The Brass Goggles Occult Society...The Esoteric Order of the Brazen Dawn...

[rovingjack]

had a grand old adventure tonight. Started for reasons I'm struggling to recall at an island continent sunk beneath the waves some 8200 years ago (fascinating to remember the people of that land lived with the likes of the unicorns). and the fleeing from those lands being about the right time for Fomorians to appear on the nearest body of land. While ineresting to note the stories of Utrost to be taking place in about the same region.

Which leads to the Huldufolk, which meanders through one of the orgin tales for them, which has a stark similarity to the story of Lilith. Which I've often wondered might be the source of the people in the land of Nod.

Then Back around to sunken islands for some exploration of orichalcum, which for all I've been able to figure out is a form of copper that is often golden and harder than standard copper... aka brass (or at the very least a form of natural yellow bronze).

Interesting to note that tin and zinc deposits come from that same regions about that time and right around that time the first honest metalworking starts to take off. along with agriculture and the first cities.

but I still find it especially amusing that orichalcum might actually be brass.

[MWBailey]

Could be what's sometimes called "red brass." I'm not much of a metallurgist, though.

[Inverurie Jones]

See, that's where Skyrim really missed a trick; 'Dwemer metal'? Really? And 'orichalcum' is..green plasticine?

[Khem Caigan]

Hi, All -


I read The Beat Godfather, The Great Beast,
& the Necronomicon over on RealitySandwich.com
a while back (and thanks for the link - you know who
you are).

It's over here :

http://tinyurl.com/k8nnzlp

Seeing as it's excerpted from the [ now released ]
Mandrake offering, The Magical Universe of
William S. Burroughs, it's too late for any
more corrections to be made to the text.

Hopefully, it will see another edition where some of
the more egregious errors will be corrected. I take
work as a proofreader, among other things ( I proofed
the American editions of Kenneth Grant's books while
I was living at the Samuel Weiser warehouse in
Manhattan, shortly before the production of the
'Con ), and this sort of thing irks me.

So, for the record, it's Schlangekraft, not
"Schlangenkraft".

And I didn't assist Harry Everett Smith in an
attempt at compiling a concordance of Enochian -
we produced the darn thing, basing it upon the
then-recently released Casaubon excerpts of Dee's
manuscripts (A True and Faithful Relation of What
Passed for Many Years between Dr. John Dee and
Some Spirits, Magickal Childe Publishing, Inc.,
1992), with shoeboxes to contain all of the pieces
of Chelsea Hotel stationery that we employed.

Our concordance had absolutely nothing to do with
anything that Crowley had produced.

If anybody wants to take a look at it, presumably
the Getty has it under lock and key, along with
much else, owing to the depredations of someone
that used to bring Harry beer and cigarettes upon
occasion.

Next, the author goes on to misquote me :

" It was about that time that William Burroughs
dropped by, having caught wind of a "Necronomicon"
in the neighbourhood. After going through the
pages and a few lines of powder, he offered the
comment that it was "good shit." He might have
meant the manuscript too . . ."

What I actually wrote was :

" It was during this time that William Burroughs
dropped by, having caught wind of a "Necronomicon"
in the neighbourhood. After going through the
pages & a few lines of powder, he offered the
comment that it was "good shit." He might have
meant the manuscript, too - check out the
'Invocation' on page xvii of his Cities of the
Red Night: Humwawa, Pazuzu and Kutulu are listed
among the Usual Suspects. "

You may still access the webpage from which this
quote derives at Archive.org :

http://tinyurl.com/kbn2lxt

Some of the links still work, thanks to the
magic of Archive.org but, strangely, the Cities
of the Red Night page is missing.

That, too, may be viewed here, on another
version of the webpage, then hosted on Flash.net
following its tenure on Bway.net :

http://tinyurl.com/mooe859

So much for proofreading / picking nits.

I have upon occasion been portrayed as somehow
distant from all of the personalities and
goings-on around the creation of the 'Con.

Fact is, I slept on a couch outside the temple
that Jim Wasserman and I built in Jane Nelson's
loft on Howard Street ( the locked temple door
that was discovered mysteriously 'opened' was
just across from my couch - make of that what
you will ).

I heard the rats running overhead across the tin
ceiling every night on their scavenging rounds.
There was a factory upstairs, with lots of yummy
garbage available. Like many of the buildings
around Canal Street, we were infested with rats
- long before the 'Con came along.

And I occasionally bunked downstairs from Jane
and Jim with Bonnie Nielsen and Lia Colla, aka
'Feint Type'. They set the text of the 'Con on
the old word-processor that I had lugged to their
loft from the Weiser warehouse on Broadway, a
little ways north of Houston Street.

I was at Bonnie and Lia's loft on one occasion
when Burroughs dropped by for a look at the 'Con
(the incident related above, with the powder)
and, awhile later, escorted over to his "Bunker"
for a visit by James Grauerholz, Burrough's
assistant and Bonnie's ex. I was invited to sit
in the infamous Orgone Box, and did so.

We discussed the work of George de la Warr,
Solco Tromp, Cleve Backster, L'Abbe Nollet,
Cecil Maby - Bill was widely read and his ideas
on magic were, and sadly still are, ahead-of-
the-curve. Bill and Harry [ Everett Smith ]
knew and spoke about a lot of the same military
-industrial folks who were also involved in the
'human potential movement', such as Arthur
Middleton Young - inventor of the Bell Helicopter.

Anyhow, apart from my peeves, I am looking
forward to receiving a copy of The Magical
Universe of William S. Burroughs.

Cors in Manu Domine,


~ Khem Caigan

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

A Complete Book of Magic Science
transcribed by Frederick Hockley, 2008.
( 18.6 MB .PDF )

This file may be downloaded from the URL
provided below :

http://tinyurl.com/zn398zm

This file will be up until January 25.

Following that, if anyone would like
a copy, please feel free to message
or email me.

This text is Hockley's edition of the
Grimoire of Turiel.

[Khem Caigan]

As with grimoires in general, the Complete
Book of Magic Science contains a great
deal of useful information interspersed with
scribal errors in the form of misreadings,
misspellings, interpolations and confused
attributions.

For example, on page eight we find :

" Make the pentacles, lamens, and
provide all other things necessary.

And let the circle be increasing. "

In the Grimoire of Turiel, we find :

" Make the pentacles forthwith and
provide the other things necessary,
with Incensing. "

Which is to say, all of the implements
ought to be Perfumed prior to your
Working.

The sentence referring to the "circle"
has been badly truncated owing to scribal
error ( presumably before this text ever
came into Hockley's hands ), and should
read :

" Let the circle of the Moon be
increasing and equal, if it can be done;
but especially let her not be Combust,
or in Via Combusta, which is between
fourteen degrees of Libra and fourteen
degrees of Scorpio, and let the Moon
be aspecting a Planet favorable to your
endeavour. "

[Athanor]

According to author Colin Low, whose work deserves to be much better known than it is, the real Necronomicon hasn't been written yet; it is not a grimoire in the traditional sense because it assumes a level of scientific (and especially cosmological) knowledge that simply did not exist before the 20th century.

From http://digital-brilliance.com/kab/essays/pressure.htm ;

One difficulty I have is that as a practising magician and industrial researcher for over thirty years I have learned that some ideas have a kind of ontological pressure behind them. It is like holding an acorn and asserting that the oak tree exists. A statement of this kind may violate many of the common sense rules of language, but for me this shows that common sense language lacks subtlety of expression, and there are many kinds of useful statement I would like to make without a huge pedagogical preamble. The oak tree does exist in potentia, and the real argument is about how we rank existence in potentia versus bark and bird’s nests. It is in precisely this sense that I am prepared to state that the Necronomicon is a real book.

This is not the kind of answer that many people want to hear however so I have made the more satisfactory argument that the Necronomicon hinted at from the contextual framework of Lovecraft’s fiction is not a book that could have existed in the ancient world. It is an outcome of Lovecraft’s modern consciousness of the universe. It has attained a powerful mythic credibility precisely because it squares the circle: in a modern world where no grimoire has authority, the Necronomicon has this awe-inspiring authority while still being a grimoire. It is like the Cretan who stated that all Cretans are liars. An essential aspect of its authority is that it is content free - had Lovecraft provided any substantial content other than the vague hints we have, we would tear it to pieces like any other supposed work of authority.

I believe a book like the Necronomicon could not have existed in the past, and cannot exist in the present. It will exist in the future.

The reason I believe this is that my radar as a professional researcher tells me that a new enlightenment is in the offing. The first enlightenment transformed our relationship with the universe, so that instead of a living cosmos maintained by a divine hierarchy of being we found ourselves in a dead machine to be investigated using scientific method.

The new enlightenment is a non-dualist understanding of matter, life, and human consciousness that transcends to vocabulary of the past, where the key concepts are emergence, simulation and information. The reductive, mechanistic language of mid-twentieth century science will be discarded. The universe will once more become a place of unfathomable mystery and complexity, where life is not a frail accident but one of the most important physical processes, alongside gravity and stellar fusion. It is a new gnosticism without the inherent dualism of the past. In this vast, utterly alien, terrifying, unfathomably complex universe, Lovecraftian protagonists will journey and record their travels and experiences. One thousand years from now someone will be able to read the Necronomicon. Not a spoof, nor a fabrication... it will be the book Lovecraft intuitively grasped.

Someone alive today may be its author. In potentia of course.

Colin Low's other essays are also well worth reading. You can find them at
http://digital-brilliance.com/kab/essays/index.htm

Believe nothing; question everything; think for yourself!

Athanor.

[Athanor]

...... but then, on the other hand, there is the Pseudonomicon, by Phil Hine, well known writer on Chaos (or Kaos) Magic; it is downloadable from
 
http://thexlibrary.com/index.php/viewdownload/53-chaos-magic/387pseudonomicon-phil-hine

....described by TheXLibrary as

Short and rare-ish text dealing with the Kaos aspects of the Lovecraft tradition.  Brief but concise and powerful.  Arguably more informative than the Simon Necronomicon in dealing with Lovecraftian modalities.

........ or in other words, a sort of modern version of a possible Necronomicon, and perhaps more useful than the so-called "Simon Necronomicon", or any of the other recent books claiming to be the "real" Necronomicon. Anyway, definitely worth perusal.

Hail Azathoth!

Athanor.

[Oakley]

Count me in.

[Athanor]

Greetings and welcome to BGOS-EOBD Oakley. If you read this whole thread you'll find all manner of fascinating information regarding the shadowy world of occult studies.... but, as with all things;

Believe nothing; question everything; think for yourself!

Athanor.

[Atterton]

In this months edition of Fortean Times, there is an article on window pane ghosts. Images of people showing up within the windows of houses. In some cases said to be people who died in the houses. As this mostly relates to the 1800s, I hoped someone here might have knowledge of it? Apart from windows made from recycled photographic plates, is there anything else that might have caused a window to retain an image? Some kind of "bomb shadow" phenomenon?

[Khem Caigan]

In this month's edition of Fortean Times, there is an article on window pane ghosts. Images of people showing up within the windows of houses. In some cases said to be people who died in the houses. As this mostly relates to the 1800s, I hoped someone here might have knowledge of it? Apart from windows made from recycled photographic plates, is there anything else that might have caused a window to retain an image? Some kind of "bomb shadow" phenomenon?

Apparently lightning is capable of striking a portrait in a pane of glass.
See, for example :

Lightning Portrait Etched in Window

THE FACE IN THE WINDOW