Haus der Luege : Noli Evocare Quod Reprimere Non Potes

Last week Salon reported on the antics of Wikipedia user "Qworty," idenfied as writer Robert Clark Young, who engaged in an online vendetta against rival authors by in some cases "revenge editing" their Wikipedia entries and in others simply marking them for deletion. Young also appears to have had a grudge against alternative spirituality, waging a one-man war against Pagans and occultists. Abusing the "notability" standards as defined by Wikipedia, he argued that Pagans, occultists, and other esotericists, even those with a significant media presence, were not "notable" enough for inclusion. As explained in this follow-up to the original article, one of these individuals was David Jay Brown, a writer with published works on psychedelics. Brown apears to have been targeted because of his association with the organizer of the Starwood festival, a large Pagan gathering that has been running for many years.

As Qworty, Young denounced Brown as a “self-appointed spiritual savior” who had styled himself “a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol.” Young also resorted to his go-to critique for Wikipedia pages he found wanting: he accused Brown of repeatedly editing his own page in violation of Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest policies.

Brown contacted me soon after the publication of my first Qworty/Young story, but I didn’t examine his story close enough to figure out Young’s real gripe against him. Then, a week later, I started receiving emails from members of “the Pagan writing and publishing community” thanking me for unraveling the mystery of Qworty’s identity. According to them, Young had been guilty of waging a vicious and nasty war against prominent Pagans throughout 2012.


Just a few days before Brown’s page was deleted, Tony Mierzwicki, a specialist in the practice of “ceremonial magick,” published an anguished alert at witchschool.com (“Witch School International: Your Online Pagan Education Starts Here”):

“SUPER IMPORTANT: WIKIPEDIA PAGAN PAGES ARE UNDER ATTACK: DELETION OF OUR LEADERS.”

At least a dozen “important Pagan” leaders had been marked for deletion by Young on grounds of insufficient “notability.” Included on the list was the author David Jay Brown.
Tony, by the way, is also the editor of Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy and my upcoming Mastering the Great Table.

At any rate, "notability" is a somewhat flexible notion when applied to fringe interests like occultism, and Young took advantage of this gray area to promote his own anti-magick agenda. Any page he came across for individuals involved in Paganism or occultism he appears to have marked for deletion on notability grounds. This was even the case for authors with many published works, media appearances, and so forth that in any other subject area would clearly constitute grounds for notability. Salon's efforts to uncover Qworty's identity and in effect end Young's magick war are much appreciated, by both occultists like myself and members of the overall Pagan community.

Many magical practitioners grew up in repressive Christian homes and as a result have a bad attitude toward Christianity. I'm not one of them. Before I became a Thelemite and joined OTO I considered myself a Hermetic Christian for a very long time, and I still believe that Christianity is a valid form of spiritual practice for many people. The argument that led me to leave Christianity stemmed from the religion's univalent theology - the idea that only Christians can attain salvation and practitioners of any other religion, no matter how virtuous or spiritual they happen to be, cannot. True, I could have kept the aspects I liked about the Christian system and dispensed with univalence, but that struck me as incoherent and dishonest. Univalence is at the heart of every major Christian denomination, and while it isn't necessarily spoken of in more liberal churches the idea is still there.

Or is it? Pope Francis has recently made waves in the Roman Catholic community by stating that non-Christians can indeed be saved. In fact, Francis' statement extends the possibility of salvation even to atheists, so long as they are virtuous people who perform good works. This apparently new doctrine is similar to Pelagianism, a strand of Christian thought opposed by Saint Augustine in the fifth century and suppressed since that time by the institutional church. According to Pelagianism, moral perfection is attainable through human free will without the necessity of preemptive divine grace, and as such it stands in opposition to the concept of original sin that is central to Augustinian theology.

“They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of ​​possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good.” “This was wrong . . . Jesus broadens the horizon.” Pope Francis said, “The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation”


"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can... "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!".. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”
This does, of course, still assume a universal standard of good as defined by the church, but it's a start. Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism have no problem with Christianity because according to those systems the Christian God is just another deity that they as adherents of different religions simply do not worship. The basic rationality of this attitude is hard to deny. The idea that any one religion has a monopoly on the truth is not only arrogant on the part of that religion's followers but flies in the face of human experience from the earliest beginnings of civilization. Based on the Augustinian schema, the Roman Catholic Church at one point created "limbo" as a destination for infants who died before being baptized, the thought being that even though said infants had not lived long enough a sin they nonetheless would otherwise by damned by original sin. Similarly, the problem of good men and women born before the arrival of Jesus prompted intense theological debate - could original sin mean that all of them were damned as well?

This new pronouncement from Pope Francis pretty much cuts through all that nonsense. If good people who don't believe can be saved now, clearly this has been true since the beginning of time. The rejection of original sin also eliminates the need for theological gyrations surrounding unbaptized infants. As I believe I've commented here in the past, much of the original sin doctrine is derived from a poor translation anyway. When Augustine read the Bible in Latin, the Greek word metanoia - that is, meta-awareness or enlightened consciousness - was translated as paenitentia, the root of the English repent. In Latin as in English, this word carries the connotation of redress for past wrongs, whereas metanoia does not. From that connotation original sin is trivially deprived by reference to the expulsion from paradise in Genesis, but without it the connection is far more tenuous.

UPDATE: Today a Vatican spokesman has "clarified" the Church's position on salvation by re-asserting that atheists do not in fact go to Heaven. I'll leave whether this is indeed what the Pope originally meant or retroactive damage control by the Vatican bureaucracy up to the reader. Still, even this more conservative clarification did include what sounds like an explicitly worded rejection of original sin, which to my way of thinking is a big step forward in terms of church theology.

My blogging has been a little slow for the last couple of days, but this time there's a good reason - over the weekend I completed the edits for my new book, Mastering the Great Table. This is the second volume of my Mastering Enochian Magick series and presents a similar setup to the one I put together for the Heptarchial angels, but for the various Watchtower entities such as the Kings and Seniors, sub-quadrant angels, and cacodemons. My editor has now signed off on the final version of the manuscript so the layout and so forth are being worked on right now. I don't have a firm publication date, but I'll let you all know as soon as the new book is available.

This new book is also probably going to be more controversial than the last one. Not a lot has been written on the Heptarchia Mystica, which as I noted in the first book is a largely forgotten part of Dee's Enochian system. The Great Table, on the other hand, has been explored by many different magical groups and there are a lot of different takes out there, from the Golden Dawn system to that practiced by Dee purists. As in the first book, I present the material from a largely purist perspective, but with a template that can also accommodate Golden Dawn-style ritual forms adapted from Aleister Crowley's Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae.

Treatment of the Aethyrs and Parts of the Earth will be reserved for volume three, tentatively titled Mastering the Thirty Aires. I'm also thinking about putting together a fourth book of "advanced" techniques based on some of the experimental work I've done with my Enochian system over the years. About the only thing I'm sure about is that it won't be called "Advanced Enochian Magick" because there have already been two books published with that title, one from the Schuelers years ago and another by Frater W.I.T. I'll keep you all posted on that as it develops.

Last month I had heard that one of my acquaintances from long ago was murdered in his home in Columbia, MO. That individual was Brian Daniels, who I had met during my interlude in Kansas City, back in around 1985 to 1986. His half-sister introduced us and told me that we had a lot in common with each other. When I spent some time with Mr. Daniels, I found him to be quite harmlessly demented, perhaps even a borderline psychotic. Brian implored me to invoke Satan so that he could meet him, because he believed that the Devil was his real father. I also heard that Brian had performed his own kind of Satanic Mass, blessing the wine and hosts in the name of the Devil and inviting demons to enter into them, and then at the climax of the rite, greedily consuming them. His reasons for doing this is that he wanted to become completely possessed by the Devil.
I found Brian to be something of a nut-case and refused to have anything further to do with him. Even though he was quite delusional, I thought that he was also quite harmless. Brian never hurt anyone, nor was he was ever violent or even vocal about his apparent off-putting mental problems. However, I didn’t invite him to be a part of the then forming Order of the Gnostic Star, and I also declined to either initiate or even ordain him, as he had apparently hoped. In fact, I tried to convince him to get out of the occult altogether and get some help for his obvious mental instability. He found that to be quite funny and still had hopes that I would relent.
Brian passed out of my life once he determined that I wasn’t going to enable his delusions, and from what I understood, he moved on to other pursuits. Once in while, one of my acquaintances would tell me something that they had heard about Mr. Daniels. I had heard, for instance, that he had moved to Columbia to study at the university there, but never pursued a degree. For those who might not know this little fact, Columbia is the capitol of the state of Missouri. Another time, I had heard that he had been involved in a terrible apartment fire and that he had barely escaped with his life. There had been some issue with the smoke alarm detectors not having been properly installed and failing to go off, and that Brian had received a considerable sum of money as a form of compensation. Apparently, the fire had left him disfigured and crippled one of his arms and one of his legs, making him rather incapable of either getting or keeping a job. As a disabled person, he earned disability coverage for life as well as being the recipient of quite a windfall from the ensuing lawsuit.
From what I understood, Brian pursued his passion for magical artifacts. He ordered artistically produced magical tools from various local artisans, and he also collected and sold valuable artifacts on Ebay. From what I had heard, he had grown out of being a diabolical seeker to one that was firmly in the Thelemic camp. I don’t know if he ever joined the OTO or received any initiations in that or any other organization, but he did delight in projecting a kind of creepy, occult image of himself in a town that was probably quite conservative, despite the presence of the State Capitol and the University. If anyone had ever asked me what I thought about Brian Daniels, I would have said that he was a harmless crank. So, that’s the most of what I remember about him back in the days when I lived in Kansas City; and that is all that I remember hearing about him since those days from folks with whom I have met whenever traveling up that way. 
Then I read in an April edition of the “Wild Hunt - Unleash the Hounds (Link Roundup)” a news item that Brian Daniels was found shot to death in his home in Columbia on April 10th. I was a bit shocked to read this news item, so I followed the links and verified that indeed, this was the Brian Daniels that I had known. You can find a newspaper article about the murder and its early investigation here. However, a few days later, Brian’s alleged lover, house-keeper and intimate friend (who even had the power of attorney) was accused of the murder. Two other suspects were also arrested for lying to investigators. You can read about the whole sordid affair here. Even despite the controversy associated with Brian Daniel’s life and his rather lurid public persona of being a Thelemite and a closet Satanist, the local newspaper wrote an op-ed on his life that was quite fair and open minded. That impressed me and it also gave me hope that maybe there is some degree of compassion in the world for those who are not normal, particularly in a part of the U.S., which is not known for its compassion to pagans, witches and occultists. Yes, they painted him as some kind of crackpot occultist, but at least the human behind the facade was also noted. I am sure that Brian Daniels would have relished the attention that he is posthumously getting, since it shows him to have finally achieved his desire of being one of those infamous forbidden left-hand path magicians and occultists. Yet part of me feels sad about the whole ugly affair.
However we judge Brian Daniels, he deserved to live out his full life without being murdered. It is an object lesson to all occultists that we need to ensure our own safety and well-being, despite the capriciousness of fate and that bad things do happen every day. It is also sad because even though Brian was one of those individuals who delighted in the “ooky-spooky” aspects of the occult, he was essentially harmless. Whether or not he was ever able to deal with his lifetime of mental problems and serious psychological defects will never be known. His story will remain basically untold, but one can assume that such troubles are never fully eliminated, and they may have contributed to the obvious poor choices that he made in regards to the affairs of the heart. Those poor choices prematurely ended his life; but I suspect that he was likely also lonely and without family support and care, and this can lead nearly anyone to make bad choices as far as friends and lovers are concerned. May whatever Deities were in alignment to Brian Daniels at the end assoil his troubled spirit and keep him in a place of peace forever. 
All of this is, of course, quite sobering to me, and it shows that human nature is fragile, relationships and trust must be given to those who are truly worthy, and that life is precious. We must guard ourselves from the iniquities of those who would do us egregious harm, and seek the blessings of the Gods to ensure that this state is maintained.
Frater Barrabbas

Update: Jefferson City is the Capitol of Missouri, not Columbia. My mistake.

As I mentioned in a recent article, scientists have uncovered that plants emit inaudible acoustic signals that can help to encourage the growth of other plants. This is significant to energy work practice in light of ongoing Chinese research on Qigong, which has found that Qigong masters emit infrasonic waves that seem to encourage healing in the cells of their patients. I recently came across this article discussing a new book called Blinded by Science by Matthew Silverstone. In the book, Silverstone compiles studies that seem to indicate vibrations produced by trees are also beneficial to human health.

The author points to a number of studies that have shown that children show significant psychological and physiological improvement in terms of their health and well being when they interact with plants and trees. Specifically, the research indicates that children function better cognitively and emotionally in green environments and have more creative play in green areas. Also, he quotes a major public health report that investigated the association between green spaces and mental health concluded that "access to nature can significantly contribute to our mental capital and wellbeing".

So what is it about nature that can have these significant effects? Up until now it has been thought to be the open green spaces that cause this effect. However, Matthew Silverstone, shows that it is nothing to do with this by proving scientifically that it is the vibrational properties of trees and plants that give us the health benefits and not the open green spaces.


The answer to how plants and trees affect us physiologically turns out to be very simple. It is all to do with the fact that everything vibrates in a subtle manner, and different vibrations affect biological behaviours. One research experiment showed that if you drink a glass of water that has been treated with a "10Hz vibration" your blood coagulation rates will change immediately on ingesting the treated water. It is the same with trees, when touching a tree its different vibrational pattern will affect various biological behaviours within your body.
A little research into the book shows that its conclusions are speculative and less scientific than this article makes them out to be. Still, in conjunction with the study I previously referenced on plant vibrations this suggests a straightforward hypothesis that should be subject to straightforward scientific testing and validation. What researchers need to be put together is a simple double-blind trial that tests exposure to vibrations of particular frequencies in the ranges emitted by both Qigong masters and plants.

The vibrations are inaudible in that range so there's no problem with tipping off the subjects, and the trials could be randomized by a computer to eliminate experimenter bias. The apparatus could consist of a simple acoustic chamber with emitters configurable for these low frequencies, and for each subject a computer control system could randomly determine whether the emitters are on or off. Then the health data for each subject could be compiled and matched to the treatment and control groups. That would pretty much do it as far as the experiment goes, just like what you would do for a regular drug trial.

If this effect can be demonstrated in a clear fashion it may provide a mechanism by which the various forms of energy work function and also explain some other effects that have been regarded as paranormal in the past, such as the way in which music seems to influence both plants and developing infants. Perhaps the sounds that work the best are simply those that resonate with or include undertones of these particular frequencies. Another interesting avenue for research could be identifying which frequencies work the best for facilitating health. It may be that there's a vibration range out there beyond those that living things can produce but which is even more conducive to good health.

The walking dead are on the loose in Temecula, California. At least, that's the claim made by Jerimiah Hartline, who stole a truck in an attempt to flee from the undead monstrosities. Hartline led police on a wild chase during which he crashed the truck several times and injured seven people as he tried to escape both the law and the shambling zombie menace.

The California Highway Patrol says Hartline stowed away in the truck in Tennessee and stole it when the driver got out at roadside scales near Temecula, Calif.

The CHP says after Hartline caused several crashes, the big-rig overturned on Interstate 15 and spilled its load of strawberries. Seven people were injured.

CHP investigators say Hartline told them he had to speed and swerve because he was fleeing from the walking dead.
There you have it, folks - clear evidence of the coming zombie apocalypse. The creatures who pursued Hartline were not stopped by police, nor were they witnessed by anyone else on the scene. Clearly these monsters have developed the power of invisibility that only Hartline can see through, which means that they could be seeking fresh brains just about anywhere and in the process spreading their foul plague far and wide. Today Temecula, tomorrow the world - and in the ensuing chaos there won't be nearly enough trucks out there for everyone seeking refuge to steal.

Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick - the Logo for this work is an Octagram with a sun and moon occupying the circular center. What this symbolizes is the overall magical discipline of the Lunar and Solar cycles, both of which are represented by the number eight. There are eight solar celebrations and there are eight nodes in the lunation cycle. The sun and moon (and their respective cycles) conjoined like the Yin and Yang is the key to forging a true magical discipline.

Twenty years ago this year, I embarked upon my career as an occult writer. I don’t exactly know when I started my first book project (1991?), but it was already in high gear by 1993. What pushed me to begin this writing project was a complaint informally delivered to me by two neophytes in our already formed Order of the Gnostic Star. It was, to use a paraphrase, that the lore we were using was too complex and difficult for a moderately experienced beginner to learn. We had nothing in print that could help the beginner other than our method of direct hands-on teaching.
Since these two students did not have access to me or other members of the group because they lived in Dallas (and we were in Tallahassee and Kansas City), they requested that I write up a manual for knowledgeable students. This wouldn’t be a manual for complete beginners who knew nothing, it would be just a primer for individuals who wanted some help mastering the lore of the Order.
I happily complied with their request since it seemed like a good idea, and instead of just writing up a simple manual, I decided to write up a book containing a comprehensive system of ritual magick that would function as an introduction to the lore of the Order. It would also serve Witches and Pagans to make that most difficult first step in their magical career, and that would be creating their own comprehensive magical system. Since I had done this myself more than a few times, helping others to formulate and build their own magical system seemed like a good idea for a book project. There certainly weren’t any other books already published that would fulfill this need, so I began to organize and outline what such a book might contain.
Anyway, this is how the book project, which I called the “Pyramid of Powers,” had its start. It was a giddy dream and a driving passion that I had discovered in myself, which led me to pursue my literary dream of being a published occult author. The literary bug had bitten me and there was no turning back now. I also erroneously thought that publishing a book could earn me some real money, too. Later on I discovered that idea to be quite a laughable fantasy, but the desire to be an author was realistic enough. It is amusing to note that previously I had been such a hard core, autistically focused ritual magician, and that magick had been more important than anything else. Now, I had a desire to share my knowledge with others, even with individuals who had never met me. That was quite a peculiar transformation.
Little did I realize that this project would consume around five years of my life, and it would challenge me to learn how to write in a clear and definitive manner. I didn’t have those kinds of writing skills back then, and often the first book project that an erstwhile writer attempts to write ends up in the rubbish bin. After quite a number of editing cycles that included hiring an editor, I had taken this project as far as I could take it without engaging a publisher. All three volumes were fully written, and the manuscript as a whole was well organized and structured, at least in my opinion. Even so, it was poorly written and executed and there was little that I could do to change that. Even my hired editor found the job of editing the manuscript quite onerous if not outright frustrating. I had even hired one of my friends, who was a professional artist, to produce a number of the diagrams, which I thought looked quite good.
Despite all that, I was so eager to move the project forward because I really believed that I had a good literary idea and dreamed of successfully publishing this book. So I put together a submission package and mailed it out to a dozen different occult publishers back in 1997, and then waited for some positive news. Months went by, and during that time all I got was a sequence of polite rejections. Well, some of them weren’t so polite, but I took them with a certain humble mind-set, believing that some publisher would be interested in my book. After waiting nearly 18 months, all of the publishing companies had finally replied to me, each one using the stamped and self-enclosed envelope that I had included in the package, and every one of them had declined to publish my book. After that, I managed to print up some copies of the book myself, hiring the skills of the local copying store to produce three ring-bound volumes. These I distributed to some of the members of my Order and a few friends. I gave up on the idea of ever publishing my book, the Pyramid of Powers, and felt that the personalized copies had satisfied my original intent, sans all of the glory of being a published writer. (Sigh.)
Some years later, I decided to try to publish another book. This one, I decided, would not be quite so ambitious, so I put together a scaled down version of the Pyramid of Powers. I even cannibalized some parts of the old book project to fill out the new, and in much less time, I had a completed a decent sized manuscript. By this time, several years had elapsed and I was much better at writing then compared to what I had been in the mid 90's.
I had just completed purchasing and assembling the artwork from another friend who was an artist (for the cover and other some other excellent illustration work) and I had crafted a proposal letter when a friend of mine named Nicholas suggested that I send my proposal to his friend who was opening an occult section for Immanion Publishing called “Megalithica Press.” That friend of his was, of course, Taylor Elwood, and he very quickly signed me on to publish my newest manuscript, to which I gave the title “Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick.” After what seemed like just a few months of work, in May 2007, the book was released into print. I was now a pusblished author! Hazah! What a joy and a pleasure it was to finally experience seeing my words in print. (I have always been grateful for the opportunity that Taylor Elwood afforded me in getting my first book into print.)
However, my friend Nicholas, who had promoted the idea of getting my first book published by Megalithica, told me that I should also seek to publish the Pyramid of Powers. At first I was quite dubious, but then decided to give it shot. However, I had determined that the old title desperately needed to be changed. I also had to rewrite and fill in a number of chapters that I had gutted from the old manuscript in order to complete the new edition of this book. So I started to work on this project, and I got Taylor to approve the publishing of a three book set called “Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick.”
This project took quite a lot more time to complete, since I had to rewrite whole new sections in the book, and the older text required some extensive editing in order to make it have the same readable quality as my previous book. It took me nearly three years to get all three volumes into print and my girlfriend Grace spent quite a bit of time going over and editing that work. I must confess that whole sections were eliminated and others were completely rewritten. In the end, the quality of writing in that book didn’t match the level that DGRM had established for me, but at least I had achieved the dream of publishing my very first book project.
As I have said, many writers are often forced to discard their first attempt, and some even have to discard their second and third attempts, so I considered myself quite lucky. The three volumes were a good addition to any comprehensive occult library, but the overall process had lost some of the original passion and luster that it had back in the 90's. The three books sold some copies here and there over the last few years, but bought together, they were indeed a bit pricey. Sales began to dwindle and I wondered if they would ever be even slightly popular with occultists.
Then, as fate would have it, something odd happened to breathe new life into this work. For some reason, two of the three volumes of MARM became unsearchable when searching the author’s name. Nothing that the staff at Megalithica or Immanion did could rectify this problem, and they did try to fix it. It was just really weird. Then late last year, Taylor Elwood recommended that perhaps the solution would be to pull the three volumes together into one large “omnibus” edition. He asked me if this would be OK, and I heartily approved. So after a few months of steadfast work, which was mostly done by Taylor Elwood, Storm Constantine (the owner of Immanion), and Andy Bigwood (the cover artist), a new version of the book came out in early April, and I got my first copies later that month.
Needless to say, I was really pleased by the look and feel of this book, and the layout was done quite well and cleanly, too. The cover art has a new illustration that incorporates the three previous covers of the old three volume set into one unified and colorful concept. I also really loved the matt finish of the book cover, and that appears to be a nice texture quality that is found in other books recently published. As I held the new omnibus edition in my sweaty hands, I felt a strange sensation occurring within me.
This book was once rejected by publishers and existed only in Xerox copied editions with ring binders. Then it was produced as three separate book volumes, which seemed to confuse a few of my critics who hadn’t bothered to read all three of them before commenting. But the new omnibus edition, which combined the Foundation, Grimoire and Greater Key into one large three-part volume seemed to make the MARM series reborn into a newer and better format. I was witnessing my book idea in its third incarnation, and the final version, at over 500 pages, seems much more like the comprehensive work that I had planned it to be all those years ago. Now the passion from the original work has been restored, and I am once again quite excited by it.
Anyway, many thanks to Taylor Elwood, Storm Constantine and Andy Bigwood for their excellent and good work. You can purchase a copy of this book at Amazon dot com at the following link. If you have waited until now to purchase this work, I can at last truly recommend it as a literary dream come true. I am quite pleased with this newly revised book, and I believe that you will find it very useful and economical as well.
Frater Barrabbas

The regulation of magical practices is not uncommon in parts of Africa and Asia. Recently a Civil Aviation Authority official in Swaziland confirmed that witches riding broomsticks are prohibited by law from flying any higher than 150 meters. The law was put into place to protect the country's airspace and is not unlike laws in the United States that limit ultralight flights to 500 feet, only slightly higher than the Swaziland law specifies.

Witches’ broomsticks are considered similar to any heavier-than-air transportation device that is airborne, reports The Star. “A witch on a broomstick should not fly above the [150-metre] limit,” Civil Aviation Authority marketing and corporate affairs director Sabelo Dlamini told the newspaper. No penalties exist for witches flying below 150 metres.

The report said it was hard to say how serious he was, but witchcraft isn’t a joking matter in Swaziland, where the people believe in it. The statute also forbids toy helicopters and children’s kites from ascending too high into the country’s airspace.
Like all witches that are currently believed to exist in the real world (as opposed to those found in Hollywood movies and Halloween-based tourist attractions), Swaziland's witches are not reputed to fly through the air on broomsticks. So it may be that Dlamini was kidding around or using an outrageous example to illustrate the law. However, this strikes me as a rather dangerous statement to make in country where people are still killed by angry mobs for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

I recently came across this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing an idea familiar to magical practitioners and which I have been considering since working on my experimental psychology degree back in the early 1990's. The concept of building a body of light or field of consciousness that is self-sustaining and therefore immortal has been part of the Western Esoteric Tradition for a very long time, and when you combine that notion with the rapid advancement still going on in computing technology this is what you get - the possibility of preserving the mind as essentially a mathematical object that can be simulated in a digital environment.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson played around with this idea in his novel Neuromancer, both in the form of a sentient artificial intelligence and a "ROM construct" that represented the uploaded and stored mind of an individual preserved at the moment of death. Researcher Ken Hayworth believes that our technology will soon reach the point where this is no longer fiction, and may be possible to achieve by constructing complete maps of individual brains called "connectomes."

Connectomics is a new way of looking at an old idea. Since the mid-19th century, scientists have known that the brain comprises a dense web of neurons. Only recently, however, have they been able to get a detailed glimpse. The view is daunting. A piece of human brain tissue the size of a thimble contains around 50 million neurons and close to a trillion synapses. Scientists compare the task of tracing each connection to untangling a heaping plate of microscopically thin spaghetti.

In 1986, researchers did manage to map the nervous system of a millimeter-long soil worm known as C. elegans. Though the creature has only 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses, the project took a dozen years. (The lead scientist, Sydney Brenner, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002, is also at Janelia Farm.) C. elegans's remains the only connectome ever completed. According to one projection, if the same techniques were used to map just one cubic millimeter of human cortex, it could take a million person-years.


In 2010, Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard and a leading light in connectomics, and Narayanan Kasthuri, also of Harvard, published a small paper full of big numbers. Based on their estimates, a human connectome would generate one trillion gigabytes of raw data. By comparison, the entire Human Genome Project requires only a few gigabytes. A human connectome would be the most complicated map the world has ever seen.

Yet it could be a reality before the end of the century, if not sooner, thanks to new technologies that "automate the process of seeing smaller," as Sebastian Seung puts it in his new book, Connectome: How The Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). "Neuroscience has not yet been able to deliver on the idea of understanding the brain as a bunch of neurons because our tools have been too crude," he explains in an interview. "But now there's a new optimism that we can deliver on that promise."
Israel Regardie famously commented regarding the Golden Dawn magical system, "Initiation is the preparation for immortality. Man is only potentially immortal. Immortality is acquired when the purely human part of himself becomes allied to that spiritual essence which was never created, was never born, and shall never die. It is to effect this spiritual bond with the highest that the Golden Dawn owes its ritual and practical magical work." To the esotericist, the structure of the brain corresponds to an underlying spiritual construct which may be regarded as the soul or spirit, depending upon the terminology of the esoteric system employed. It seems reasonable to assume that if a spiritual dimension is indeed present in matter, the way in which the individual neurons are arranged within the brain must in some fashion resonate with this additional dimension.

This implies that the key to immortalizing the soul within this spiritual realm in any sense that we would perceive as continuity of consciousness, the practice would have to work by patterning this spiritual aspect of the self by essentially "uploading" the physical mind's contents. Experimentally, this may be possible but it is also extremely limited in the sense that as far as we can tell only fragmentary bits and pieces of the personality can be stored in this manner. Tibetan tulkus, who have been developing techniques for the preservation of consciousness for more that a thousand years, can apparently transmit portions - but only portions - of their conscious awareness. The Dalai Lama is one of the best documented cases of this - as a child, Tenzin Gyatso was able to recognize and identify various items that had belonged to the previous lama, allowing him to be recognized as the next incarnation of the lineage. However, he did not retain anything resembling the full consciousness and knowledge of the previous lama, and for the most part had to be educated as any child would.

One of the strongest arguments against "full reincarnation" - the idea that the entire personality is, in effect, reborn into a new body - is evidence compiled from the study of brain injuries. If skills and knowledge were stored within the field of consciousness itself rather than within the cells of the brain, patients with brain injuries should not experience nearly the loss of function and memory that has been observed. This strongly supports the conclusion that most of our individual skills and knowledge are in fact stored in the tissues of the brain. It may be that the individual point of awareness that we associate with our will can move on to another body, but brain science shows that for the most part it must do this without any real continuity of knowledge from lifetime to lifetime.

A connectome-based model of the brain might allow us to bridge this gap. If brain structure could be preserved in such a way that continuity of awareness is achieved, the result could indeed represent the alchemists' dream - truly immortal consciousness. Reviewing Hayworth's methods, though, I foresee a simple problem that Roger Penrose outlined in The Emperor's New Mind. While sufficiently advanced mapping technology would allow us to generate a map of a preserved brain and upload it into a digital form, quantum fluctuations of the individual particles involved may mean a true, exact map is impossible to generate in such a way that continuity of awareness is preserved. Instead, the upload would represent a close copy that may behave authentically but not actually preserve the "spark" of moment-to-moment consciousness of the individual.

Fortunately this problem does have a possible solution that if implemented properly it could further mean the full connectome mapping would not need to be done all at once. I envision a system in which an interface is developed between the neurons of the brain and a computer simulation that is connected over the course of many years and which incorporates a simple algorithm that allows the simulation to expand its "net" of neurons according to the way in which the brain naturally develops. If the simulation is close enough, the brain's own holgraphic storage mechanisms should be able to integrate this digital network into its own. Not only would it be able to expand and substantially increase the intelligence of the connected individual, it would also serve as a permanent anchor for the mathematical object that conscious awareness appears to represent.

Upon the death of the physical body, this hybrid cyber-consciousness would experience a loss of function based corresponding to the information contained within the biological brain, but its awareness should continue just as that of brain injury patients does. The interface could then be connected to a new physical brain and much of the information from the previous body essentially transferred. The human being and the machine would in effect function as symbiotes with a unified field of awareness, and furthermore as the computing power available to the digital portion expands it may be that after, say, many centuries of dynamic expansion the vast majority of this continuing consciousness would reside in the eternal digital realm. The elixir of life would become a physical reality, mediated by information technology.

While the development of such a system probably will not take place in any of our lifetimes, it should be pointed out that the problems involved are essentially engineering challenges that can be overcome by the application of greater computing power. The algorithms themselves for simulating neurons, such as the system recently announced by IBM, appear to be fundamentally sound. Interfaces linking neurons with computers exist today; their speed would need to be massively increased to facilitate anything resembling consciousness transfer, but the technology involved in making this work is no longer unimaginable as it once was. The issues involved are now quantitative rather than qualitative, and computing advancements show few signs of slowing down. Even the limitations of silicon itself may someday be overcome by the advent of quantum computing, examples of which currently exist in research laboratories, and it may be that a quantum computing principles are precisely what the physical brain employs in order to process information.

On a more esoteric note, envisioning how this system would work can provide some insight into how the spiritual version of it as practiced by tulkus and others looking to secure continuity of consciousness can be done. In order to pattern the body of light, interaction with it must be integrated into one's daily life and basic spiritual practices. As these are sustained over time, the spiritual body will grow and develop, providing insight into and awareness of an expanded realm of experience that incorporates the spiritual dimension in which consciousness can manifest. Such work and meditation is the means by which the point of awareness itself can survive the death of the physical body and move on to other things, whether they entail remaining in the realm of the spirit, seeking union with the dynamic ground of being, or reincarnating back into material existence.

This image has been circulating on the Internet for awhile, but I ignored it because I thought it had to be a hoax. The ease with which pictures can be faked is well known, and it's hard to believe any school would ever administer such a quiz. I've heard of the controversies over school boards packed by conservative Christians who want to give teachers the "freedom" to teach alternatives to evolution, but a quiz like this really takes the cake. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be real. That's right, there's an actual school that teaches this nonsense in science classes.

To start with, this photo is real, and was part of a quiz given at Blue Ridge Christian Academy, a private religious school. Since the school is private, and not public, this is not a violation of the First Amendment (unlike the flagrant stomping of the Constitution going on in Louisiana). In other words, this school can legally teach this. My complaint, therefore, is not a legal one. My complaint is one of simple reality. Young-Earth creationism is wrong, and it’s certainly not science. For that reason alone, ideally it shouldn't be taught as truth anywhere, let alone a science class.

And it’s not just wrong, it’s spectacularly wrong. It’s the wrongiest wrong that ever wronged. We know the Earth is old, we know the Universe is even older, and we know evolution is true. Any one of these things is enough to show creationism is wrong. In fact, all of science shows creationism is wrong, because creationism goes against pretty much every founding principle of and every basic fact uncovered by science. If creationism were true, then essentially no modern invention would work. Since you’re reading this on a computer, that right there is proof enough.
That this would come from a private religious school makes sense, as I can't imagine even a highly compromised public school being quite this blatant. Still, what's amazing to me is how this particular strand of creationist thought is presented as indisputable, when in fact Christian denominations can't even agree on how it should be interpreted. Mainstream Christian churches disavowed young-Earth creationism long ago. For that matter, even Pat Robertson, one of the most prominent conservative evangelicals, came out against it back in November. So it would seem that the folks running this school are determined to raise the most ignorant children possible when it comes to understanding not only the natural world, but also the theological discourse within their own religious tradition.

One of the research findings that I covered awhile back related Qigong practices to the generation of infrasonic waves. Any Qigong student will tell you that plants have a particular sort of Qi or energy, different from that of animals but present nonetheless. Researchers have now found that plants do in fact produce microscopic sound waves that can influence the growth of other plants. It may be that practitioners who work with Qi are able to sense these same vibrations, as well as issue sonic vibrations of their own.

It’s long been known that planting basil near other species can tend to encourage its neighbor’s growth, and it’s not new that plants communicate with each other through shade, chemical smells, root structures and other forms of touch. What scientists at the University of Western Australia were looking at specifically is if there’s any other ways that plants communicate, and what they found is astonishing. By planting chili pepper next to basil, then separating them from all known methods of plant interaction, the chili plant still grew as if it knew the basil was there.

“We have previously suggested that acoustic signals may offer such a mechanism for mediating plant-plant relationships,” they explained in their conclusion (PDF), “and proposed that such signals may be generated in plants by biochemical processes within the cell, where nanomechanical oscillations of various components in the cytoskeleton can produce a spectrum of vibrations.”
So maybe Qi really corresponds to "energy" after all - sonic vibrations have a measurable physical intensity. This might also explain why some people seem to have "green thumbs" even when they are very casual about caring for their plants. The plants themselves may just like the infrasonic vibrations produced by those individuals. It's also no big secret that sonic waves such as those corresponding to the vibration of names of power and so forth play an important role in magical operations. Closer investigation of the properties of these waves could prove very fruitful in terms of quantifying paranormal phenomena.

Stories of the magical use of unicorn horns go back to the Middle Ages. The horns that still exist in museums come from the narwhal, a species of whale that like the mythological unicorn grows a single horn from the center of its forehead. As this article published in the Harvard Gazette back in 2005 explains, the horn of the narwhal is far more than a simple horn or tusk. According to researcher Martin Nweeia it is a complex organ for sensing the temperature, pressure, and composition of the water around it.

Ten million tiny nerve connections tunnel their way from the central nerve of the narwhal tusk to its outer surface. Though seemingly rigid and hard, the tusk is like a membrane with an extremely sensitive surface, capable of detecting changes in water temperature, pressure, and particle gradients. Because these whales can detect particle gradients in water, they are capable of discerning the salinity of the water, which could help them survive in their Arctic ice environment. It also allows the whales to detect water particles characteristic of the fish that constitute their diet. There is no comparison in nature in tooth form, expression, and functional adaptation.

"Why would a tusk break the rules of normal development by expressing millions of sensory pathways that connect its nervous system to the frigid arctic environment?" asks Nweeia. "Such a finding is startling and indeed surprised all of us who discovered it." Nweeia collaborated on this project with Frederick Eichmiller, director of the Paffenbarger Research Center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and James Mead, curator of Marine Mammals at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.
What's most interesting to me is that one of the principal uses of the unicorn horn in folklore is as a magical implement to detect poisons, and in fact when attached to a living narwhal it would be sensitive enough to chemicals in the water to do exactly that. So how did that particular bit of information make it into the stories? It seems like a remarkable coincidence that the narwhal would use its horn for the exact same purpose that magicians did, when the science of how the horn works was only recently discovered.

The story all over the media today is the rescue of three Cleveland women who had been held in captivity for many years. Amanda Berry, the second woman kidnapped, had been held for more than a decade. Back in 2004, on The Montel Williams Show, Berry's mother was told by celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne that her daughter was dead. With Berry's successful rescue, it's now clear that Browne's alleged abilities were at the very least seriously off that day. This article, originally published in 2004 before the young woman's fate was known, covers the broadcast.

Desperate for any clue as to Amanda Berry’s whereabouts, and tired of unanswered questions from authorities, Miller turned to a psychic on Montel Williams’ nationally syndicated television show. The psychic said what the FBI, police and Miller hadn’t. “She’s not alive, honey,” Sylvia Browne told her matter-of-factly. “Your daughter’s not the kind who wouldn’t call.”

With those blunt words, Browne persuaded Miller to accept a grim probability that has become more likely with each passing day. Miller went back to the West Side home where she had been keeping Amanda’s things in careful order and cleaned up. She gave away her daughter’s computer and took down her pictures. “I’m not even buying my baby a Christmas present this year,” she said. Miller said she returned devastated from the show, taped this month in New York.
Is it overly cynical of me to suspect that Browne has no powers at all and was just playing the odds? Perhaps, but even though I believe that there are genuine psychics in the world, this is pretty transparent. At the time the show was taped Berry had been missing for nineteen months. If you look at actual criminal abduction cases, the odds that a missing person will reappear after being gone so long is probably something like one percent or less. Guessing they're dead is pretty much the definition of playing it safe.


The fact is that as many skeptics note, you can be right a lot of time just by understanding the odds of various events. Alternately, perhaps like most magicians Browne's powers only work some of the time and when they don't she has to cheat. Still, given the emotions involved the latter strikes me as pretty unethical. If Browne was getting nothing, she should have just said that she was getting nothing - and resisted the temptation to play the odds with Berry's grieving mother.

I understand that celebrity psychics engaging in media appearances are under a lot of pressure to get something, but faking it - ever - just adds to the widespread perception that these people are frauds and therefore so is absolutely anything psychic or paranormal. I realize that stating she was having a bad day on national television would have hurt Browne's public image and undermined her with clients who pay good money for her insights, but what about now? It strikes me as pretty dumb to pay for psychic visions that are simple guesses you could make yourself at least some of the time.

Given these events it would be interesting to see a breakdown of Browne's predictions and how accurate they really are. I have no idea where to find all the information for this, as her career has been quite long, but I would be looking in particular for (A) cases in which she predicted something unlikely that came to pass and (B) cases in which she predicted something likely that did not. In fact, this schema could provide a metric by which psychics could be evaluated that teases out normal guesswork. Theoretically, a psychic who has a high A/B ratio should be more likely to have genuine powers than someone whose ratio is low.

It seems that I'm not the only one doing talismanic work lately. RO put up a post yesterday describing his own recent efforts in that regard around the time I was putting this one together over the weekend. The ritual described here has a lot in common with my Venus elixir ritual that I put together for the transit of Venus last June. The reason that I decided to go for Venus again had a lot to do with my studies of traditional astrology, in that a particularly favorable Venus election manifested last Friday morning during the first hour of the day. So it entailed rising early, which I'm not particularly fond of doing, but I'm expecting that the talisman itself will prove potent enough to justify the loss of sleep.

Venus is not just associated with love spells, which I'm not in need of at the moment, even though that's the most common sort of Venus rite most magicians perform and such rituals do work quite well. The state of consciousness associated with the planet is "the vision of beauty triumphant" and in traditional astrology the planet is considered the lesser benefic, the greater benefic being Jupiter. Venus is also associated with art, creativity, and aesthetic virtue in addition to this sort of general good fortune. I won't reveal the exact nature of the charge here as the talisman itself represents an ongoing operation, but its influence is intended to fall within those areas rather than the realm of love and relationships.

Because the nature of the talisman is generalized, the angel of Venus is conjured rather than the intelligence or spirit. The intelligence of a planet is best for Theurgic rituals intended to induce particular states of consciousness or obtain information about the divine realm or for protection, while the spirit is best for obtaining specific practical objectives - the more specific the better. This contradicts Agrippa's statement that the "intelligence is for good and the spirit is for bad," but my experience with these entities suggests that this stems more from a bias against "sorcery" - that is, practical magick - than anything inherent in their nature.

Some of this bias may also be due to the fact that a spirit conjured on its own without the influence of the intelligence behaves like a blind force that's hard to control, but the solution there is simply that you never do it. Even when calling on the spirit to perform an specific action, you conjure the intelligence first to provide a measure of control. With a generalized intent, though, that may involve both Theurgic and Thaumaturgic components in some unknown combination, the angel is usually a better option. You don't need any sort of additional sigil to conjure the angel; the planetary seal from Agrippa works just fine.


In a previous series of magical operations with my working group I constructed a series of seven planetary tablets in the Golden Dawn flashing color style incorporating the planetary seal from Agrippa and a collection of names associated with each planetary realm. Such tablets are wonderful implements - they mean that when conjuring the angel, most of your preparation is already done for you. You just put the tablet in the center of your altar, set your talisman on top of it, and you're good to go with the ritual proper.

This rite also incorporates the main magical weapons that I use in my workings, a Tibetan phurba dagger that I use as a banishing implement and a purpleheart wand with an opal at the base and a carnelian at the tip that I use as an invoking wand. In the context of my operant field model, the dagger is used from Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the invoking wand is used for the Lesser and Greater Invoking Rituals of the Hexagram, in addition to being employed during the conjuration. In this rite the bell chime is used to mark both the opening of the operant field and the arrival of the angel.

The ritual itself follows. It may be adapted for any of the other seven ancient planets by substituting their seals, employing the appropriate form of the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram, and changing the colors visualized and number of circumambulations to match.

The temple is arranged with an altar in the center. The altar holds the banishing dagger, invoking wand, bell chime, and a cloth to shroud the talisman. In the center of the altar is placed the Venus tablet. The material basis for the talisman is placed on top of the tablet at the start of the rite and remains there throughout.

I. Opening

Officiant starts at the west of the altar facing east. All others present stand around the altar as space permits, facing inwards.

Officiant: Balasti! Ompehda!

Officiant then performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, with all present joining in for the initial Qabalistic Cross.

II. The Magical Field

Officiant performs the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram.

III. Preliminary Invocation

Any invocation by which the group accomplishes union with the divine may be substituted here. My working group usually employs Aleister Crowley’s Prayer of the Aeon, shown here.

All: Now I begin to pray, thou child,
Holy thy name and undefiled
Thy reign is come, thy will is done
Bring me through midnight to the Sun.
Save me from evil and from good,
That thy one crown of all the ten.
Even now and here be mine.
AMEN.

Bell Chime.

IV. Conjuration

Officiant performs the Greater Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram for Venus (Venus hexagram in emerald green, Venus symbol in scarlet, godname YHVH Tzabaoth).

Officiant: Oh glorious and mighty ANAEL, you who command and rule over the intelligences and spirits of NOGAH, behold me, and in the name of the same your God, the beautiful and triumphant YHVH TZABAOTH, attend and appear before us now. Full powers and wonders of the planet Venus do we rightly desire! Enlighten our understanding, encourage our hearts, and manifest unto the majesty of your spiritual realm.

All: So mote it be!

Officiant: Gloria Patri et Matri et Filius et Filia et spiritui sancto interno et spiritui sancto externo ut erat est erit in saeculo saeculorum sex in uno per nomen septem in uno…

All: ARARITA.

Led by Officiant, all begin to vibrate the name ANAEL as a chant. When Officiant senses the angel’s presence, he or she rings the bell chime and the chant stops.

V. Charging of the Talisman

Officiant: O beautiful and triumphant ANAEL! To thee we raise this talisman of our magickal will! We ask thee, oh Exalted One, to receive this body of our rite into the light of thy presence. As we proceed in making this Talisman of Venus, I charge you to manifest the victorious energies of NOGAH vitalized in Assiah by thy blessing. In the crafting of this Mystery, let there be unto our creation vitality of soul and true embodiment of the wonders of thy Sphere!

All make seven clockwise circumambulations, visualizing a wall of emerald green light whirling rapidly about the circle while maintaining attention on the talisman. When this is finished the wall of light is allowed to fade.

The formal charge linked to the talisman is now delivered to Anael.

Once the charge is delivered Officiant raises power, visualizing a continuous spiral of emerald green light ascending from the ground at feet, whirling clockwise around the body and ascending until it disappears above the head. He or she holds the visualization and vibrates the divine name once.

YHVH TZABAOTH

Officiant then allows spiral to fade. Each participant in turn, clockwise around circle, does the same as above. When finished, all vibrate the name once more.

YHVH TZABAOTH

With Officiant leading, all extend hands toward the center of the altar, visualizing beams of emerald green light emanating from both hands and entering into the talisman. When the talisman feels “full” of power Officiant ends visualization and folds hands on breast, left over right. All do likewise. Finally, the Officiant traces in a horizontal plane the symbol of Venus over the tablet while vibrating the divine name once more.

YHVH TZABAOTH

All make one more complete circumambulation of the circle, then shroud talisman.

Officiant: There is success.

All: ABRAHADABRA!

VI. The License to Depart

Officiant: O thou ANAEL, praise and honor be unto thee for the splendor of thine office and the majesty of thy being. And the blessing of thy God and mine, the beautiful and triumphant YHVH TZABAOTH. Because thou hast diligently answered unto our demands, and hast been very ready and willing to come at our call, we do here license thee to depart unto thy proper place; without causing harm or danger unto man or beast. Depart, then, I say, and be thou very ready to come at our call, being duly exorcised and conjured by these sacred rites of magick. AMEN.

All: So mote it be!

VII. Closing

Officiant performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, with all joining in for the final the Qabalistic Cross.

Officiant: I now declare this temple duly closed.

Battery: 1.

Just in time for Beltane, it turns out that the ancient Egyptians took part in annual rituals involving widespread sex and drinking. While most Egyptian rituals were highly organized affairs revolving around the priesthood, this particular rite was a far more chaotic affair. Archaeologist Betsy Bryan has pieced together some of the details of these ceremonies from evidence uncovered during the excavation of an ancient temple complex.

Since 2001, Bryan has led the excavation of the temple complex of the Egyptian goddess Mut in modern-day Luxor, the site of the city of Thebes in ancient Egypt. And the ritual she has uncovered, which centers on binge drinking, thumping music and orgiastic public sex, probably makes "Jersey Shore" look pretty tame. At least it was thought to serve a greater societal purpose.

Bryan, a specialist in the art, ritual and social hierarchy of Egypt's New Kingdom (roughly 1600 to 1000 BC), has painstakingly pieced together the details of the Festivals of Drunkenness, which took place in homes, at temples and in makeshift desert shrines throughout ancient Egypt at least once and, in some places (including at the Temple of Mut), twice a year.
The sexual aspects of the rite were intended to represent and encourage fertility much like those associated with modern-day Beltane, and were also thought to facilitate the annual rise of the Nile which was vital to agriculture in the region. The drinking was related to the destruction wrought by the lion goddess in Egyptian mythology, and in fact it seems the point of it was to drink until one passed out. Everyone would eventually awake to the beating of drums.

Unsurprisingly, there is substantial evidence that many Egyptians disapproved of these rituals. I suppose that just goes to show killjoys have been with us from the beginning of time.

Hardcore skeptics can be a real annoyance to anyone trying to explore paranormal or even unusual phenomena, such as those who insist that acupuncture doesn't work even though recent scientific studies show that it clearly does. At the same time, however, those who are honestly examining the data and working to eliminate fraud perform a valuable public service by preventing confidence artists from enriching themselves on the basis of phony paranormal claims. In a victory for the skeptic movement, and which should be considered a victory for the paranormal movement as well, James McCormick, the maker of a "high tech" bomb detecting device that essentially works as a dowsing rod, was recently convicted for fraud.

The devices did nothing at all to detect bombs. They didn’t even have any working electronics in them. Instead they rely on what’s called the ideomotor effect; small movements of the human body we aren’t conscious of, but can be affected by what we want them to do. The classic examples of this are Ouija boards and dowsing rods, both of which have no paranormal ability at all. They simply reflect what our brains are telling our muscles to do.

This has been shown to be true over and again, so much and so thoroughly that there’s little room for doubt. These bomb sniffers worked the same way, as was brought to light by skeptics James Randi and Air Force Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack. And as with dowsing rods, the people who use them swear they work, despite proof that they can't work, and are no better than random chance at detecting objects. Flipping a coin would do as well.

Unlike skeptic Phil Plait, the author of this article, I'm convinced that there are people capable of dowsing. For that matter, a number of Thelemites perform divinations using the I Ching, which can be done by flipping a series of coins. The problem here is that success in dowsing has nothing to do with the rods themselves - as Plait correctly notes, a dowsing rod (or Ouija board or pendulum or whatever) moves based on picking up small movements of the user's muscles, not on its own. This means that even according to the magical paradigm, the material the rods are made from has nothing to do with how well they work and the dowsing itself is essentially a psychic ability that the individual using the device must possess.

The big story here, though, doesn't even revolve around whether or not dowsing works. As I see it, the fraud revolves around the price tag for these "high tech" devices - $16,500 to $60,000 each. This for a device that, even from the perspective of a true believer, is no more effective than a forked stick you can just pick up off the ground or a couple of bent coathangers. Furthermore, there's really no possible way that the manufacturer could not have known this. The "electronics" in the device were fake and talking to a dowser for five minutes should have made it clear to McCormick that the skill involved is of a psychic nature, not an inherent property of sticks or wires.

So regardless of my disagreement with Plait over the nature of dowsing, I'm glad to see this transparent fraud convicted and this ridiculous gadget off the market. Unfortunately, Iraqi security forces are still using them, which can only spell disaster unless every single individual using them happens to have heightened psychic ability - and even then, you're talking about a statistical rather than a deterministic method. Hopefully the skeptics can keep at it and manage to get the devices shelved, as their technological appearance leads the user to think that something other than psychic awareness might be going on. Not to mention that anyone who seems to be able to use it successfully could save an awful lot of money by switching to an ordinary stick.

Spoiler: Nope!
For those who might be tempted to dismiss obsession with Masonic conspiracy theories as harmless nuttery, this story out of New Mexico should make it clear just how dangerous such obsessions can become. A man there has been charged with vandalizing a Masonic lodge and attacking a church choir director that he believed to be a Mason. He claimed that his actions were motivated by Masonic involvement in a far-reaching conspiracy, which almost certainly is related to the "Illuminati" nonsense that has recently been all over the Internet.

Lawrence Capener, 24, told police that he tagged the Sandoval No. 76 Masonic Lodge in Rio Rancho with spray paint on Sunday, authorities said. Police later found red and blue spray paint on signs, outside walls and a door. Investigators said he also left the message, "I hope you guess who I am." Capener is accused of attacking a choir leader at St. Jude Thaddeus Catholic Church at the end of Sunday Mass services. At least two others were stabbed in the attack when they tried to stop Capener.

According to a criminal complaint, Capener vaulted over pews and lashed out at choir director Adam Alvarez, who had his back toward him. The complaint said church flutist Gerald Madrid saw Alvarez being attacked and attempted to "bear hug" Capener to try and stop him. Madrid was then stabbed five times in his back by Capener, authorities said. Capener later told police that he was "99 percent sure Alvarez was a mason" and that he thought Alvarez was involved in a conspiracy.

It's not so much that reasonable people believe in Masonic conspiracies so evil that the only remedy is murder, but rather that these imaginary plots provide a convenient framework for the delusions of unhinged individuals just like space aliens and CIA operatives can. However, unlike space aliens Masons are actually present on this planet, and unlike CIA operatives they have no intelligence agencies keeping their identities secret. In fact, many Masons are open about their affiliation precisely because the fraternity does not actively recruit members. You have to ask one to become one, which is pretty difficult if you have no idea who the Masons are, so we're not that hard to find.

As a past master of Braden Lodge #168 here in the Twin Cities, I can assure you that eavesdropping on a Masonic meeting would be incredibly boring. The "sinister resolutions" we vote on involve things like paying the rent, planning fundraisers, and allocating charitable donations. Aside from that, we vote on petitions for membership and plan degrees, the latter being the only "secret" part of the meeting - because as in all mystery traditions, an important part of the initiation experience is coming to the degree without any preconceived idea of what will happen. Knowing about things like parts and cast lists almost certainly would give some of what goes on away.

There was a time when a sort of Masonic "conspiracy" did exist, but those days are long gone. When the United States was founded Masonry took on some of the duties performed by the state religions of Europe, such as dedicating buildings. At that time it was difficult to become successful in politics without being a member of the fraternity, and this generated enough concern among the public that our nation's first major third political party was the anti-Masonic party. Likewise, soldiers who fought in the Second World War became Masons in large numbers because lodges overseas provided instant fellowship, and when that generation returned so many had joined that it was difficult to succeed as an independent businessman without being a member.

Today, though, the fraternity has been in decline for decades. When I joined the lodge in 1997 there were almost twice as many Masons on the state of Minnesota as there are now. That same World War II generation that exploded the numbers of lodges everywhere is in the process of passing away, leaving many lodges nearly empty all over the country. The Boomer generation had little interest in what they perceived as an organization associated with the status quo, and as a result until relatively recently few younger members joined. It should be pointed out that if we Masons are indeed so powerful, why is it that these lodges are having so much trouble keeping their doors open?

In fact, it's possible that much of the conspiracy mumbo-jumbo about Masonry has become so prevalent is because with our reduced numbers, most people don't have Masons in their circle of friends so the fraternity seems exotic and weird. At the same time, our lack of resources means that an effective public relations campaign on behalf of Masonry would be too expensive to carry out in a reasonable and efficient manner. Besides, the most obsessed conspiracy theorists are not going to be convinced by such a campaign, and those are the very people most likely to become dangerous.

Brazilian evangelical pastor Valdeci Sobrino Picanto was recently arrested. His crime? Convincing his congregants that his penis contains "sacred milk." And yes, that's just as bad as it sounds. The British press can rail all it wants about allegations of OTO being a "sex cult," but the fact is that if anyone in the Order tried a stunt like this it would never go anywhere because they would be laughed out of the lodge. Or, if anything non-consensual occurred, expelled outright.

Picanto told his followers that the Holy Spirit would secrete from his penis in the form of “sacred milk“. This pastor said that his penis was blessed and that “the Lord had consecrated him with divine milk of the “Holy Spirit,” reports Vatican Crimes.

One of Picanto’s followers stated, “He convinced us that only God could come into our lives through our mouth and that’s why he would do what he did. Often, after worship, pastor Valdeci would take us to where the funds were kept at the back of the Church and asked us to have oral sex with him until the Holy Spirit would come through ejaculation.“
I suppose this constitutes a novel interpretation of Matthew 15:11 - "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man." Seriously, though, where do churches find these people? Settlements related to sex abuse scandals have cost churches billions over the last decade or so. You would think at some point these pastors would just wise up and keep it in their pants.

The recent flap over British celebrity Peaches Geldof's possible involvement in OTO has returned Aleister Crowley's special relationship with the British press corps to the spotlight. This relationship dates back more than a century, and can best be described as one in which given a chance to vilify Crowley, the British press leaps to do so at the slightest possible opportunity. One example is the awful Guardian article that I linked to in my previous post, but here are more:

• The Daily Mail.
• The Mirror.
• The Telegraph.
• Another from The Daily Mail.

Some are worse than others, but all contain substantial inaccuracies and they aren't the only articles out there. A number of other tabloids and celebrity gossip sites have picked up the story using the above as their sources, spreading the nonsense far and wide. Occulture has now responded to these articles with - gasp - accurate information about Crowley and the Order, noting that among other things the reporters working on the above stories apparently couldn't even be bothered to look up Ordo Templi Orientis on Wikipedia. That's some crack reporting right there.


Seizing on Crowley’s appetite for drugs and sex, while totally ignoring the fact that Crowley saw these as legitimate routes to spiritual enlightenment, today’s press have spun a lazy and inaccurate picture of the O.T.O., pulling out all the hackneyed tropes about sleaze, drug-fuelled sex orgies, Satanism, sacrifice, and more worryingly, links to Nazism and anti-Semitism, in order to flesh out their weak and unsubstantiated claims of the Order’s activities.

Seemingly unable to locate the excellent and highly informative Wikipedia page on the O.T.O., or to read any of the numerous professional websites maintained by the Order itself, the press have instead chosen to put their lot in with the type of YouTube-addicted teenage conspiracy theorists who claim that anyone from Jay-Z and Beyoncé to Barack Obama are members of the Order, that the O.T.O. is somehow responsible for the ‘occult symbolism’ found in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics, and all the while being secretly involved in the highest levels of politics, entertainment and international business.

This reliance on paranoid teenage fantasy in order to sell newspapers is telling. What it exposes is that the press is not in the least bit interested in fact, and when it comes to the personal spiritual explorations of a young woman, who just happens to have famous parents, not one of the newspapers or magazines who have run stories on Geldof have been against stooping to the lowest journalistic standards to sell more units.
In response to the Guardian article, I commented that it was so bad I didn't even know where to start. Occulture is clearly mightier than I am in that regard, because those three paragraphs completely nail it. It's amazing that even in this day and age, with biographies of Crowley far better than John Symonds' lurid and dishonest The Great Beast available, that the British press nonetheless latch onto the latter book as though it represents the absolute, unvarnished truth about Crowley and the Order that he once led. The fact that many of its allegations are simply nonsensical tabloid fodder woven into a biographical narrative to make the book more shocking is conveniently ignored.

To live is to change; and to oppose change is to revolt against the law which we have enacted to govern our lives. To resent destiny is thus to abdicate our sovereignty, and to invoke death. Indeed, we have decreed the doom of death for every breach of the law of Life. — Crowley The blog [...]