An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for January 3, 2021

It’s the first Omnium Gatherum of the month, and the first of the year! So, let’s again welcome all Patrons to join the fun. Hi, everyone!

I’m currently in the midst of a winter storm here at the library. Staying wrapped up, under cats, with hot tea, mostly! Hope you are all doing well, and recovered from any safe and sane festivities you engaged in over the last few weeks!

Yesterday was perihelion, when Earth is closest to the Sun. It’s a moveable event on the Gregorian calendar, and I’m not sure there’s any calendar that marks it, but it occurs so close to New Year’s Day on our common calendar, that I really do think it makes sense for perihelion to be “Astronomical New Year” in a solar calendar system. Anyhow, I’ve personally decided to start paying attention to perihelion and aphelion, as much as I do solstice and equinox, for example.

Speaking of marking perihelion, in case you missed it, I’ve just released (Whew! Finally!) a new zine: Hermetic Library Zine January 2021, issue #3, at perihelion! Be sure to check it out!

I also started to post updates for followers on Bandcamp about the activities of Anthology Artists that I’ve noticed. This time around the sun, I’m going to try to do better at keeping up with what all 142 Anthology Artists across all 15 (+2!) albums (so far!) have been up to about what news I’ve heard through little updates that go out via email, or are on the Bandcamp site. This is part of my thinking, which I’ve talked about previously and which is ongoing, about how to keep in contact with people in ways that avoids drowning in noise or being filtered by algorithms. So, there’s now Patreon and Bandcamp updates which hopefully reach you all! I’ll keep thinking on this more, but I just started doing the Bandcamp updates, and maybe you’d like to be sure you’re following along on the library’s profile there, if you want to get those also! (But, I’ll probably be posting those regularly in these Omnium Gatherum posts, such as the one below about Primitive Knot, as I see them, too!)

By the by, it’s the time of resolutions. So, like the quote from Moonchild, which is often attributed directly to Aleister Crowley, but is actually in letter from one character in the story to another: “may the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!”

Thanks again, again, and again for being ongoing Patrons of my work, and for your help keeping Hermetic Library going! May your coming cyclical trip around the sun bring you many joys and much success!

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

• Public Domain Day! “January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all!” Also “Party Like It’s 1925 On Public Domain Day (Gatsby And Dalloway Are In).” Also “We deserve The Muppet Great Gatsby. Great works are entering the public domain in 2021, opening up a host of puppet opportunities.”
• “Blue Wave 3.0: Georgia on Our Minds: January 4th Mass Ritual. Join us January 4th, 2021 at 8pm EST as we do one final mass magical ritual to save our country!”
• Watch “Welcome to BREATH,” the 7th year of A 30 Day Yoga Journey from Yoga With Adriene. I know I mentioned this before, but consider this a gentle, belated invitation to begin this sequence of practice. (Also, “Welcome to BREATH – A 30 Day Yoga Journey.”)
• “We’re Still Here. What are your plans?”—”I don’t make resolutions, I make plans. This year’s overall plan is: To do my best with what I have. What this plan looks like in execution: Meditate daily. Exercise daily. Write daily. Help people.”
• Solid State Logik 1 [Amazon, Apple, Spotify] by The KLF, a new best of album was just released to the streaming services, and released on 1/1/21. 1+1+21=23. So, you know. That makes sense. Also “The KLF’s songs are finally available to stream. After years of silence, The KLF have uploaded a selection of their most famous songs to streaming services like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music.”
• Watch “A 4000 Year Old Recipe for the Babylonian New Year.”
• “New Year’s Eve, Babylon Style. Some things never change as we wring out the old year and ring in the new one.”
• “Are we doomed? An investigation. At the conclusion of a dystopian year, we look to historians, preppers, and even the heavens in search of answers: What exactly was 2020, and what happens now?”
• “12 full moons in 2021 will include 3 supermoons, a blue moon and 2 lunar eclipses.”
• Hermetic Library Anthology Artist Primitive Knot has an upcoming release TRIUMPH ÖF DEAF, on pre-order and due March, and is joining the underground record label Annihilvs Power Electronix.
• Psychedelic Press is having a sale. “Up to 60% off many of our #psychedelic books, journals and merch for the next few weeks – limited stock available.”
• Crowdfunding with 11 days to go: “Anne of Green Gables Tarot Deck. An illustrated Tarot Deck made by an Anne of Green Gables fan.”
• Crowdfunding with 14 days to go: “Faunabelle: Beautifully illustrated tarot deck for children. A compassionate and kind tarot deck for children and the young at heart.”
• A couple recent crowdfunding efforts, part of MAKE 100, by Century Guild / Thomas Negovin: “Witches SWEARING IN Rare 1909 vintage occult magick poster.” Also “MAKE 100: Rare 1886 Masonic Satanic Devil occult poster.” Also “MAKE 100 Grand-Guignol theater posters Macabre Witchcraft.”
• Watch “Aleister Crowley & Sex Magick With Prof Marco Pasi.”
• “William James and the Occult: Download a Free PDF of my Oxford Handbook Chapter, ‘James and Psychical Research in Context’.” From the upcoming The Oxford Handbook of William James edited by Alexander Klein.
• Tweet—”A corollary of ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ is that actually coaxing that technology into functioning properly is indistinguishable from spell-casting.” Not wrong! Back in the day we used to describe our technical work with computers to muggles as “sacrificing chickens and waving their bloody bodies at the machines.” Also, fwiw, apocryphally because I can’t for the life of me remember what movie or documentary it was from (something recommended to me because I’d watched Ron Fricke’s Samsara, I think?! But, idek now.), I remember the depiction of Hindus propitiating Ganesha, opener of ways and new beginnings, and putting a statue of the god on it, when getting a new computer.
• “One Man Spent 60 Years Building a Mysterious and Sketchy Cathedral. An ex-monk spent 60 years building a temple to the Virgin Mary. Now everyone is wondering: What will happen to it when he’s gone?”
• “Ireland’s modern druids: ‘There is hidden knowledge you are asked not to share’. The Tetteroos live near Killarney and know at least six other practising druids in Kerry.”
• Old info, new article: “Jesus Christ breakthrough: Overlooked ‘humorous’ gospel story paints Christ in new light. Jesus Christ’s most “humorous” years were revealed for the first time in a vast collection of lost ancient Gospel texts.”
• Fenris Wolf 6, from Traparts in 2013, available again.—”This volume, the sixth, contains material by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Michael Horowitz, Frater Achad, Timothy O’Neill, Anton LaVey, Freya Aswynn, Nema, Philip Farber, Kendell Geers, Sasha Chaitow, Shri Gurudev Mahendranath a.k.a. Dadaji, Derek Seagrief, Robert Taylor, Marita, Aki Cederberg, Renata Wieczorek, Gary Dickinson, Vera Nikolich, Robert Morgan, Henrik Bogdan, Alexander Nym, Sara George, Anders Lundgren and Carl Abrahamsson, on topics as diverse as occult London, Tantric quests, rune magic and neurology, Cannabis, LSD, entheogenic influences on culture, the Mega Golem, Aleister Crowley in China, Bogomil Gnostics, decadent French author Josephin Péladan, the birth and death horoscopes of the Great Beast 666, Liber AL vel Legis, the psycho-sexual surrealism of Hans Bellmer, healing, death, the extraterrestrial origins of language, Ernst Jünger’s psychedelic approaches, recent Satanic cinema, the occult potential of contemporary physics, “Babalon” as a magical formula, the mystical art of Sulamith Wülfing and a never before published poem, The Litany of Ra, by Charles Stansfeld Jones a.k.a. Frater Achad. And more…”
• “The impact of digital piracy on Pagan authors and publishers.” This is in part about a tweet that started a flurry of activity. And, I subtweeted a response, for my part, let me be clear: I do my best to be sure that I have proper permissions for anything I present substantially or in whole on the site that is not already in the public domain. Illicit PDFs, scans, or photocopies of works still in copyright are not of interest to me. I do not participate in or facilitate pirating works in copyright or truck stolen goods. I am clear about this with anyone that contacts me seeking or offering such contraband. I buy the books I add to my teetering to-read pile. I am adamant about the issue of permissions, even when there are so many sites that are happy to pirate anything and everything out there, including pages from Hermetic Library! But, there it is. I have my standards for the site, which I uphold as best as I am able.
• “Louis Kahn: Listen to the Bricks. New books on the architect’s life and career put the personal and the professional into a revealing dialogue.” About Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by John Lobell—”For everyone interested in the enduring appeal of Louis Kahn, this book demonstrates that a close look at how Kahn put his buildings together will reveal a deeply felt philosophy.”
• “Thorstein Veblen and the Myth of the Academic Outsider. Charles Camic on the birth of the modern research university, the history of disciplinarity, and Veblen’s sex life.” More about Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Charles Camic.
• “The Artist Isn’t Dead. Eulogies for the creative class are premature. Art workers can organize—and survive.” About The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Shannan Clark—”At once a portrait of a city and the national culture of consumer capitalism it has produced, The Making of the American Creative Class is an innovative narrative of modern American history that addresses issues of earnings and status still experienced by today’s culture workers.”
• “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Essays Struggle With Big Ideas.” About In the Land of the Cyclops [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken—”From New York Times bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard comes a collection of ambitious, remarkably erudite essays on art, literature, culture, and philosophy.”
• “Ray Bradbury at 100: A Conversation Between Sam Weller and Dana Gioia.”
• “Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom. On the political and moral lessons of Fyodor Dostoevsky.”
• “Why the Hate? The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, and Race, Racism, and Premodern Critical Race Studies Today.”—”The journal called the 46-page opus a ‘review essay,’ though the review did not treat any other books or any larger subjects, as review essays do: it was just a sustained condemnation of a single book, mine.”
• “Age of Paranoia, Hate and Persecution.”—”So much hate, paranoia, and persecution is still the major threat even as mediocre mainstream democracy enters the arena of the American Presidency. The supposed right-wing enemies will not go away quietly into that political night. No. We’ve only begun to enter a decade of struggle and turmoil as the age-old battles of Left and Right transition into a new decade of paranoia, persecution, and hatred of each other.”
• “Trapped by Thucydides? Updating the Strategic Canon for a Sinocentric Era.”
• Watch “How to Be a Better Reader.”
• “Is fungus the answer to climate change? Student who grew a mushroom canoe says yes. ‘Mushrooms are here to help us — they’re a gift,’ college student Katy Ayers said. ‘They’re our biggest ally for helping the environment.'”
• “How the humble slime mold helped physicists map the cosmic web. Despite similarities, ‘We don’t think the universe was created by a giant slime mold.'”
• A few from SciTechDaily: “Scientists Peer Into the 3D Structure of the Milky Way and Observe Star-Forming Processes in Unprecedented Detail.” Also “All Dark Matter in the Universe Could Be Primordial Black Holes – Formed From the Collapse of Baby Universes Soon After the Big Bang.” Also “‘Unprecedented’ – Unusual Planetary Nebula Fades Mere Decades After It Arrived.” Also “The Ancient Moon’s Missing Magnetism.” Also “Black Holes Discharge the Energy in Their Powerful Plasma Jets Much Farther Away Than Thought.” Also “Astrophysicists Discover Unfathomably Large Intergalactic Gas Filament.” Also “Acceleration of the Solar System Measured by the Gaia Space Telescope.”
• “Feast your eyes on the space rocks Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission harvested from asteroid Ryugu.”
• “WTF: Newly Discovered Ghostly Circles in the Sky Can't Be Explained by Current Theories, and Astronomers Are Excited.”
• “In 1110, The Moon Vanished From The Sky. We May Finally Know Why.”
• “The Problem With Problem Sharks. A marine biologist’s ideas for singling out sharks that attack humans have prompted objections from other shark scientists.”
• From the Nothing That Smart Should Be That Squishy dept: “Cuttlefish Took Something Like a Marshmallow Test. Many Passed.”
• Buddy Movie with the frozen wolf pup! “Extinct woolly rhinoceros found frozen in Siberian permafrost.”
• “How electric lighting changed our sleep, and other stories in materials science.”
• “Four new Chinese archaeological discoveries of the Neolithic Age announced.”
• “Ancient Egypt: A pyramid scheme that worked.”
• “Ten-Year Long Study Confirms No Link Between Playing Violent Video Games as Early as Ten Years Old and Aggressive Behavior Later in Life.”
• “Apple Took Three Years to Cut Ties With Supplier That Used Underage Labor.”
• “Amazon To Expand Its Childhood-To-Career CS Program To India Later This Year.”
• “The Small Colorado Town felt insulated from the Pandemic. Then Came the Coronavirus Variant. Simla, Colo., an isolated ranching community, is the site of the first known case in the United States of a new, more infectious variant of the coronavirus.”
• “Weed and Seven Benadryl: The Wild Lengths COVID Docs Are Taking to Get Sleep. The worst part: Sometimes, sleeping is even scarier than not.”
• “‘It’s going to get much uglier’: The US is not prepared for the next phase of COVID-19 vaccinations.”
• “Prostate Cancer Regulator Plays Role in COVID-19, Providing a Promising Treatment Lead. Clinical trials underway are testing whether drugs that target the androgen receptor – successful in controlling prostate cancer – could also work against the coronavirus.”
• “Stories from a Lost Year. 2020 was a hard, hard year. Here are the stories of people who lived through it.”
• Into My Veins by XKCD
• “The Dark Reality of Betting Against QAnon. The conspiracy theory has been tied to real-life danger—but before it entered the mainstream, one man stumbled upon Q in a game of political predictions.” “This article is part of ‘Shadowland,’ a project about conspiracy thinking in America.”
• “Trump’s fight to overthrow election now falls to the guy who invented the CueCat. Fittingly, the CueCat is widely regarded as one of the worst gadgets ever made.”—”So, will the 2020 election be overturned by the guy who made the CueCat? It seems unlikely. Before wading into politics, Pulitzer reportedly became a ‘full-blown treasure hunter’ in an apparent quest to find fame on The History Channel. But unable to locate the biblical Ark of the Covenant, Pulitzer is back to search for something just as improbable: widespread election fraud.”
• “What to Do About GOP Bad Faith After Trump—”There’s no single incident that perfectly captures the nature of modern conservative politics, but the lengthy, bad-faith Republican effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act comes close.”
• “Biden Is Ushering in a Second Coming of Religious Liberals. And he’s not alone. Everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Rev. Warnock to AOC are publicly embracing their faith in a way many Democrats haven’t done in a long, long time.”
• “How Ancient Political Losers Had to Bribe Roman Emperors for Peace. A vicious power struggle for control of Rome ended when Septimius Severus triumphed as Emperor—and sent his enemies scrambling to avoid revenge.”
• Tweet—”Does this sound familiar? Written around 540 AD.”
• “Between the sacred and the secular. Why, for the Frankfurt School, democracy’s survival depends on reason and religion.”
• “Argentina Legalizes Abortion, a Milestone in a Conservative Region. The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.”
• “For we are all attracted and drawn to a zeal for learning and knowing; and we think it glorious to excel therein, while we count it base and immoral to fall into error, to wander from the truth, to be ignorant, to be led astray.”—Cicero. “Knowledge has never been understood and recommended more purely, more earnestly, or more sublimely, and it is still a dead letter to-day for those who cannot pursue it in this spirit.”—Werner Jaeger. Both quoted at Desire for Knowledge.
• “Jean Giraud record covers.”—”Unlike other artists whose cover work tends to be a repurposing of existing art, many of the Giraud/Moebius covers were created for the albums on which they appear.”
• “Why a Disabled Artist Collective Was What I Needed All Along.”
• “Shock Value. Peter Saul’s American icons.”—”If a painting is the material expression of an idea and if the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, can we call Peter Saul our quintessential painter? Certainly, Saul is the contemporary American artist who most acutely registers the putrid, deranged quality of American public life during the Trump era.”
• “The Casablanca Letters.”—”Groucho penned what has become a well-known letter to the Warners. It’s full of his great wit and is absolutely worth reading. It’s less well-known that he wrote a couple follow-up letters. Here are The Casablanca Letters – with a few footnotes from me.”
• “Russell T Davies: ‘I looked away for years. Finally, I have put Aids at the centre of a drama’.”
• “The Long Battle Against Racism and Sexism in Emoji. Jennifer 8. Lee, producer of the new doc ‘The Emoji Story’ and vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, writes about the mission to diversify emoji.”
• “The US is getting an official women’s history museum. The Smithsonian Women’s History Act will establish a women’s history museum on the National Mall. Supporters say it’s long overdue.”
• “In old Bangkok, a goddess resists a wave of gentrification.”
• “Spanish town looks to its ‘Evil Angels’ to boost its fortunes. A Spanish TV show brought Talaván’s ‘Evil Angels’ to national attention. It now hopes their restoration will help revive the shrinking rural town.”
• “American Revolution and Traditional Christianity. The absence of rules from the Church of England and the influence of Enlightenment and Republicanism did not allow religion to become a controlling influence in the early American culture. The American Revolution of 1775 further did not allow Christianity to make a stronghold in the American culture.”
• “An Apology for a Massacre. 41 Years Later.”—”On November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, at approximately 11:20 on a bright Saturday morning, nine carloads of Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis drove into the preparation site of a legally permitted anti-Klan rally. Opening fire on the crowd, they shot and killed five people, wounded ten others, and terrorized the poor Black public housing community of Morningside Homes. No uniformed police were visible at the rallying site, which was most unusual.”
• “Jerry Seinfeld: Transcendental Meditation and weight training will ‘solve just about anyone’s life’.”
• “11 Ways To Avoid Multitasking & Focus More Each Day.”
• “We Should All CRAAP More Often.”—”‘CRAAP’ is an anagram for ‘Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.'”
• “The last season of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is too distracted. Season 4 has so many subplots, and so little time.” Also “Kiernan Shipka Explains How Sabrina’s Finale Leaves Room for More.”
• MOAR MONOLITH! “Monolith found on Laverstock Downs near Salisbury. WALKERS were greeted by an unusual sight on this frosty New Year’s Day morning.”
• Watch “Seattle’s virtual New Year’s at the Needle show welcomes 2021.”—”KING 5 Evening rang in 2021 in Seattle with ‘New Year’s at the Needle.’ The show featured a first-ever virtual display from the Space Needle. The virtual display, which a Seattle-based entrepreneur helped develop, used sky-mapping technology and video footage to create a digital artistic presentation. ”
• “In Our Own Wor(l)ds: A Fantastical Zine Trading RPG Zine. Half DIY zine making guide, half fantastical storytelling game about trading zines across universes.” A successful crowdfunding effort by Olivia Montoya.
• “Hesitation at the Gate is a game of chasing enlightenment. Hesitation at the Gate is a Tarot-based roleplaying game with an innovative trick taking resolution system.”
• “Harusexy. This is a lyric game about fucking and the future based on the ancient practice of Roman and Etruscan haruspices. Haruspicy is about learning the future through examining entrails, particularly the liver, to determine the outcomes of future actions. Often dramatized in fiction, a practitioner would be called ‘Haruspex.’ I took it a step further and added sex for some reason.”
• Watch “Treat People With Kindness“, official video by Harry Styles, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
• Tweet—”The All Seeing Tyrannosaur of Providence.” Probably an original by Princess Pricklepants.
• Wow. But, also big mood for any creator out there. Watch “My fate has been decided.”
• Watch “What Will Future Homes Look Like? Filmed in the 1960’s.” Narrated by Walter Cronkite. (Bwahahaha! He says “robutts”!)
• Sex furniture for kids. Er, sorry. Strike that. Reverse it: Kid furniture for sex. Watch “the Nugget couch, Nuggettok, and Nugget After Dark.”
• Watch “Southern US Accents & Shakespeare’s Accent.” Not sure I’d heard this before, but I do strongly recall the argument that the Southern and Canadian accents came from settlers, primarily Scots, as told in The Story of English, book and also PBS series, by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran. But, interesting discussion.
• Tweet about a couple important New Year’s resolutions to consider.

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.