Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who in 1943 accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic effects of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has died at the age of 102, Reuters reports.

Plenty of books have beaten up on the Bush administration’s military and diplomatic strategies. But Fred Kaplan’s Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power may be the most broad-based assault yet. In it, Kaplan hammers on everything from the White House’s faith in military technological superiority to its holier-than-thou approach to negotiating (or not). Kaplan, who writes Slate’s “War Stories” column, also explores the roots of many of these beliefs. And that’s where we start this Q&A — this first of many, I hope, with leading authors on national security.

Evidence of pagan rituals involving swans and other birds in the Cornish countryside in the 17th century has been uncovered by archaeologists.

Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.

Anyone familiar with the Catholic Mass will notice similarities. The Gnostic symbolism, however, leans more toward taboo than tradition.

It’s interesting to see the Gnostic Mass reported on as part of a “survey of local churches” type of series. I do get the feeling that the Mass in question was “barbaric,” with the priestess remaining clothed throughout. The reporter doesn’t mention a naked priestess, and the description of the space makes it sound as if it is partially outdoors.

But does the challenge really make a statement about the existence of the paranormal and/or psi abilities? According to paranormal investigator Loyd Auerbach (who, like Randi, is a member of the magic fraternity):

Now, I do not “believe in” psychic phenomena in any uncritical sense. Some things make me wonder, though. What bothers me about this is that it’s basically rigged to fail. The Challenge effectively asks a person to produce phenomena according to what people who have a cartoonish idea of such things have constructed before the fact. So, you can’t win, either in terms of the number of tests you’d actually have to run, or beating a strawman created by someone who already thinks you’re nuts.

The death has been announced of Alan Miller (aka Dr Christopher Hyatt), author and publisher of Thelemic works, on 9 February at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Hyatt was part of a very specific generation of esoteric authors. Like Robert Anton Wilson, he stressed liberation from our fixed ideas, and was fiercely anti-dogmatic. The last book of his that I read was To Lie is Human, Not Getting Caught is Divine which is basically a series of questions to ask about how much you betray yourself. It’s strange, angry, and the kind of magickal book that doesn’t center around reifying a symbol set so that you can be a pre-fab “adept.”

His voice will be missed.

Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of tickytacky
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same
There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
-”Little Boxes” by Melvina Reynolds

With our concept making apparatus called “mind” we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about- reality are mistakenly labeled “reality” and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see “reality” differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept.

We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids.
-Principia Discordia

The song quoted above was written as a kind of protest against suburban conformity, using the artifact of the pre-fabricated tract home as a concrete metaphor. I think it expresses something a bit deeper, about how we tend to think.

We live in the most data rich environment in history. Some call it the “information” age, but the if we take the word in its technical sense, in terms of organization of data into something *new* we will see that there is very little actual information out there. Lots of bits floating around, little actual novelty.

This is because, in another sense, we have in-formed a great deal of data beforehand into discrete packages that to a large degree limit our capacity to incorporate novelty. Things which are alien to the boxes we’ve made in our brains tend to either *not* register, or register in some sub-optimal way. To make matters worse, we tend to put alien data into *other* boxes, with labels that mostly boil down to “threat to mental territory.” Since the human brain works partly by association, data bearing even a passing resemblance to anything in the “threat” boxes automatically get put there. All based not on the validity or lack thereof of an idea, but because it “sounds like” it originated in “Box X.”

We inherit nearly all of our boxes. Most of them quite early in life. They’re built up first of associations with a feeling of security, then a desire to dominate or submit. Random events cause us to associate certain perspectives with certain kinds of people. Those linked pre-consciously to those people we have good experiences with tend to be the ones we build our boxes with. By the time we hit maturity, the world rushes in with several different sorts of “package deals” to put in our ready made containers.

Politics, which is really just a form of stylized territorial conflict with the State as the mediator of some kind of violence, consists mostly of one group of people triggering in another the associations laid down in their “target audience.” No matter how much politicians make noises about their campaigns being “about ideas” or “about policy,” they’re really about making people feel threatened enough in their mental space to run to a protector. Naturally, the associations triggered don’t just deactivate after election season. They accumulate more data, more crumbs on the sticky slush of the mind. Entire chunks of language acquire special meanings, and even ones directly opposite to their obvious meaning. (For instance “neoconservative” refers, in fact, to radical right wing ideologies, not anything remotely “conservative” in the literal sense.)

Religion, of course, is the ultimate “package deal.” The Western approach tends to be “read the book, follow the instructions, don’t ask too many questions.” It’s “tradition,” inviolable even when the “tradition” has been exposed as pure invention. There is no absurdity, impossibility, atrocity, or torture that has not been defended in terms of “tradition.”

We also have, related to this, the division of the world into “sacred” things and “profane” things. How this division makes sense outside the set of boxes in someone’s head I simply don’t know. These are not categories such as “hot” and “cold” which can be measured with instruments, but a priori value judgments. (Unless someone has a “sacredometer” to measure the relative “sacredness” of every idea or phenomena.) Too many things are held sacred in one place and not in another for the distinction to be anything but prejudice.

In the occult, we see this pattern as well. The “traditional wisdom” is often considered valid even when it conflicts with known history and advances in philosophy. What’s important is to “follow the tradition” because it can teach you something about how to do it yourself. Which is all well and good, but one would think that it would do a better job if irrelevancies and nonsense were gotten rid of, rather than sanctified. Or, if it is noted that some other system fills an obvious gap or solves a problem, it makes more sense to incorporate it rather than shun it as “not part of the tradition.”

One often hears people using phrases like “think outside the box,” and some will even agree that the “map is not the territory.” Unfortunately, this rarely means anything, other than that this person has built another box which includes platitudes of this nature. It’s still identity, not relationship with the world.

To honestly “think outside the box” means breaking it. Taking out the contents and periodically reorganizing. This is very difficult, and can lead one to some very odd places. Conversations with others become steadily more surreal unless some common ground is discovered.

Still, the effort is worth it, if one can even once look at the world totally fresh, without previous filtering. That is, before the new filters get installed, and one starts again.

One would think that one of the prime characteristics of the “New Aeon” would be that those promoting it would have a perspective on things like religion that was, in fact, new. What I have seen recently is not just old but a stupid version of old.

As I’ve stated before, I find the odds that one group of people have discovered “The Truth” incredibly slim. Thus it should be no surprise that the notion that one person did so seems categorically absurd to me. The same arguments apply: really big Universe, very narrow perspective interpreting it.

Spewing out a lot of post-Marxist Continental crap in between Crowley quotes will not impress me either. To me, Thelema is about, among other things, thinking for yourself. When someone’s word count reaches more than 2,000, and 1,500 of those are snippets from Crowley, I find it hard to believe a person is doing that.

This sort of religion, where the words of dead people count for more than personal experience, should be just as dead by now.

My last thoughts aside, I do find the drive toward a totally non-Crowley Thelema a bit odd to say the least. To begin with, we’re talking about a massive amount of material that would simply have to be ignored. Even keeping only Class A documents would be chopping out several million words from the sources one references. To me, this sounds like an utter waste.

Of this body of material, I would say roughly forty percent consists of amateur social theorizing based on long discredited Victorian pseudo-science that can be safely set aside as irrelevant simply on account of its own weakness. This is generally combined with the most ridiculous reading of Nietzsche one can imagine outside of a Marylin Manson interview. One must remember that Crowley switched majors out of philosophy before taking anything he said on the subject at face value. He was a poet and a seer not a systematic philosophical thinker.

This leaves sixty percent of Crowley’s corpus. Much of which is really good shit. Whole aspects of modern occultism derive from his practical and theoretical work.

Another point: While there may have been antecedents to Thelema, these in themselves do not constitute a system or a religious philosophy. Crowley was, in my opinion, one of the last systematizers of occult practice coming out of the nineteenth century. Before that trend, there wasn’t really much going on that could be described as a coherent “Tradition.” There was a general tendency amongst a large number of disparate practitioners, revolving around the bits of Lurianic Kabbalah that were available, and several different kinds of alchemy along with a host of different individual bits of technology such as Arts of Memory. But the “Hermetic Tradition” as such was largely a figment of the late Renaissance imagination.

What Crowley did was focus on those bits that tended toward sensuality and individual freedom, as well as incorporating “Eastern” practices. Again, not something that should be discarded, since these influences and ideas actually fill huge gaps left in Western Esotericism by the centuries of Christian dominance.

I think what I’m getting at is, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to idolize or slavishly follow the words of any individual, give the man some fucking credit would ya? Really, if one looks at the cultural atmosphere in which Crowley moved, he actually comes out looking pretty good. We just need to remember that our current society is to that of the early twentieth century what that period was to the late middle ages in terms of progress. In this sense, Crowley can be seen as a Renaissance man.

His call to change the Constitution “according to God’s standards” was frightening enough, but it turns out that “Republican” candidate Mike Huckabee is also affiliated with some of the most extreme edges of the Dominionist movement.

From Daily Kos:

As bad as that gets, though, it’s worse than I feared. It seems that Mike Huckabee is not only a good friend of neopente cult leader and “Bible-based baby beating” and Joel’s Army-with-guns advocate Bill Gothard…but he’s also a member of his Bible-based cult.

A site with more information on Huckabee’s connections to Bill Gothard.

He also promoted Gothard’s program in public schools as governor of Arkansas.

While he’s being portrayed in the media as a folksy kind of guy, Huckabee represents the worst kind of theocratic fascism alive in America today. Not just Dominionist, but paramilitary. He is, in fact, already a traitor to the Constitution, by virtue of his active disregard for the First Amendment, and thus unqualified for the office of President.

How many vague, qualitative terms can one put into a “scientific” finding? Just read and see.

Rosemary Aird of the University of Queensland has released a masterpiece of pseudo-science propaganda in order to “prove” that “non-traditional” religion, basically, makes you depressed and anxious. The news release from the University includes such statements as “This focus on self fulfilment and improvement over others’ wellbeing could undermine a person’s mental health with many people feeling more isolated, less healthy and having poorer relationsihps. “[sic]

This is such a startling example of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking that I cannot believe a major university in any country would allow it to slip by. It is just as likely that thinking differently from the majority of a person’s social group would cause depression and anxiety before the adoption of a new religion, and perhaps even lead to such a change, as it is that someone developed depression and anxiety because of that religion.

What are we supposed to think of a study where the researcher says “There’s no way of measuring all of those different types of things.” You mean, there’s no way to actually determine if your findings actually refer to any real world phenomena?

Great. I’m sure this will be a popular study for Dominionists to cite. And it has an academic pedigree to give it that special authority.