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Pyramid Texts Online Library
Pyramids Texts Online has just added a rather nifty library function. If you want to read some fascinating early work on Egpytology, this is certainly a great place to start.
More on pagan web filtering
The BBC story on Birmingham’s City Council blocking of pagan and alternative religious websites using Blue Coat filtering software seems to be getting a lot of traction around the Web (and rightly so). Now even Tech World is getting into the fray, advising IT personnel to think carefully before implementing potentially illegal directives passed down by clueless HR managers.
Interestingly it appears that Blue Coat’s filtering software divides web sites into distinct categories. From their site:
Religion
Sites that promote and provide information on conventional or unconventional religious or quasireligious subjects, as well as churches, synagogues, or other houses of worship. Does not include sites about alternative religions such as Wicca or witchcraft (Alternative Spirituality/Occult), or atheist beliefs (Political/Activist Groups).
Alternative Spirituality/Occult
Sites that promote and provide information on religions such as Wicca, Witchcraft or Satanism. Occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism are represented here. Includes sites that endorse or offer methods, means of instruction, or other resources to affect or influence real events through the use of spells, incantations, curses and magic powers. This category includes sites which discuss or deal with paranormal or unexplained events.
Blue Coat do also say that they are willing to discuss fixing this discrepancy, which as has already been pointed out, may fall under illegal religious discrimination in some jurisdictions. Concerned readers are encouraged to contact Blue Coat directly to express their views - please be polite and respectful when doing so, regardless of your personal views on the web filtering business. (And for the record, my personal view is that they should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Temple of Mithras in London
A fascinating video exploration of the London Mithraeum by Payam Nabarz.
Sexual energy brings rain to farmers
Apparently drought-ridden Australia is turning to Wilhelm Reich’s “cloud-busting” technology in order to cause rain via manipulation of orgone energy.
For the past month in Kellerberrin, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding have been chasing atmospheric phenomena in the way someone else might fish for trout. Through hope, coaxing, and a fair degree of positive thinking, Haines and Hinterding have been siphoning sexual energy into the Wheatbelt. Yes, this is cultish, but don’t be alarmed, it’s all in the name of creating rain.
More info at The West
The Veritable Key of Solomon
The Veritable Key of Solomon by Stephen Skinner & David Rankine
completely different text from that translated by SL MacGregor Mathers
being a translation of Wellcome MS 4669 and Wellcome MS 4670 translated by Paul Harry Barron from the French version of the Hebrew text translated originally by Profession Morrisoneau.
Not cheap, but rather lovely. Available to order from Golden Hoard, shipping soon.
UK city council censor occult websites
Birmingham’s City Council has just installed the “fabulous” Bluecoat web filtering software which allows Christians and Moslems to view websites relating to their religion but filters out sites dealing with “witchcraft or Satanism” and “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism”.
The little known Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 specifically forbids any kind of religious discrimination in the workplace within the UK, and gives adherents of even tiny minority religions the same rights as mainstream ones. The National Secular Society is currently investigating the option of legal action.
It strikes us here that this is probably not an isolated case, so we would welcome comments about any other workplace computer system that implements equally misguided and illegal censorship policies. If you are aware of any such at your place of work, local library, or other such system, you should consider contacting the National Secular Society and/or your Trade Union representative.
We cannot allow such censorship to flourish. And in the UK the law is on our side, unlike many other places. Let’s use it.
More info at the BBC
Denessa Smith passes on
We annouce the passing of Denessa Smith, mother of teenager Tempest Smith who took her own life as a result of bullying over her Wiccan beliefs. Denessa set up the Tempest Smith Foundation and worked tirelessly in aid of bullied children and religious tolerance.
More info at the Magical Education Council
Magical library may vanish
The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, based at the University of London, may be broken up and sold. This legendary library is considered one of the great collections of occult literature in the world, but may now be sold off because of budget cuts.
More info at The Independent
The Strange Love of Breyer/P-Orridge
Possibly the most moving interview ever published by a music magazine:
Strange Love
How music legend, performance artist, and notorious “wrecker of civilization” Genesis P-Orridge met dominatrix/performer Jacqueline Breyer and fell madly, deliriously in love; how cosmetic surgery helped them become one; and how their romance was interrupted by a temporary setback called death.
Edgar Mitchell: aliens & mystical experiences
There’s been a lot of speculation in the past days over revelations by former astronaut and moonwalker Dr. Edgar Mitchell that he believes that alien intelligence has already contacted Earth. What many people don’t know is that this is nothing new for Dr. Mitchell, who has had a lifelong fascination with the realm of the unknown. While crewing on the Apollo 14 mission he conducted ESP experiments, and for the past 35 years he has run the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
I was coming back from the moon after completing a successful mission on the moon. My job was being responsible for the lunar spacecraft for the lunar surface activities. So on the way home, my successful job had been mostly completed and we were just coming home. We still had experiments and work to do, but the big stuff was done.
We were orientated such and rotating in order to keep the thermal balance of the spacecraft so that every two minutes you could see the Earth, the moon, the sun and a 360-degree panorama of the heavens came through the window every two minutes. That’s powerful stuff, particularly since it’s space. Without the atmosphere to block, the stars don’t twinkle, and there’s 10 times as many as you could possibly see on Earth because of the lack of interference and it’s much closer to what you could see through the Hubble Telescope these days, with those pictures and I hope you’ve looked at some of those: it’s overwhelming — and I realized as that happened, because I do have a PhD from MIT and I studied astronomy at Harvard and MIT and knew that molecules of matter in my body and in the spacecraft and in my partners’ bodies were made in some ancient generation of stars. That’s where matter is created.
Suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars and suddenly that became personal and visceral, not intellectual and I had never had this experience. It was accompanied by bliss, an ecstasy I had never experienced.
Later — and I’m making this long story short — with some discovery and some help from scientists at Rice University in Houston, I discovered in ancient transcripts that this type of experience — a transformational, transcendental experience where you see things as you perceive them but experience them viscerally and emotionally as one, as a part of it — is called samadhi. In doing more research, I found that it has taken place in every culture on Earth. The political and cultural expression of that turns out to be religion.
The experience is the same — a heady, overwhelming experience. But when it gets politicized, put into the culture, those things get lost on the people who had the experience and it becomes something else. So that’s what it was: a deep, deep cultural experience that is in the culture of our civilization in hundreds of places.
More at the Discovery Channel