but powerful techniques for entering appropriate extraordinary states of consciousness.

The link above takes you to tickets.

MAGICK FOR DOING

Folksinger turned nature writer Sam Lee coined a useful term: ETD, or Ecological Tidiness Disorder. You have no doubt seen someone mowing down wildflowers on grass verges; what's the point of doing this? It seems to be an actual cultural affliction, so it's probably vulnerable to change by magick.

Sigils will be forthcoming, but how about making your own?
Here's one local council that is recovering from that particular idiocy:

If you care about the cynical defunding and selling off of our (UK) NHS you might like to power up this legal challenge to the robber politicians who are now stealing our data to sell to their billionaire mates, and even bung them a few quid if you can. (And if you're fond of curse magic, why not get some real nastiness off your chest and fling it at these unspeakable crooks?)

BLOGS and SUCHLIKE

Myself interviewed about the runes by Soror Brigantia, 30 minute interview.

And here's me again with the Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole bloggers, talking about all sorts of magical stuff. 50 minutes.

23 AND A BIT

The Church of Burn is organizing a Money Festival - which will run over four days - 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th July 2021 - CoB's Festival of Money offers poetry, dance, workshops, film, seminars, art, performance, talk and ritual exploring money and economy. We're bringing together leading thinkers, activists, musicians, performers and artists to consider and respond to the huge challenges we face around money right now. Church of Burn will conduct a Synod, Service and Ritual on the Fri, Sat & Sun evenings.

The day themes are:

Thurs 22nd: Money, Sex & the Unconscious

Fri 23rd: Money and Climate

Sat 24th: Money and Art

Sun 25th: Money, Community & Society

We're also taking over the Studios to install a MoneyArt Exhibition. We've curated 23 pieces from around the world; from established money artists to exciting new projects exploring money from different perspectives and across various media. You'll find work that is fresh, thought-provoking and beautiful.

The above link will take you to a crowdfunded for the event, and more information than you could possibly shake a stick at.

A big mate of RAW’s from back in the day talking on Jamie 23’s Podcast.

Jimmy Cauty has been building models of broken places, with just the right amount of humour to stop these places being more mere representations of the dystopia we now live in. His current thing is Tower Block, a set of scale models which he created, right down to miniature versions of his own posters on the tiny walls of the flats, then 'painstakingly vandalised'. That's my kind of artist. The work was stuck in isolation until recently; it's now in realspace in Edinburgh. This is a fairly lengthy and informative article off the back of that exhibition.

And more about Blake: Myra Stuart has created one of her amazing big puppets - this one of Blake -

- will be appearing at Blame Blake day, and will, I imagine, speak forth to us lucky people!
I learned this fact from John Higgs's newsletter. Be like me and subscribe here.

BODGE will probably only happen for 12 months; we're into issue 6 now. So support Liverpool Arts Lab and get one!

PSYCHEDELIA

Since Leonard Pickard got out of gaol he's been doing the interviews we've all been waiting for. Here he is with Julian Vayne, in a moving and inspiring exchange.

It's the 50 year anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act. I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here, but as the author puts it, 'it has mutilated countless lives, thrown hundreds of thousands of people pointlessly in prison & accomplished the square root of absolutely fuck all'.

Every so often I plug Psychedelic Press Journal, because it’s always worth reading, but then one issue grabs me. This one, #33, does just that. It's pictured above with the editor, the lovely Nikki Wyrd.
In particular, Charles Winninger’s excellent piece about how he found a use for his MDMA highs, in communicating his unburdening from a driven nature. He writes of the fear epidemic and his personal defeat of it:

‘ …all the fears I’ve known have all come and gone. And while what pervades is the fear industrial complex, what has prevailed is me.’

And:

‘Some may call this escapism. They’re right! It’s escape from the media-induced loony bin trance you and I are supposed to stay caught in like so many deer in the headlights.’

I would not wish to give the impression that the rest of the journal is not also well worth reading; it certainly is.

MAGICK

I've reviewed Alan Chapman's Magia book, which basically involved reviewing some features of the last 15 years of my own magickal life. How else do you review a book which is all about how to become awakened?

Dying, in this clinician’s experience, isn’t so bad after all.

TINFOIL HAT WATCH

Listen to Erik Davis, he has really nailed the mechanism of the popularity of the Qanon lie factory. How does it spread? Some cynical blogger losing followers, gets a massive upspike after mentioning Qanon. And the appeal is based on a cunning exploitation of the challenge of absolute good and evil (minute 34). Qanon has resurrected a mythic scale of battle inside contemporary culture, invoking 'absolute evil' using paedophilia; no-one loves a paedo, so it brings together fluffy hippies and hard-right people. This invocation of radical evil allows us to feel good again.
A fact-based rejection of Qanon rubbish is ineffective because there's a 'religious visioning' going on here. The kind of thing that is way beyond ordinary fact-based discourse.
He relates this to one of his =areas of interest, Archons and the Gnostic origin of that idea (minute 40). It's nice to hear that term used by someone who isn't themselves a deranged tinfoiler.
He also challenges the problematic nature of the term 'conspiracy theory', its use as a dustbin to dismiss out of hand your opponents' ideas.
In the end he notes that it's exciting to have absolute good'n'evil, but it's more human (and more spiritual, actually) to engage with the corrupt mess of our political world, what we actually do have.

Has the UK Independent newspaper unmasked "Q" of the QAnon movement as someone called Ron Watkins? This is one of the names that comes up repeatedly.

I suppose even the Sun newspaper can't be wrong all the time. Here it reports on the increasingly deranged behaviour of Qanon infectees; this is actual terrorism territory. Notice how the promoters of Qanon are themselves abusers of children?

CULTURE etc

'Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Why do we tell apocalyptic stories about the end of society?'
Considering William Gibson's dictum that 'the future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed', something like that applies to colonialism: indigenous tribes and nations already live in a 'post-apocalyptic' world. They were nearly wiped out by the violence and disease brought by foreign invaders — but they survived.

A very interesting challenge to the popular 'collapse' narrative, one of the stories that keeps the nihilism of this culture in place.

Ever wondered what happens to space junk? Here's an article about people who live near where it drops.
People have worrying about this since at least 1978. Here's Devo with Space Junk Killed My Baby.

Quote of the week, Officer Tilly on Star Trek Discovery: 'You know how I get, around violations of causality.'

Now that's a fancy thing to have, an antimatter factory.

As I'm sure you've worked out, I sometimes review things my friends have created, to plug them. John Short aka Hubert Tsarko has been one such friend. His latest collection - Those Ghosts - is particularly good though. If you like good poetry, do check this out. The subtitle, A Life In Poems nails it - this is a very special, privileged journey through one man's life.
Don't take my word for it. This is from the title poem Those Ghosts:

You can't seal up death
Despite the rituals,
It abides in tobacco
pouches and old armchairs
and abandoned shoes
worn once to tread
the winding alleys of this town.

And finally a bit of inspiring good news to send you away with: How an Aboriginal Family Beat Back a Fossil Fuel Conglomerate

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