 Born in Time (Part One)
2006 09 27
You've seen the story of the presidential doodles. There are many odd and revealing examples, such as GHW Bush's "any more dead ones?" (ABC News says his sad and teary face "gives the note a bit of melancholy, or maybe humor," appropriately ambiguous for a man of shimmering surface and black depths), but the one perhaps receiving the most notice hasn't even been reproduced online.
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 Born in Time (Part Two)
2006 10 03
I've always been dismayed by the thought of reincarnation, so its unlikelihood has always been a comfort. Which is why it saddens me to consider that oblivion may have been as much wishful thinking as paradise. But if the occult is on the table in these times then we need to talk about this, too, since reincarnation is the "great fundamental doctrine" of the Mystery Schools, as Dion Fortune writes in Sane Occultism. And more to the point, the emerging holographic model in which our minds are seen to both extend beyond our material bodies and to have emerged from a common consciousness provides the theoretical construct in which reincarnation becomes scientifically credible, if not inevitable.
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 The Clown at Midnight
2006 09 10
More people than ever are ready to believe it's midnight in America, and not many of them think there's anything funny about it. But when was the last time you noticed the hands on the clock move? How long has it been midnight? In The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky writes that "occult philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already commenced."
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 Darkness Falls
2006 07 25
Things fall apart. Other things are pulled apart. The distinction means little to those caught in the collapse, but perhaps those of us who haven't fallen yet may still find a place to stand by discerning one from the other. Every week, the world becomes a little more like Godard's Weekend. We're becoming inured to the degradation of infrastructure, public institutions and personal ethics. Thousands of New Yorkers are entering their second week without electricity, and in St Louis a quarter of a million residents and businesses are not far behind. |
 Chant Down Babylon
2006 06 27
The misty-eyed nostalgia has created bitterness and confusion over how members of the Grateful Dead can also be members of the Bohemian Grove. Before Neil Young's change of heart, there was dismay at his support for Ronald Reagan and at his "Let's Roll" jingoism. And there's the resistance I still feel within myself to the consideration that Hunter S Thompson may have been up to some pretty weird shit with some disturbed company, even though Michael Aquino is also a fan, and Thompson said in 2003 that he didn't "hate Bush personally. I used to know him. I used to do some drugs here and there." |
 Mind over Mind
2006 06 23
Maybe I've been reading too many comic books, or maybe too many books that should be comic books. Or perhaps a lot of non-fiction that describes a world most people presume to be fantasy. But I've been thinking lately how it can't be enough to know enough to recognize how strange and perilous our circumstances are, and how wicked the rulers of this age. Because if that's all we're about then it will be first they came for the communists-time all over again. |
 The Red, White and Gray (Part Two)
2006 06 01
Weird didn't begin with America, though its been advantageous for some to presume otherwise. Still, America has been weird since before its beginnings. Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 manuscript, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of the America, describes his conquestador voyage up the Mississppi. Near the Ozarks his party encountered the Avavares tribe, who warned de Vaca that the area is home to a little man with indistinct features whom they called "Badthing." |
 The Red, White and Gray (Part One)
2006 05 25
Something went seriously weird in 1954. France, and not just France, saw hundreds of UFO sightings and encounters with bizarre entities in cases of high quality reported almost exclusively by local media - there was no national "contageon" of hysteria - told by multiple witnesses of impressive character. Jacques Vallee notes that all incidents consisted of "strange happenings...reported by normal people, who had normal occupations at the time of the sighting, were generally not known, had no interest in flying saucers and were seeking no publicity." |
 The Devil You Know (Part One)
2006 05 05
Nineteen-year old Italian Benjamino Evangelista emigrated to the US in 1904 and changed his name to Benny Evangelist. Two years later he began having ecstatic visions - "my own views and signs," he said, "that I see from 12 to 3 AM" - and they lasted for 20 years. He wrote it down in one of America's many "received" books, which he titled The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Michigan. The first volume, self-published in 1926 and out-of-print until September, 2001, left the history at the time of Noah. |
 The Devil You Know (Part Two)
2006 05 10
Satanic Ritual Abuse and occult crime negate themselves for many progressives who might otherwise now be inclined to believe the worst of Earthly Powers. This is because the charges are a challenge to secularist and reductionist assumptions, and come cloaked in layers of ridicule and the seeming superstitions of the reactionary right, against which they have struggling all their political lives. |
 In the Air
2006 05 02
If we're potentially co-authors and participants in ideas that are "out there," then perhaps we can also intuit and anticipate the bad ideas that come of age to work mischief. Because it doesn't always take a secret lodge or a Grove cabin for dark elements to conspire together; it only requires a compatability of unspoken means and motive, up and down the chain of unaccountability. Once the pieces are in place, the commands needn't be explicit and top-heavy and the conspiracy needn't even be self-conscious. |
 What Dreams May Come
2006 04 30
Perhaps it's the fact of demonstration and its attendent synchronicities and not its content that is most significant, because it's a manifestation in the mundane world of a normally hidden order of reality and congruity. At least it can be said that the demonstrations are for us, and that the patterns exist in order to draw our attention. Patterns like those in the fields emulating the standing waves of a voidless, holographic universe percolating with energy. We likely know by our experience of them that synchronicities don't pertain only to borderland experiences. However, they do all lead us to borderland issues of human consciousness. |
 The Body Eclectic (Part One)
2006 03 30
Some fascinating glimpses there of a kind of orphaned rationalism running scared. My current favourite comment is this one: I rue the day that the woo-woos discovered the term "quantum physics." It's become their catch-all phrase that they can apply to anything in order to imbue whatever idiocy they're on about with a veneer of scientific validity. Naturally, skeptics who pride themselves on their scientific method would like to keep the "woo-woos" in Newtonian blinders, because the science has turned uncomfortably weird for those who mean to interpret the world by it.
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 The Body Eclectic (Part Two)
2006 04 10
Do you remember The Spirit of the Beehive? Here's yet another example of the "buzzing of bees" common to boundary experiences, this one mentioned in a 1996 interview by cereologist Colin Andrews when asked, "What was your most memorable crop circle experience and why?": While visiting a circle in a remote field at Kimpton, Hampshire, England during July 1987, I heard a very strange buzzing sound which was close to me and appeared to interact with me. I was overwhelmed by the experience and it left me very touched because it began after I had stood near the ring alone and prayed for a clue as to what the crop circles were about. |
 Grave Mysteries (Part One & Two)
2006 03 04
In 1904 Crowley and his first wife, Rose, traveled to Egypt for their honeymoon. While visiting the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, Crowley recited the "preliminary invocation" of the Goetia: the occult ritual of "low magic" to bind demons to a sorcerer's will. When the two returned to their hotel room in Cairo, Rose entered a trance state and began murmuring "They are waiting for you," along with "similar urgent but unintelligible phrases" according to Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Triggers vol. I. Wilson continues: Crowley did not like this at all, since it is typical of the uncontrolled, quasi-hysterical trances of spiritualist mediums.
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 Life and Life Only
2006 03 09
Let's start with the unlikely figure of Troy Hurtubise. He's a self-taught inventor led by his intuition known for his "bizarre, yet functional" creations. (Much like fellow Canadian John Hutchison and his physics-bending "Hutchison Effect".) Hurtubise makes things work that people who know better believe shouldn't, and can't really explain why they do. "Firepaste," for instance: an astonishingly effective fire retardant he's repeatedly demonstrated by the protracted application of a blowtorch to a half-inch thick smear of dried paste atop his head.
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 America's Dog Star Days
2006 03 05
Remember the Order of the Solar Temple? In 1994 the neo-Templar secret society, founded by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, embarked on its very own cultic auto-destruct sequence, when 69 of its members, including children, either killed themselves or were murdered in their chalet-compounds in Switzerland and Quebec. (The trigger for the group's termination appears to have been the ritual slaying of a three-year old infant with a wooden stake, on order of Di Mambro.)
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 JFC Fuller's Army
2006 02 07
Since I was fourteen or so I've had on my bookshelf a copy of JFC Fuller's Decisive Battles of the Western World. I knew he was a Major General, an early advocate of air power and mechanized assault, and a popular military historian. I'd known his philosophy of armoured warfare won more favour in Germany than in Britain, and that it became the blitzkrieg of commanders such as Heinz Guderian. And that was about it. What I didn't know was Fuller was both a fascist and an occultist, and no slouch at either.
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 "No man sees my face and lives"
2006 01 31
Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico in 1936 in order to become Europe's first "shamanic tourist" among the Tarahumara Indians. "Peyote, I knew, was not made for whites," the surrealist wrote in The Peyote Dance. "And a White, for these Red Men, is one whom the spirits have abandoned." The Tarahumara tried to fob off on Artaud "old men who would suddenly get the bends and jiggle their amulets in a queer way," but he held out for the genuine shamans. Finally he was permitted to join an all-night peyote ceremony, and partook of the "dangerous dissociations it seems Peyote provokes, and which I had for 20 years sought by other means"
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 Full Spectral Dominance (Part Two)
2006 01 27
Dr Albert Hoffman, the "father of LSD," but perhaps better described as its midwife, turned 100 a few days ago. Like so many other things we trip over this fraught century, lysergic acid diethylamide first appeared in Nazi-dominated Europe, and first through dreams and intuition. Hoffman was looking for compounds that induced muscle contraction. After synthesizing LSD and testing it on animals to no useful effect Hoffman's research moved on.
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 Full Spectral Dominance (Part One)
2006 01 14
As I said in an earlier post, I'm finding the correspondences between boundary experiences a fascinating and instructive study. And an aspect which almost always appears present, whichever boundary is breached, is the electrical. Perhaps not surprisingly so, since the electric is also a irreducible aspect of physical life. It's not only out there, but it's in us. (In other words I suppose, wherever you go, there you are.)
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 Space cadets
2006 01 10
An article last week in The Scotsman claimed an "extrordinary 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government." The theory is to create an intense magnetic field that would provide gravitational thrust: Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached.
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 Estimate of the Situation
2006 01 03
Lately, every year has been a weird one, but just think of 2005. The bald prostitute in the press room who, even though he's likely not Johnny Gosch, reminded enough people of protected paedophile rings and their proximity to power that Gosch's name was again in the news. The London bombings, seemingly synchronized again with simulations. The possible manipulation of Katrina, the deliberate murder of New Orleans and the abduction of its children.
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 Down the Scole Hole
2005 12 27
The phenomena recorded in the Scole sittings was unusually rich and obtained under protocols anticipating the objections of skeptics. There was channelling of course, as well as spirit voices, noises, dancing lights, levitations and physical manifestations of alleged spirits. Also "apports" - the inexplicable materialization of dozens objects onto the session table, including an original pristine copy of the Daily Mail from January 4, 1944 and a tiny gold disc with hieroglyphics, "the source of which has not yet been identified." And remarkable captures on audio tape, photographic film and video.
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 The King of Terror
2005 12 18
Iraqi security forces allegedly caught terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi but released him because they did not realise who he was. Deputy Interior Minister Hussein Kamal said on Thursday that the Jordanian-born leader of al-Q'aida in Iraq was in custody some time last year, but he would not provide further details, CNN reported.
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 The Lone Conmen
2005 12 14
I got suckered yesterday by a logo. Nothing special about that besides the irony that the logo was No Logo, which sold me a copy of No War by Naomi Klein ("and others," though that addendum is dark blue on a black background). I didn't realize until later Klein's only contribution - and apparently without her consent - was "Baghdad Year Zero", an essay published more than a year ago in Harper's and available free online.
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 Weird Tales
2005 11 24
The Necronomicon isn't supposed to exist, but - like so many things that shouldn't - it does. And how it's come to exist makes an interesting, and troubling story. But first, let's talk about HP Lovecraft, who imagined the book into fiction. Figures such as Michael Aquino, who composed a "Call to Cthulhu" ritual before he left the Church of Satan to found his Temple of Set, have adopted aspects of Lovecraft's mythos and imagery of hungry, tentacled gods in order to stimulate their own magick.
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 The Top of My Head
2005 10 29
When the US Declaration of Independence was signed on the second Dog Day of the summer of 1776, the Sun was conjunct Sirius, a star of unrivalled significance to ancient Egyptian mystery religions, esoteric Freemasonry and New Age UFO cults. In 1846, the date for the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was chosen to again coincide with the passage of the Sun over Sirius, this time while the Moon was in Virgo.
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