Category Archives: Mytho-Poesis

Entering the Theatre of Manifestation – Unveiling the FoolishPeople

Strange Factories 3 It’s a fool’s quest to go seeking strange angels and emergent archetypes in the muddled minds of the contemporary world. What more to seek to manifest them, confront them, engage with them in the hopes of giving some sense of trans-spiritual renewal to the blighted urbanism and abandoned traditions of today. So it is that the FoolishPeople step forward to take a task that few would be willing to see through, they have sought entry into the Theatre of Manifestation, and the gifts that they return with are pregnant with the possibilities of art and magic.

It is my pleasure to announce an ongoing project documenting these FoolishPeople and their living legacy, to share their tale of travel from avant-garde theatre, if one must fall into transient terminology, to manifesting Strange Factories, a cinematic spell that takes their tradition of magic and ritual into the digital age. With Theatre of Manifestation Unveiled we are invited to join them on a jocund journey, a rare opportunity for exploring a contemporary artistic tradition that remains well tried in the mysteries.

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Selling Holy Death – From Grim Reaper to Skeletal Virgin, A Brief Look at Commercializing an Emerging Iconography

“What Flowers Indicate:

I have always noticed that wherever you find flowers, no matter whether in a garret or in a palace, it is a pretty sure sign that there is an inner refinement of which the world is not cognizant. I have seen flowers cultivated and cherished by some of the lowest and poorest of our people. Where these emblems of purity are found, you may rest assured that they represent a  hope, and speak of a goodness of heart not to be found where they are absent.”

- from My Prayer Book – Happiness in Goodness: Reflections, Counsels, Prayers and Devotions by Rev. F.E. Lasance (Benzinger Brothers, INc. Printers to the Holy Apostolic See, 1944)

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Tracking the flowering of the Santa Muerte tradition is a fascinating way to study the development of an “official” religion from the seeds of folk practice.  In the United States alarmist media has spurred the interest of popular kitsch, and the images of La Madre Poderosa that have become part of the commercial aspect of Her cultus are an interesting way to engage in the changes that occur when a tradition begins to develop enough efficacy in the social domain to elicit commodification. 

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Opening the Conversation About NDE – Dr. Eben Alexander & the Question of Consciousness

There is a slow shift in our cultural worldview surrounding the nature of consciousness. It’s a shift that is occurring in incremental stages, its main bulk still writhing below the surface of frothing rhetoric and opinionated debate, but Newsweek’s  cover story this week marks an important change in the public discussion . Dr. Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon, with 25 years of experience, including teaching at Harvard Medical School, has had an NDE.

In his upcoming book, Proof of Heaven: A Neuroscientist’s Journey into the Afterlife, Alexander describes in detail his Near Death Experience, which is detailed in brief through the Newsweek article, Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. His experience, as he understands it,  radically altered the static assumptions that he had developed throughout his career in academic science.

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The Extraordinary Equation of George Van Tassel

F = 1/T

Original air-date: June 18, 1964. This recording is from the KVOS Channel 12 Films, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Washington University, Bellingham WA 98225-9123.

The Entity – A Discussion of the Poltergeist Phenomenon with Dr. Barry Taff

Dr. Barry Taff, who holds a doctorate in psychophysiology with a minor in
biomedical engineering, is a world-renowned parapsychologist who worked out of  UCLA’s former parapsychology laboratory from 1969 through 1978 as a research  associate.

During his 43-year career, Dr. Taff has investigated more than 4,500  cases of ghosts, hauntings, poltergeists and conducted extensive studies in telepathy and precognition, which led to the development of the initial protocols and methodologies for what was later termed “remote viewing.”  He was also himself investigated as a psychic subject in 1969, the results of which were published in Behavioral Neuropsychiatry, “A Laboratory Investigation of Telepathy: The Study of A Psychic,” Vol. 6, Nos. 1-12, April-December 1974-January-March, 1975.

In the spring of 2010, Dr. Taff’s new book; Aliens Above, Ghosts Below:
Explorations of the Unknown was published by Cosmic Pantheon Press, whose title is self-explanatory.

Note: Biographic information taken from Dr. Taff’s website.

Think of the peaceful cat… – Reflections on Initiation by Guido Mina di Sospiro

The world’s best fame no higher doth advance

Than breath of wind, whose fickle gusts deceive,

And changing side, leaves name to change and chance.

Divine Comedy, Purgatory – Canto 11, 100-102, Dante Alighieri, tr.  E.H. Plumptre (1886)

After a very long initiation, I’ve come to the conclusion that initiation per-se is overrated. The problem with any initiatic journey is initiation itself:

Why, after all, is it necessary?

Why are we never content in our own skin?

I find the humble domestic cat to be a very wise creature. Once his needs are taken care of, he’s just happy with himself and the routine that he establishes. He’s content with being, thoroughly satisfied ontologically. Nothing would be more repugnant to such a cat than going through the sort of torture, for lack of a better word, described in so many accounts of spiritual training.

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In an Open-Minded Way – Jack Hunter on an Ethnography of Anomalous Phenomena

“In other cultures, therefore, experiences such as telepathic communication between two individuals, predicting the future in dreams, seeing the dead reanimate, witnessing an apparition, communicating with spirits through entranced mediums, or being afflicted by witchcraft (amongst others) may be considered entirely possible.

Many highly respected anthropologists, in conducting ethnographic fieldwork amongst other cultures, have gone several steps beyond appreciating different modes of thinking about the world and have crossed the threshold into alternate ways of experiencing it. E.B. Tylor, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Bruce T. Grindal and Edith Turner all crossed this threshold during their fieldwork,and all interpreted and presented their experiences in different ways.

Through examining the ways in which these ethnographers documented their experiences, and how their personal world-views accommodated such unusual phenomena, it is possible to gain an insight into both changing academic attitudes towards the anomalous and the mysterious nature of the paranormal itself.”

- ”Anthropology of the Weird: Ethnographic Fieldwork and Anomalous Experience” by Jack Hunter in G. Taylor (ed.) (2011). Darklore Vol. 6. Brisbane: Daily Grail Publishing. pp. 243-253.

Since the late 60′s and early 70′s parapsychology has sought objective verification for the phenomenon in the laboratory rather than cultivating the experience as a participant in the field.

Jack Hunter, editor for Paranthropology,  Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal , is working with a group of researchers that are changing this trend. Through ethnographic and participation based research they are discovering new ways to engage with anamolous phenomenon that offer alternative avenues for exploration outside of the circular skeptic/believer debate.

What got you into all this?

I have always been interested in the paranormal, and when I went to University to study archaeology & anthropology I came to the realization that anthropological, and more specifically ethnographic, methodologies provide an ideal means to investigate the paranormal in an open-minded way.

How can the study of anomalous phenomena help our understanding of human experience?

I think the best answer to this question was given by the psychologist William James in the 19th century when he wrote that “no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded”. James stressed the fact that our understanding of reality will be limited, and hence fundamentally flawed, if we fail to take into account all aspects of existence – no matter how weird and unusual they are. To ignore these “anomalous” phenomena and experiences is to arbitrarily neglect a facet of the human condition and of reality as a whole.

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The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, & Sacrament by Maria de Naglowska, a review by Jenna Kraus

Listen to Light of Sex by The Whip Angels

“You will learn the falsified language when you come down from the Mountain to speak to the sons of the Earth.”

- Maria de Naglowska, The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, and Sacrament

Maria de Naglowska’s The Light of Sex: Initiation, Magic, and Sacrament, translated from French by Donald Traxler, attempts to unite light and dark forces through the terminology of sex and the Biblical creation myth. Naglowska also developed rites veiled in occult imagery to achieve such reconciliation. The underlying and most crucial theory of the text Naglowska calls “The Triangle.”

The angles of this triangle represent the very course of all existence, and it acts as a template that can be applied in a variety of ways. In one instance Naglowska assigns the angles the following names: Night, Noon, and Evening. Since the beginning, the sun rises and sets again, creating light and darkness respectively. Therefore, within this three-pointed cycle there are two qualities, light and dark, which are to be balanced.

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Bill Sweet of Spindrift Research – On the Efficacy of Prayer

Bill Sweet, author of Journey into Prayer – Pioneers of Prayer in the Laboratory, and former President of Spindrift Research, a group of Christian Scientists founded by the late John and Bruce Klingbeil, has been studying the efficacy of prayer since the late 60′s.  Spindrift’s experiments were some of the first formal experiments into the nature of prayer, and represent a foundation for much of the research that has been conducted since then, including recent experiments in prayer as an aid to medical treatment.

Many of the tests conducted by Spindrift focused on plant growth, and the effects that prayer had on the development of vegetation. They were, however, also pioneers in testing the effect of using prayer as a focus for intention on changing the outcome of random number generators, a test that has been used in other laboratory settings to test psi capabilities and retro-causal action at a distance phenomenon. In the following essay, Bill answers a question posed to him on a Christian Science message board, and in doing so provides an interesting look at the experiments that Spindrift Research has conducted over the years.

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Philosophically Thinking Through Nihilism: A Reclamation of Embodied Thought For Enhancing Cultural Practices (P. 2/2), by Prof. James Magrini

For Part 1 – Please Click Here

Philosophically Thinking Through Nihilism

The crucial question for those concerned with nihilism thus becomes: Is there still left in our practices some remnant of the nonobjectifying practices that were presumably extant in fifth-century Athens before the cultural collapse that is expressed and furthered by Socrates and Plato?” ~ Dreyfus                                                                                                

In response to this pressing question I now attempt to explicate what Dreyfus terms “nonobjectifying” practices as an active response to the nihilistic condition within which now find ourselves. This final section focuses on two aspects of our lived world and the values, which are inextricably bound up within our worldly existence: (1) the practices and “forms of life” we share that demand the rethinking of our privileged modes of epistemological links to the earth and others, which includes rethinking philosophy’s role in elucidating and contributing to the development and sustaining of our cultural practices, and (2) the attitude we adopt in relation to science and technology that is the crux of nihilism, and how that relationship might, and indeed, needs to be rethought and recast in terms other than a relationship of divine reverence and servitude. According to Dreyfus, as long as we continue to think in terms of explicit views of truth and objectifying models for values over implicit shared concerns, we will not “find anything that has authority for us and elicits our commitment” (512).

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