Gordon White (1981-2026)

Last month, my friend Gordon White set sail for the Undying Lands.

Yesterday was his birthday. I spent it thinking about him, writing this, and remembering him.

This is only the second time I have written words for the dead on here. The first was for Eriol, another member of the Rune Soup community, whose death Gordon announced to us at the end of 2019. I didn’t really know what to say then, or how to say it, and I do not know what to say now.

I heard the news just like everybody else on the 13th of May. And I’m not going to lie, it sent me spiralling for weeks. Someone I had known and spoken to almost every single day for a quarter of my life was gone. During that first week, I read the immense outpouring of grief, gratitude and inspiration from people whose lives he had touched, including beautiful tributes from Peter at Scarlet Imprint, JDO and Avalon Cameron.

I cannot give an account of Gordon’s whole life, or even of the person everyone else knew. This is an account of my Gordon White. The catty, cringey wizard who changed the course of my life, and the friend I miss.

My thoughts are especially with James, Gordon’s family, and all those who loved him most closely. I still cannot quite believe he has gone from this realm.

A Recent Dream

A few days before the announcement, I had a dream.

I was in a white box gallery space with a dusty, dirty, polished concrete floor. I was sitting on one of those stackable chairs with a hole in the back, in a circle with my closest friends and co-conspirators. We were at some kind of meeting or event, deep in heated debate. About the world, about culture, and about the future. There were so many great people sitting around the circle, and in the dream I thought it strange that Gordon hadn’t made it.

In the unfolding of the dream, there was a lot of back and forth about politics, the environment, AI, and the nature of intelligence. During the dream, frustrated at what everybody else was saying and the materialist background assumptions in the conversation, I felt the urge to speak up. I told everyone what I thought. Not what I believed, but what I know and intuit to be true about the nature of things and the universe. A revelation amongst close friends, of how much of a crazy weirdo I am. When I woke up, I felt relieved, unburdened, and perhaps even rejuvenated.

A few days later, the announcement arrived that Gordon White had died. I understood the dream and what comes next.

The Cringey Wizard

I first met Gordon in person in my late twenties, although I had been reading Rune Soup since at least the early days of the Whisky Rant. We became mutuals online when he was shitposting about needing magical spells involving beer, and I sent him a Mesopotamian ritual for removing a fallen meteorite from one’s property.

We had been DMing on Twitter for months before we finally met in Soho one afternoon. I had just successfully landed a job after an interview at the startup that would eventually give me a mental breakdown. That first meeting turned into an afternoon of day-drinking in Fitzrovia, moving from pub to pub for lunch. We sat in the sun and talked about magic, meditation, permaculture, and conspiracy theories. We got on like a house on fire. I was deep into The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos at the time, and we were comparing notes. I got the impression that I was the first person he’d met that was doing the whole working.

I was immediately struck by his magnetic personality, his wit, his charm, and above all, his absolutely extraordinary memory. This last quality was both scarily impressive and frequently absolutely infuriating. The confidence that made him such a compelling thinker could harden into a genuinely formidable inability to back down.

The bitch would just never admit that he was wrong.

About.
Anything.
Ever.

You could pull out your phone and prove beyond doubt that he had misremembered some point about Tolkien lore or whatever, and he would just announce that he had been “directionally correct” and move on, and never mention it again. Warhammer lore was the sole exception, on that, he always deferred to me.

From that first meeting, we spoke basically every single day on Google Chat. Him with his bullshit media job, and me with my bullshit startup job. At the same time, he was finishing the two books that would become The Chaos Protocols and Star.Ships, working constantly and burning the candle at both ends. His drive was astonishing, both inspiring and worrying. He seemed constitutionally incapable of doing anything by halves, including work, exhaustion or relaxing.

On Gchat we talked about our practice, what was going on in the Occult world, and recommended each other what books to read. I don’t think he ever quite got over my total lack of interest in film or television. In those years before Brexit and his Bilbo’s birthday vanishing act, our time consisted of impromptu afternoon beers and after-work trips to the British Museum, the V&A, and the National Portrait Gallery. We would sit in the medieval galleries looking at paintings and reading out a biography from Butler’s Lives of the Saints or Wikipedia, having a good laugh as we pondered the English saints and the altarpieces.

When The Chaos Protocols and Starships came out, I was there, pleased for my friend, that he was happy and in his element, being crowned “the dark prince of modern Chaos magic” and basking in the triumph of having published two books back-to-back.

At one point, we went to an event in North London, a pub meet up. A meeting of minds of spiritual seekers and conspiracy theorists. This was still back in the “before times,” when interest in such things were still counter-cultural rather than morally objectionable.

The cab ride home was, as he later put it, unnecessarily confusing. The driver had failed to reset the trip charge in the app. So Gordon woke up the next morning to a £120 bill, essentially having paid for my leg of the journey home as well. In return, he demanded a bottle of fancy rum and would never let me forget it. During the ride, we talked about Rune Soup and his future plans, both for the newsletter that became the All Red Line and what would eventually become RuneSoup.com as we know it today: the magic school.

When we next met up on a random Saturday for another epic, all-day drinking session, the rum debt was paid. I thanked him for mentioning me on his blog writing about the event. He laughed, making a comment about Google juice, and something about hypertext and “Breadcrumbs for the future.” My own goal in life he knew, has never been to be a main character, but to be well-indexed in other people’s stories.

The title of that first post where he mentioned me on his blog was “Always Go Full Wyrdo“.

I knew the sentiment was aimed specifically at me. Advice he would repeat to me for the rest of our friendship. We had a perennial conversation throughout our boozy, in-person relationship about being public about one’s spiritual practice and saying what you believe online. True to form, he was unapologetic. He argued that one should set aside worries of social ostracism; if one is invincible, as he put it in The Chaos Protocols, then none of that matters. I disagreed, and in important ways still do, believing that one’s Great Work is a private matter between oneself and the universe.

It was at that pub garden in the sunshine, that a group of extremely loud and obnoxious Americans once sat at our table. Almost as if to demonstrate the act of being true to oneself, Gordon proceeded to talk loudly and animatedly with them for twenty minutes about how his favourite movie of all time was Flubber. He went on and on in detail about the plot, and how Flubber should make them (the Americans) feel proud and so patriotic to come from a country that could produce such a work of art. He talked about Flubber non-stop until they fucked off to another table.

He turned to me with a smug look of triumph, and I told him it was pure cringe and that I couldn’t believe he just did that. But he was genuinely offended that I’d called him cringey, and maintained from then on that I thought it cringey to be his friend. It became a running joke: my refusal to go full weirdo was bound up with avoiding being cringey. He on the other hand was the king of cringe.

It was in that same pub garden on a frigid winters day that he told me he was leaving. Later he arranged to perform his Brexit vanishing act after his talk at the Occult Conference in 2016, and it was a secret I couldn’t tell anybody for obvious reasons. As the clock ran down, we went for drinks and smoked on pub terraces. We discussed the reception to Star.Ships and speculated over dinner about Guinevere Petzinger’s First Signs. Meanwhile, the Google Chat conversations and Twitter GIF wars continued.

Around the same time, one of those long, boozy conversations became my essay Seeing Through the Debris. Gordon’s ideas and writing run all through it, as they still do. My most recent episode, Monsters in the Mirror for example. The method remained fruitful for the rest of our friendship: throwing models at one another until something gave way and the world looked different.

At the conference in 2016, I met the Scarlets properly for the first time, and outed myself as an Enya fan in their most august company. The day after, I went back to North London for his leaving drinks with close friends and old housemates from his time in London. Throughout the time when he was in London, I had maintained that I wouldn’t get him to sign copies of his books for me because I knew him personally, so why bother? But that morning, I balked. I brought them with me and made him sign them; a snap decision I am now intensely grateful for.

As he signed the books in a quid pro quo exchange, he said: “I’m doing this for you, so you need to do something for me.” From his backbag, he produced a trapezoidal package wrapped in the most exquisite Japanese style, covered in sigils, alongside a wax-sealed envelope with a date, time, and location written on the front. He told me, “I need you to go to this place, at this time, open the envelope, and say the words inside, then throw it all into the Thames.”

Which of course I did.

The Visitor at the Farm

And so, he was gone.

I thought perhaps I would never see him again. Our relationship turned into a digital crossover of a few hours: my early mornings and his late evenings. We discussed his work on the membership and the courses while he was still living near the Hawksmoor and looking for the farm. We exchanged permaculture video links and worked our way thought writers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn, passing ideas back and forth and trying to work out what they meant for magic, ecology and the way a person ought to live. I would wake up in the morning, see his messages from overnight, and respond, and then I would get a reply in the late evening my time if I was still awake.

There are traces of those conversations all through the Rune Soup archive. More than a few episodes begin with Gordon or his guest saying, “I was just talking to Jay” or with Gordon mentioning that I had made the introduction or suggested the topic. I never appeared on the show itself due to cringe, but I was often somewhere just off-mic.

I remember the morning he messaged to say that he had found the farm but had some reservations. I told him that if the place felt right, he and James should pull the trigger. They did.

In 2019, my girlfriend and I organised the first of our grand adventures: Singapore, several weeks in Bali, followed by several more travelling around Australia, including a visit to see Gordon and James on the farm in Tasmania. I still remember being in paradise, staying in a beach hut in Bali’s National Park, when the news of the Tasmanian bushfires arrived in a message from Gordon. As the days passed, the fires spread. We later flew from Bali to Cairns, then Sydney.

While we were in the jungle in northern Australia, the Vāsuki dragon ritual was being devised. I followed the preparations on my phone on patchy WiFi. Several days after the ritual, on the morning we were due to fly to Tasmania, I received word from Gordon that the decisive rain had arrived after days of lighter showers. Reports on the Australian news followed: an unexpected deluge had dampened the fires in southern Tasmania. We flew out of Sydney even as a member of the cabin crew warned us that they were uncertain whether we would be able to land in Hobart. Smoke from fires elsewhere still raging had reduced visibility.

But we landed, and there he was outside the airport, waiting by his ute in his stupid mirrored sunglasses, shorts, and a slightly dishevelled shirt. He looked blessed and shell-shocked at once. Still coping with the ordeal of the fires, and the intensity of having served as the focal point of a vast ritual. Still trying to comprehend the magical implications of the exact quantity of rain required to break the emergency. And so I became the unnamed old friend who arrives in chapter five of Ani.Mystic. Gordon had left me as a breadcrumb inside his story.

He collected us that Thursday morning, his car still packed with books rescued during the evacuation, and together we drove back into the valley. We arrived at the farm, beat its bounds, and looked over the future permaculture plans. I spoke to the party tree. James cooked on the barbecue. We talked about the wonders of rice cookers. I drank and smoked my way through untold amounts of rum.

We drove through apocalyptic, fire-scarred forest, the smell of ash and smoke heavy in the air. We walked Gordon’s favourite beach and we recorded a joint interview about Solarpunk. If you have ever wondered about Gordon’s view from the old office space, it looked like this:

Beneath the stars on our last night, we talked about visions, our mental health, where we stood with our work, and of course the ancestors. Throughout those days, I was acutely aware that I was with him and James in the immediate aftermath of a local apocalypse. One that had been averted by a miracle. It felt like a great privilege even then. It feels even more so now.

After we returned home, and with Gordon’s encouragement, I continued to go all in on making Permanently Moved, a project that was as much a magical working as a piece of creative work. After episodes dropped, messages would arrive: “I know what you think. Why didn’t you go further or say what you really think?”

Small Apocalypses

Later in 2019, Gordon left for his first trip to the Peruvian jungle. On that first dieta, he was with several mutuals of mine, all of whom, helped open the path he would walk for the rest of his life. For the next few years, he churned out an astonishing amount of work: Weekly shows, blogs, card decks, the membership courses, on top of the farm chores, and a social life both on and offline.

I would tease him endlessly about the absolute state of his endless god-awful haircuts in his videos, which I called the “Groomsoup Review”. I also pushed him to see how far he would take the soy-face thumbnails, back when that was still the YouTube meta. This masterpiece of a crop remains my favourite.

The first week he was in danger of missing a Rune Soup upload, he asked me to come on the show as an emergency guest. I refused, still not prepared to go full wyrdo. He made some remark about being my cringey friend. Later, during the pandemic, after his broken heart, he asked me to host the show. I told him the show didn’t matter. He did.

In March 2020, he returned to London for Avenging Angels, and the Food Forest talk at Treadwell’s. We met the moment he arrived, and that night was the last time I got completely fall-down drunk. Somewhere in the course of the proceedings, Dr Jack Hunter dropped out of the event because of COVID, and I agreed to step in.

My head and practice was full of prayer, and we spoke for hours about our the shared Christian inheritance. After an ill-advised round of cocktails, we ended up back at his Airbnb. He gave me a bottle of rum from Melbourne; I gave him a Victorian map of Chiswick, the London neighbourhood where he had lived with James, and the namesake of their farm in Tasmania. Then I staggered home. I spent the rest of the week with severe bruising on my hip and grazes all down my elbows and forearms after falling over on the crossing on my walk back from the station.

On the day of the Treadwell’s event, we sat with the Scarlets in the pub, watching the dystopian, early pre-lockdown verhoeven-esq branding being adopted by the BBC. We talked about the Wuhan labs and joked that, from now on, we should only ever see each other in person on the brink of, or in the aftermath of, small apocalypses.

Although I enjoyed the event, I regretted not going full wyrdo in front of an audience who would understand. Those who were there, or have watched the recording, you can now read my ”100 Notes on Storydwelling” for something a little closer to what I wish I had said. Print zine edition coming soon.

During the pandemic, Gordon went through his cancellation, and he was angry that I did not publicly support him. He was right to be. I told myself that my friendships are private, that public declarations were not how I conducted my relationships, and that I did not want to be pulled into an online conflict. But beneath all of that was a deep fear of the mob. It was an act of cowardice on my part that I deeply regret. His being my cringey, crazy friend had ceased to be a joke between us.

Our daily communication dropped off after that, but the friendship survived. It gathered strength again during his ‘medical event’, and the uncertainty of his recovery.

We mostly talked about our favourite plant-based recipes and broccoli. Then he began spending his winters in South America and going on adventures again. I have so many video tours of his Airbnbs, and voice notes of him bitching and moaning at length about chaotic bureaucracy and lost luggage whilst showing me around the places he was staying.

When he was in South America, the time difference allowed for late-night Zoom calls rather than asynchronous chats. Mostly about the terrible state of online media culture, but also progress with ‘the work’. On one of those jungle trips, he had his ‘Enochian experience.’ The encounter with the laughing being full of golden light. He messaged me. We talked about awakening, about the event, compared notes, and then he asked me what to expect next.

After he moved from blogging to Substack he would tease me about being like the last soldier on the isles of blogging, fighting the last war, posting to an internet that was over long ago. When he finally got on Instagram, going in hard on the WitchTok numskulls, I was all in. Even during this final catty elder era, while he was remastering all the membership courses, I told him he worked too hard. Earlier this year, however, the tone of his stock replies changed. We all have a limited time on Earth, he said, and we need to do the work we are here to do.

“Do the things that need doing.”

News of the Departure

The news that he had died on one of his adventures was shocking. But never has a man been so prepared for what was to come next.

What made Gordon’s work so powerful was not simply the magic. He treated the occult as a serious way of knowing and acting in the world, inseparable from history, ecology, politics, place, ancestors and the practical business of building a life. He had no patience for a disenchanted universe, or for the idea that spiritual practice should remain safely decorative. Again and again, he insisted that the world was stranger, more alive and more negotiable than modern people had been taught to believe. His work gave people permission to take that possibility seriously.

He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work. Taken together, the courses on RuneSoup.com may constitute one of the most important modern grimoires we have, and I suspect his influence among Western practitioners will be measured in centuries.

A few weeks ago, I was in London for lunch with a friend. We ended our time together with a toast to Gordon’s life. I went to the spot on the bridge where I had made that offering a decade before. I honoured the “old man” and the “flower of cities all” that he loved so much. Then I announced aloud that Gordon White was dead. As I did, the wind whipped up and the clouds rolled in. I spoke to the river and to the city about Gordon. It was their entanglement, and our shared infatuation with both, that had allowed Gordon and I to meet in the first place. Then I spoke about my own relationship with London, what I wanted now, and where I was, and the blessings I was asking for.

As I walked away, thunder rumbled and the rain began. On the train home to South London, the sky was apocalyptic with lightning. I saw hundreds of flashes in the span of minutes outside the carriage window. When I got off the train at my destination, it was over, and the sky was clear and shining once again.

Then, when I stepped through my flat’s door, my partner said, “You have to see this,” and took me to the kitchen window. At almost the exact time I had been on the bridge talking to the city, she had seen the brightest flash and heard the loudest boom of her life. A lightning bolt had destroyed my neighbour’s back wall.

Not exactly a subtle omen.

Gordon believed that words like “rest in power” and “live on in our memories” were curses placed upon the dead: “the blackest of black spells”. I will not ask him to remain here for our sake. He has places to go and things that need doing.

I know that at any time, I could call him up through the mirror, or pull him through the cards, and I believe others out there already have. But were I to do so, it would begin the same way as so many of our conversations did when I needed something from him: “Bitch, I’m busy. What do you want now?”

My friend Gordon was pure hot fire. His influence on the last quarter of my life, was immense and full of meaning. He encouraged me to do more, go deeper, say what I really think, fly my freak flag, and go full wyrdo. That influence has not ended with his departure to the Western Isles. He changed my life, enriched it, and made it so much more than it would otherwise have been. I miss him greatly, and I am deeply grateful.

Even now, weeks on, I occasionally wake wondering whether Gordon has messaged me overnight. The thought passes through me as I pick up my phone, followed by a sudden pang of sadness. For ten years he told me to stop hiding, so this is me, finally, trying to take his advice.

In the words of the greatest cultural mage of our era:

Sail away, Sail away, Sail away.

The post Words for a Departed Wizard appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This blogpost is the sort of thing I would usually post on my Tumblr. But it got a bit long so was upgraded to a blog post.

1. The Aliveness of Swing
   1. Time
   2. THE TIME
2. Songs are Worlds
   1. A Tale Is Alive in Its Telling.
3. Blurred Lines
   1. Living Worlds
4. The Future

A note to musicians and especially jazz fans: I did Music at undergrad level and have my Grade 7 in Music Theory. I am trying to explain things without resorting to technical or terms implicitly understood by people who make music. (The video eschews them too, which is why its so good).

The first 90 seconds of this video contains some of the best musical communication and education I’ve ever encountered.

Breaking down these 90 seconds has cracked open various thoughts I’ve had over the last few years.

The Aliveness of Swing

Time

We usually think about time time as being about the ticking of a clock, the date, the year etc. The forward momentum of past becoming the future. The present being the name for the bow wave along the flowing river of time that carries us along.

For all intense and purposes let’s call this Machine Time.

I’ve previously written about Clock Time, this sense of machine time, one-thing-after-another-time is known as Chronos.

In the case of the video, Time is described as in musical terms. A time signature, the number of beats in the bar.

At 0Ms 14Secs the bass begins playing and the host then counts of the beats out 1,2,3,4

You can hear the location of the bass notes in relation to the clock/beat.

1+3.

Chirillo process to play, you begin to feel a bouncy sensation. The rhythm is created by the interplay of bass and guitar.

All four beats are now filled by the two instruments.

The word ‘presides’ in the previous phrase above is a good term.

To Preside means ‘position of authority in a meeting or other gathering’ or ‘be in charge of’. These instruments preside over 1+3 and 2+4 respectively. They don’t own or control them. The musicians are merely stewards over these particular beats in the bar. They preside.

They are the rhythmic anchors of the song. Now that all four beats are filled they create the sensation of ‘Up and Down‘. Literally the Up and Down Beats.

The pianist begins to play.

Ignore the melodic nature of the piano and chords being played by all the instruments. Focus on the rhythm of all three instruments at once.

Listen carefully to how the piano dances around, across, inside of the 1+3, 2+4 rhythmic world established by the Bass and Guitar.

I hope you can still feel the ‘up and down’ sensation, but the piano re-shapes whats going on. All 4 beats of the bar are filled up but the rhythmic emphasis now moves and slides around.

You know what this shuffle is … you’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it million times before.

The ’tiss, tiss ta tiss’ on the ride cymbal.

The shuffle, also known as ‘The Spang-A-Lang’. Is the foundation of swing, the heart of Jazz.

Rewind the video and listen again.

The drummers entrance gives me chills every time.

The Spang-a-lang adds a new internal logic to the previous rhythms played by the previous three instruments. The rhythmic interplay between the three instruments is totally transformed.

The music has come alive.

It’s swinging.

THE TIME

The spang-a-lang introduces the swing. The song is now alive.

This is Kairos, THE TIME, or right timing.

Kairos is the product of resonance between interconnected intangible elements in the present. The feeling of things unfolding.

I hope that you can hear, but more importantly feel whats going on.

The bass and guitar have 1+3, 2+4 covered. The piano dances around.

But the spang-a-lang sits between the up and down motion of the rhythm.

It’s the beating heart, the internal logic of swing.

A set of rhythmic coordinates around which, the rest of the sonic world turns.

What an understated turn of phrase.

“The unlegislated devision of power”

No one playing here has control. No one legislates. Instead the musicians preside over different elements of the rhythm.

Between them there’s unspoken agreement, together the rhythmic interplay is greater than the sum of its parts.

Jazz is often called a social technology.

The use of unlegislated to describe the power dynamics within the ensemble should also bring to mind political relations too. They are free from legislation.

I don’t want to go into much detail here, but Jazz is the creation of an egalitarian worlds.

When jazz musicians talk about their experiences playing and improvising inside of their bands world you have to belive them.

Songs are Worlds

All songs are complete self contained worlds. Some are more alive than others.

One of my favourite podcast episodes I’ve made was about the sonic geography.

The goal of any artist or musician is to bring an idea, feeling, emotion, whatever, to life.

In the video above you can clearly hear the moment that the world comes alive. The moment the spirt of swing arrives.

Swing of course is a style, a vibe. It’s a living intangible thing. It’s hard to describe but you know it when you hear it.

Vibe of course is alive in many other genres of music, Reggae, Blues, Samba whatever.

The spang-a-lang doesn’t even need to be on the drums. Listen to this 1946 recording of Django’s Tiger by Django Reinhardt – you can hear it in the rhythm guitar. The swing nevertheless is alive.

A Tale Is Alive in Its Telling.

Swing is brought into existence by musicians. Whilst playing, they are all feeling and experiencing that alive thing – the sprit of the music.

It’s mysterious, miraculous even. Swing is conjured somewhere collectively between them.

In turn, that feeling is communicated – or a better – shared with the audience (if there is one). A recording captures and shares it too.

Again, all art seeks to capture and communicate a feeling, emotion, thought.

A similar thing happens with stories and narratives:

Whats the difference between a story and a tale? Here’s a quote from Huw Lemmey

Tell me a tale. Don’t write me a story. But tell: tell meaning to reveal, to divulge. In story-telling, the stories already exist; the richness, the innovation, is in the manner of their revelation.

A Tale Is Alive in Its Telling

Rituals also create worlds- they produce a kind of alive-ness that is felt and experienced. Rituals crate space and deepen our awareness of alive-time or THE TIME – Kairos.

And just as you can resonate with the characters in the sky, the positions of the characters resonate with you. You have agency in the cosmic story itself as you are part of that story in the witnessing. This is story as ritual. Alive in its telling. It has it sacrifice (being alive), meaning and resonance. 

This sort of alive time is the measure of experience.

It’s my belief that the Metaverse – the spaces we create there, and the experiences we have there – will be judged by their aliveness.

Blurred Lines

Any mention of Blurred Lines, at least in my circles always evokes a ‘fuck that song‘ response.

Regardless of what you think about the songs lyrical content, I really do urge people to have an opinion about its vibe – what it brings the song life – and the consequences its wrought.

The Blurred Lines lawsuit resolved back in 2018, was one of the most shocking copyright decisions ever.

Up until 2018, in the eyes of the law: everyone knew what a song was: Chords, Melody, Lyrics.

The Blurred Lines Lawsuit charged that Blurred Lines infringed the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up.

Yet, Pharell and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines has diffrent chords, diffrent lyrics, a diffrent melody AND a diffrent rhythm from Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up

They sound absolutely nothing alike apart from the share sonic pallet:

What they both do however is feel the same.

The Blurred Lines groove, its vibe, its aliveness, communicates the same feeling as Got to Give It Up.

So a case was put to the public, Pharell and Thicke were judged according to a jury of their peers. They lost. This was later upheld in their appeal to 9th circuit judges.

It was established that “Got to Give It Up” is “entitled to broad protection against copyright infringement liability because musical compositions are not confined to a narrow range of expression”

Pharell and Thicke infringed on the Gaye estates copyright because they made something that feels the same.

At university studying Philosophy of Arts, all I ever talked about and wrote about was copyright. If I was still in academia I’d be wondering what is it about the culture of late capitalism, the nature of our ‘reality’ that lead a jury to be convinced that you can copyright the intangible. I blame DnD.

Culture has been totally blown apart by this ruling.

What even am a song now? (As Gordon White would put it).

Living Worlds

Ian Cheng describes ‘Worlding’ as

The art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

A World Runner(s) job is to steer a world towards more aliveness.

Other Internet stressed the role of VIBES in their essay on Squad Wealth.

I think the musical demonstration above shows that the ensemble are very vibe rich indeed.

Moving on, writing about DAOs last year Kei Kreutler said:

DAOs are less technical protocols for governance and more high stakes game worlds that interweave.

We should aim for rough consensus and running worlds.

Rough consensus and running worlds.….

It’s interesting. Richard Bartle, the godfather of all online worlds, wrote in his book Designing Virtual Worlds back in 2003 about how one should judge an online world

You can only judge a world in its totality.

I have been on Twitter 14 years and I judge it to have failed in bringing an experience of something alive into this world.

What is brought into being, what is made alive by the component parts of the world? What is experienced by the user.

If the metaverse is a medium…

Can you copyright a world?

The Future

Strains of weed make people feel a certain way – Indica vs Sativa etc.

One makes you feel one way, another makes you feel a different way.

Currently you can’t own a strain of weed – or have copyright over the way a drug makes people feel.

But the 2018 Blurred Lines ruling says you can now own the intangible. Which means boy howdy are folks in California trying to change this state of affairs.

Imagine a world where one type of chocolate makes you feel the same way as another brand of chocolate. What sort of lawsuit madness are we going to get ourselves into? Imagine being able to copyright the feeling or difference between Rayon and Silk? No new shared cultural grammars would be possible.

This is a weird post I’ll admit. Going though 90 seconds of musical education brings us though Ritual, Folktales, Pop Songs, DAOs and Virtual Worlds and Weed, but it’s all connected somehow in my mind.

The big battle – the cultural fight that we are all participants in right now – will be about the aliveness of worlds. Both online and offline. We are still in its early stages.

The podcast I’m making this week is going to be about this subject, but the same lens will be on machine learning, image generation, copyright and AI models.

Can you own? copyright? control? a vibe? can you stake a claim on the ‘aliveness’ of a thing?

Can you own how software makes people feel?

The post How The World Alive, Swings appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 21, 2020

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Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S03E33

Folktales, Place, Megaliths, Bluebells, Homeless Children, Angels, Demons, La Llorona, Bad Streets and Landscape.

You can now support the show at https://thejaymo.net/support/

Links:
Medway Megaliths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medway_Megaliths
Myths Over Miami: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/myths-over-miami-6393117
Bonus Link: The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth: https://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com
Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/

From Medway To Miami

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the interwoven nature of myths and truth and place.
About how important the flow model of reality espoused by Gordon White is. for having a larger understanding of the world. 

About how folktales are localised in landscape. How the land wraps itself around a story like a blanket. So tightly that both the story and the place become part of the fabric.

I grew up in Kent. So there are loads of stories embedded in place.

If you drive over BlueBell Hill, on the A229 south of Chatham there are two stories to pick from. The ghost of a bride-to-be is said to try and flag down cars for a lift. Multiple drivers have said they have picked up women and driven them to Chatham for them to vanish when they get out the car. 

The other:

For decades there have been numerous accounts of motorists saying they have driven into a girl who rushes out in front of them. This girl is said to look calmly at the driver before vanishing under the car.

I used to teach forigen students english in the summer when I was back home from university. One of my jobs was to go with them to the airport to see them off.  Driving back it would be just me and the coach diver chatting. One of them told me straight up he’d seen a girl late at night by the side of the road that looked like she was going to step out.

I bring this up not to tell ghost stories in the middle of summer. But because I want to place them in the landscape. The hill is of course covered in bluebells. Blue bells are also fairy flowers. Rung to summon fairies to a meeting. As such. It is expedient to ask the empty air for permission before you enter a bluebell wood. And to whisper thank you as you leave. 

But there’s more. On top of the hill are two monuments. One dedicated to the crew of an air ambulance helicopter that crashed there in tragic circumstances in 1999. The other are the standing stones known as the Medway Megaliths. The most famous of which is Kit’s Coty Constructed circa 4000 BCE. Three standing stones with a 4th laid across the top. It’s a name that falls down to us meaning “Tomb in the Forest”. From the Ancient British *kaitom, later *keiton, meaning “forest”. 

All this weird off on one stretch of road in the south east england. Given the flow model and the landscape I’ve always felt it pretty clear that bluebell hill is a place that likes to remind the living that it exists.

Now lets zoom 7000 kilometers west from Medway to Miami. I want to point you towards one of the most amazing articles on the internet. “Myths over Miami” published by 1997 by the Miami New Times.

It tells of the shared complex spirit culture between children in the city’s homeless shelters. 8 year olds explain to other children that Angels “Eat light so they can fly,” that they hide in empty buildings while they study battle maps. “There’s a lot of killing going on in Miami” one kid called Andre says. “You want to fight, if you want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.” 

On Christmas Night 1996 God fled Heaven to escape a demon attack, his palace of blue marble smashed to dust. Leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. What’s more remarkable is that children in shelters across the country reported being awakened from sleep. Alerted in dreams by dead relatives. 

The children go on to explain that One demon is feared even by Satan. They know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from empty sockets and feeds on children’s terror. 

The homeless children’s chief ally is the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name”. The folklorists interviewed are baffled by the origins of children conjuring Bloody Mary by chanting her name before a mirror coated with ocean water – a theft from the Blue Lady’s domain – in a pitch-dark room. Perhaps they should have asked a local mambo.

Embedded within the landscape of the city is of course the river that drains to the everglades. Here’s what the kids have to say.  On “One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took over” . “The other side the demons call Good Streets. Rich people live by a beach there. They wear diamonds and gold chains when they swim.”

I won’t spoil the rest of the article but there’s much much more. If you read it, it will blow.your.mind. This is the world of the vulnerable homeless population or at least it was in 97. I would argue a far more real world than “the party in the city where the heat is on” as Will Smith once sang. 

What does Myths over Miami suggest about the fabric of the city and story. With runesoup eyes on I wonder about land, the place, the people. There are also the hurricanes to consider of-course too. It’s interesting.

The post From Medway To Miami | 2033 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

June 19, 2020

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞 | The Chalk ♘

S03E24

If you have a tin helmet, or even a tin foil hat. I’d strap it on tight. Also Fairies and Love Spells.

Links:

H2 2020 ASTROLOGICAL FORECAST WITH AUSTIN COPPOCK: https://runesoup.com/2020/06/h2-2020-astrological-forecast-with-austin-coppock/

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Midsummer

On Jan 2nd of this year manstrologer Austin Coppck wrote his year ahead. He called 2020 it the year of The Bridge. I bring this up as we have some terrible space weather directly ahead. And I’ve also just finished listening to Austin Coppocks half yearly appearance on Gordon White’s Rune Soup to speak about the second half of 2020 so it’s front of mind as I sit down to write today’s script. (Link in the show notes)

I suppose it’s important to just say that we are where we are. We are a live at the ending of empires. This year sees the ending of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle. Since 1802 Jupiter-Saturn have conjoined every 20 years in an Earth sign. But from December onwards they will begin a new cycle in Aquarius. Air. 

The last 200 years have been absolutely dominated by Earthly Pursuits.. Empires, Wars, Resources, Coal, Oil, Territory, Maps, Borders, Industry, Farming, and Topsoil. 

So we really are at the end of an era. But it’s important to remember that when the color on the tip of the brush of history changes, the water that the brush gets cleaned in remains dirty and cloudy, full of pigment and shade from the previous flavour.  

Aquarius is associated with many things: electricity, computers, flight, inclusiveness but nonconformity freedom, humanitarianism, idealism, modernization, astrology, nervous disorders, rebellion, philanthropy, veracity, perseverance, humanity, and irresolution. And air sign. 

Zooming into the rest of the year, we are still under the influence of Jupiter in Capricorn.

I said in December last year, that all the big dreams and plans that Jupiter in Sagittarius laid in 2019 would have been executed now with graft and effort. A heroic trial. A fitting description for 2020 if you ask me.

Jupiter’s time in Capricorn also ends 1 day away from the end of the wider earth cycle. Again there is no change like a light going on in a dark room. But instead it will be like a multi month and year long dawn. Fortunately we already had a preview of what 2021-2023 looks like with the short period of Saturn in Aquarius. So the future looks very much like Q2. And we all know how that went down. Speaking of Saturn, this September brings us the worst weather of 2020. So hold onto your hats this summer. It’s going to be long and hot. There’s a storm brewing. Avoid unnecessary conflicts.

Now, with that extended forecast out of the way my word count tells me that I’m only half way through the episode. Just as we are halfway through the year I suppose. Ah Ah see what i did there? it’s called a segue. haha

Midsummer. So many influences we could talk about. It is the most romantic day of the year. A day that romantic souls can divine their future loves. A cornish tradition hold that “if a woman, blind-folded, plucks a full-blown rose, on Midsummer day, while the chimes are playing twelve, folds the rose up in a sheet of white paper and does not take out the rose until Christmas day, it will be found fresh as when gathered. Then, if she places the rose on her bosom, the young man to whom she is to be married will come and snatch it away.”

Meanwhile in Somerset on the night of Midsummer Eve a girl must go to the church-yard and wait for the stroke of twelve. She must have rose leaves, and a herb such as rosemary in her hand. At the first stroke of midnight, she must start to run round the church, scattering the leaves and singing softly:

All my reference books on flowers,herbs and their histories are packed with love potions at this time of year. Edible Orpine, with its fleshy bluish green leaves is supposedly at its best in midsomer, for only 1 week a year the leaves apparently have a sharp tartness at this time of year. But i’m not from cumbria so i’ve never eaten ‘midsummers man’ 

Lastly, midsummer of course is a time for fairies. 

My nana used to say they lived in pansies. Flowers that bloom in spring and autumn. So in summer I presume they are abroad. She told me that you put salt outside the back door to keep them away. Happy to have them hanging about, just not so welcome to come inside.

A couple of years ago Eriol, god rest her soul and I chatted at length about Faerie Queens and Fairy Law, Eduardo Kohn’s, Country, and Spirits of place after she published her blogpost FAERIE LAW (link in the show notes). 

I wonder as more and more people emerging out of lockdown are re-engaging with the world around them. Perhaps this summer we could all try and walk around our local areas, with fresh minds and bodies. Every place everywhere makes you feel something, you just need to find the places that make you feel the most. Midsummer is a good time as any to find them.

The post Midsummer | 2024 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I was supposed to be on a flight to The Canaries this morning. We booked it before Christmas. It became apparent we wouldn’t be going in the middle of last week, Jet 2 canceled their flights mid air on Saturday morning and Easyjet finally put us out of limbo yesterday morning. So I have a week off, and like a week where I do have work on, I’ll be largely self isolating. Can’t say the same for last week however.

I worked Monday and Tuesday, had a project kick off and continuation of a project thats so secret it doesn’t even have a code name

On Wednesday I went out drinking with Gordon White.

We were joking that from now on every time we meet it’s has to be to be to a biblical backdrop. Last year we flew into the embers of the fires in Tasmania. He’s back in London now during a time of pestilence. We drank a lot of mezcal cocktails in 7 dials.

During our session Dr Jack hunter called to cancel his appearance with Gordon at Tredwell’s, as he got off the phone, he turned to me and said “You should do it”. So with less than 48 hours notice.

I did:

We had a public conversation about ecology, the sprit world, hope. A main theme that emerged during the discussion was our culture (or should I say natureculture’s) lack of words for describing things. I’m glad I made that episode on depression last year. Similar vibes.

Saturday saw Gordon in conversation with The Scarlets at the Avenging Angels event at the Old Nick in Holborn.

It was awesome to see and meet so many #RSPM’s. Quite amazing to be in a pub named after the Devil with *everyone* in it talking about Magic.

After the event we moved to the Enterprise just off Russell Square where the only things I remember talking about was Warhammer 40k and Enya.
So I was 15 again or something.

Permanently Moved

Living In A Time Of History

S3E10

The longue durée, paying taxes after pestilence, boomers, ancient greeks, make art when the time ghost is at the door.

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

One day I *may* be able to to talk about what I’m up to.

Dipping the Stacks

I was a teenage Riverdancer – and I may never get out

How Vin Diesel Ended Up Living Every Nerd’s Best Life

The Inconvenient Truth about Your “Authentic” Self – Scientific American Blog Network

Hear How Choral Music Sounded in the Hagia Sophia More Than 500 Years Ago

Reading

I finished reading The MAGA Doctrine. I think its really worth taking a look at if you want to understand where Trumps quote unquote intercellular base is.
Haven’t started reading anything else, yet. But sarah from Silver Press put their edition of Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde in to my hands on Monday morning, so I think that will probably be on deck very soon.

Music

TBH I’m still listening to the Infant Annihilator album I blogged about last week. But A friend sent me a like to this single ‘Damned to Love You’ by Miserable with the comment ‘Singing like Billie Eilish is now a genre’

Remember Kids:

Real life aesthetics are becoming a little too on the nose even for cyberpunk set designers IMO.

The post In The Food Forest Of Souls, Angels Are Avenged appeared first on thejaymo.net.

February 14, 2020

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S3E06

Cronos vs Kairos. Garfield hates the eternal cyclical nature of Mondays. Early Christianity, the Eternal Eucharist, and Personal Narratives.

Links:

Blog: She Continues
Mentioned Episodes:
1926 – Ritual and Storytelling
1931 – Saints & Souls

—

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Clock Time vs Plot Time

My dear internet friend Eriol passed away in Dec. You can read the blog post slash eulogy I wrote on hearing the news in the show notes. Today is one of those days that I wish she was still around. As I just know that she would have had something to say about today’s episode.

Originally when I woke up today I wanted to do an easy saint episode on the Saints Valentine. Instead you get a show on chronological timing vs narrative timing. And I don’t even get anywhere near explaining about the 14th of Feb.

There is a sort of person on the internet who like’s hashtag folklore Thursday, and likes to say things like ‘oh thats just a christianised pagan festival’ or that the saints are a continuation of pagan gods. They like to get very hung up on dates of things. But dates aren’t that important if you live in an enchanted world.

Back in episode 1931 on saints + souls I had to cut an in depth discussion about dates in the christian calendar. Instead I just had to leave it with that All Saints Day was originally on May the 13th. The date of the dedication of the pantheon in Rome as a church. It was later moved to Nov 1st. 

It’s important to get your head around dates and time in the early christian church and ancient world. It’s the year 2020ad right now, because Christiany has an Eschatology.

We usually think of this as a “final destiny” . What’s unique about having an eschatology is you experience ALL of time as moving towards something. Which means it makes sense to count FROM something until we get to that point you are headed. The thing is, early Christians were not as hung up about the end of the world and ultimate judgement as later ones. As a new world had only just begun. With Jesus’s death and resurrection on the cross for early jews and christians the world had only just entered what Paul calls ‘New creation’ or a new age. With Jesus as the Logos. He in some sense not only powers the universe but also drives it forwards towards the eschaton. We can even still see hints of this movement forward in anno domini or ‘advancing age’.

This idea was of course all very novel and theological rather than practical. Early christians went about their days and years with a far more circular notion of time. Inside the wheel of the year as some people would say.

What’s important about thinking about a circular year is that in some sense every solstice is the same solstice. The date is useful but not *that* useful for ones day to day life. When the main clock for telling the time of year is the moon and the stars. This is what I’d call narrative timing. The story of the universe that you are embedded in. (see episode 1926 on Ritual and Storytelling).

The Greeks of course have words for these ideas. Anno Domini is Chronos. And the time and place that we are embedded in is Kairos, or right timing.

The simplest explanation I’ve heard to distinguish the two is:

• If you think of time as a flowing river which carries us along then – that’s Chronos.
• Or as a quiet lake which we swim in and watch the stars and planets turn over head – thats Kairos.

The Liturgical year calendar works in a Kairos or ‘right timing’ kind of way. Easter always falls on the First Sunday after the vernal equinox. No matter when it falls in March or April. Easter is always Easter.

And here’s the thing that’s really hard to get our head around in the modern era, but would have would have been understood by early christians and non christians alike at the time: 

Every Monday or Moons day is the same Monday. 

The stars overhead may change but every Monday is in some sense the same. 

When Garfield says he hates Mondays he means it in the same sense. He really means Fuck Monday’s. Not fuck that Monday in particular. Fuck the Eternal Monday that comes around every 7 days after Sunday. Every Monday or Moons day is the same Monday

This still seems strange so let’s take an early christian example to really pin the eternal nature of a time and places like ‘Mondays’ down. You can still find elements of this in the Orthodox traditions – let’s look at the Eucharist. 

When you go up to the altar and take holy communion you are in a Kyros sense: joining all other christians throughout time and space across history in union with Christ. You are receiving the body and blood of Christ, the force that powers the universe along with all other christians who experienced the same thing. All the saints, your ancestors, priests etc. They are all there with you, next to you, alongside you as you kneel in front of the cross.  

You can see why Kairos is such a powerful idea.

I’ve also heard the difference between Chronos and Kairos as clock time and plot time. 

Plot time being when things happen in a play or a story. 

Kairos means that we all live inside and experience the same narratives about the world together. We are all here on Friday today and it will be the same next Friday. So why not think of them as in some sense the same Friday? 

I want to do an episode on Storydwelling at some point. What it means to bring “living inside a narrative home, down to the personal level”. I’ve spoken already about one’s personal story being embedded in the stars, and now today how it kinda works with narrative in time and space. Storydwelling is about narrative and place.

But I’ll be touching on landscape, folklore and tales. Which will probably get me cancelled in some circles as those particular subjects have been so thoroughly seized by the right.  But before then I’ll need to explore hyperthickness with you and I want to make an episode about the racist people angry about dev patel playing sir gawain in the new green knight film.

More to come.

If you regularly enjoy my writing or podcasts please consider supporting my work with a membership here.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved is a 301-second personal podcast, written, recorded, and edited by @thejaymo.

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The post Clock Time vs Plot Time | 2006 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Yesterday I woke to a message from DB saying I should check the little corner of the dark forest internet we hang out in. For .. news.

On Friday night (27th Dec 2019) Eriol AKA Dr. Clever stepped off this mortal coil and left the realm.

I am absolutely gutted. My heart goes out to her entire family.

First, I need to get this out of the way – she would have got a kick out of this.

Saturday morning (28th Dec 2019) I awoke from a dream thinking ‘wow, I can’t wait to tell the team about this’. But I was avoiding the Internet over x-mas. So I didn’t. I also didn’t write it down in a dream journal (that I don’t have). I can feel her reaching for the ?‍♀️emoji from here.

On Friday I was still back home on the chalk for Christmas. Staying in my childhood bedroom. Before going to sleep I had gone though some special thoughts and prayers for my grandparents. Thinking about Christmases past and times I’d spent with them. Memories of them being in the house etc. Some business with the dead.

Early Saturday morning Eriol was in my dreams. I dreamt about crossing a bustling outdoor forum. A souk or medina maybe. I walked up to a trestle table in the middle of the hubbub. It was difficult to hear her words over the noise. I stood at the table watching her mix complex alchemical substances from one bowl made from rare material to the next. Showing not telling. Watch and learn.

Gordon wrote over on Runesoup.com yesterday, breaking the news to the RSPM community. In it he mentioned the following point:

That ferocious eclipse we just passed was right on her Ascendant and I know she is tapping that sign right now in the Otherworld. Look. Look. There is something to all of this. 

ALL OUR SMALL BOATS: SOME VERY SAD NEWS – Runesoup

Now listen here.

There IS something to all this. The reason Eriol and I bonded chatting online in the first place was the fact we’d both been to the same place.

“A cave underground, a roof of stars, with a reflecting pool and a statue of ‘the beauty’“. If you have been there too you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Experiments on the Peshteran Discord have been remarkable: We have waved our arms around in the same way and ended up seeing the same shit. (which tbqh is a good description as any for ceremonial magic)

To quote one of her favoured backchannel phrases “All Verified UPG is Canon”

I really don’t know where to go from here to be honest. I’ve never done anything like this before. There’s already been two links I’ve seen in the last few days that wanted to send her. I’ll miss her dearly.

Dr Clever had been writing the good shit for more than half a decade. She became a central node for many people in the occult / magical renaissance that has been happening online. She often wrote with a sharp clear clarity.

She was also one of the most important recurring characters in the wider ‘Runesoup Extended Universe‘.

I know others are grieving right now. I have spoken with some in the dark forest that we share. I’ve also seen some wonderful comments online too.

Gordon wrote yesterday:

When I lose someone I worry that expressing or communicating this loss somehow makes it about me, which it isn’t.

ALL OUR SMALL BOATS: SOME VERY SAD NEWS – Runesoup

I’m worried that i’m going to ‘make it about me’. But I also know she would just encourage me to write something. “Write it. Create even more when the feelings get rough”.

Eriol was a ‘web friend’.

We never met in person. We have only ever corresponded avatar to avatar. In chat programs, DM’s and lengthy email correspondence. Hours and hours of conversation and interaction. In my minds eye she IS Whittaker in those steampunk goggles. But this doesn’t matter at all, nor does it change how I feel today. The impact that Eriol had on my life during our friendship was … significant.

Gordons post says a lot of the things that I would also like to say.
But I want to add a few personal things – at this point in the timeline.

1. Eriol always encouraged me to be more confident with my writing and with my podcast. To explore ideas and to never stop being curious about tangential threads. To keep pulling them until I was satisfied I knew where they lead.
2. She read ‘with pleasure’ over 150k words of my writing/bullshit that is currently unpublished. She is the only person that has read all three of the personal ‘texts’ that I have been working on: Mediation, Christianity, and Magick. The good Dr Clever also 100% called that the Meditation/Christianity texts should be combined months before anyone else. As both texts apparently feel at home when they ‘slip into memoir’.
3. I am grateful for every word doc comment saying ‘I can see what you are doing here ;)’. Every time she detected that I was sneaking animism on to the big table.
4. I am grateful for the 10k+ words of feedback I received from a 60k word first draft. If anything, this should illustrate her extraordinary generosity. I know many others have similar experiences.
5. Eriol was always the first in with the ‘Like’ on Twitter after I posted my podcast on a Friday. As it coincided with her mid morning break between classes. Honestly, over the last two years I had come to expect it. The signal that she’d listened to it and some feedback on that week would be incoming. I will miss this dearly.
6. In the dark forest we have a “Confessions” channel. Back in November Eriol wrote the following:

“my god, you have honored me with your trust, your kindness, your respect, your work, and with your support. I…have to admit I don’t always feel like I’m as cool as you think I am (except when I do). I treasure that you value my opinion, and I am so glad you’re here with us crazy Americans (but we’re all crazy here…).”

Eriol was cool as fuck actually.

I thanked her in DM’s in the backchannel. Her words meant a lot to me at the time. Now she is away … they mean even more.

7. I will miss her bullying me into reading a whole god damn Shakespeare play in a week just because her students were reading it. Then poking me to know what I thought.

Despite my mutterings at the time. On the bright side I have now read quite a lot of Shakespeare.

8. I am deeply saddened that our scheming/research into Medieval English puppetry traditions, folk tales & passion plays will never come to its creative outcome. However, perhaps one day I will do something with all the material you pulled together for me. It’s amazing that Antitheatricalists (who were Puritans/Evangelicals) knew that theater was weird and dangerous, and were correct that it subverted their shit world view.

BTW. Despite our disagreements about the cultural understanding of shadows and plato in in the early 21C. I still think shadow puppetry is the way to go. But I’m still open to you to convincing me otherwise.

9. I’ll also definitely miss our backchannel gossip and side eyes at some of the spiciest takes from the astro/occult/magic community. Twitter really is a stupid place.

10. Her favourite poem was The Hosting of the Sidhe by Yeats.

Earlier this year Eriol wrote a post on reincarnation and the soul. (It also opens with the important point that one should “take advantage of opportunities to write as they come”).

I find myself looking back to my thoughts about the Egyptian model. My “fetch” or ka will eventually go back to country and become part of the ancestral lining we’re all doing. I am hopeful that my ba will have adventures in realms invisible and visible until perhaps I decide to incarnate again.

One of the recurring threads I’ve encountered in my personal work is that the spirit world allows us sundry kinds of experiences and more, but eventually, our spirits can grow old, strange, hungry, and fey. I suspect this dilemma contributes to some of the accounts of fae being like that. I suspect a roaming spirit can continue to change and grow, but, like the living, they have to avoid falling into languid stupors and calcifying habits. If you can keep changing in the spirit world, you can probably carry on there indefinitely.

RECYCLED SUNLIGHT – Crowess

I just know that Eriol’s spirit will continue to change and grow. To have adventures and most likely report back if we are listening.

Lastly. She always had an uncanny ability to be at least one step ahead.

I mean, she left us with the Fisherman’s Prayer as her final tweet for gods saaakkkkee.

For those wondering or interested. The Peshteran are in contact with Eriol’s sister. When the time is right we will ask about her literary estate. Some of you may already be aware of the Book of Crows. But there are journals, and endless Gdocs. Plus her blog and many many pictures of her cat. Y’know, the usual. With her families permission we would like to pull her work together to ensure that –

She continues.

The post She Continues appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 1, 2019

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Christianity ✝️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E31

All Saints Day and All Souls Day. 
Humanising invisible companions
Necromantic Bone Cults
Staying with the trouble
Ancestors as a complicated story


This podcast was nearly 1m 10s over length after the first edit. I cut A LOT out. Hope it still makes sense.

But Lesson learnt: 2 essays in 301 seconds is … hard.

 —

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Saints & Souls

Saints

The saints emerge from a proto-christian tradition. They predate Catholicism by three centuries.

Originally being any dead Christian or Jew but very quickly evolved into what author of ‘The Cult of The Saints’ Peter Brown calls The Very Special Dead. 

The Saints have always produced a certain tension throughout the history of Christianity, many early members of the church uneasy with a faith that had incorporated a necromantic bone cult somewhere along the way. 

So much so the last pagan to rule the Roman Empire and nephew to Saint Constantine, Emperor Julian the Apostate wrote the following after he abandoned Christianity sometime after 351AD

You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres, and yet in your scriptures it is nowhere said that you must grovel among tombs

Emperor Julian the Apostate – Against the Galileans

Some kind of a balance was eventually found by St Augustine in Predestination of the Saints where from about 390AD people began praying TO the saints and FOR the dead. 

This was later solidified by complexifying the idea of worship. As pagans would point at early Christians and laugh over ‘Thou shalt not have any other gods’ and ask if he was jealous of the Saints.

As such, worship was split into two concepts:

1. Worship appropriate to human beings.
2. Worship reserved for God alone. This may sound unnecessary it’s important as it resolves a great deal of the metaphysics.

All Saints Day originally was on May the 13th. The date also chosen for the dedication of The Pantheon (the temple of All Gods) in Rome as a church. It was a movable feast that skipped around the Easter calendar. By the 9th century it was moved from May 13 to Nov 1 with ol’ Bedey telling us (previously on Episode 19-10) that Boniface IV had originally said 4 centuries before “that the memory of all the saints might in the future be honored in the place which had formerly been dedicated to the worship not of gods but of demons”.

In the Chrstian worldview both of these things exist: Demons AND Saints

Saints aren’t is the continuation of Pagan Gods (however much to atheist bros wish to claim). What they are (am) the very special dead of place and in a landscape.

It took nearly a 1000 years before the church took control over the saints lists and canonisation etc. Before then, for a long time, most saints were only venerated locally. 

The afore mentioned complexification of worship was transform the earlier pagan experience of an invisible companion, guardian, or daimon etc into a human being.

Things that people experience everyday and have always existed as part of the human experience. The cult of saints and its metaphysics provides a framework to utilise them.

Saints are things exist in our world.

Listen to Fr Seraphim of the Orthodox Monastery on the Isle of Mull talk about it:

I opened the last episode of last year on Saint Andrew’s day with the following:

He is a saint that has always been kind to me. I was Baptized in his church. … the family parish back on the chalk. And now I live on his square in south west london. We hear the bells from the bell tower. He’s just … always been around.

The saints are all around us, if you live in the ‘West’. You probably live under a saints parish, perhaps live on or near a road named after one, maybe a first or middle name and never given it much thought. But it’s All Saints day, and I think that you should.

Souls

Tomorrow is all Souls Day or ‘The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed’.

All Souls Day is about remembering our ancestors. Many of whom were kind, but others did unfathomably horrible things to people. Some were both.

It is important to remember that to commemorate is to recall and show respect rather than celebrate. 

In 2019 we face: climate change, anti-racist struggles, de-colonisation, biodiversity loss and many other challenges. These are all also intergenerational issues. Some caused by our forebears, Some caused by ourselves. All are issues that will continue to affect our descendants. 

Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble is about exploring new ways of reconfiguring our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She posits that learning to stay.with.the.trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth that will provide the means to building more liveable futures.

Staying with the trouble of our ancestors presents a chance to bare witness to them and All Souls is as good a day as any to do this.

A deep rooted problem of modern western society is that it does not favour bearing witness to its past.

It certainly instrumentalises it, but our wider cultural stories of progress and enlightenment demand that we don’t. The UK government tried to convince us that the economy works like a household over austerity: But our history certainly is.

Our culture is like a household that has tried to brush its unsavoury elements under the rug while the cupboards are full of skeletons. 

The past was simply a horrible place, it’s only a hop skip and jump backwards that our immediate ancestors were living grim Dickensian childhoods. Cut yourself? You died, Got a fever? You died. Pretty much everything was out to kill you. People romanticise the past but I’m pretty sure it sucked more ass than primitivists and reenactment fantasists think. 

Everyone’s family no matter how far you go back will repeatedly encounter horrible people. 

People who committed all sorts of horrible acts and violations towards (and of) other people.

They helped lay the groundwork for structural oppressions though ignorance or wilful malevolence. You may even have known these people IRL, but I can assure you, there are more. This is true for everyone that has ever lived.

Ancestry isn’t a value judgement, it just is.

And that IS, is that all bodies breathing on this earth today today are a complicated story.

Complicated by those in the past that didn’t survive either by friend or foe. And that is why we must bear witness to them. Everyone that came before us did so with struggle and that is why you are alive to struggle today. A victory that is worth celebrating. But again they also did things you probably don’t agree with and you should stay with that trouble. 

All Souls Day for me is about the sometimes tragic, bloodthirsty, sad, and malevolent story. But they all also loved and laughed, danced and sang – and so do you.

That’s why we commemorate the dead.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Saints & Souls | 1931 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

October 25, 2019

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E30

It’s that time of year. Here’s my ghost story.
Dealing with a haunted chest of drawers and The Laughing Man as a kid. (ft. My Bro)

 

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

The Laughing Man

This episode falls on the Friday before All Hallows Eve. Next week I have plans to talk about this time of year’s most important days. All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. Days of the very special dead and the very dead respectively.

Tumblr witches can prattle about Sow-wen and the veil and what not. But All Hallows Eve is for divination, mirror work, cleansing, mummers plays, and storytelling. It’s a time for banishing spirits not invoking them. Anyways, that’s the rant I shan’t be going on next week.

One of the things that time of year does encourage however is – telling scary stories.

Especially ones that are true.

When I was a kid. Probably about 7 or 8. My bedroom had a digital clock radio with numbers lit in 80’s krypton factor green. It would project a milky green light from the other side of the room. Throwing harsh shadows in the dead of night. The light would catch the lampshade hanging from the ceiling: casting a deep inky black of darkness across bedroom ceiling. 

And from this shadow I was terrorised by: ‘The Laughing Man’.

It wouldn’t happen every night. But I remember being absolutely terrified of it when it did.

Within the shadow would be a face, or a skull with the idiot grin that they have. From deep in the darkness, an endless laugh would emanate in the dead of night.

The laugh was maniacal and mocking. The laugh was a cackle, it was the sound of someone who knows your secrets. It delighted in my terror. The more scared I got the harder it would laugh.

The laughing man would be inside the lampshades shadow. But its presence felt like he was inside my room at my doorway, pointing and laughing, telling me I wasn’t good enough. It would go on for hours until I couldn’t do anything more except go to my mum and dads room and then they would come back and put me to bed.

Sometimes he would still be there grinning at me with feelings after they head left. But after all the lights had been on and I had settled down usually he’d be gone. Like he’d turned his back and left, just as a person would leave a room.

Then one day I remember being on the worn out brown and orange carpet of the grandparents house by the fire and I remember telling my Nana about the laughing man.. She didn’t question my experience or tell me he wasn’t real. She simply said ‘Ask him to leave’ or something like ‘Ask him to go somewhere else where he won’t bother you’. She didn’t miss a beat and went about the rest of her activities.

Before I go on, I must explain that also in my room was my great nana’s chest of draws. A piece of furniture that was most definitely haunted. 

I asked my brother who lives in Asia about it over DM’s and he sent me the following: Prefaced with his usual disclaimer of course.

I preference this with the fact I have a terrible terrible memory.

I remember it making me feel very uncomfortable and being quite scared of it and I think I remember once being in my being in your room on my own and staring at it and wondering why it made me feel so uncomfortable and why it made me feel so scared.

In the wooden paneling either side of the mirror in the furniture were faces. Faces made from the knots and grain in the wood. It wasn’t just my brother who was creeped out by it either.

I remember talking to mum about it once, and she said that she used to be frightened of it when she would see it at little nana’s house our great nana’s house when she was a child.

MY BRO

And she did something about it:

Mum said that she’s in a bit but the way that she stopped being scared that she started to think about it as if it was from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. (…) because she knew that if she hadn’t she said that if she didn’t give it a positive va Association that should be scared of it.

Anyways.

One night I simply asked the Laughing Man to leave with a stern voice. And I felt him move across the room. I put him in the cupboard – into one of the faces. And then of course I stuck a poster of a Space Wolves Space Marine over it. I now think of this as my first act as a magician. ‘The Space Marine Working’.

So from then on, I lived in that room with the Laughing Man trapped in the wardrobe behind the poster. 

Many years later, about 10 years ago now, I made the effort to throw my childhood life away. Emptying out the room and boxing up old treasures. Eventually we got to the point where the furniture had to go. 

When I took the poster down, I saw the face again, and still got a slight chill. The shows cover today was taken during this process. It was on black and white film but i’ve boosted the contrast so you should be able to make out the face between the 0 and 1.

I said goodbye to him, and told him he could stay in the wardrobe or go somewhere else but not to bother me again or I’d do something worse now I’d grown up.

Bullying spirits is 99% of the job after all. 

The Laughing Man is a common spirit encounter, reported across all cultures, all around the world.

The internet is full of stories of Laughing and Shaming Ghosts. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably just patiently lived in the cupboard waiting for someone to be alone with him.

He went off to the Princess Alice Hospice Shop. So perhaps he’s laughing at some poor kid right now.

But who cares, at least he isn’t bothering me.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post The Laughing Man (A Ghost Story) | 1930 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 27, 2019

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Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E26

This show was a big bite to take, make and chew within one hour but ah well:

Technology and Ritual
Ritual needs sacrifice
Storytelling and Mythos
The story becomes alive in its telling
Our ancestors would struggle to see mythology as separate from ritual

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Ritual and Storytelling

When I sat down 35mins ago to make this show I was fully intending to talk about: Meditation Habits, Sacred Time and Sacred Space. But where I’ve ended up is: Ritual and Storytelling. I can already make out the sound of atheists and materialists cringing on the wind.

Whether you like it or not Witchcraft and Astrology are having their moments in the sun. And the least surprising thing about 2019 is Marianne Williamson running for president. 

Until recently I’ve found is that any mention of ritual or sacred has been dismissed as culty or treated with suspicion. But I’ve noticed some quote unquote thought leaders saying things like ‘Technology-as-Ritual” recently. Valley bros trying to think piece up James Carey’s Ritual As Technology. 

As we live through the collapse and are forced to confront the natural world. Subjects like The Sacred and Ritual will have to unpack in our culture in new ways in the next decade. 

Quote unquote ‘Established religions’ don’t have a monopoly on Ritual. Nor do social scientists or anthropologists.

Ritual belongs to all of us. Both collectively and individually. 

By now we all understand that technology neither works nor signifies the same in every place or culture. And If it does. It is often because the environment has been moulded to suit the technologies needs not the cultures. The reverse of Don Norman’s line in Living with Complexity. “We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.”

Ritual and technology are both manifestations of local desires. They include complex ordering mechanisms. They both signify their beginning, verify and communicate their successful operation.

Ritual like technology is as integral to processes of knowing, doing and making. As it is to the production of symbolic meaning.

Unfortunately. It’s become very common for people use ‘rituals’ interchangeably with ‘routines’.

The entrepreneur dot com has “10 Bedtime Rituals That Help You Reflect, Relax, Sleep and Succeed”. Maybe this is something to do with spicing up copy up in the click bait age that causes this..

But there is an important difference between the two. One of them generates meaning, the other doesn’t.

Given that definition. I can hear you all shout “Then everything CAN be a ritual” and I would agree. But CAN is a word that’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting. One can imbue a routine with meaning and make it a ritual. Whether you SHOULD or not is an open question.

But rituals don’t just generate meaning. They also require one other element. Sacrifice. 

As Will Newsome says:

All rituals have a sacrifice. The default one is time.

Will Newsome

If you go back and look at the bedtime routines with the two tests of meaning and sacrifice. Most of them struggle to be minimum viable ritual.

Because what you find in ritual is an act of meaning that resonates with, and echoes out to the wider universe. That meaning can also flow both ways.   

Reading aloud can be Ritual. Drama. Dance. As can a whole host of things.

An effective ritual creates a two way resonance between the audience and the performer. Black rod showing up in parliament the other week showed the aliveness of resonant ritual.

To Recap:

Like that meme, let’s take a screeching exit at the sign marked storytelling.

Starwars or the MCU is a quote and quote mythos. One that contains warmed over archetypes taken from children’s comics. Going to the cinema to watch a movie meets ritual criteria for many. It generates meaning in their lives AND is a sacrifice of time and money. People resonate with the characters that are being invoked during the movie. The characters however don’t resonate with them.

I’ve said before that deep engagement with mythos should give people agency within those realms. If someone else owns the stories then it’s not possible as the resonance is only one way. 

There however other ‘story universes out there’ that are two way. The most OG of all is the night sky. 

The Night Sky Is A Story Universe

The dance of the stars, constellations, planets and the moon is a vast cosmic soap opera that changes from day. When you pay attention, the sky is alive with meaning. 

You don’t have to quote unquote even ‘believe’ in horoscopes to follow along. There is a whole cast of characters in the night sky that resonate with you personally, assigned in certain ways at the moment of your birth. 

Over our heads is a cast of cosmic characters. Interacting dynamically. A story alive in the present moment that you can watch play out. You don’t need to go out and buy a T-shirt. But you already have a team so you might as well follow along. 

And just as you can resonate with the characters in the sky, the positions of the characters resonate with you. You have agency in the cosmic story itself as you are part of that story in the witnessing. This is story as ritual. Alive in its telling. It has it sacrifice (being alive), meaning and resonance. 

The reason the story in the stars as ritual is important. Is because our ancestors would struggle to define mythology as something separate from ritual. This is the toolkit that all our other narrative tools live inside.

If you managed to follow along, then we should demand a great deal more from the storytellers in our culture.  

It is sacrifice, that generates the meaning, in the moment of the act. The act causes resonance.

The story becomes alive in its telling

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Ritual and Storytelling | 1926 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 9, 2019

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E19

The anatomy of an info binge.

Blake > Tennyson > 20th C Anglosphere Public Policy > Keplar > Lana de Terzi > Pearson’s Weekly

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

From Blake’s London to Air to Surface Missiles

The Anatomy Of An Info Binge

I was on a weird one this week. Follow along with me on an info binge that took me from William Blake to the first imagining of an air-to-surface-missile. 

For my Birthday Mr Ben Vickers gave me a pamphlet called William Blake’s Mystic Map of London, by artist and author Louisa Albani

The book takes Blakes work and builds a map of london and demonstrates with wonderful art that Blake really is the OG psychogeographer.

The book makes it clear that whilst Blake’s work is deeply infused with spiritual significance, he was not an isolated ‘mystic’. He was a native Londoner, politically and socially aware of the world around him. He witnessed poverty and social injustice and wrote about it, mindful of the ‘mind-forged manacles’ that he saw as imprisoning the human spirit.

On a mystic poetry kick, I finally read ‘Tennyson an Occultist: As His Writings Prove’ by A.P Sinnett. Published in 1920 by the London Theosophical Publishing House. The inside price indicates I bought it from  Oxfam for 40p. 

The introduction has some zingers in it like: ‘the self-sufficient “sceptic” (or ignoramus) who challenges every occult writer to bring him proofs of this or that statement that he cannot accept, fails to understand that it is not worth the while of the occulist to undertake his elementary education. Which is the sort of thing I could hear Conner Habib saying on his podcast.

But anyway.

What’s interesting about the book given its publication date is the brief discussion on the poem Locksley Hall. A piece modern writers point to as Tennyson “peering through the looking glass” (see episode 1915) to see the future. Tennyson says as much in the poem: “dipp’d into the future, far as human eye could see,”  and he postulates a “ghastly dew” raining from the heavens as “the nations’ airy navies” grapple “the central blue.” you can well see why folks see glimpses of the horrors of the 20th Century. 

A.P Sinnett in Tennyson an Occultist says that the only comment he could get from Tennyson on the poem (by way of seance I assume) was the following “‘Tennyson’s answer simply was: ” regret that I wrote it” That put an end to further conversation on the subject. “ Wild. This book goes deep intoTennyson’s occult imagery and has some great UPG anecdotes from the author and an aside. 

We now take another leap, as I got interested in other visions of flying machines. I’m sure most of you know of the Vimana in the ramayana. I have a not very good conspiracy book on them.

So instead I turned to the book Rhetoric and Reality in air warfare The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 which I originally bought for the great chapter on the 1899 Hague convention and America’s insistence on holding the door open for strategic bombing. As technology would eventually allow them they argued to bomb things accurately. Very pertinent given the US’s current arguments on the efficacy of drone strikes. 

Via this book I also ended up reading E.E. Mill’s dubois “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire” the next day which reads like a UKIP rant written in 1905. But I digress once again. 

The Strategic Bombing book then took me to Johannes Kepler’s Somnium. A novel written in 1608. In the narrative, an Icelandic boy and his witch mother learn of an island named Levania (our Moon) from a daemon. Somnium presents a description of how the Earth might look when viewed from the Moon. I’d never heard of it. The text I found describes a man being shot from a cannon into space to the moon which reads like an interstellar cryopod “Therefore, he must be put to sleep beforehand, with narcotics and opiates, and he must be arranged, limb by limb, so that the shock will be distributed over the individuals members”

I also found “The Aerial ship” written in 1670 by Jesuit monk Francesco Lana. Which quite frankly reads like a real prophetic fever dream.

“Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would be proof against surprise, as the ship could at any time be steered over its squares, or even over the courtyards of dwelling-houses, and brought to earth for the landing of its crew. …. or even without descending, iron weights could be hurled … fireballs and bombs. houses, fortresses, and cities could be thus destroyed, with the certainty that the airship could come to no harm as the missiles could be hurled from a vast height.”

Lana however does dismiss the whole idea stating that “God would never surely allow such a machine to be successful, since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind.”

I ended up my infobinge at the short story “Angel of the Revolution”, by George Griffith.  Which has the first recorded imagining of an air-to-surface-missile. It’s an OGl steampunk story set on a steam airship published in Pearson’s Weekly 1893

“There was a sharp but not very loud sound as the compressed air was released; something rushed out of the muzzle of the gun, and a few seconds later, Colston could see the missile boring its way through the air, and pursuing a slanting but perfectly direct path for the centre of the fortress.”

I’m trying to find copies of Pearson’s Weekly fiction as the stories seem very readable and would make for some great audio content.

 Anyway I hope these somewhat psychedelic leaps through texts have been interesting. I’ll speak to you next week. It’ll be episode 50.

The post From Blake’s London to Air to Surface Missiles | 1919 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

July 11, 2019

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Meditation 🌀 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E15

 

This week I discuss methods of increasing your ability to interact with the liminal and the imaginary.

Note: I set some homework.

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

In (+) Through The Looking Glass

‘Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try, there’s a dear!’ Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it up before the kitten for it to imitate: however, the thing didn’t succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn’t fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was—‘and if you’re not good directly,’ she added, ‘I’ll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that?’

Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll Chapter One 

I caused a few frowns and murmurings amongst close friends last year by posting on twitter about seeing things in the mirror. Specifically, seeing a woman sewing a shoe made of rough fibers that looked exactly one like one discovered in a cave in North America thought to be 9000 years old. Y’all might think I’m a crazy man too. But I don’t care. I refer you to the two shows I’ve done on experience.

I started with the Carroll quote as I really like the term ‘looking glass’ to describe all phenomena that can be produced by scrying, or doing mirror work. As the outcomes can be so much more than what’s most commonly described as ‘psychomanteum work’.

I’ve seen all sorts of trippy shit in the polished copper mirror we have. It’s so simple I’ll tell you how to do it right now: 

• Sit in a dark quiet room with only one little source.
• Have the mirror tilted away from you so you can’t see your own reflection or the light source in it’s surface.
• Stare into the mirror and in the gloom things will begin to cohere.

That’s basically it.

You’ll see psychedelic colours, fast expanding geometric forms and shapes that have wild leaps of logic. Once you get through the veil all the things seem to tune in.

If you get good at it, you can watch it just like TV. It comes so naturally to me that it’s impossible not to intuit that folks have done the same thing for millennia in polished stones and reflecting pools.

If you want to get better at mirror work, journeying or have tried lucid dreaming in the past here are two exercises:

Exercise 1: Homunculus Hands

In a darkened room, hold your hand up in front of your face with fingers relaxed. Have a light source behind your hand. This can be a candle or a window letting street light in from outside. But sure that its full brightness is covered by the hand.

Stare at it until you are well aware of the sensation of the image having been ‘burned in’. I’m sure you know what Im talking about a bunch of optical illusions are also activated in this way. Once satisfied. Close your eyes and drop your hand to your side. You should still be able to see your hand as it was in front of your face. As you recognise the outline of your hand – in your minds eye – try and close your fingers that are in the after image. Try opening them again. Try twisting your hand around at the wrist. These are all super familiar motions that your brain knows how to do and I think that you will be surprised at how quickly you can manipulate your hand in the liminal. 

At some point you’ll realise that your hand is both on your lap, and being manipulated in this ‘other’ space, the dexterity of your ghostly hand should feel natural like its actually there. 

I’m not suggesting you’ll be able to do it straight away but your mileage may vary. However, if you make it a practice. Do it nightly before bed – it’ll come. The more control you develop in manipulating this 3rd imagineal hand will translate across the imaginal realms. 

I think this technique works very well alongside the manipulation of the platonic solids in the mind’s eye you find in the early mystery cults: Spinning them around, turning them over or changing the viewing angle like a 3rd person video game camera

Build up these tools and your dreams can become fantastically liminal spaces.

Once you feel comfortable and confident that your hand can exist in this space – try this.

Exercise 2: A Bed Time Walk

Before going to sleep, lay on your back with your eyes closed. Regulate your breathing and try to feel everything: The sheets, the bed cover, the feeling of the pillow case against your hair etc.

Be as present as possible.

When you know where you are, in your minds eye pull back the covers, sit up, turn sideways and imagine putting your feet on the floor.

We all know that reality is a spectrum, but once your feet are on the floor it should feel quote unquote real as when you were manipulating your hand in the first exercise. The next challenge is to stand up, get out of bed and walk out into the liminal. Once you can do this you’re away. Who knows what’s outside the bedroom door.

Go for a walk, see what’s around. Hell, leave the flat and walk around the neighbourhood.

Things might get a little weird – that’s normal and even better.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. A big hello any and all new subscribers, i appreciate you listing. I’d love for all ya’ll to try this and report back your successes, failures, frustrations. I’m interested.  

The script above is the original script. It may differ from what ended up in the audio due to time constraints and editing.

The post In (+) Through The Looking Glass | 1915 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

It’s been such a weird week. We got back from Benedict and Mina’s wedding on Tuesday afternoon. So I was wandering around on Wednesday thinking it was actually Monday, then Panicked and dove into the mountain of stuff I put on my list..

Here’s some gratuitous snaps from the Hagia Sophia for your eyeballs.

Here’s John Romers 3 hour Byzantium Documentary.

Last night was the launch of The Brazen Vessel 10 years of Collected Works from Alkistis Dimech ☩ Peter Grey of Scarlet Imprint at Treadwells.

I forgot to take any photos at the event but here’s a snap of the paperback. I can’t wait to dig in. Especially their earlier writings.

Permanently Moved

S2E14

[Media property name] isn’t your friend.

We need anti trust laws for culture. I take a dump on Disney, Marvel and Star Wars. Roll your own culture.

(Yes the podcast cover is my teenage bedroom)

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Dipping the Stacks

History: “The Power of Trees” (1855) – SANDRA RENDGEN

Why are England’s roadsides blooming? – BBC News

The Afrofuturists with designs on African architecture | Financial Times

Heavy rain forces evacuation order for 800,000 in southwestern Japan

The Ministry

I’ve had some really interesting comments and feedback on the first 27 pages (10k words) of the meditation book. A lot to chew on.

Been working hard on the text for the first zine. Should be Ready to go in August at the latest.

Been talking with the folks at UCT (apodcastfornow). we’re doing a collab together.

The most important thing that happened this week tho:

Reading

I’ve been reading more Warhammer and A LOT of PDFs on UK public policy documents on land use this week. Nothing really to report.

Music

CATNAPP X MODESELEKTOR “THE MOVER”

This track is dark and square wavey as hell. I love the suction they have achieved on the kick drum. It feels like the billowing of a sail.

Remember kids:

The post Back from the Wedding appeared first on thejaymo.net.

April 19, 2019

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Culture 🏛️ | Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S02E06

Lord of the Rings is better than Game Of Thrones. The significance of sailing to ‘the west’ and its place in the modern collective unconscious

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

LOTR is better then GOT

At the credits of the new Game of Thrones episode this week I loudly declared to everyone in the room that Lord of The Rings was better than Game of Thrones. Everyone disagreed and shook their heads at me. So used as they are to my arbitrary opinions.

So since Monday I’ve been thinking about the WHY Lord of The Rings is better or perhaps more important. So here we go….

Lord Of The Rings is THE definitive fantasy novel, and its impact on the world cannot be overstated. 

The important thing about Fantasy, perhaps the defining thing about Fantasy is that it contains magic. Fantasy re-mystifies the world, it allows us to reconsider or re-see the world through eyes that are completely open to magic and the mythical. A facet of our our culture that has been lost since the reformation and the age enlightenment.

A lot of people will go on at length about the themes and threads of Lord of The Rings. Tolkiens views towards landscape and criticisms of the industrial revolution and just stop there. This reading of the book in my opinion is lazy and boring and also not the main theme of story at all. 

There’s a lot to say on the interactions and synchronicities between Tolkien and Jung’s ideas, and I direct you to the work of Becca Tarnas to read more.

But for now let’s think about the collective unconscious or the imaginal realm.

Fantasy as a genre provides a safe container within which people can explore the world anew with eyes open. In fact the existence of magic in the medium is the clear mechanism that allows people to cross the boundary from quote unquote reality and enter the world of the fantastical.

What Lord of the rings is actually about is – that it is an ending. 

The entire story is about the fading or slipping away of magic and sorcery from the world and the coming of the Age of Men – ‘much what once was, is now lost’ and ‘the world is changed’ as the opening lines of the movie makes clear.

The defining point of the Return of the King is not the moment that the ring is cast into Mt Doom. But the departure of the folks from middle earth in the stories closing pages – when they sail to the west. 

The Dwarfs all sail, the Elves sail, Frodo sails, and Gandulf sails away too. They leave middle earth from the grey havens and sail across an ocean. Leaving behind them the time of men. 

The significant point of the story’s ending is that the characters aren’t dead. They have just gone away, to the west, and we can still reach them if only we know where to look or where to go. They remain alive in our imagination, just over the next hill as it were.

Tolkien installed these figures ‘In the west’ at the end of Lord of The Rings in our collective unconsciousness so they could remain forever alive.

Lord of The Rings is one of the first major works of 20C popular culture to reignite the mind of the pre-enlightenment. Tolkien largely abandoned his work of trying to create a mythological history of England, but instead he manifested a mythic reality into modernity and gave them space within our unconscious to continue to exist. Fantasy – again- is a safe container to explore the mindset of our ancestors.

To safely explore a world where people didn’t travel very much beyond the market, unless like frodo, they went on pilgrimage of their own that would take them well beyond the next hill. 

Secondly the super natural wasn’t even questioned: magic, clairvoyance, telepathy, saints, holy wells, spirits, demons were not held within a safe container of fantasy but very much real, alive and in the world. Observable in the comings and goings in ones everyday life. Our ancestors knew as much about the world around them by direct experience as we do – which when you are honest with yourself is actually very little, and like our ancestors the rest of our world is imagined. What happens in other parts of the world don’t happen to you everything else is imagined.

As much as it probably pains our quote unquote rational mind to admit it – this is the truth. I’ve never been to California, but I can imagine it as a real place that exists over the next hill from the clues and information i’ve received via movies, stories and people who come from there. But there really is no difference between the Los Angeles of my imagination and Minas Tirith. I apologise to residents of the City of Angels for my misapprehension of the finer details of their lives as much as i do to the citizens of Gondor.

There are just as many dragons on the edge of your own world map today as there were for the creator of the psalter world map in 1265. 

You see, when fundamentalists right essays about Lord of The Rings like “But it’s Only Fantasy! How Demonic Imaginations are Changing the Minds of a Generation.” they have a point and see something that the rationalists don’t.

With every iteration of Game of Thrones, HeroQuest, magic the gathering, Conan, and I hate to say it Harry-fucking-Potter, we summon these figures of the Mythical age back to the world of men. 

Tolkiens ‘the west’ continues to build in power every time we draw from it, with every episode of Game of Thrones that gets made, we make the lives of those that sailed out from middle earth and into our unconscious more powerful. And that’s why Lord of The Rings is better than Game of Thrones

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I’m under the weather today. Thought I had a cold coming, but it has moved in to my head instead so I’ve been sleepy all day so this post is short.

Went to the launch of Ignota Books‘ first publication Spells on Halloween.

The Nigredo Ritual that opened the night was the real deal. Exciting times ahead I think.

Last night i went to see the Green Rock River Band  at the south bank centre

then went on a nice Friday night dinner date with Eve afterwards 🙂

Permanently Moved

Episode 28 – General Ludd

Thinking about the Luddites this week, what are the wide frames of today? which bits of the stack need a visit at midnight?

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Dipping the stacks

Dystopias Now

The Ministry

Nanowrimo began…. I’m typing

Went for dinner with someone from tactical tech it was super interesting.

Reading

I finished RED MOON . I have thoughts on it.

Music

I’ve been listening to A LOT of Australian neoclassical ambient doom duo Divide and Dissolve’s new album Abomination this week. Its awesome. Play it fucking loud.

Remember kids:

Always take selfies

The post Dystopias Now appeared first on thejaymo.net.