7 ms·

John Dee and the occult in California

60 points by mr_tyzic 12y ago

minimaxir 12y ago
For clarification, this article is unrelated to the well-known gaming company Wizards of the Coast: http://company.wizards.com/ http://company.wizards.com/
- kenjackson 12y ago
  Nice clarification. I kept reading through it trying to get the connection -- knowing that I had missed something. Eventually I realized that they weren't related at all except both used the same phrase (which I don't think is a common one). Honestly, I probably wouldn't have read it, if I had known that it wasn't related. After having read it, I'm not sure I would have recommended to my past self to do so (not that it's bad, just not something I'm interested in).
- richforrester 12y ago
  And comments like these are why I pop into the comments before I open the story. Cheers :]
- vorg 12y ago
  Another clarification: the Philosopher’s Stone may be known by Americans as the Sorcerer's Stone. The US publishers of the first Harry Potter book thought American children wouldn't want to buy and read a book with the word "philosopher" in the title, and so renamed it to suggest magic and instant gratification, rather than thought or learning.
- dang 12y ago
  Ok, we'll take that out of the title.
h1karu 12y ago
What does this have to do with technology or "hackers" ? Real wizards code in Lisp.
- dang 12y ago
  Please re-read the site guidelines. Hacker News is about interesting things. Not everyone will find this story interesting, but that's true of any story. The post certainly isn't off-topic.
  - h1karu 12y ago
    How is posting this article any different than handing out a thinly disguised pamphlet for a religious organization ? If someone were posting material here about how some people in California are into "accepting jesus as their personal savior" I would find it every bit as boring and off-topic
    - dang 12y ago
      This is a historical sketch. Pretty sure the author isn't trying to convert followers for John Dee, Alastair Crowley, or L. Ron Hubbard. (The Hubbard-Parsons-Crowley link is fascinating, btw. Who knew?) It's pretty rare that someone would be interested in all 30 items on the front page, so if complaining about personal boredom were the thing to do, it would quickly dwarf everything else on the site. Therefore it's not the thing to do.
      - h1karu 12y ago
        shrug. That parsons-hubbard connection was trotted out not too long ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641580 I'm not trying to hate on it, post whatever you find interesting, just saying to me it reads more like a phamplet for a particular 'society' or religion, see the last paragraph.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        If that's interesting to you, check out _Going Clear_, by Lawrence Wright, who also wrote _The Looming Tower_, which is also an excellent book.
    - kefka 12y ago
TeMPOraL 12y ago
So that's the Dee from cstross's quote: "for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuller_Memorandum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuller_Memorandum)
- walterbell 12y ago
  Like Bob Howard, Dee knew a bit about math & hiding secrets a.k.a. crypto. http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/john_dee.pdf http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/john_dee...
ryan33 12y ago
I don't particularly like the OTO because of the distortion of Enlightenment Era groups and Freemasonry. Crowley and some of the esoteric philosophies are interesting but there's not many concrete ideas there. John Fleming wrote a great book related to this called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason. There's a distinction between Freemasonry, philosophy, and DMT; and the speculative ideas of John Dee, the OTO and mystical reasoning. A lot of the most fascinating things are polluted with ridiculous claims and beliefs.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Fleming on the Dark Side of the Enlightenment is great, I agree. But I wouldn't say his book is trying to separate the dross of ridiculous belief from the gold of "true" science or philosophy. What I take away from that book is a to me more interesting claim that Enlightenment ideals and methods have always been entangled with varieties of magical beliefs, be they utopian idealism or alchemy or (in a contemporary context) transhumanism. I wrote about this at more length in an article about the history of drugs that appeared in Aeon magazine a few months ago, if you're interested: http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/yesterdays-drugs-are-tomorrows-medicines/ http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/yesterdays-drugs-are-...
  - dang 12y ago
    Welcome to HN, by the way! Aeon and The Appendix have both been sources of some excellent posts here. We'd like to see more such material—the more in-depth, the better. I'm excited to see what you do with The Appendix. There's a crying need for more substantive general-interest articles online. HN has a largely technical orientation, but its mandate is for intellectual diversity and we're a little low on historical nutrients these days.
anigbrowl 12y ago
I hope this was horribly mangled by some chthonian sub-editor, because I hate to think that this rambling disconnected potpourri is considered acceptable output from a PhD candidate as the bio claims.
- benbreen 12y ago
  As the PhD candidate in question, I would have to agree that it is rambling - but I hope you wait to read my actual dissertation before judging my scholarly output as a whole! I should also add that I have no connection to the O.T.O. or any similar group (and speaking frankly, I find all such contemporary occult groups to be faintly silly). But I do think their intellectual genealogy is super interesting.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    It's a great subject, which I think is why I was so disappointed in the article. I was looking forward to a few thousand words on the odd modern history of alchemy and its continuing allure, but I really feel you tried to pour a quart into a pint pot here. I would be delighted to read a scholarly dissertation on this or a tangentially related topic.
    - benbreen 12y ago
      My dissertation is actually about the origins of the drug trade, but I think you'd be interested in the journalist George Pendle's Parsons biography, Strange Angel, which I think does a great job of teasing out what alchemy meant for 1940s practitioners: http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly-Scientist-Whiteside/dp/0156031795 http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly-Scientist-W... I also touch on the topic a bit (albeit from the perspective of the history of medicine) in the Aeon article that I link to further down in the comments, although that's also aimed at more of a popular audience. Another person who you might find interesting is Pamela H. Smith of Columbia University, who's actually recreating an early modern alchemical lab there as we speak.
      - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 12y ago
> Dimethyltryptamine [is] the reason people lick the backs of Mexican toads to get high. Not correct, Colorado river toads have 5-MeO-DMT, not DMT. Confusing the two could easily be deadly.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Very true, and licking the toads can also deliver cardiotoxins (people who really, really want to harvest the 5-MeO-DMT from them apparently "milk" their glands and then smoke it, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth). Sorry for the mistake on my part - I should have looked into that one more.

60 points by mr_tyzic 12y ago

For clarification, this article is unrelated to the well-known gaming company Wizards of the Coast: http://company.wizards.com/ http://company.wizards.com/

kenjackson 12y ago
Nice clarification. I kept reading through it trying to get the connection -- knowing that I had missed something. Eventually I realized that they weren't related at all except both used the same phrase (which I don't think is a common one). Honestly, I probably wouldn't have read it, if I had known that it wasn't related. After having read it, I'm not sure I would have recommended to my past self to do so (not that it's bad, just not something I'm interested in).
richforrester 12y ago
And comments like these are why I pop into the comments before I open the story. Cheers :]
vorg 12y ago
Another clarification: the Philosopher’s Stone may be known by Americans as the Sorcerer's Stone. The US publishers of the first Harry Potter book thought American children wouldn't want to buy and read a book with the word "philosopher" in the title, and so renamed it to suggest magic and instant gratification, rather than thought or learning.
dang 12y ago
Ok, we'll take that out of the title.

h1karu 12y ago

What does this have to do with technology or "hackers" ? Real wizards code in Lisp.

dang 12y ago
Please re-read the site guidelines. Hacker News is about interesting things. Not everyone will find this story interesting, but that's true of any story. The post certainly isn't off-topic.
- h1karu 12y ago
  How is posting this article any different than handing out a thinly disguised pamphlet for a religious organization ? If someone were posting material here about how some people in California are into "accepting jesus as their personal savior" I would find it every bit as boring and off-topic
  - dang 12y ago
    This is a historical sketch. Pretty sure the author isn't trying to convert followers for John Dee, Alastair Crowley, or L. Ron Hubbard. (The Hubbard-Parsons-Crowley link is fascinating, btw. Who knew?) It's pretty rare that someone would be interested in all 30 items on the front page, so if complaining about personal boredom were the thing to do, it would quickly dwarf everything else on the site. Therefore it's not the thing to do.
    - h1karu 12y ago
      shrug. That parsons-hubbard connection was trotted out not too long ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641580 I'm not trying to hate on it, post whatever you find interesting, just saying to me it reads more like a phamplet for a particular 'society' or religion, see the last paragraph.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      If that's interesting to you, check out _Going Clear_, by Lawrence Wright, who also wrote _The Looming Tower_, which is also an excellent book.
  - kefka 12y ago

TeMPOraL 12y ago

So that's the Dee from cstross's quote: "for iterator count from zero to number of entropy sinks within ground state, hear ye, hear ye, I open the gates of starry time for ye that you may feel the ground beneath your feet and the air upon your skin; I invoke the method of Dee and the constructor of Pthagn, forever exit and collect all the garbage, amen." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuller_Memorandum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuller_Memorandum)

walterbell 12y ago
Like Bob Howard, Dee knew a bit about math & hiding secrets a.k.a. crypto. http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/john_dee.pdf http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/john_dee...

ryan33 12y ago

I don't particularly like the OTO because of the distortion of Enlightenment Era groups and Freemasonry. Crowley and some of the esoteric philosophies are interesting but there's not many concrete ideas there. John Fleming wrote a great book related to this called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason. There's a distinction between Freemasonry, philosophy, and DMT; and the speculative ideas of John Dee, the OTO and mystical reasoning. A lot of the most fascinating things are polluted with ridiculous claims and beliefs.

benbreen 12y ago
Fleming on the Dark Side of the Enlightenment is great, I agree. But I wouldn't say his book is trying to separate the dross of ridiculous belief from the gold of "true" science or philosophy. What I take away from that book is a to me more interesting claim that Enlightenment ideals and methods have always been entangled with varieties of magical beliefs, be they utopian idealism or alchemy or (in a contemporary context) transhumanism. I wrote about this at more length in an article about the history of drugs that appeared in Aeon magazine a few months ago, if you're interested: http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/yesterdays-drugs-are-tomorrows-medicines/ http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/yesterdays-drugs-are-...
- dang 12y ago
  Welcome to HN, by the way! Aeon and The Appendix have both been sources of some excellent posts here. We'd like to see more such material—the more in-depth, the better. I'm excited to see what you do with The Appendix. There's a crying need for more substantive general-interest articles online. HN has a largely technical orientation, but its mandate is for intellectual diversity and we're a little low on historical nutrients these days.

anigbrowl 12y ago

I hope this was horribly mangled by some chthonian sub-editor, because I hate to think that this rambling disconnected potpourri is considered acceptable output from a PhD candidate as the bio claims.

benbreen 12y ago
As the PhD candidate in question, I would have to agree that it is rambling - but I hope you wait to read my actual dissertation before judging my scholarly output as a whole! I should also add that I have no connection to the O.T.O. or any similar group (and speaking frankly, I find all such contemporary occult groups to be faintly silly). But I do think their intellectual genealogy is super interesting.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  It's a great subject, which I think is why I was so disappointed in the article. I was looking forward to a few thousand words on the odd modern history of alchemy and its continuing allure, but I really feel you tried to pour a quart into a pint pot here. I would be delighted to read a scholarly dissertation on this or a tangentially related topic.
  - benbreen 12y ago
    My dissertation is actually about the origins of the drug trade, but I think you'd be interested in the journalist George Pendle's Parsons biography, Strange Angel, which I think does a great job of teasing out what alchemy meant for 1940s practitioners: http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly-Scientist-Whiteside/dp/0156031795 http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Angel-Otherworldly-Scientist-W... I also touch on the topic a bit (albeit from the perspective of the history of medicine) in the Aeon article that I link to further down in the comments, although that's also aimed at more of a popular audience. Another person who you might find interesting is Pamela H. Smith of Columbia University, who's actually recreating an early modern alchemical lab there as we speak.
    - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Alex3917 12y ago

> Dimethyltryptamine [is] the reason people lick the backs of Mexican toads to get high. Not correct, Colorado river toads have 5-MeO-DMT, not DMT. Confusing the two could easily be deadly.

benbreen 12y ago
Very true, and licking the toads can also deliver cardiotoxins (people who really, really want to harvest the 5-MeO-DMT from them apparently "milk" their glands and then smoke it, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth). Sorry for the mistake on my part - I should have looked into that one more.