Everything You Know is Wrong — Disinformation: The Podcast Series Finale
Everything You Know is Wrong — Disinformation: The Podcast Series Finale
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This two-hour edition of Disinformation: The Podcast is the final episode of the series. Join Raymond Wiley, Joe McFall, Austin Gandy, and Joe Nolan for one last journey into the bizarre undercurrents of the human psyche. Raymond talks about the recent release of his first book, The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument. Austin Gandy’s Invisible College returns with a new take on the infamous Knights Templar, and the Oslo shootings they are said to have inspired. Joe Nolan’s Insomnia delves into the undying myths of Carlos Castaneda, and the New Age subculture they have inspired. Finally, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall present a retrospective discussion of their podcast careers, along with impressions of the occult mysteries, conspiracy theories, and obscure realms of belief featured in their seminal broadcasts. After 7 years, 80 podcasts, and more than a million downloads, these two friends say thank you and goodbye to the audience … For now.
‘Union of Opposites’ Ritual Occult Performance
Brian Butler featured in the disinformation TV series and is Kenneth Anger’s main collaborator. His latest work, ‘Union of Opposites,’ is an experiment in ritual magick, combining the use of sound and light with the intent of creating a collective out-of-body experience. It will debut at Art Los Angeles Contemporary on Saturday, January 21, 2012. Brian told disinformation:
Aleister Crowley defines magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This statement provides the magickal formula in a very simple yet powerful way.
Union of Opposites is a public ritual performance that explores how the principals of magick operate in the astral and physical worlds. It is a live experiment with the participation of an audience. I have designed this working to activate the chakras in a specific order that is very unconventional. Given the advancements in science and technology since Crowley’s lifetime the rituals must be constantly revised in order…
Did Lady Gaga Perform A Satanic Ritual in a London Hotel Room?
So this earlier Disinfo.com post ain’t so nuts after all? This story has been removed from the Independent’s website (cached version in link):
Lady Gaga allegedly left “large amounts of blood” in a hotel bath. The eccentric singer reportedly shocked staff when she checked out of London’s lavish Intercontinental Hotel last summer and they discovered a pool of red liquid in the tub of her suite.
One housekeeper claimed the pop superstar was “bathing in blood as part of a Satanic ritual”.
She told website Truthquake: “Lady Gaga left large amounts of blood in the suite during a stay this summer. The incident was reported to the concierge, who was told to put it out of her mind.”
Other sources believe Gaga could have been using the red liquid as part of a “weird” stage costume or prop.
This Weekend in Portland, OR: 5th Annual EsoZone Alternative Culture and Thought Festival
The fifth annual EsoZone Portland event will be held this weekend at p:ear, Friday evening November 18th and Saturday November 19th (see the website for schedule and location information).
EsoZone is festival celebrating alternative culture and thought. It follows a hybrid unconference/conference model, meaning that in addition to pre-programmed content, participants can propose their own sessions to share their own ideas, projects and skills with the group.
This years presentations include:
- Tom Henderson, author of the forthcoming book Punk Rock Mathematics, on illusory nature of self.
- Eric Schiller of Beyond Growth on “digital hipsterism” and the rise of anti-intellectualism in social media.
- Yoga for Slackers lead by Loren mccRory.
- Grant Writing for Artists and Other Alien Beings lead by Amanda Sledz.
- Anarcho-Sewing lead by Jillian Ordes-Finley.
Plus music and performances, and whatever sessions are proposed by this year’s participants.
Egypt Closes Great Pyramid to Prevent 11/11/11 Rituals
Weird. Has anyone been digging into this story? Reports the AP via MSNBC:
Egypt’s antiquities authority closed the largest of the Giza pyramids Friday following rumors that groups would try to hold spiritual ceremonies on the site at 11:11 on Nov. 11, 2011.
The authority’s head Mustafa Amin said in a statement Friday that the pyramid of Khufu, also known as Cheops or the Great Pyramid, would be closed to visitors until Saturday morning for “necessary maintenance.”
The closure follows a string of unconfirmed reports in local media that unidentified groups would try to hold “Jewish” or “Masonic” rites on the site to take advantage of mysterious powers coming from the pyramid on the rare date.
Amin called all reports of planned ceremonies at the site “completely lacking in truth.”
The director of the complex, Ali al-Asfar, said Friday that an Egyptian company requested permission last month to hold an event called “hug the pyramid,”…
Aleister Crowley May Have Been Behind The ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’
In post-WWI London, the public’s attention was gripped by a string of mysterious deaths of people linked in one way or another to the unsealing of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Was the “pharaoh’s curse” in fact carried out by Aleister Crowley? Via the Telegraph:
Six mysterious London deaths famously attributed to the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ were actually murders by notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley, a historian claims in a new book. Incredible parallels between Crowley and Jack the Ripper have also been discovered during research by historian Mark Beynon.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, London was gripped by the mythical curse of Tutankhamun, the Egyptian boy-king, whose tomb was uncovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter. More than 20 people linked to the opening of the pharaoh’s burial chamber in Luxor in 1923 bizarrely died over the following years – six of them in the capital.
Victims included Carter’s personal secretary Captain Richard Bethell, who was found…
The Kybalion with Philip Deslippe
The Infinite and the Beyond — Episode #23 — The Kybalion with Philip Deslippe
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In the latest episode of The Infinite and the Beyond, we look into the history of The Kybalion with author Philip Deslippe, who wrote the extensive introduction for the newly released book The Kybalion, The Definitive Edition. Seemingly shrouded in mystery, The Kybalion has been a popular text for the last one hundred years that and has been a big influence in many people’s lives. In the early episodes of this podcast we went through The Kybalion and the seven hermetic laws that it discusses. In our conversation with Philip Deslippe we learn about some of his recent findings in regards to the text and its author William Walker Atkinson and we wrap up our discussion with Atkinson’s lost book The Seven Cosmic Laws just now appearing in print.
In “A Corner in the Occult” we look into famous American occultist, Tarot expert, and author Paul Foster Case. Not only was Case an initiate of the famous Alpha et Omega and even a Freemason, but he was also the founder of the Builders of the Adytum an Order following in the tradition of the Western Esoteric Tradition which still exists to this day …
BOMB and Transgressive Art
Born in the middle of nowhere Raymond Salvatore Harmon has wandered the earth, building things out of nothing, constructing realities from vague indifference and cultivating a prolonged distaste for both academia and any kind of manual labor.
RSH: “At all levels, ultimately graffiti is an act of cultural insurgency. It is a rebellion; against the norm, against society at large, against corporations, against the city or “government.” Graffiti is the act of changing the visual environment in the public space. It doesn’t matter if its a quickly scrawled tag or a well developed painting, it shouldn’t be there and it is.”
James Curcio: To begin with, I’d like to hear what you think the function of graffiti art is. Maybe it has a purpose, maybe it doesn’t, but even if you don’t intend a purpose, a social action like that has a reaction, it serves a function. They don’t necessarily all need to have the…
Gnosis: The Not-So-Secret History of Jesus
This article, which discusses the Mystery School origins of Christianity, comes from my new memoir, The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic through Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books.
In December 1945, during the tail end of the most devastating war in human history, a peasant named Mohammed Ali of the al-Samman clan stumbled upon an earthenware jar near limestone caves in the deserts of Upper Egypt. He feared an evil djin (genie) resided inside, but hoping for lost riches, he still opened the jar. To his disappointment, twelve ragged leather-bound codices fell onto the ground. He didn’t realize these 1,200 weathered pages contained a priceless treasure with dozens of lost Christian gospels that had been hidden away for 1,600 years. Mohammed carried them home to his mother, who kept warm throughout the night by feeding pages of what we now call The Nag Hammadi Library to her fireplace.
These fifty-two texts, with…
“Shadow Land”: Memoir of a Medium
Elizabeth d’Espérance, one of the star mediums of the Victorian era, penned a fascinating memoir filled with rich descriptions of altered states and otherworldly visitations. An often-overlooked, first-person account of the 19th century seance from the perspective of the medium herself, Shadow Land is the subject of a recent review at VictorianGothic.org:
Elizabeth d’Espérance grew up in a tired old house on the East End of London, filled with dark, oak-paneled halls and desolate, forbidden rooms that compelled her to explore. “I was very fond of wandering about from one empty room to another,” she wrote,
“and of sitting with my dolls on the broad low window seats, whence I would be fetched with an exclamation of horror and wonder by our servant, who considered my liking for the haunted rooms as “uncanny” and unnatural, threatening me with the ghosts and their vengeance if I persisted in invading their domains by myself.
“I could never quite understand…
Spiritualism was the Psychedelic Movement of the 1870s
…complete with altered states, free love, and millenarian ideals. In this piece, Victorian Gothic discusses “The Lighter Side of Victorian Spiritualism”:
“One important and often overlooked aspect of Victorian mediumship is that it could be enormous fun,” says Alex Owen in The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. This is the picture that emerges when one looks particularly at the “star mediums” of the 1870′s, who were known for performing theatrical, full-body materializations for eager audiences.
In a dim seance room, the medium would enter a closed cabinet wherein she would tap the mysterious psychical forces that would allow her to manifest one of her spirit familiars. This familiar would then emerge to from behind the curtain to entertain the assembled sitters. Each medium had her own repertoire of otherworldly entitles at her command, each with his or her own distinct personality, speech patterns, favored tricks and antics. They could be…
Robert Johnson Opened the Gates of Hell for Elvis Presley
Courtesy of Brandt Hardin
Robert Johnson supposedly made a deal with the Devil to obtain his blues licks and Elvis Presley was the televised Son of God. How appropriate that they share a death day at RockStarMartyr.net:
Even after the abolition of slavery, life in the Mississippi cotton fields was brief, brutal, and as boring as an aging preacher’s Sunday sermon. No wonder fieldworkers sought the fleeting comforts of cheap moonshine and loose women at the Saturday night juke joints.
Robert Johnson could mix it up with the best of them, but he was never one for hard work. His bizarre, spider-like fingers weren’t intended for cotton-pickin’ and penny-pinchin’. They were made for crawling across guitar necks, whiskey bottles, and the legs of middle-aged sugar mamas. If Johnson was going to suffer hell to make a dollar, it would be as a wayfaring musician. His road was full of adventure and ecstasy, but…
Occult Map Of New York
Last year the venerable Watkins Books published a Spiritual Sightings Map of London. The intent was always to expand the map globally and now disinformation author Gary Lachman (Turn Off Your Mind) has contributed an Occult Map of New York:
I had already been living in New York on East 10th Street for a few months when in the early spring of 1975 I was asked to play bass in a fledgling rock band that would later become fairly successful. Their name was Blondie and their bass player had quit to join another group, Television.
CBGB on the Bowery was just starting to make a name for itself and would soon become the home of an honest-to-goodness scene. Soon after joining the group I had to give up my place on East 10th, and I moved in with the singer and guitarist. Their tiny flat in Little Italy, however, quickly proved too small…
Aleister Crowley’s Dirty, Dirty Poems
Victorian Gothic on Aleister Crowley’s White Stains:
Readers will likely be familiar with Aleister Crowley, the notorious English occultist, bisexual libertine, recreational drug user, founder of the Thelemic religion, leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), and all-around scary wicked person. Those familiar with Crowley strictly through his esoteric writings, however, may be interested to know that one the “Great Beast’s” first forays into publishing consisted of a perverse little volume of erotic poetry entitled White Stains.
It was issued in Amsterdam in 1898 by Leonard Smithers; a leading publisher of English pornography, but also of controversial literature. His clients included Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. White Stains was published in a print run of one hundred copies which, according to rumors in the book world, Crowley is said to have white-stained himself. Most of these were destroyed in 1924 by British Customs; the surviving first editions currently sell for around $4,000 – $10,000.
The authorship of White Stains was attributed to…
Conspiracies and World Peace
The Infinite and the Beyond — Podcast: Episode #021 — Conspiracies and World Peace
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In the latest episode of The Infinite and the Beyond, we look into the popular issues with conspiracy theories and uncover the truth behind what they are. Is the government really spying us? Do conspiracy theories actually reveal anything significant or is there something deeper and more personal behind their existence in the world?
In “A Corner in the Occult” we visit early 20th century Germany and discuss the Nazis and the issues pertaining to their possible involvement with occultism. Many people like to attribute their rise to power and the events pertaining to the Second World War to their involvement in the occult arts and even demonic influence.
We also read some listener email and in “The Essence of Magick” series we talk about visualization and astral projection. Learn why visualization is so important to the magickal arts and learn how to astral project in this episode’s installment of this great and informative series!
And to close, we finish the episode with a look into the ever present concern and pursuit for world peace. Take a new perspective on the issues surrounding world peace and why it may not be the easiest thing to accomplish after all despite what some people say about it.
Douglas Rushkoff On Kicking The Consensus Reality Habit
Doug Rushkoff. Photo by Paul May (CC)
An interview with Douglas Rushkoff via Technoccult:
“When Video Toaster for the Amiga came out everyone was really excited,” he Rushkoff said. “We believed that we could use it to create deeply alternative states of consciousness using lights and colors and things.”
“Today, those technologies are used by companies like Fox News to make you pay attention to what they want you to pay attention to, or to make your eye fall on a particular ad. Stuff like that.”
But he says if you know how the program works, you’re less likely to be hypnotized by it. “There’s two ways to experience magic,” he says. “And I don’t mean stage magic.” You can either experience it as a spectator, watching a priest or guru. Or you can participate. “Having a guru will only take you so far,” he said. “You have to become the guru.”
But it’s not easy.…
Have You Ever Had A Dream So Strange You Were Sure It Wasn’t Your Own?
Via Modern Mythology and Strange Factories’ IndieGoGo page:
Strange Factories is an immersive feature film that tells the story of a world haunted by a phantasmagoric fiction. A unique and powerful project that fuses cinema and theatre within a dreamlike environment to create an experience like no other.
