CONvergence Weekend 2011

I've been posting at a pretty good clip so far this month, but over the holiday weekend I'll be at CONvergence, the Twin Cities' largest fantasy and science fiction convention. I've been attending since the beginning, and even though I'm in no way, shape, or form a bestselling author it's still a good feeling to have gotten to the point where I can talk about my own work in addition to how much I like the work of others.

CONvergence is an annual convention for fans of Science Fiction and Fantasy in all media, held each July. We are a 4-day event with more than 4,500 attendees, and the premiere event of our kind in the upper mid-west.

We offer everything you expect and more from a major science fiction convention, delivered with that unique CONvergence style. You can read about all the things there are to do at CONvergence in the ACTIVITIES section at left, as well as amenities like ConSuite and the CoF2E2 Free Coffee Shop in the HOSPITALITY section.

This year's convention theme is TOMORROW THROUGH THE PAST, a celebration of yesterday's visions of tomorrow, and you can expect that theme to run through many of the panels, parties and costumes to be found at CONvergence this year.

While I enjoy the convention and would go regardless, this is also one of those cases in which an author's work is never done. I'll be promoting my novel, selling signed copies, and letting folks who are interested in the subject know about my new Enochian book that will be coming out later this year. You know, the things that in theory a publisher would do but won't unless (A) they're a huge company and (B) you're already on the New York Times Bestseller list. That's something you need to keep in mind if you're thinking about trying your hand at professional writing - don't quit your day job, especially if it's a good one. Even mid-level authors with solid but not enormous fanbases have trouble living off their earnings.

Along those lines, I recently came across this article, which while ostensively a humor piece is also quite accurate as far as my experiences as an author go. Enjoy, and I'll be back with more postings sometime next week.

Ahmadinejad Calls For Iranian Witchcraft Study

Since this spring a power struggle has been going on in Iran between president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As an "Islamic republic," the structure of Iran's government is such that the power of the elected president is substantially limited and much executive authority rests with the nation's spiritual leader, Khamenei. The split between the two seems surprising, given that Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad in the 2009 presidential election that was reputedly wrought with irregularities. But back in May several Ahmadinejad associates were arrested and charged with using magick to further his political career.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

If any of the accused were really invoking the Djinn, I'm curious how common copies of the Picatrix are in Iran. As far as I know that's the principle grimoire used for such work, though there may be other Persian or Arabic texts with which I and other Western magicians would be unfamiliar. Ahmadinejad has responded to the charges leveled by Khamenei's Guardian Council by calling for a public study on Iranian witchcraft.

One of the Council's favorite tactics is to accuse Ahmadinejad's allies of practicing black magic and witchcraft. Ahmadinejad has responded by backing a public study of these practices in Iran, apparently in the belief that this will implicate some Islamic conservatives, or at least provide more exposure of the fiscal corruption so common in the families of senior clergy.

While I recognize that backing the study has strong political ramifications for Ahmadinejad's career, I hope this is more than a stunt and will lead to some genuine research. At least according to folklore, there is a long tradition of magick in the Middle East that remains largely hidden and I would love to take a look at an objective academic analysis of its inner workings. It also makes me wonder - does Iran's Guardian Council use magick for its own ends? If so, how far back does it go? Magical assistance would certainly help to explain some of the events surrounding the 1978 Iranian revolution.

More Christian Cluelessness

I continue to be amazed at how many self-proclaimed Christians don't seem to understand that minding one's own business is a civic virtue. It's disappointing to say the least, because the fact is that the vast majority of Christians in the world do get it and the ones that don't give the others a bad name. It also doesn't help that it's the bad apples who yell the loudest, so they tend to get the most press. There's the guy who decided that stealing a sign from an occult shop and leading police on a dangerous car chase through town was somehow God's will. There's the store manager who was apparently incapable of explaining that his store didn't carry Harry Potter toys without accusing anybody who wanted to buy them of "teaching children evil." And then there are these folks who are apparently bent on harrassing a woman who runs a witchcraft shop in Devon, England.

Nikki Kitchen, who practises witchcraft and runs White Trinity Witch in Plymouth, said Pro-Christian leaflets were pushed through the door.

Anonymous handwritten notes have also been delivered to the shop.

Ms Kitchen previously had to stop running a stall in Plymouth's indoor market because of abusive comments.

Ms Kitchen said: "Churchgoers think we're the spawn of Satan.

"It's been quite harsh and heavy but you've got to laugh it off."

While Kitchen has a point that a few leaflets and letters aren't the end of the world, it does make me wonder how severe the harrassment was that forced her to stop running her stall. Beyond that it's really the cluelessness that gets me about these pampleteers. I genuinely think this guy has no comprehension that there's anything wrong or offensive or incoherent about his comments.

Dr Theodore Danson-Smith who runs a company which distributes leaflets like Ms Kitchen received, told BBC Radio Devon: "We don't sell any hate mail whatsoever.

"It's not hate mail, it's telling the way of salvation.

"Any witchcraft shop is working for Satan not for God."

He said he did not know which Christian group had posted the leaflets, which are entitled "The Beast" and written in comic book form, through Mrs Kitchen's door.

Hey, I recognize that! It's a Jack Chick tract, and you can see it for yourself here. And as far as Danson-Smith comments go, what more can I add? "Oh, it's not hate mail. All we're saying is that these people are evil and need to be stopped." Nice. As a matter of fact, that's pretty much the definition of hate mail, moron. While I know that neither this guy nor the tract pushers are about to take a clue from me, I'll offer one anyway. When Jesus instructed his followers to spread the "Good News" he was not telling them to initiate campaigns of harrassment against anyone who didn't share their beliefs.

Worst Psychic Ever Has Competition

As I've noted previously, bad psychics abound. Some such individuals are confidence artists, while others may be dangerously delusional. In the Texas case an inept psychic called in a police tip that led to a full-scale search of a property on which she claimed many dismembered bodies were buried. Then last week, a "message from God" prompted another would-be psychic to tell an airport worker in Dayton, Ohio that there was a bomb on board a flight en route to Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. This led to the grounding of all flights at Reagan National while the TSA investigated. As you can probably guess from my headline, nothing dangerous or even out of the ordinary was found.

No explosives were found aboard the jet that flew from Dayton International Airport to Reagan, but the threat shut down the airport near Washington for about 20 minutes, the FBI said.

The woman approached a US Airways ticket agent in Dayton about midday Sunday, said Terrence Slaybaugh, director of the Dayton International Airport.

"She communicated to the agent that there was a bomb on board and that people were in danger and they needed to turn the plane around — that people were going to be killed," Slaybaugh told The Associated Press on Monday.

The 54-year-old woman from Shelbyville, Ky., was immediately taken into custody, he said.

She later told police she had received the message about the bomb from God, Slaybaugh said. That explanation was first reported by the Dayton Daily News on Monday.

The woman, whose name was not released, remained at a mental health facility Monday, FBI officials said. She has a history of mental health problems, Slaybaugh said.

All things considered I'm guessing that the Texas psychic is likely still the winner as far as overall badness goes, since the two separate searches in that case probably cost more in terms of time and manpower than a twenty minute grounding, even at a large airport like Reagan National. In addition, she gets some extra points for falsely accusing an innocent family of mass murder. Still, the Ohio psychic can always try again with an even more fanciful prediction, and I'm guessing that once she's out of the unnamed mental health facility she probably will.

The Return of Noah's Ark

For centuries explorers have search the area around Mount Ararat in Turkey looking for signs of Noah's Ark, which according to the Bible came to rest on the mountain after the waters receded from the great flood. In recent times various odd artifacts have been found in the region that might have once been part of a ship, but the vast majority of them have turned out to be either hoaxes or not nearly old enough to have come from the Ark. Now Johan Huibers has decided he will wait no longer. Prompted by dreams of a flood, he has spent the last three years building a seaworthy replica of the massive boat.

A doomsday dream about massive flooding prompted Dutch man Johan Huibers to build a huge Noah's Ark, which he plans to float down London's River Thames ahead of the 2012 Olympics.

Johan, the head of a construction company in the town of Dordrecht in the western Netherlands, started work on the 100-yard long, four-storey tall ship three years ago after a night-time vision that came to him some 20 years ago.

'I dreamed that a part of Holland was flooded,' the 60-year-old explained to NBC's Today Show in the US. 'The next day, I get the idea to build an ark.'

True to the Book of Genesis' tale of Noah, 'Johan's Ark' features life-size replicas of animals - including pairs of faux giraffes, zebras, cows and donkeys, and an elephant that cost $11,000. There are also live chickens on board.

Currently sitting in a shipyard, the vessel - which Johan insists is seaworthy - is 300 cubits in length, 30 cubits high and 50 cubits wide. Cubits are the ancient measure denoting an arm’s length, elbow to fingertip - or approximately 18 inches.

Pictures of the new Ark, shown above, look quite impressive and demonstrate that not only has Huibers done a great job in following the instructions from the Book of Genesis, but also that those Biblical instructions appear to produce a real ship. My only question for Huibers concerns the dream from more than twenty years ago that led to his interest in building the Ark. Holland is below sea level. Isn't some part of the country always flooding?

James Arthur Ray Guilty in Sweat Lodge Deaths

Back in March James Arthur Ray, a New Age guru who teaches a New Thought methodology similar to "The Secret," went on trial for the 2009 deaths of three students during a sweat lodge ceremony he conducted in Sedona, Arizona. Last Wednesday the jury returned its verdict, finding Ray guilty on three counts of negligent homicide.

Prosecutors argued that the lodge, made of willow trees and branches and covered with tarpaulins and blankets, was heated to a perilously high temperature, causing the participants to suffer dehydration and heatstroke. They also said Ray didn't monitor the temperature inside the lodge or the well-being of participants and was indifferent to those clearly having trouble.

Ray's lawyers countered that what happened was a tragic accident, not a crime. They asked witnesses who were in the sweat lodge whether they signed a release form warning them of the dangers. All replied that they signed, but some said they didn't read the form.

Ray's attorneys also suggested that exposure to an unknown toxin in the lodge -- perhaps a pesticide, rat poison or something in the type of wood used to heat the rocks -- could have caused the deaths.

The idea of a pesticide or poison being involved in these deaths is a novel theory, but anyone who has studied forensics knows that when a person is poisoned there's almost always some trace left behind. Rat poison in particular is easy to detect by forensic methods, as it's a readily available household chemical that is nonetheless strong enough to be used as a murder weapon. Pesiticides tend to build up in the body as well, so it's hard to imagine how any of those could kill and then drop to undetectable levels by the time the bodies were autopsied.

Thoughts on Rob's Rights of Magick

The third section of Rob's article on the laws, rules, and rights of magick deals with what he calls "rights," which he defines as a special subset of magical rules. Generally speaking, like the rules discussed in the previous section these are treated as functional rather than ethical. That is, they are largely defined in terms of what can or can't be done rather than what's right or wrong in any abstract sense.

Rights are kind of like rules, in fact I’d classify them as a specific type of rule. First off magical rights, like civil rights or any other kind of right, is something that you are granted by virtue of existing. Sometimes you may have to meet some other criteria, such as being incarnate in this world or being the first spirit to possess the body you’re currently residing in, but for the most part these rights are fairly easy to obtain. Unlike civil rights though these rights are not granted by some higher government authority, they can’t be taken away by that higher authority, and you don’t have to go to court to defend them.

As a Thelemite I follow Aleister Crowley's Liber OZ in terms of what I consider to be my rights as an individual. While OZ articulates these rights in a manner that imply nearly total freedom, there are several caveats that must be kept in mind. First of all, nothing in the text should be taken to imply freedom from the consquences of one's actions. Second of all, the panoply of rights detailed in OZ apply to everyone, not just me, in a universal fashion.

Thoughts on Rob's Rules of Magick

The second section of Rob's article on the laws, rules, and right of magick deals with what he calls "magical rules," which he treats as similar to laws except that they are neither as strong nor as universal. As I noted yesterday in the first article of this series, the "laws" of magick tend to be probabilistic rather than deterministic, so another way to think about these two classifications might be as "strong rules" versus "weak rules" or something similar.

Rule of Spatial Distance

The Rule of Spatial Distance states that despite appearances, ‘every point in the universe is right next to every other point’. Right away there are some obvious problems with this rule.

First off this rule contradicts the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction tells us that different things are in different locations, and that the location a thing inhabits is based on its qualities and the other things it is attracted to.

Secondly the rule contradicts what we know of physics. We know that location is a real thing. We know that spatial distances are real and they exist, and they have a very real effect on us. We don’t have to worry about accidentally walking into the sun, because it’s not going to happen.

A better way to state this rule might be as follows: magical links do not depend on spatial distance, at least at any scale with which we are familiar. It might be that there is some sort of distance limitation that could preclude, say, psychic contact with alien magicians on a world orbiting a distant star, but in practice a link's power is independent of any distance that I've been able to observe. So in a magical sense linked objects are "close together" regardless of where they are in space.