In Pursuit of Mysteries

Persian Collection of Austin Spare’s Writings Available

I was contacted yesterday by the translator, Sepand, of a Persian (Farsi) collection of the writings of Austin Osman Spare. Sepand has released this translation under a Creative Commons license, which I appreciate. He’s made a hardcover of it available for purchase through lulu for those that prefer a print copy.

For those that are unaware of 20th century Western Esotericism and its history, Austin Spare was an artist born in the late 19th century who popularized a method of magical practice that involved the creation of sigils and other talismanic objects through his artwork and using desire to facilitate the execution of one’s will. He was one of the inspirations behind much of the “Chaos Magic” movement within esoteric practice from the 1970s through to the present.

There is a brief wikipedia article on Spare as well but it really doesn’t go into a lot of the details of his thought or life.

Sepand’s translation contains the following works by Spare:

• Focus of Life
• The Book of Pleasure
• Anathema of ZOS
• Earth Inferno

I’ve run a site for Spare’s writings on Hermetic.com for a while and you can find html copies (with pictures) of some of his work there. Sepand had contacted me to see about hosting his file on the site. I’m interested in doing this but I am afraid that hosting a 5+ megabyte file may do bad things to my bandwidth usage so I’ll have to figure out a good solution for hosting the file (or just biting the bullet and sucking up the bandwidth cost).

If there was a practitioner of Western Esotericism likely to push the hot buttons of the current authorities in Iran, you’d be hard pressed to find one able to do so more than Spare (with the exception of Aleister Crowley). With Spare’s focus on sexuality and his provocative imagery, he’s likely to cause fits amongst the puritanical. This is leaving aside the heretical nature of his ideas concerning magic and the will. Sepand seems to be based out of Tehran so I will raise my glass to him for having the daring to follow his beliefs in a less than friendly environment. I wonder how many magicians that I’ve known would do the same (and then publish!)?

Sepand also has his own website on Google’s pages hosting service. On that site, he also has a Persian translation of Aleister Crowley’s “Book of the Law”, though I doubt if it is OTO approved and official.

Koyasan Pilgrimages

I noticed today that Philip Nicoloff’s book, “Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great Sun Buddha”, is out now.

I ordered a copy of this as I have been waiting for it to come out. I went looking for more books on Koyasan and visiting Koyasan before my trip to Japan in September. Koyasan is one of the places where we spent a few days, including two nghts staying in temples, and was one of the most interesting places that we went in Japan, especially for students of Buddhism or Japanese history.

The cover blurb states:

For more than one thousand years, the vast Buddhist monastery and temple complex on remote Mount Kōya has been one of Japan’s most important religious centers. Saint Kōbō Daishi (also known as Kūkai), founder of the esoteric Shingon school and one of the great figures of world Buddhism, consecrated the mountain for holy purposes in the early 800s. Buried on Kōyasan, Kōbō Daishi is said to be still alive, selflessly advocating for the salvation of all sentient beings.

Located south of Osaka, Kōyasan has attracted visitors from every station of Japanese life, and in recent years, more than a million tourists and pilgrims visit annually. In Sacred Kōyasan, the first book-length study in English of this holy Buddhist mountain, Philip L. Nicoloff invites readers to accompany him on a pilgrimage. Together with the author, the pilgrim-reader ascends the mountain, stays at a temple monastery, and explores Kōyasan’s main buildings, sacred statues, mandalas, and famous forest cemetery. Author and reader participate in the full annual cycle of rituals and ceremonies, and explore the life and legend of Kōbō Daishi and the history of the mountain.

Written for both the scholarly and general reader, Sacred Kōyasan will appeal to potential travelers, dedicated armchair travelers, and all readers interested in Buddhism and Japanese culture.

It is probably worth checking out if you are interested in this sort of thing.

Portal Physics

Valve Software came out recently with the game, “Portal.” In this game, the player runs the victim of an unfortunate science experiment through a series of puzzles involving the ability to open pairs of portals (one blue, one red). These are, effectively, a portable hole. Things that go in one portal come out the other. Because momentum is unaffected, a number of the puzzles involve you throwing yourself off of a high place, falling through a portal on the ground, and then ejecting yourself at high velocity at the conveniently placed other end of the portal.

Paul Spooner has written an amusing paper on the implications of the physics of Portal and the creative application of the same. A sample below:

Free Kinetic Energy

The basic way in which portal technology is used in Portal is to move matter from place to place. Apart from conquering distance and re-directing energy balls, the obvious direction to go is straight down, the infinite elevator shaft. This makes use of the earth’s gravity to get free kinetic energy. In Portal you mostly just fling yourself about with it, but this kinetic energy could be used in several ways.

Try placing a magnet in a vertical tube and coiling wire around the tube. With the portals added it becomes linear generator! Strap some mass to the magnet and evacuate the air. Now the generator will charge up kinetic energy when there is no power being used. A more military application is the kinetic energy weapon. Evacuate the tube and throw some long rods into it (or ball bearings, old washing-machines, whatever). With the air resistance gone any object in the tube will reach fantastic speeds. In just eight hours it will have exceeded 9/10 of the speed of light! Redirect it through a portal for a nuclear-style explosion. You could launch stuff into space this way too. Of course, once you launched a portal (or the associated generator) into space you wouldn’t need to launch anything else.

Fun stuff.

Oh, and the game is fun too. I’ve played through it a couple of times and unlocked the bonus levels. I just wish there were more maps available.