An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for December 16, 2020
Welp, that’s a wrap! I just recently finished featuring each track and artist from Magick, Music and Ritual 15 on social media. So, it’s mostly done until next year. I’ve started to point people toward “following” Hermetic Library on Bandcamp for anthology news; but, of course, I’ll keep talking about it elsewhere too. But, hopefully, it will be another way to reach people that avoids drowning in noise or being drowned by algorithms.
Hey, I don’t know if you knew about this, but I ran into it, again, I think: OpenLibrary has a search feature that does text searching within the entire catalog of Internet Archive documents. Try it out: Thelema. It doesn’t work so well for terms like A∴A∴, but maybe they’ll improve it over time. Anyhow, that’s a neat way to check for terms across books. I think I’ll add that and Wiktionary to the list of external references on Hermeneuticon pages! This will become increasingly useful as I get further into adding important terms from the material at the library, as a way to find materials outside the library that are also relevant. I’ve long wanted to start adding crossindexing from within and without the library materials, with important quotes. That’s another step in the right direction, anyway, of being more useful as a reference and research tool for the site, as I’ve always intended Hermeneuticon to become.
In other news, I just added a bunch of new pages to the long suffering, ever-upcoming issue of the Zine. It’s gone from only 1/2 filled, to only a few pages before I can release it! Oh! So it looks like there’s definitely going to be a zine issue in 2021! (I shudder to imagine when the next one after that will be ready, but let’s celebrate now whilst we can …) Oh, gods, did I just jinx it?
Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:
- Christmas and Hogmanay with Jim and Susie Malcolm: “First up is our Christmas Cracker, Sunday December 20th, 2pm PST; 4pm CST; 5pm EST. A concert of carols and Christmas songs Lyrics, Zoom codes and donation links will be sent to all who register Suggested donation $12 per person. Bring along your favorite drink, your pets, some snacks, tinsel and baubles or just pull up the best chair in the house and come as you are.” “Then, Hogmanay in Scotland. Welcome in the New Year at a sensible time by joining us for the Bells as they ring out in Scotland. Thursday December 31st. Start time: 11pm in Scotland; 3pm PST; 5pm CST; 6pm EST. Featuring New Year songs, visiting, drinking and humorous songs (mostly with rollicking choruses). Special ‘show us your dram’ interlude, at which we hope to see many a bonny bottle. Zoom codes and donation links will be sent to all who register. Suggested donation $15 per person” RSVP to [email protected]
- Portland Cello Project’s Cello-rific Virtual Holiday Sweater Extravaganza! A free livestream 12/22 at 6:30pm PT.
- “January 1st brings public domain riches from 1925.”
- Pre-orders for limited book and DVD set, 222 copies only: “MetamOrphic Ritual Theatre presents… Solve eet Coagula, an Orphic Mystery Film. An immortal head, having learnt presence, disembodied yet with heightened senses, aware now of the power of the physical form in which it is forever encased, wise yet carnal, desires to make a new body… Three years in the making, SOLVE et COAGULA is writer-director Orryelle’s first feature-length film, an EsotErotic Surreal and psychedelic journey of re-enchantment. With a wyrd mix of contemporary subculture and Ancient archetypes (exemplified in a diverse and layered soundtrack ranging from bardic neo-classical to ritual ambient experimental) its central message of the reintegration of spirit and matter, mind and body is pertinent in our disconnected times…”
- 7th year! Watch intro to upcoming Breath – A 30 Day Yoga Journey by Yoga With Adriene—”Your Free 30 Day Yoga Journey for 2021 is here! We begin Jan 1st. Join me for 30 Days of Conscious Breath! To start your Free 30 Day Yoga Journey,” sign up.
- The Critique of the Image… Is the Defense of the Imagination [Amazon]
edited by library Fellow Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey. “This book has the ambition to stage a multi-phased resistance to the power that images exert in the contemporary world, and, at the same time, to offer something like the keys to the transformation of that power.”
- Check out this article about Living in the Sunlight, a meditation practice created by library figure Jeanne Robert Foster, Soror Hilarion, and described in a letter by figure Aleister Crowley to figure Frater Achad, Charles Stansfeld Jones; which is now a being revived as a modern official practice of OTO in Italy and Australia, and likely more to follow. Consider it for your own daily practice.
- “Series of teenage WB Yeats letters sell for over €53,000 at Sotheby’s auction in London.” Also “Letters written by a young WB Yeats fetch nearly £50k at auction.”
- More about this: “House of the Devil: Aleister Crowley and the curse of Boleskine. The occultist’s home has long been the scene of evil rituals, freak accidents, and rock excess. And the Satanic panic continues to this day.” “Plans to turn former home of ‘wickedest man in the world’ into holiday retreat approved. Plans have been approved to restore the former Highland home of occultist Aleister Crowley as a historic visitor attraction and holiday retreat.” “Notorious occultist Aleister Crowley’s fire-ravaged Loch Ness house will be restored and holiday homes built nearby after it was left in ruins by two blazes despite fears it could become a shrine for Satanists.” Also “Occultist Aleister Crowley’s Highland home to be rebuilt. The former Highland home of the “wickedest man in the world” will become holiday accommodation under rubber-stamped plans.” Also “Boleskine House: Plea to occultists not to spoil house renovation. Highland councillors have approved plans for the restoration of the former home of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley.”
- From the Cadaver Synod dept: Long before ‘Ghostbusters,’ fiction’s detectives were exploring the otherworldly. A look at psychic sleuths from Flaxman Low to John Silence, Simon Ark and more.” Mentions Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, and more.
- From the Crowley Corollary dept: “The Time for Talking with the Left is Long, Long Past“—”It’s reasonable to assume that mentioning right now the futility of reasoning with the Left is motivated by the election. It’s also, in my case, untrue. I’ve for decades recognized that devout leftists, emotion-driven and vice-ridden, operate by occultist Aleister Crowley’s “principle,” “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” But now, with the Left stealing an election after have stolen our whole culture and increasingly achieving its ends through violence, more people may accept this message.” “So how should we regard vanguard leftists, the Machiavellian destroyers of civilizations? How can you be prepared for them? Well, pretend you’re dealing with Satan. ”
- From Chorazin to Carcosa. Fiction-Based Esotericism in the Black Pilgrimage of Jack Parsons and Cameron by Manon Hedenborg White, LIR Journal, 2020—”Rocketeer, poet, and polyamorous proto-feminist, Jack Parsons (1914-1952) is one of the earliest and most legendary followers of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and his religion Thelema in America. A precocious only child and avid sci-fi reader, Parsons made vital contributions to the American space programme, and was briefly regarded by Crowley as a potential successor. However, Parsons’ romantic side, keen imagination, and tendency to be seduced by literary fiction was a source of fric-tion between the two men. Parsons drew freely on gothic horror as well as pulp and sci-fi literature in articulating his personal magical universe. In 1946, he undertook the ‘Babalon Working’: a series of magical operations aimed at manifesting the goddess Babalon on earth as a sort of Thelemic messiah. This paper will explore the importance of literature for Parsons’ magical worldview and experimentation, focusing on three key works: Crowley’s Moonchild, Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think, and M.R. James’ short story »Count Magnus«.”
- “Sappho and Dionysus.” Quotes figure William Bulter Yeats.
- “A whistle-stop tour of W. B. Yeats quotations in popular culture.”
- Correspondences Volume 8, no. 1—”three research articles, five book reviews, and an editorial, ‘Transformations and Troubled Times,’ by Manon Hedenborg White.”
- “Women and Other Monsters. A witty and erudite exploration of the enduring influence of the female monsters in Greek myths.” About Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Jess Zimmerman, due March 2021—”A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism.”
- Coptica, Gnostica, and Mandaica: Language, Literature, and Art as Media for Interreligious Encounters [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Wolf B Oerter and Zuzana Vitkova, part of the Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur series, partially available Open Access from the publisher. Proceedings of a conference held in Prague 2017.
- Gods and Humans in the Ancient Near East [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Tyson L. Putthoff—”In this book, Tyson Putthoff explores the relationship between gods and humans, and between divine nature and human nature, in the Ancient Near East. In this world, gods lived among humans. The two groups shared the world with one another, each playing a special role in maintaining order in the cosmos. Humans also shared aspects of a godlike nature. Even in their natural condition, humans enjoyed a taste of the divine state. Indeed, gods not only lived among humans, but also they lived inside them, taking up residence in the physical body. As such, human nature was actually a composite of humanity and divinity. Putthoff offers new insights into the ancients’ understanding of humanity’s relationship with the gods, providing a comparative study of this phenomenon from the third millennium BCE to the first century CE.”
- “What Does It Take to Be Granted Sainthood?” From The Saint Makers: Inside the Catholic Church and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Joe Drape—”Part biography of a wartime adventurer, part detective story, and part faith journey, this intriguing book from New York Times journalist and bestselling author Joe Drape takes us inside the modern-day process of the making of a saint.”
- “Ruins of a Memory Palace. On Judith Schalansky’s imaginative archives.” About An Inventory of Losses [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith—”With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.”
- “Where Preposterous Dreams Meet the Raw Edges of Reality: Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life by Jörg Matthias Determann.” About Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Jörg Matthias Determann—”The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.”
- “Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation? A new book suggests that modern readers can still follow the path of reason that Spinoza traced to true well-being, but they might not want to.” About Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Steven Nadler—”From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler, an engaging guide to what Spinoza can teach us about life’s big questions” “In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family’s import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. Yet the radicalism of Spinoza’s views has long obscured that his primary reason for turning to philosophy was to answer one of humanity’s most urgent questions: How can we lead a good life and enjoy happiness in a world without a providential God? In Think Least of Death, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler connects Spinoza’s ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one’s best life. In the Ethics, Spinoza presents his vision of the ideal human being, the “free person” who, motivated by reason, lives a life of joy devoted to what is most important–improving oneself and others. Untroubled by passions such as hate, greed, and envy, free people treat others with benevolence, justice, and charity. Focusing on the rewards of goodness, they enjoy the pleasures of this world, but in moderation. “The free person thinks least of all of death,” Spinoza writes, “and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life. An unmatched introduction to Spinoza’s moral philosophy, Think Least of Death shows how his ideas still provide valuable insights about how to live today.”
- “‘Strongmen’ Review: Nostalgia, Virility and Power. Can a group portrait of modern tyrants tell us how to prevent their outrages?” About Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Ruth Ben-Ghiat—”What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped).” “Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is—and by valuing one another as he is unable to do—can we stop him, now and in the future.”
- “Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis? In the answer, and its consequences, a bioethicist finds moral lessons for today’s professional healer.” Adapted from “Nazi Medicine and the Holocaust: Implications for Bioethics Education and Professionalism” by Ashley K Fernandes in Nazi Law: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg [Bookshop, Amazon] edited by John J Michalczyk—”Thus, the story of the Holocaust is a tragedy that unfolded because of the corruption of moral philosophy first, and medicine and law second. Why is this important? The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine.” “Other scholars have suggested that the real cause of the Holocaust was an economic, political, or racial one—not a moral one—and that, since the United States has a radically different political, economic, and cultural system, the use of the ‘Nazi analogy’ should be restricted.” “While I agree that the so-called ‘Nazi analogy’ has been misused and even abused, and therefore should be used with restraint and precision, denying the risk of backsliding steps too far.”
- “Writers on the Storm.” About Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan—”A luminous anthology of poems and prose inspired by the weather, that mutable, impressionistic action on the stage of the day.” “In three hundred varied entries, Gigantic Cinema narrates the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night, and back to dawn again. It includes reactions both formal and fleeting–weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters–to the imaginary and actual drama unfolding above our heads. Ranging from Homer’s winds and Ovid’s flood to Frank O’Hara’s sun, Pliny’s reportage on the eruption of Vesuvius to Elizabeth Bishop’s “Song for a Rainy Season,” Gigantic Cinema offers an expansive collection of writing inspired by the commotion of the elements. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other’s elements, as a medley of voices. Assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air’s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on the oldest conversation of all.”
- “The Medieval Philosopher Who Outlined the Basics of the Universe.” More from The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Seb Falk—”An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk.” “The Light Ages offers a gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world and conjures a vivid picture of medieval life as we have never seen it before. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.”
- “Harry Clarke online.”—”It’s taken some time but with a little careful searching it’s now possible to see (almost) all of Harry Clarke’s major works of illustration online.”
- “Who Exactly Was Rilke’s Young Poet Correspondent?.” From Letters to a Young Poet: With the Letters to Rilke from the “Young Poet” [Amazon] by Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus, translated by Damion Searls—”A work that has inspired generations, this new edition of Letters to a Young Poet features a fresh translation of Rilke’s ten classic letters, along with the missing letters from the young poet himself.”
- “Rewriting the History of 1970s Gay Liberation.” In part about 2016’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Jim Downs—”From a prominent young historian, the untold story of the rich variety of gay life in America in the 1970s”
- “Unrecognizable. William Gaddis’s American pessimism.”
- “John le Carré didn’t just invent the characters in the foreground of the spy world. He designed the entire set. His genius was that his re-imaginings of people and events have proved more memorable than the real things.”
- “Tome raiders: solving the great book heist. When £2.5m of rare books were stolen in an audacious heist at Feltham in 2017, police wondered, what’s the story?”
- “‘Like nothing seen in nature before’: strange dinosaur has scientists enthralled. The highly unusual Ubirajara jubatus boasted a mane of ‘hair-like structions’ and two ‘ribbon-like features’, researchers say.”
- “Great Pyramid: Lost Egyptian artefact found in Aberdeen cigar box. A long-lost Egyptian artefact has been found in a cigar box in Aberdeen – and it is hoped it could shed new light on the Great Pyramid.”
- “The farthest galaxy in the universe. Chemical signatures give away the distance to the most distant galaxy.”
- “New synthetic molecule can kill the flu virus. EPFL scientists have developed a synthetic molecule capable of killing the virus that causes influenza. They hope their discovery will lead to an effective drug treatment.”
- From the Abramelin Operation dept: “Scientists show what loneliness looks like in the brain. Neural ‘signature’ may reflect how we respond to feelings of social isolation.”—”We use the default network when remembering the past, envisioning the future or thinking about a hypothetical present. The fact the structure and function of this network is positively associated with loneliness may be because lonely people are more likely to use imagination, memories of the past or hopes for the future to overcome their social isolation.”
- From the Digital Detox dept: “Meat-Ax Your Notifications.”
- Longest known exposure photograph ever captured using a beer can.”—”A photograph thought to be the longest exposure image ever taken has been discovered inside a beer can at the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory. The image was taken by Regina Valkenborgh, who began capturing it towards the end of her MA Fine Art degree at the University of Hertfordshire in 2012. It shows 2,953 arced trails of the sun, as it rose and fell between summer and winter over a period of eight years and one month. The dome of Bayfordbury’s oldest telescope is visible to the left of the photograph and the atmospheric gantry, built halfway through the exposure, can be seen from the centre to the right.”
- “Academics turn RAM into Wi-Fi cards to steal data from air-gapped systems. AIR-FI technique can send stolen data at speeds of up to 100 b/s to Wi-Fi receivers at a distance of a few meters.”
- “Imitation mosquito ears help identify mosquito species and sex. A mosquito-inspired detector could help identify the species and sex of mosquitos, which could be used to identify disease-carrying mosquitos and help save lives.”
- “Novel form of Alzheimer’s protein found in spinal fluid indicates stage of the disease. Discovery could lead to better diagnostics, speed efforts to find treatment.”
- “Researchers discover new particle in the blood of septic patients. LJI scientists get first glimpse of how mysterious particles break off of immune cells.”
- “Russian Communist Party Is Now Following the GOP Playbook on COVID. Just like Trump, Russia’s Communist Party is claiming the impact of the pandemic is exaggerated and anti-COVID measures are destroying the economy for no good reason.”
- “Closing the Loop: Becoming Aware of the Body Again Under Quarantine.”
- “The Chart of Doom: Ranking Apocalypses.”
- “How QAnon’s lies are hijacking the national conversation.”
- From 1964: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from ‘the international bankers’ to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.”
- “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, 1980—”There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
- “The Rotting of the Republican Mind. When one party becomes detached from reality.”
- “Global Inequality and the Corona Shock.”—”Even in a world accustomed to extreme inequality, the disparate experience of the COVID shock has been dizzying. It will be years before comprehensive data is available to chart the precise impact of the pandemic on global inequality. But what might a sketch look like?”
- Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War.—”The recent protests have made clear that histories of slavery and colonialism are urgently relevant and that histories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution are still ongoing. It is not random that in 2020 the Black Lives Matter movement combines protests against police violence with outrage at the disparity in susceptibility to and deadliness of COVID-19 for Black people. Both violent state surveillance and disease risk and treatment are deeply rooted in the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery.”
- “Watching Whiteness Shift to Blue Via Nationalist Aesthetics.”
- Watch “Republicans try to deliver their own electoral votes to Michigan Capitol.” Also.
- “Biden Wins Again, Again, Again, Again, Again.”
- “A New American Manifesto.”—”Adapted from the Declaration of Independence.”
- “Caught in the Crossfire. Brexit isn’t about Europe, and isn’t about the UK. It’s the outcome of a civil war within capitalism.”
- “Identifying Slut-Shaming, Racism, and Transphobia in the Byzantine World.”
- Ted Lasso, a Model for the Nurturing Modern Man
- “32 Museum Directors Lead Calls for German Parliament to Reverse BDS Ruling.”
- “What Does Success Look Like in the New Normal?”
- “Inside the Shady Sex Work Abolitionist Group That Gutted Pornhub. Following a Nicholas Kristof Times exposé, Pornhub removed millions of videos. But the group behind the crusade is an anti-sex work outfit that’s raising money off the controversy.” Also “40 Women Sue Pornhub Parent MindGeek for $80M Over ‘Sex Trafficking’ Videos. The Jane Does have sued MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, accusing them of knowingly profiting off tons of sex-trafficked material.”
- “Remembering “Heat” for What It Was: The Most Homoerotic Film of the ’90s. Nominally it’s an action movie, but the simmering tension between De Niro and Pacino belongs to another genre.”
- “Meet the Renaissance Master of Instagram.”—”‘People who called me the new Michelangelo were probably drunk,’ says Jacopo Cardillo, 33, a promising Italian sculptor better known as Jago.”
- “Chris Pine In Talks To Star In ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ For eOne And Paramount; Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley Direct.”
- “The Masque Of The Red Death: New 4K Restoration & Uncut Version!” About The Masque of The Red Death directed by Roger Corman, with Vincent Price, &al., a 4k blu-ray restoration, due January 2021 in the UK, presumably coming to the US some time.
- “Santa and Mrs. Claus and the Christmas War of the Sexes. In the late nineteenth century, bachelor Santa got married. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Claus contributed uncompensated labor to the Claus household.”
- Gnostic Films for the Holidays
- Tweet—”One goat, one sheep and three lambs have been terrorising the streets of Nevsehir in Turkey.”
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