By Psyche | January 29, 2008
We all know women have made great strides toward gender equality in the past hundred years, yet it seems men have barely inched along.
Men continue to be abused in pop culture, and indeed, the male image may be subject to further degradation and oppression now than at any point in the last hundred years. How does this affect men’s psyches and general self-perception? Continue reading »
Popularity: 20%
By Psyche | January 28, 2008
Winner of the Miss Canada Plus Pageant last year, Stephanie Conover was recently invited to judge for the Miss Toronto Tourism pageant happening on Februrary 2nd.
“I said I’d definitely be there,” Conover told the Star yesterday.
“Then, last week, on Monday, they asked me for a biography. I told them everything I do, how I’m an entertainer and a singer and a dancer. I talked about my charity work and I said I also have hobbies, including songwriting, knitting, painting, yoga, reiki and tarot cards.”
That’s where things got sticky.
“We just got her bio a week ago and we don’t agree with it,” said Karen Murray, Miss Toronto Tourism pageant director. “We want someone down to earth, not someone into the dark side or the occult.”
The Toronto Star, “Beauty queen rejected as a pageant judge“
On January 24th Conover received an outrageously offencive letter, stating “We need a judge who has an upright reputation and we would be proud to introduce to the audience” and “Our board of directors has eliminated her as a judge as tarot card reading and reiki are the occult and is not acceptable by God, Jews, Muslims or Christians. Tarot card reading is witchcraft and is used by witches, spiritists and mediums to consult the dark world.” Continue reading »
Popularity: 4%
By Psyche | January 26, 2008
The PolyOccult University is a new (and free!) online occult school spearheaded by Veleda of Temple of All Gods and assorted associates.
“The Esoteric in Pop Culture” is the first course the POU will be offering:
…[T]hat which is hidden is found equally within all things, there is nothing that is outside the realm of the esoteric – even popular manifestations of everyday culture. From Buffy to the Beatles, the Foolish People to comic books and beyond, the depths constantly interweave with the surfaces.
From the PolyOccult University’s course listing
It’s a four week course, each week representing an element and pop cultural medium as follows: Continue reading »
Popularity: 2%
By Psyche | January 25, 2008
Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen is a chaos magickian best known for his encyclopedic website Chaos Matrix and the creation Fotamecus, a sigil which evolved into a godform which manipulates the experience of time.
This interview was conducted on August 16th, 2006 for issue 4 of RazorSmile, a print-based chaos magick magazine. This is the third and final piece of a three part interview.
Start with [cref 75], and follow with [cref 76] to conclude with this third and final part of the interview.
P: Were you concerned when you realized Fotamecus had transitioned from a viral servitor to an egregore in such a short period of (linear) time?
FKR: Concerned? Not really, I think I was too fascinated with it. There wasn’t any reason to be afraid. The whole process was endlessly fascinating; all we were trying to do was to see how far we could push the little sigil we’d started out with.
P: It was fairly unprecedented
FKR: It’s been modeled since, though. A few folks have used the same methods to over-empower a sigil to servitorhood and then push it the same way to egregorehood.
It works remarkably well for generating a purposeful group gestalt for things like intentional communities. Starting with sigils that represent the goals of the community, you overcharge, get servitors who act as guides you should listen to, and then eventually become overcharged to egregorehood where they steer the energies/fates/whatevers that surround the group. Those are somewhat limited in scope, though, and not likely to pass to godform. Continue reading »
Popularity: 3%
By Psyche | January 24, 2008
Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen is a chaos magickian best known for his encyclopedic website Chaos Matrix and the creation Fotamecus, a sigil which evolved into a godform which manipulates the experience of time.
This interview was conducted on August 16th, 2006 for issue 4 of RazorSmile, a print-based chaos magick magazine. This is the second of a three part interview.
Start with [cref 75].
P: When Fotamecus first began to spread, where did it go?
FKR: To whoever used it, which were mostly the folks we spoke to via the Internet. Primarily through the z-list of the Z(Cluster) and essays written for Chaos Matrix. Within a year we had at least 200 known individual magicians around the globe using him on a regular basis. As a servitor he fulfilled a useful niche, just about everyone can use expanded and compressed time.
The idea with the network was that whenever you needed expansion and someone else needed compression – even if you were two isolated mages on opposite sides of the globe – the Fotamecus network would pass the balance off.
The idea behind a viral servitor is that it’s a servitor that can spawn copies of itself. Now they can either go their separate ways, or you can tie them together somehow; picture each one becoming a cell in a much larger body, connected by magickal links that form a sort of network. Continue reading »
Popularity: unranked
