HOW TO GET YOUR START IN MAGIC: Lesson One

In order to cast your first magical spell, you'll need to find a place very much like the one shown in this picture.

Preferably exactly like it. (If you're cutting corners this early on, it's a bad sign for later and you'll probably end up chipping the furniture.)

Soon you'll be ready for Lesson Two!

Barney Frank: Today's Vote "One Of The Truly Great Coincidences In History Of Numerology"

Finally Congress is accepting the importance of this ancient art. I guess it takes the Dow crashing 777 points in one day to make them sit up and pay attention.

One steep drop for Wall Street, one shuffling step forward for synchromysticism.

A person who consorted with the devil supposedly had a mark somewhere on his flesh as a souvenir of the experience. A modern UFO contactee develops these "devil's marks," sometimes in the form of a wart or boil, sometimes a rash or blotch that looks like a birthmark...Nothing in the paranormal world is as it seems.

-John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies

A Romantic Hero Over Whom The Symbolically-Minded May Swoon

The late James Shelby Downard's primal way of looking at things, which is the way I think ancient man perceived the world, encompasses a vision that detects every link and every symbol, beginning with the significance of names, then places and then the obsessive actions which stem from the confluence of the two and which have come to be known as ritual. Publisher Adam Parfrey, who first brought Shelby's work to a mass audience, states:

"In Downard's writings, the products of his subconscious bubble to the surface and catalyze painstaking research. The collision of the poetic against the logical works especially well in the field of conspiracy; it remains the freshest approach to a field of inquiry..."

I remember sitting in Shelby's airstream trailer in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1977, along with the great Fortean philosopher William N. Grimstad and Charles Saunders, a brilliant recluse who was a close friend of Jack Kerouac toward the end of the Beat writer's life (a fact missed by every one of Kerouac's numerous biographers; so much for biographers).

Shelby's conversation that day ranged from the occult significance of the Theremin musical instrument to the sorcerous implications of elevators, the relationship he had with an evanescent rabbit named Petey; the sinister connotations of the circus and the mystical topography of the American Southwest, which Mr. Downard knew the way you and I know our backyard.

As he fried our hamburgers, he regaled us in his prospector's drawl with the hidden wonders of a tapestry of coincidences which he wove from the seeming mundane details of everyday living, into a magic carpet of incomparable strangeness and peerless utility.

Parfrey spoke for many of Shelby's friends and associates when he stated:

"Downard has influenced me to look with interest upon the details and the fantastic convergences of life..."

-from the introduction to James Shelby Downard's essay King Kill 33

Evil Scientist Tries To Replace Venus Cloacina With Machine

It will never work.

The Chronic's Official Response to the U.S. Banking Crisis

Bezoar.

Click here to see.

It is wonderfully smooth and spherical, like a world unto itself.

Via Mapping The Marvelous.

NEW COLUMN: The Modest Occultist

This fall, The Galloway Chronicles is proud to present The Modest Occultist, a new semi-weekly column by Roberta Mumford-Kenning.

Once Dr. Sherwood Kenning's most promising graduate student, Mrs. Mumford-Kenning has distinguished herself in the occult field quite independently of her illustrious ex-husband. She is perhaps best known for My House in Sumeria, an autobiographical account of her time in "Babylon, between the wars," focusing largely on an affair with a swarthy man believed by many to be Zecharia Sitchin. While well-received in Germany, Mrs. Mumford-Kenning's recent work on the effects of Kabbalah water on the Persian phoenix has yet to find American publication.

Written from her recently purchased bungalow in Providence, Rhode Island, Mrs. Mumford-Kenning's new column will focus exclusively on matters of morality, taste, dignity, and propriety -- her four most cherished ideals that she believes are too often overlooked in modern occultism.

Questions for our newest columnist may be left in the comments section.

Dear Mrs. Mumford-Kenning,

I have recently taken up practical alchemy but, as with most of my previous hobbies, my boyfriend refuses to even pretend to be interested. Even the (I know, slight) possibility of unfathomable riches doesn't turn his head from professional wrestling and Attack of the Show.

Recently when he loaded the dishwasher, he put my alembic in backwards. The inside of it is now encrusted with Spaghetti-Os sauce (his kid's) that I'm having the worst time getting out. Suffice it to say that Kitchen-Aid does not make a tool that can get inside the neck of this thing and no alchemical practice (that I know of) will loosen it either.

I'm having a hard time believing that this was not passive-aggressive behavior on his part and symbolic of so much else that is wrong with our relationship. I hate to think that I've wasted the last eight years of my life, but I can't get it out of my mind that the last time I left, he didn't even notice until my credit card bills came in the mail.

-Sincerely Frustrated

Dear S.F.,

Alchemy is a filthy habit, never to be practiced in any decent home. One need only observe the suggestive shape of the alchemical retort to know the bestial origins of this unholy activity.

No doubt, spiritual fulfillment (or piles of gold) is a worthy goal. Under my direction, my ex-husband once tried draping his alchemical equipment in fabric, as more curvaceous furniture legs were once wisely and modestly shrouded in Victorian times. But this resulted only in a horrific burning smell and the destruction of several yards of my family's tartan wool.

Lesson learned: Something rotten at the core is rotten through and through. The venereal imagery at the heart of so much alchemical lore only pollutes the mind. The yoni and lingam are best kept well apart, and dusted regularly lest they attract unwholesome influences.

As to the dishwasher event being "symbolic of so much else that is wrong with [your] relationship," I suggest that you mentally refrain from plunging into anything "symbolic." As we all know, symbolism by its very definition has many hidden layers of meaning and I for one don't care to know what they are.

I will add that dishes are best washed by hand. Some duties should never be trusted to machinery.

-RMK

"The drilling will begin in five minutes."

A short study in human evil.

Idiotic Man Cursed By Jim Morrison's Ghost

"Does no one - really - get out of here alive?"

Typical of the mundane community's tendency to over-dramatize. Our editorial staff has been cursed by the ghost of Stevie Nicks for several years but we don't make such a big deal out of it.

Submitted by M. Silva, our agent-on-remote, just back from the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Talks on Dion Fortune

New (to us) insight on Dion Fortune, courtesy of Gareth Knight.