Metamorphic Ritual Theatre - the travelling pagan theatre company

I was first introduced to this group when I came across the above image several months ago, and then found their website and strangely enough (I rarely say this) I found it somehow confronting.  That's really saying something!  I'm fascinated to see more of what they do and 'become a part of their ritual' by attending one of their performances which tell stories of the Old Religion - yet even as a Pagan, even I harbour some strange fear from them - attraction and repulsion at its best!

Watching their video I'm reminded of my favourite movie Interview with the Vampire and the French vampires who have their Théâtre des Vampires

Louie: "They're vampires pretending to be humans, pretending to be vampires."

Claudia: "How avant garde!"

The above image depicts a Chakra piercing/ quantum qabbala rituals, aligning the Chakras, as the main system of the East, with the Tree of Life/Qabbala, the main esoteric tradition of the West, and incorporating elements of other ancient cultures in a post-modern context of Chaos Magick involving Horus, Maat and Pan Currents of magick. This featured in the 1998 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Metamorphic Ritual Theatre aims to find a medium between ritual and theatre, ie. public rather than private magickal rites which are a combination of pre-meditated/rehearsed and indeterminate spontaneous elements. We take 'theatre' beyond its usual bounds of 'pretending' into the realm of Becoming. We don't just act our characters, we Invoke them or related deities and/or archetypes.

I certainly hope that they get as much of an audience as they would like, as I can imagine that many people would find this kind of religious performance very intense and confronting!  From May-June they're in Europe, and from July to September they're in the USA so I've asked when they will be in Melbourne next and will post if anything is happening.

It has to be said: the costumes are something else.

All information via
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre

Part II of Crowley Fest - Boleskine House

Hold onto your bedlinens and cups of tea - scary stuff!  You have to love stories like this one.  Boleskine House is said to still contain some very angry energies from Crowley himself and the psychic in the beginning of this documentary by the BBC says that he could feel Crowley watching him from the house...  Without wanting to give too much away, perhaps without Crowley having finished the exhausting ritual of Abremelin he is now bound to the house permanently along with the dark spirits he conjured up...  shudder...


*Update.  An interesting piece of information from Wikipedia which Kenneth Anger doesn't mention: At Page's invitation, Anger would travel to Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland, where Crowley had once lived and which Page had purchased, and helped the musician to exorcise the building of what Page believed to be a headless man's ghost.Page subsequently agreed to produce the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising, and used the editing table which was in the basement of his London home to alter the music which he produced.

Fantastic documentary on Crowley - and: why do so many witches defend him?

Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man in the World

I did post the whole darn thing on here because there are several bad versions outon the web which clash, so this is the best lineup I could manage! I posted this here because I found a Wiccan publication which stated that Crowley was 'misunderstood' as though he's a victim of sorts which really seems to ignore the majority of hisactions which even he called evil.

I have watched this documentary twice to try to understand the thought process of the man who has labelled as the Wickedest Man in the World by the press in his time. Nearly all of his actions go against the Wiccan 'do as ye will but harm ye none' where you could say that Crowley's version would be 'do exactly what you like in this lifetime whilst using others for your magick.' Sorry, I'm trying not to be biased here, but it's VERY hard! I could easily have some people arguing with me over that, but really, why do so many people defend him? Sure, it's a free world, but the radicals of the 60s who were inspired by his complete defiance of morality seemed to only mimick Crowley's completely free self expression and hedonism alone as some
sort of a pioneer. As a minister says in this documentary, it seems that those who applaud Crowley do so by envisioning him as a 'benign humanist' - when in actual fact, he had no care for others which you will see in this documentary as he clearly rebels against his parents' beliefs as "a victim of his own idea of Christianity.” Crowley has done a great deal to inspire the Ordo Templis Orientis (most of these videos come from their fan page) and Satanism.

You can make up your own mind from this documentary - as I always stand as the moralist, completely unable to understand the motivations of a man who would happily walk all over others to form his spiritual path. The second video repeats itself (I couldn't find the one version) and I apologise for the sound going out of sync - the version I had seems to have disappeared. I'll post another set of videos relating to the house he lived in in Loch Ness which they don't really go into, which is fascinating in itself.

The man surely can be admired for his adamant desire to travel, taste and explore to the limits with great passion. He must have undertaken incredibly amounts of research in order to undertake the variations of rituals from a range of cultures - and without the internet, that means hard work! He really did try various hats and remained somewhat open minded to be able to explore a variety of religious orders before
creating the Thelema.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is the lesson we take away from this. He abused and destroyed the lives of others and took that into his own hands - dying friendless and penniless in a home for the aged. Certainly do not deny yourself life, but remember to have compassion in perfect love and perfect trust.

3D image of the moon

I can't get this happening - because I can't 'defocus' my eyes all that well - read the instructions below.

Remember the 1990s craze of Magic Eye posters? Just like those, the spectacular space pictures in this gallery can be brought to life in 3D when viewers use a trick of the eye - with no need for special glasses. Stare into the screen and allow your eyes to defocus. You will get double vision as each eye sees the L & R images separately. Move your head towards and away from the screen until the two middle images overlap. The single overlapping image should be in 3D


via Derren Brown Blog
Originally from The Daily Telegraph

Witchy home of the week

This reminds me of my cousin's old house in Tasmania, several stories tall and broken down overlooking the Tamar River threatening to fall down any minute...  I miss that house!  This home is like that house if it hadn't figured out how to separate as twins in the womb - like conjoined heads with all of their features smeared across one another.  It's creepy...

via Cardboard Antlers

Witchy interior of the day

via MBV Music of Joanna Newsom's wonderful new album

The plan: I will have one room with dark blue walls and stars like in the Joanna Newsom image above, and another room painted like Becky Sharp's room in Vanity Fair (Mira Nair version) - a pic of which I can't find!

Witchy outfit of the week VIII

via Blacklung

Witchy homes of the week - ye olde wagons

First Image via Gypsy Wagons UK

Second image via Flower Power

The Insect Circus Museum

via Chelmsford Borough Council

The Carney Wagons as seen in 'Freaks' 1932

via If You've Got it Flaunt It

Weighing up our values with our intelligence

My point of view from a conversation online with a friend (refer to the beginning of the article below - with a link to the rest of the article):


That's really interesting. I'd like to see the statistics about those who enter cults, because I had read somewhere that the majority of people who join cults independently in young adulthood actually have a high IQ and are evoluntionarily novel to their 'pack.' I'd take this with a grain of salt - I know some damn intelligent religious people and really annoyingly not so smart atheists who all they need to back their argument is that 'religion is stupid' - some of which were brought up with religion, so that's more understandable!

I find that sweeping statement of "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," in some instances is certainly true, but what about the capacity within our brains to 'feel' the presence of a universal consciousness? I just hate sweeping statements that put people in a box where they're suggesting that fear and paranoia is a part of ALL religions! 

Individuals can be a combination of the things they are suggesting: I 'care' about strangers to an extent as we are all a part of the one organism - so this article suggests that I am smarter in this case via being evolutionarily novel, BUT if I'm religious - which I am - I'm put into another box yet again which suggests that I can't be religious and liberal simultaneously. And I was an atheist during high school with an IQ at the time of 126 and now I'm Wiccan... I know it's all very general science, but it's... kind of weak! 

I simply don't like the suggestion that I cannot have social values from my religion and not be able to see past the values which are 'dictated' to me - certainly not the case with Wicca!  Just because I have these set of values does not mean that I do not have the capacity to question and reason other people's values.  Perhaps I'm reading into this far too much!

An excerpt of the article

From Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history.  Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values.  The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess.  In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

Click here to read the rest of the article
- Thanks Steph!

Witchy outfit of the week

A piece from Alexander McQueen's last collection from Paris Fashion Week 2010

RIP McQueen