Good Stuff from Chaotopia

CHAOTOPIA Newsletter
Midsummer 2023

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

And a Happy Solstice to you! Whether it's Summer or Winter in your part of the globe, may it be a good one.

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

CHAOTOPIA SCHOOL OF MAGICK

- is in the process of moving, from Teachable to Udemy.

Introduction to Rune-Magic is now fully operational!

Check its out - you can watch two videos free to see if it suits you!

PUBLICATIONS, INTERVIEWS, BLOGS

EIGHT MUSICS FOR EIGHT MAGICS

This album is designed for people to do magic to, but it's also eight electronic compositions by four experienced magicians. All the words are by me, five-minute guided meditations embedded in the middle of the tracks, most of which are about fifteen minutes.

Here's a couple of comments it's gathered so far:

From Ian Read:
'Disco music it ain’t* Instead this is well-crafted, quite brilliant music drawing the listener into the right mood for the magick of Dave Lee’s voice calling on the eight colours, which can be nothing less than perfect, after a lifetime performing magick or workshops around the world, as Dave has.'
*ask your gran.'

And from magical artist Erin Sexton
'Amazing work! Perfect for listening in the pentadome studio-temple, thank you:)'

My forthcoming book Primordial Chaos has earned, at least for me, the epithet 'long-awaited'; we're planning to release it this Autumn.

Here's a chapter listing to whet your appetite.

Foreword

Part 1: Primal Chaos: Magical Writings from 1979 Onwards
Lamp of Thoth

- The Carthorse, the Orchestra and the God of Silence
- Azodai Stele

Pagan News
- Letter from Egypt
- Review of Oxford Thelemic Symposium

Chaos International
- Magickal Aeonics
- The Head Be Unreeled
- The Slope of Words
- Capimao vovim (Timedragon) - an invocation of serpent time
- Seven Small Sorceries of Smell
- Buddy, Can You Spare a Paradigm?
- The Cyberzoo
- Catching an Astral Dose
- Magic and NLP

Kaos Magick Journal / Proceedings of the Thelemic Symposium 1994

- Cut-up and Collage in Magic
- Collage: This is what you want

Part 2: Psychedelia and Embodied Alchemy
Head Over Heels talks
- Beyond Recreation: Psychedelics, Ritual and Time

Head
- Trance Out

Handout for Arcanorium
- Body Alchemy

Gyrus’s Dreamflesh Journal Vol.1
- The Mythic Breath

Breaking Convention Conference
- Solve et Coagula

What Is Tripping For?

Part 3: Landscape and Culture
Talk 2011: Three Thurses For Thee

Runa magazine and Recent Northern Mysteries writings

Runic Collage Spells

Part 4: Talks, Courses and Public Spells
- The Inferno of Choronzon
- Undreaming the Apocalypse

Working with Eris Discordia
- Festival 23
- Burn, Wizard, Burn!
- From SNAFU to FUBAR

Egregore entities for the World
- Kawa Pohr
- Varrawallal
- Izawa

Arcanorium College and the Colours of Chaos

- The Grimoire of Selfhood

Healing magics and Body Alchemy
- Column of Lights

A Pair of Spirits
- Hirxil-Nu
- SORU

Afterword

That's a bare list of the original documents included. Each of those has a new commentary, and in some instances, a longer piece collating my thoughts on that area or pointing out where I now disagree with my previous self.

PSYCHEDELIA

My review of Andy Roberts's excellent book In Search of Smiles :

Funnily enough we need metaphysics when doing psychedelic therapy. Philosopher Peter Sjostedt-Hughes gives us some good reasons for not neglecting metaphysics, and actually sums up some of its its varieties in a table.

The core argument is that "Metaphysics should be used to integrate and understand psychedelic-induced metaphysical experiences. No shit Sherlock, you may be thinking, but the fact of the matter is that something so obvious does not happen. This text seeks to remedy that, making the case that psychedelic therapy is not the sole province of psychology or psychiatry, or neuroscience for that matter. Beyond therapy, it also points to societal enrichment. References provided span two and half millennia, slightly over the ten-year period that my psychology students (for Philosophy of Mind) said they were told not to transgress in their discipline."

Even if you're wary of academic philosophy, give it a read. This man is a superb teacher, someone who has passed through the Dark Satanic Mills of academia and gained its skills without losing his soul.

I've seen a few DMT 'machine-elves' but I've never used so-called AI to produce pictures. These people seem to be onto something though.

Here's something which could be a compact description of an attitude appropriate to a magician. And a great warning against doomscrolling.

“Our mental universe (which contains all we know, feel or are afraid of in the real world we live in) may be enchanting, happy, tragic, comic, etc.

“We are capable of transforming it and giving it a charm which makes life more valuable. More valuable since life becomes more joyful, thanks to the extraordinary effort needed to create this charm.

“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is “the truth”, that this terror is knowledge of the “extra-mental” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.

“Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.
[…]
“We must go in search of enchantment.”
Rene Magritte

PHILOSOPHY / COSMIC STUFF

If you find weirdness truly gripping, you'll have long since come across Erik Davis. But this latest couple of essays on his Substack are... well, words fail me. So here are some of his:

'perhaps the most important legacy of post-structuralism: the recognition that language, and especially writing, is already alien, machinic, and nonhuman. By technologizing language at such a high semantic level, we can more easily glimpse the squigglings of Uncle Bill’s “virus from outer space.” '

Pour one, roll one, whatever your favourite sacrament is, and dig deep in. Here Be Dragons indeed.

When I was growing up in the 1960s it seemed that world population growth was the most terrifying monster facing the survival of humans. What a relief it is to find that my generation's ideas on this were based on false premises, and that not only is it likely that population is becoming self-limiting, but that the way to do this is to reduce social and economic inequality. Who'da thought it, that better social policy would lead to a better world? Billionaire caste, are you listening?

If you've ever disputed with someone who subscribes to silly theories such as QAnon or Electric Universe Theory you will know that there's no point in defeating their arguments logically. Just as is the case with religion, people don't arrive at nonsensical beliefs through logic but through finding something which appears to satisfy some emotional need - usually to belong to some special group which has superior knowledge about the world.

Unsurprisingly, the most effective technique is to teach people to think critically for themselves. Unfortunately, evidence is slippery: the author of this article was premature in lumping together amongst 'erroneous conspiracy theories' the idea that the moon landing was faked (for which there is no decent evidence) to concerns that COVID vaccines are causing a lot of deaths and the drug companies and their state lackeys are covering them up, a view for which evidence is mounting by the month.