this means war!

"i wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are over in pakistan, israel and pakistan, and all those other different places"
or
"there are two kinds of people in the world; people who love jesus, and people who dont."

dodgeball?

dodgeball.

free your mind... will the masonry follow?

Human progress is our cause,
liberty of thought our supreme wish,
freedom of conscience our mission,
and the guarantee of equal rights
to all people everywhere our ultimate goal.

now who could have a problem with someone saying that?
well, you, possibly. i think most folks would agree with what is being said. i'm not so sure who is saying it would be as warmly received. see, the above is the creed of the scottish rite supreme council, 33°, S.J. USA, the southern jurisdiction of the 'scottish rite' branch of freemasonry.

the image of freemasonry is, for me, all mixed up with some unexamined ideas about sectarianism in scotland, establishment figures, and some varied conspiracy lunacy encountered in my youth. my vague notion of the whole nebulous beast that is speculative masonry was given a face by grant morrison's character sir miles from the invisibles, and not much happened to change it from then on.

not much, that is, until i met a young german chap wandering australia and was present when someone initiated him into the temple of techno via the gates of ecstatic release.
his was the first voice that i had ever heard in favour of the order to which i gave any credence, and he started me wondering. my wondering didnt get very far, to be honest, still being massively tied to the notion of freemasons as a negative, 'establishment' influence on the world at large.

a big part of my difficulty with the whole idea, i think, is my early introduction to anarchism's favourite soundbyte "no gods, no managers", which would seem mutually exclusive with "the great architect" concept so central to masonic life.
in the battle of anarchists versus masons i've always been with the anarchists.
i have been a friend of the former for a while, my love of punk and the many tendrils of rebellious thinking that surround it informing that love.
but you know how it is with friends; you take their side without thinking too hard about it.

i guess i'm realising my folly, and refamiliarising myself with the truth that sometimes your friends are wrong. not always, clearly, but i reckon it pays to be open to the idea that they might be, especially when your friends are political ideologies.

what might be of interest to someone interrogating the unexamined prejudices about freemasonry they had swallowed whole all their life, as and when they were handed to them?
well, a before and after exposition of the experience of undergoing the 32nd degree would be a good start.

before:
tomorrow i'm taking the 32 degree of scottish rite masonry
after:
the slow motion revolution

thank you barbelith.
again.

remembering John Dee

John motherfuckin Dee, bitch.

the man is a legend.
i'm not being flippant here, he really is, quite literally, a legend.
he is also a very real historical figure, and the two are not as separate as you might expect from the figure behind a legend so very like a character from shakespeare.

the thing is, he is a character from shakespeare.
Dee was the original prospero on that fated island in the tempest.
he isnt like a character from fiction; a character from fiction is a century spanning tribute to him.
he was of the elite mathematicians, astronomers, astrologers, geographers, and occultists of his day, named by many as the father of that last one in the united kingdom, and even spent some of his illustrious time here on the mortal plane as consultant to his queen, queen elizabeth I, coining for her the phrase 'the british empire'.


from wikipedia;

Dee was an intensely pious Christian, but his Christianity was deeply influenced by the Hermetic and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrines that were pervasive in the Renaissance. He believed that number was the basis of all things and the key to knowledge, that God's creation was an act of "numbering". From Hermeticism, he drew the belief that man had the potential for divine power, and he believed this divine power could be exercised through mathematics. His cabalistic angel magic (which was heavily numerological) and his work on practical mathematics (navigation, for example) were simply the exalted and mundane ends of the same spectrum, not the antithetical activities many would see them as today. His ultimate goal was to help bring forth a unified world religion through the healing of the breach of the Catholic and Protestant churches and the recapture of the pure theology of the ancients.

say what you will about him, he is certainly one of history's most wonderful and fearsomely wise sons, and will no doubt be remembered yet another four hundred years after his death as an old man of over eighty.
yes, over eighty. John Dee saw almost all of the 1500s (save the 27 years he was yet to be born), and some of the 1600s.

a very long life, and one filled with many far reaching actions and words.
John motherfucking Dee, bitch.