If you woke up this morning with Queen Elizabeth II as your head of state then you probably have an opinion about rugby.

Or if you woke up this morning in a country we have repeatedly trounced in battle (France) then you also probably have a rugby opinion.

Kiwis, Australians, English, French, Welsh, Saffas. Ask any of them.

And you know what? I usually do have an opinion about the rugby.

I was trained by a World Cup winning wallaby as a kid (this is back when Australians were actually good at the game), I’ve been in teams that have won two grand finals, One of my cousins is a wallaby, the All Blacks were a client of mine for two years, I used to do set-ups at Eden Park every day for almost a year and I’ve been in the All Blacks changing room (that was rather fun). My family is Anglo-Scot-Irish-French-Kiwi-Australian… and those are just the passports we can muster amongst the living.

So yeah. It’s not that surprising that the topic came up among other Antipodeans at a party near Regent’s Park during the most recent Rugby World Cup and led to a spirited conversation.

Granted, mine isn’t an expert opinion -far from it- but I like to think that maybe it shouldn’t be immediately discounted. Now, naturally, I’m just trying to have some party chat rather than reveal to a bunch of mostly-strangers that I’m completely insane which means I didn’t mention all that previous rugby stuff.

I did, however, show up with my male partner.

God help straight boys if a gay guy has an opinion about sport that extends beyond critiquing the teams’ uniform. So they listened and we conversed and it was general big party fun. But by the end of the conversation the loudest of them is referring to me as “rugby pundit.”

Hmmm.

So I guess this point is largely for the laydeez and the gays out there. (Not saying it doesn’t happen to other groups but if/when we ever meet it will be immediately apparent as to why I can’t confidently speak to the personal experience of Asians or black people.) It reminds me of that hilarious line in season two of 30 Rock where Jack says “I like it when a woman has ambition. It’s like seeing a dog wearing clothes.”

The loudest guy in the group is actually the little brother of one of my closest friends. She spent more than a decade dating women before permanently taking the train back to boystown. Those two are the closest I have ever seen two adult siblings. In no way is he actually homophobic. And yet the fact that I have an opinion about rugby rather than ribbons leaves him faintly bemused… like seeing a dog wearing clothes.

And you know what’s so insidious about it? When you try to explain to a husband/brother/boyfriend/father why it upsets you because you know why they said it that way… but without a trail of evidence to point to… it just simply does not compute. You sound crazy rather than righteous.

My wrongness is legendary. I don’t mind being wrong which is good because that’s usually the case. I definitely don’t need to be right but I do demand to be heard. Dismiss my opinions if they’re wrong and I’m fine. But dismiss my opinions because you don’t think I should be listened to and I will come at your neck with a fork.

Which brings us -as you have probably guessed- back to the whisky rant.

Why a map?

What follows is a list of -to my mind- reasonably qualified opinions. They’re allowed to be wrong. Some earlier versions of them have indeed proved to be so… For instance, opinions relating to Pleistocene civilisations have certainly been scaled back over the last fifteen years as more accurate information regarding the last stage of the Younger Dryas event and better modelling of ancestral DNA has come to light.

Whilst they are allowed to be wrong, I am not satisfied that enough has been done to dimiss them.

And that’s about as close as any chaos magician should come to statements of belief. Any and all of these will be blown away like dandelion heads the moment I feel they have been ‘heard’ and refuted. Also, each will have an entire post devoted to them over the course of this series should you wish to get into more detail about any particular point. (You know who you are.)

Why is this a ‘map’ of forbidden places? Why not just a list of articles of faith?

For personal reasons.

Because the beginning point of the rant, the failed booty call from fifteen years ago, is the map that -for better or worse- sits at the current centre of pseudohistory’s quest for Pleistocene civilisations… the Piri Reis map. (Apologies for the extremely camp video explanation.) Copied in Portugal from older maps obtained from who knows where (it’s right next door so I have some ideas), it demonstrates an understanding of longitude we only recently obtained and potentially shows the outline of Antarctica centuries before it was ‘discovered’.

Yes, the reactionary theory is that the so-called ‘Antarctic’ parts are actually just South America stretched around to fit on the skin which may be the case.

But riddle me this.

It’s part of an extensive, contemporaneous collection of maps that also show an island off the coast of Ireland called Hy-Brasil which has definitely not been above sea level for thousands of years. It also shows Bimini above sea level (which is intriguing for obvious reasons). The Reinal map of 1510 appears to show the west coast of India as it looked more than 15,000 years ago as well as islands which existed 11,500 years ago that are under water today. Oh, and based on the maps he took with him, Marco Polo thought India was one third bigger than it actually is and that Ceylon was connected to it… which was of course the case before the end of the Ice Age.

So yes… maybe that isn’t Antarctica on the Piri Reis map. Maybe it’s just a bent South America. But there are still these other jigsaw pieces we need to fit somewhere, if you please. And the difference between ‘dispute’ and ‘refute’ left to explain, I suppose.

That’s why this is a map and not a list. With a map, all we need to do is take it, charter a boat and go and see if Antarctica is actually there. If it is, yay me. If it isn’t, well I’ll just got about my business then. There’s some rugby punditry that needs attending to.

The Map of Forbidden Places

1.

Inadvertent ingestion of hallucinogens provided the first extra-human contact which has continued in various forms ever since. (See entire history of magic literally anywhere on earth.) It’s my contention that the fungal and vegetative components that enabled this first appeared as a result of changing climates, which provides an answer as to why it didn’t happen sooner.

2.

DNA quite possibly reveals clear evidence of intentionality in our construction. Regardless, we are at the ‘flat earth’ stage of understanding DNA so it is fucking ludicrous to make pompous claims that we know what is going on up in there.

3.

Ancient aliens were at least some of the first civilising gods, though the distinction between the two is largely irrelevant. As is their physical presence on earth (refer to the first point) but if they did show up in bodily form -which I’m on the fence about- we should probably cast Enki in the lead role. (Show me another four thousand year old first hand description of flying low over the earth, landing in marshes, getting out of your ship and then ordering your shipmate to check if the water is potable.)

4.

Further to point three: the universe is extremely crowded. The case for vastly ancient structures on the moon is fairly strong to anyone with even a cursory understanding of film technology. Though open to it, I remain to be convinced with regards to Mars, unlike Buzz Aldrin whom you should probably believe over me. However it shakes out, this seems to indicate that even the inhospitable corners of our solar system once held now long vanished civilisations. Sustained, inter-species, multidimensional contact continues (but I probably don’t need to tell you that).

5.

Universal flood myths are tumbled-down cultural memories of the dramatic upheaval associated with the end of the last Ice Age and subsequent sea level rise. (Even today most people live by the sea.) At least one culture, and likely more than three, reached levels of complexity we would consider comparable to the late Mayan period during the time between the Last Glacial Maximum and the end of the Pleistocene.

It will eventually emerge that a surprisingly large amount of land area experienced changes in climate were extremely rapid and destructive.

6.

The creation of art (see Alan Moore’s description of the relationship between art and magic) occasionally ‘tunes into’ future events, giving the impression that the artist is somehow “writing the future”. See Bob Wilson, Grant Morrison, Jack Kirby, Uri Geller, Arthur C Clarke, PKD and many more. This phenomenon has the unfortunate side effect of making the events seem less real and even totally fictional when they subsequently happen.

7.

Hermetico-Gnostic ideas constitute the “secret religion of Europe” and have tumbled down in an unbroken but hugely mutated “line” from where they coalesced in Alexandria. When you think about it, this is the only way it could reach us. In the rare instances of so-called direct descent of spiritual ideas such as the Catholic Church it’s still only ideas that are being transmitted. Ideas have no genetic material that can be “passed down” generationally… and besides, even genetic material mutates. There are no ancient witch cults or centuries-old secret societies. There are just ideas.

These Hermetico-Gnostic ideas sporadically reappear throughout western history (founding of the US, building of various cities, returning kings to thrones, founding of EU) in powerful circles to influence long-term policy objectives.

There are seven?

Shouldn’t a chaos magician be making lists of eight? Probably. But I have two responses to that. The first is there’s still one slot left on the whisky rant hard drive if you’re selling something. The second:

Who is the master who makes the grass green?

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

The greatest challenge when engaging with pseudohistory is its persistent need to speculate beyond the data.

Take the Paeleolithic Renaissance.

There is currently no universally accepted -or even verifiable- explanation for this simultaneous global flowering of art, and technological innovation that occurred pretty much everywhere where the earth wasn’t covered in a two mile block of ice.

Whatever it was essentially kicked off ‘modern humanity’ as we would understand it.

Pseudohistory has a tendency to immediately jump to explanations that rely on ancient astronauts and lost civilisations.

The most popular orthodox version of the story of our beginnings lies in the work of James David Lewis-Williams whom we will return to later but you can pick up the gist in the first half of this interview with him here.

Orthodoxy is essentially saying “we don’t know how it happened but it’s definitely not whatever crazy talk you’re spouting.” Forget beyond the data. It even refuses to speculate with it. Like the geological age of the sphinx, ignorance is the best policy, apparently.

Because the natural response to their position is “oh really? Well why don’t we just find out?” Pseudohistory legitimately exposes just how little the scientific method actually underpins modern historic academia. Why not start with the verifiable scientific facts and build from there? Why not start with the footprints found in South America that are 12,000 years too old for your ‘population of the Americas’ theory? Why not start with the geological age of the Sphinx? Why are you sticking to a patently wrong story?

Pseudohistory fulfills this classical satanic role. It challenges, it pokes at the artifice, it demands hegemony speaks the truth… it calls out its lies.

Wizards, I  like to think, sit somewhere in between the two poles of historic and pseudohistoric. Because there is a critical interplay here… a yin and yang exchange that we use to weave the narrative of our existence, of our place in the world.

Graham Hancock says in this interview that he “presents anomalies rather than a belief system.” Debate that assertion amongst yourselves but this is the point he is driving at… wizards should hypothesise with the available data and then make amendments as new data comes to light.

And you know what? It works. Agitation in a system leads -eventually- to innovation. Here is a quote from an interview with the amazing Jacques Vallee about the orthodox treatment of UFO encounters:

By denying the reality of the reports, brushing aside the witnesses…and treating them like fools or crooks, the academic skeptics are actually teaching the public that science is impotent at studying the phenomenon.

Pseudohistory was refused entry into the tenured ivory towers of bitchy academia so it turned around and went after the villagers instead. It went after us. It’s much better at capturing mindshare because the thing about being locked out of the towers is that it applies to everyone who doesn’t put on a tweed jacket and (hopefully) metaphorically blow the head of the department.

Pseudohistory’s near-irresistible temptation to speculate beyond the data -to make ever more bold claims- is an entirely understandable manifestation of the narrative fallacy. For instance, Richard Hoagland has spent decades agitating NASA about structures on the moon and Mars. Decades. Doing one thing. That gets into your head, man. So it’s no surprise he thinks JFK was murdered because he was about to give the space programme to the Russians and that returning astronauts have their memories erased. We don’t need to talk about reality tunnels, we’re all wizards here.

One last point to bear in mind, especially as we move further into the fringe… the final thing that paints pseudohistory into a crazy corner is ‘false’ or ‘counter’ pseudohistory created by the orthodoxy; psyops being a publicly acknowledged -and regularly used- strategy by most major governments. (Sometimes I really do wonder about Crowley’s claim that his pro-Nazi propaganda was deliberately outrageous and paid for by the Secret Service Bureau so as to weaken the entire pro-Nazi discourse on the east coast. It only sounds weird until you realise we were even using Roald Dahl for a very similar thing.)

Pseudohistory should not -at least when deployed properly- function as a complete replacement of a world narrative constructed by the inherently conservative institution of academia. Far from it. It augments the story by holding up the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that don’t fit and says “what about these?”

Given we have explored a potentially more sophisticated role for the field, perhaps it’s time we take back the word? Perhaps it’s time we reclaim it as our own like so many previous pejoratives that have been hurled at those who ever dared to suggest that being different is the same thing as being bad? I can’t imagine the parades will be quite as dazzling but it’s worth a shot:

We’re here. We’re pseudohistoric. We don’t want any more Bering ice bridge theory.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

Where's Waldo?

In 1324, Mansa Musa, king of the Malian empire, left on his pilgrimage to Mecca.

He took with him a retinue of 60,000 followers, used Andalucian architects to build a palace in Timbuktu along the way and peaceably incorporated a quarter of Africa into his realm. When he was done, he had the second biggest empire on earth at the time (after the Mongol Empire).

Upon reaching Cairo the king gave away so much gold that he depressed the Egyptian economy for ten years.

That, kids, is what you call a motherfuckin’ road trip!

The Hajj marks a slight departure from the British Museum’s previous blockbuster exhibitions like Treasures of Heaven or Ancient Egyptian Book of The Dead. It necessarily lacks ‘high impact’ or ‘core’ artefacts like seventy-foot scrolls wrapped around the inside of the Reading Room or glittering, ghoulish remains of long dead saints. It’s not like they can actually install the Ka’ba (though they do have a replica and as a honky, gay Chaoate that’s all I’m ever likely to get). The closest thing to a ‘core’ artefact is a genuinely stunning sitara which covered the door of the original in Mecca itself.

In a lot of ways, The Hajj marks a return to the original, seventeenth century purpose of the British Museum. This is a teaching exhibition. There is a lot of actual content rather than simply exquisitely curated, perfectly lit relics from across the world. You come out of it smarter rather than just ‘blockbusted’. As The Guardian put it:

Neil MacGregor and his team at the British Museum, including Venetia Porter, curator of this exhibition, have, for a decade now, been on an impassioned quest themselves to shed light on some of the more misunderstood history and rituals of the contemporary world and to find the shared humanity in them. Once again, it is worth commending these boundless efforts at cultural diplomacy, and sheer determined curiosity, that allow us all to enjoy the detail and scope of a story that is to many a closed book.

We were there for opening day -something I endeavor to avoid in most cases as crowds get in the way of my nerdly engagement. Two things immediately leapt out at me.

First, that there were a high proportion of actual Muslims visiting the exhibit.

This pleased me as museums -by sheer design rather than intention- have an unavoidable cultural bias: you necessarily require a starting culture in which to branch out and explore others. Inevitably some viewpoints fall by the way side.

Second: it was much quieter than usual. There were no queues to get in (not that I ever queue at the BM) and I had plenty of space to explore each section without being crowded by jerks.

In fact, there were very few people over fifty (the BM’s core crowd, obviously). And it’s not because they weren’t around. We had just come from the British Library’s Illuminated Manuscrips exhibition which is less than a mile away and the whole place was like God’s waiting room.

In some vague sense it’s troubling in its implication but on the plus side there were a lot of young people of all colours and stripes. If you want to read into that I’d say it’s positive; it indicates a permanent generational drift toward cultural openness.

The actual production itself is a masterpiece of museum curation. Because the Reading Room is itself circular, Venetia Porter has laid out the space to imply an actual Hajj journey, beginning with a thousand-year-old Koran open to the relevant passage compelling Muslims to go on the Hajj, then through to medieval road markers and route maps in the first section and swinging the whole thing around the central replica Ka’ba as the exhibition moves through time to the present day. (Only once since the death of the Prophet has there ever not been a Hajj and that was because of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during the First World War. Not even the Crusades interrupted it.)

Perhaps what appealed to me the most was the sheer logistics of the whole event. There is nothing quite like it in all mankind. Sure, Hindus have some extremely large scale pilgrimages that you can even see from space but the distances and complexity involved with the Hajj boggle the mind. (Apparently the London 2012 Olympics Organisers have consulted the Saudis responsible for Hajj operations.)

A curator holds one of the oldest known copies of the Korans at the British Museum in London, Britain

In fact, the Hajj has attracted operational concerns for centuries. There was a news clipping from The Times of London on display: One pilgrim ship leaving from Singapore sank in 1880, killing a thousand people.

During the days of empire, the British Raj became concerned that these mass migrations had become vectors for cholera which was spreading across the colonies and killing thousands.

So they appointed Thomas Cook himself -yes, that one- as the Official Travel Agent for The Hajj.

There’s also some details on other, slightly adorable, tales of Victorian derring-do. A one Richard Burton, who spoke Arabic decided to grow a beard, dress in pilgrim whites and undertake the journey himself. He was the first non-Muslim to do so (we’re not allowed otherwise). Or rather, he was the first non-Muslim to pretend to be a Muslim, sneak across North Africa and then come home to write a Boy’s Own Adventure style account of his escapades. (Told you it was slightly adorable.)

Of particular interest to the magically inclined were examples of the modern day pilgrims’ guidebooks, written in seven languages, looking for all the world like an art gallery programme you’d pick up at the entrance and then deposit in large plastic bins as you leave. They’re spiral bound with a lanyard to hang them around your neck and an easy index. So if you’re leaving your accommodation to go out into Mecca you turn to page whatever and recite the recommended prayer. Or flip to another page if you’re about to drink some water. I loved them. It’s like the gamification of the spiritual world. Somebody make one for magical folk.

The review is a couple of days late because I needed time to process what I considered some of the shortcomings of the exhibition. This is from the British Museum’s press kit:

The exhibition which has been organised in partnership with the King Abdulaziz Public Library Riyadh…  A wide variety of objects will be lent to the exhibition. Loans include significant material from Saudi Arabia including a sitara which covers the door of the Ka’ba as well as other historic and contemporary artefacts from key museums in the Kingdom. Other objects have come from major public and private collections in the UK and around the world, among them the British Library and the Khalili Family Trust.

The unavoidable reality of staging global exhibitions is the risk of competing interpretations and attitudes influencing the material. One frankly glaring omission was any discussion of the pre-Islamic use of the Ka’ba. You get the Koranic story of it being built by Abraham but what researchers such as my darling Karen Armstrong have shown is that it was likely dedicated to previous pagan gods. It’s not like it’s secret information or even all that difficult to obtain. This is a direct lift from Wikipedia:

In her book, Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong asserts that the Kaaba was dedicated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and contained 360 idols that either represented the days of the year, or were effigies of the Arabian pantheon. Once a year, tribes from all around the Arabian peninsula, whether Christian or pagan, would converge on Mecca to perform the Hajj.

Imoti contends that there were multiple such “Kaaba” sanctuaries in Arabia at one time, but this was the only one built of stone. The others also allegedly had counterparts of the Black Stone. There was a “red stone”, the deity of the south Arabian city of Ghaiman, and the “white stone” in the Kaaba of al-Abalat (near the city of Tabala, south of Mecca). Grunebaum in Classical Islam points out that the experience of divinity of that period was often associated with stone fetishes, mountains, special rock formations, or “trees of strange growth.” The Kaaba was thought to be at the center of the world with the Gate of Heaven directly above it. The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred world intersected with the profane, and the embedded Black Stone was a further symbol of this as a meteorite that had fallen from the sky and linked heaven and earth.

According to Sarwar, about 400 years before the birth of Muhammad, a man named “Amr bin Lahyo bin Harath bin Amr ul-Qais bin Thalaba bin Azd bin Khalan bin Babalyun bin Saba”, who was descended from Qahtan and king of Hijaz (the northwestern section of Saudi Arabia, which encompassed the cities of Mecca and Medina), had placed a Hubal idol onto the roof of the Kaaba, and this idol was one of the chief deities of the ruling Quraysh. The idol was made of red agate, and shaped like a human, but with the right hand broken off and replaced with a golden hand. When the idol was moved inside the Kaaba, it had seven arrows in front of it, which were used for divination.

King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz's 2014 plans

Not. One. Word.

The British Museum, in my opinion, is getting better at coordinating with differing viewpoints which was reflected in the truly excellent Babylon exhibition the other year (which required extensive cooperation from Iran and Iraq).

But what was going around in my head was whether they had ceded too much of the BM’s core mission in ignoring the backstory of the giant black cube they installed in the middle of their own reading room.

I’m still not sure I’ve landed on an answer I’m happy with but it did get me thinking about that speech of Paddy Ashdown’s about how we are moving into a multi-polar world and we’ll have to do business with -in the case of Saudi Arabia in this instance- people whose attitudes to women, gays, corporal punishment and human rights we find abhorrent. To my mind, this is what The Guardian means when it says “cultural diplomacy” in the quote at the top of the post.

Diplomacy is the art of the possible rather than the preferable and perhaps the opportunity to incorporate a much wider audience into the British Museum’s footprint and to shed much needed light on something the non-Muslim world has little understanding of is worth the mission cost? (Again, I come back around to the original mission of the British Museum when it pillaged the empire in an attempt to shed light where there was ignorance. Their role has always been complicated and always involves a cost.)

Perhaps it’s best to consider it a starting position, the beginnings of increasing engagement, rather than the definitive partnership? In twenty years time just think of what a Hajj exhibition could be like at the British Museum -or what it will probably be called by then if the Tories get their way- the Starbucks Museum of British and World History.

In one of the last chambers of the exhibition was a scale model of the planned extension to the Ka’ba complex in Mecca. I really wanted to take a sneaky photo of it but there was an angry looking volunteer staring at me.

It’s. Enormous.

By 2014 the Haram will cover a million square metres. You can’t see it in the image I found online but each of those gigantic covered pathways leading up to the stadium has helipads on them. You can barely make out the tiny black cube in the middle.

So yes. Perhaps it’s best we take an ideology hit in order to improve the cultural literacy of everyone involved? My own literacy has certainly improved thanks to the exhibition.

There is a customary to say when someone has undertaken The Hajj: “Hajj mabroor.” May the pilgrimage be accepted by God.

May it, indeed.

Hajj: Journey To The Heart of Islam is open every day until April 12. Adults £12. Members free.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

And yet... still not the best choice of president in this handshake.

From your own experience, ask yourself this honestly: how successful are surprise parties?

How about this one: how long does it typically take for a workplace-based extramarital affair to become common knowledge? Even ones that ruin marriages and (more importantly) careers seemingly have the inevitably of avalanches.

We are shit at secrets.

Gossip is an evolutionary advantage. Endless, pointless nattering solidifies social bonds in primate groups. (Yes, I just gave you an evolutionary explanation for the Kardashians. Nobel Prize, please.)

Most of the time we understand this. Most of the time, Peter J Carroll’s observations in Psybermagick ring true:

Any conspiracy lacking internal conspiracies will rule its world… In practice the power of any conspiracy rises and falls in inverse proportion to the power of its internal conspiracies. Mutual guilt and bribery mainly hold together conspiracies whose ideologies command insufficient loyalty, but this makes them vulnerable.

Never join a conspiracy that you could possibly betray, because if you could, someone else will.

The trouble is… when you look at the Fortean world for long enough you inevitably, erroneously -and hopefully temporarily- reach the conclusion that a vast conspiracy of the powerful and hegemonic is allied against you… against the truth.

Because how else could it be possible that the Egyptian authorities have steadfastly refused all global attempts to explore the chamber under the left paw of the sphinx that is unequivocally there as proven by independent ground penetrating radar?

How else could it be possible that the potentially unavoidable proof of ancient structures on the moon -which you can see in publicly published photos- hasn’t reached the mainstream without generations of sustained, complex and active suppression? What happens when people who have actually been into space tell you there are structures on Mars?

It’s kinda a big deal.

And so you start to think unhelpful thoughts. You start to think like a character in the last few pages of a Lovecraft story.

You start genuinely entertaining the notions that astronauts have had their memories erased and rogue academics have been offed in suspicious plane crashes. You start to believe in -paraphrasing PJC- a conspiracy devoid of internal conspiracies.

That being said… there is only so much instant dismissal, mockery and shrill counter propaganda -rather than the eminently reasonable and scientific examination- of these oddities before you start feeling a little disturbed… a little bit moved around the board. Something is evidently going on because, clearly, the lady doth protect too much.

If you’ve ever worked in a large company or government organisation you will instantly recognise the absurdity of the very idea of a vast conspiracy maneuvering in concert to keep mankind ignorant of what’s really going on. My old company couldn’t manage to keep a few layoffs (including my own) secret. Everyone knew about it six months in advance.

My comments about conspiracy do not apply to the Norwegian government who is clearly keeping the existence of trolls secret from us as this doucmentary proves.

This is basic Organisational Theory.

Large organisations -especially bureaucracies- can barely do the job they are supposed to be doing let alone a whole extra one, executed flawlessly, that nobody knows about.

Our helicopters crash into each other in broad daylight, we are declared dead by the tax man in a phone call on our way to work, human resources overpays us for a year without noticing and then wants it all back, diabetics are injected with methadone rather than insulin in hospital.

If you don’t believe me then just look at the person in the cubicle next to yours. The one talking about last night’s [insert talent/singing show here]. Do you think they are keeping the secrets of an alien civilisation from you?

The seeming coordination of factors contributing to the “suppression” of unorthodox facts and ideas can be more elegantly explained as the summary of competing mutual agendas. After the fact -thanks to the narrative fallacy- it looks like an alliance of the powerful working together to keep us ignorant.

Market-wide coordination, however, is extremely rare which is why price fixing is also such a rarity. It’s really only OPEC countries, utilities like gas and electricity and government contractors that manage to do it. And they do it boldly, in broad daylight, right in front of everyone’s nose. A conspiracy it is not.

Other examples like Big Tobacco’s patchy and unsuccessful attempts to suppress the health effects of smoking only look like coordinated activity. They are instead dozens of smaller suppressing actions taken for localised reasons. It might look like a ship but it is a ship without a captain.

Sidebar: This dovetails neatly into my nascent Demiurge-as-Egregore theory. It’s a narrative fallacy… it’s a mental shortcut -convenient on the spiritual path- that implies intentionality and complexity when the reality is much more likely to be banal. There is no great Sauronesque being seeking to keep you chained to the earth… there is just the bureaucrat having a bad day and the business development director at a weapons manufacturer trying to make his quarterly target. Multiply by six billion and you have a potent enemy.

Thus true gnosis is escaping the inevitable false narrative of dominant power structures. The narratives would have been different in the second to tenth century when the notion of the Demiurge crystallised but the ‘inevitability of the banal explanation’ would have been the same. It would have been the untalented, ambitious priest, the shrill, petty king and the local burgomeister who insists on a bribe but… just like in the modern era… if you add together all these horrible little factors you inadvertently build an implacable, continent-spanning egregore of darkness, a high emperor of the radioactive wasteland, an astral Simon Cowell, who whispers in your ear that you should buy The Sun and keep that job in the call centre and watch reality television all night because your world is devoid of magic and your starlit sky is devoid of teachers and companions.

Except that’s not the case. That’s an observational error.

Conspiracies don’t have to be the suppression of knowledge. Conspiracies are simply those moments when the currently inexplicable meets the unwillingness to change. They don’t trickle down from the Bildebergers conference… they are the side effect of encountering that unhelpful employee at the DMV.

Where we are going in this series it’s important that we bring this up first. We will be swimming at dusk in some very murky waters and the bull sharks of ignorance are always hungry.

Intentionality is not always necessary for suppression. Sometimes it’s just another day in the cubicle for the Demiurge.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

For Scribs.

As a teenager it became apparent that getting boys to make out with you required a substantially different strategy than getting girls to.

With girls I would just add wine use my ears.

Straight(ish) boys required a delicate balance of

• Demonstrating your own non-threatening awesomeness while
• Sufficiently loosening their reality bonds so as to be amenable to (or groomed into) doing something they initially weren’t planning on.

Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one or if it precisely describes your own awkward, fumbling teenage years but I found magic to be particularly effective with that second part.

It was like a cold reading. Ask open, innocuous questions and then move down whichever rabbit hole appeared in the conversation. Could be tarot, could be ghosts, could be whatever got the best reaction. The goal was to get to the point where you could start using words like “socially conditioned identity” and “culturally constructed personality” and then provide helpful suggestions as to how to loosen those shackles. Muggle teenagers are idiots. They will rebel against anything and do whatever you tell them as long as their parents or The Man doesn’t like it.

And for me the best results seem to come from, over many drinks, outlining a broadly Hancockian vision of Ice Age civilisation. (If you start with Atlantis/Ancient Astronaut theory you inevitably land on the realisation that we are luminous beings and not this crude matter. The meat suit is just temporary. So really “it’s all just about feeling that inner connection like I’m getting from you.” *GAG* What a douche!)

One such successful target got really into the Atlantis stuff. I had moved to Sydney to start university a year after we’d hooked up and it turned out his father had a pied-à-terre “that was free that night if I wanted to come over and talk ancient history” about a six minute walk from my own.

“Well, all right,” I say. “But I’m going to need some whisky and some old naval maps.” (Love me those maps.) He laughed. Boom. Fish in a barrel.

And you know what? I did bring over some maps photocopied from the library and a bunch of books and some whisky and we did talk Ice Age civilisations. We talked excitedly till 2am. Whereupon he declared he was really tired and took himself off to bed, leaving me to walk home in the dark clutching my maps and books.

I had got distracted and lost the mission. Outplayed by those stupid muggle teenagers. So ended my days of using magic for grooming. (I was now old enough to get into clubs, anyway.)

My Atlantean obsessions, combined with my high school passion for Old Kingdom Egyptian burial customs, positively fizzed when I encountered Michael Foucalt during university. His work gave me the psychological framework to understand how power creates rather than suppresses knowledge. It was plain to see how power could create a dominant historical narrative that supports its own needs.

And I would get a little ranty about it. From that moment ‘whisky rant’ became the umbrella term that held my pseudohistorical studies, Forteana and all the little pieces of the orthodox story of “us” that falls away from the main edifice, neglected and ignored.

It is, in lieu of a meta-narrative (still a chaos magician), my account of magic and mankind, beginning with the emergence of the first modern humans and extending into our furtive explorations of space. This may take some time.

So… bring me some whisky and some old naval maps and we’ll get started.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

The colleague who sat next to me on my last flight home from Hamburg is not a confident air passenger.

If you are in a similar situation the secret is to hide in the numbers rather than resort to personal experience.

The is because, unless you are flying several times a week, your mind considers it an unfamiliar experience. ie you can’t trick yourself into saying “well it was all right the last time I was in a plane so it will be fine this time.”

Instead, you need to tell yourself facts like there are more than a million people in the air at any one time. This number is rising while the number of air fatalities in the developed world is decreasing and so on.

You need to look outward to better effect an inward change.

For me there is a corollary with practical magic here. Obviously you ‘believe’ in the efficacy of enchantment just like my colleague ‘believes’ she will eventually get home safety. However, when you’re in the business of collecting fireflies it helps to hoard firefly food wherever you may find it. It helps to build a picture of a world filled with wonder if you are planning to add to the global supply.

My supply tends to be a lot more varied than mere Forteana. It include scientific discoveries, new historical information, portentious signs of business model collapse. And… uhh… Forteana.

So here you go. Here’s some wonderment from the planet you currently call home.

1. The oldest known astrologer’s board was discovered in Croatia.

2. Here are some photos from Ostia Antica. I went there during a monsoonal storm a couple of years ago. Amazing place. For my money it’s a better experience than that other preserved Roman town near Naples because it was so functional. It was Rome’s port so it had sailors and whores and foreigners and wizards and exotic products and returning soldiers and all that good stuff. The continuity of industry is a source of wonder to me.

Not that I dislike Pompeii. Where else can you read such hilarious bawdy graffiti like Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up.  Now it penetrates men’s behinds.  Goodbye, wondrous femininity!

3. A common blood pressure medicine prevents lungs from being damaged by smoke.

4. Impossible? It’s probably from space. Like these impossible crystals.

5. Some deep thoughts at Reality Sandwich against ‘you create your own reality’ in a great piece on Dynamic Paradoxicalism. To wit:

You-create-your-own-reality absolutists may invoke quantum mechanics to justify their fundamentalism. Indeed, the wave-particle duality — a photon being a particle or a wave depending on which you expect it to be — does raise questions about reality as observer dependent. Again, I feel that this principle is a potent reality-forming vector; I just don’t think it is the only vector.  There may be other humans collapsing the wave function based on different intentions than ours, and there is also the gigantic inertia and momentum of the collective human psyche affecting our world. There is a New Age tendency to use quantum mechanics as a magic wand, or an endless supply of fairy dust, that can be used to justify any proposition, no matter how fantastic. The abuse of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which was created to have very specific application on the subatomic plane, is used by some relativists and New Agers to mean, “Everything is uncertain,” which for them means, “Anything goes.”

Love it. In a related sphere, here are some thoughts regarding the limitations of Free Will:

The new challenge to free will comes from a different direction: neuroscience’s discovery that people’s brains are a collection of diversely oriented modules, and that our understanding of our own intentionality is to a great degree a legitimating fiction which one module in the left hemisphere of the brain retroactively imposes over the decisions different modules make. The old challenge to free will came from the “free” side. The new challenge comes from the “will” side.

6. Remember that post where we speculated as to when we can legitimately call ourselves cyborgs? Well NPR is thinking along the same lines about how we probably already live on Caprica. (I read recently that one third of US Air Force craft are now drones. Robots, man… Robots.)

7. [Video] Prehistoric bear skulls have been found in underwater caves in Mexico. Near human remains. Limber up those whisky drinking muscles! Here’s a related piece on how long humans have been living in Southwest Florida.

8. Old isn’t necessarily good as shown in these experimental data found at Freakonomics. Definitely makes me think about magic.

9. Checking back in on our apocalypse, it’s now harder for Americans to rise from the lower rungs of the ladder. Here’s a piece from today’s Telegraph on a similar matter (with some great piggy art from Occupy London). For the non-UK readers, the Telegraph is pretty much exclusively read by aged, Tory vampires in their Cotswolds country piles so the piece is rare. Rare like an Iranian newspaper running a Dan Savage column.

10. Rare Mesopotamian script dedicated to the moon god Sin found on Malta. Cue the ridiculous speculations of orthodox historians as to how it got there. Malta has underwater Neolithic structures. It was important for a long time a long time ago. (Pity it’s insanely boring now.)

11. What we learned about our ancestors last year. (Note how they keep pushing back the ‘out of Africa’ date? They’re actually getting closer. And by closer I mean the needle is moving back toward where pseudohistory had it pointed sixty years ago.) Keeping it nice and ye olde, here’s an extremely old obsidian bracelet in case anyone was wondering what kind of stone-making skills we had access to in that part of the world around the end of the ice age.

12. Staying in the same part of the world, here’s a piece on the archaeology of the legendary City of Dan. There are very few places in the world where you get such long continuity of habitation.

13. There are exoplanets around most stars. It seems I’m coming around to the idea we’re being ‘primed’ for an ‘announcement’.

14. Had a bad day at work? Come home and cook a really complicated meal to forget about it. It seems the therapeutic industry is finally letting go of the idea you need to retain and ‘process’ your memories. (This is an ol’ chaos magic trick since at least the 80s. It’s time it got wider pick up.)

15. Here’s an excellent piece on radical gardening. I’ve touched on this topic before but it seems to me the food industry is ripe (sorry) for some de-centralised disruption. We live in a world now where ideas and personal experiences can be transferred instantly to where they are relevant. This is really more of a hope than a prediction but I would like to see more towns like this one attempting to declare complete food independence. Probabilistically we are extremely likely to need it in the next thirty or so years.

If I were more confident in being at this exact address for the next twelve months then I’d give it a shot because now is definitely the time of year to get your radical edible gardening plans laid down. Instead I’ll settle for shopping skint.

16. This is something I shared via Google Plus yesterday but it warrants a re-share. Apple’s plans for its iBooks Author software are appalling. Please read if you’re interested in digital publishing.

Having had a day to digest the news, here are some takeaways:

• They will change these plans in the medium term as Amazon seeks to exploit their draconian weakness by pushing through a much better deal and a whole host of free publishing tools to compete. (This is a two horse race. Ignore the Nook, ignore Smashwords, ignore everything else.)
• Until they have changed, there is still some use to be had from Apple’s platform when it expands out to consumers. In particular its huge in-built distribution: Create a free publication that you distribute via both platforms (and everywhere you can) and use that to build a permission asset. Obviously you will need a website to drive people to and a database capture/subscribe mechanism for when they get there. Which means, if the iBooks tool turns out to be helpful and easy to use just as GarageBand is then type away to your little heart’s content.
• When it comes to selling your digital publishing content do not ever (currently) use iBooks, not even to write it. Don’t forget that iPad and iPhone users can still transact via Amazon. Market to the list you have generated via your free publications.

17. Here are some ‘Deep Thinker’s’ suggestions of science’s most beautiful theories. My particular favourite from that list is Emergent Phenomena.

18. And finally, thanks to the fine website that is the Daily Grail, here’s a documentary on The Hessdalen Lights because, like it says at the top of the post, your wonderful world always needs some Forteana.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

"Just give me your fucking email address, Herr Faustus. I'll take care of the rest."

Even accounting for wars and famine and such our understanding of wealth has been reasonably stable since the development of agriculture.

It wasn’t ever really all that mysterious. There were a small number of haves and then the rest of us are the have-nots.

Wealth -or other system capacity- was accumulated in a more or less regular pattern of growth followed by harvest.

Even expansionist military economies like Imperial Rome followed a similar pattern as inflowing booty relied on regular campaigns which relied on good weather to wage them. War itself has seasons.

And so our prosperity spirits acquired a sense of immovability… regularity. (Ever wonder why so many bank logos use Graeco-Roman columns?) The male ones were kingly and static… the female ones fecund and dependable.

But sometime in the early twentieth century, as a result of the perfect storm that was global war, the resulting incorporation of women into the workforce and the ruling powers’ panicked, self-serving reaction to the Bolshevik revolution the demarcating lines inside the triangle slipped… a bit.

What followed was something unprecedented in the history of money: thanks almost exclusively to sound government policy that has been systematically dismantled over the last three decades, we had a couple of generations of free education, affordable housing, stable employment, easy access to healthcare and widespread boosts in overall prosperity (for straight, white people in western countries). It was the closest we will probably ever get to a genuine meritocracy.

We no longer live in that world. Ask yourself honestly, does the group-soul/archetype of wealth in the twentieth century look more like Lakshmi or Azathoth?

Last year in the UK there was much talk about new regulation to reign in the investment banking arms of global financial institutions because “they had gone feral”. There can be no better descriptive term. Except it’s not just the investment banking industry that has gone feral… it is the entire corporate world. From James:

From beginning of the startup until the time I left my job was about 1.5 years. Give it time. I feel like the world is in a startup frenzy right now. Relax. Corporate America as has been traditionally is now officially dead. There’s no safety there. There’s only hustling now. Always have ideas and you’ll eventually be able to leave the day job.

Emphasis mine. Even in the public sector there are no more jobs for life. If you stick around at your job for long enough to get that gold watch the only thing you are going to get is redundancy. And one way or another it is going to get even more chaotic, even less predictable.

"Oh great Azathoth! Bring me an iPad 2... like... if you've got one lying around or whatever... a job at a hedge fund maybe? I'll also take CEO of a Top 4 Hollywood Studio. But not Fox."

There really is only hustling now.

The man behind the curtain has been revealed. Values like loyalty and stability are utterly vanished.

Only genuine psychopaths make it to the top of the corporate ladder (at the expense of everything else in their life), there is zero correlation between CEO pay and personal performance. (There is actually -with few exceptions- very little correlation between different CEOs and company performance. Read this book for more.)

Just because great swathes of the white collar world have gone feral doesn’t mean you should avoid it.

In fact, if you’re like me that’s a financial impossibility. (I definitely put the ‘slave’ in ‘wage slave’.)

What it means is your tactics and -crucial to the point of this post- companions need to change. A suitable metaphor can be found in the lives of our ancestors during the end of the last ice age. The climate was changing rapidly. This meant a changed hunting landscape and changed prey behaviour. It did not mean the end of the hunt.

The workplace as you know it is your hunting ground. (Unless you are in fact a hunter in which case that last sentence is reversed. In which case I have few suggestions for you. Maybe check your email or something. Hey, where do you buy those duck whistle things?)

What you need to ask yourself in this severely disrupted, explosive landscape is whether you need Alan Greenspan’s god or Mark Zuckerberg’s? Think long and hard about this because you are fighting your own brain here. According to a recent study by University College London we are hard-wired for the upside:

When given good news — i.e., a bad outcome is not as likely as you thought — people responded strongly. But given bad news, they tended to change their prediction only a little bit.  Importantly, distinct brain regions seemed to be related to prediction errors for good and bad news about the future. Interestingly, the more optimistic a participant was the less efficiently one of these regions coded for undesirable information. Thus, the bias in how errors are processed in the brain can account for the tendency to maintain rose-colored views.

When choosing your spirit companions you are going to naturally gravitate toward the Lakshmian end of the spectrum. Even now your brain is resisting my earnest entreaties to find a being with a little more blood thirst. But please, the rules have drastically changed so pick a hunter to go hunting with you.

Because power and access to wealth has changed. Now billionaires ride scooters down hallways to meeting rooms that don’t have any chairs while Her Majesty takes the train to Christmas dinner. This is not the era of spectral kings. This is the era of the network, the crowd… the pack.

UPDATE: Found this amazing article about business flux through Penelope Trunk. Hail chaos.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

My father has two favourite stories about me growing up, both from around my sixth or seventh year.

And by favourite I mean two thirds of all the stories he tells about me as a child. (The other being the time I harassed an unfamiliar woman in the supermarket for buying cigarettes.)

The first was on holiday in Fiji and my recall of it is so dim and the number of times it has been told mean it’s probably now a false memory.

Apparently, one sunny afternoon, I wandered away from the kids area, propped myself up on a stool at the poolside bar and commenced ordering “cocktails” (fire engines). The Fijians behind the bar, being possibly the most child-friendly nationality in the world, were only too happy to oblige in between fits of laughter.

I was only discovered again when the father of the family we were travelling with came to the bar and I offered to buy him a drink. (Picking up doctors in hotel bars. Begin as you mean to continue.)

The second was later in that year and I do remember it.

From personal observation rather than experience, it seems that, for the first ten years or so, child-related discussions between middle class parents are a thinly veiled game of oneupmanship (which is probably why my father remembers this incident).

This being summer in Australia, we were having a barbecue at our house. One of the attendant dads asks my father if I’m reading independently yet. At that moment I walk by, carrying a copy of Fellowship of the Ring, my finger keeping my place in the middle of the book. Needless to say, my father won that round of “friendly conversation”.

And The Lord of The Rings was indeed the first ‘proper’ book I independently read -if not independently comprehended. Since that first time it has probably had a dozen or so read-throughs. In fact, in some sense I am always reading it.

Having attempted it so early on, the characters and places emerge from that foggy place that is right at the very edge of your long term memory, sitting somewhere near the smell of your favourite babysitter and the sound of colouring pencils on paper. They are fragmentary because I failed to understand a lot of it and because I failed to understand it a long time ago.

What this means is I only have a handful of memories that are pre-Middle Earth. It’s a strange kind of brainwashing -like realising as an adult that you somehow accidentally raised yourself as a Mormon in a Jewish family. It is probably my defining narrative. I have moved countries because of it. In a literal sense it serves the same function in my life as a Bible or Koran. Because, in Tolkien’s own words, it has “enchanted” me:

Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are one in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

And yes, I’m aware of the criticisms of Middle Earth: that it’s an elitist, sexist, technophobic, Tory fantasy of a rose-tinted world. But you know what?

I live in a severely compromised biosphere under a constitutional monarch whose uncle (and possibly father) was pro-Hitler at a time when a miniscule ruling minority, mostly male, can apparently get away with all but destroying civilisation and condemn generations to penury and neglect. Our ‘elected’ leaders are entirely corrupted by exposure to extreme wealth and power while our one hope that things can get better lies with a tiny group of commoners camped out in front of the looming towers of faceless global power who might yet win.

What should I be reading?!

Besides, guiding narratives -be they Hebrew or Elvish- must be so much more than mere, dreary reportage if they are to fulfill their role. Here he is again:

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.

Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

So yes. A visit to this complex yet unassuming man’s grave was a must. We had spent the afternoon before in the pub where he and C.S Lewis and the other inklings would meet and drink and smoke and read to each other. It’s quite easy to get a feel for the personality who created hobbits in a place like that. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at the grave site. He is buried with the enduring love of his life. Would there be more of Tolkien-the-husband as opposed to Tolkien-the-nerdy-linguist?

Not really.

The overwhelming feeling at the gravesite -as you can probably tell- is one of gratitude.

Clearly I’m not the first person to have had their life changed by this man’s writing.

Gratitude is certainly what I felt -and expressed- standing there in the last few minutes of cold January sunshine.

Gratitude and peace of mind. It’s a good graveyard, if that makes sense. (This blog has a magical audience so I know that makes sense.)

As we parked and made our way through the tombstones we could see a few people coming to visit their relatives. The space was active in a living kind of way and quiet in a dead kind of way. A good place for Catholic bones to rest.

So maybe that was it? Maybe I couldn’t pick up on anything because there’s nothing to pick up on? He’s buried there with the love of his life; the Lúthien to his Beren. Complete. Finished.

I express my gratitude, promise to write this post, and make my way back to the car. There is no one else in this corner of the graveyard so the only sounds are our footsteps on the path back to the drive.

Then I feel it. He would have walked along this path after putting Edith in the ground. Tears appear. I wanted Tolkien-the-man and I got Tolkien-the-heartbroken, clinging to faith and decorum, walking the longest few dozen yards of his life since the Somme.

Suddenly feeling a little ghoulish -a risk I go to significant pain to avoid as a respectful necrotourist- I hurry back to the car.

It was later, over dinner, that it occurred to me this little glimpse is actually quite touching. You have to work to find the heart in Tolkien. He wrote what is probably one of the most moving love stories of the postwar period and then buried the entire thing in the book’s appendices. Both in life after death -like all good Englishmen of his era- he seems to evade emotional engagement with strangers.

As an outsider, trying to find an entry point into the life of an idol is only ever going to yield tiny fragments. But perhaps that is appropriate? This is the man who gave us the story of tiny things -hobbits, rings, riddles- that shape the entire world.

And with that, let’s close with the first ‘tiny thing’… a charm for the forgotten Old English angel that inspired Eärendil. When he first saw the words in a ninth century poem he writes “I felt a very curious thrill as if something had stirred in me, half-awakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind these words, something far beyond ancient English.” His biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, says that it was this little fragment that “marked the beginning of Tolkien’s own mythology.”

So I suppose, in a way, it marks the beginning of mine too.

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended

Hail Earendel, brightest of angels
Above middle-earth sent unto men

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

It's a few weeks past the solstice but if you stand on the barrow and look back you can very easily see the effect they're going for

Here’s a little tip if you’ve a mind to go on an English megalithica excursion: do it in early January.

Everyone complains about the weather but which annoys you more: the fact you have to wear wellington boots or the arrival of packed tour buses? Exactly. We had the place entirely to ourselves for the whole visit.

Unfortunately government budget cuts mean that any of the English Heritage sites that charge you to visit will be closed during the week.

But the ones you want to look out for in the booklet are the “open any reasonable hour” ones.

They’re unattended and, at this time of year, all yours. You can clamber to your heart’s content. (Not in a vandalism way, obviously.)

One such place is Wayland’s Smithy.

What fascinates me about ancient history is that it also has an ancient history. The Saxons living in the area in the first few centuries AD would have had no frame of reference with which to understand the lives of the bodies buried inside three thousand years before. It would have appeared to them -as it does to us- as a sacred place that was subsequently incorporated into their own mythic narrative… in this case a residence of the god Wayland. (Sidebar: can you say we don’t do the same thing in the twenty first century?)

When you go on a journey like this you are folding yourself into a mythic space where the universe speaks loudly and in code. My goal -beyond simply seeing as awesome tomb- was to see if I could tune in to how the Saxons conceived of this space. (It’s a fool’s errand trying to contact Neolithic shades. Even if there were any around -and there aren’t- they’d have to be a special kind of insane to have stuck around their tomb for almost six thousand years.)

The mythic speaks to you in a language that is simultaneously untrue and yet real. Which means you quickly fall into that Black Swan problem of describing events after the fact that don’t sound significant but in fact were.

So when I tell you I was in the flow for the entire drive out of Oxford you’ll take it in the way you’re supposed to take it. It actually reminded me of the drive across the Isle of Mull on the way to Iona. That time I could “see” centuries of mystics and wizards and clerics on horseback and in wains… all making their way to the western ferry.

Wayland’s Smithy doesn’t appear to have been a destination in quite the same way but you certainly travel along a mythic ‘road’. You can actually continue the walk to Avebury and Stonehenge.

In order to get to the site, you have to drive up Dragon Hill Road -so named because it passes the flat-topped hill where St George fought the Dragon. Then you park below the nearby Iron Age fort of Uffington Castle -complete with famous white horse -which you can see on Google Maps- and walk two kilometres. And of course, as we are driving up the poorly-maintained, one-land sheep track that is Dragon Hill Road to get to the carpark a horse wanders down the road in the opposite direction. A white one.

The path to Wayland's Smithy. Keep walking and you eventually get to Avebury.

I nod my head. “That’s a good sign. Literally.”

We start the walk. My poor, long-suffering partner. I can’t stand other people at sacred sites to such an extent that I will leave at dawn to get there if possible and, if not, I’ll be at the gate waiting for a place to opener like a pensioner loitering outside a mall.

Anyway, on this particular morning my insanity paid off. Crisp, clear, sunny weather and not another soul around.

Then we hear the horns.

What the fuck was that? It’s important to realise that there are nothing but fields on either side of the path in the image to your left. Rolling, empty fields.

We continue for another three quarters of a mile along the path and suddenly a tractor pulling a large wagon lurches into view on the right. The driver slows, looks at us and carries on to our left. As he drives away I see into the back of a trailer. It’s filled with creepy old Tory men clad in Barbour and wellingtons. It’s a hunt.

If you don’t live in the UK it probably needs mentioning that fox hunting is illegal the way doing thirty five in a thirty zone is illegal. Everyone does it and nobody gets caught. So not really that weird unless you’re talking mythically.

Finally we arrive at Wayland’s Smithy – it’s deserted just how we planned- and I tune in.

It’s naming is currently unknown. The best I can find is the tomb became known as Wayland’s Smithy because of its “uncanny quality.”

Yeah, maybe. But a smithy is oddly specific. From what I get, the name is unrelated to the nearby hill (which isn’t Saxon anyway) and is based on nocturnal incidents that happened to Saxons travelling the ancient Ridgeway. The tomb is a fairly useful waymarker at the base of a gentle hill that would protect you from the elements. Basically you would camp here on your way somewhere else.

There are aspects of being ‘on the road’ that are significantly darker than our post-Hollywood vision of the idea. And quite a number of these fold into Wayland’s story.

Firstly there is loneliness. Wayland is a lonely figure. In his story the three valkyries that he and his two brothers were getting around with up and left them one day. His brothers followed them. He stayed behind. Then there is the whole thing about being lamed and imprisoned by King Niòhad… which follows neatly into the next unpleasant aspect of the road:

Being somewhere you don’t want to be. This could be a Travelodge by a motorway at 3am on a Tuesday morning, staring up at the sickly ceiling paint. A lot of journeying involves “unpleasant milestones”. Growing up in Australia, when we’d drive to the mountains to go skiing there were two specific gas stations (Goulburn and Cooma) where we’d get to stop. There was nothing good about either of them… they were just where we stopped. Even when road markers are glamorous they are always in some way functional. Especially as a horseshoe-making forge is essentially the Saxon version of a gas station.

Looking back down the long barrow toward the 'entrance'

Added to this, to my mind anyway, there is something bleak in the legend that leaving a coin by the smithy will result in your horse being freshly shod by morning.

It’s like if Wayland were incarnate today he’d be working in one of those Taiwanese factories that make iPhone components.

Even the tooth fairy gets an element of “maybe” in her transaction: “Maybe she’ll replace your tooth with a coin.” Wayland is reliable, still in servitude.

The final aspect that came through was that sense of extreme isolation and distance.

There are depictions of Wayland in the north of the country grabbing hold of a large bird to fly free of his captor. It’s a rather beautiful end to what is essentially a story about the loneliness of disability and the physical cost of status objects but it does rather beg the question… where did he fly away to?

Here. He flew away to this very spot.

Even the English-born Saxons would be aware that Wayland is a foreign god. He, like their parents and grandparents is from elsewhere. We already know that the Vikings considered the westernmost British Isles to be much closer to the Otherworld. The smithy captures that sense of distance, isolation and foreignness that is the shadow side of “the road”.

All of this may make it sound like the place was in some way grim or desolate. Far from it. It is cthonically uplifting (oxymoron?), potent and definitely sacred. A god lives here, after all.

And to me, this is how myth works best. Not as a story but as a language. Here’s Jake Stratton-Kent describing it in Geosophia:

So there is another aspect to the question, which is, if mythology is a language, how does it work? Before really addressing this, some examples are useful to illustrate the innate flexibility of mythological language.

Some are implicit among the themes explored herein: in the myths of the birth of Athene from the head of Zeus some uncertainty about roles is seen; was it Prometheus or Hephæstus, both Lords of Fire, who struck the blow? How could Hephæstus – the limping god – have done it if Hera created him in revenge for the birth of Athene? The mythic birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus involves further apparent confusion of roles. If Zeus is lame when Dionysus is in his thigh, is Zeus then Hephæstus? When Dionysus fetches Hephæstus back to Olympus, drunk and seated on an ass, is Hephæstus then Silenus? When Dionysus conquers the world including India he is portrayed as bearded, no longer the eternal youth; which of the elder gods is he then, is he Hades, is he Silenus? Or is he Zeus himself, of whom he was the infant form, then the son, to be finally the Father?

In these scenes gods are seen at once as older and younger, dying and being born, tragic and comic. It is not that myth provides no clear cosmological system, but that it provides a language by which cosmological ideas are expressed, and by means of which they evolve. What is important is not that static forms neither define nor confine myth, but that myth gives life to otherwise static forms.

For me, Wayland’s Smithy expresses the cosmological idea of ‘the road’; multi-faceted, complex and somehow familiar.

After saying my silent goodbyes we walk a couple of miles back up the path to Uffington Castle. From the top on a cold January day you can see into several counties. We cut across the field in front of the white horse on our walk back to the carpark. In the distance I hear the horns again and look up.

On the horizon I see the tractor on its way to meet the hunters at the end of their route. Just ahead of me I see a herd of wild deer in front of me, leaping fence after fence.

On the road to somewhere.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic

There's off-brand and then there's off off-brand

More people searched for the term “Kindle” than “iPad” both before and after Christmas. That never happens.

It’s supposed to go “iPhone, iPad, world peace, a different baby sister that maybe isn’t so annoying, everything else.”

Via search trends, twitter and such, the sentiment of entire nations is available for you to measure for free in real time.

Disney villains never dreamed of such power! They resorted to such desperately analogue measures as asking their mirrors.

Last year some countries asked for freedom from dictators. We asked for Kindles. (Polls indicate we’re happy with our dictator at the moment.)

In the previous decade it’s been computing power crunching data that has contributed the most to our understanding of the universe. In space, in economics, in health, in government. We know more things about us as a group than ever before.

Let me ask you then -now that the majority of 18-34 year olds Americans now own smartphones (not bad given total US phone adoption trails the rest of the first world)- do you think the volume of available data is going to increase or decrease?

From the Wall Street Journal:

Crunching millions of data points about traffic flows, an analytics system might find that on Fridays a delivery fleet should stick to the highways— despite your devout belief in surface-road shortcuts.

You probably hate the idea that human judgment can be improved or even replaced by machines, but you probably hate hurricanes and earthquakes too. The rise of machines is just as inevitable and just as indifferent to your hatred.

Business people have been having such fantasies of rationalism for decades. Until the last few years, they have been stymied by the cost of storage, slower processing speeds and the flood of data itself, spread sloppily across scores of different databases inside one company. These problems are now being solved.

“We’ve just got to the point where the technology really starts to work,” says Michael Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy Corp.

What we have to consider, then, is where the technology threshold lies before we can deem ourselves permanently changed as entities. Asked why it’s all kicking off, here’s the answer from the BBC journalist who has been reporting on our own summer of discontent.

“One is the graduate without a future. The second thing is the network; the network is key. The third is something that’s far less tangible but something I have begun to explore – the changes in human consciousness that come about when you are living in a networked society.”

Our attention spans are shorter but we now have instant access to most of the world’s written information, making wrote learning largely pointless. We’ve stopped talking to our neighbours but now have free HD video discussions across the globe. (In a pre-internet world proximity was only ever a proxy for affection, anyway.)

And now the tipping point for the printed word -backbone of western civilisation for a thousand years- is at hand.

Sooner or later you have to ask yourself… exactly when do you become a cyborg?

A million cyborgs with a million typewriters

Take a look at the graph to the below.

So there are more farms in farmville than in the real world now, right?

Facebook is positively spanking Google for time spent online. And mobile. It’s more than 50% of all mobile data traffic in the UK.

Why are these things important? From the same ZDnet article:

In Q1 2008, Facebook only occupied two percent of a typical American’s day. In Q3 2011, the social network takes up eight times more of your typical 24 hours: around 16 percent. Even though Facebook is still a private company, the site already dominates the Internet in a way that makes it impossible for investors to ignore.

As people spend more time on Social Media sites, it would be logical to assume that they would do more Search activity on these sites. Use of portal sites and direct entry (to Websites) appear to have declined as a means to Search for content. Today, most of the Searches done on Facebook are “people” searches, but as Facebook increasingly socializes content and commerce, we would expect people to find rich Search results influenced by social signals from their friends.

“Influenced by social signals from their friends.” Discoverability is moving from gatekeepers like publishers and bookstores toward your own always-own, fully-global social graph.

Cyborgs in a barrel

So a lot of people are consuming social media, Gordon? That’s hardly news, you fat drunk. In fact, social media is well and truly at the peak of its hype cycle.

Well yeah, obviously. I’m not suggesting you are in competition for traffic with social media. But there are two main takeaways:

1.

Think of the above graph as the people walking past a bookstore a few decades ago -they are the potential market.

Because it’s not just discoverability that has changed, it’s almost -more crucially- what we choose to spend our attention on that has changed, become digital, become social. We have options now. And what we consider a book is changing.

I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people refuse to buy them? The answer turned out to be one step short of phonebooks. As long as it isn’t floppy, consumers still perceive it as a book. [Emphasis mine.]

That worked as long as buying printed books was the only way to read them. If printed books are optional, publishers will have to work harder to entice people to buy them. There should be some market, but it’s hard to foresee how big, because its size will depend not on macro trends like the amount people read, but on the ingenuity of individual publishers.

 That’s from a moderately famous essay from a couple of years ago. Here’s more:

Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying “this will sell a lot of papers!” Cross out that final S and you’re describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don’t need as much paper.
…
I don’t know exactly what the future will look like, but I’m not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.

2.

Have you ever dreamed you were on Facebook? Creepy, right? How many waking hours do you spend socially engaging via digital media?

If you’re reading a post containing digital publishing advice then let me hazard two guesses:

• It’s probably a lot.
• It’s probably not as much as your non-writerly friends.

That’s pretty much the key right there. In a couple of years there won’t be any such separate thing as “social media”. Just think of it like “talking” but with ones and zeroes. And the chattering classes need something to talk about.

And just like magic... blogs are back

Every year since about 2006 blogging has been declared dead. Killed by Myspace. Killed by Facebook. Killed by ‘microblogging’ (thank fuck that term never took off).

But the thing of it is… 2012 is something of a blogaissance.

When they first achieved widespread adoption, blogs were principally used as a way of sharing your daily life; photos, opinions, etc; with people you knew or e-knew.

This functionality has been superseded by social media because it is much, much better at it.

Take a look around the magical internets.

There is still a small amount of “ZOMG soooo sorry I haven’t blogged for ages but I’ve been busssssy” but… to a large extent… it’s a dynamic exchange of ideas in mostly written form. It’s publishing, motherfuckers! More here:

• 7 Reasons To Rethink Your Blogging Strategy
• 2012: The Year Of The Blog

You know why it’s the year of the blog? Have you heard of participation inequality? If you have a blog, let me be the first to welcome you to the one place in your life where you are in fact the 1%:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

The obvious takeaway, then, is the best thing you can do if you intend to digitally publish is to digitally publish in blog form. And be all up in the social media. Your audience is now built for shareability. Even your mother posts things to Facebook.

Which is fine, of course, but where is the money?

Where indeed.

The money

I bought my last copy of Fantasy & Science Fiction in early 2008.

And I mean my last. I was done with it. Living in New Zealand at the time, it always cost so much more, it arrived a month late which meant you missed all the writing competitions, the paper stock was awful and some issues never appeared making it very difficult to get emotionally involved. Which is a pity because it’s probably the best short speculative fiction compendium around.

Well, well, fucking well. It’s 99p on the Kindle.

The living room rant I subjected my poor partner to as I jammed my index finger into the cover of my final F&SF went something along the lines of “this is bullshit. Look at this stock. Look at it. Why do short story writers have to publish digitally to get noticed and then go through this ludicrous shitty paper step on the way to getting a decent blog audience so they can get an agent and a book deal? It’s a step backwards! It’s like the world’s worst secret bonus level. And it’s a month late. What magical powers are in this fucking toilet paper that we must do its bidding?! It has SCIENCE in the title for fuck’s sake! I am so glad I’ll never work for a traditional media company again and I certainly won’t be buying F&SF again. Done done done!”

I was wrong on both accounts.

Because I can think of few better examples of publications that will be better off in this new world.

1. Their horrible, angry, nerdy audience (me) is a technology early adopter
2. The media experience is improved in ebook form
3. They pay a pittance for their content
4. It’s a trusted heritage brand as media sales Gordon would say
5. They don’t have to pay for their toilet paper

And without the printing costs, as we learnt a couple of years ago, price moves to the marginal cost of production. Which is how you arrive at 99p with an existing subscriber base.

Which brings me to the recent couple of posts over at Llewellyn about ebook piracy. (Or at least the first one. Based on my father’s advice about never arguing with the mentally ill, I tend to ignore my ranty emails/death threats from the evidently unstable, especially after you’ve won the day.)

Firstly, let me say that I absolutely agree with the anti-piracy stance, obviously. (Although stealing from libraries is better attributed to terrified kids, Christians and retirees who think the books are inappropriate rather than us sticky fingered occultists. They do the same thing with gay books. We’re not all out to getcha.)

Secondly, Llewellyn should be genuinely applauded for being one of the first movers in the occult ebook space  -it’s an indication they’ll be one of the winners out of this large market change.

Thirdly, getting back to price, let me also say the author isn’t correct about calculating the cost of ebook production on two accounts:

There are no fixed costs. As Seth Godin said in a recent post, an ebook costs ten bucks to make. An edited ebook costs another hundred bucks maximum on elance.com. The post writer may cost more than a hundred bucks but that’s a different matter. The going rate for editing an ebook is a hundred dollars.

The same thing that happened to music is going to be true of books. The typical ebook costs about $10 in out of pocket expenses to write (more if you count coffee and not just pencils). But if we add in $50,000 for app coding, $10,000 for a director and another $500,000 for the sort of bespoke work that was featured in Al Gore’s recent ‘book’, you can see the problem. The publisher will never have a chance to make this money back.

Sure, there will be experiments at the cutting edge, but no, they’re not going to pay off regularly enough for it to become an industry. The quality is going to remain in the writing and in the bravery of ideas, not in teams of people making expensive digital books.

The second inaccuracy in her depiction of price is that piracy exerts some kind of price pressure. Pirates pay zero. They’re not haggling. Price pressure is only exerted by those who are willing to buy your books. If you’re not selling enough then it’s your customers who think your prices are too high. Pirates don’t care. They’re like Elizabeth Taylor. They never look at the price tag.

The AV component

Because you’ve all been such good little cyborgs (did anyone really make it past me ranting about a 60 year old magazine?), the final resource is one of my favourite nerds waxing passionately about the future of copyright that extends the discussion much further than books and music.

Rune Soup - Adventures Beyond Chaos Magic