March 2011
46 posts
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900's Baghdad, Illuminist Pagan Monotheism of...
You will recall that Plotinus set off from Egyptian Alexandria around the year 250 to learn more of Persia and India, but never made it. It is fitting that his descendants created a Synthesis of Indian/Greek/Persian thought in Sassand Persia in the 500s and 600s. This Neo-Platonism mixed with the Syrian Christian Neo-Platonism in Baghdad to spark off the Golden Age of the Baghdad Caliphate in...
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700's Baghdad - Powerful family of ex-Buddhists...
The Barmakids were like The Medici’s in Florence who financed translation of alexandrian Esoteric books into Latin in the 1400s The Barmakids created a vector of intellectual ferment in Baghdad. Which lasted through the scientific revolution of the 800s. Baghdad soaked up the Alchemy and Occult tradition from the Greek Neo-Platonists who had taken refuge in the persian Academy of...
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529 Persia - The Greek Pagan Philosophers Become...
These refugee Greek Pagans established an academic and theological tradition that would become influential in Islam. These heretics flee but take with them the Esoteric Neo Platonism that had been forged in Roman Egypt and Syria in first three Centuries. Reprinted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khosrau_I_of_Persia Persian Philosopher King Khosrau I was known to be a great patron of...
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1200s France, Esoteric Heresy As Viral Epidemic...
For a period around 1200 - The Southern French Cathar heresy occupied territory and created a Esoteric Radical Cultural Zone in which Troubadors Poets, and Christian and Jewish mystics flourished. I would argue that the Cathar Heresy created a kind of proto Burning Man Libertarian Zone which gave cover to the Kabbalah studies that emerged here and in Catolonia and Castille. Ironically both...
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1200s - Jewish Mystic in Christian Spain Learns...
In 1280 he tried to meet the Pope on a divine mission and the Pope died of Apoplexy. I wonder what he said? via books.google.com
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1636 New England - Radicals break off from the...
Anne Hutchinson led a schism among the Massechusetts Bay colonists. She believed in a personal Born Again re-conversion experience. She and her followers went around the colony heckling sermons, of pastors whose faith they doubted. She wanted to restoke the millenarian drive that had founded the colony, and she publically called out hypocrasy. Eventually she was put on trial and banished. In 1637...
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200's Egypt, a Pagan Revival births a hybrid of...
Neoplatonism and hermeticism had a huge influence in the Renaissance. The idea of the universe emanating from the deity suffuses the Esoteric Christian tradition (Boehme, Swedenborg, Emerson, Spinoza). Emanationism supports a vitalist concept of Nature, as well as a Mystical goal of experiencing God infused in the everyday world. Much has been written about the similarity of Neo-platonism and...
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200's Roman Empire, Divine Androgyny filters from...
This fragment of Plato mixes magic, science, and prophecy to give a theory of primal earthlings who were fused in pairs, but were later split into individuals, doomed to seek their lost half. Third Century Christian Platonism integrated part of this idea. An androgynous Man-Woman became the “primal man”. Adam, and thus, god became seen as a bi-sexed being before he were cast from the...
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1920's Germany - Neo-Pagan Social Movements Took...
The ‘German Faith’ movement and Jung’s Nazi Period show where an Esoteric Public Sphere can evolve to. Poewe is a scholar of New Religious Movements. She uses this basically anthropological viewpoint to understand the growth of Nationalist Pagan Churches. These churches evolved independantly of National Socialism, and show that a diversity of social movements created a fertile...
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This site was created by Jasper Gregory
Jasper is a Networked Media Story Teller. His Ethnographic Photography of the San Francisco Queer Und erground has been exhibited in in The National Queer Arts Festival. He works in vernacular video, Javascript geo-location Smartphone Apps and Junaio/Layar Augmented Reality. He is available for contract work in Europe/USA for both the creative and technical aspects of transmedia projects. ...
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1780's - Theological 'Science-Fiction' book...
Swedenborg’s imagines holy Married Couples fusing into a single bi-gendered angel when they died, but only if they were filled with Conjugal Love. This would later evolve into the Mormon idea of a Temple Marriage. Swedenborg’s concept of Conjugal love was a reflection of the Androgynous deity of the Esoteric tradition. Swedenborg sacralizes marriage as an attempt to transcend mortal...
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I have decided that my Augmented Reality Magazine...
They were dealing in public magic, in other words. Want some? Fluxkit (1965) Everything is connected, somewhat Fluxus was about as networked as you could be in 1962, with the web just a twinkle in the Pentagon’s eye. Fluxus society was a pretty loose affiliation, one linked by postcards, parties, posters, phonecalls and xeroxed memos, boxes of toys, mail art and mailing lists for very...
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A Beautiful Mormon Burner at Center Camp
via flickr.com Ash left this comment on Flickr. She said her experience of being mormon did not conflict with her participation at Burning Man. Yay, a picture of me that someone else took! Though I do look a bit stoned…lol. I promise I wasn’t! @Jasper - I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m the Mormon Lamplighter from Utah. We met at the Center Camp Cafe. It was a...
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Open-Source Activism and the New Social Movements
I am delighted to inform you that I have stumbled upon a new theoretical framework for examining the identity-based politics with first emerged in the 1960’s, the so-called new left and new right. The framework is called New Social Movement Theory (NSM). I am currently reading the Alain Touraine (1995). Chesters and Welsh have integrated Complexity Theory Deleuze and NSM into a the...
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The Radical Faeries Issue of Jasper's...
I have a new Magazine/Fluxkit called Parallel San Francisco, The Radical Faeries Issue. It contains 24 Portraits from the San Francisco Faerie Solstice Celebration. It includes an audiobook of me telling a few stories about these fabulous creatures. I am about to publish my Junaio Glue, Augmented Reality Content which comes free with the Magazine. (more info soon)
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Transmedia Art Hack. Junaio Augmented Magical...
via vimeo.com
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Badiou sez It is better to do nothing than to...
Alain Badiou’s Fifteen theses on contemporary art 1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. It is the production of an infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction. 2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production...
The black girls in West Oakland are Queens of...
CC at revolution cafe iPhone
The lovely eyes in oakland
iPhone
Eyes sings at cafe revolution next to my house in...
iPhone
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1830-1860 Northern USA, 'metaphysical science...
Upstate New York was the Northern California of its time. It birthed waves of cultural and social utopian innovation. The movement was linked to the 1830’s popularization of Swedenborg, a ‘Metaphysical Science Fiction’ author who created a writing style in the 1770’s which blended religion, magic and science. The travelling Mesmerizers blended Swedenborg and Mesmer...
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1830's New England, A Virally-Organized,...
One figure states that in any given week in the 1830’s 400,000 people attended a Public Oratory. Mostly in The Puritan Diaspora Regians of New England and the Midwest. This was the forum of the Village Enlightenment in which Science and Alchemy were taught interchangably. I believe that this was the crucible of American Modernity, which is a fundamentally Esoteric and Millenarian Modernity....
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1830's New England, The Lyceum Movement create a...
The America Lyceum Movement helps to explain the wild profusion of Communes, Sex and gender experimentation, moral reform, Mesmerism and christian heresy in the period 1830-1865. In this period New York State experienced its Age Of Aquarius which produced the Mormons, The Cult of Positive Thinking and Occult Spiritualism. It was a proto Flower Child revolution, and it was broadcast through...
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1866 New England, Spirit Channeling is used to...
The philosophy of spiritual intercourse (1866) By Andrew Jackson Davis See the full gallery on Posterous Andrew Jackson Davis became famous in upstate new york as a living prophet and father of Spiritualism. He claimed to contact dead spirits, among whom Swedenborg. His instructions for forming spirit circles were followed by the spiritualist circles which sprang up across the North. In...
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1850's New England, The Mesmerist Phineas Quimby...
New Age and neopagan religions in America By Sarah M. Pike With Quimby the rhetoric of Holistic Medicine starts to sound like California Pop Culture. His method reached huge audiences through the self-help literature of the early 1900’s. At least half of my California friends beleive some form of Quimby-ism. Mesmerists like Quimby are also interesting because this is the mileau that...
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1870's New England & California - Commune believes...
via books.google.com A Swedenborgian “Theo-Socialist” Commune Winery was founded in Fountain Grove in 1875. Its centralized corporate structure was similar to other Swedenborgian, Mormon and Radical Pietist Experimental communes which have been part of the American Landscape since the 1690’s influx of German Radical Pietists into The Radical Cultural Libertarian New...
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1875 Northern California - clairvoyant Thomas Lake...
The western esoteric traditions: a historical introduction By Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke via books.google.com
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1700's International Occult Public Sphere blended...
The International Occult Public Sphere was transmitted through many sources among which, the Freemasons and Jewish Scholars. 1670, Spinoza was a Portugese Jew in Amsterdam. His blasphemous Diest Vitalism endangered his life even in the Dutch City States, which were radical libertarian by accident. There was no central cultural authority in the seven confederated provinces. Blasphemers could...
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Amsterdam 1670, Spinoza's mix of science and...
This is a readable speculative history of what I term Millenarian Religion. The authors’ give Swedenborg a central role in the 1800’s birth of the New Religious Movements. See the full gallery on Posterous Pages 91-112 are all available online. I recommend it as a brief overview of Swedenborgian influence in modern millinarian groups. The research was done in the 1990’s....
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1600's Europe: The Heresy Of the Pan-Gendered...
The idea is that Adam was both Male and Female before Adam split into Adam and Eve. This is also related to Plato’s idea’s of a perfect form for each creature. The perfect form of the neoplatonists combined genders. Millenerian groups inspired by Kabbala believed that the Gender Binary would be healed by the rapture. They saw their gender explorations as hastening the return of Jesus....
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1973 USA - Radical Feminism Embraces the...
Echols is essential reading for an understanding of the America Progressive movement (especially chapter 6). Basically, her argument is that a Quasi-Religious Authoritarian wing of feminism took over radical feminist politics in the 1970’s. This wing of Puritan Feminism revived many of the themes of Female Moral Superiority and Innate Goodness that had motivated the 1890’s...
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1700's Puritan Diaspora - Pietists take control of...
Pietism and the making of eighteenth-century Prussia By Richard L. Gawthrop Spener’s Pietism represents one very strong wave of a continual process of social and moral reform. It is interesting how Pietism was an organizational technology innovation. Pietism was organized as a conspiracy within all of the other Churches. They were organized in small cells called conventicles. A conventicle was a...
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Beyond The Meme Ooze. Some thoughts on the Google...
I have become a Google Book miner. Over the past few months http://books.google.com/books has become my online destination of choice. Google has given us an full-text search of every text it can acquire. This has been a dream since the beginning of the internet, the digital library. I find that it has opened a vast amount of social historiography to me. Some thoughts on harnessing the...
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German Saxony 1523 - Luther's first radical...
History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World Martin Malia, Terence Emmons - 2008 - History - Limited preview In this monumental survey, eminent historian Martin Malia examines how the European revolutionary tradition has evolved and escalated over the centuries. Uniquely wide-ranging, the book explores religious conflicts in fifteenth- and sixteenth...
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Fetter Lane Moravians was the link Mystical...
The Puritan Diaspora includes the English speaking countries except Ireland, the calvinists the German and Dutch speaking Calvinists and, through Pietism, the Lutherans of the Nordic Countries. The print-mediated public sphere intertwines the histories of these countries. Radical Pietist Sects introduced gender equality and gender reform into the London Public Sphere many years before the...
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1420's Bohemia, Born Again Christian Radicals form...
Christian millenarianism: from the early church to Waco Stephen Hunt - 2001 The heretical Hussites took control of Prague. The Evangelical Radicals founded Communes in the countryside. Their center was Tabor. Tabor became a sort of Medeival Burning Man where all of the Heretics converged. The heretics formed a Paramilitary Army called the Orphans which defeated all the Armies of...
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The French Revolution Convinces England That The...
Romanticism and millenarianism Tim Fulford - 2002 - Limited preview Waiting for the millennium was a major feature of British society at the end of the 18th century. But how exactly did this preoccupation shape—and how was it shaped by—the literature, art, and politics of the period we now call Romantic? These … See the full gallery on Posterous Pages 2-8 give a...
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1896 Sex & Marriage Manual advocated for Sexual...
via books.google.com Alice Bunker Stockham was part of a broader Swedenborgian movement which wanted to reform the masculine gender to be more androgynous. The ritualized sexuality she promotes can still be experienced in California under the banner of Tantra, the modern adherents have forgotten the christian occult origins and instead attribute an exotic asian spirituality. The Christian...
1600's German Land - A Shoemaker Become...
Spirituality and the occult: from the Renaissance to the twentieth century B. J. Gibbons - 2001 - Body, Mind & Spirit - Limited preview Gibbons explores the continued presence of esoteric mystical movements in western culture and its relevance to the history of medicine, science, philosophy, Freudian and Jungian psychology, radical political movements and imaginative...
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Johnny Appleseed Was A Swedenborgian Missionary...
via books.google.com Johnny was the heir to Moravian Radical Missionaries of Pennselvania and through Swedenborg the Esoteric Occult Christianity of Boehme. He helped spread these ideas during the Millenarian Evangelical revivals of the 1820’s & 1830’s. He did more than anyone else to turn Puritan New England into the New Jeruselam that birthed Mormonism, American...
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London Cultural Radicalism from the 1740's ended...
Eve and the new Jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century Barbara Taylor - 1993 Barbara Taylor’s compelling book popped up on my radar again today. In these three paragraphs she describes the establishment of 1,000’s of local anti-Jacobin paramilitary groups who roamed England “reforming England” by rooting out radicals. Anything queer...