Reminds me of something a designer acquaintance of mine, Melncoly, is fond of saying:
"Be yourself and you will always be in fashion.”
AuthorFell
Okee-dokee, so last night I ran into an old acquaintance of mine whose recently moved back to Edmonton from his time being solitary in Saskatchewan. For anyone who grew up on Whyte Ave, there’s a good chance you know who this someone is.
I’ve been kicking around the idea — as has Klint, I’m sure — of doing some videos and interviews. I happen to know a handful of awfully swell, interesting folk up here in the Great White North, and I figure that since they’re in no way associated to the online occult community I’d maybe put the effort into bringing their insights to light via Technoccult.
And because I’m hardly smrt, I’d like everyone to chip in and throw in any questions you might have. Not just my acquaintance here, but most of the persons I would like to interview are exceptional and each has particular outlooks on the esoteric, life, and magic, all from different schools of thought. In time, I might explore everyone from skinhead magicians to yoga specialists to Reiki masters. Might as well, since I got ’em here in the city.
So post questions, if any. If nothing comes up, I’ll just have to make do talking about hockey and porn.
Literally. Check this out, from: Scientists discover secret sex nerve, via MSNBC:
Nerve “O” has endings in the nasal cavity, but the fibers go directly to the sexual regions of the brain. Indeed, these endings entirely bypass the olfactory cortex! Hence we know the role of Nerve “O” is not to consciously smell, but to identify sexual cues from our potential partners.
What sexual cues do our scents give off? For one thing, we are more likely to be attracted to people whose scent is dissimilar to our own. Family members often share similar chemicals, so our attraction to differing chemical makeup suggests that sexual cues evolved to protect close family members from procreating together. On the other hand, pregnant women have been shown to be more drawn to people with similar chemical makeup, which might be due to the fact that during this crucial time, women are more apt to seek out family members than potential mates.
Research has also shown that these unconscious cues processed in Nerve “O” can make or break a relationship. Couples who have high levels of chemicals in common are more likely to encounter fertility issues, miscarriage and infidelity. The more dissimilar your and your partner’s chemical makeup, the better chance you will have at successfully procreating and staying together.
So the question is, how does one go about shifting their bouquet of aromas to their advantage?
One of my female friends attests to the above:
haha, i always knew that
one of the first things I do when talking to a guy is take a quick inconspicuous wiff
[my boyfriend] always says "you love me for my smell, not for the secrets in my heart!"
because half the time i have my nose shoved in his armpit
And another seems to agree:
thats interesting
never even thought about that before
kinda makes sense though
i’m totally attracted to the scent of some people and others not
Most of us are probably aware of this on one level or another. Anyone else got sexy smelling stories out there? Post them in the comments here. I can safely say that I can genuinely get myself off just smelling a women I am with. Particularly breathing their breath and the scent of their sweat during sex. I often prefer it over the act itself.
Inspired by our now regular watching of Paranormal State on Monday nights (from the good folks that brought you MTV’s Laguna Beach), my friend Mark and I decided to dig up the schematics for the device used in tonight’s rerun. In it, the crew travel to an old asylum which is now used as a drug treatment centre. Good ol’ Chip Coffee is briefly possessed by the "demon" that inhabits the asylum, and there is an appearance by Chris Moon and his radio-to-talk-to-the-dead, aka "Frank’s box."
From the Paranormal State website:
Frank’s Box scans AM/FM and low band frequencies to create a noise matrix from which the dead — as well as other entities — can use to modulate for messages. It’s made of computer, radio and electronic components. Like real-time EVP (electronic voice phenomena), Frank’s Box produces messages from a word or two to complete sentences in length.
Sumption says he received instructions for building the device from disembodied entities. His first box was built in 2002, and he has made fewer than three dozen. While anyone can build one from his schematics, there seems to be something especially effective about the boxes hand-made by Sumption himself.
As the owner of two Frank’s Boxes made by Sumption, I can attest to their operation. The box (shown in photo with digital records and K2 meter) seems to create an entire energy field that attracts spirits. You can ask questions, and get answers — but not consistently. No matter who you ask for on the Other Side, it’s often a guess as to who — or what — really answers. Some researchers, like Sumption himself, don’t ask questions, but turn on the box and record whatever comes through, much like EVP.
Anyhow, most people online I perused call it a hoax — that it picks up random bits of broadcasts or something. I for one don’t think that would work the way it’s set up, but then again I’m no electrical engineer.
I’m curious to see what effect these things have when someone hooks orgone accumulators up in the vicinity. Or, as I’m interested to try out, performing some evocations from the Goetia or Heptameron. I wanna get our little friends on tape.
Regardless, Mark and I may try to make one this summer if we find the time and know-how. Anyone else out there wanting to give the radio-to-the-dead a try can find some (what appears to be?) useful information here:
- Ghost-Tronics: A new electronic method of spirit communication
- Keyport Paranormal (two PDF schematics for download, which Mark and I are reviewing)
- Beaver Spirit Search Society: One more PDF schematic there
After briefly reading over the schematics, what I found interesting is that it reflects ideas I’ve had in the past. When I used to be smarter and write more, I wrote an interesting post called "Here Be Demons." In it, I contemplate the chaotic elements of our realm Malkuth ("kingdom"; ?????) as canvas by which entities of an occult nature might "embed" themselves, in order to make human contact:
Rather than offering parfums and analogous artefacts and symbols by which to aid the entity to embed itself in Malkuth — the manifest realm which we believe is reality — if there were some way in which to associate code and "sacrifice" or offer a binary language to them by which they could learn? […] As parfums are used in ceremonial magic and other rites, their functions are many, but I figure from what I know that they act as a lighthouses in that the particles have poetic properties akin to the nature of the entity being evoked. The nature of the parfum offers an entry point — an anchor — into this realm. The olfactory sense, in particular, seeing as how it bypasses the other processes of the senses and affects the part of the brain that deals with long-term memory (if I recall correctly), may tie together aspects of the subconscious mind to other aspects of subtle consciousness and/or altered states made use of in magical rites.
In the PDF "Newer ‘Frank’s Box’ Schematics," available above from Keyport Paranormal (or here direct), the author believes that it is the randomness from accessing the white and pink noise and whatever other frequencies that allows them to pick up on these paranormal auditory signals. In this, I would be willing to say I agree, at least in theory. It has long since my belief that chaos is what lets supranatural elements in to affect us. It is Prometheus’s light, if you will, shining through into the realm of the Archons and the ordered realm by which the Demiurge keeps this realm spinning on in.
As an aside, here’s more on magical parfums if you’re looking to putz with this stuff.
Photo by Simon Crowley
In the spirit of my friends and I regularly watching Paranormal State on A&E on Mondays, here is a gooder from YouTube. Some good quality ghost stories, which always send shivers up my spine. Which is why I like them:
Though the score is most probably much higher in atheism and science’s favour, I’d like to take this opportunity for all the believers in magic out there to take a look at a recently publicised event in India (link):
On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most ‘powerful’ tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the ‘ultimate destruction ceremony’ on live TV. Sanal Edamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. India TV observed skyrocketing viewership rates.
Definitely worth the read.
Not to say I’ve not had my own peculiar results, but I attribute it more to a level of “reality hacking” I’ve learned over the years via my interest in chaos magic, rather than so-called magick in the (traditional?) sense of the word.
Two interesting reads to follow-up the above with are on Psychology Today, dealing with magic:
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a God
I had a good talk about this with Erik Davis, the author of TechGnosis. He told me, “In the magical worldview, the world is kind of like a language. If you know the spells or the signs or the symbols you can effect change.” Hard physics has discredited that soft outlook, “but with cyberspace and technology and the Internet it’s a human space, or it’s all a constructed space. And on its most basic level, it’s constructed of language.” Maybe not English, but computer code.
Magical thinking springs up everywhere. Some irrational beliefs (Santa Claus?) are passed on to us. But others we find on our own. Survival requires recognizing patterns-night follows day, berries that color will make you ill. And because missing the obvious often hurts more than seeing the imaginary, our skills at inferring connections are overtuned. No one told Wade Boggs that eating chicken before every single game would help his batting average; he decided that on his own, and no one can argue with his success. We look for patterns because we hate surprises and because we love being in control.
I’m drunk, but Joe Rogan makes me giddy with glee.
I can’t find a embeddable video, and I am too lazy at this point to keep looking. But here is a gooder. Joe Rogan talking to the Holy Spirit. Worth a watch.
Joeshow – Episode 6: The Holy Hooker
Goal: Everyone out there with a webcam or video camera or whatever, start recording some shit, interviews, ideas, and just post it. Once I get my shit together, I’ll get some stuff together. I think Klint’s been kicking around the idea, too.
YAY REALITY!
Jane McGonigal, the creator of alternate reality games I Love Bees and World Without Oil, has just launched a new global ARG for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The plot of the game, called The Lost Ring, revolves around a fictional Olympic sport that vanished 2,000 years and five athletes who have reappeared in the present. via Boing Boing
I came across this very interesting piece by xiaoJ on the design site COLOURlovers yesterday. Anyone interested in sigil magic would do well to read over this.
Many outsiders think that modern Chinese remains a purely pictographic language, similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. While it is true that Chinese script began as a pictographic system, pictures do not make for a particular efficient writing system. Some pictograms do still exist (e.g., ? ?mountain’, ? ?person’), but 90% of modern Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds: they are part semantic (a portion of the character, called a radical, provides the general meaning) and part phonetic (the other portion of the character tells you how it is pronounced).
The characters for red, green, blue, and purple in Chinese are phono-semantic (all bearing the radical for silk, ?), but a few color characters are associative compounds: two or more ideographic elements combined to create another meaning.
I find the phono-semantic description very intriguing. It reminds me of the utteral and inutteral elements of magic as espoused in R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing books. Albeit fiction, his understanding of philosophy has given him some great insight into how human will and the universe can coalesce.
While I am not too familiar with the works of Michael Bertiaux, I was led to believe him and the Cult of the Black Snake (I think that was their name) were constructing ever larger sigils out of carefully constructed smaller ones. Careful consideration may be placed unto the original sigils, to be wed together on a dreamscape of a sort by the members of the Cult. What they were accomplishing with this stuff, I dunno.
Anyhow, just an interesting read for anyone that works with sigil magic. Let me know if anyone is doing any interesting or experimental work with sigils or chaos magic these days. =]
Via kottke.org: The placebo effect is real apparently even when you know it’s a placebo, and, alternately, the possibility exists that cultural expectations of whether a drug works or not may have an effect on how well the drug works:
There are various possible interpretations of this finding: it’s possible, of course, that it was a function of changing research protocols. But one possibility is that the older drug became less effective after new ones were brought in, because of deteriorating medical belief in it.
Via me: Which reminded me if this insightful tidbit on chaos magic, by Mark Defrates:
Chaos Magick focuses on the mechanism of belief, and suggests that the process of belief rather than the object of belief is the critical element in magick.
Go think about that.
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