Adam Gorightly Discusses Black Magic, Mind Control, and the Manson Family Mythos
This premier episode of the Tone Color Alchemy podcast features author and historian Adam Gorightly, discussing his new book The Shadow over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control & the Manson Family Mythos.
The conversation centers around Manson’s musical career and the many songwriters who he was in touch with during his life, prior to the Tate-LaBianca murders. Tune in for a discussion of Charlie’s ties to the Church of Satan, the Beach Boys, Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Kenneth Anger, Jimmy Page, and Scientology, along with Manson’s musical techniques, 9/11 synchronicities involved in the recordings of his music, and plenty more. Gorightly has an encyclopedic knowledge of this topic and as always, he brings a warm, fun presence to the mix. Enjoy!
‘Our Gods Wear Spandex’ Author Christopher Knowles on The Black Fridays
The Black Fridays — Episode 11: Christoper Knowles
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES is on the show! We had an awesome time speaking with Chris on this episode. We talk about his Eagle Award winning book, Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes, about the symbolism in Torchwood: Children of Earth, and about how ancient symbols permeate our modern day culture.
Chris also gave us an inside look into his newest project, The Secret History of Rock ‘n Roll.
You can (and must) check out more about Chris at his blog at www.secretsun.blogspot.com.
Stock Market Slows as Tiger Woods Apologizes
So for thirteen minutes on Friday, the world’s biggest casino came to a crawl while Tiger Woods made his “apology” speech. (One can argue that the apology was more for Nike’s benefit than his wife’s.) As financial blog Zerohedge puts it:
When Tiger’s speech causes a more dramatic volume impact than the FOMC you know this market is all sorts of perfectly efficient. Bloomberg’s chart of the day below shows the total NYSE volume change in-between when Tiger started his convoluted and meandering mea culpa, and when he ended.
FOMC stands for Federal Open Market Committee, a.k.a. “The Fed” that many disinfo.com visitors have plenty to say about. So Tiger had more impact than a Fed Discount Rate hike announcement that day, good to know for the next time I talk to some finance guy who cold calls me about getting into the market…
Seems like just more proof that, as the Onion recently put it (brilliantly), money is a “symbolic, mutually shared illusion.”
U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion
Via the Onion:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.
Calling it “basically no more than five rectangular strips of paper,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke illustrates how much “$200″ is actually worth.
What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.
“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we … if we …” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his…
Hypersigils Reconsidered
Via Technoccult:
I’ve been thinking recently about Grant Morrison’s “hypersigil” concept, but considering as not an occult/magical practice, but as as a cybernetic phenomena. [...]
The way I see it, the online persona, fictional self, or avatar one creates can create feedback loops to reinforce behaviors and perceptions and have a create significant “real world” changes in a person’s life over time.
In the case of Grant Morrison, he was also shaping his persona in the letters column of The Invisibles, in interviews he gave, and his public persona at comic conventions.
Sitting Now (Podcast) Raises Pan with Brian Butler
Via: sittingnow.co.uk:
This week we venture back into the worlds of the Occult, and film-making. Brian Butler is a filmmaker, magician, and colleague to legendary director Kenneth Anger.
In this weeks episode we discuss: Jack Parsons and his magickal journey, The Night of Pan, Kenneth Anger, and how the occult can influence the filmmaking process.
This weeks guest is Brian Butler
Brian is screening his new film The Night of Pan, as well as performing live music with Death in Vegas’ Richard Fearless in London this week, make sure you don’t miss it — the event is free, and you can get more details here.
Read More: sittingnow.co.uk
Out There Radio: It’s a Strange World
For those of you who are fans of the Disinformation Podcasts, make sure to check out Raymond, Joe, and Austin’s original series, Out There Radio.
We’ve built a brand new website with mobile integration for this 50 episode series about the occult, conspiracy theories, and other bizarre undercurrents of the human psyche.
While you are there, make sure to take a look at Raymond’s Ultimate Conspiracy Video List.
The list contains nearly 100 full length films, many of which are sources for episodes of Out There Radio.
The Weird World of Occult America — How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
Alternet reviews Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation:
If witch-burning Puritans are the original jocks of American history, then the mystics surrounding Johannes Kelpius are the first goths. While the rest of the British colonies were still dutifully worshipping their angry Christian god, Kelpius and his followers—who fled Austria to settle in Philadelphia during the late seventeenth-century—busied themselves with astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and other “dark arts” with tangled roots in the Italian Renaissance, the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and various (often fabricated) antiquities. We meet Kelpius early in Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, an uneven but always interesting account of 400 years of New World Strange. Among the several misconceptions Horowitz seeks to dispel, the most foundational is the idea that Colonial America provided shelter only for persecuted Christian sects. Almost from the beginning, North America was also home to a fair number of those who, like Kelpius, had more arcane spiritual interests.
Horowitz never claims that these beliefs were as formative an influence as Christianity in the making of America, but after finishing his book, one can’t help but wonder if maybe Ouija boards don’t belong next to King James in every motel room…
Pakistani Couple Charged with ‘Occult Killing’ of Baby
From BBC News:
A couple in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi have been charged with murdering their baby daughter as part of an alleged “black magic” ritual.
Officers found the body of the four-month-old girl buried in the couple’s house, a court heard. Doctors say it had been there for about four days.
They believe the couple were planning to murder their second daughter, a girl of three, who police found tied up.
Superstitious rituals are not uncommon in Pakistan, but rarely lead to murder.
‘Semi-conscious’
Police raided the house in the poor Karachi neighbourhood of Korangi after a tip-off that it was being used by suspected militants as a safe house.
“When nobody answered the door, we broke into the house in the presence of some elders,” local police chief Rana Mehmood Pervez told…
Skull & Bones Skull To Be Auctioned
via HuffPo
A human skull that apparently was turned into a ballot box for Yale’s mysterious Skull and Bones society is going on the auction block.
Christie’s estimates the skull will sell for $10,000 to $20,000 when it is auctioned on Jan. 22. Fittingly, the auction house has agreed to keep the seller’s name a secret. On Monday, it described the person only as a European art collector.
The skull is fitted with a hinged flap and is believed to have been used during voting at the famous society’s meetings. The auction house said it also may have been displayed at the society’s tomblike headquarters on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., during the late 1800s.
Skull and Bones, an elite society founded in 1832, has closely guarded its members’ names and its activities since the early 1970s. Prior to that time, the group published an annual roster.
Publicly known members, known as Bonesmen, include President William Howard Taft, both presidents Bush, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, businessman and diplomat Averell Harriman, publisher Henry Luce and author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr.
Witch Side is Right? Woman: Bath & Body Works Fired Me Over Pagan Holiday.
From The Boston Herald:
A Connecticut Bath & Body Works staffer who practices witchcraft claims her boss put a hex on her career for using vacation time to attend Salem’s annual Halloween celebration.
Gina Uberti charges in a federal lawsuit that Bath & Body Works fired her after she took a week off around Halloween 2008 to mark the Wiccan holiday of Samhain.
“Any and all excuses offered by (Bath & Body Works) for the plaintiff’s termination are a pretext for the true reason – religious discrimination,” the East Haven, Conn., woman’s lawyer wrote in court papers.
Neither Uberti, her attorney or Bath & Body Works returned calls seeking comment on the case.
But in court filings, Uberti alleged that the chain canned her after eight years because she took time off for the holiday, also…
CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces
Via Wired:
At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.”
This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to…
Halloween and (Black and Orange) Magic
“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,…
Republican Councilman Explains his Paganism
The GOP must be really confused by this. Score one for freedom of religion!
Last week, Councilman-elect Dan Halloran (R-Bayside) narrowly defeated a Democratic candidate in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Now comes the hard part: explaining his religious beliefs to the press. For the past two decades, the cop-turned-lawyer has been a devout believer in Theodism, a pre-Christian faith rooted in Celtic and Germanic tribal religions. “Understanding my theology is a little difficult for mainstreamers,” admits Halloran, who serves as the “First Atheling,” or king, of a local tribe of 120 followers called New Normandy.
The incoming Councilman tells the Post that his faith is a “cousin religion” to Hinduism, and downplays the role of “humane” animal sacrifices as nothing more than “processing food in a specific way.” “If a Christian goes to a Greek Orthodox lamb roast for Easter, there is nothing considered wrong with that. If a Jewish person decides to keep kosher, [it's similar],” he said. “To say ‘animal sacrifice’ makes it sound like you’re killing an animal willy-nilly.”
Pow-Wow: Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Magic
Read this entire book at the sacred-texts.com site…
“Written by a Pennsylvania Dutch healer in the 1820s, this book is a rambling collection of rural home remedies and folk invocations. Pow-wow is a unique creole of Christian theology and a shamanistic belief system. It is still practiced in some rural areas of Pennsylvania. In spite of the name, it is not of Native American derivation. It is believed to have been brought over to America by German immigrants who practiced folk-magic.”
Here is a cure for warts: “Roast chicken-feet and rub the warts with them; then bury them under the eaves.”
Georgia Mom Can’t Stop Harry Potter
From : 11alive.com
A judge in Gwinnett County denied, on Tuesday, a Loganville woman’s request to remove the Harry Potter books from the Gwinnett County Public Schools.
Laura Mallory argued, during the hearing that preceded the ruling, that the books are harmful to children and unconstitutionally promote a religion.
Worse, she said, is that when school children read the books as part of class work, she can provide examples that the books often encourage children, as early as in the Second Grade, to practice witchcraft and convert to the Wicca religion.
“This violates our rights of freedom of religion,” Mallory told reporters after the judge ruled against her, because, she said, Judeo Christian religions are banned from the classroom and “because this other religion is being, you know, spoon-fed to our children.”
For an hour,…
Making Magic With Music
Aside from being a wandering minstrel, Larkin Grimm also tucks the occupation of shaman into her well-worn cap.
“All great artists are shamans,” says Grimm. “Everyone who is a musician and goes into an altered state of conscience is a shaman, and music puts you in that altered state of conscience.”
This mystical connection between a musician and their audience was one of the many reasons Grimm teamed up with the Ordo Templi Orientis, also known as OTO, to curate the Musicka Mystica Maxima Festival, a new sort of event featuring musicians who all practice magic, kicking off Monday at Santos Party House.
“We have been kicking the idea about for a year,” said Peter Seals, aka Frater Puck of the OTO. “Certain synchronistic occurrences made it seem that now was the time.”
When…
Some Pennsylvania Shops Close Doors to Pagan Festival
Some Pa. shops close doors to Pagan festival
By RON TODT (AP) – 2 days ago
ADAMSTOWN, Pa. — In the rolling hills of deeply religious rural Pennsylvania sits Stoudtburg Village, a tiny hamlet modeled on a German town. On weekends, tourists come here to visit shops on the ground floors of closely set three-story houses painted bright colors on pedestrian-only streets.
But this weekend, plans for a nature-worshipping group of modern pagans and witches to hold a festival in this picturesque section of Adamstown are getting a mixed reception, with some shop owners welcoming the visitors but others saying they plan to close.
“My personal feeling is that it’s not something that I’d want to have anything to do with,” said Jane Lesher, standing Friday amid the yarn creations of her shop The…
Fliers and Posters for Esozone 2009
Great design work from Danny Chaoflux, the design mastermind behind Black Sun Gazette. Get these in full size over at the Esozone website.
Also, you should still totally donate to make this year’s Esozone extra special awesome:
