Noetic Punnary
It sounds hard to believe, but Nemu’s End has gathered something of a following at Furrowbrow Abbey in Norfolk.
In fact, this is one of the finest examples of 14th century church architecture, so I am pleased, if a little surprised, to find that my book has found its way into its cloisters.
Stranger still, the abbot and some of the sisters of charity have been sending me poetry they have composed.
I can’t quite fathom the connection with my own researches, but I will share it all the same.
Thoth speaks
Thoth speaks.
And indeed,
Thoth writes.
Writes riddles and roles,
Binding and unwinding,
Text tells two tales or more.
But at the centre,
Six swords slice through
Wooly thinking,
Fluffy thinking,
And pages of thoughts undisciplined,
Cutting a path past sorrow and peace
To something left ineffed.
Thoth's ink covers the parchment
With combinations of letters exhausted,
Forms fixed in finite space.
Sphynx, hold thy tongue and keep thy secrets
Lest the goddess remain veiled.
Naked, she is revealed in brilliant black noise.
And in the word CHAOS let the book be sealed.
(by Sister Josephine Thirdspoon)
Prophesy for Profit
One day, every child learns that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, but how do you recover from discovering that he was put to work as a Coca-Cola poster boy? Hark ye! It wasn’t singing angels heralding the birth of our lord but dancing Santas, festive bargains and Christmas number ones, followed by specials on weight loss plans and detox tea.
I can cope with shattered dreams as well as the next man who grew up in the 80s, but what about dreams repackaged and sold back to me? Look closely, children of the nightmare. Shining lights in toy shop windows guide wide-eyed wonder to plastic tack moulded in toxic sweat shops. We adore children with kingly gifts, making a pilgrimage into debt as we seed them with our greed. This is mythology is at the mercy of the market, folklore flogged by Snow White Barbie and the seven Disney dwarves, Satan’s claws deep into Santa Claus.
Our yearly celebration of unbridled capitalism leaves Xmas trees discarded in the street. It generates enough wrapping paper to cover Guernsey. It generates enough moolah for British toy companies to be registered in Guernsey, but not enough goodwill for them to pay British tax. Mary trekked to Bethlehem to pay her taxes, and gave birth in a stable. Tesco trekked offshore to evade taxes, and NHS maternity beds will be cut in 2012 as they were in 2011. Read the rest of this entry »
Nemmy Xmas
The End of the Year is Nigh!
(And so is Christmas)
In keeping with the festive season, and with my fears that money won’t mean anything in the near future, Nemu’s End is on offer at less than half price!
(This is called “creating urgency” when car salesmen do it, but for this reverend it is plain and simple doom-mongering amidst the collapse of the economies of Europe).
Yes that’s right! For only £10, you can have a copy of Nemu’s End.
And UK orders made with the code COUNTDOWNUK by December 14th receive an extra 25% off, and it will arrive before Xmas.
And you can have a digital copy for your Kindle or your computer for any price you like.
(before you have to swap it for stolen potatoes)
Apoc-cupy London!
The End is Nigh! Occupy!
“The End is Nigh!” is a delight to behold, written in bold on a sandwich board or screamed out on a street corner in the ecstasy of doom, but what does it mean?
Sadly our own Christian enthusiastics at Occupy London are too busy dancing jigs, hoisting enormous crucifixes about and berating strangers to preach about the latter days, but this relentless reverend does not tire in his evangelism. Once again, oh children of perpetual resistance, let us reoccupy scripture, and rescue the good news from bad translation.
“The End of the World” comes from Matthew 13, and the word translated as “world” is αἰών, or aeon. Aeon means pretty much the same in Greek as it does in English, an epoch or age, such as the Iron Age or the Age of Feudalism. It is a period of time defined by some theme. The Gnostics had a slightly more nuanced take on it, but the simple fact of the matter is that it doesn’t mean “world”. “There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth”, as Matthew continues, but something survives, though it is entirely beyond our imagination. (Rev 21:1)
The translation of aeon is so suspect that it raises questions. In 1611 when the King James Bible was produced, England was gripped by revolutionary fever. Against a background of creeping inflation, the seizure of common lands, the wording of scripture was a serious business. A generation before, 5,000 Cornish Catholics chanting “Kill all the Gentlemen!” had perished in a revolt over a new prayer book, and in 1605 another Catholic had failed in his Gunpowder Plot. King James hoped to calm religious unrest by commissioning a standard Bible for all Englishmen, as simple and non-provocative as possible. Whereas “the end of the world” is beyond the imagination of all but the doomiest, “the end of the aeon” was exactly what many revolutionary Bible-bashers wanted to bring about. Read the rest of this entry »
Occupy Matthew!
The bells, the bells, the bells which ruined my blessed sleep on the first Saturday of the occupation barely register anymore, having merged into the general background, but who ever imagined that all this Jesus-talk would become so normal? On the cathedral steps, everyone has become a theologian, taking up whips against the money-changers and rendering unto Caesar what is his.
We seem to have agreed that social justice and consideration for the poor are fundamental Christian values, and, along with several important men in frocks, we are prepared to make sacrifices for them. But what kind of tactics does scripture suggest?
“Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matt 5:39)
This must be one of the best known Biblical passages, and one of the least understood, because whilst it appears to be a piece of masochistic nonsense designed to enslave you for generations, it is in fact a subversive’s crowbar. Read the rest of this entry »
St. Pauccupied
I try to guard against optimism in general, but having spent the last three days and nights occupying central London, I must admit to feeling a little cheery.
We met at the London stock exchange and, after failing to occupy Paternoster Square, we moved a few yards to the front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. A constant stream of cameras filed past to snap my twins, grinning, politicised, and loving the limelight. Julian Assange said a few words, and people shouted through megaphones, but the police were better organised than us, and stormed in after a few hours to make a line in front of the cathedral pillars.
They took shifts to hold the line all night. On Sunday morning the canon arrived for mass, saying that he had no problem with the protesters, their signs and their tents, but he’d like the police to leave the steps. They said they were there to protect the pillars, and the canon replied that the pillars seemed alright. He didn’t mention that they had survived three centuries and two world wars, but the police filed out all the same, with neither warrant nor permission to stay.
I was in my robes, of course, and you can imagine my delight when a chap from the Socialist Worker Party asked me if St. Paul’s would open for mass. I took the opportunity for some guerrilla evangelism, gave the poor atheist a few crumbs from the Lord’s table, so to speak, and instructed him on the subversive subtext concealed within the turning of the other cheek.
The camp grew over the next few days, with tarps tied, a library popping up, lectures and workshops organised, and the kitchen collecting a huge amount of food from donations and from skips. A few tents took off in the wind, but we tied them to drains, pillars, water bottles, church windows and each other, and a kitchen marquee arrived and went up on Monday, just hours before the first rain fell. Amongst the occupiers, tourists and passers-by, there were suits from the stock exchange. A few shouted abuse, most just milled about, but one or two went on camera to vent their fury about mismanagement of the economy.
How long we will stay depends to a large degree on how long the canon remains happy with us, but winter is coming in hard and Dale Farm is being forcibly cleared of its residents. We might expect some very angry people to join us fresh from their eviction.
For the time being, however, things are cool, and there are protests in progress all around the world. Like many men and most bankers, I take pleasure in large numbers, so scenes of civil disorder from 1000 cities give me cause for uncharacteristic optimism.
Come down if you can make it.
And bring some hot water bottles!
Ayahuascademia
Unrobed and undercover, I recently gave a talk in a secret Amsterdam basement to a group of researchers engaged in the academic study of ayahausca.
My point was that clinicians, therapists and anthropologists should take note of how traditional practitioners work with ayahuasca, and pay attention to what is considered important in the Amazon. Doing that, we might avoid the mistakes of the nineteenth century medics who investigated Chinese medicine and hypnosis with their own limited tools and concepts, ignoring reports of hundreds of individuals cured of diphtheria, and hundreds of cases of amputation under hypnosis.
Riots & Revelation
“Shop looted and youths storm McDonald’s and start cooking their own food”
- Daily Mail
(Do you want Armageddon with that, sir?)
I was at a demonstration once when someone tried to climb the Downing Street fence. The police responded as you might expect, we all got squeezed a bit, and I went home, shaken by my first taste of civil unrest. Some years later I saw a football riot kick off in Manchester, from the top deck of a bus on the Oxford Road. It was so stupid that it was funny, fizzling out as quickly as it had started.
Tonight, London braces itself for a fourth night of disorder, with police numbers tripled, and talk of water cannon and rubber bullets. I have been teaching about riots at school today, pausing as sirens go past the window, encouraging Colombians to loose the “ee” in “eesmashing”, drilling Koreans to say “vandals” rather than “bandoos”. We were joking about what we would loot that night, but speeding fire engines aren’t all that funny. Stories of rioters breaking into McDonald’s and flipping burgers are hilarious, but also spine-chilling. Given complete autonomy, what kind of mind chooses to do that?
Unprecedented riots look like part of an unprecedented apocalypse to me. Rioters and authorities, like their counterparts in the Middle East, co-ordinate their efforts through technologies which didn’t exist a few years ago. The Arab world is ablaze, the economies of the US and much of Southern Europe are melting, but perhaps something is emerging from the flames. Residents of some areas got together last night to defend their streets when it became clear that the police were overstretched, proving that a united community is quite capable of facing challenges without state intervention. The broom army organised their clean-ups on the same new technologies as the police and thieves.
Radio Revelations
Straight outa Texas!
On American Freedom Radio…
With Casper Leitch on Time4Hemp Live!
And the Reverend Chris Bennett
And the Reverend Dean Becker
And the Reverend Nemu – Forming a high holy trinity on one wavelength!
Pyschoactives in the ancient pages of the Bible,
and wickedness in the new bills of parliament:
Yee-ha!
Links:
Onward & Foreword!
Good Tidings, Bold Brethren!
My HEART is SHOUTNG, oh Sisters of Sense and Sweetness!
The author David Jay Brown has written a glowing foreword to Nemu’s End
He is, by way of introduction above and beyond his many honours and accolades, the guy who came up with “BS” for Belief System, as used in the books of his friend Robert Anton Wilson.
Scroll down for his bio and his foreword.
But first, the spirit of the Lord moves me to poetry, and to photoshop:
