Month: February 2013

You can easily spot someone who wears his “weirdness” on his sleeve (often they‘re trying so hard at it that it has the opposite effect), yet a magician skilled in the antinomian stance doesn’t have to make. Antinomian practice is commonly associated with the concept of becoming “alien“ – something which again has romantic glamour. But becoming “alien“ is much more than a matter of dressing in strange clothes and saying “beep beep“ to people (or “Hail Shub-Niggurath,“ if you prefer). No, look again at the movies and horror stories. Often the most succesful aliens are the ones who blend into the crowd.

Phil Hine – The Pseudonomicon (via christopharianism)

Magic is often referred to in terms of being a path, a spiritual quest, a voyage of self-discovery, or an adventure. However you want to dress it you one point is clear, it is a means of bringing about Change. For this change to be effective, it is important that you be able to set the effects of your magical work within a context – to be able to make sense of them and integrate them into a dynamic interaction with a moving, fluid universe.

Phil Hine, Are You Illuminated?  (via nec-plus-ultra)

mirelurk-cakes:

Lamia by Herbert James (1909)

In ancient Greek mythology, Lamia was a beautiful queen of Libya who became a child-eating daemon. Aristophanes claimed her name derived from the Greek word for gullet (laimos), referring to her habit of devouring children.

In the myth, Lamia is a mistress of the god Zeus, causing Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, to kill all of Lamia’s children (except for Scylla, who is herself cursed) and transform her into a monster that hunts and devours the children of others. Another version has Hera merely stealing away all of Lamia’s children and it being Lamia herself, losing her mind from grief and despair, who starts stealing and devouring others’ children out of jealousy, the repeated monstrosity of which transforms her into a monster on its own.

Some accounts say she has a serpent’s tail below the waist. This popular description of her is largely due to Lamia, a poem by John Keats published in 1819. Antoninus Liberalis uses Lamia as an alternate name for the serpentine drakaina Sybaris; however, Diodorus Siculus describes her as having nothing more than a distorted face.

Later traditions referred to many lamiae; these were folkloric monsters similar to vampires and succubi that seduced young men and then fed on their blood.

In later stories, Lamia was cursed with the inability to close her eyes so that she would always obsess over the image of her dead children. Some accounts say Hera forced Lamia to devour her own children. Myths variously describe Lamia’s monstrous (occasionally serpentine) appearance as a result of either Hera’s wrath, the pain of grief, the madness that drove her to murder, or – in some rare versions – a natural result of being Hecate’s daughter.

Zeus then gave her the ability to remove her eyes. The purpose of this ability is unclear in Diodorus, but other versions state Lamia’s ability to remove her eyes came with the gift of prophecy. Zeus did this to appease Lamia in her grief over the loss of her children and to let her rest since she could not close her eyes

Source: X

In Soviet times, the Ministry of Defense was working on a secret project aimed at creating a superhuman with paranormal abilities. Under this project, a group of scientists managed to get in touch with a foreign civilization. The head of this top-secret project shared some details with reporters for the first time.

On a regular winter day in Moscow, in the comfort a room with a fireplace, journalists were given a real sensation. A senior retired official of the Ministry of Defense, lieutenant-general in reserve, PhD, a fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences Alexey Savin said that in the late 1980’s a group of researchers from the Expert Management Unit of General Staff managed to make a contact with representatives of another civilization
‘We can say that we learned to summon UFOs in Vladimirovka. To do this, we dramatically increased the number of military flights and movement of the equipment. If the intensity on our side increased, UFOs appeared with the probability of 100 percent,’ explained Yeremenko. After six months of tests the authoritative commission came to three main conclusions.
Over two hundred highly skilled professionals from across the country participated in the program.

‘In the process of research, we came to the conclusion that a human was an energy and information system that receives information from outside. This is precisely why a human can manifest paranormal abilities,’ said Alexey Savin. In order to identify this external source of information, three groups were created. One group was formed from scientists, another – from military, and the third one was composed of women.

The experimental results were impressive: six participants were given a chance of physical contact, and two of them even managed to visit an alien ship. According to Savin, representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations revealed themselves gradually, giving away the information as they saw fit.

X-files of Soviet Defense Ministry Exposed (via gnowing)