Category: [Religion & esoterica]

And then the hammer came down

I have seen many odd things on the Internet over the decades…

…but THIS is so fucking peculiar I can barely get my head around it. Spotted it on Tumblr this afternoon and was… perplexed. Indeed, I thought it had to be some rather esoteric joke or something; the idea that a spoken word album of the fucking Malleus Maleficarum read by Francis Urquhart is something that a record label—even a spoken-word specialist label like Caedmon which contained some very curious items in its catalogue like the Marcel Marceau album (no, really)—thought there was a market for just strikes me as impossibly unlikely. Surely this was an exceeding abstract joke…

…OH.

No, Caedmon actually produced this baffling object in the 1970s. And, as further proof of its existence…

…here it is on Youtube. Have not listened yet, but I’m weirdly excited to…

This is my beloved Rusty

Russell Brand’s career has gone through some interesting changes over the years, and this is the latest one:

…Cosplaying John the Baptist in his daks. Brand’s high-profile Christian turn has been regarded mostly, and understandably, with suspicion; having been hit with a raft of sexual abuse allegations about a year ago, his big and extremely public adoption of Jesusness (read Matthew 6:5 lately, Russ?) looks like some sort of attempt to deflect from those or something. No one is seriously buying it, and nor should they, although I am interested to discover that it’s not actually a new interest as such; this is him talking about it in 2017:

After an intervention orchestrated by his agent, Brand embraced recovery—not just as a means of getting clean, but as a way of seeing the world. The experience radically changed him, and he’s since become an advocate for what’s known as the 12-step program, an addiction recovery method based largely on Christian principles that is centered on a reliance on a higher power, self-reflection and forgiveness.
The program transformed Brand’s life. And in the years since he discovered it, Brand began to see everything through the lens of the 12 steps. […]
Brand realized that cultivating a spiritual life could help free himself from the strongholds of addictions by treating the root causes of the pain he’d attempted to dull with drugs. And being raised in the U.K.—a traditionally Christian country—he turned to the Christianity. He began implementing spiritual practices every day.
“Because I come from a Christian culture, a lot of the language of prayer that I use is Christian,” he explains. “I say the Lord’s Prayer every day. I try to connect to what those words mean. I connect to what the Father means. I connect to what wholeness means to me. I think about the relationship between forgiveness and being forgiven and the impossibility of redemption until you are willing to forgive and let go.”

This was quite a change for someone who’d been such an advocate of Hare Krishna Consciousness and Transcendental Meditation, and I’m now inclined to think Rusty may actually be perfectly sincere in his beliefs… it’s just the aggressive flaunting of them now, and the fact that he’s only “officially” declared himself a Christian as of a few months ago (when he was baptised by Bear Grylls of all people), that’s suspicious. And the spectacle offered in the photo of him and some other dude baptising a third dude who appears to be fully dressed in what looks like a Starfleet uniform (?)… well, seeing Brand in his undergarments like that is kind of troubling by itself, but the whole thing has more than a whiff of desperation to it. He didn’t need a camera on hand to record that show. I just wonder how far this grift will extend now. Still, hopefully the people in the boat in the second picture enjoyed the performance…

Good thing he didn’t paint him as Palestinian

Artwork featuring Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters removed by Sydney council after threats of violence

A Sydney council has removed a “playful” artwork of Jesus Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters after a torrent of online abuse.
Sydney artist Philjames’ work, Jesus Speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem, was removed from the Blake Art Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre after fierce criticism was directed at the artist and gallery on Friday, just two days before the eight-week exhibition ended.
The biennial prize at the Liverpool city council gallery recognises contemporary artwork that explore spirituality and religion and draws artists from all beliefs and cultural backgrounds.
But a last-minute online protest claimed the 2023 oil-on-lithograph work mocked the Christian religion, with some protesters threatening the museum and its staff – many of whom are volunteers – with violence.
Philjames said he received about 200 “vile” social media messages on Friday and Saturday, with the gallery receiving over 60 phone calls from protesters on Friday alone.
“I do like stirring a bit of a reaction with my work, but the novelty very quickly wore off on Friday. The level of vitriol and the sheer volume of it was actually frightening,” the 48-year-old said.
“I’ve been doing these sorts of works for around 15 years and I’ve had one or two people upset but nothing like this. It was vile and not at all Christian.”

Actually there’s nothing more Christian than getting worked up about this sort of thing, they’ve had centuries of practice at it. And having got worked up about it, it’s a short step to threatening (or just taking) action against whatever they’re worked up about; recent American history should show us how increasingly short that step is becoming.

Now this thing has been on the artist’s Instagram since last year and it’s been exhibited too; apparently entering it into an art competition I wouldn’t have thought was that popular made all the difference eventually, cos it was on show from May and yet it’s evidently only just been whined about. So ‘twould appear there’s been a concerted effort by someone, I wonder who…

Charlie Bakhos, the founder of conservative Catholic group, Christian Lives Matter, told supporters on social media that the “shocking disrespectful art” had been removed.
“This is another attack on Christianity we have managed to put a stop to thanks to everyone’s support. Let’s keep defending our faith respectfully and we will get results as Jesus is on our side.”

Oh, THOSE cunts. How surprising to find them apparently involved.

Anyway, as I often say in these instances, if you find your faith under attack from bullshit like this thing, your faith isn’t worth piss. Cos, frankly, neither is this art; it’s just a co-opting of some other religious painting and slapping a few cartoon faces on it (are they even “Looney Tunes” characters as such?) and… to no point that I can see. James has another picture of Jesus leading some children but he’s added the “born to kill” helmet from Full Metal Jacket and stuck it on Jesus’ head. THAT actually makes some kind of point which this thing doesn’t, it’s just vacuous. And James actually says as much himself, he reckons it was just a bit of absurd fun. So probably as little point in me getting worked up about it as Charlie Bakhos and Ned Mannoun? I don’t know. But I think I find this picture I found on Tumblr of the Last Supper painted on a saltine cracker more valuable as art:

What’s in the box?

Spotted this on Tumblr recently (part of that reading up on esoterica I mentioned the other day), the TOPY manual of “television magick”. Never actually read it, but this did remind me that I read something once about how one of TOPY’s “television as a magical tool” things was to use a TV set as a scrying tool, by tuning it off channel and watching the static to see what appeared in it. I forget if this was preceded by consumption of mind-altering substances or not. I’ve often wondered how this would work in the modern digital TV age when there isn’t any more TV static as such, maybe a bit of glitching but that’s all since analogue transmission was shut down, at least as far as I know. Then again, some of the people on this forum reckon any surface will do, so I presume even a TV switched off entirely is also good… and I’m sure those folks would know, they’re posting on a forum run by a noted “black magician” who isn’t at all a piece of shit who inspired a teenager to kill people with a text written for a frankly Nazi occult organisation. Those are people whose opinions you can probably trust…

Christian Pseudoscience

I saw this posted online to mark the hundredth anniversary of this very peculiar case:

Yes, A.G., we all like to think nothing bad can possibly happen to us ever, but that doesn’t happen in reality, and much as you may have begrudged that $50 (worth about $870 now) fine, you’d have been in a lot more trouble if the building had burned down and people died cos they didn’t know how to get out of it. Fucking idiot. I’m only surprised we don’t see this sort of “safety regulations are against my religion” nonsense more often…

Something curious

I’ve been doing a wee bit of research on chaos magick and other things esoteric lately, cos for whatever reason that’s the way my useless brain seems to be turning at the moment, although when I say “research” I mostly mean these two videos:

These come from a channel called What Magic is This?, and they have a bunch of other interesting-looking stuff (I also quite liked their video on William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin).

Anyway, midnight last night rolls around after watching the second video, and there’s me doing the latest Wordle… and the word of the day is, well, “chaos”.

I’d like to apologise to anyone who hasn’t played today’s games, but tough, I’m not going to. Anyway, that was… odd, to say the least. It’s not necessarily the oddest thing like this to happen to me; I used to call these “synchroincidences” cos they struck me as falling between those two stools, in that maybe they were meaningful (which, as I’ve always understood it, is what separates synchronicity from just coincidence) or maybe they were just shit happening. Who could tell which was which? It was when they started piling up that things really got weird, but that’s another story. This story is odd enough as it is. If I were inclined to think in terms of omens, I might consider this one… albeit an omen of what exactly, I don’t know…

Satan’s what now?

I am not a Biblical scholar or theologian, but I do know there’s more than one set of Ten Commandments in the Bible and there’s some debate over which of them is the “proper” one. But most people evidently agree that there are, in any event, ten of them… as opposed to this chud who seems to think there’s only nine:

A former Park Rapids School Board member wants to display the 10 Commandments on school property, carved in stone.
Dennis Dodge’s 32 years on the school board ended in 2022. On Monday, May 20, Dodge presented a monument that he proposes to donate to the school district, to place on school grounds in Sept. 2025, after the landscaping is completed for the school improvements currently under construction.
Concept drawings of the stone monument, to be constructed by Dakota Monument Co. of Fargo, N.D., show a display of the 10 Commandments on one side and the words, “We must put God back into our educational system before we lose our children and this great nation,” and text crediting the donation to Dodge and the Dodge Legacy Group. […]
In his presentation, Dodge argued that current society is in a war between good and evil, and “Satan seems to be winning because we are allowing him to,” by allowing God to be pushed out of government, churches, homes and schools.
“Our society has lost its moral compass, its values and its respect for each other,” he said, adding that “if we can save even one child from Satan’s grapes, it is worth every cent we spend on this donation, because God’s children are priceless.”

Let’s not worry too much about what the fuck “Satan’s grapes” are supposed to be (I found this via Friendly Atheist on YT, where one of his commenters suggested the article’s author somehow misunderstood the words “Satan’s grasp”, which does make sense… but what if he did mean grapes?), and look instead at the proposal art:

You may notice that the one about not bearing false witness (or, depending on what version of the Big Ten you accept, the one about worshipping false idols) is conspicuous by its absence. Now, I’m going to be charitable and assume that our Dennis is just remarkably stupid; I mean, the idea itself and his insistence that it won’t actually break the laws prohibiting this sort of thing are foolish enough, but putting only nine commandments in a “Ten Commandments” monument is special. I am going to assume, though, that it was an honest mistake that will be corrected on the finished work if it goes ahead, cos if it was deliberate then it’s about as perplexing as Satan’s “grapes”… what does it say about Dennis’ theology that—again, depending on which version you use—he either refuses to not worship false idols or to not bear false witness; at least one of those things is an unacceptable command for him… and I feel like he would otherwise be one of those Christians who would insist on others obeying all the rules in the book…

Oh not again

ANOTHER fucking Rapture? How did I miss that this one was coming? Still, at least I know to expect the bearded fellow’s assumption of the throne in July; I’m sure that’ll be a BIG and PUBLIC event that will be EVIDENT to EVERYONE, so that it’ll be OBVIOUS when it happens and not an EMBARRASSMENT if it were to, you know, not happen…

The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism

Book #9 for 2024. John Coulthart’s been revisiting surrealism somewhat on his blog in recent weeks, which has in turn kind of led me to investigate it a bit further myself, which I’ve never really done much before. This may or may not have been a good book with which to start building on my existing knowledge. I’ll quote the “about the author” page first:

Patrick Lepetit has written several books in French on esoteric traditions and surrealism. He is a member of the Grand Orient de France and of the Mélusine Network of scholars interested in surrealism. He lives in Mons en Baroeul, France.

I must say the book does give me the impression that Lepetit has spent years immersed in his subject and that it’s a real labout of love from someone who Knows His Stuff (capitals used advisedly). Being French, Lepetit obviously has access to vast numbers of French-language resources of which probably hardly any (apart from a couple of bigger titles like Seligmann’s Mirror of Magic or Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvellous, both of which I’ve got and should finally get around to reading now) has ever been available in English, which does make it a useful resource for the non-Francophone.

And therein, somewhat, lies the problem with the book. Lepetit just throws so fucking much information at you, with quotes from the surrealists themselves (particularly Andre Breton, obviously), fellow travellers like the Grand Jeu mob, critics and commentators and whoever else he can cite. The book opens by observing the surrealists’ fairly unbridled loathing for conventional religion, then spends most of the rest of the book going into their fascination with decidedly non-conventional stuff before ending by asking just how seriously they actually took this sort of thing. I’m not sure how well he answers that question really, but it is intriguing to see just how deep the hole goes. (I for one had no idea Arthuriana was something the surrealists were into. H.P. Lovecraft puts in an appearance, too, cos the surrealists had a long-standing fondness for him. I don’t think he reciprocated it, though. And even Colin Wilson gets a look in, and I think he would’ve been even less sympathetic…)

So there’s a lot of information in this book… and, as I say, that’s part of its problem, there’s just so much of it and Lepetit also seems to assume a lot of prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Like I said, he has access to a lot of material by people who are for the most part probably best known outside of France by specialists, insofar as they’re known at all, and one of the things Lepetit seems to assume is that you do in fact know who they are. I don’t blame him for this; he’s clearly writing for a French readership that presumably knows these people a lot better, and I don’t suppose he was expecting the book to go any further than that.

It’s just some of the other stuff he assumes you already know, particularly the visual art he describes; the book has some illustrations but nowhere near as much as it needs (I would particularly have liked some pictures of Victor Brauner’s work, which Lepetit writes about at some length). And there’s smaller things like glancing allusions to Breton’s “Great Transparents” that Lepetit never elucidates, and which would’ve baffled me had John Coulthart, again, not posted about them a few months ago. Lepetit’s presentation of all this business is, of course, the other part of the book’s problem; he has a rather thick writing style, full of subordinate clauses and other things that make his text a lot more convoluted than it needed to be. I don’t know if that’s an issue with Lepetit or his translator, but it’s an issue in any case, and the longer I persisted with the book the more of an issue it became.

So, awfully interesting subject matter kind of hindered by how it’s actually transmitted, which is a bit of a shame, though if you’re interested in the subject it’s still worth reading. Just not as a beginner’s book or anything like that. It’s got me interested in reading more on the subject, anyway.