The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week - The Magical Druid

The Magical Druid
Supplies for Paganism and Pagan Magic

Ok, I didn't just see this this week, but still, I haven't seen anything to beat it...
So the coolest thing this refers to is actually the excellent, high-tech laser engraving device that my friends and colleagues Mike Dangler and Seamus Dillard bought. Just have a look at this:

That’s high-detail line-art translated into wood by computer engraving. It isn’t just wood-burned, though, it’s a nice, tactile 16th-inch deep cut in the wood. It makes a product that feels both natural for its wooden material, and as precise as if it had been cast from resin. They can do it on wood, horn, some kinds of stone, leather, various plastic and who knows what else.



Don't let "Druid" put you off. The lads'
expertise runs from Asatru to Chaos magic
and their willingness to work to you
spec is limitless.



  One of the best opportunities here for magicians is that Magical Druid can handily do custom work. I’m confident they would even work out planetary hours of production (within the limits of their day-jobs…).

A 12" granite Triangle of Manifestation
made to my system's specs.
Cool, eh?

They’ve been using a bit of my artwork, so this is not a disinterested plug, but still, how cool is this:

Yes, it's a jigsaw puzzle, suitable for little hands
and hearts.

 

From unique Rune and ogham sets to handy portable triangles of manifestation, this is a valuable source for unique magical aids. Look for a special offer from me, supported by them, very, very soon…

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

Nanocthulhu Lovecrafti

Now, it's always cool when they find new speces, and it's cool that some scientist gets to name them.
It is very cool when they decide to enshrine the Priest of the Old Ones in the halls of taxonomy.

The Coolest Thing(s) I've Seen This Week - Movie Edition

Nobody knows better than my marvelous wife what a Lovecraft fanboy I am, but long-time readers here will have noticed. One of my favorite sources for Mythos material is the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. They seem to have began as a LARPing crew, but a few years ago they graduated to real movie making with their silent film feature of the Call of Cthulhu, which has gotten wide distribution, right up to Netflix. They must have made a couple of bucks on it, bless 'em, because they've just made available their first talkie, a full-length feature making of The Whisperer in Darkness. In Call of Cthulhu they attempted to make a movie from 1927, the year the story was published. Whispere hit the pages of Weird Tales in 1931, and so we reach the sound era.

Fellow kids, this is the best depiction of a mythos story yet to be filmed. The team understands the feel of Lovecraft's work, the paranoia and claustrophobia, the combination of wonder and danger and fear that HPL's best work produces. Set in a rainy autumn in Vermont, a skeptical folklorist becomes drawn into strange doings in a backwoods cult, in a tale that moves from intimations of demons to interstellar conspiracy.

The original story is told nicely, with just enough expansion to make it more cinematic. These guys can build some props, and the spooky devices and manuscripts of questionable lore are excellent. None of this is exactly high-budget, but, like CoC, the film is in black-and-white, which forgives many sins. In general the film looks great. It also features the single best depiction of a Cthulhu Mythos ritual to date. Just buy it.

Making a movie is on my bucket list. If I made a movie, it would surely have to be some occult adventure or vignette, with ritual and FX. However, my old friend Taliesin Govannon aspires to be Kevin Smith, not Dennis Wheatley. Taliesin has succeeded in making a full-length feature film called Dark of Moon. (See trailers and lots more here) This is a Pagan movie but... it's a romantic comedy. It tells the story of a post-college Coven as the reality of adulthood meets the expectations of youth. The cast goes on a little tour of the alternative community, from Witches to Druids to ghost-hunters, providing some great material for Taliesin's observant wit. So, it's a realistic depiction of modern Paganism - no amped-up magic, no FX, just real people doing what we really do.

Incidentally, I'm in it, for a limited number of seconds, along with many others from our local Grove. We did a shoot in our little festival space, Tredara, and our barn and Nemeton look pretty good. Utterly worth a look!

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

Omega Artworks is a sculpture and toolmaking crew doing some wonderful stuff. The truth is, as a Druidic occultist I have never had a great use for an edged magical tool. The only thing I can think of as a purpose for a magical knife in Pagan ritual would be for sacrificing, and us Reformed Druids don't do that any more. Of course one could still lay a sacred knife or sickle on the non-live-animal things we do offer - bread, ale etc.

If I had a sickle like this, I'd find an excuse to use it.

For grimoire mages, they stand ready to make any of the Solomonic tools, and lots of good examples are shown on their site. My only small complaint is that they've gone all Harry Potter with the shape of the Solomonic Wand shown here. Did wands ever have 'hilts' before HP? I don't think so...

Beautiful work... just beautiful.

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

Been a while since I did one of these, but this struck me as cool.
At the House of Vines, a cat named Sannion is pursuing his work as a hellenic polytheist. In general it's a cool blog and related site (or vice versa) but I especially struck by Sannion's work as a public oracle in Eugene Oregon.

I've known folks who busked tarot before, but none who offered Greek-letter sortilege, or direct oracular speech from Dionysus, either! I'd think that even up there in Ecotopia that has to be an unusual thing. A street-corner oracle who sets up his own shrine to the gods of his work is cool enough for me...

He also uses the 'Homeric' oracle, but he seems to use modern six-sided dice. I like my ceramic astragals...

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week: The Dwale

Some years ago I crafted a fake Lovecraftian Grimoire called the Dwale of Avagddu, writing the content and creating a big fake-evil book. The book was made easily enough, by composing the pages, having the book hot-glue-strip bound at a neighborhood print-shop, aging the pages and then pasting all into a case ripped from a full-size sketch-book and sculpted with paper clay. My kinda pointless fun...

I'm very pleased that the Manager over at the Propnomicon blog (who I recently added to my blog roll over on the right hand side of your screen) likes the item enough to post the photos I sent.

Thanks!

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

For something completely different, I found this marvelous paper on neurological studies of Brazilian mediums. Along the way we get comparitive neuroanatomy of buddhist meditations, Carmelites, and enthusiastic Christians (no sorcerers of any type, more's the pity.). The observations of the mediums' process sound so very similar to what I see Neopagan seers and trancers doing. There's more neuroanatomy than most folks will care about, but the summaries, theories and observations are worth a read.

The paper is by various science folks, including our old Starwood chum Stanley Krippner, certainly a Dean of Weirdo Studies by now.

There's just so much good stuff:

• "The term “severely dissociative” could be reframed as “intensively imaginative” when culture-bound beliefs and practices are taken into account."

• "From the perspective of modern neuroscience, all behaviors and experiences have typically been related to the dynamic matrix of chemical and electromagnetic events within the human brain. However, resuming a rigorous, open-minded and comprehensive investigation of trance and mediumship may provide important evidence and many insights capable of advancing an alternative understanding of mind-brain relationships."

• Eight good reasons why brain research need not lead to materialist conclusions about mind.

Usually these Coolest Thing posts are funnier than this, but this is cool.

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

So, being a big geek, I really like(d) the fad for fake-o Harry Potter wands. (Please have a look at the coolest cheap way to make good toy wands here) I find the whole idea of wands with hilts and pommels wierd - to me a wand has always seemed like a straight rod, with whatever signs on it. But, the fad does offer some interesting ideas. There are dozens of internet wandmakers out there, but I've never seen one like Acme Wand Supply Ltd. Before proceeding, note the cowboy with the wand on the front page. From there have a look at the most elegant fake-o wands I've ever laid eyes on.

Almost enough to make me wanna invent occult uses for 'em... almost...

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

I remain interested in the Non-Wiccan Witchcraft efforts moving through the movement today, and interested in the modern cunning-folk and professional magic users. While there can be a needless resistance to religion in some of them, there's also quite a lot of good research into what folk-magic actually looks like, and how some kinds of modern magical techniques can be adapted to traditional forms.

In my web wanderings I came across the site of one Sarah Lawless, an artist and modern spae-wife from British Columbia. She's got great articles on a variety of Scots magical topics, all pretty late period stuff, but surely retaining bits of an older lore. It's a great combination of scholarship and inspiration, with good charms and invocations of some unusual Scots spirits.

I don't think us Druid types should be scared away by the Witch word. The reg'lar ol' Druid, living in a village or in his own little steading, would have been offering a menu of services including land-blessing, divining for the efforts of the people, turning aside the ill-will of spooks and sorcerers, love-spells and profit-spells. Even the sacrifices would often have been specific blessings for their village patrons. So the kinds of skills being developed by these practical witches is directly related to what a Druid might be today.

Articles that are directly interesting to Druids might include How to Create a Genius Loci Profile, Nicnevin and Cunning Folk, this last with a great list of links to later Scottish lore.

I Like Ohio (Weirdest Thing I've Seen This Week...)

I like northeastern Ohio for a lot of reasons. It's starting to be fall here, and the air is getting crisp and pleasant. Not much rain, and our woods and meadows are dry and walkable. I like NE Ohio because we're a bastion of center-left mind-yer-own-damn-business liberalism, where no fundy preacher gets any socio-political cachet. I like the Lake, and I even like most of our four seasons, though that fifth month of winter some years can be trying. But... I also like NE Ohio because we don't have too many natural disasters - too moist for fires, too well-drained for much flooding, tornadoes mostly go south of us, hurricanes don't get here. Euro settlers killed all the predators years ago, though we're getting the coyotes back. But you know what? We also don't have TERRIER-SIZED CRABS THAT EAT COCONUTS AND CAN CLIMB TREES! Call of Cthulhu players take note...

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week - Yet

I *am* nearly out the door for that Brigadoon with Nipples - Starwood. But I was looking for a copy of Zappa's "200 Motels" to show my kid the classic rock head. It isn't on DVD! as far as I can tell, but I ran into this on you tube. It's nearly nine minutes long, but just soooo cool.

Please join me in lighting some incense and pouring That Elixir for the spirit of the Hero Zappa

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

Me Waaaant!

Thanks to the HPLHS for pointing this out. The Mrs thought it was a Zoidberg mask...

Also, here, for more of this sort.

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

Thanks to Jason at The Wild Hunt Blog for pointing me at this. With the probably-less-than-stellar film adaptation of Alan Moore's classic comic Watchmen hitting theaters this week, I'd thought I'd point this out. Moore is himself an occultist, with a very unique perspective on the art. His whole output is worth attention.

Of course nobody this weird could completely ignore Lovecraft. Moore's short mythos story The Courtyard is cool, and even cooler, perhaps, is the Courtyard Companion, with page after page of Moore's notes on his litle in-jokes and references in the tale.

I am just tickled wiggly to note that he's working on his very own grimoire of the occult arts. I just can't wait! Unfortunately, dates I've seen for it run from this year all the way to 2011... ah well...