We’re bringing back a classic.

Before I head off into the night to celebrate the fairy raids and the lifting of the veil to the other side, I wanted to post these links to the yearly Halloween Magic threads on Barbelith.com. “Not pagan Samhain celebrations or the like,” to quote Chiropteran, “but bright-orange, screaming-pumpkin, Trick-or-Treating Halloween.” It’s all about doing magic with the wild, pop mystery explosion that Halloween has become. The Universal Monsters (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, Mummy) as the spirits of the North, South, East, and West; invocations of Jack Skellington; Jack-o-lanterns as the undead spirit servants we all carve every year to protect our homes from evil.

Halloween and Black (and Orange) Magick

Chiropteran – Well, yesterday was October 1st, the official opening day (by my reckoning) of the Halloween season.

This year, as part of my overarching goal to get my magickal butt in gear, I’ve decided to do a nightly meditation/devotion/working to hammer my Halloween Magick system into shape.

(I don’t know if anyone’s interested in the particulars, but here goes anyway, for any of you who are…)

I started last night by turning the lights down and reading some H. P. Lovecraft (“The Moon-bog”). Cheesy, maybe, but it set the mood nicely. I’ll probably do this with a different horror short story or novel excerpt every night.

Then I got things rolling with the quasi-improvised Four Monsters Banishing. Basically “calling the quarters,” with Dracula to the North (air), The Mummy to the South (earth), The Wolfman to the East (water) and Frankenstein’s Monster to the West (fire). (I’ve spent a while trying out different combinations of associations, and this seems to work out best, for now.) Then I read aloud a short passage from Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (the bit about the Autumn People).

As silly as it might sound, I have never had a more powerful opening to a ritual, whether solo or group. As I finished the final “call,” the air in the room charged up with an almost audible *thunk*, and my hands positively swarmed with gathered energy.

The feeling was so powerful that I almost considered charging a spontaneous working, but I decided to stick with the original plan, which was the “skull mask” meditation, the first step toward a full-blown Pumpkin King invokation.

Sobek – Yes, I think of the trick-or-treating as being the “Rade” of the fey. So I load the candy up with lots of goblin energy.

The Halloween Black and Orange Magic threads are some of the most fascinating occult writings I’ve ever read. I love the ideas behind them, the Halloween Current, ghosting, the recipes for Halloween Dust (sugar and graveyard dirt!), the exploration and shamanism of it all. It has definitely effected my vision of the holiday.

The thread quoted about above is the first of the Black and Orange Magic series, with a new one starting every year since.

A Black and Orange Update?
The Black and Orange, Autumn 2004
Black and Orange Magic 2005
Black and Orange Magic 2006
Black and Orange Magic 2007

The Halloween Tarot Deck should be looked at as well.

Read it all. Make your Halloween magical.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!

(Image by Yasmine-Chan)

UKOMA PEFIGU NOSA LEHITU ROBA!

Revolution, Supernatural | 1 Comment »

Police Officer Sees Aliens at Crop Circle

The sergeant, who has not been named, was off-duty when he saw the figures standing in a field near Silbury Hill, and stopped his car to investigate.

However, as he approached the ‘men’ – all over 6ft tall with blond hair – he heard “the sound of static electricity” and the trio ran away ”faster than any man he had ever seen”.

The officer returned to his home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and contacted paranormal experts and told them he had spotted a UFO.

(Link via The Anomalist)

The encounter this police officer had reminds me of something I read in a book I discovered just yesterday. The book was Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, and the being described within it was the Japanese Kuchisake Onna.

There are two main similarities between the Kuchisake Onna and the beings described by the officer above. First, they both appear to be almost human (with the Kuchisake Onna wearing a surgical mask or scarf to cover her mouth), and the incredible speed with which they can move.

From Yokai Attack!:

It is feared by schoolchildren as a cold-blooded predator with a mouthful of fangs and the ability to outrun a speeding motorcycle. In fact, according to one source, a whopping ninety-nine percent of Japanese children are familiar with the general story.

The connections between the Kuchisake Onna and the three entities above is of course superficial, but the presence of these supernatural speedsters in both the British Islands and Japan make me think of the ongoing discussions in the UFO spheres regarding the extraterrestrial hypothesis. . .

In other UFO news:

UFO Attacks X-Files Wind Farm
Plasma Balls, Tripods, and Giant Fractal Mantoids
UFOs in Nambia
Former AEC Supervisor Says Roswell was ET
Did the UFO Abduct the Water Buffalo?
Steven Greer on Disclosure
How Long is a UFO

And here is a leaked video of two reporters discussing the now infamous Chicago O’Hare Airpot UFO incident, one of the most well documented UFO sightings to date.

(via Throught the Looking Glass)

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(So many strange synchonicities surrounded this album for me, I had to do a post.)

Urban Legends, the cool new album by Ice-T and Black Silver’s group, Black Ice, has finally been released and is available on CD or to download as mp3s. With special guests Marc Live, Fedie Demarco, Too $hort, Faxx, Act!on, Tash, Main Flow, Erule, Griffen, RBX, Aceyalone, and music that was produced by Bionik.

It’s a tight album, very laid back.

There’s a Black Ice mixtape here free to download as well.

In related rap news, Rex Roland (who was one of the Analog Brothers along with Ice-T and Silver) has announced that he is planning to do a remix of the Analog Brothers’ Album in 2010 with eight never-before-heard tracks.

Rex Roland Interviewed by Ultrakeith

What projects have you been working on recently?

New projects include (A) Psychedelicpimpgiantrobot (“the brand new funk”) (B) Super Mack II (Reborn) is some Curtis Mayfield style vocals from the 70′s with a hip hop twist! (C) Mr. Goodfly ” A million dollars worth of game!”

We hear you’re remixing the analog brothers album,Tell us about it and when will it get released?

” Rimixology ” The Analog Brothers album Remixed Remastered with 8 unreleased and new tracks from the ” Realm ” ( Rex Rolands Studio ) Released in the beginning of 2010!

Do you have any unreleased analog or keith stuff we might get to hear one day?

The “Relphonics” is Kool Keith at his best and it’s never been released outside our personal circle of friends! Actually Keith lost his copy and wants another, Holla!

He’s also promised a Synthasizer Sistas album, which would be classic.

See also:

New Album by Marc Live
Black Ice
Ice-T Kicking It Electro Old School

Music | No Comments »

This is a clip from American Drug War: The Last White Hope, a very important documentary about why we should end the War on Drugs.

American Drug War (Pre-Release Cut)
American Drug War (Official Site)
American Drug War on Facebook

The medicinal benefits of magic mushrooms and other psychedelics is only one small aspect of their argument.

See also:

MDMA and Psychology
Salvia Madness
Terrence McKenna Audio Online
John Lennon Describes his First Acid Trip

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David Lynch, acclaimed film director and master of transcendental meditation, being interviewed at Amoeba Music.

(Link via Dugpa)

More by David Lynch:

David Lynch – The Lime Green Box Set

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

David Lynch Organic Coffee, House Roast Whole Bean

Dynamic:01 – The Best Of DavidLynch.com

Dark Night of the Soul

Images

The Short Films of David Lynch

Fox Bat Strategy

It turns out there was also a documentary made about him recently called Lynch (One).

See also:

Kyle MacLachlan Wants to Bring Back Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks and UFOs

The Magical Language of Twin Peaks

New Short Film by David Lynch

Movies, Music | No Comments »

The Weird Fishes graphic novel by Jamaica Dyer has finally been released by Slave Labor Graphics. You should definitely buy it.

Warren Ellis said it best:

“The only explanation for Jamaica Dyer is that she was built by aliens and dropped here to show us all how crap we are compared to her.”

Behold the Weird Fishes preview:

Previously on Electric Children:

Weird Fishes

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Can You See Time?

Imagine if you could see time laid out in front of you, or surrounding your body. And you could physically point to specific dates in space.

Important dates might stand out – birthdays, anniversaries. And you could scan a visible timeline – to check if you were available – whenever you made plans. No actual diary necessary.

According to Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh, there is a reasonable chance you can. And that you may use the experience, unconsciously, every day.

Dr Simner studies synaesthesia – a condition caused by an unusually high number of connections between two areas of the brain’s sensory cortex, making two senses inseparable.

Synaesthetes, as they are known, have experiences that might seem extremely strange to any non-synaesthete.

The extra connections might be between the brain area that processes colours and the area that processes language.

“One of the most common variants is called grapheme-colour synaesthesia,” says Dr Simner.

“People with this variant know the colour of letters of the alphabet. So they know that the letter ‘A’ may be red. But not just any red, it’s a certain shade of crimson. And B is turquoise-blue.”

(Link via Dangerous Minds)

I’ve always wanted to be a synaesthete.

Are you one?

These are a few of the synaesthesia tests I’ve found online:

Synaesthesia
The Synaesthesia Battery
Can You Hear the Dots Moving?
Synaesthesia Research
Synaesthesia Test
Synaesthesia Prototype

See also:

Synaesthesia in Mystical Traditions

Science | No Comments »

Night of the Harlequin

The thing in five-year-old Dan Mitchell’s bedroom in southeastern Wisconsin only came at night. As Mitchell lie in bed, his parents far down the hall, a thin, androgynous creature would appear and tell him stories.

It looked almost frightened.

“I would tell my mom about this and she always thought it was just my imagination getting the best of me,” Mitchell, now 33, said.

But he knew it was real, and it looked “like a harlequin.”

“Its clothes were absolutely motley and strange,” Mitchell said. “Its face looked like it was in a perpetual state of shock.”

Large, wide-open eyes – too large to be human eyes – stared at Mitchell through the gray of night as words spilled through its always open, round mouth.

(via From the Shadows)

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This is an interview with Gary Lachman, one of the founding members of Blondie and author of Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, A Secret History of Consciousness and  Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen. Lachman is an interesting author, definitely one worth reading.

Gary Lachman – Music, Magick and Mind

Did you continue exploring altered states after leaving the OTO?

I was interested in altered states of consciousness and consciousness in general. J.W. Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time (1927) impressed me. And again, as with magick, I thought I’d check it out by doing as he suggests. I kept a dream journal from 1980 until the mid 1990s. Dunne claimed it would demonstrate the existence of precognitive dreams. He was right – I had quite a few which I discussed in 1997 in The Quest, an American magazine. I have no theory about how this works, but my experience is that it happened so many times that I’m willing to believe that it’s common and it’s real.

In Turn Off Your Mind you say that Jung’s Philemon and Edward Kelly’s angelic visitations are strong evidence for the objective existence of an external intelligence.

I think Jung is right when he says that there are things in the mind that are not voluntary or subjective. One area of research that’s been very fruitful for me is the hypnogogic state. I read an interesting book on Swedenborg by a clinical psychologist named Wilson Van Dusen called The Presence of Other Worlds (1974). It’s a study of the states Swedenborg got into when he was having his visions. Van Dusen experimented with them himself, and of course the Surrealists had done it with automatic writing.

I pursued them myself, and suddenly I would hear things, get sentences, or see cenes and they were clearly autosymbolic – they were not just nonsense. I recognized these things were actually metaphors of either the state I was in at the time or ideas I’d been thinking about. There was an intelligent, autonomous, recognisable process taking place. It was neither random, nor the junk disposal mechanism that some dream theorists claim. I didn’t have anything like Jung’s Philemon or Edward Kelly’s Enochian experience, but I do feel that these processes are not a result of my rational self, nor am I talking to or fooling myself.

Link

And here is an article by Lachman on Hypnagogia.

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The very cool and brilliantly styling Lady Gaga performing Paparazzi, Just Dance, and a collection of her hits on Saturday Night Live.

Check it out.

(You have to watch this as well)

(Lady Gaga remixes The Fame as a bizarre mini-movie)

Music | No Comments »