TOP TEN POSTS OF 2010

Last year was a great year for These New Old Traditions, with all sorts of interesting pieces coming down the wire. Here’s a list of the top ten most read pieces:

10. PLAYING NORDIC: The fine line between honoring one’s own heritage and creepy white pride cultishness…, by Onalistus Reveler
“Conservatives befriending pagan traditions (often specifically Heathenism, also known as Germanic Paganism) hover so close to the ideas of the men’s movement, and to supposedly ‘post-racial” concepts of racial solidarity, you just wish sometimes they’d take off their Norse helmet and be like, Look. We take pride in being white. We relish in dated concepts of ‘maleness.’ And, we believe ethnic purity is a real thing that should be preserved. Instead, so many PagaCons try and hide their racism beneath the leaves on their Odin altar, burying their bigotry in notions of ‘roots’ and ‘heritage.'”

Find the rest after the jump….

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PHIL HINE UPLOADS HIS CHAOS INTERNATIONAL ARTICLES TODAY!

Chaos Magick mastermind extraordinaire, Phil Hine, just made available digital formats of all his Chaos International articles. From his website enfolding.org:

A friend recently asked me if I had any of my old contributions to Chaos International magazine in digital format. I’ve scanned all the articles I think are worth hanging onto (mostly written under my own name, with a few using the pseudonyms “Kalkinath” or “Cliff Othick”) and collected them into a zip file which can be downloaded from Mediafire (zip is about 76mb): http://www.mediafire.com/?03bxcf7e4eknny4

Particularly great is his piece on sodomy and spirituality recalling a time when his boyfriend put a bottle in his boom-boom.

Enjoy! (It’s about 76 MBs of stuff, so make room).

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TWO RECENT MAGICK(ALLY) CHAOTIC ARTICLES: Phil Hine and Peter J. Carroll

Chaos Magick ritual involving teleconferencing

The quite lovable Phil Hine, author of Condensed Chaos and man of many interests has a new piece up on his Enfolding site title “Occult gender regimes: Polarity and the body electric,” which is just a grand ole read. Hine has been going just where I’d like to see chaots headed these days: identity politics. Not that that’s exactly what Hine is talking about, and not that that’s exactly what I feel like talking about, but I think it’s good for chaos magick as a whole. In this most recent piece Hine discusses the roots of the energetic polarities we’re so keen on regurgitating (masculine and feminine) and how we might reconsider these.

“Its not unusual to see arguments for polarity supported by exhortations to think of how polarity “works” in terms of electricity, magnetism, or the generic, all-encompassing term “energy”. My contention here, is that the explanations of sex/gender polarity which are underwritten by appeals to “energies” of various kinds did not pop out of nowhere and that, despite ahistorical appeals to esoteric tradition or the energy systems of “ancient cultures”, the roots of these discourses can be traced back to concepts which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly with reference to electricity and thermodynamics, and the technologies of the industrial age – telegraphy for example, which were used to create new understanding of bodies in energetic terms.”

In other chaos news…

Peter J. Carroll, considered to be one of the originators of chaos magick and founder of the Rebel Physics website, has got a new-ish (5/18/2010) piece up titled “A New Paradigm of Science and Sorcery:Physics and the Magician, Part Two” that deals with the concept of “metadynamics,” which according to him

“attempts to provide a paradigm of Science and Sorcery. To do this it shows how the three-dimensional transactional time in the HD8 interpretation of quantum and particle physics could allow divination and enchantment to occur.”

Confusing? Maybe this will help:

“Metadynamics, the study of our fundamental ideas about what phenomena actually do, has become perhaps humanity’s most powerful and least recognized tool for understanding the universe. The great concepts of causality, chance, probability, symmetry, and the conservation laws all fall within the remit of what I would call Metadynamics, and they all dominate the way we perceive the world and act in it to such an extent that we rarely stop to question these concepts.”

I’ve long been intimidated by Carroll’s foray into things “meta-” and “dynamic” but find this most recent article to be just about digestible, if not entirely satisfying to taste. Enjoy!

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LITTLE BITS ON CHAOS MAGICK: “Prime Chaos” gets an updated intro by Phil Hine

All that is currently pagan blog, The Wild Hunt, posted a nice piece on Chaos Magick by writer, anthropologist, and esotericist Amy Hale, which takes an honest look at some updated critiques of the DIY anarcho-magickal movement started in the 1980s. For those who may be unfamiliar with the movement:

“When Chaos Magick sprung forth in Britain in the 1980s, it styled itself as the naughty child of magickal movements. Inspired by a combination of punk and DIY culture, the work of Austin Osman Spare, Thelema, Robert Anton Wilson, and popular culture, Chaotes like Ray Sherwin and Peter Carroll proposed a rejection of ‘orders’ and ‘traditions’ and ‘lineages’ and advocated an emphasis on the perfection of magickal technique for the purposes of getting results by concentrating on the universals of magickal technology.”

When I first came across Chaos Magick I, like many others before me, felt as if I had stumbled upon the Holy Grail of contemporary esotericism. Anarchistic, pagan, DIY, fuck you, magickal, homo-friendly, Chaos Magick seemed to have it all. Everywhere that neo-paganism failed for me (think: ubiquitously pony-tailed Druid impersonators) CM seemed to pick up the loose ends. For me, CM came as a necessary assault on the preciousness of privileged long ago mysteries. It was an attack on everything that held the old ways to be better than new ones. In short, for me, Chaos Magick was the kick in the ass paganism needed in order to get off the “doth thou” and “wilst ye” train.

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