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.

Hey! Good news! We may have an extra year!

That’s right, the civilization as we know it won’t end until 2013. Breath that sigh of relief.

NASA predicts that the sun will wake up “from a deep slumber” which will create massive solar storms which will disrupt communication devices and electronics causing major problems around the world.

This could seriously impact my vacation plans on Titan.

• Circle Sanctuary Nature Preserve has created Circle Cemetery, which is “America’s first National Pagan natural burial ground and contemporary Green cemetery to be platted and recorded in Wisconsin”, reports Jason Pitzl-Waters on The Wild Hunt. This is something we talked a bit about at the Toronto Pagan Conference a few years ago. I’m glad to see a dedicated space for Pagan burials.
  

• In a recent feature on Reality Sandwich Patrick Harpur reprints “Soul an Daimon“, an excerpt from his book A Complete Guide to the Soul. Angles, personal daemons, ka, muse – a variety of whats and whyfores regarding the soul and its function. Neat stuff.

• Nick Spencer at Guardian.co.uk writes that Richard Dawkins would like to set up an atheist free-thinking school. Somewhat ironically, Spencer seems to have his doubts about the viability of such an institution.

• Jason Miller, in his blog Strategic Sorcery, describes “How to make a Psionic Wand from a Toy Sonic Screwdriver“. Cool. Doctor Who fans take note.

On a more personal note, thanks for your patience these past few weeks. Things have been hectic as I recently resigned from my job and there were a lot of things to wrap up before my departure. But as of today I am officially a free agent, and a more regular posting schedule will resume.

I’ll keep you up to day on my progress when I have news that relates to occultural subjects. At the moment one of my projects is a book on tarot which has been in progress for a few years. It’ll be nice to finally be able to devote full time hours to finishing this up.

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.

I’m writing this a few days before I leave for Paris, so I’m going to assume that I’m happily sitting in a cafe somewhere sipping  cafe sans lait, eating a croissant and conversing with the locals in perfect Ontarian franglais.

C’est magnifique, I’m sure.

Next vacation spot: Titan? Right now its surface has the texture of creme brulee, but give it time.

I’ve prepared this Signal especially for your clicking pleasure. Just you. Enjoy.

• Ryan Hurd offers an excerpt from his eBook on Reality Sandwich with “Sleep Paralysis Visions: Demons, Succubi, and the Archetypal Mind“. I suffer from this more often than I like, and it’s always frightening as hell when it occurs. Hurd discusses a variety of commonly experienced apparitions and the theories surrounding them.

• Duncan writes “God Does Not Exist: Some Thoughts on Anselm’s Ontological Proof ” on Open Enlightenment. Weird (a)theistic mindplays to “prove” non-existence. Kind of. (Atheism’s so much more straightforward.)

• Klint Findley‘s been hard at work at Technoccult creating groovy dossiers on leading contemporary occultural figures. So far he’s done Hakim Bey, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, William S Burroughs, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Timothy Leary, Dennis and Terrence McKenna, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Robert Anton Wilson. There may be more by now, but I haven’t found a page yet where they’re all collected to link to. It’s a neat resource.

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!

Be a Happy Panda.

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

The first week of the Esoteric Book Club has had mixed results. We’ve started the first and second exercises, but participation hasn’t been as high as was suggested by the book club’s launch.

There’s still lots of time to join in. All forums will remain open indefinitely, and when a topic is replied to it shoots to the top, so we’ll see it and respond. So, if you’ve been thinking about it, but haven’t dived in yet for whatever reason, please do join us!

• Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Terry Rey and Leslie Desmangles let us know “It’s Vodou, not ‘voodoo’” in the Chicago Tribune. (Via The Wild Hunt.)

• In Mary K. Greer’s Tarot Blog she discusses the “Oldest Cartomancy Meanings in English“- and apparently they predate Etteilla! It details meanings for a “regular” playing deck of Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds and Spades.

• Frater Barrabbas asks “Whence Cometh the Demons?” in his blog Talking About Ritual Magick. Judeo-Christian mythology have their guess, so do the ancient Greeks.

• Mike Jay‘s essay about “The Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy” is worth a read on Reality Sandwich.

Found something 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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