An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for August 2, 2020

Here we are in August! And, here’s a new Omnium Gatherum open for every Patron!

I want to specifically mention a couple of new things I’ve started recently. A new sigil for these times, a place for friendship and mutual support, and a place to start, re-start, and remember.

I was inspired by current events, and a little bit by the Antifa Cascadia “3 Trees” design by LikkitP among other things, and spent some time coming up with an Anti-fascist Nuclear Disarmament Algiz Lilith Foot sigil, in solidarity, which you may find interesting.

Next, I wanted to mention that I created a place on the site for a kind of directory, a place to recognize people, entities, and organizations with services to offer others that have helped Hermetic Library with meaningful support or participation. I’ve called this section Fraternity. A while ago someone asked if I’d considered having something like this, and I had but not done it. There are already the index of anthology artists and Fellows, of course, but what about a place for other listings? Well, I’d been thinking about it for a while, and then started to think about it more. Then I wanted to remind myself of how some others had done things, and in the course of that discovered that the venerable site WitchVox, which for many years was for many people an essential site for finding groups and information, has gone dark, with the old domain apparently now being squatted by who knows who with a blank blog. So, I thought about it a little more, specifically how I would do this, in my own way; and now I’ve done it! Which is as much to say, I started it. There’s not much there to look at yet! I’ve begun to reach out to a few people to add the first few listings, so I can see how that goes, and then I’ll keep adding more as time goes by, getting in touch with people and adding them. Furthermore, I just want to mention, as you are a Patron here, that if you offer services or are a vendor of things, let’s talk about putting up a listing for you, as an ongoing supporter!

Last, but certainly not to be exhaustive, I wanted to mention that I’ve also long thought about doing some kind of curated section with suggested practices. I had originally created a stub section on the site I called Praxis, where I was going to put a bunch of subsections with links to existing specific practices, and also new things. One of the new things was inspired by the Thelemic Tephilah series I’d been posting to social media, and finished an entire year cycle of earlier this year, and also the 30 day yoga journeys from Yoga by Adriene on YouTube, I’ve been thinking about doing a few 30-day daily practice sequences. Well, I started to get more serious about pulling this together and realized some things. The first was that the project was bigger than just praxis, so I created a new section for the site called Fundamentals, which will become a kind of meta-index for links to existing material, and also a repository for new material, about not just practice, but also theory, study and journeys. Maybe there’s more too, but that’s where I’m at right now. Again, there’s not much to look at yet, but Robert Mitchell created the first journey, which you can take a look at right now: The Hermetic Cross: Sixteen Days of Insight. We’re still doing some minor editing, and I’ll be adding a bio with links to his stuff, but I wanted to share what we’ve got right now.

Okay, so, there’s some stuff I’ve been working on that I’ll continue to work on, and I’m excited about these ideas, that I’ve been tossing around in my head for literally years, finally coalescing into real sections of the site. So, take a gander! Let me know what you think, and if you’ve specific ideas, or have a particular practice, moreover a journey, to share that others might find useful, let me know! Also, if you’re in touch with someone who may be interested in participating with something, let them know to let me know, you know?!

I hope you are doing well and weal, staying safe and sane out there, and thank you for your ongoing support!

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• “Popular Pastor Claims Beyonce’s BLACK IS KING Is Satanic” because, I mean, of course. I’m just surprised they didn’t call it “gnostic” which seems to be the new Satanic Panic dogwhistle. But, counterpoint, and moreover: “Beyoncé’s Black Is King unabashedly celebrates the Afrofuture. The Disney Plus visual album is an opulent portrait of Black pride.”
• Like someone who went into isolation in the before times and then emerged to see the trash fire: “I read every Halo novel and became the Master Chief of loneliness.”
• “The Outer Dark Symposium on The Greater Weird 2020. When the world gets weird, the Weird goes virtual. August 14-16, 2020.”
• The Occult Nineteenth Century: Roots, Developments, and Impact on the Modern World edited by by Lukas Pokorny and Franz Winter, from Palgrave, due Jan 2021—”The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of alternative religious currents and practices, appropriating earlier traditions, entangling geographically distinct spiritual discourses, and crafting a repository of mindscapes eminently suitable to be accommodated by later generations of thinkers and practitioners. Penned by specialists in the field, this volume examines important themes and figures pertaining to this occult amalgam and its resonance into the twentieth century and beyond. Global guises of the occult, ranging from the Americas and Europe to India, are variously addressed, with special attention to the crucial role of mesmerism and the origins of modern yoga.”
• The movies got it wrong?! “Simulating quantum ‘time travel’ disproves butterfly effect in quantum realm. Evolving quantum processes backwards on a quantum computer to damage information in the simulated past causes little change when returned to the ‘present’.”
• Oh, no. Not all movies got it wrong. This is how it starts! “Deep sea microbes dormant for 100 million years are hungry and ready to multiply”
• Here’s hoping this helps? “1,000-year-old medieval remedy could be potential antibiotic, scientists say”
• Not to trigger Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, but maybe just a little tweak to our water supply? “Lithium in Drinking Water Linked With Lower Suicide Rates. Naturally occurring lithium in public drinking water may have an anti-suicidal effect – according to a new study from Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London.”
• If not, maybe Plato has some room in the cave? “Could Doomsday Bunkers Become the New Normal? When we were told to stay inside our homes, a portion of the population quietly went below ground.”
• Or, maybe he’ll just say, “Get lost!” “The Pandemic-Era Appeal of Getting Lost in a Labyrinth. Interest is growing in the intriguing structures designed for mindfulness, from backyard installations to finger tracing.”
• And, if we happen to get lost on the Plateau of Leng, at least we’ll get a great view! “Astronomers pinpoint the best place on Earth for a telescope: High on a frigid Antarctic plateau.”
• Uh oh. Radioactive zombie dead dark stars?! “Dead star emits never-before seen mix of radiation.”
• Damned mollusks teaching our future robot overlords new tricks! “Squid-inspired robotic muscles heal themselves in a second”
• “New hope as dementia therapy reverses memory loss. Two brothers researching dementia at Macquarie University have made a world-first discovery in the race to treat and cure Alzheimer’s disease.”
• “A New Way to Target Cancers Using ‘Synthetic Lethality’. Approach exploits tumor weaknesses when two genetic defects are combined.”
• Who’s a good boy?! “Diagnoses by dog noses – Dogs can sniff out patients with COVID-19”
• “Smallpox and other viruses plagued humans much earlier than suspected. Genetic research is rewriting the history of diseases.”
• “COVID-19 Broke the Economy. What If We Don’t Fix It? Instead of reopening society for the sake of the economy, what if we continued to work less, buy less, make less—for the sake of the planet?”
• “The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived. With the pandemic and a global uprising against racial injustice to be explained away, conspiracy communities are bleeding into each other, merging into one gigantic mass of suspicion.”
• The Original Forger of Magic—”He was a forger who had not been meticulous enough and it caught up with him.”
• “The Umbrella Academy is delivering what Marvel movies taught fans to expect. A focus on inner emotional lives and relationship dynamics … with a splash of sexy.”
• “V for Vendetta knew our future would be a bleak one. A movie that seemed to take things too far ultimately did not take them far enough.”
• Playing Superman Changed Henry Cavill As Playing Captain America Changed Chris Evans
• Goa’uld? Did they find Goa’uld? “Little ancient Egyptian mummies hold surprises inside … and they aren’t human. CT scans revealed unexpected findings inside these ancient Egyptian mummies.”
• Everyone. “The Myth of John James Audubon. The National Audubon Society’s namesake looms large, like his celebrated bird paintings. But he also owned enslaved people and held white supremacist views, reflecting ethical failings it is time to bring to the fore.”
• Is. “The Man Who Made Stephen Miller. Almost 20 years ago, anti-immigration activist David Horowitz cultivated an angry high-school student. Now his ideas are coming to life in the Trump administration.”
• Awful. How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof Into Thin Air.. This spring, a team working under the president’s son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?” Also
• Normcore. Good god, y’all! What is it good for? “How Brooks Brothers Became a Symbol of What Not to Wear to the Revolution. That notorious “Ken and Karen” couple from St. Louis politically slimed a 202-year-old staple of American belonging. Is it still Ok to wear sensible chinos and a pink polo?”—”Now, the playing field is a lot more complicated—traditional symbols of conformity or anarchy are being further warped by the participants in the frontlines of the culture wars.”
• Tweet—”Next academic tweet thread to the universe in these trying times: Resist absolutist thinking. It rarely leads to good things. Rarely is a person/text all good or all bad. If there is something you love, practice finding things in it that are flaws/problematic and sit with it.”
• “A Look at the White House Rose Garden’s History. How the iconic presidential garden has evolved over the years to become a place of power.”
• “Why Protest Tactics Spread Like Memes. When items like umbrellas and leaf blowers are subverted into objects of resistance, they become very shareable.”
• “No Blueprint for Utopia.” About Who Needs a World View? By Raymond Geuss—”One of the world’s most provocative philosophers attacks the obsession with comprehensive intellectual systems―the perceived need for a world view.”
• Detection of electrical signaling between tomato plants raises interesting questions
• “Portland sees peaceful night of protests following withdrawal of federal troops. Thursday night’s protest passed off without major incident or intervention by the police in the absence of federal officers.”
• Tweet—”If you aren’t in Portland, OR, you likely don’t know how bad things are here. Even folks who live here don’t know, unless they’re on Twitter, or follow indie journalists, or are out in the streets….”
• “1960s coverage of Stonewall shows that mainstream press has always struggled to cover protests. New Yorkers reading the local, mainstream papers wouldn’t have known that a new civil rights movement was unfolding.”
• “Do Protests Even Work? It sometimes takes decades to find out.”
• Tweet—”Remember the reason you started working was there was something inside yourself, that if you could manifest it in some way, you could understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with society.”
• I see sigils: “Like a Hurricane. An Unofficial Oral History of Street Fighter II.”
• King Arthur: five men who made up the legendary Dark Ages king. The fabled lord of Camelot may be a figure of folklore, but there are elements of truth to his legend. Archaeologist and historian Miles Russell says that King Arthur is a composite of five Dark Age characters.” Watch
• The Zombies Are Coming: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Revised and Expanded Edition) by Kelly J Baker, due in August.—”Really a wonderful book that ties together horror, the history of white supremacy, paramilitary culture, the American gun fetish.” HT Scott Poole
• The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke, due in September. HT Dread Singles—”An outcast teenage lesbian witch finds her coven hidden amongst the popular girls in her school, and performs some seriously badass magic in the process.”
• “Dune – A Bookmark Journaling Game is a fan-fiction journaling game in which you will focus on one character and journal their thoughts while reading Frank Herbert’s Dune.”
• Climbing a Symbolic Mountain With a Surrealist Writer
• Design as Adventure
• “The Maladjusted RULE!”: A Conversation With Vaginal Davis
• “Do as thou wilt”—Hellpoint by Cradle Games, from tinyBuild
• Comet captured streaking across Stonehenge night sky
• From the 93 Skidoo dept. “We Need To Talk About The 93 Penises On The Bayeux Tapestry.”
• “This Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Is Out to Change Perceptions of Spiritual Music. Before becoming a monk, he was busking around the world.”
• Mars In 4K
• numb
• my future

This post was possible because of support from generous ongoing Patrons and Members of the newsletter. Both Patrons and Members get access to Omnium Gatherum immediately and directly via web and email. On the blog, this will be exclusive to Patrons for one year, after which I’ll make it publicly available to everyone so they can see what they’ve been missing.