Michael, Author at Technoccult

AuthorMichael

Return to Normalcy?

Well, it’s May 31st, which means that Klint is due back from Europe tomorrow. I’d just like to express my appreciation for him letting myself and Wes take control for the past two months. It’s been an excellent experience that has made me more blog-savvvvvvvvy (wanted to make sure I put enough v’s in there).

In addition to Klint, I’d like to thank Wes for a great deal of valuable input, and for having excellent timing when it came to posting during days when I was having blogger’s block.

I’d also like to thank my boss at my real job, for never being in the office to monitor my work productivity. Without his absence, I would have scarcely found enough time.

John Dee and the Book of Soyga

May 17, 2004 / Michael

The Book of Soyga is a medieval or early modern magical treatise, a copy of which is known to have been owned and (to some extent) studied by the mathematician and magician John Dee (1527 – 1608). The book itself was, to the frustration of generations of Dee scholars, not to be found. Quite recently, however, D. Harkness found copies in the Bodleian Library and in the British Library, filed under its alternate title, Aldaraia.

Read Jim Reed’s full essay

(via Obscurantist).

TripZine

May 14, 2004 / Michael

Trip Magazine seems to have run its course in the print environment:

There are just a few more of issue 10 left, the VERY LAST issue of Trip Magazine! Order your signed collector’s copy today! Featuring Afro Celts, The Bad Shaman, Drug Geeks, Erik Davis, and more!

There have actually been some pretty enlightening articles posted on the web site, including a first person account of tryptamine hallucinations, so you might want to check it out.

Sued Over Anti-Witchcraft Bias

May 11, 2004 / Michael

A transexual Wiccan woman has decided to test out Victoria’s religious tolerance legislation and is suing the local mayor who ran a vendetta against her on local radio.

The Pagan Awareness Network is also suing, and Attorney-General Rob Hulls is on their side. Encouraging them to file their complaint, he wrote: We govern for all Victorians – and that includes witches, magicians and sorcerers. So maybe the Courier-Mail ought to have been a little bit more careful when they described Olivia Watts as a black magic woman?

Full Story: Pagan Prattle: He knows so much about these things

Metaprogramming

May 6, 2004 / Michael

Most of us will live our lives without much consideration of these ideas, content to exist as semi-automatons, acting & reacting based on genetics and imprints and the accumulated experiences of our lives without ever questioning these habitual responses to our world. In spite of the brain’s ongoing updates, the perceptions and beliefs of most people will change little after about 30 years of age, barring some sudden traumatic or visionary experience which disrupts their ingrained view of things enough to allow the brain to rewire a new way of seeing the world. Yet the hardware of the brain and the software of the mind is open source. We can each become mind programmers – metaprogrammers – actively rewiring our beliefs and associations towards whatever goal we may have. This is no new revelation and there are many techniques, both modern and archaic, for breaking the mold of belief and mapping novel associations in the brain.

Future Hi: The Self as Metaprogrammer posted by Chris over at LVX23 for Future-Hi.

New Orleans Voodoo Crossroads

May 4, 2004 / Michael

A very professionally constructed commercial Voodoo site:

From the Old French Market to St Louis Cathedral to Congo Square, discover the way it was among the Creoles, the Quadroons, the Planters and the Privateers, the Voodoo Queens of the past and meet the Voodoos of today!

“New Orleans Voodoo Crossroads was founded in 1991 as a vehicle for the dissemination of true and accurate information about the beliefs and practices of the Voodoo religion in New Orleans. We offer the finest products and services in the Tradition of New Orleans Voodoo.

ADHD: a Farce

May 4, 2004 / Michael

Looks like some physicians are finally seeing the light on the whole ADD/ADHD excuse that runs rampant in our society:

Retired California neurologist Fred A. Baughman Jr. fired off a letter in January 2000 to U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in response to Satcher’s Report on Mental Illness. ‘Having gone to medical school,’ Baughman wrote, ‘and studied pathology – disease, then diagnosis – you and I and all physicians know that the presence of any bona fide disease, like diabetes, cancer or epilepsy, is confirmed by an objective finding – a physical or chemical abnormality. No demonstrable physical or chemical abnormality: no disease!”

“It is this direct, no-nonsense style that has made Baughman a pariah among the psychiatric and mental-health communities and a hero to families of children across America who believe they have been ‘victimized’ by the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) label. The ‘disease,’ Baughman tells Insight, ‘is a total 100 percent fraud,’ and he has made it his personal ‘crusade’ to bring an end to the ADHD diagnosis.

Full Story: Insight Mag

(via Invisible College).

Coffins w/ Panic Buttons

May 1, 2004 / Michael

A cemetery in Santiago, Chile is offering its clients coffins with a sensor that detects any movement inside them after they have been buried.”

“According to the Camino a Canaan cemetery the sensor attached to the coffin is to avoid anyone being buried alive.

What kind of lack of confidence in the medical system is required to motivate someone to put panic buttons in coffins?

Full Story: Ananova Quirkies: Cemetery offers coffin with panic button

Synchronicity

April 29, 2004 / Michael

Synchronicity’s a word the seminal psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined to refer to a seemingly occult phenomenon he had noticed anecdotally: two apparently disconnected but at minimum thematically related events occurring more or less simultaneously, as if some more complex form of cause and effect was at work. You pick up the phone to call someone you haven’t spoken with in a long time and find them on the other end of the line calling them, that sort of thing. Jung chalked it up to a function of the collective unconscious, and for a long time in the ’70s, ‘synchronicity’ became a catch-phrase for both the self-help shrink crowd and the ‘magic is real’ crowd, and still pops up now and then, though the word’s almost never used as Jung meant it.

Full Story: Comic Book Resources: PERMANENT DAMAGE: Issue #137

(via Cabbages & Kings)

The Shaman of Alta

April 26, 2004 / Michael

Feeling a little historic.

“A criminal case was brought against a Sami shaman (noaidi ) called Quiwe Baarsen, working as a servant for Norwegians at Aaroya, in Altafjorden. From 1603 until 1607 he lived in Lappojavrre, at this time in the Swedish-Norwegian borderlands (Lapland). In 1608 he moved to Porsangerfjorden and after 1613 we can find him at Talvik and Lagnes in Altafjorden before settling down at Aaroya in the early 1620’s. He is one among twenty-six Sami accused of witchcraft in Finnmark (or Vardohus Len) in the 17th century.”

The 1627 Witch Trial Of Quiwe Baarsen

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