Darren Lorente-Bull

It was a mild and pleasant autumn day in Bilbao and the unusual structure of the Guggenheim museum drew a strange silhouette against a background of emerald hills and mountains. Javier Otaola and I found ourselves on the second floor of the museum, in front of a sculpture by Jorge Oteiza entitled “Caja Metafísica por Conjunción de Dos Triedros- Homenaje a Leonardo”. The sculpture consists of a steel box with openings on both sides. A seemingly incomplete structure. While I was wondering what the hell this could mean, if anything, my host and friend Javier Otaola began to speak: Metaphysical Box for the Conjunction of Two Triangles - Tribute to Leonardo. Jorge Oteiza OTAOLA: As humans we are “Entities” conditioned by our physicality, by the limitations of time and space, we are ourselves and our circumstances as Ortega y Gasset said. But we are also “Beings”, potentiality, incompleteness. Look at this box, Darren… ME: It has a definite basic structure but it is open… OTAOLA...

Gods throughout human history can be understood as creations of human imagination, arising from our attempts to explain the world, address fears, and meet social or psychological needs. Storm gods, fertility deities, or war gods often personify natural forces or cultural phenomena, and myths and rituals develop around them, reinforcing their significance even if they do not correspond to an ultimate metaphysical reality. Philosophers such as Xenophanes criticized anthropomorphic depictions of gods, noting that humans tend to project their own qualities onto the divine, and mystical traditions like Neoplatonism and Gnosticism often distinguish between these cultural or symbolic gods and the ineffable, transcendent source of all being. In this view, the many gods encountered in religious practice may function as intermediaries, emanations, or symbolic reflections of the ultimate truth, but they are not the ultimate reality itself.  Christ is a God made man. A God who has ...

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. Roland Barthes Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author," published in 1967, is an iconic and  ground breaking text in literary critical theory in which Barthes argues that the key to understanding a text can be found in the reader. Barthes posits that the author's biography and intentions when writing are far less important than the multiple interpretations that the readers of the text will create. It is readers who matter in the creation of meaning in any given text and not the creator authoring the text.  Barthes states this unequivocally in his essay " the author is not the source of meaning; rather, the meaning is produced through the interaction between the text and the reader." This, of course, is a very postmodern notion: there are no absolute truths. Truth and meaning are relative, fluid and changeable. This affects not only the interpretation of an...

" For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Matthew 25:35- Despite everything, I choose to believe in the Risen Christ.  Is it a grand narrative? Is it a man made religion based on a Jewish teacher, healer, and prophetic figure living in first-century Roman-occupied Judea? Maybe. This is not that important for me. Is Christ the son of God? And what does that even mean? Yes, we all know how the theology has been worked out. We all know that it all comes with a stringent set of instructions ( how stringent depends on what denomination we are talking about). But there are instructions, no doubt about that. Judging by how things have turned out in the USA recently, the instructions are based on the old model of " my God is bigger than your God." A G...

The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new; for millennia it's been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct. Dean Radin One of the biggest questions I asked myself since reading John Symonds' biography of Aleister Crowley aged 16 years old, was what in the hell was "magick" spelled with a k to distinguish it from ilusionism and stage magic. Symonds' book was the first book I had read  that dealt with the topic ( it must have been around 1988 then) and all this business of pentagrams, invocations to strange deities came across as eccentric and frankly quite ridiculous. I was - and remain- a great fan of HP Lovecraft and the stuff that Symonds was writing about looked more like a work of fiction than an the actual pursuits of real people. It was only many years after, when I joined Freemasonry, that ...

“Everyone who sins must render to God the honor he has taken away, and this is the satisfaction that every sinner must make to God. But this is something which no sinner can give; and unless it is given, he cannot be saved.” St. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man, Book I, Chapter 21) The Christian grand narrative is, without doubt, powerful and deeply moving. The story of Christ forgiving his tormentors on the cross makes a break with the so called pagan religions that preceeded Christianity. Or does it? In the Celtic pantheon we have Crom Cruach – An Irish fertility god sometimes called the "lord of the mound" who demanded child sacrifices.  Another Celtic deity, The Morrígan was a  war goddess (or triple goddess) who thrived on bloodshed, manipulating battles and dooming warriors. In the Egyptian pantheon there was  Set ( or Seth), known for treachery and brutal cunning. Set was  the God of chaos, desert, storms, and violence. Set mu...

Mainstream religions are limiting by design. Limits are probably necessary for us humans but there is an implicit problem with religions: they resist change, by design, since they purport to stand for inmutable truths. I spent a long time trying to balance my former Christian faith and the impossible challenges of living in a global, enlightened and post Christian world. I had created my own metaphysical prison.  But of course, I came to realise that it the issue goes far beyond all that. We don't live in a post- Christian world. We live in a post- Theist world. This is to say, what we thought of as God, what we described as God in such intricate detail in all our different religions across time was merely a construct, a way of creating a metaphysical superstructure that would help us hold civilization together. But a construct isn't necessarily the truth. It is important to note that rejection of the different guises that we, as humans, have chosen to present our g...

    He was a wise man who invented God. Plato It's not unusual for many people who are looking for a particular spiritual path to do so first by knocking on the door of mainstream, organised religion. After all, mainstream religions have achieved the impossible at least on one level: they have made the belief in the supernatural acceptable to an extent. Yes, they have sought this through unscrupulous means at times and by finding strength in numbers. The problem, of course, is that exclusive belief in one religious paradigm is at best hugely limiting. At worst, it's unadulterated fundamentalism. And fundamentalism, regardless of the particular flavour and packaging it comes in, is normally always a dangerous thing. Somehow, be it through the work of the crusaders or of  Buddhists killing Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or ISIS and their campaign  of terror in recent times, people always end up dying.  So, the most discerning spiritual se...

"Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot." Robert Anton Wilson Six months ago, seeking a new metaphysical model, I approached the IOT ( the Illuminates of Thanateros).  The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) is an international magical order formed in the early 1980s, officially around 1987, by Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, key figures in the development of chaos magic. Emerging from the ideas in Carroll’s Liber Null and Sherwin’s writings in the late 1970s, the order took its name from “Thanatos” (death) and “Eros” (sex), representing the polar forces of magical energy and human experience. The IOT was created to promote chaos magic as a practical, results-oriented system stripped of dogma, emphasizing techniques such as sigil work, altered states, and belief as a tool to be adopted and discarded. Its objectives include fostering magical training and initiation within a struct...