I don't use this site very often but I needed to share this somewhere that maybe wouldn't find me completely crazy. Weeks ago, I finished re-reading the Invisibles for the first time since I was a drunkard in college. I found it much more meaningful this time while I was reading but the comic itself wasn't nearly as impactful as what happened afterwards. I had a dream and it led me down a deep occult rabbit hole of self improvement and intense synchronicity. I learned what my childhood dreams meant and unfolded systems and symbols. I learned why the asteroid belt is where it is in the solar system. I will do my best to explain all this. The dream, tho while I was aware and awake I must describe it as such, for it uses the same logic and rules, took place at 2 after pondering the last page of the comic series. I had a dream about Abraxas. A chicken deity with two snakes for feet. I have learned to interpret this symbol as the energy of nurturing sacrifice needed to consolidate a pair of opposing forces. It is the force that turns dichotomy into Trinity. In my dream he took the form of the hanged man and brought the pleroma (heavenly realm) down to earth. The new world tree sprouted in his place. He fortook this sacrifice by a serpent erupting from his beak and biting his own throat. The snakes that composed his legs followed suit. A triple ourobouros was this created. That self consuming energy. The unconscious feeding on the conscious feeding on the subconscious. The nurturing energy of sacrificial archetype in the center. Since the dream I have watched many symbols and experiences unfold their meaning to me. Synchronicity is increased exponentially. I have learned more about astrotheology and the planets and the tarot and all of the knowledge overlaps . The dream ended with three images. A crown I understood to be the crown of the prince of a thousand enemies. I will come back to this. The holy Grail in the hands of Dionysus. And a donkey headed man in the form of the hanged man tarot. So the Egyptian god Seth was once used as a god of foreigners and chaos. The unknown and chaotic as his domain. He was charged with protecting ra as he carried the sun thru the night from the serpent that would eat the sun. Seth historically was associated with the judeo tribes at the time (sometimes in a teasing manner sometimes in a revenant). During his process of demonization in late Egyptian history he came to be drawn with a donkey head that had a knife plunged into it. The knife I understand as a mirror turned painfully inward. So I have likened Seth kadmon, first son of Adam, to set, Egyptian god of chaos and the unknown. Donkey headed The archetype of the unseen adversary displayed. Sabaoth takes the form of a donkey and is the seventh archon, the sons of yalbadoath, and prophecies to kill his father. All apocalypses translate to renewals in the human psyche that bring about change. They are the same symbol as death is for the personage. Donkeys are associated with Saturn. Mercury is associated with set. Jupiter holds deific power. The old testament is alchemically associated with Jupiter and Saturn and the new testament is alchemically associated with Jupiter and Mercury. Set and horus have depictions where they share a body. Order and chaos bringing the unification of opposites. The exact thing Abraxas symbolizes in the first place.Mercury as Hermes. Wiedler of caduceus. Staff of twin serpents. Another ouroboural archetype of conjoining opposites. Mercurius decomposed and taken into the fires of the sun is an alchemical step towards the lapis philosophorum. Fire representing the north in the cardinal elements/directions. The element of continual rising. The north wind brings tumolt and change. To bring the opposing elements into the light to be observed and into the heat to be purified. The north star is a universal symbol of guidance.

When I lived in Tennessee I saw a chicken choke on a copperhead as it tried to swallow it by the tail. It could be easy to say the dream was caused by this real event. But to me they are the same event.

The prince with a thousand enemies is the first rabbit in the world creation story of watership down. All creations mythos are the rising of consciousness. My early years of consciousness were of paranoia, and an acute sense the world was out to get me. I would later work thru this to a degree but it is still the paradigm that I initially rose out of.

I hate to say that I'm still just scratching the surface of this rabbit hole Basically it's all a guide and how to purify your true self (signal, melody, cadence) out of the noise. I think thats a pretty significant message of the comic.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Just realized that I can ask people "Do you know Barbelith?" in same tone of voice that people discussed "Carcosa" in True Detective.

"Now you are in Barbelith, and we are all together."

“Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are.”

As a less occult-y cousin to some of the principles of chaos magick, what's your take on those topics?

I remember some people on the old board being into Neville Goddard and similar stuff.

https://overcast.fm/+AAYNatTcC6I this sounds like they found the supercontext

Look what showed up.

The lips, the stature, the beehive hairdo... Has it ever been explicitly stated that Lumley informed Fanny's appearance?

https://preview.redd.it/eh0su6rxr1md1.png?width=352&format=png&auto=webp&s=47677ef4dfda270542f2fa4febd9818c5f8f3384

She’s going by Ragged Roan in this facet, but I’m certain. Don’t you remember?

So a few days ago I was looking into, I dunno', whatever, and for no real reason clear to my consciousness I found myself thinking back to days long gone from the vantage of now with respect to the old Barbelith community.

Ah yes, now I recall: I was looking into some of today's people's thoughts about how the internet has changed over time and thinking about its commercialization and algorithmization and so on. All the things that have turned it into something seemingly less than what we may have thought it would be back then.

So, again, for no real reason clear to my mind, I found myself thinking about back when people were posting on Barbelith and how that crew of folks might see things from now as compared to then. It would make a good Head Shop post, perhaps.

Then I thought to myself, and who knows why, "self, I wonder if there is a Barbelith sub on Reddit?" And lo and behold, here it was. I looked over some of the posts, thought about replying, maybe. Saw it has flairs mimicking the old board and so on. It even brought to mind: do I reread The Invisibles one more time?

I've already read it three times--once as it was being produced, then again a few years down the road from that, and then once again maybe a decade ago?

Nah. Although I was tempted a few years ago when I started reading that book on all things Invisibles, um...let me see...right, yes: Our Sentence is Up. I read a bit of that book and it got me somewhat excited about a reread, but then I moved on to other things.

I wonder--how many of that old school have moved on to other things?

And yet the other day as I was giving Luther a go--and I can't say I'm really all that into it, but I was still watching into the second season--and there's a scene where the Spring-heeled Jack wannabe is about to murder someone in their home while live streaming and the police are trying to work out where. There's a car parked on the road with the license plate visible, so they run it and it comes back as registered to Grant Morrison. So I laughed.

That's all.

I read Invisibles as it came out in the 90s, and like many here, it changed my life. I made lists of things to read, watch, look up and spent the last 30 years doing just that. Somehow I never got around to the Prisoner.

Well, all eps are on youtube and I just finished the series. Its leading me to my first reread of Invisibles in many years and Im excited to see how it hits this time, after so much “study”. Decades of absorbing PKD and Moorcock, Buddhist and dream yoga texts, chaos magick tutorials, etc et al.

The Prisoner lends so much DNA to the series, it felt like watching Invisibles Year One. Constant mindfucks, who side are you on, both sides are the same, paychological treachery, and the roots of identity. And it ends with a great deal of head scratching.

Im well aware Im stating nothing new, and Grant cited the Prisoner as influential. But I cant wait to dive back in with all the seeds they gave me, especially this quite large one. And standalone, the Prisoner is fascinating for the time it came from. But its hard to imagine King Mob’s interrogation or Key 23 without it.

Thats all, be seeing you.

Does anyone know anything more about this? I found it in search results.

https://github.com/friuns2/BlackFriday-GPTs-Prompts/blob/main/gpts/the-invisibles-game.md

Click Start Chat

Last night on my walk home from work I saw a homeless person having a mental breakdown, curling up on the street and screaming angrily.

I feel like I see so much sad shit in the city. There's so many folks who need help, and the resources just aren't there, and it hurts so bad to just walk past people who might as well be your family members, and to see them just drowning. Drowning in the street. Sinking into the concrete.

Then I have to find ways to shut down my own empathy, because I can't bring that shit home every night. I can't constantly be going to my partner in hysterical tears because the world fucking sucks. I gotta be kind and funny and try to lift up the people around me, and I can't do that when I'm losing my own mind.

Sometimes I feel like works like The Invisibles, and my parents (lousy beatniks), taught me to be this open lens to take in the universe and feel what others feel, only to then drop me into hell. "Here you go, mirror built so the universe can see itself, go reflect some pain."

I know there's good in this world. So much good. But god, sometimes it just feels like we're never gonna get the nails out, as hard as we try.

I swear to god, I'm not a defeatist. I just saw some sad shit recently, and I need to put it in its place.

Birds are singing outside. It's dawn again.

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Greetings Barbelith. Another walk in from the occult abyss; Chaos Magician here, student of the Arcanorium College.

With no conscious awareness of Barbelith, I built a mystic red orb into the boutique mythology of my own personal Servitor and demon-in-chains, BYSMAL.

The orb in my mythos has always represented a connection to occult knowledge and power, but never with a distinct definition. Morrison has been an influence on my practice, but not the Invisibles specifically, so I'm amused to have been led here by threads of synchronicity.

" So these things, I met them. And what they were were, like, silver.. like those things you get in rave videos.. silver, morphing, mercurial blobs of chrome, that think. And they took me to the fifth dimension. And the fifth dimension is outside space and time, and they explained to me what time is all about.

The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae. Right? Believe.. you don’t have to believe me; I’m just setting the story here.

They explained to me that beyond space and time, we have our actual selves. These things that we’re experiencing right now are sections through time. Everyone here is a section through time. But in actual fact, you’re not experiencing your real body. What is your real body? Your real body is a process. It starts when you’re born, and it moves forward until you die. That is you. Seen from outside, that’s what you look like. You look like a gigantic centipede, spread around all the little things that you always do: up and down through your house, up the stairs, down to the store and back – and it’s a centipede, and it’s us. It starts as a little baby and it comes out of your mother’s womb, and it gets bigger.

That is the process in time. Like I said: we’re experiencing sections now, so we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this. But think of ourselves as processes through time, which is what we actually are.

We all know we were twelve, we all know we were ten years old. But where is that? Point to it. Show me you at ten years old – and yet you were there.

So these things said to me: this is what’s going on. We use time to grow larvae, because outside space and time you can’t grow anything. Because it’s timeless, nothing grows. What you wanna do, if you want to make one of these higher dimensional beings – that’s actually us, already – is that you grow it in time. So you make a universe.

And how you make a universe is: you plug a little part of yourself into the information world that they live in – which is what I seemed to be experiencing; this kind of sea of pure information – and they exist in that, but there is no time. Time is part of that.. but this is the fifth dimension; it’s like: time, space, breadth, depth.. plus.

And they said to me: the universe you live in, the world you’re living in, is a larvae. Every single one of us here is the same thing. There’s no distinction. All we do is.. we don’t understand what we are.

And they explained to me: if you’ve got a two-dimensional field, see; a flat plane, and you stick your hand through it – there’s one hand there, but if you stick your hand through a two-dimensional plane, the two-dimensional entities who live on there, they will see four circles. Right? Four distinct, completely different circles. But no, it’s the one hand.

Every one of us in here is the same fucker. We’re all the same thing, according to these weirdos. And what we are is.. thank you… I’m pleased someone agrees. And what we are is intersections through 4D space-time.

So yeah, I look like this. I stop here. No, I don’t stop here. I’ve been here for, what, five minutes now? Where was that guy who was here five minutes ago? Where is he? Point to him. But he existed; you all saw him. I saw you five minutes ago. Where is that guy?

So this led me into some very strange alleyways.

These things explained to me that.. as I say, the universe is some kind of larval entity. What it does is it proceeds through stages of development.

Now if you think about a foetus in the womb – and there’s a famous phrase that says.. what is it? Phylogeny recapitulates.. y’know, evolution or whatever the fuck it is. Y’know, I forget the good bits.

But it’s the idea that if you’ve got a foetus, it starts off.. like every living thing, it starts as a unicellular entity, it splits.. it becomes a lizard; it becomes a mammal; eventually it becomes a human.

And they said to me: the culture you’re living in is.. understand it this way: phylogeny recapitulates history.

So what we’re actually watching is this thing coming towards self-awareness and coherence in the same way that a foetus does. We haven’t even been born yet. There are no adults on this planet.

There’s not one adult on this planet.

Which explains a lot. It explains why we let fuckers like Bill Clinton bomb the Kosovans. It explains why I let Tony Blair put cameras in the streets.

Punk rock, dude. This is a Donna Karan suit. Fuck it."

- Grant Morrison @ Disinfo Con

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I love the Gideon Stargrave sections, so I did some digging and found the Jerry Cornelius series by Michael Moorcock, which seems to be sort of the original non-parody version of Austin Powers that Gideon Stargrave was based on - psychedelic British playboy superspy injected with occult philosophy.

I want to get into this series, but I'm also seeing a lot of bad reviews of it. Apparently it's essentially a retelling of Moorcock's Elric series in a different setting/style - because it's a part of the Eternal Champion cycle where the hero reincarnates throughout time. So I'm worried that I'm going to have to read through (some of) the Elric series, which is apparently very good, just to fully appreciate this series which may or may not actually be worth it.

I'm also seeing the book A Day of Forever by J.G. Ballard listed as a major influence, but this one seems a bit tougher to find.

Has anyone read these books and can give me their opinion?