Saturday Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

i09 is a fun blog – their tagline is “We come from the future”, which seems to mean they’ll cover anything science, sci-fi, and other geek stuff of that ilk.

A recent post titled “Jupiter became king of the planets by devouring a ‘Super Earth’” caught my eye because, well, it’s a great title, and it seems the planets’ names were more appropriate than the ancients may have realized:

New discoveries suggest Jupiter and Saturn learned a lesson from their mythological namesakes, “eating” any planet that opposed them.

For more on this check their source, NewScientist.

More cool news? Check out “Neptune will soon complete its first orbit around the sun since its discovery in 1846“. And by “soon” they mean yesterday. They come from the future, but Pluto’s far, it takes time for news to reach us. Forget it. Happy (Earth) birthday, Neptune!

With that, here’s your occultural linkage for this week.

• Jack Faust has a new blog, still called Dionysian Atavism but now located on its own shiny domain at eldritchinfluence.net. He writes well and with a depth and breadth that’s unusual in occultural blogging. See “The Tradition of Secrecy” for a recent gem.

• Christina‘s piece on Enfolding.org titled “Letter to a Young Gay Man on Celebrating Beltane” is excellent. She writes, “Maybe you, like me, have no call to create an internal heterosexual nuclear family with wedding bells, bride and groom” and then sets the record straight: “Beltane is and was the joy of desire of the body fulfilled in sex.” Hear, hear.

• Ryan Hurd writes about “Lucid Dreaming as Shamanic Consciousness” for Reality Sandwich. Using films such as Avatar and Inception as a launching point, he discusses our desire to become “Conquistadors of Consciousness”, and what that looks like in different cultures, on drugs, and what it all means.

• Johnny Rapture suggests a re-purposing of public space in “Public Statues, Pagan Shrines“, on his blog The Great Tininess offering specific suggestions with some great pictures. Sounds like an excellent idea.

• Mark Vernon, on the Guardian.co.uk, discusses the new etchings on display at Tate Britain in “William Blake’s picture of God“. A fascinating portrait of Blake’s thoughts on gods and religion.

As always, if you come across anything nifty, please share it in the comments, or if you use delicious tag it “plutonica” and we’ll take a look. Thanks!

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Saturday Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

Today was Pagan Pride Day at the Pagan Harvest Festival in Hamilton, Ontario.  I was set to leave Toronto at 7 am, but I had a heck of a time getting there due to a “trespasser” on the train tracks which turned into a “fatality” according to intermittent updates from conflicting sources.  Instead of arriving before the festival began, I got there five minutes before my workshop was set to start at 11.  Continue reading »

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