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A CHAOTIC ONLINE ENTITY

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This piece is a visually-rich resource for my forthcoming article on the magic of egregore entities, to be published in the Weiser anthology This Is Chaos . It also serves as a resource for a forthcoming booklet on Egregores and Memetics .  KEANU REEVES IS JOHN MASTODON  In 2023 after Eldritch Musk had owned Twitter for a few months, he started suspending accounts that he felt threatened by.  One of these accounts was one that had the name tag @joinmastodon, promoting the anarchist-leaning federated social media platform Mastodon. This tag was misread by a social media columnist as @johnmastodon.  The error was corrected later, but by then it was too late. People had already produced John Mastodon memes; something had sprung into life on the Internet.  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/john-mastodon The rest is history, written by devoted followers. Here are a few more of the memes they made. I couldn't find the original source of all of them; the links I give are where I found them. 

Egregore against weapons of mass destruction

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WABRI EGREGORE POWER This series of open workings is an experiment in using social media to empower a helper spirit. It’s a product of group mind, so it’s an egregore entity. This is the original sigil for the entity WABRI, the function of which is to make sure that weapons of mass destruction are never used.  BACKGROUND The original spell - ‘From SNAFU to FUBAR - Five Spanners in the War-Machine’ - was done at a public Discordian event in 2018, Catch-23. Since then, we’ve been developing it to become more effective. Over 50 magical practitioners have been involved so far.  The sigil above is the original one, the simplest, which you are encouraged to use as a starting point. In this latest stage of the workings, you are invited to put your own magic into it, to help it become a true egregore entity - something much more effective than a servitor. This process of open magical work started at my book launch on 9/12/23. Here are some of the other sigils that were made at that event, all

C-Star vs E-Star: a quick rundown

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This is a short piece from 2022, that used to be on the now-defunct chaosmagick.com site. For the last few years I’ve been aware of Dugin’s Eurasianist star glyph, via pictures of Russian nationalists standing in front of what looked a bit like a chaos star, the familiar eight arrows radiating out from the centre, though minus a circle and forming a square shape.  My chaos friends and I were a bit concerned about this similarity, because some people don’t look closely at things, and online reputation is a volatile thing. However, it wasn’t until recent months that the issue suddenly seemed to be all over social media. On top of this, a chaos magician friend in Sweden mentioned that there is a public perception over there of our beloved chaos star being associated with the political far right. So what is this Eurasianist star? It’s an invention of Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist who supports far right positions. His thinking is complex and (deliberately) confusing - a stew of ide

Democracy, Anarchy and Isonomia

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Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy by Koji Karatana I’ve read much of the work of Peter Kingsley, thereby getting a very particular view of Western philosophy - how Plato buried the Pre-Socratics under his system, how Aristotle delivered the final death blow to the ancient Hellenic lineage of mystical attainment and prophecy.  That view seemed complete when I acquired it, as is the tendency with rich, well-argued positions. Especially when there’s something you are looking for for yourself in that argument - in my case, a philosophical basis for my own path of magick and mysticism. Therefore I supported those ideas, I had skin in Peter Kingsley’s game.  So this book came along at a good time for me, having been put off Kingsley’s work by the increasingly rampant narcissism of his writings, culminating in the latest, his Book of Life .   Karatana builds an argument based on the idea of isonomia. I know, I’d never heard the word either. I initially misread it as ‘insomnia’. He expoun

Wyrd Times by Nigel Pennick

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Nigel Pennick has written countless books, but only this one full memoir. The edition is the second in a series by Arcana Europa - ‘Wild Lives’. The first was Far Out In America by Wolf-Dieter Storl, which I review here.  https://chaotopia.com/2022/02/21/far-out-in-america-by-wolf-dieter-storl/   The front cover of Wyrd Times is a montage which sums up a lot of the interior - Mr Pennick stands as a giant in a landscape of standing stones, a labyrinth and Hiberno-Saxon knotwork.  This is a life-and-times book, evoking that other country, the past. I remember much of what Mr P writes about as post-war London, being only a few years younger than him. This fascinating part of the book also introduces his eye for architecture and design, especially lettering. When we get into the 1970s much of the text is a history of his ‘underground’ publishing days, putting out many magazines of local (Cambridge) anarchist agitprop as well as an emerging theme of earth mysteries and local tradition. He

In Search of Smiles, by Andy Roberts

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Hardback ISBN: 9781916266773 Paperback ISBN: 9781916266780 *OUT 10.06.2023* This is Andy Roberts’s fourth book of British psychedelic history and I think it’s his best. It’s a history of one Alston Hughes, more generally known as Smiles, the photogenic chap on the cover with his corvid friend. Smiles was a major distributor of the (excellent) LSD made by Richard Kemp and others of the ‘Microdot Gang’ who were busted in the 1977-8 police extravaganza known as Operation Julie.  The early chapters outline Smiles’s early life, giving a biography that adds depth to the stories we read of his later exploits. However, the book is carefully framed as an important bit of British psychedelic history, an area in which ‘Establishment’ narratives have dominated the discourse for too long. Andy writes about the directions his research for his earlier books on psychedelic history took him: ‘… one event repeatedly drew my attention: Operation Julie. This was the British government’s police-led init
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  Once again, greeting the Unconquered Sun in Grenoside.  https://youtu.be/sZSXRTEffcA The still at the top is from 2012, the first year we went along. They've been doing it for over 200 years. Here's my first bog from 2012, with some more details:  http://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.com/2012/12/grenoside-boxing-day-sword-dancing.html?m=1 The mainstream media seem to be catching onto it this year, here's a brief item from the BBC:  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-64094768 Hail Smiling Morn!