Chaos Mathemagical Cyber-viruses from the Future

One academic's musings on the dynamic interaction between our technologies, our "selves," and our rapid acceleration/disintegration.       

[metamagicalhyperstitions]

The DruidPunk Manifesto (Part Three)

The DruidPunk Manifesto (Part Three)

VI. Okay, but what does it really look like?

Too much theory? Druids were scholars, but of a very different stripe. Theory would be part of their practice. But only a part. So, let’s pull it back. DruidPunk doesn’t come from nowhere. It is an intervention and it fills a gap that we think exists in speculative fiction. So, what do we look to? Who are our influences? What are we reacting to?…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

The DruidPunk Manifesto (Part Two)

The DruidPunk Manifesto (Part Two)

A few people have asked, and I thought that it deserved an answer: right now, there is only one Druidpunk. Me. But I use “we” throughout because I don’t want to be alone in this. And none of these are statements of dogma. They are suggestions. I want DruidPunk to spread like spores, infecting a thousand different cracks in the cultural landscape and yielding a million mutant offshoots. As R.U…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

The DruidPunk Manifesto (Part One)

The DruidPunk Manifesto (Part One)

Editorial Note: What is DruidPunk, anyway?

If you are one of the few people who follows me in any of my online forms, then you know that I’ve been using the term “DruidPunk” (both with and without the camel capitalization) for a bit. It’s been rattling around my brain longer than I’ve been using it publicly. And I’ve been reluctant to make any kind of absolute statement about it because it’s…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Infection Vectors: Fragments Toward a Theory of Techno-Magical Posthuman Collapse

Infection Vectors: Fragments Toward a Theory of Techno-Magical Posthuman Collapse

This is not a fully-formed blog. Instead, it is my first attempt to put something more complex together. Take it as you will… this is fragmentary and contains a lot of quotes with no context.

The Scientific Mystic: A Modern Paradigm for an Ancient Experience

The consensus doesn’t explain our lives. –Grant Morrison

Axiom One:The mystical/shamanic/ecstatic/psychedelic experience is…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Pride Goeth... well, It Goeth Somewhere

Pride Goeth… well, It Goeth Somewhere

It can be easy for me to become self-congratulatory. I hope that I’m not alone in this, and to hear my therapist talk about it I would think I’m not. We like to tell ourselves that we are good people, that we’ve done a good job, that we made a difference. And to that end, I’d like to offer another story:

I used to work at a grocery store to help pay the bills while finishing graduate school.…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Gods and Fathers

And the graven image you know who

With his plastic crucifix, he’s got him fixed

Confuses me as to who and where and why?

As to how he gets his kicks, he gets his kicks

–Ian Anderson, “My God” (1971)

El Greco, “Portrait of an Old Man”

Every now and then, the few people I am still in touch with and knew way back in high school will ask me, “Why didn’t you keep going with your…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

The "Old" Woman and the Tower

The “Old” Woman and the Tower

I bought my first deck of Tarot cards when I was thirteen. It was a Rider-Waite deck that I bought at a “head shop” somewhere near Philadelphia. I was only vaguely aware of Tarot cards, little more than the stereotyped “fortune teller” images. But something about the deck called to me, and I threw down the twelve dollars to get the cards. The Tower was, by far, my favorite.

When I went back to…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Memento Mori... ish

Memento Mori… ish

“Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.” From Plato’s Phaedo

Death has been a concern of mine for a very long time. I feared death from a very young age. To make this point clear, let me start with a story:

As a young child growing up in the late…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Posthuman Collapse Tarot II: The High Priestess

As my tarot journey continues, I come to a card that, honestly, I dreaded working with. Female energies are difficult for me to work with, as I am not as deeply attuned to them as I might wish to be. On top of this, most of the time when I attempt to draw women, they end up looking more like men in drag—there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the energy that this card evokes. But I had…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Posthuman Collapse Tarot I: The Magician

Posthuman Collapse Tarot I: The Magician

The second Major Arcana card, and—following certain traditions such as Rider-Waite—the first numbered card of the Major, we have “The Magician.” In keeping with the themes and concepts I am keen to explore this tarot card mixes the technological and the arcane. [Note: I see absolutely no difference between the two; “the technological” and “the arcane” are the same. I plan to create a blog post on…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Gods and Fathers

And the graven image you know who

With his plastic crucifix, he’s got him fixed

Confuses me as to who and where and why?

As to how he gets his kicks, he gets his kicks

–Ian Anderson, “My God” (1971)

  This is not my painting; this is El Greco’s “Portrait of a Man”

Every now and then, the few people I am still I touch with and knew way back in high school will ask me, “Why didn’t you keep going…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Doing the Work

The image is not mine, but came from Heaven Dragon. I didn’t take a picture of our meeting as it was a long time ago, and he drank coffee anyway.

“Life gets in the way.” A long time ago, a friend told me this. It was I reference to how long we had gone without talking to one another. We are the kind of friends who don’t talk for six months, and then when we reconnect, we pick up exactly where we…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

[Note: I’ve been a bit behind in my posting because I wanted to write about my personal tarot process. However, I’m not quite ready to post on the first card so it seemed like a good idea to post this instead. I will have a post together about my interpretation of and vision for The Fool soon.]

The jacket with the raven banner

An important person in my life saw me the other day. I was wearing my…

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[metamagicalhyperstitions]

Posthuman Collapse Tarot

Terence McKenna, Psychonaut

Terence McKenna once described the work of alchemy as renewing the exhausted symbol system of the late Medieval period (I believe it was in this lecture). I would argue that our modern symbols have reached a similar point of exhaustion: we live in a post-literate society that has raised polysemous symbols to an art form. Memes and GIFs are the new cultural currency,…

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[megalopoliscity]

Skyline | Manila

[metamagicalhyperstitions]

ACS 3000: Technology and Culture

This is the class Tumblr for ACS 3000: Technology and Culture.