Portals & Metamorphosis

[IdleRich]

No he was hiv positive and I believe was risking other people's health

 

[sus]

This is very contentious but yeah definitely speculated. In particular too that some of his paramours were grad students at Berkeley, that a whole generation of Berkeley academics died off in the wake of Foucault's time there.

 

[version]

No he was hiv positive and I believe was risking other people's health

Right, but he had to get it from somewhere in the first place, so maybe he was into risking his own too.

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah ok sure but it's one thing to play around with your own life, a different thing to mess with others'.

 

[version]

Yeah ok sure but it's one thing to play around with your own life, a different thing to mess with others'.

Yes.

 

[IdleRich]

And it's really unfair to describe risking someone else's health as your own limit experience.... if true that's fucked.

 

[catalog]

I posted a thread a while back on here and deleted it because I didnt like the concept. But the comment text was relevant I think:

Everyone is talking about how magic is the next big thing, everyone is writing books on magic. I have two magician friends, one just got an arts residency at MIT working alongside a cognitive scientist. I have in my lap Poets as Spellcasters and The Secret Occult Teachings of Jim Morrison, both gotten from my local Barnes & Noble where they're featured new releases.

There's been pretty widespread activism & protest culture the past decade. Lots of unrest over 60s-era issues: womens lib, race relations, big resurgence in socialism. A wave of recent assassinations. Cannabis and psychedelic use are at all-time highs. Sense of moral corruption in/betrayal by government. The Internet has become an underground press. There is a sex revolution happening around dating apps, polyamory, queer/trans stuff. Back to the land movement, online communes, group homes, a thousand whacky ideologies and AI x New Age religions.

Astrology and tarot have never been more popular, it's really crazy actually, whether you're in the arts or just a normie horse girl you're into astrology, even computer science engineers are into astrology. I have two friends who read tarot for a living. There are astrology-themed bars in Bushwick. I go to a West Coast coffeeshop they have horoscope-themed lattes.

I guess much of this stuff is connected. I was thinking, reading the Morrison book, how the existential fear of the Atomic Age is kinda like the existential fear of AI and climate change today. There is an apocalyptic tone infiltrating everything. And in The Master thread we talked about how new religious movements come out of periods of dissatisfaction and unrest, such as post-war. Periods where young people are questioning whether the ruling order/their parents/the ruling order really has control, whether its prescriptions of true and false, rational and irrational are worth listening to.

I was talking to a friend recently he said that the only magic anyone talks about is, more or less, hyperstition. It's edged out all the other kinds, it's the only kind of magic we understand anymore, we are all very fluent in hyperstition. (Or in manifestation, which is very similar. Belief becoming real, map changing territory, reflexivity.)

I do think there are other kinds though, some of the ones I've observed are:

- frame control: setting the implicit terms of discourse, or controlling its form (e.g. its pace)
- implanting voices: songs are really good at this, you get tags stuck in your head, but poetry does it too. also implanting voices in the freud introjection sense—the way parents implant voices in you guilting you telling you what to think and do
- mimetic contagion, transmission or production of emotional states, mental illnesses, preferences, stances; inciting or turning on or enchanting
- transfer phenomena, e.g. frame transfer, style transfer
- ability to imagine new equilibria, new ways of being in the world that work; neologism is tied up with this, new words changing the language.
- altering the connotations of words, objects, the way that advertising/marketing works to build up or alter reputations of products; manipulation of the public symbolbank
- ability to nudge groups into coordination equilibrium—ability to get things done socially, instigate mimetic cascades, play confidence tricks, make common/mutual knowledge cascades happen a la Emperor's New Clothes
- channeling of ancestors, in a secular historical sense: aligning yourself with tradition, in a ts eliot way; establishing historical vectors and teleologies that people believe in
- vibework: this is similar to mimetic transfer stuff—but setting the tone in a room
- energy healing? people say this is real but I have no experience/theory of how it works

Probably all are rationalized forms of what past generations have called subliminal messaging, mind control, demonology, spellcraft (language altering landscape).

I think music is very magical too, maybe the most magical artform along with poetry. See the Pied Piper, or Dionysus for music, and the schizo stuttering shaman poet spellcaster for language.

The Rise of the Shaman Bro (and his eventual demise) — Asleep Thinking

If you go to a sceney party these days in New York City, you will encounter guys – grown adult men - who dress like wizards. They wear colorful capes and tunics and crystals. They are surrounded by beautiful women who pulsate about as a DJ pumps trance music set to a tribal African chant. I realiz

www.asleepthinking.com

 

[mixed_biscuits]

This is very contentious but yeah definitely speculated. In particular too that some of his paramours were grad students at Berkeley, that a whole generation of Berkeley academics died off in the wake of Foucault's time there.

Take away that panopticon and he'll get up to all sorts.

 

[catalog]

Re fouc

Reckoning with Foucault’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia

We need to address the reports about the French philosopher’s predatory behaviour in Tunisia.

www.aljazeera.com

 

[DLaurent]

Plato's Cave.

 

[version]

Re fouc

Reckoning with Foucault’s alleged sexual abuse of boys in Tunisia

We need to address the reports about the French philosopher’s predatory behaviour in Tunisia.

www.aljazeera.com

Yeah, wouldn't surprise me if this were true. There were questions raised at the time though and the bloke making the accusations started squirming and having to backtrack when people pointed out inconsistencies in his story.

 

[catalog]

yeah there's this article too

Michel Foucault: the prophet of pederasty | Daniel Johnson | The Critic Magazine

Daniel Johnson says the fact that Foucault scholars now overlook his advocacy for sex with boys shows the great libertine failed to overturn Judaeo-Christian morality…

thecritic.co.uk

It is a matter of public record, however, that Foucault signed a petition to the Assemblée Nationale in 1977 calling for the decriminalisation of all “consensual” sexual relations between adults and children. Foucault was impressed by the fact that the Greeks “never admitted love between two adult men … [for them] love between two men is only valid in the form of classic pederasty”. He even told his biographer James Miller: “Besides, to die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful?” For Foucault, pederasty was the only truly romantic form of love.

Reminds me of samuel delany a bit

 

[version]

Grim how many big names were on those petitions. It wasn't just Foucault.

 

[william_kent]

The Rise of the Shaman Bro (and his eventual demise) — Asleep Thinking

If you go to a sceney party these days in New York City, you will encounter guys – grown adult men - who dress like wizards. They wear colorful capes and tunics and crystals. They are surrounded by beautiful women who pulsate about as a DJ pumps trance music set to a tribal African chant. I realiz

www.asleepthinking.com

that reminds me of this mushroom ceremony in a vice documentary where Billy The Shaman presides over a car crash of a mushroom ceremony with the help of the girls from the gym where he used to deal steroids










they play magical instruments that cure cancer

 

[catalog]

It's a serious problem. Have you heard about the bee shaman who made it all up?

Eg

Pulling The Thread Part One: Spinning

'Truth, however, is no easy matter. It is complex, strange, and fluid - open to question, a living thing. And yet it is the place where we have to begin, and in the end it is all that remains.'

open.substack.com

 

[luka]

The Rise of the Shaman Bro (and his eventual demise) — Asleep Thinking

If you go to a sceney party these days in New York City, you will encounter guys – grown adult men - who dress like wizards. They wear colorful capes and tunics and crystals. They are surrounded by beautiful women who pulsate about as a DJ pumps trance music set to a tribal African chant. I realiz

www.asleepthinking.com

not a real shaman bro till you dose your mum

 

[catalog]

I mean that looks like pretty positive stuff to me, probably a good thing? But yeah, the whole business shaman thing is super weird.

The thing with all this stuff is that you just don't know, you have to assume there's positive intentions.

It's all very jedi mind tricks, dark side, mandrake thd magician. Literally children's stories but somehow we are hooked.

I think cos of that thing version (?) quoted, from mcluhan? That a wheel spin in terms of tech one way elicits a backwards roll too? So the lurch to AI is a lurch back to superstition, something like that.

But beyond that, all the reasoning around "other states of consciousness", "imaginative commons" etc is completely sound I think, tried and tested throughout various cultures and times. No arguments with any of that.

What concerns me is the business-ification of it.

 

[william_kent]

It's a serious problem. Have you heard about the bee shaman who made it all up?

Eg

Pulling The Thread Part One: Spinning

'Truth, however, is no easy matter. It is complex, strange, and fluid - open to question, a living thing. And yet it is the place where we have to begin, and in the end it is all that remains.'

open.substack.com

well, that author has certainly got a bee in their bonnet!

I enjoyed "part 2" with the stuff about the author of Mary Poppins and her alcoholic adopted son being the link to the secret tradition of shamanic beekeeping.. very creative!

there's plenty of "shamans" and "occultists" who just made it all up - Castenada, Crowley, Grant, Spare, Bertiaux, Chumbley, Harner, etc.
I suppose Buxton is just the latest in a long line of pretenders

 

[catalog]

What is your feeling about that, the pretenders. Do you think it's OK?

 

[william_kent]

What is your feeling about that, the pretenders. Do you think it's OK?

yes

I am an advocate of creating your own "MAGICKAL UNIVERSE"

it's the only way if you don't subscribe to organised religion

but I don't expect anyone else to buy into my personal cosmology