In some weird alternate fantasy universe, this song would to taught to school children so that they could memorize their Hermetic fundamentals.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

As a magician and sleight-of-hand artist, I've been wrestling with the thorny and slippery notion of Art for a long time. A recent "magical project" rekindled my attention about this ongoing quest. Here follow my latest musings on this domain.

What is Art? Art can be seen as the lifeblood running through the veins of human history. From prelinguistic cave dweller to postmodern city dweller, art stands as a witness to the evolution of every culture, reflecting and participating in our views of reality, consciousness, and the cosmos. Art existed long before the word "art" itself existed; for most of history there were no museums, no galleries, no concert halls, and no special class of people to be known as "artists." As human societies developed and evolved, so did the category of art -- which now includes a boundless constellation of forms, languages, media, materials, technologies, and aesthetic theories. As a result, the contemporary discourse on art is a fascinating and intricate spectacle. Many players -- creators, critics, curators, merchants, collectors -- interact within a matrix of sociological, cultural, political, and economic forces. The interplay of unpredictable factors generates the perceived value of artists, as well as the price of their work, and ultimately what ends up being labelled as art. The art industry produces an unstoppable stream of innovative ideas and artifacts, never-seen-before contaminations, and all sorts of category-defying "artwork." On the inevitable flip side are all kinds of aberrant deviations and plainly Barnumesque stunts. Today, everyone is welcome to decide for themselves what is what, and consume any piece of the cake of their liking. Read the rest

With The Watchmen now on teevee, I hope that many more people will dive into the magickal brilliance of Alan Moore who co-created the original comic in 1987 along with other seminal works like V for Vendetta and Batman: The Killing Joke. Over at the Daily Grail, Greg points us to a fantastic web video series of 5-minute mind grenades with Moore. Below are two of my favorite segments in the 8-part series, titled "Inside Alan Moore's Head." You can also view them on YouTube.

image: Fimb (CC BY 2.0) Read the rest

For sale: Boleskine House, occultist Aleister Crowley's infamous digs on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland that Jimmy Page later owned. The Georgian home, sitting on 9.3 hectares (22.9 acres), burned in 2015 but the exterior walls remain. The real estate agent is open to bids over £200,000.

According to the sales materials, "The opportunity now exists to restore the house and grounds to create an outstanding property subject to obtaining the necessary consents."

Consents? I say, remodel as thou wilt.

Here is the listing.

Read the rest

Last year, Benjamin Mackey designed an inspired collection of digital Twin Peaks Tarot cards. Now, Mackey is making the deck real through an Indiegogo campaign! From the project description:

The Magician Longs to See Tarot is a complete 78-card deck with 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana in full color. The deck combines the mystical world of Twin Peaks with visual evocations of Pamela Colman Smith's iconic tarot illustrations. The Major Arcana have manifested as some of the primary movers and shakers in Twin Peaks, while the Minor Arcana tend towards depicting infamous scenes and moments in the series. My goal is to strike a delicate balance between accurately representing the respective characters while still maintaining readability as a deck.

"The Magician Longs to See Tarot" (via Daily Grail)

Read the rest

Bowing to intense pressure from elves and the people who believe in them, the government of Iceland will unearth a purportedly magical “Elfin Lady Stone” buried by highway workers by mistake. The inadvertent burial of their sacred site seriously pissed off the mythical creatures, according to reports. Read the rest

At the Daily Grail, Greg Taylor posted a fascinating essay about the Pokemon Go experience seen through the lens of medieval occult practices in which "incorporeal entities have sometimes been as much a part of the landscape as the everyday physical objects surrounding us that we can touch and see." As Gregory Benford once said, riffing on Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." From the Daily Grail:

The modern, scientific view has these entities as products of the imagination; our pattern-seeking minds combining with our evolutionary survival instincts and desire to feel in control, to create phantoms out of nothing. The 'other world' does not exist; its imaginary denizens therefore cannot invade our own world and affect us, as they don't exist in the first place.

How ironic, then, that the modern scientific world has now created its own 'other world' - the world of computer-generated, virtual realities - and the creatures that populate any of those worlds can now manifest within our own plane through augmented/mixed reality. For those with phones to see...

This month, the infernal gates to this other world were thrown open. Within a week of its release, the game Pokémon Go amassed a similar number of active users to that of Twitter - with all those players running about their neighbourhoods, seeking the incorporeal monsters now inhabiting our environment, that can only be seen through a special, magical scrying device.

"Walkers Between Worlds" (Daily Grail) Read the rest

Pam "Phantasmaphile" Grossman and artist Jesse Bransford have organized The Occult Humanities Conference taking place October 18-20, 2013 at New York University. Focused on the intersection of art and the occult, the lineup features some of my favorite writers on esoteric matters and high weirdness including Mark Pilkington, Mitch Horowitz, Gary Lachman, and dozens more. I hope some of these presentation are documented for posterity online! Read the rest

After consulting with a warlock, police in Dorset have concluded that the mysterious plaits (braids) that have been appearing in horse's manes are part of "knot magick" rituals. As many as 12 horses have been braided.

PC Tim Poole, who has investigated the incidents, said: "We have some very good information from a warlock that this is part of a white magic ritual and is to do with knot magick."

"It would appear that for people of this belief, knot magick is used when they want to cast a spell. Some of the gods they worship have a strong connection to horses so if they have a particular request, plaiting this knot in a horse's mane lends strength to the request. This warlock said it is a benign activity, albeit maybe a bit distressing for the horse owner."

Animal magic as warlock reveals mystery behind plaits found in horses' manes

(Image: Rarity's (Styling Pony) Braids, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from dreamcicle19772006 's photostream)