Aleister and Adolf

The latest from Douglas Rushkoff, with images by Michael Avon Oeming.

Review on Boing Boing (has a range of images from the book)

Language of the birds

Fascinating exhibition in New York 

Images below from the Disinfo site

"The exhibition takes its name from the historical and cross-cultural notion that there is a magic language via which only the initiated can communicate. Often referred to as the “language of the birds,” it is a system rumored to operate in symbols, and to be a vehicle for revealing hidden truths and igniting metamorphic sparks."

Nino Japaridze “Six of Winds” 2015. Courtesy Gallery of Surrealism

Participating Artists

Kenneth Anger * Anohni (FKA Antony Hegarty) * Laura Battle * Jordan Belson * Alison Blickle * Carol Bove * Jesse Bransford * BREYER P-ORRIDGE * John Brill * Robert Buratti * Elijah Burgher * Cameron * Leonora Carrington * Francesco Clemente * Ira Cohen * Brian Cotnoir * Aleister Crowley * Enrico Donati * El Gato Chimney * Leonor Fini * JFC Fuller * Helen Rebekah Garber * Rik Garrett * Delia Gonzalez * Jonah Groeneboer * Juanita Guccione * Brion Gysin * Frank Haines * Barry William Hale * Valerie Hammond * Ken Henson * Bernard Hoffman * Nino Japaridze * Gerome Kamrowski * Leo Kenney * Paul Laffoley * Adela Leibowitz * Darcilio Lima * Angus MacLise * Ann McCoy * Rithika Merchant * William Mortensen * Rosaleen Norton * Micki Pellerano * Ryan M Pfeiffer & Rebecca Walz * Max Razdow * Ron Regé, Jr. * Kurt Seligmann * Harry Smith * Kiki Smith * Xul Solar * Austin Osman Spare * Charles Stein * Shannon Taggart * Gordon Terry * Scott Treleaven * Panos Tsagaris * Charmion von Wiegand * Robert Wang * Peter Lamborn Wilson

Paul Laffoley “Astrological Ouroboros” 1965 Oil, acrylic, and hand applied vinyl letters on canvas and wood. Courtesy Kent Fine Art

A little flashback to an MLA gathering in Paris 2008, to see the exhibition Traces du Sacré (Traces of the Sacred).

Aleister Crowley “The Moon (Study for Tarot)” 1921, Oil on board. Courtesy Buratti Gallery.

Language of the Birds, or Green Language, according to Wikipedia

7 Contemporary Artists Influenced by Alchemy and Magick - at UltraCulture

James Joyce - Modern Psychonaut

“I am convinced personally that Mr. Joyce is a genius all the world will have to recognize.”

– Aleister Crowley, The Genius of Mr. James Joyce

“Joyce’s prose prepared me to enter psychedelic space.”

– Timothy Leary, FLASHBACKS

“(Finnegans Wake is) about as close to LSD on the page as you can get…”

– Terence McKenna, Surfing on Finnegans Wake

“If you’ve never had a psychedelic, reading Joyce is the next best equivalent.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, RAW Explains Everything

“I have read Finnegans Wake aloud at a time when takers of LSD said, ‘that is JUST LIKE LSD.’ So I have begun to feel that LSD may just be the lazy man’s form of Finnegans Wake.” 

– Marshall McLuhan, Q & A

“Someday I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until centuries after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I’ll be famous forever.”

– Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

“Joyce’s book is called Finnegans Wake. The missing apostrophe creates another pun,
which Joyce explained to friends as a warning to the ruling classes:
 the oppressed rise, eventually, in every historical cycle.”

– Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance

“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either
shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”

– James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

I thought it would be fun on the occasion of Bloomsday 2015 to offer up a smattering of James Joyce’s hierarchitectitiptitoploftical influence on the psychonaut counter culture, and hopefully provide a novel context for his great works, which might help them extend beyond the trappings of highfalutin literary scholarship.

Please feel free to explore for yourself:
The collected works of James Joyce

Graphic Crowley

Maybe a little present for yourself, for the new year. Buy, or download it here.

Extended review (with sample illustrations) at Bleeding Cool.

The Wormwood Star

Curtis Harrington's 1955 portrait of Marjorie Cameron (second wife of Jack Parsons) and her art...



Some details of the film from Dangerous Minds

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel on Wikipedia

The Cameron-Parsons Foundation
 Excerpt from the Foundation biog:

 In the early 1960s she corresponded with Joseph Campbell, citing her interest in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as well as in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and Isak Dinesin. Consumed by myth, and the idea of protean growth, Cameron depicted the process of metamorphosis and transformation in hundreds of line drawings where ominous figures and landscapes emerge from uniformly striated, passionately articulated ink marks. Other gouache drawings and paintings depict mythic figures of her own creation engaged, in ritualistic, symbolic acts.

ALBERT AND THE HORUS AEON

420 KABBALAH

420 KABBALAH With Eric Wagner.
Feb 22 - May 18 (2010)

PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK FOR FURTHER COURSE DETAILS.

Dude, like, Aleister Crowley said you could learn the Holy Kabbalah, in, like, two ways. You could memorize all those tables of correspondences, OR you could tackle one Kabbalistic problem and focus all your attention on it. Well, a few years ago I noticed that the Hebrew word for “smoke” adds up to 420, which I found an interesting coincidence. Man, that sounds like a Kabbalistic problem. This class will explore the mysteries of the Kabbalah through the number 420. I think this will provide a wonderful entryway into the thought of Aleister Crowley and a playful approach to the Golden Dawn material which so greatly influenced Crowley, Israel Regadie, Robert Anton Wilson and many others. Along the way we will discuss the history of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, the relationship between the Kabbalah and the Western occult tradition, and the interrationships between the Jewish, Christian and Sufi traditions. Please join us on this Kabbalistic voyage.

Text: 777 by Aleister Crowley

Also, read Eric Wagner at full steam in "AN INSIDER'S GUIDE TO ROBERT ANTON WILSON"

RAW scavenger hunt!

The Robert Anton Wilson memorabilia auctions at eBay got me thinking about the auctions Bob had while he was still alive and struggling to pay his bills.

He auctioned off individual cards from two complete Thoth decks during that time. Each was inked with a cool potato-stamp creation made just for these cards. I bought two and know of a lot of other people who also got some, but I started wondering... could we locate them all?

I'd like to give it a try. I encourage everyone who bought any of these to go to the Maybe Logic thread linked here:

MLA Scavenger Hunt thread

Post what you got, and feel free to spread the word.

ESPionage and magiCIAns

Don't start me talking
I'll tell everything I know
Gonna break up this signifying
Everybody's got to go

Sonny Boy Williamson

Magic of a kindIt’s funny how things come together. I didn't finish this yet, but here's take one...

I like magic (the conjuring tricks of my youth), but have difficulty contemplating magick (the ritual type), which (in spite of the protests of people I know who use it) seems to me like a religious or mystical modeling of the world. Still, they have lots in common (more than either might like to admit) – especially in the area of the manipulation of perceptions and beliefs.

Although a pre-computer geek sub-culture, the magic community has always seemed not so much a secret society as a ‘society with secrets’ (as the Masons also like to consider themselves). The Magic Circle of London has always sounded to me much like a sort of ‘gentleman’s club’ as so many other specialist lodges appear (My grandfather and uncle may have belonged to a masonic ‘music lodge’), but I don’t think it really bears comparison with Masonic groups, even if it shares similar structures (for decades membership remained men only, as initiation you have to perform magic in front of them, they award medals and ranks, and have an Inner Circle, etc. Still, people from all ‘classes’ – remember them? - belong.).

Membership may remain open to all, but it has an elitist quality which does seem to invite the middle classes, the established members of society, the respectable. Similarly, the defence of the realm (the intelligence services) have drawn most of their candidates from Oxbridge (I suspect you will find more John Le Carrés than Harry Palmers).

Magic and spiesAnd the skills of the magician (trickster version) have always figured in secret service skills and interests. The perfect murder? Slipping things into people’s drinks unnoticed? Picking their pocket, extracting information and returning it? Codes and ciphers? Hiding information? Misleading people?

You can find how John Mulholland (a widely respected magician) got involved with spooks, and shared his skills, and is now sometimes vilified by his fellow magicians – for misuse of the arts – in this book.

The MagiCIAn: John Mulholland's Secret Life

If you don’t want to read a book, this article in Genii (Genii - The Conjuror’s Magazine - April 2001) might do

THE SPHINX AND THE SPY
The Clandestine World of John Mulholland
By Michael Edwards Copyright 2001 by The Genii Corporation. _All Rights Reserved. _

"The manual as it now stands consists of the following five sections:
1. Underlying bases for the successful performance of tricks and the background of the psychological principles by which they operate.
2. Tricks with pills.
3. Tricks with loose solids.
4. Tricks with liquids.5. Tricks by which small objects may be obtained secretly. This section was not considered in my original outline and was suggested subsequently to me. I was, however, able to add it without necessitating extension of the number of weeks requested for the writing. Another completed task not noted in the outline was making models of such equipment as has been described in the manual.""As sections 2,3,4, and 5 were written solely for use by men working alone the manual needs two further sections. One section would give modified, or different, tricks and techniques of performance so that the tricks could be performed by women. The other section would describe tricks suitable for two or more people working in collaboration. In both these proposed sections the tricks would differ considerably from those which have been described.Gottlieb, whose goal was an operational guide that would be of use to agents in the real world, shared Mulholland's view that broadening its scope to include collaborative efforts by teams of operatives or by female agents was well worth the delay. On November 17, he authorized Mulholland to draft the two additional chapters and extended the timeline for completion of the book until May. This new work became MKULTRA Subproject 19…”
Magic, camouflage, dirty tricks and the occult...
And yet Jasper Maskelyne (of a family of British magicians) used his skills to confuse and bemuse the enemy in WW2 and seems to come out of it as a hero. Book: War Magician. Disguising tanks as trucks, and (when necessary) trucks as tanks, moving a whole port city along the coast (by lighting), so bombs fell harmlessly, and all kinds of camouflage and bluff got involved. ‘Dirty Tricks’ still had a glint of wicked deviousness back then.

Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Graham Greene, John Le Carré – I enjoy to see how much play-acting, fiction, magic and games (from chess to poker) have to do with the world of the spook.

So it almost bemuses me to find espionage doubts and suspicions directed at ‘occult practioners’, too.

Gurdjieff (in James Webb’s The Harmonious Circle);
Crowley (in Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult), and even hints about
HPB (Blavatsky) herself - spying for Russia in The Great Game of mystical imperialism (British Empire and Tsarist Russia fighting over central Asia - Tibet, Afghanistan, etc).

Scientific expeditions, or spying?

Early travelers and adventurers sometimes brought back useful maps and information which they perhaps shared if asked, bullied, blackmailed, pressurized, paid, etc. They might even have found it a good way to fund their explorations (as taking a tv crew can today), with upfront payments and commissions.

From the point of view of local peoples, however, foreigners often get treated with suspicion, and if border tensions increase then the unknown may look like military reconnaissance rather than science… Even Wordsworth and Coleridge, poetically wandering in the hills of Somerset (West of England), and conversing in French, were suspected of being spies from the French Revolution (a threat to Britain at the time) and got investigated.

Cells and such

Lone travelers may appear odd enough, but extended networks can come under even more suspicion, as the secretive nature of some business links crime, smuggling, espionage, etc.

Of course, any organisation using a clandestine cellular system has high security but still lays itself open to corruption from within – as a small pocket of members with a different agenda is (by definition) isolated and able to develop its own path and priorities. So I don’t think of all Freemasons as ‘baddies’ (for instance) but I suspect that Freemasonic Lodges do sometimes get taken over (‘turned’), and misdirected from their original course. One example, in Italy and the P2, for instance.

The British secret service apparently ‘turned’ virtually every German agent in the UK during WW2 – and were effectively running the German network, feeding it good, bad or indifferent info and misinfo, etc.

Occult lodges seem a likely target for seeking out and drawing in people, and acquiring influence among intelligent, multi-lingual, well-travelled and perhaps ‘amoral’ people.

Psychic Research

How much of the Russian ‘psychic research’ arose from the Cold War, (secret weapons, black ops, psychological warfare, etc) and how much as genuine scientific research still seems unclear to me, and it turns out the Americans had invested quite a lot of time and money in it, too. Think Puharich and Geller, or Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats.

There are so many threads to pursue. What of the connected stories implicating UFOs, alien abductees, secret experiments, social manipulation of belief systems, and all the other ‘paranoia’ of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ (and those inverted commas show how easily such comments get turned aside)?

Ah, yes, anyway...

When we published Magical Means, we dropped in passing mention of The Great Game (the battle between Brits and Russians over control of India, Tibet, Afghanistan, etc) but perhaps we didn’t take it seriously enough.

[Update: Aug 2014: new material on Houdini as spy in The Secret Life of Houdini]

As in any good scam (or double-cross heist movie), you eventually wonder who controls who...

A few more references:

Joyce Colin Smith – an appreciation of James Webb

In case (like Chris M) you mistake me for a total sceptic about psychic and paranormal 'stuff', can I point you to The Trickster and The Paranormal for an interesting mixed view. Website. Book. Blog.

All my own magic research links can be found on this blog.

Randi's Project Alpha

An interesting edition of the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (The Occult and Espionage)

THE GREAT BEAST'S WASTED FLAVOR 666

Adapted from Aleister Crowley's THE BOOK OF THE LAW





A selection from:

http://www.bobbycampbell.net/OMNIBUS_777

UFOS ON THE LAM!

An Ongoing Media Virus by Bobby Campbell

Soundtrack: Little UFO
by The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy w/ Robert Anton WIlson

"THE IMPOSSIBLE OFTEN HAS A KIND OF INTEGRITY WHICH THE MERELY IMPROBABLE LACKS."
- Douglas Adams



During the winter of 1918, in New York City, Aleister Crowley &
Scarlet Woman Roddie Minor conducted the Amalantrah Working.
This sexual & ceremonial ritual was intended to open a "magickal portal"
through which invoked interdimensional intelligences could come to physical manifestation. (!?!)

An egg headed character called LAM is supposed to have been the resultant visitor from this most peculiar experiment. Crowley claimed his artistic rendering of LAM (pictured left) was a portrait he drew from real life! The image was published in 1919 within a book of Crowley's commentary on Blavatsky's "The Voice of the Silence." The image was titled "The Way" and included the following inscription:

"LAM is the Tibetan word for Way or Path, and LAMA is He who Goeth, the specific title of the Gods of Egypt, the Treader of the Path, in Buddhistic phraseology. Its numerical value is 71, the number of this book."

Much has been made of LAM's prescient resemblance to The Greys, those world famous pro bono proctologists from the stars, who starred in a great many alien contactee claims of Reagan Era USA, and are now pop culture icons.

"Lam is a Great Old One whose archetype is recognizable in accounts of UFO occupants." Says Kenneth Grant, whom Crowley gave his portrait of LAM to in 1945.

Michael Bertiaux, who is said to have replicated the Amalantrah Working in the 1960's, described the phenomena as the "subterranean burgeoning of Lucifer-Gnosis."
Such psychological interpretations of the extraterrestrial visitations actually seem to amplify the mystery! It was no less a luminary of the mind than Carl Jung, in his book "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky", who deduced that belief in UFOs better suited general opinion, which very much wanted them to be real. Jung then set himself to answer his famous question: "Why should it be more desirable for Saucers to exist than not?"

This curiosity was very recently exemplified by the Blossom Goodchild media virus, wherein Ms. Goodchild announced that she channeled a message from "The Federation of Light" that alien spaceships were due to appear on October 14, 2008. Incredibly, this flimsy premise was suitable to create a global media buzz! There was nothing even resembling "proof" offered, only a message, which a great many decided to believe, but why?

Because flying saucers are symbols from an ancient dream language, Jung would suppose, the circular shape of a self perfected and projected into the abode of the Gods. An ideal savior and/or nemesis of technologically alienated modern humanity, unidentified flying objects have been interjected into history, disrupting the normal proceedings of the world for better and/or worse. 

The mass hysteria induced by Orson Wells' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds on October 30th, 1938, perhaps one of the most effective media viruses ever propagated, is a perfect example of both how readily the public will accept news of an alien invasion, and how the aliens need not necessarily actually exist in order to dramatically effect the reality of the psyche.

“The saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is not a vehicle from some other star system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest trick.” Says Terrence Mckenna, who frequently hallucinated contact with alien intelligences under the influence of entheogens, especially DMT, the hypothesized “Spirit Molecule.” (A psychedelic neurotransmittor found naturally occurring within the human nervous system.)

Beyond even the psychological interpretation, I am most interested in the neurochemical interpretation, as advocated by Dr. Rick Strassman.


The general premise is that within certain extreme situations the pineal gland is capable of synthesizing psychedelic quantities of endogenous DMT, thus providing a neurochemical medium for visionary experiences of any and all kinds.

DMT has also been proposed as playing an active role within the brain chemistry of the dream state, so of course yes, I do here propose the alien contact experience may be a case of neurologically DREAMING while AWAKE. Though just to slight the non-believers as much as the believers, DMT is not thought to supply the content of hallucination, but rather just to change the ways and means of information processing in the brain.

Meanwhile in 1918 New York City, Aleister Crowley is told "It's all in the egg." When he questions this statement he is answered "Thou art to go this way."