Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from you own mind and thus understand all things?
~Tao Te Ching (via iheartloons)
Month: December 2011
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Jung (via rathangellloyd)
Vile as the atrocities on 9/11 were, one can easily imagine worse. Suppose that al-Qaeda had been supported by an awesome superpower intent on overthrowing the government of the United States. Suppose that the attack had succeeded: al-Qaeda had bombed the White House, killed the president, and installed a vicious military dictatorship, which killed some fifty thousand to one hundred thousand people, brutally tortured seven hundred thousand, set up a major center of terror and subversion that carried out assassinations throughout the world, and helped establish neo-Nazi “National Security States” elsewhere that tortured and murdered with abandon. Suppose further that the dictatorship brought in economic advisers—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who within a few years drove the economy to one of its worst disasters in U.S. history while their proud mentors collected Nobel Prizes and received other accolades. That would have been vastly more horrendous than 9/11.
And as everyone in Chile knows, it is not necessary to imagine, because it in fact did happen, right here: on “the first 9/11,” September 11, 1973. The only change above is to per capita equivalents, an appropriate measure. But the first 9/11 did not change history, for good reasons: the events were too normal.
Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (via melancholicbeauty)
Isis
According to the artist’s hieroglyphs, Isis is flanked by her son and her husband: At left, Harpocrates, ie Horus the Child; at right, Osiris-Re, the ram-headed composite god seen in the tomb of Nefertari. The picture is similar to paintings which represent the Coronation of the Virgin, with God and Christ both placing a crown on Mary.
Just Random Info: The Old Ones and the mysterious Brian Ward
Just Random Info: The Old Ones and the mysterious Brian Ward
pg 112
In 1978 a book by an English occultist named Peter James Carroll was published. That book wasLiber Null, the text that is widely considered to have given birth to Chaos Magic. It was followed in 1982 by the book Psychonaut. From 1987 onwards these two books were published in one volume ( Liber Null & Psychonaut), which is still an essential primer for anyone desiring to get to grips with the theory and practice of Chaos Magic.
pg 116
When I first read the book back in 1992 in my bedsit in Roath, I was struck by the illustrations by an artist named Brian Ward that appear in Psychonaut. They were said to be portraits ofLovecraft’s dreaded Old Ones, at least in the urban legends surrounding the book, of which there were already quite a few by the end of the 1980s (back in the days before online shopping).
pg 120
Certainly this correlation between Ward’s images and the Old Ones was re-enforced by the pseudo-esoteric comic strip Zenith where obvious imitations of Ward’s images were used to portray entities clearly derived from the preternatural deities of the Cthulhu mythos.
pg 124
And yet there is little actual evidence to confirm any relation between these images and the Old Ones, other than that some of them (particularly the illustration on page 168) bear an uncanny likeness to Cthulhu and his ilk.
pg 128
We don’t know for certain who they are are what their titles are, with the exception of the rather different illustration on page 172, which is clearly the Mithraic leontocephaline.
pg 146
Surprisingly – considering the cult status of Liber Null & Psychonaut – none of these images (with the exception of the leontocephaline on page 172) can be found online, or have been marketed at all outside of the covers of the book. I’m not sure how many fans of the book would buy them in the form of T-shirts, posters, models or cards, but I imagine quite a considerable few would.
pg 168 – Cthulhu?
Brian Ward – despite his obvious talent – does not appear to have any online presence at all. So, giving in to curiosity I decided to email the book’s author – Peter Carroll himself – and ask him to clarify who or what were the subjects of Ward’s illustrations. I didn’t expect a reply, but I got one anyway.
pg 172 – Mithraic leontocephaline
In his reply Peter explained that the identity of the images are unknown to him (“I selected them because I liked the look of them…It all remains a bit of a mystery……..”); that he hadn’t seen the artist in “decades”, and had originally met Brian Ward “only briefly” describing him as “a strangely secretive character”,
pg 178
Given the mystery surrounding the artist, I guess we can feel fortunate that Peter chose to employ these images in Psychonaut, as otherwise we would most probably never have encountered them at all. Who knows what other gems this otherwise unknown artist has produced? Just like the identities of these illustrations, we may never know.
pg 190
Sometimes, these thoughts overwhelm me
Today, the US war in Iraq has ended. After all is said and done, including increased spending on health care for vets, we will have spent over $1 trillion dollars. Think about how much better our world would be if we had that money to spend on jobs, and Saddam had to face the Arab Spring. Ask yourself who won the war on terror, us or al Qaeda?
